Not I by Joachim Fest Read Free Book Online

my courage to ask whether I could keep some of the books. “They’ll just rot here,” I remonstrated. He looked at me in annoyance, but hesitated. Then he said with unexpected harshness, “You Nazi louts will have to get used to the fact that you’ll have no say about anything now. Or even better: that you’re not even allowed to ask for anything anymore.” For a moment I wanted to answer back that I wasn’t a Nazi lout, perhaps he had noticed that there hadn’t been a single Nazi book in my map case. But then I refrained from making the objection. He’s like Mahlmann, I said to myself. Typical military blockhead! But as if he had guessed my thoughts, the lieutenant went over to the pile of rubbish and picked out three of the thrown-away books: Goethe’s poems, Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs , and Josef Weinheber’s Self-Portrait . A curious selection, I thought, as he threw the books down in front of me. I asked him why he had left all the others. He replied, this time somewhat more civilly, “None of that German greed again. The other books stay where they are.”
    He ordered me to follow him into a neighboring room. At a small table sat a youthful captain holding an illustrated magazine, apparently unaffected by all theturbulence of battle, and for the first time I saw a person of rank with his feet on the table. He asked who was being brought to him. The lieutenant briefly stated what he had found out about me, my unit, and the names of the officers. The two exchanged several more sentences in what seemed to me more like Double Dutch than English, and the captain threw his magazine aside to ask me a couple of questions himself. What was the operative officer on the German side called? What did I know about a Major Scheller and about the National Socialist political officer? And more questions like that. At the end he told me to pull up the sleeve on my right arm, and merely said the conversation was over. As I went out, he picked up the magazine again, put his feet on the table, and shouted, “By the way, we’re going to leave your hometown Berlin to the Russians. That’s what you deserve, after all.”
    In the more distant room to which I was then led I encountered three more prisoners, none of whom, however, had belonged to my unit. We had hardly exchanged a few words when a sergeant came in and ordered us to follow him. Escorted by two GIs with submachine guns, and repeatedly forced to take cover by shell fire, we ran across a big field toward Unkel. On the deserted street right by the first houses lay dead soldiers, most in contorted postures, some also stretched out on their backs, their sightless eyes turned to the sky. The colors of death everywhere, I thought, as we ran down the street alongside a house front. There was also a woman among the dead, her apron covered in blood, and a few yards from her lay a dead soldier who had evidently been flattenedby the tracks of a Sherman tank into a board, dark red at the edges. “Like in a cartoon,” said the German NCO running beside me, but I thought what he said was out of place and retorted, “Shut up! No jokes about the dead!”
    We spent the evening on the cellar steps of one of the houses by the roadside. Over the hours more and more groups of prisoners arrived. Soon there were about twenty of us; there was a rough shoving and pushing on the steep, narrow stairs. After darkness fell there was suddenly shouting and movement; we were led out of the town and through the Erpel Tunnel to the Rhine crossing. One of the guards, who spoke German, warned us to be extremely careful, because the bridge had been badly damaged by attempts to blow it up, and indeed we passed by a number of large holes, through which we could see the Rhine flowing black and bubbling far below. On the approach road, on the other bank, there was a jam of vehicles with silent soldiers sitting on them or waiting in the tank hatches. Occasional shells landed from the German