The Odyssey of a U-Boat Commander Read online

  He was full of temperament and good cheer, just like that officer on the Reuben James. Everyone would wait for him; only after he had arrived could the party begin. On the piano, using only a handful of notes, he created the most fantastic improvisations. For him everything became music. Once, coming back from an evening at the opera where he had just seen and heard Weill's The Threepenny Opera for the first time, with its picaresque-romantic plot and its entirely novel, revolutionary music, he sat down at the piano and played whole passages from the opera as he had memorized them, as though he had the sheet music in front of him. During the day he studied philosophy, theology, and art history. In the evenings his genius came alive: Beethoven, Schubert, and whole cascades of compositions of his own.

  There are not many individuals whose creative powers are strong enough to lend mankind on its miserable journey an occasional moment of bliss. The watch officer on the Reuben James appears to have been such a man. And so does my brother-in-law. As shepherd of his flock he would have commanded far greater reservoirs of healing strength than many pastors in today's church with all their political involvement.

  The name of the officer of the Reuben Janes, along with those of the other dead, can be found printed below the lyrics of Woody Guthrie's song, a song meant to shake up the American nation and to prepare it for war. My brother-in-law's name is gone with the wind.

  Approximately 26,000 names are engraved on bronze tablets at the UBoat Memorial in Moltenort on Kiel Bay. These men thought they knew what they were dying for-their fatherland. Much later, Americans sought to ensure that some 58,000 of their war dead would never be forgotten. Their names are engraved on America's "wailing wall," the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. They, too, thought they knew what they were dying for-the freedom of others.

  Man's fascination with might and power has always been a guiding theme in works of art. Indeed, it has illuminated the history of western civilization on many occasions: just think of the heroes of the Iliad; Marathon and Salamis; the battles of Alexander; the sagas of the Nibelungen and of Roland; El Cid, the Campeador; the legend of Joan of Arc; Shakespeare's dramas; Albrecht von Wallenstein; Heinrich von Kleist's The Prince of Homburg; Heinrich Heine's The Three Grenadiers; or Rainer Rilke's The Cornet. The Naval Memorial at Laboe at the entrance to Kiel Bay, too, is a work of art, as is the wedge-shaped, 244-foot long wall of polished black granite bearing the names of American soldiers killed in Vietnam.

  Behind all these monuments, legends, dramas, tragedies, and poems stand men who dedicated themselves to a single idea: the pursuit and exercise of power. This holds true even if their actions did not conform to existing laws or moral codes, or if they displayed vanity and selfishness in the process. And power often knew no bounds. At other times it was barely reined in by religious restraints or humility. Only the unimaginably destructive potential of nuclear weapons has brought a transformation in the application of force because the logic of survival requires clear standards and moderation.

  We have been forced to abandon the ever so resplendent myth of force and power and with it the glorification of heroes. As Balzac once wrote, "Glory does not soar on white wings." Inquiries into the complexity of human nature did not begin with modern psychology. No, we already encounter them in the works of Euripides, as we do more recently in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Today it has become fashionable to glorify the underdog and, far worse, to celebrate what is mediocre in our world.

  This we may regret. The tragic ties that link those who act to those who suffer, the connections between glory and guilt, have grown more complicated. But they will not disappear.

  Glory finds a proper place only beyond victory and defeat. Moderation, self-limitation, and self-discipline today define the bounds within which man proves himself and creates examples for others. This is not new. None other than Aristotle coined the phrase, "To act reasonably means to avoid extremes." Measured moderation is all the more vital in our days as the criteria for the application of force have changed and those in power have little choice but to seek arrangements and compromises where confrontations and war were once the rule.

  My generation tottered blindly into the madness and drama of the war and became entangled in the crimes of the regime without personal guilt. For we never were given a chance or choice to influence decisions. We were like extras in a drama. Many were not even that, because they failed to recognize the development of the plot. They somehow did their "duty"--an oscillating word, for it covers the entire spectrum between honorable and unscrupulous deeds, between what men did deliberately and what they failed to do.

  We learned that one cannot allow oneself to be carried along by the tidal wave of mass hysteria, be it to drown oneself in it or to try to reach the Island of the Blessed. One must steer one's own course, must remain one's own navigator. Above all, one must stay inside the markers of the channel that 3,000 years of history have laid out for us and that is brightened by the shining beacons of our western civilization.

  On the conning towers of my three boats-U 57, U 552, and U 2513we painted as our distinguishing emblem two dancing red devils, one holding up the torch of life, the other the torch of death and destruction. One torch, the one representing the forces of destruction, has now been lowered, with all its implications for remembering and forgetting, fate and actions, certitude and opacity. The torch of life, however, still burns. Once it was a glimmer of hope; today it has become a signpost and a beacon-beginning and end.

  2

  Before the War

  CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

  My earliest recollections reach me as if through a veil. The images have become pale, detached from real time. Some occurrences from my youth have entered my life's kaleidoscope, indivisibly woven into an ornament. Without this benefit of a rearview mirror many events in my adult life would be difficult to untangle.

