Book Review - Not I by Joachim Fest

 Not I : Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers, edited by Herbert A. Arnold

New York: Other Press, 2013 (original German publication 2006)   ISBN 9781590516102

This book was an unexpected pleasure. Picked up on a bargain table at one of my favourite bookshops, I bought it having read a few of Fest's histories of Nazi Germany over the years and thought it looked like it might be an interesting book to read. It certainly is that.

Much of this memoir is taken up with the story of Fest's father, Johannes, and how he reacts to and deals with the Nazi takeover and life after 1933. Johannes was a member of the Zentrum Party, which was the party of the Catholics in the Weimar Republic. He was also a committed Catholic and Republican. He was one of the minority who saw through Hitler from the first, and stuck to his principles. Doing this meant he lost his job as a principal of a school in Berlin, and was not allowed to hold down any other job. He was regularly harassed by the Gestapo, and shunned by most of his neighbours, as well as his former work colleagues.

While the Fest's upper middle-class life was slowly falling apart, Joachim and his siblings were slowly brought to understand how one operates in a tyranny - trust no-one, be very careful what you say, and who you say it to. Joachim and his brothers are no longer welcome at their Berlin Gymnasium, and are sent to a Catholic boarding school in Freiburg just before the war breaks out. While their family moved from having an entire floor of an apartment building, with a maid, to sharing bedrooms and wearing patched clothes, Fest writes of a basically happy childhood - children everywhere make the best of what they've got, and often don't realise how bad things really are, even though young Joachim has an idea of what is happening. While he is learning how to navigate being anti-Nazi in a Nazi world, he is also learning what he can of German music and literature, with the help of many of his father's friends.

Quite a few of those friends were Jewish, and Joachim learns much from Dr. Meyer, a widower who becomes increasingly depressed as time goes on. Johannes is very clear-eyed about the danger to his Jewish friends and constantly urges them to leave Germany. Only a few do so, and the rest are lost to history, swallowed in the Holocaust.

Fest moves from school to a Flak unit, then the Labour Corps, and finally into the fighting around Remagen, where he is captured by the Americans and spends a few years in camps, from which he unsuccessfully tries to escape. Eventually he is freed, and reaches Berlin again, and those of his family that remain (his elder brother died on the Eastern Front and his Uncle and Aunt were killed by Russian troops). The final, shorter part of the memoir relates his move into journalism and finally to writing about the Third Reich, which he initially looked down on as a subject, thinking that he'd much rather write about his true interest of the Italian Renaissance.

This memoir, while describing what happened to Fest, is also a memoir of his developing mind, and of the difficulties of the times in which he grew up. As the son of a member of the educated middle-class, Fest was exposed at an early age to the greats of German literature and art, and much of this book is taken up with his discovery of, and reaction to, Mozart, Beethoven Schubert, Rilke, Goethe and other staples of the German canon. After the war, while incarcerated, he is exposed to American literature and begins to see that his cultural education was blinkered by his upbringing much more than he thought.

Fest's life, and more particularly his father's life, is evidence of the price that must be paid to be true to principles, and how most are unable or unwilling to pay that price and don't understand those that do. On several occasions Johannes could have retrieved his old life back, but didn't. He fought for what was right in his own way, but it brought him nothing but trouble and pain. He came back from Koningsberg and Russian captivity after the war a changed man. Fest too came back a different man from the war. However, their principles had not changed. They had resisted Nazism as best they could.

Not I describes very well how life is lived under totalitarianism. Fest is amazed at the freedom and casualness shown by his American captors, which helps him to realize just how much life is circumscribed when living under a totalitarian system, where you cannot say what you think or do what you want to do. Fest writes a little of how this came about - that the Germans are a law-abiding people rather than a people concerned with justice, and that National Socialism attracted opportunists - people hopped on the bandwagon when it was good for them to do so, and hopped off again when it wasn't - which is Fest's theory for why, after the war, no-one was a Nazi, or had ever been.

This book has also been treated well by the people that turned it into something I could read - translated well, the text is very readable (in fact gripping in many places) and contains plenty of footnotes to explain Fest's cultural references. Being published in the US also means that the paper and binding are to a much higher standard than the usual British and Australian rubbish we get Down Under - made to last, rather than to make money.

This was a book that I was going to read and pass on, but it's now a keeper. If you are interested in German history, it's one to read.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell