CHAPTER 16
The Furies: Johann Kessler
“I still say,” said Herr Kessler, “that National Socialism was good for Germany.”
“Was it good for you?” I said, on an off chance.
There was a pause. Then: “No.”
“Why not?” I said, “if it was good for Germany?”
“Perhaps we will talk about that, one day, Herr Professor.”
We did, one day, months later. It burst out. “Through National Socialism I lost my soul. I blasphemed. Every night, through all those years, I blasphemed; I said my children’s prayers with them; I took the name of the Lord in vain. I wanted them to be Christians, and I myself had denied Jesus Christ.”
Johann Kessler had been born and brought up a Catholic, in a Catholic village in Württemberg, in southern Germany. He was the second son in a large family; his older brother would inherit the Kesslerhof. He himself wanted to learn. At nine he had gone to the village priest and asked to be taught Latin. At ten he wanted to be a monk, and he was so insistent that his mother (his father was dead now) sent him with the priest to a Benedictine monastery nearby. The monks were kind to him, but there were no other children and he had to get up at midnight and dawn for Mass; at the end of a week he wanted to go home. The monks told him that he might come back, if he wanted to, at eighteen.
At eighteen he was a soldier. At seventeen he had been a bank clerk, leading a glorious life in town. The day the first World War began he enlisted and served as an Army regular through the war. He participated in the suppression of the Communist rebellion in Munich after the Armistice. Then he was demobilized, got a job again as a bank clerk after a year unemployed, wound up in Frankfurt, jobless again, in the depression of 1931, and moved to a village just outside Kronenberg, where he worked for a year as manager of an estate and was unemployed again.
He was very happily married to a fine, large woman, a good “free-thinking” Protestant. She had never been converted to Catholicism, but he had gone on being a Catholic, less ardently than he had been as a child, of course, and the Kesslers’ two children, a boy and a girl, were being brought up in the Catholic faith. Like a good woman, Frau Kessler respected her husband and his wishes; like a good man, he was warmly devoted to his children, much more so than any of my North German friends.
Herr Kessler was an engaging personality, a semilearned man among unlearned men, and a popular public speaker, in the rolling, sententious Fourth-of-July vein, a favorite at weddings and birthdays, at veterans’ meetings, and at assemblies of the nationalist Kyffhäuserbund. Politically he was a good Catholic centrist of the conservative, clerical-agricultural wing of the Center rather than its Christian Socialist–trade-union wing. But he had no compunction, in 1933, against joining the National Socialist Party in the hope of getting a job. He was placed in personnel work—where he belonged—in the Kronenberg Labor Front office and was appointed. one of several “Party Orators” for the county, one of the little men with big voices who addressed small-town meetings.
He was allowed to speak on the Party’s history and on German history and culture but never received (or asked for) the special permission required to speak for the Party on “the Jewish question.” Every Sunday morning at ten the Party had a two-hour service at the local theater. It was not exactly a religious service, although the speakers, and especially Party Orator Kessler, often took religious or, more properly, spiritual themes.
Those who came to the Sunday-morning services, like those who spoke at them, knew that they should have been in church; at least the hours conflicted. After the Church-Party split began to develop, in 1936, the Party services became more ritualistic, more specifically a substitute for church. When, a year or two later, Church-Party relations had become bitter, it was not uncommon at the close of the Party service for the SA and the Hitler Jugend to march noisily (even singing) past the churches, whose services, beginning at eleven, were in progress. Kessler became the most popular speaker in the vicinity at the Sunday-morning meetings of the Party.
One day in 1938 Kessler was asked to perform a German Faith Movement funeral service, for a Nazi who had died in the new racist-naturalist Nordicism of Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi philosopher. No pastor in Kronenberg, not even Weber, who was a Nazi, would conduct such a service; Rosenberg’s Faith Movement was the purest paganism, with the orb of the sun as the center of its symbolism. It was radical even for Nazism.
The man who had once been the boy who wanted to be a monk, whose dying mother had placed her missal in his hands and said, “Whatever happens to you, never stop praying,” had a hard time deciding. The County Leader of the Party, who himself had not left the Protestant Church, did not order or ask him to perform the service. It was the Party red-hots who put pressure on him, men above whom, in natural gifts and feeling, Kessler stood high. But it was a chance for the man who had once wanted to be a monk to be a cleric, of some sort, and, besides, “There was no one else to conduct the service. That part of my impulse was Christian. But the service—the service was not.”
