Turning a Blind Eye

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I spent an evening in conversation with Mr. Sperber—a Jewish-Polish émigré I never knew by any other name—in his housing project apartment in lower Manhattan. At midnight Mr. Sperber offered to see me into a taxi, as there’d been a number of holdups recently in the project. We were alone in the elevator going down when suddenly it stopped at a floor halfway to the lobby; the door opened and there stood a teenaged Black boy. Before I could think I lunged for the “close” button. Mr. Sperber, however, held back the door, and invited the startled boy into the elevator but he, the boy, had seen my gesture and his face hardened. “Never mind,” he muttered. “I’ll take the next one.” When the elevator door closed and I stood there, numb with mortification, Mr. Sperber turned to me and, very gently, said, “One must remain human until the last moment.”

Journalist and historian Joachim Fest’s Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, first published in German in 2006 and published in English in 2012 before being reissued last year, is about remaining human until the last moment.

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Fest was born in Berlin in 1926, the son of a conservative Roman Catholic schoolteacher whose upright Christian morality made him a staunch anti-Nazi from the moment the first Brownshirt appeared on the city streets. Needless to say, the whole family, wife and five children, stood behind this imposing paterfamilias; as a result of their open opposition to the Nazi party, the father lost his job, the children were threatened in school, the neighbors began to shun them. The Fests lived on as the Nazi party rose to power, in poverty and isolation, but essentially untouched for a remarkably long time. Then the war caught up with them.

After managing to evade enlistment in the Hitler Youth, the Fest boys were eventually compelled to join. At the age of eighteen, unable to evade conscription, Joachim joined the Wehrmacht in order to escape being drafted into the SS. Within the year, he was captured by the Americans, spending two years as a prisoner of war. As for the rest of the family, Joachim’s elder brother, Wolfgang, died on the Eastern Front and their father, Johannes, spent many months imprisoned by the Russians. Though not explicit, the implication in some of the writing is that Joachim’s mother and two sisters may have been sexually abused during the Allied occupation of Berlin (for which read: by the Russians). Thus, the entire family was penalized, first as minority anti-Nazis and then as defeated Germans.

Of Hitler, Fest wrote, “He was never only their leader; he was always their voice. . . . the people, as if electrified, recognized themselves in him.”

At war’s end the Fests regrouped, although never again would they function as a single entity. Joachim himself became a radio journalist in the American sector of Berlin, and over the next fifteen years achieved success as a writer and editor in German radio and television. In 1973, with the publication of a major biography of Hitler, he established himself as a respected if controversial historian of the Nazi era: at a time when it was not yet popular to analyze the Nazi years in quite this way, Fest argued that the party’s rise was due to millions of ordinary Germans turning a blind eye, day by day by day, to the gradual destruction of democratic law, thereby allowing the barbarism in their own hearts to manifest itself incrementally. Of Hitler himself, Fest wrote, “He was never only their leader, he was always their voice. . . . the people, as if electrified, recognized themselves in him.”

Following his famed biography of Hitler, Fest wrote other books about the Nazi years, including one about the architect Albert Speer, a top Nazi minister. (In 1969, Fest had served as an editorial aide on Speer’s memoirs, allowing his critics to complain that he was helping Speer dodge responsibility for the full extent of his role in the party.) At the same time, he was gaining a reputation for editorial excellence, which earned him a position as co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a renowned institution in German newspaper publishing; here he served for the twenty years between 1973 and 1993. It was only toward the end of his life that he chose to write a memoir about his family and the war. Days before the publication of Not I, Fest died.

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Fest’s father, Johannes, urged upon his children the avoidance of self-pity and the cultivation of irony: this latter quality, the younger Fest recalls his father telling him often, was “‘the entry ticket to humanity. Outwardly one displays a seriousness the situation demands, but inwardly one snaps one’s fingers at the frustrations.’” Yet it seems that Joachim, much as he loved and admired his father—and this he did inordinately—nonetheless forgot at least part of the elder Fest’s admonition. While Not I is certainly free of self-pity, it is surprisingly straightforward both in tone and point of view, and thus entirely free of irony. The grave, even-handed calm that pervades his prose is particularly striking, sounding as though its author is intent on respecting the memoir-writing conventions of the late nineteenth century rather than those of the early twenty-first—a tone that is both the book’s strength and limitation. One appreciates the calm but is put off by the emotional distance. For instance, the father loses his job and Fest writes: “Of course our meals became more modest. There were no toys anymore and Wolfgang did not get his . . . model racing car or I the football.” Hardly another word on the subject. In a sense, the reader is left hanging: What was the real cost to the family? How did it manifest itself on a daily basis? And where is the mother in all this?

Later in the book, when a friend of the family jokingly says the Jews shouldn’t leave because that was exactly what the Nazis wanted, Fest makes no comment. As for the Jews in general, the brevity of Fest’s reference to them is also surprising. Everyone sees that life for the Jews is gradually shutting down. Take their neighbor and good friend, Dr. Meyer: one day he can no longer subscribe to newspapers and magazines; another, he has to hand in his bicycle and typewriter; another, he can no longer keep a pet or buy flowers. Then all the Jews simply start disappearing from the neighborhood. On a winter walk with his sons, Johannes tells the boys that someone he knows heard on the BBC that “the Jews removed from Germany were not, as was whispered furtively here and there, dumped in open country, which would have been bad enough, but were murdered by the tens of thousands.” They simply could not believe that even Hitler’s gangsters were capable of such monstrosity. And that’s pretty much it for the Jews in Not I. A great deal of attention is paid to the fact that the family, and especially Joachim, was devoted to music and literature—so much so that Not I often sounds like a wholesome family memoir about middle-class life in times of peace. Repeatedly and at detailed length Fest tells us what he is reading or listening to at any given moment while the war is going on: a radio broadcast of Figaro is transformative; absorption in the work of Friedrich Schiller is crucial; he’s fallen in love with the Italian Renaissance and thinks of making it his life’s work. When he’s around fourteen and about to read Buddenbrooks, Dr. Meyer, with whom he regularly talks literature, tells him that “hardly anything in life was comparable to the pleasure of reading a book like that for the first time.” One can well believe that people as intensely middle-class as the Fests were, and such profound believers in the unassailable superiority of German civility, had “lost their instinct for danger.” Johannes himself said that he “‘would never understand . . . why everyone who opposed Hitler was inevitably, sooner or later, left out in the cold.’” He had thought such things “might occur in darkest Russia or the Balkans, but surely not in their law-abiding country. What had happened? That was the question raised on all sides, but no one had an answer.” Very mildly indeed, the younger Fest proffers his own: “When, toward the end of the Hitler years, they regained their senses,” so many shabby compromises and betrayals had been made or committed that “it was too late.”

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While reading Not I, I could not help comparing its tale of the rise of an authoritarian regime with our situation here in America at this moment. It’s not that I think we’re headed for a homegrown version of Nazi Germany—I do not—but so much that is described in Fest’s book feels eerily similar to what is happening right now in the United States: people being grabbed off the streets and deported, universities and law firms punished if they don’t conform to an administrative ideology, federal employees fired overnight in the thousands, independent agencies abolished outright, Congress failing to assert its rights and obligations, judges being sidelined. Never in a million years could I have imagined the day when an American president would ignore a court order—and the Supreme Court would uphold his right to do so!

It’s the inertia—the daily accommodation to the rise of an authoritarian regime—that is most shocking.

From one day to the next, what we in America have always thought of as law-abiding normal is disintegrating.  There is not yet systematic murder of political enemies or death camps, but who knows? Whatever holds today is not guaranteed to hold tomorrow. On the other hand, perhaps it never was. Many people have re-read American law and history and found in it not only numerous loopholes but designs that, from the beginning, may have provided for the rise of dictatorial power. More important, I think, is the incredible capitulation that seems to have taken hold in the entire country. Capitulation and inertia. It’s the inertia—the daily accommodation to the rise of an authoritarian regime —that is most shocking. We—that is, Americans—live most of the time inside the cocoon of our small daily lives. Except for fire, flood, or outright war, the history-making world hardly ever impinges on most of us. For the most part, it is over there and we are over here. I watch myself and I see the divide operating clearly. On an ordinary day, throughout most of my New York middle-class life, I wake up in the morning, check my email and flip through the pages of the Times—a plane crash in Maine, riots in Iran, giant pandas in a Tokyo zoo—then I eat breakfast and figure out a day that will include working at my desk, reading in the afternoon, and meeting a friend for dinner. What I have read in the Times makes me gasp or shudder or smile for five or ten minutes but does not seriously affect my plans for my Mrs. Dalloway day. The history-making world is still over there, and I clearly still over here. Since Donald Trump took office one year ago, this routine has changed to the degree that I wake up, read the Times and, first thing in the morning, a drop of dread falls on my heart. Another piece of normalcy has just been outraged; democratic law is going down the drain; ordinary lives are upended; we’re going to bomb someone who’ll bomb us back. A haze of gloom begins to gather in the air around me; anxiety injects itself into the gloom. The hours pass. I think, “This can’t go on! Something has to happen.” Yes, there are flashes of fierce resistance, especially to the ICE raids taking place across the country, but still I can’t help feeling that nobody does anything—not me, not the Congress, not anyone I know. And the day goes on. The news in that morning’s Times steadily loses strength as I go about my business and lo and behold, the sky doesn’t fall. After all, the reality for many of us is that no one we know is being deported. We’re not made frantic if the price of eggs goes through the roof, or the rents in Queens are beyond the beyond. By the end of the day our anxiety is what can only be called “normalized.” We go to bed and wake up into another morning in which another piece of threatening news fills the front page of the Times and instead of being galvanized, we will merely prepare ourselves to absorb the shock.

Read Not I and you’ll see how easily it can all happen—how easily we can all become good Germans. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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