‘To What Should We Cling?’: A celebrated German historian recalls growing up in the shadow of Nazism
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, few Germans foresaw the depths of barbarity into which their country would sink. Germany was the nation of Beethoven and Goethe, of Kant and Hegel. Its people were among the best educated and highly cultured in Europe - it seemed inconceivable that they would tolerate a vulgar thug like Hitler for long.
In this thoughtful and subtle memoir, expertly translated by Martin Chalmers, Joachim Fest chronicles the helpless astonishment with which educated Germans watched the gradual corruption of their country, their people and their beliefs. It is a subject that Fest has written about before, not only in his famous biographies of Hitler and Speer, but also in his capacity as co-editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. This book, however, which was first published in German shortly after the author’s death in 2006, is a much more personal view.
The son of a headmaster, Fest grew up on the outskirts of Berlin in the Nazi era. Much of his childhood was spent watching family friends arguing round the dinner table about what on earth had gone wrong with their country. “Why do these easy victories of Hitler never stop?” they would ask despairingly. “Why did the Nazi swindle not simply collapse in the face of the laughter of the educated?” The most outspoken of these intellectuals - and the true hero of Not Me - is Fest’s father. This passionately moral man steadfastly refused to succumb to Nazi pressure, despite being stripped of his job, shunned by former friends and colleagues, and visited regularly by the Gestapo. He kept his children out of the Hitler Youth, resisted being called up to build anti-tank defences, and did not give in even when his wife begged him to.