  My ancestors were carpenters and peasant farmers in Lower Saxony. It may well be that the memory of those carpenters, especially as journeymen, left in me an interest for the construction industry, would later determine my choice to study architecture and encourage me to see the world. My peasant forebears, by contrast, had their feet rooted firmly in the soil.

  The Topps have always worked hard, trying doggedly and steadily to improve their situation. By the time of my father's generation they had made good headway; his brothers became architects and merchants, he himself became an engineer.

  We lived in the countryside until I was eight. At that point my father was transferred to the city of Hanover where he became the director of a maintenance plant for the Imperial Railways. For our family this meant moving into rented quarters with less space than we had enjoyed before.

  As a member of the volkisch youth movement (Bundische Jugend), I realized for the first time that there was a way out of the labyrinth of given social conditions, family obligations, and similar limitations. We searched for, and tried to define, the true values of our world, away from conventional institutions and organizations. Nature in particular ap peared genuine and unadulterated; in the company of like-minded companions drawn from all social classes I undertook short and even extended hiking tours through the countryside. We searched history for meaningful guideposts and found them in literature and in music. Madrigals and Passions by composers like Schutz and Bach underwent a renaissance. The youth movement took on both romantic and elitist characteristics. We removed ourselves from the bourgeois world around us as much as we could. The impulses I received from the movement were of lasting influence. I have always tried to live my life according to the values inherent in our western culture while rejecting what mere civilization might offer as a substitute.

  By the time I was fifteen and we had moved to Celle, I found these ideals embodied in the musicians' guild. We sang the Mass in B minor as well as the Passions of St. John and St. Matthew by Bach. We also enjoyed good times together in the guild's rural retreat. I spent more time with this circle of friends than at home with my parents
. For here I discovered not merely a forum for music but a fascinating center for broader artistic interests and activities. I began to believe that art, and culture in a broader sense, was the best preparation for meeting the imponderables of the future. Only much later did I realize that imagination and reality are creative in wholly separate ways, leaving behind quite different traces. At first I noticed hardly more than a sense of dissatisfaction that my emotional escapism provided no answer for the pressing problems of the day.

  What were the problems that confronted us? Nearly 7 million workers were unemployed. The political parties fought one another without mercy. Every day brought public demonstrations and paramilitary parades in the streets, often involving violence, gunshots, death. The political and economic chaos was complete, a consequence of the Versailles Schanddiktat, as we called the treaty in those days. The victors of the war appeared to have honored the dictum of the Roman senator Porcius Cato: " Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. " The treaty hinged on the theory of Germany's exclusive war guilt, which in turn justified all other measures: the demilitarization of the Rhineland; the limitations imposed on Germany's armed forces; the reparations whose burden defied all economic sense; and the territorial amputations.

  Books, newspapers, and our history lessons in school reflected antirepublican sentiments. Responsibility for Germany's decline, we learned, rested on the shoulders of Erfullungspolitiker-those leaders of the Weimar Republic who seemed to do the enemy's work by honoring the terms of the Versailles treaty. As a result the entire republican system came under fire.

  The National Socialist German Workers' Party presented itself as the best hope to solve Germany's problems. We defined "workers," as Fer dinand Lasalle had done earlier, as those who somehow dedicated themselves to the benefit and progress of human society, as serving the bon urn commune. At the same time we understood "socialism" to mean a system of government that allowed for the development of the individual while fostering a climate of equal opportunity and reducing economic hardships. Naturally, we also harbored reservations toward the image of this party with its brown columns, the violence it created in the streets, and its Fiihrer cult. But for us such reservations did not outweigh the promise of the party's national and social program. I, as most people, became part of an irresistible, almost mechanical movement. We joined this movement voluntarily and tried to justify our decision as best we could.

  For half a year I served in the Voluntary Labor Service. Then, after having taken up the study of medicine, I decided to pledge one of Germany's old student fraternities. I joined the Navy on April 8, 1934.

  During the first year in the Reichsmarine we had to keep an "official diary," its daily entries to be written in ink and in a legible script. Criticism concerning "official matters" was taboo. For this reason the journal is like a meal without spices, like sailing without a breeze. Nevertheless, it is a mirror of that year-a year that imposed harsh discipline on me; indeed, more discipline than I was prepared to bear given my natural predisposition and questioning mind. Many measures were sheer chicanery, and we put up with them only because everyone had to suffer from them, some more, some less.

  From today's perspective the education and training we received in the Reichsmarine was one-sided. Instead of learning and appreciating discipline dictated by the tasks we would have to master, we encountered unconditional obedience and inflexible harshness. The theory seemed to be that anyone who could survive that kind of treatment without giving up had been recast in the Navy's image and thus acquired the leadership qualities it desired. The cadet training program, at least in our Crew 34 (those men who took up officer training in 1934), remained stuck in superficial military drill. It was not designed to make us a part of the currents flowing from the reservoirs and fundamental values of our western culture. I am making these observations not merely from the viewpoint of a Bundesmarine officer and with the knowledge of improvements that have since been introduced. Even in those days, among comrades, I recall heated debates about this subject-debates that confirm the critical distance we kept from the Navy's methods of indoctrination.

