classes, groups, or ideologies. Too many forces in society had contributed to the destruction of this world, the political right just as much as the left, art, literature, the youth movement, among others. Basically, Hitler had merely swept away the remaining ruins. He was a revolutionary. But because he was capable of hiding behind a bourgeois mask, he destroyed the hollow facade of the bourgeoisie with the help of the bourgeoisie itself: the desire to put an end to it all was overpowering.
Of the twelve families at 13 Hentigstrasse, only one tenant was a member of the Nazi Party. As far as I know, it was not much different in the neighboring buildings. If asked, each person living in our building would have passionately defended middle-class and civil virtues. Yet, inwardly, this stratum of society had decayed long before, so that I was essentially brought up in accordance with the principles of an outmoded order. Its rules and traditions right down to its poetic canon were passed on to me. It kept me at a distance from the times to some extent; simultaneously, it put some solid ground under my feet, which helped to sustain me in the years that followed.
As is evident in retrospect, each member of our family had his or her own distinctive way of coping with the challenges of the age and, taken all together, we were a reflection of the various possibilities of evasion in the face of the regime. My father’s stubbornness was coupled with a contempt that never diminished and allowed of no compromise. My mother’s opposition derived from her quite different set of values, impregnated by religion, which she was able to bring into play with often surprising skill. Wolfgang was able to checkmate every difficulty with his wit and charm. I drew attention to myself with acts of impudence that my parents observed with some concern, but which also had a political aspect. Winfried had his level-headed introversion. My sisters faced life each in her own way, in part quietly, in part defiantly, and had no problems either with the world or with regarding it ironically. We sometimes defined the behavior of friends inaccordance with this family catalogue of types. Everyone in our close circle of friends had their own way of getting through the times halfway undamaged.
Also among those things that survived the Nazi Reich, despite the heavy losses, was for a few years a link between Germans and Jews. In the Berlin of the first years after the war I still encountered brilliant, educated, and charming witnesses to this past, and I regard it as one of the strokes of luck of my life that during the 1950s I experienced a brief revival of this world in the home of the respected doctor Walther Hirsch. He had been born around the turn of the century and in his Grunewald villa he tried to conjure up once more the luster of the 1920s and to revive the memory of the vanished days of his youth. At the soirees which he held at his home every couple of weeks I got to know Fritz Kortner and Joachim Prinz, Wolfgang Lukschy, Hans Scholz, and Sebastian Haffner, as well as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Melvin Lasky, and the painter Heinrich Heuser, and many more.
Long after midnight, when most of the sixty or so guests had taken their leave, a circle of about a dozen remained behind, and each time three of them were called on to enter a kind of competition for the best story of the night. Anyone who was present will remember tales that were developed in masterly fashion and brilliantly told, and often the winner was the host himself or the writer Hans Scholz, whose great success was yet to come. I still regret that these tales were never recorded and collected. They are gone and lost forever, like the German-Jewish community.
Many voices—most prominently that of Gershom Scholem—have argued that the much-discussed German–Jewish symbiosis never existed. That is very understandable as a response to injustice stretching over generations, and above all to the
Of the twelve families at 13 Hentigstrasse, only one tenant was a member of the Nazi Party. As far as I know, it was not much different in the neighboring buildings. If asked, each person living in our building would have passionately defended middle-class and civil virtues. Yet, inwardly, this stratum of society had decayed long before, so that I was essentially brought up in accordance with the principles of an outmoded order. Its rules and traditions right down to its poetic canon were passed on to me. It kept me at a distance from the times to some extent; simultaneously, it put some solid ground under my feet, which helped to sustain me in the years that followed.
As is evident in retrospect, each member of our family had his or her own distinctive way of coping with the challenges of the age and, taken all together, we were a reflection of the various possibilities of evasion in the face of the regime. My father’s stubbornness was coupled with a contempt that never diminished and allowed of no compromise. My mother’s opposition derived from her quite different set of values, impregnated by religion, which she was able to bring into play with often surprising skill. Wolfgang was able to checkmate every difficulty with his wit and charm. I drew attention to myself with acts of impudence that my parents observed with some concern, but which also had a political aspect. Winfried had his level-headed introversion. My sisters faced life each in her own way, in part quietly, in part defiantly, and had no problems either with the world or with regarding it ironically. We sometimes defined the behavior of friends inaccordance with this family catalogue of types. Everyone in our close circle of friends had their own way of getting through the times halfway undamaged.
Also among those things that survived the Nazi Reich, despite the heavy losses, was for a few years a link between Germans and Jews. In the Berlin of the first years after the war I still encountered brilliant, educated, and charming witnesses to this past, and I regard it as one of the strokes of luck of my life that during the 1950s I experienced a brief revival of this world in the home of the respected doctor Walther Hirsch. He had been born around the turn of the century and in his Grunewald villa he tried to conjure up once more the luster of the 1920s and to revive the memory of the vanished days of his youth. At the soirees which he held at his home every couple of weeks I got to know Fritz Kortner and Joachim Prinz, Wolfgang Lukschy, Hans Scholz, and Sebastian Haffner, as well as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Melvin Lasky, and the painter Heinrich Heuser, and many more.
Long after midnight, when most of the sixty or so guests had taken their leave, a circle of about a dozen remained behind, and each time three of them were called on to enter a kind of competition for the best story of the night. Anyone who was present will remember tales that were developed in masterly fashion and brilliantly told, and often the winner was the host himself or the writer Hans Scholz, whose great success was yet to come. I still regret that these tales were never recorded and collected. They are gone and lost forever, like the German-Jewish community.
Many voices—most prominently that of Gershom Scholem—have argued that the much-discussed German–Jewish symbiosis never existed. That is very understandable as a response to injustice stretching over generations, and above all to the
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