Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood Paperback – Illustrated, February 11, 2014

I'm only on page 56, but am not waiting to finish before reviewing it.Reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (just prior to the internet) was like reading the newspaper -- we were making mistakes the ancient Romans made; yet for all their ghastly blunders and atrocities, Rome took 1,000 years to fall. Although Germany too was a great nation of art, science and enterprise, the Third Reich was over in twelve -- perhaps because Nazi hatred so pervaded society that even the everyday middle class came to regard it as normal: "For a while [1933] one saw uniformed patrols everywhere, although there was neither unrest nor brawls in public halls. Instead, the more or less declared opponents of the regime were abducted and sometimes beaten to death....At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such crimes were the most natural thing in the world." The Nazis were handed power in a legal election, hence their seeming legitimacy, yet ruled by lawbreaking -- which may explain both their passionate support by so many Germans and the fear that silenced the rest.Joachim Fest's absorbing memoir of growing up in an anti-Nazi family that barely survived does not recount every step down Germany's slippery slope to totalitarian savagery, but mainly how it felt not to join in. He observes that after the war, many rationalized their support for it by claiming that in 1932 their only choice was between Nazis and the Communist Party -- a self-serving lie. What followed that election is why citizens in a time of political upheaval MUST pay close attention to politics, and not from sources passionately committed to hatred. However intoxicating and cathartic its dark festivals, hatred never saved a nation, yet destroyed many. (And one mustn't regard Nazi Germany as wholly unique. When its armies crossed frontiers across Europe, the conquered governments were often waiting to welcome and collaborate with them, having installed Fascist or proto-Nazi governments and begun persecuting Jews and other "undesirables" already! See Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, for just one account.)People don't change -- which is why Mark Twain said history, while not repeating, will rhyme. Plato and Aristotle saw more than one democracy become a tyranny. Crises of economy and foreign relations are inevitable, but the ugliest options need not be. The more a system lets people govern themselves, the greater their obligation to be mature sovereigns and responsible stewards acting on one another's behalf. When someone embodies everything you want in a strong leader, never forget what Scripture, Shakespeare, and the framers of our Constitution said about power and human nature. (cf. The Federalist Papers.) And always practice critical reading! Daniel Patrick Moynihan's book Secrecy explains how CIA so often led our leaders astray: it used to claim the USSR would surpass us economically and militarily in the 1970s, yet publicly available information and observable facts argued otherwise, and were vindicated. But no one wanted to read anything that wasn't classified, which they assumed meant it was the truth -- yet it was inadequately sourced and totally wrong. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof -- which in politics may be in short supply.

Historian and author Joachim Fest has written a memoir about his boyhood and life up til the age of about 24. The book was published, in cooperation with an interpreter and an historian, in 2006, the year of his death, at the age of 80. His memoir gives a different side of life in Nazi Germany in the 1930's and 1940's. His parents - his father in particular - were against Hitler and lived a circumscribed life under the Nazis.The Fest family were members of the Catholic upper-middle class. Fest's father - Johannes - was a teacher and school administrator who lost his job and was prohibited from holding a paying job because he would not cooperate with the new Nazi regime. The family lived in a suburb of Berlin called Karlshorst. Fest was one of five children - 3 boys and 2 girls - and survived in those years with the help of family money and assistance. Most of the family survived the war and the Russian occupation of Berlin at war's end and were reunited.Okay, what did the Fest family do to show their displeasure with the regime? The Fests were not Communists or liberals. Johannes (Hans) Fest was a member of the Zentrum (Center) Party and was active in positions in the Weimar Republic. This perhaps put him into an interesting category of non-Nazis in Germany. Besides losing his job and being serially harassed by Nazi officials, their lives never seemed to be in danger during the era. No one was hauled off by the government to camps and the Fest sons were not forced to join any Hitler-Youth organisations. They had Jewish friends who "disappeared" and who they tried to help out, but it seems the family was basically left alone. The sons were sent to a Catholic boarding school near Freiburg during the war and the two older saw service in the last months of the war, after being drafted from their studies. I read nothing about any of the family doing anti-Hitler work, other than Joachim carving some caricatures of Hitler in a class desk in Berlin.Joachim Fest went on to become one of post-war Germany's most noted historian and biographers. He was always quick to point out that it was impossible for most Germans not have known what was going on by the Nazis, both inside Germany and in the occupied lands. He says his family heard stories and reports about what was going on in the occupied eastern countries, particularly against the Jewish population. What does he say in his memoir? He alludes to various friends who told the family about such happenings but what does his family do, besides live quietly under Nazi rule and try not to draw too much attention to themselves? But, and this is a big "but", what did MOST German Christians do during the Nazi era? How many really were protesting or conducting any form of sabotage? How many were putting their own lives at risk to protest? Not many, not many...Fest was an excellent writer and his memoir is interesting. I wish he could have made a better connection between his family and their survival with what that said about the Nazi state.

I was interested in Fest's account of belonging to an anti-Nazi family during Hitler's time and in the aftermath of war. This story is present but for every page about it there another four or five other pages where he met some random person somewhere and related their endless debates over the merits of Goethe, Schiller, Chopin and many other prominent figures of culture.While I found this harder going than I expected, I would recommend it for those as deeply into esoteric debates on important cultural figures. Just so you know what you are getting into.

Joachim Fest experienced life as the child of a dissenting family in Germany during the Nazi years - dissenting in the sense that they rejected Nazi-ism and regarded the people in charge of government as thugs and criminals. This book gives a convincing picture of just how difficult it is to stick with your convictions when the people in charge are thugs, criminals and toadies.Fest's family was a prosperous middle-class one with pretensions, and I found some of his assumptions that life needs a focus on literature and music to be meaningful a bit yawn-making, and I think that had I met him during his younger years I would have encouraged him to lighten up and live a little. Perversely his wartime experiences did that for him to some extent, for as he points out, the middle class was pretty-much destroyed in 1930s Germany.Certainly thought-making. A bit turgid I found in the initial chapters, but the story is worthy of the telling.

If you start where he starts his childhood story, missing out the first part about his parents background, you will probably go on to appreciate this book very much. I certainly did. It gives a poosibility to start to find answers to all the questions you hear and ask yourself, like 'why did people in Germany go along with the regime ?' or 'how much did people know about the camps?' etc etc .

This is a touching insight into growing up in Nazi Germany. The Fest family was quite remarkable in standing out against the encroaching tide of xenophobic nationalism in the pre-war years. The book contains some translation idiosyncrasies and Fest's obsession with music I found overblown. Well worth reading!

Beautifully written memories of a time and people long gone. People of principle standing against a frightening regime where the risk of annihilation was ever present.