Authors: JOACHIM FEST
I was still calling on Dr. Meyer, and one day he got around to talking about Thomas Mann, “indisputably the greatest German writer,” as he repeatedly emphasized. Until then I had no more than heard the name, but now, in his hoarse voice, Dr. Meyer talked about the writer’s stature, the Nobel Prize, his elder brother Heinrich, and the great literary talents of his children. As he talked, he poured out so many names and titles that I soon had everything mixed up. Finally, he read me some passages from
Tonio Kröger
and said that the book was the briefest summing-up of Thomas Mann’s lifelong problem. All his principal characters were outsiders and every one of his books was a variation on that theme. Once he had got going, he also quoted some phrases from
Royal Highness
and
Buddenbrooks
. He stood on a step-ladder and brought down several volumes by the author. After leafing thoughtfully through them he handed me
Buddenbrooks
for the “next fortnight,” and told me insistently neither to turn down the corners of pages nor to damage the book in any other way, never mind lose it. Because, under present conditions, Thomas Mann was no longer in favor and new copies were hard to come by.
I began to read the first pages on the S-Bahn, but said nothing about it at supper, because I knew my father’s reservations about novels. When Aunt Dolly, who was a librarian, once brought Hermann Hesse’s
Narcissus and Goldmund
for Wolfgang, my father thought her
action incomprehensible, and said novels were mostly for housewives or maids with time on their hands.
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After a long argument he read the first two or three pages of the book and gave it back to Wolfgang with an amused “Well, have fun, Miss Magda!”
With Thomas Mann it was different. After a few days, when I had just reached the description of Uncle Gotthold’s death, my father discovered the book and asked where I had got it from. When I told him about Dr. Meyer’s special liking for Thomas Mann, he was unimpressed: Dr. Meyer couldn’t know that, but he wasn’t having Thomas Mann in the house. He was certainly a significant author, but a politically irresponsible person. My father had lost all respect for Thomas Mann with
Reflections of an Unpolitical Man
. Precisely because it was so well written it had done more to alienate the middle classes from the republic than Hitler.
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That sort of thing was impossible to forgive. He demanded that I send the book back to Dr. Meyer immediately; he himself would include a few lines of explanation.
When I came home from school the next day, the book had already been taken to the post office. My mother
remarked that she had had an errand nearby anyway and sent the book off for me. At my next visit on Saturday Dr. Meyer received me shaking his head and with
Buddenbrooks
in his hand. My father, he said embarrassedly, evidently did not know that literature was only a game. He took books and their authors too seriously. All of belles lettres was at home in the circus, as it were, and had a humorous side. The truth of his observation was underlined a couple of weeks later, when my father once again demanded the return of a book. This time it was Felix Dahn’s
A Struggle for Rome
, which Heinz Steinki, the son of a tailor who lived in Blumenstrasse, had lent me.
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My father disliked playing the censor, but he did not want such a politically dubious author as Felix Dahn in the house, either. “One ends up living with these people,” he said, “they become part of the family.” He shook his head. “Felix Dahn will never be a part of this family!” As a result, for years I had no idea how the Goths had got to Cosenza, and what had happened historically when they had sunk their king together with his treasure in the River Busento at night. What did become clear to me, however, was the depth of the wound that the demise of the Weimar Republic had inflicted on its supporters.
