IN MEMORY OF JOACHIM FEST: The Proud Loner

SPIEGEL Online ^ | September 12, 2006 | Matthias Matussek

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IN MEMORY OF JOACHIM FEST The Proud Loner

By Matthias Matussek

Joachim Fest has died. The author of a best-selling biography of Adolf Hitler and former editor of the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has left an impressive life's work - one of the most important to be produced in Germany since 1945. Fest's memoirs "Not Me" are a masterpiece. They tell the story of a family that refused to bow to the pressures of history and society.

Now he has lost his battle against illness after all. Joachim Fest had to muster the last of his strength to complete his memoirs "Ich nicht" ("Not Me"). One wishes he had had the chance to use this book to intervene in the public debate about Germany's historical memory that has erupted once again, and in time for the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, thanks to Nobel laureate Günter Grass's confession that he was once a member of the Waffen SS. No one could argue like Joachim Fest.

He was a brilliant raconteur. His biography of Hitler is one of the stylistic high points of German historiography. He returned to the historical role played by the Nazi leaders again and again - right up to the script he wrote for Bernd Eichinger's film on Hitler's final days in Hitler's bunker, "The Downfall."

When he told me about his memories of childhood and youth over dinner in London one-and-a-half years ago, he seemed to want to supplement his previous work with information about everyday life, the history of common people. There was nothing proud or arrogant about that. On the contrary. "It was no special childhood," he said casually. "Nothing spectacular. Except that my father prevented me and my siblings from becoming Nazis."

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