|
"We are not little people, Not on this subject!"
. . . Published in Germany 13 months ago, "Ich Nicht" is a memoir by the late Joachim Fest, author of the best-known German study of Hitler and a co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It describes his father, his family and growing up in Nazi Germany.The book is exceptional because it tells in a modest, believable, quietly bitter and totally proud way of the family's extraordinary decency - no ironically "good" Germans here - and its refusal to bend before Hitler. The title packs it all in: Ich nicht, Fest's father's phrase, borrowed from the Book of Matthew. Others betray you, Ich nicht. The words are more powerful and less theatrical sounding in German than "Not I" in English (and less ordinary, exclamation point added, than the French "Pas Moi!", which is what the book is called in a translated version appearing in France this month). . . . Fest has written with remarkable detail about being a teenager in that awful time, describing his father's unfailing resistance to the Nazis, how a family could work to learn of Germany's atrocities and mass exterminations, avoid having its middle son get pulled into the SS and keep its honor to the end. . . . . As Fest makes clear, nobody in Berlin in 1940 was listening to radio call-in shows debating whether the invasions of France and Poland were morally acceptable. Rather: One night, Fest overheard his mother asking his father, the Roman Catholic, Prussian nationalist, and friend of Jews, can't you join the Nazi Party? We won't really be changing, she said, and lying is how little people have always dealt with the powerful. "We are not little people," Fest's father shot back. "Not on this subject!" Obviously, Papa Fest was a giant among men. Posted by: Mike 2007-11-16 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=207530 |