That evening, when Kessler came home, he told his wife that he had left the Catholic Church and asked her to say the children’s prayers with them. She looked at him and said nothing. She finished the dishes and then started to the children’s room, when the two children’s voices were heard in a jingle they always sang when they were ready for their father to come in for prayers: “The children will not go to sleep, ’til Daddy’s asked God their souls to keep.” Kessler pushed past his wife, went in himself, and said the prayers, ending with the usual words, “In Christus Namen, In Jesus’ name.”
That night, having said nothing more to his wife, he went to the parish priest and told him he was no longer a Christian. “I was going to tell him about the funeral, but he knelt and prayed—”
“Did you?”
“Kneel?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Did you pray?”
“No. No, I didn’t. I waited until he stood up, and then I left.”
“Were you going to tell him about the children’s prayers?”
“Was I?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I went home,” Herr Kessler continued. “I told my wife, and talked to her almost all that night. It wasn’t so serious for her, because she was not church-connected. And she wasn’t interested in politics or in history. I had read Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the ‘bible’ of the Faith Movement. It was on the Papal Index, and, although I could have got permission from my priest to read it, I hadn’t bothered to or hadn’t wanted to. Inside I had been turning against the Church ever since I’d become a Nazi, against the political Church, the Papacy as a government. Canossa, the struggle of the German kings against the popes, the right of Germany and Germans to be free from an outside government—this was the way I had been thinking. It is the way I still think, too.
“All this I told my wife. She didn’t say much, almost nothing. Only at the end she said, ‘And the children?’ And then she added, from the Bible, ‘The father’s blessing builds the children’s house.’
“What would happen to my children, my children?” he went on, one moment impassioned, the next didactic. “They could not go to church any more or to Sunday school. And the teaching in the public schools is not adequate for the moral development of children. Many times afterward I talked with teachers about it. I never got a satisfactory answer. Blut und Boden, blood and soil, the eternal life of the plants, of the animals, of nature—that’s only a part of the religious story; it isn’t religion.
“I told my wife: ‘When they’re twelve or thirteen, they shall decide for themselves.’ I knew when I said it that that was a lie, the same lie, at bottom, that dominated the Hitler Youth, the lie that children can educate themselves. Children who grow up without religion cannot decide about religion for themselves; that’s a fallacy, that people can choose intelligently between what they know and what they don’t know. What it was, was an excuse for me, a shimmer of hope to excuse me, hope that they would find what I had lost, that they, my little children, would absolve me!
“At the end, when I had finished talking that night, I was more tired than I have ever been before or since. I told myself—not my wife—that I could remain a Christian in soul. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t true. The next day I declared my intention to leave the Church before the county court. It was done. After that, I never had a quiet hour—”
“Until after the war?”
“What has the war to do with it?”
“I mean, until now, when things are changed again.”
“Do you mean that because the Nazis are gone, and the outside has changed, that the inside has changed? There are things that don’t change so easily, Herr Professor. When I say, ‘After that I never had a quiet hour,’ I mean every hour after that, this hour included.”
During the next six years Herr Kessler was called upon more and more often to perform German Faith Movement funerals, baptisms, even weddings. There was no church service, of course, for the funerals, only a cemetery service, and no sermon but, rather, a speech, “no Bible, never a word about God or the soul, the whole personal afterlife denied by the clearest implication.” The baptism celebrated nature as the source of life and the child’s father as the “life-giver,” and the wedding joined the couple as “Germans.”
“But,” said Herr Kessler, “man is still man, he must be comforted in the presence of death and sobered in the presence of life. Those who had left the Church—Evangelical or Catholic—had no place to go. And no—pastor.”
“But the municipal marriage office performed weddings, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but Germans are religious, including those who believe they are not. Especially as regards death. During the war, it was hard in the hospitals. If a wounded soldier died confessed in the Church, or even if he died unconscious and his religion was unknown, the Church would bury him. But when they died having said they had left the Church, and their identity was unknown or their relatives couldn’t be found, the hospital called the Party office, and they asked me to officiate.”
“Even if they were not known to be members of the Faith Movement?”
“Even then. Even if they were not known to be members of the Party. Very few, that we knew of, were members of the Faith Movement. But, if men died who had left the Church, what was there to be done? We were glad to do it. I was glad myself, although I knew it was blasphemy; so far had I fallen that I was glad to be of ‘service.’
“Millions had left the Church—the Protestant much more than the Catholic—before 1933. Not just Social Democrats and, of course, Communists, but people in general. That had been going on since 1918, more and more all the time. Protestants, especially, didn’t believe in the Church any more, because the Protestant Church was the official Church, the State Church, and its head was the King of Prussia, who happened to be the Kaiser, the Emperor of Germany. With the Kaiser gone, the Church didn’t know where it stood; it was as if God had run away to the Netherlands. Only when the Nazi flag flew over it again did it know (or think it knew) where it stood.
