Not I by Joachim C. Fest

Author:Joachim C. Fest [Fest, Joachim C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-611-9
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

Father Johannes Wittenbrink, a neighbor and friend of the family, in a photo taken in the 1950s

Around this time, I decided on my future profession. In Greek class Dr. Breitscheid was reading out a poem written in a classical style. Its title, as far as I remember, was “The Tears of Nausicaä” or something like it. The author’s name was Eckart Peterich, added our teacher, and the poem described a maiden gazing after a longed-for or vanished happiness. When I asked what kind of poet Peterich was, Dr. Breitscheid talked about Peterich’s publications, his origin in a German-Italian family of scholars in Florence, and his marriage into a wealthy patrician family, so that he was able to live in aristocratic circumstances. All of these factors permitted him to lead a life as—yes, as what (he said, looking for the right word), well, let’s say, as an independent scholar.17 The term, mentioned in passing, was like an inspiration to me: Florence, the wealthy lifestyle, and the propertied patrician wife included, of course. Apart from that my second thought was that as an “independent scholar” I would evade, as my father put it, the wretched impertinences of the Nazis, and so freely dispose of myself and the objects of my interest, as no university teacher far and wide was able to do. My preferences were anyway all for the remoter past, whether Athens or Florence. As my mother often reminded me with amusement years later, I wrote to my parents on November 22, 1941, in a flush of clever Dick excitement: I have a profession.

In a lifetime one probably never again reads as one does between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. The feeling was intensified by the circumstances of the war, which ate into our minds and made us fear we might miss one of the important works. This fear was even more marked when it came to music. Whenever I played with the crystal radio set which Wigbert Gans had given me on my last Berlin visit, I heard through all of the abrupt whistling and intermittent interruptions a basso continuo, which told me that this very performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Edwin Fischer or that Haydn symphony conducted by Eugen Jochum might be the only or indeed the last chance to become familiar with these works.

The feeling was so powerful that I passed hours turning the dial of the set without picking up more than a few distorted bars of a never-to-be-identified piece of music or spent my time over books of which in less threatening times I would have read at most a couple of dozen pages. Since I read mostly after lights out under the blanket in the bright cone of a pocket lamp, I had for the time being to do without Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, which Wolfgang had brought from Berlin. Both were too heavy and bulky. More for lack of anything else I then turned to Robert Graves’s great

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