History | Biography of the Hitler biographer

Joachim Fest only made up the C in his name and left it out later. Photo: IMAGO/United Archives Sven Simon Archive Anyone who read sophisticated newspapers and followed the cultural program on television will probably remember Joachim Fest as "one of the most important intellectuals" in the Federal Republic, never blustering or polemicizing, but rather concerned with etiquette and well dressed. "That's how most people saw him, that's how he always interpreted himself: Joachim Fest, the educated citizen, stylish grand seigneur, a universally educated man, influenced from childhood by his 'upper middle class family' in Berlin."

This is what Franz Walter writes in his biography about the journalist Fest, who was celebrated in 1973 for his biography of Hitler, which, translated into numerous languages, sold around 800,000 copies by the time of his death in 2006. It is a tome of almost 1200 pages.

Franz Walter's biography is not quite as thick at 720 pages and no page is too long. Because Professor Walter, who is known as a party researcher, knows how to captivate his readers, just like Joachim Fest once did. He straightens out a lot of things, but leaves more than a good mark on the co-editor of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ), who tolerated opinions other than his own in the features section of this paper and, after initial reservations in the editorial team, proved to be a very good and sociable boss.

Father Johannes Fest was a farmer's son and elementary school teacher who was involved in the Catholic Center Party during the Weimar Republic. In Berlin-Karlshorst, Johannes Fest maintained friendly relationships with social democrats who came from the working class. His son later considered the resistance of the workers' parties to be irrelevant when he spread the word about the Hitler assassination attempt on July 20, 1944. He didn't have the nerve for it.

Thrown out of school by the Nazis, Johannes Fest firmly resisted the temptation to be reinstated in exchange for joining the NSDAP or even giving the Hitler salute. As a 14-year-old, his son Joachim scratched a caricature of Hitler into his school desk at Leibniz-Gymnasium in Berlin and had to transfer to a boarding school in Freiburg. He became an anti-aircraft assistant, a soldier, was a prisoner of war in France and was only able to graduate from high school afterwards. When he studied law, Fest failed the state exam in his first attempt and didn't dare to take a second one. In 1953, without a university degree, he joined the RIAS in West Berlin, the broadcasting company in the American sector. According to Walter, the framework for the theses of his later books was basically created there, books like “Downfall” (2002), in which Joachim Fest describes the last days of the Nazi regime. The 2004 film adaptation was nominated for an Oscar.

A temporary member of the CDU, Fest was more left-liberal than conservative when he was young and read Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. At his next stop at NDR television in Hamburg, he attracted attention as the presenter of the political magazine “Panorama” because he castigated the emergency laws. When it seemed as if he would be replaced because of this, the journalist and later RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof protested.

Joachim Fest's portrait collection "The Face of the Third Reich", published in 1963, was praised in left-wing circles and by historians in the GDR. But while Fest was working on the manuscript, his 23-year-old wife Jutta felt lonely, began an affair with Nathum Goldmann, the 67-year-old president of the World Jewish Congress, and ran away with him. Fest's second marriage, to a woman of Jewish origin, lasted until his death, although he had mistresses who had children by him.

Franz Walter makes me want to read Joachim Fest again, because he could write.

Franz Walter also tells us this because it is part of Fest's life. But he only stays there for a short time. He even gave more space to the construction of the villa in Kronberg near Frankfurt am Main. Because the entrance front lacks windows, it looked like a bunker to visitors. Fest had the old villa on the property demolished against the recommendation of the monument protection authority and a new building designed by Caesar Pinnau. He drew sketches for the world capital Germania under Hitler's favorite architect Albert Speer. Joachim Fest had considered commissioning Speer himself, whose memories and diaries he had polished up as a ghostwriter. But Speer waved his hand and recommended Pinnau.

Today we know that Speer excused himself at the war crimes trial in Nuremberg and otherwise would not have escaped with a prison sentence. Fest didn't know this in the 60s and 70s, he just suspected it. But in his 1999 Speer biography, Fest ignored research results since the 1980s. This damaged his reputation. The reputation had already been tarnished by the historians' dispute of 1986. At that time, Fest published a speech by Ernst Nolte in the "FAZ" that was allegedly not allowed to be given. Nolte believed that the Shoah was only a reaction to the Stalinist Gulag. FAZ literary director Marcel Reich-Ranicki, himself a survivor of the Shoah, would have accepted publication if Fest had had an answer in his drawer. But that wasn't the case. Instead, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas responded in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”. He stood by Nolte, even though he didn't share his views.

On the one hand, Franz Walter tears Fest apart when he describes, for example, how he could not tolerate "the recurring concepts of freedom, equality, justice" from the writer Heinrich Mann. Should Heinrich Mann have better shouted the slogans of the people, the leader and the fatherland? On the other hand, Walter regrets that the care of the intellectual property of the democratic-conservative movement is being neglected. The consequences have been observed for around ten years. Because the space given up does not remain unoccupied. According to Franz Walter, the later AfD founder Alexander Gauland was once one of the guests that Joachim Fest invited to his villa during the Frankfurt Book Fair. But at that time Gauland was not yet considered right-wing.

Walter makes me want to read Joachim Fest again, because he could write - and the working-class boy Walter, who grew up without the classics in the bookcase and paintings on the walls, can do it too!

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