“The Catholic Church was different; the head and center of the Catholic Church were outside Germany. The German Catholic—and, if you include Austria, Germany is half Catholic—had an allegiance which, while it was not temporal, had a temporal capital, Rome. This ‘divided allegiance’ the Nazis hated, and I hated it with them. But it was just this ‘foreign loyalty’ that provided a greater possibility of Catholic resistance to Nazism.”
“Which, however,” I said, “did not materialize.”
“That’s so,” said Herr Kessler, “not in the masses or the priests, but for another reason. But, for one Protestant prelate who resisted, you found two or three or four Catholic prelates.
“Outside Catholicism only women, and especially old women, were very religious any more, except in the villages; and to some extent this was true even there. The Protestant cathedal churches stood almost empty, sometimes with more tourists than communicants. The women tried to make their husbands go to services with them for the children’s sake, but they were not always successful. The sermons had always been dull, and now they had lost any great meaning, any comfort, any relevance to people’s lives.
“The trouble was that the Church—Catholic as well as Protestant—was supported by taxes. Thus it did not have to consider the people’s wants in order itself to survive, or minister to their needs. When their wants and needs changed, the Church, especially the Protestant Church, didn’t know it. Only in the villages (those that could still support a resident pastor) were the people and the Church in real contact. Otherwise, only a few young and enthusiastic pastors ever called on their parishioners, except in great sickness. If you were ever to see your pastor, you had to call on him in his visiting hours, which were during workingmen’s working hours, and then you had to sit and wait for him, as you would at the dentist’s, and he would look at his watch while you talked; or perhaps you would be told to come back at the same time next week. There were exceptions, many exceptions, the whole Christian Socialist movement, for example; but, in general, the Protestant clergy acted like high civil servants, which, after all, is what they were.
“I do not mean to say that the Catholics were better, and there certainly was no more Catholic resistance to Nazism than there was Protestant. But there was a reason for this. The reason—it had both the best and the worst consequences—was that the priest was close to the people. After all, he had no more status in the German State than they had. In the Catholic villages, in the years after the first war, you would not find a Communist; everyone belonged to the Catholic Center Party; the priests had real power because they were close to the people. In the Evangelical towns it was different, especially where the industrial workers lived. In Westphalia, for instance, you would find the workers on one side, the pastor on the other. The pastor did not belong to the people; the priest did.
“But why, then, you ask, did the Catholics go Nazi? Why didn’t the priests hold them, as they had held them from Communism? The answer is twofold. First, Communism was atheist and Nazism was its enemy, supposedly the defender of religion. But there was another reason, and I’m told that you see this today in Italy and France, where one hears that there are actually Communist priests. And that is that the masses of the people could not be held back from Nazism, so powerful was its appeal, and this same priest, who would not leave his people, went with them to Nazism, too.”
I knew something about all this. My authority was Policeman Willy Hofmeister. In 1936 or 1937 each of the Kronenberg detectives was openly assigned to a local church as observer, to report on the “loyalty” of the sermons. In addition—this the detectives were not supposed to know, but they did—there was a Gestapo agent assigned to report on the fidelity of the detective’s report. One day, at the height of the Church-Party struggle, Hofmeister was ordered to inform Pastor Faber, whose sermons he reported, that he must not read the pastoral letter sent out by the Protestant bishops to be read from the pulpits on the following Sunday.
To Policeman Hofmeister’s horror, Pastor Faber coldly told him that the Church, not the State, would decide what was to be read from the pulpit. Hofmeister tried to “reason” (he puts it this way, fifteen years later) with the clergyman and told him that there would be a Gestapo agent present and that they would both, Faber and Hofmeister, get into trouble if the pastoral letter were read. Faber said that Hofmeister would have to look out for himself, and rose, ending the interview.
To my amazement, Hofmeister, who had by no means been an ardent Nazi, still, fifteen years later, resented the pastor’s defiance of the “law,” that is, of the authorities. He no more admired Faber’s heroism—the letter was read from the pulpit—now than then. He himself, Hofmeister, had violated the “law,” that is, what his superiors told him to do, by revealing to the pastor that there would be a Gestapo man present, and the pastor was willing to jeopardize an innocent man along with himself. “It was like a slap in the face,” said Hofmeister, and I saw that even the policeman might have a hard time of it in the police state.
I could not, at first, understand Hofmeister’s persistent failure to admire the pastor’s great courage. I pressed the matter and learned that the policeman had always disliked the great pastor. “He was too high and mighty for us, a great theologian, you know, above the people. I was a member of his church, you understand. He had been my pastor for years. That did not mean a thing to him. When I went to him—this was years earlier—to ask him to come to the house to christen my daughter, he said, ‘There will be a charge, of course, for coming to the house.’ Like a doctor; worse than a decent doctor.
