Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest

(Other Press, $17)

“If ever a book demonstrated the slow but seemingly unstoppable reach of tyranny, it is this one,” said Rachel Seiffert in The Guardian (U.K.). Its author, Joachim Fest, was a boy in 1930s Berlin, and he paid close attention to how the Nazis’ rise changed almost all the people around him. It did not, however, change his father—a schoolmaster and devout Catholic who repeatedly refused to join the Nazi party, drawing strength from a short Gospel passage about not bending: “Even if all the others do, not I.” The family suffered for its quiet resistance, but Fest—who grew up to be an acclaimed historian, biographer, and journalist—doesn’t suggest that they triumphed in the end. His “often painful, always clear-eyed” memoir instead “bears witness to the limits of personal courage.”

Fest’s father, Johannes, was clearly a remarkable man, said Barry Gewen in The New York Times. His refusal to pretend any Nazi allegiance cost him his career in 1933, and his stance would gradually cost him many risk-averse friends. As the family struggled to get by, Johannes drew closer to his Jewish friends—fellow bourgeois Germans who refused to believe that Hitler could triumph in the land of Goethe and Beethoven. But even as we watch the elder Fest trying to help many of them, his son makes sure we see that courage and stubbornness can be hard to separate.

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Up to a point, the Fests were lucky, said Keith Lowe in the Financial Times. Unlike most dissidents, Johannes avoided imprisonment (his anonymous protector, the family later discovered, was a sympathetic local Nazi official). Eventually, though, he was dispatched to a labor camp, and his sons, including the author, were compelled to serve in the Wehrmacht. One of Joachim’s brothers died in the war, Joachim landed in a prisoner-of-war camp, and many of the women in his family were raped by Allied soldiers. “There is a curious emptiness” in Fest’s descriptions of all this: “For all the unease” he expresses in this book, “it is painfully clear that we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg.”