Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood Author: Joachim C. Fest | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EMX82J2 | Format: EPUB
Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood Description
A portrait of an intellectually rigorous German household opposed to the Nazis and how its members suffered for their political stanceFew writers have deepened our understanding of the Third Reich as much as German historian, biographer, journalist, and critic Joachim Fest. His biography of Adolf Hitler has reached millions of readers around the world. Born in 1926, Fest experienced firsthand the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War, and a catastrophically defeated Germany, thus becoming a vital witness to these difficult years.
In this memoir of his childhood and youth, Fest offers a far-reaching view of how he experienced the war and National Socialism. True to the German
Bildung tradition, Fest grows up immersed in the works of Goethe, Schiller, Mörike, Rilke, Kleist, Mozart, and Beethoven. His father, a conservative Catholic teacher, opposes the Nazi regime and as a result loses his job and status. Fest is forced to move to a boarding school in the countryside that he despises, and in his effort to come to terms with his father’s strong political convictions, he embarks on a tireless quest for knowledge and moral integrity that will shape the rest of his life and writing career.
- File Size: 4606 KB
- Print Length: 464 pages
- Publisher: Other Press; Reprint edition (February 11, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EMX82J2
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,595 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Europe > Germany - #7
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- #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Europe > Germany - #7
in Books > History > Europe > Germany - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > World War II
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.
Joachim Fest wonders how Hilter and Nazism and the Third Reich took swift root in Germany. He gives many facts to build a good analysis, but in the end he doesn't get it: "Democracy...if one approached it responsibly was rather boring." (378)
I concede that most of what happens in a democracy is not exciting UNTIL DEMOCRACY MUST BE USED. DEMOCRACY becomes efficient and powerful, much more than a totalitarian system like Nazi Germany where everyone much wait for the chief thug to awaken from his beauty sleep to get the wrong decision.
Democracy might be boring if it is not material, not relevant and not important to balance the interests of individuals, the interests of an individual to that of society, the interests of groups versus those of other groups. Instead, the people of a totalitarian nation have no need to worry about those issues because the chief can make a snap decision and the problem is eliminated forever.
Democracy is boring if considerations, elements and factors constituting and defining freedom and liberty are uninteresting to a people grubbing at the feet of the chief thug, healing him at every chance and giving their lives to the caprices of a mentally ill victim of medical malpractice.
HOWEVER, this book admirably adumbrates circumstances leading the Germans to Hitler: Education, family, culture, society. What's wrong here: Fest's father is political and he attends political meetings. After the War starts, he father discusses with a like thinking neighbor whether they or anyone would be justified killing a tyrant. The men discussed St. Augustine and Johannes Althusius (158) Assassination is an act of politics, which is a human invention. The killer does not need theological and philosophical sanctions to murder Hitler!
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