“After the ceremony, my wife offered Faber and his assistant wine and Torte. The assistant accepted gladly, but the pastor said “No,” he would not have any. As soon as the assistant finished his wine, Faber said they would have to leave, but I said that the custom was that the guests at a christening must not leave schief, that is, ‘out of balance,’ with an odd number of glasses of wine. The assistant held his glass out, but Faber would not have any. When they were leaving, I asked the pastor how much it was customary to pay for a christening. He said three Marks, so I laid a three-Mark piece in front of him and a five-Mark note in front of his assistant. That’s how I felt, and that’s what kind of Christian the great Faber is.”
“Were they all like that, the pastors in Kronenberg?”
“More or less. Not all. There was Weber, the one that become a Nazi. He was a friendly man, really beloved, even by those who disagreed with him. Ask anyone. And the Catholic priest, Father Pausch, there was a man you could talk to. You would visit him, and he’d show you into the parlor, and you’d sit down next to a table on which there was an open box of cigars. The housekeeper would bring wine and glasses, and the priest would hand you the cigars, and you’d sit and talk with him, about conditions, yes, even about your problems, although you were not of his faith. And he would speak of his troubles. When the government forbade the continuation of religious services in the Church schools, Father Pausch accepted it (what else could he do?) and said to me, ‘This is the saddest day of my life.’ There was a man you could sympathize with, a man like yourself.”
So I knew something about the Protestant and the Catholic clergy, at least about one Protestant clergyman and one Catholic, the heroic Pastor Faber and the un-heroic Father Pausch, as they appeared to my Protestant friend Hofmeister. What Herr Kessler, the Catholic, or former Catholic, was telling me did not sound at all incredible.
“At the beginning of National Socialism,” said Herr Kessler, “there was no effort to draw people away from the Church. Just the opposite. The Weimar Republic had separated Church and State, just as it is in America, you know, and the pastors, most of them, supported the Nazis in the hope of reuniting the two and rebuilding the Church. Certainly the Party call for ‘positive Christianity’ was clear, so much so that, in the first days of the regime, many liberals and radicals who had left the Church hurried to join it again as a means of ‘covering up,’ of proving that they were not leftists.
“But by and by the Party’s own spirit began by itself to fill up the emptiness of spirit in people’s lives. This was where the Church had failed. And people began to turn from the Church, which in spirit they had already left, to the Party. The Church blamed the Party for this, but in the beginning it was not the Party’s fault at all. The Church created this vacuum, and the Party, in the end, took advantage of it.
“On the surface there were other things, but that was what lay underneath. On the surface the Church-State fight began on the ‘Jewish question,’ but it is important to remember that the fight did not begin for two or three years. The Party had not expected the Church to take a stand against anti-Semitism as such, and, with some individual exceptions, it didn’t. Then the Party made the claim that baptized Jews, converts to Christianity, were Jews still and had to be dismissed from the clergy and, presumably, thrown out of the Church. Of course, that was a mistake, but the Party had to make it to be consistent. And the Church had to resist if it were even to maintain the pretense of being Christian; Christianity is evangelical; its business is to win all souls to Christ.
“Once the fight had begun, the Church leaders blamed the Party for luring the people away. Finally that was actually the case, but that was after the trouble began. And, when a man died who had left the Church, the Church people would say it was the Party’s fault that there was no one to bury him. It would look bad for the Party, you can see that, and I was a Party man.”
“A Party man first, or a Christian first?”
“A Party man, then.”
“And now?”
“Now?—Nothing. But,” Herr Kessler went on after a pause, “it was not just a matter of how it would look for the Party. There was something else. You ask why the hospitals would call the Party office when a soldier died who had left the Church. It was because people called the Party in all difficulties arising from the reconstruction of the country, and the Party always helped. This pattern was established from the first, long before the war. It was what made the Party so strong—it would always help. In religious matters, in domestic problems, in everything. It really watched over the lives of the people, not spying on them, but caring about them.
“You know, Herr Professor, we are told that not a sparrow falls without God’s care; I am not being light when I say this—that not a person ‘fell,’ fell ill or in need, lost his job or his house, without the Party’s caring. No organization had ever done this before in Germany, maybe nowhere else. Believe me, such an organization is irresistible to men. No one in Germany was alone in his troubles—”
“Except,” I said, “‘inferior races’ and opponents of the regime.”
