THE GERMAN historian and journalist Joachim C. Fest was a central figure in his country’s postwar debate about the origins and consequences of the Nazi catastrophe. His biography of Hitler, published in 1973, was a bestseller which stimulated national debate for many months. And his other writings, including assessments of the career of Albert Speer, the resistance to Hitler and life in the last days of the Third Reich in the Berlin bunker were also successful.
Fest was also active as a radio and TV journalist, a cultural critic especially during his two decades as co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and a vigorously conservative political commentator, who challenged all utopian thought from an instinctively sceptical point of view, and was especially critical of what he saw as a leftist establishment holding sway in German life. In recent weeks he had been one of the harshest critics of the novelist Günter Grass, a prominent figure on the Left, following his revelations of wartime service with the Waffen SS — a step Fest had taken pains to avoid.
Fest’s views were moulded profoundly by his family life during the Third Reich. He was born in Berlin in 1926 into middle-class and highly cultured family headed by his father, Johannes, a schoolteacher, who was and remained Fest’s role model. Johannes Fest was dismissed after the Nazis took power in 1933, and the family with five children lost much of its status and material comfort. However, he refused utterly any compromise with the regime.
In a memoir of his early years, which is about to be published in Germany, Joachim Fest recalls his mother’s suggestion, as she contemplated the family’s increasing poverty, that her husband should compromise and join the Nazi Party “as it wouldn’t change anything”. “On the contrary,” he replied, “it would change everything.”
Joachim Fest was expelled from his Berlin school for caricaturing Hitler and sent with his brothers to a Catholic boarding school in Freiburg. From there, as he approached the age for military service, he decided to volunteer for the armed forces rather than risk being conscripted into the SS. His father disagreed, writing that: “One doesn’t volunteer to take part in Hitler’s criminal war, not even to avoid the SS.” But in the end Fest went ahead, and was taken prisoner by the Americans in France. His father, meanwhile, suffered a much worse fate, taken by the Russians as they entered Berlin and kept for years in the Soviet Union until he was sent back, a broken man.
Advertisement
After the war Fest completed his studies and began his journalistic career with RIAS, a radio station in Berlin, and then from 1961 with Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg, where he worked for the drama department as well as news programmes. After publishing earlier work on The Face of the Third Reich he decided in to embark on a significant biography of Hitler, which was published in 1973.
Before then important biographical studies of the Nazi leader had been mostly by foreigners such as Alan Bullock. Fest’s work rapidly became standard reading for Germans, as well as for readers in many other languages, though it was also controversial, as it challenged the increasingly fashionable view that Hitler and Nazism were primarily the product of economic forces.
Fest explained Hitler’s success in terms of what he termed the “great fear” that overcame the German middle classes as a result of Bolshevism and First World War dislocation, but also more broadly in response to rapid modernisation, which led to a romantic longing for a lost past. This led to resentment of other groups — especially Jews — seen as agents of modernity. It also made many Germans susceptible to a figure such as Hitler who could articulate their mood. “He was never only their leader, he was always their voice . . . the people, as if electrified, recognised themselves in him.”
Fest also wrote of Hitler’s obsession with Wagner and of the Nazis’ skill in orchestrating potent political theatre, giving back to political occasions their intimate nature and using devices such as the domes of light at the Nuremberg rallies, “walls of magic and light against the dark, threatening outside world”. At the same time the danger Hitler posed to the wider world as well as Germany was emphasised. “Without war,” concluded Fest, “Hitler would not have been the man he was.” And in 1939, having achieved much by political means, he returned fatefully to the violent anti-political revolutionary of his earlier years.
After the success of this book Fest was invited to join the prestigious group co- editing Germany’s most prominent conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He used its pages to indulge his love of the arts, especially music, and also to engage in often bitter warfare with those of the Left in the so-called 1968 Generation who had very different views of the recent German past and West Germany’s direction.
Advertisement
After the reunification of Germany in 1990 Fest worried publicly about how far and how fast the country shaped by the two great totalitarianisms of the 20th century could recover its civic virtues. Fest preferred to call himself a pessimist rather than a conservative, albeit a pessimist who believed that strong healthy societies could be built out of the rejection of dangerous utopias.
In 1994, marking the 50th anniversary of the bomb plot against Hitler, he published a study of the anti-Nazi resistance, celebrating this example of German civic courage but lamenting, too, that it had been too little, too late. And as a conclusion to his reflections on the Nazi leadership and regime itself he published in 2002 Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, which was the basis for the film Downfall — a landmark in the ability of Germans to look at these individuals and events with a cooler, more ironic eye than during the fraught debates (or embarrassed silence) of the earlier postwar decades.
In the weeks before his death Fest was caught up in a final highly public debate about personal responsibility and wartime experience following Günter Grass’s revelation of his Waffen SS service. Grass, as a man of the Left, had never been Fest’s favourite author. And Fest’s own memoir of his youth, beginning to appear during the Grass controversy, highlighted his avoidance of the SS route. “Now I would not buy a used car from this man,” Fest said scathingly of Grass. Fest remained confident that his had been the life of greater moral consistency in that German generation which found such qualities so hard to sustain.
He was married with two sons.
Advertisement
Joachim C. Fest, journalist and historian, was born on December 8, 1926. He died on September 11, 2006, aged 79.