  The diaries are revealing in other respects as well. They show how little we knew about critical and comparative historiography, how deeply we believed in the positive forces at work in the German people, and how profound our ignorance remained with regard to the techniques and effects of mass psychology. After all, who among us had read the works of the Frenchman Gustave le Bon, or those of the Spaniard Ortega y Gas set? Instead, we heard about the racial utopias of men like Alfred Rosenberg and Hans Gunther, that the Nordic race had been the global and universal carrier of culture and civilization throughout the millennia. Then there was Nietzsche. We completely misunderstood that he had meant his superman to be a philosophical rather than a political creature. We also did not know what genuine science had to say about genetics and anthropology. We had faith in ourselves and in our role in the rejuvenation of the German people as it was advanced in National Socialist propaganda.

  Above all, it was service to the state that concerned us. Whoever did his proper duty toward the state could do no wrong, no matter what he did. There were many things we did not like, but any doubts and hesitations we might have had were wiped away through discipline and asceticism. We were taught to be decent to our fellow men, but fulfilling one's duties toward the state always ranked first. This philosophy appealed to us all the more since the state itself seemed based on social principles; it did something for its citizens. Service to the community came before pursuit of personal gain; the very idea of a people's community appeared to make sense. The state itself seemed to be off to new and exciting shores. Politically and morally we believed Germany stood poised on the threshold of a thousand-year Reich. Who really cared if there were a few minor blemishes in the beginning?

  Only much later did we see the limitations and dangers inherent in the substitute state religion to which we all had pledged our loyalty. When we realized its base perversions at last, complete emptiness and resignation took their place. To fill this vacuum again with hope and faith in the bonum commune will take generations.

  What was the composition and self-image of our Crew 34? We were born in the Second Reich under Emperor William If and later experienced the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Every year the Reichsmarine took in a limited number of cadets, about one hundred. Our Crew 34, reflecting Germany's restored military sovereignty, contained 318 cadets. Later classes in the 1930s and during the war were larger still. Crew 34 was selected from a much larger pool of applicants, and for this reason we may be forgiven for considering ourselves an elite. Our average age at induction was about nineteen. Some of us were a little older than the rest because we had studied at universities for a while or had transferred from the merchant marine.

  Most of my Crew comrades came from northern Germany. Socially we were drawn from the upper middle class, from educated, respected circles. Very few were nobles, some were sons of admirals; but they received no special treatment as a result of their background. The Navy gave us respectability and responsibilities at an early age, something we cherished greatly. In the broader context of Germany's national renewal the position of an officer as the "nation's warrior" was an elevated, privileged one.

  At home and at school we had been raised in the belief that the Treaty of Versailles had inflicted damage on the fatherland. We became convinced that the treaty needed to be revised by diplomatic and political means backed by strong armed forces. Our sense of patriotism reflected Prussian values like order, discipline, and thrift, all seen in the interest of serving the bonum commune.

  Soldiers submitted to the primacy of politics-in this case, National Socialist leadership-much too long, until some rebelled and joined the resistance instead. Franz Werfel once wrote: "The primacy of politics destroys the spirit by reversing the roles of master and slave."

  BASIC INFANTRY TRAINING

  Diary:

  The most important event of the we
ek came on April 12, 1934, when we received our arms. In a festive ceremony the company commander spoke at length about a dictum by the Fihrer: "The soldier is the nation's weapons carrier." He added: "This implies that a soldier must hallow his weapon and be ready for the highest commitment." Our platoon leader, representing the state, handed the weapons to us. With a solemn handshake we vowed to honor our weapons, to become good warriors. Spontaneously I was reminded of a poem that had been popular in the Deutsche Freischar, an organization of the youth movement:

  May 31, 1934, turned out to be a special day for the city of Stralsund [where we underwent our basic training]. The German Navy commemorated simultaneously the great Battle of Jutland; the death of the young poet Gorch Fock, who fell on that occasion; and the 125th anniversary of the death of the Prussian freedom fighter Ferdinand von Schill, who gave his life in this city.

  The ceremonies began Wednesday evening when two platoons of No. 6 Company performed the Great Retreat. Today all citizens of Stralsund gather in the old market square, surrounded by its historic buildings such as the magnificent gothic-style city hall, the houses of the patrician families, and the mighty steeple of St. Nicholas Church. Delegations from the various military units in town take up their positions. As dusk falls the contours of the square disappear into the growing darkness until they suddenly return in the light of countless candles, placed one each in the windows of every building that surrounds the square. The steeple of the church rises sharply into the cold night sky, while the city hall offers but a dark silhouette. Floodlights whisk across the facades of the houses until they come to rest on the square in front of the officers' casino where the commandant, the officers, and the invited guests are waiting. As the military band approaches, the beating of the drums begins to drown out the humming of the crowd until the marching music itself can be heard. The people stop talking. Our company, in field-gray uniforms and steel helmets, moves in. The adjutant on horseback makes his report to the commandant. The Great Retreat begins. On two ledges of the city hall first green and later red fireworks are lit, burning like incense. The drums roll, trumpets blare. Then we enter the church for the service.