Defying Hitler: A Memoir by Sebastian Haffner

Author:Sebastian Haffner [Haffner, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
Published: 2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

~ 25 ~

“If you notice that they are entering people’s homes, Charlie, come to me,” I said as we parted, though I must admit I wondered how I could explain it to my parents. That, however, must take second place. “You will be safe with us, I hope. Promise you’ll come.” She was touched, and promised to do so.

Thank God she did not need to. She would not have found me at home. For the next day...

At ten o’clock in the morning, I received a telegram. “Please come if you can, Frank.” I said goodbye to my parents, almost like someone leaving for war, and took the suburban railway out toward the east to see Frank Landau. I was not unhappy to be called on to do something, instead of passively awaiting the turn of events.

Frank Landau was my oldest and best friend. We had known each other since we started grammar school in the same class, had raced together in the Rennbund Altpreussen and later in proper athletics clubs. We had gone to university together and were now both Referendars. We had shared virtually every boyish hobby and enthusiasm. We had read each other our first literary attempts and had continued this with more serious pieces later. We both vaguely considered ourselves to be authors rather than Referendars. Some years we had seen each other every day, and we told each other everything — including about our love affairs, which we discussed in detail without feeling at all indiscreet, rather as one thinks about them when one is alone. In the seventeen years we had known each other we had never seriously quarreled. That would have been like quarreling with oneself. As adolescents we had derived much pleasure from analyzing our differences, among which we counted our racial origins the least. They did not separate us.

He was the more brilliant of the two of us. He was very handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, but otherwise lightly built; as a young boy he had been compared to an Apollo. Later, when his nose had become more prominent, his brow higher, and his face more lined, he reminded me of the young King Saul. His life also, though it was very similar to mine, seemed to be laid out on slightly grander lines. His emotions rose higher and sank deeper, love shook him more than me, and there was more luster about his adolescence — for which, however, he paid by periods of deep, devouring, desperate despondency, which I was spared.

He was currently in the latest of these depressions, and it had lasted dangerously long. This time it had an external cause. A year before, his girlfriend, Hanni, had been unfaithful — a chance affair, thoughtlessly entered, not really serious. It had completely overwhelmed him. That seems a bit ridiculous by the usual twentieth-century standards in love affairs; but this had been a great passion, of a character quite out of fashion, and, it sometimes seems, no longer possible, like in Goethe’s Werther or La nouvelle Héloïse, the kind that produced Heine’s Book of Songs, or Chopin’s waltzes.

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