Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Joachim Fest’s fascinating memoir about what it was like to come of age during the years of the Third Reich is unusual because its central character is not the author but the author’s remarkable father. Johannes Fest was the middle-class headmaster of a primary school in suburban Berlin, a pious Catholic and father of five, a cultural conservative who revered Goethe and Kant, and a loyal German patriot — “a dyed-in-the-wool Prussian,” in Fest’s words — the kind of person who might have been expected to become an active supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. In a foreword by Herbert Arnold (a professor emeritus of German studies at Wesleyan University who has also supplied informative notes throughout the text), the elder Fest is described as “tailor-made for a career” with the Nazis. And yet some quirk in his personality made him a fierce Weimar republican, ready to sacrifice himself, even his family, to principles he knew to be right even as everyone around him was yielding to mass hysteria. “Not I,” a best seller in Germany when it appeared in 2006, the year of the author’s death at age 79, is a memorable tale of lonely courage, stoic endurance, self-imposed hardship and a life lived amid ubiquitous, all-encompassing danger: “Even innocent-sounding remarks could be life-and-death matters.” It reminds us that simple human decency is possible even in the most trying of circumstances.
The outspoken Johannes Fest was dismissed from his position a few months after Hitler took power in 1933, and prohibited from finding other employment. The family survived on a small pension and help from relatives, but throughout the Nazi years the Fests lived on the edge of poverty, with spartan meals and patched clothing. One of the largest changes in their lives, however, was watching friends and acquaintances withdraw from them. Johannes’s colleagues at work avoided him; the family nursemaid and the cleaning lady soon departed. A neighbor turned one of the Fest boys away from her apartment because he hadn’t read “Mein Kampf.” Among the greatest surprises, Johannes later recalled, was that it was impossible to predict who, of the people they knew, would stand by them and who would shun them.
And even those lines blurred. On several occasions, the family received anonymous telephone calls warning them that the Gestapo was about to pay a visit. After the war, Johannes learned the caller’s identity: He was a dedicated Nazi who remained guilt-ridden and embarrassed by his act of kindness because it had violated the oath he had taken to Hitler and demonstrated unforgivable weakness.
Almost inevitably, Johannes drew closer to his Jewish friends. They, of course, were suffering far more than the Fests: the wife of one of them, who had given up all hope, starved herself to death. Most of them were like Johannes, bourgeois German nationalists who couldn’t believe what was happening to the country they loved. “A nation, they said, that had produced Goethe and Schiller and Lessing, Bach, Mozart and so many others, would simply be incapable of barbarism.”
In a particularly striking passage, Joachim reports that his father once said of his Jewish friends that “in their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance, they had really been the last Prussians” — the embodiment of all that was good and right about Germany. (It’s necessary to add a wrinkle here: At least some of these Jewish-German conservatives would probably have become Nazis if they could have. As a youthful Leo Strauss wrote to a friend in 1933: “Just because the right-wing oriented Germany does not tolerate us, it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected.”) Toward the end of his book, Joachim offers a rueful meditation on the fraught German-Jewish relationship, saying it went much deeper than the French-Jewish or English-Jewish connection, and suggesting that the Holocaust “may be interpreted as a kind of fratricide.”
Johannes, who repeatedly urged the Jews he knew to get out while they could, complained that they seemed to have lost the instinct of self-preservation. The same could be said of him. His wife, for one, though she shared her husband’s politics, served as a kind of Greek chorus of lamentation, constantly reminding him of the risks he was taking when he helped those in need with money and forged documents, or sheltered Jews. He was endangering not only his own life but the lives of his children — and for what?
At first, Johannes could have answered that he was upholding the spirit of the true Germany, but as Hitler went from success to success, winning ever greater popularity, that justification became harder to sustain. Then there was his Catholicism. Johannes was not unhappy when Austria was incorporated into the Reich, hoping that a large infusion of Catholic citizens would temper the fanaticism of his largely Protestant countrymen. When the Austrians proved to be even more rabid Nazis and anti-Semites than the Germans, that ethical bulwark, too, was knocked out from under him. In the end, he had nothing to fall back on but himself and his conscience — while a tearful wife persisted in urging him to bend, at least a little, for the sake of his children. She had a point. Joachim makes it clear that the other side of Johannes’s heroism was an unattractive stubbornness and rigidity; he wouldn’t allow Thomas Mann novels into the house because of what he considered Mann’s questionable politics.
The worst never did arrive for the Fests. The Gestapo questioned Johannes several times, to no particular effect, and members of the Hitler Youth angrily demanded to know why his boys hadn’t joined up, but never seem to have pressed the matter. Joachim himself was once interrogated by the police for a juvenile act of anti-Hitler rebelliousness. Only the war brought genuinely grievous suffering. Joachim’s adored older brother died at the Baltic front, while Joachim was captured by the Americans and spent two years in a prisoner-of-war camp. (The account of his failed escape attempt, when he lived for six days in a wooden box, could fit comfortably into a Hollywood World War II movie, except for the fact that the hero was a German soldier trying to get away from the Allies.) Johannes, who was sent east as a laborer, was captured by the Russians, survived and returned home 100 pounds lighter. Meanwhile, the Fest women endured horrors of their own as the Red Army went on a sexual rampage across Germany. A crippled aunt was gang-raped before being thrown down the cellar stairs and left to die. The classmates of Joachim’s young sisters, ranging in age from 12 to 15, were all raped. Joachim isn’t explicit about the fate of his mother and sisters, but he does say that “in those days almost every story ended with acts of violence of some kind.”
In a few cursory pages at the end of “Not I,” Fest tells us that he went on to a successful career as a journalist and a historian of the Third Reich. He is the author of one of the best biographies of Hitler. Other survivors retreated into bitterness, denial or silence (up to his death in the 1960s, his father would not discuss the Nazi period and objected that his son had chosen to write about a “gutter subject”). Some turned to Communism, which to Fest was no better than Nazism. Most simply tried to get on with their lives as best they could. Through it all, a few Berliners did manage to retain their famous sense of humor. Shortly after the war, one German exile returning to the city asked the taxi driver on the ride from the airport how things had been under the Nazis. Gesturing at the bombed-out ruins all around them, the driver replied: “You actually didn’t miss much!”
NOT I
Memoirs of a German Childhood
By Joachim Fest
Translated by Martin Chalmers
Illustrated. 427 pp. Other Press. Paper, $16.95.
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