At around this time Sally Jallowitz, whom my mother still could not stand, turned up again. I told him about
Dr. Meyer’s residence theory, according to which the first generation of Jewish immigrants settled in the Scheunenviertel or nearby in Berlin’s East End, and a hundred years later their grandchildren lived in Grunewald. That was unfortunately a thing of the past, Dr. Meyer had said, and he himself was an example of how lacking in energy even the Jews had become. In his irrepressible confidence Jallowitz merely laughed. He and his parents had occupied a basement on Andreasplatz near Silesian Station; he no longer lived in a basement but in a respectable apartment block near Spittelmarkt. Admittedly, he still went from one customer to the next with two heavy suitcases, but really he was past that. He had saved up a “pretty sum” and hidden it and a little silver under a floorboard in his small but nice two-room apartment: “The furniture, all of it the best modern, old-fashioned, fancy stuff!” And next he was going to marry. “But I swear to you”—and he pushed his hat to the back of his head, so that he could wipe the sweat from his face and neck—“my sons will live in Charlottenburg without any detour via the Seydelstrasse, and one of the three or four boys I’ll have may even live in Grunewald! I swear to you!”
In early summer 1939 the founder and director of the language school at which my father was learning Italian and Russian offered to put him in charge of the Berlin branch. My father pointed out that he had been forbidden to give private lessons, but Dr. Hartnack brushed this objection aside, saying that after six years even the Nazis had become more accommodating. Nevertheless, he recommended my father apply to the relevant
department to issue the necessary permission, and my mother went every morning to the rogation service to pray for a happy conclusion to the matter. After about three weeks the answer arrived: it had been impossible, it said in the letter, to agree to a permission, because the petitioner’s behavior, “as known to the department,” did not allow the conclusion that his political attitude had changed in the intervening time. He had not even concluded his application with the “German greeting,” as had been officially required for years.
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As soon as there was evidence before the department that the petitioner had come around to a positive assessment of the National Socialist order and of its leader Adolf Hitler, then it would be prepared to review the matter.
Throwing the letter onto the table with an angry laugh, my father remarked, “The bastards will wait a long time for that. They were all once colleagues of mine.” My mother was unable to hide how desperate she was, but she was also obviously greatly impressed by her husband’s intransigence. Occasionally, I saw her in the evening sitting in the easy chair in the drawing room, her face empty and exhausted by the long day; her eyes had fallen shut over her darning things and a kind of swoon, so it seemed, had overcome her. If she felt herself observed, she started up and said, embarrassed, that she hadn’t been sleeping, but only thinking. Then she asked
me to keep her company for a few minutes, but I failed in the attempt to come up with an amusing piece of gossip. So I talked about my most recent school essays, about the agreement I had come to with Wolfgang, according to which in future I was no longer supposed to support Schalke 04, but Rapid Vienna instead, and finally that recently one saw so many men with German shepherds.
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In the end my mother said, “Six or seven years and the world and people in it are turned upside down!” It would always be beyond her.
This was also when Walther Rosenthal and his attractive wife said goodbye. They didn’t understand the Germans anymore, he said on the phone, and would leave the country in three days, despite all the difficulties the authorities were putting in their way. They had always considered themselves to be Germans, but that had been overhasty. Then Sonja Rosenthal came to the phone for “one quick word of farewell.” She just wanted to say, she remarked, that the little bit of trust she still had in human beings she owed above all to some Berlin friends. “Not so few at all,” she added. Then she said, “
Auf Wiedersehen!
,” which almost sounded like a question, and hung up.
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On the whole, however, the summer of 1939 belonged to my brother Winfried. One day he came running into
the flat breathless with effort and happiness and shouted, “Done it! At last! I’ve managed it!” For two or three months we had watched him as in wind and rain, with youthful perseverance, he practiced the giant swing on the horizontal bar. Wolfgang, who was not a talented gymnast and only managed the knee circle, had soon given up, and after two weeks I had achieved nothing more than the much easier little giant swing. Only Winfried had gone on struggling and finally performed not only a rotation but two giant swings. The whole family, including my sisters, who had never shown any interest in our boys’ world, followed him down to the garden. Because they were going on to a birthday party they had broad, colored ribbons in their hair, which my mother had been tugging away at before the beginning of the show, so that everything looked “neat and tidy.” Then Winfried jumped onto the high horizontal bar from a chair, swung back and forth a couple of times, and threw himself into the giant swing. When he came down, even ending in a standing position, old Katlewski was so impressed that he offered to register Winfried in the local gymnastic club, Karlhorst Turnverein KTV 1900, and my father aroused our envy by giving Winfried one mark—as much as for ten poems!