“Of course,” he said, “that is understood, but they were few, they were outside society, ‘over the fence,’ and nobody thought about them.”
“But these, too, were ‘sparrows.’”
“Yes,” he said.
“Could these,” I said, “have been ‘the least of them,’ of whom Jesus spoke?”
“Herr Professor, we didn’t see it that way. We were wrong, sinful, but we didn’t see it that way. We saw ‘the least of them’ among our own people, everywhere, among ordinary people who obeyed the laws and were not Jews, or gypsies, and so on. Among ordinary people, ‘Aryans,’ there were ‘the least of them,’ too. Millions; six million unemployed at the beginning. These ‘least,’ not all who were ‘least’ but most of them, had somewhere to turn, at last.
“You say, ‘Totalitarianism.’ Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so (you’ll pardon me, Herr Professor) it is easy for you to say, ‘Totalitarianism—no.’ But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But, believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.
“In the Labor Front every person we placed in a job remained our responsibility, our care. The owner of a café tried to mistreat a girl I had placed there. She came to me. I warned him. He did it again, and his business was closed. Totalitarian?—Yes, of course. He was an alter Kämpfer, an Old Party Fighter, this man, and at the hearing he said to me, ‘You treat me as if I were a Jew. You will lose your job for this.’ He took it up with the district office of the Party, without any success. And that was not an exceptional case. Totalitarianism?—Yes. But I am proud of it.”
The Party Orator was getting oratorical. “Yes,” I said, “I can understand that. But—what about your children?” I had yielded to the temptation to deflate him; I was sorry, but it was too late. The Party Orator shriveled, and there was Johann Kessler.
“The children,” he said, “yes, the children.”
“Excuse me, Herr Kessler,” I said.
“That’s all right,” he said, “nothing to excuse. The children.”
“Did your wife say their prayers with them after their first night?”
“No. I did. I had to, Herr Professor, I had to. They were too young to understand, don’t you see?”
“To understand what?”
“To understand what—what their father was. I had to say their prayers with them, and I could not talk to anyone, not anyone, about it. Not because of the danger, this was not the kind of thing that would ever mean danger, but because of the shame. It was a lonely road; it still is—lonelier, I think, than never to have believed at all.”
“Did you ever pray otherwise?”
“Yes. At Faith Movement funerals. At the end of my—my talk—you know, about what a good comrade the man had been, what a good husband and father, how true to our cause and our country, at the end I would say the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Aloud?”
“Oh, no. But that was different, you know.”
“How?”
“Well, what you do to yourself and to God, God can carry, and you yourself don’t matter. But what you do to your children—.”
He broke off, and I said nothing, and then he went on. “Every night, all those years, even the last night, before I left home. We were all told to go north, to fight to the end, even the old men. So I started north, on my bicycle, and surrendered like everyone else. That night, too, when I thought I might not see my children again, I said their prayers with them, after I had kissed my wife.”
“What did your wife say?”
“My wife never said anything about it, ever, after that first night. We didn’t talk any more about it, in all those years. But she knew.”
“And you, you knew all the time that you blasphemed?”
“All the time, I knew all the time that I was damned, damned worse every day. But I wanted my children to be Christians.”
“Why, Herr Kessler?”
“Why does a man want his children to be better than himself?”
A month after the night her husband left home and was captured, Frau Kessler went to the parish priest and asked for Communion for the older child, the girl Maria. She had not been able to locate her husband, and she thought that, even if he were still alive, she might not see him again; she had heard that anybody who had been a Party Orator would certainly be classified as a war criminal. Three days later she got word that he was held in the compound at Darmstadt, and she went to see him. She told him what she had done. He wept. “Why?” I asked.
“Because God had had mercy on me, a sinner. I was damned. Whatever I did, whatever they did with me, I was damned. And God had had mercy, even on the damned.”
“Can’t a man always be saved, Herr Kessler?”
“I didn’t believe that any more. I didn’t even believe that. The Faith Movement denied the Redeemer.”
Every Sunday, now, Herr Kessler’s grown daughter and his almost-grown son worship with the congregation in the parish church. Maria (like so many girls in Europe, and unlike most girls here) plays the violin. Hans, the boy, sings in the choir with a rich voice like his father’s, the Party Orator. The Party Orator, who now works in the shipping-room of the village feed store, goes to the church alone and sits at the back, outside the congregation. He has not asked to be readmitted to the faith, and the priest (who himself was a Nazi) shakes hands with him but has never spoken. “God can wait. He waited for me,” the priest told Maria, who told me. In the biographical record which Johann Kessler wrote down for the United States military authorities on July 3, 1945, he gives his religion as Gottgläubig—non–church-connected believer in God.