My Literary Mentors: Three Men and One Woman

My relationship with the four individuals I am about to discuss began in one of my favorite bookstores; it is the one in the main railroad station (Hauptbahnhof) in Munich. Almost every time I am in Europe, usually two or three times a year, my path leads to this bookstore. It is a humble place, but its shelves are much more readily accessible than those in some of the massive bookstores in this and other cities.

This group of role models is a set of three men and one woman who lived through and have influenced the way we interpret 20^th century European, particularly German, history. The individuals are Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-); Marion Countess Dönhoff (1909-2002); Raimund Pretzel, better known for his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999); and Fritz Stern (1926-).

These four human beings are a fascinating flock; I came across Reich-Ranicki in the later 1990s, Haffner in 2007, and Dönhoff and Stern in 2009. I knew nothing of

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Ranicki before I read his autobiography The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki. I had read Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler before I came across his recollections Defying Hitler: A Memoir (2002), but this rather lengthy exposition struck me so powerfully that I gobbled it up in one sitting on a plane from Munich to Charlotte, North Carolina. The same is generally true of my encounter with Dönhoff. I had read some of her articles and knew of her work with Die Zeit, a leading German paper. I had been especially impressed with two of her books, which are not available in English but could be translated as, Names No Longer Mentioned: East Prussia-Human Beings and Stories, which I also discovered in the same bookstore, and What was Important to Me: Last Writings and Conversations. It remains absolutely astounding to have read her account of the friends, almost every one of whom was murdered during or shortly after July 20, 1944 for their role in the last attempt on Hitler’s life. Stern’s Five Germanies I Have Known (2006) is the most recent of these discoveries; again, I found the German version. I had read his The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, An Analysis of the Thought and Influence of Lagarde, Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck, and Einstein’s German World, but the massive tome of his recollections was an instant success with me.

Why these four? Most importantly is that the bookstore in the main railroad station stocked their books. Very important also, although all the titles are here rendered in English, I came across them in German, either because they were written in that language or translated into it. The German language is a part of me so rendering the titles in English takes away one reason for the appeal of these individuals. Importantly, through these men and this woman, I progressed from little concern to a deeper understanding of Germany and its National Socialist deviation. With this insight

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comes my appreciation for their uncompromising stance against the Nazi regime. They arrived at this view from personal experience and subsequent efforts to deal with it. Their trauma made them all the more acutely aware of the calculated meanness of the Schweine (pigs), to quote my father, in Germany and beyond.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who describes himself as a Jew living in Germany, experienced the regime at its most vicious as the secretary to the infamous Judenrath (Jewish Council) in the Warsaw Ghetto, his tribulations in hiding afterward, and the eventual and not always pleasant post-war adjustment. Once he settled in what was West Germany, he became the most prominent critic of German literature. He worked at Die Zeit, then at the Frankfurter Allgemeine, another leading paper and is probably best known for his TV show, Literarisches Quartett, on a commercial station.

Sebastian Haffner, in 1933 a German, immediately and intuitively understood the danger of the consolidating National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) and emigrated to England in 1938. There he became a journalist and wrote some of the most perceptive analyses of Hitler and his regime. Until I read him, I did not appreciate the sheer brutality and ingeniousness of the Nazi machinery as it prepared and assumed power in Germany in January 1933.

Countess Dönhoff, a Prussian-German, experienced the Nazis as a young woman and fellow conspirator against Hitler. She survived because her name was not on the conspirators’ lists, no one betrayed her, and she remained “cool” during Gestapo interrogations. Thus, she became another direct connection to the men of July 1944 whom I deeply admire. Whether they were in the Wehrmacht (the WWII German military) or not, they had the mental staying power and physical courage to understand the regime’s horrific dimensions and reluctantly overcome their religious and other re-

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sistances to killing Hitler. She became a prominent reporter and editor of Die Zeit. She also stands in for the female conversation partners whom I lost over the last three years and whose voices are not carried forward in the written word.

Fritz Stern grew up in Breslau (now Wroclaw) as German-Jewish before he and his family were forced out of Europe by Hitler’s regime in 1938. In this country, he became a brilliant historian of German history with close ties to many contemporaries in Germany, not least of which was Dönhoff.

Another common denominator of these individuals is that they were driven from their homelands, only to “return” to it as perceptive analysts. I am all too well aware of the difference between their emigrations and mine. They were forced to leave their homeland; three as a consequence of National Socialist persecution, and one because of the war launched by the National Socialists. That is, these four were forced to migrate because of political circumstances and for that reason they gained their later outsiders’ penetrating insightfulness. I see them as role models in part because we have this common denominator. I left Europe because of my miserable performance in gymnasium (the European equivalent of high school and the first two years of college) and the move to the U.S. gave me a new start. The experience of emigration and adjustment to another society may create a powerful drive to be successful in it. These four came out of what can be characterized as the middle, upper middle class, and the nobility; their families also constituted the intellectual elite. Reich-Ranicki’s mother was well educated and sent her son to study in Berlin while Haffner came from a family of attorneys and initially chose the same path, also in Berlin. Gräfin Dönhoff was the highly educated daughter of the Prussian aristocracy and Stern emerged from a family of prominent doctors. These backgrounds are most

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likely the reason each of them chose writing as their tool of expression, analysis, and success.

Their profound understanding of the National Socialist regime, their clear opposition to it, and yet also their capacity to appreciate the post-war adjustments first in West Germany and then the reunited Germany, gives hope to all of us who find no excuse for the regime. This is the regime that created unspeakable misery and horror for Europeans of all ethnic backgrounds with its arrogant Aryan ideology; its vicious persecution of everyone who opposed it, or it thought to be inferior; and its unleashing of a devastating war that cost at least 60 million human beings their lives. But that was not all, as it also destroyed some of the most flourishing subcultures in Europe, including the Eastern-European-Jewish and German-Jewish cultures.

I discovered these individuals in a German language setting and in Germany. Part of my long-standing ambivalence about Germany was rooted in its National Socialist period, and so I encountered difficulties even thinking that one could criticize it in German, although others have done so. German is my first language and it fits uniquely with the abuses. Yet, these four individuals allowed me to disassociate it from them; one can indeed abhor the abuses of the past through the language of the abusers. In other words, the language of Luther and Goethe allows for critique as much as the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. As Haffner and Dönhoff showed brilliantly, the German language was and is a powerful tool against the National Socialists; maybe it is the most profound tool because one can step with it into the deeper meaning of the words that set and accompanied the abuse.

I discovered or rediscovered these individuals in Munich’s main railroad station bookstore, and each encounter began a new and significant conversation. Both the emigrant

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and immigrant experiences, and their choices to write as a form of expression and understanding, are reasons for my sense of affinity. But it is more than that; it is guidance. However less the mental skills with which I operate, they encourage me to explore aspects of the past long after others have given in to daily routines and puttering about. They enable me, through their vibrant example, to dig deeper and not to give up the search for a meaningful life, hopefully until its end.

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