The next day Hans Hausdorf, who often made considerable sums dealing in dental instruments and equipment, happened to call, and the giant swing was performed for him. He was so astonished that he took five marks out of his pocket. But when he heard how much Winfried had received from my father, he gave him only one mark. “I can’t give you more than your father,” he
said, and Winfried retorted, “You can! You just don’t want to!” After a brief hesitation, Herr Hausdorf added another seventy pfennigs. “But with that you have to buy an ice cream for everyone in the family!”
At around the same time the organist of our church declared himself willing to give me and my sisters piano lessons free of charge. My brothers had responded so negatively to the mere mention of instruction or (in Wolfgang’s case) with such amusement that they were never asked again. Herr Tinz was a lively, charming Rhinelander with a bald spot and curly hair combed up at the sides. He taught me how to sit at the piano, the varieties of fingering, and an appreciation of composers I knew hardly anything about, such as Handel, Telemann, and Schütz.
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More than that, his boundless enthusiasm (which in conversation could be quite trying) taught me that music demanded powerful emotions on the part of both performers and audience and that “without fire” it was nothing more than “blowing at a heap of ashes.” Passion was more important than technique, he said in his high voice. In the course of the lessons our teacher was carried away by his own enthusiasm, and he frequently concluded them by playing a movement from a classical sonata, preferably one marked presto. When I asked my mother whether, after all the artistic thunder and lightning, she could play “Ah, vous dirais-je maman”
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or one
of Brahms’s dances, she looked at me from her stove with an almost pitying smile. With unusual curtness she said, “It would no longer be appropriate now!”
Then I would have to turn to my new friend, I replied, who was at least a year ahead of me on the piano. Wigbert Gans had only recently joined our class. He came from Halle and it so happened that his father, although only the previous year, had been “let go,” as my father had been in April 1933. Wigbert’s face under his long floppy hair expressed superior concentration, and Hans Hausdorf, who once met him at our home, said that Wigbert listened with a fervor which almost made one feel uneasy. Wigbert turned up at our school one day as if from nowhere and after five periods everyone knew that the class had a new top boy. He was not only ahead of us in all the natural sciences and, as it proved, of some of the teachers as well, he was also, contrary to every topboy rule, among the best in foreign languages and even gymnastics. Since he wasn’t a drudge or a show-off he was accepted from the day he arrived. Shortly afterward, when he visited me in Karlshorst for the first time, he introduced himself to my parents with the disconcertingly straightforward words: “I am Wigbert Gans and I’m from a family which is also ‘genuine’ or ‘anti’—whichever you like.”
We quickly became friends and managed to sit together at one of the double desks. We swapped stories of the most diverse experiences, complained about the ignorance of our form master Dr. Appelt, and read the
The Song of the Nibelungs
, Hölderlin’s
Hyperion
, and Knut
Hamsun together.
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Now and then after school we went the few stops to the city center, to Alexanderplatz or Friedrichstrasse, and found the piled-up hair, garish blouses, and green net stockings of the ladies on parade there more exciting than the women themselves. Sometimes we also strolled through the area between Hackescher Markt and Mulackstrasse and looked cautiously into the hallways and cellar homes of this musty world familiar from Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz
.
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At the entrances hung pathetic pieces of clothing, pots, or linen; from below there rose a sour, poor-people smell. There were occasional cigarette-butt sellers who had spread out their goods on an old tray, neatly arranged according to length and brand; three butts cost a pfennig, a half-smoked cigar three pfennigs. Here and there we passed a group of Jews deep in conversation, nodding their heads; even on hot summer days they wore dark coats and hats. They appeared curiously abandoned, and I felt attraction, dread, and sadness at the sight of them.