The Writers' Castle, page 26
In the Interpreters’ Booth
Hildesheimer spent his first weeks in Nuremberg practising for his new job. Before he could be deployed as an interpreter he had to be trained, and he found simultaneous interpretation a challenge. Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, who was quartered in the witnesses’ house, remarked: “The difficulty… resides in the special syntax that distinguishes German from all other languages commonly used at international conferences. Because in German the verb very often comes at the end of sometimes extremely long and labyrinthine sentences, whereas it’s required directly after the subject in French or English translation… nearly insurmountable obstacles arise purely in terms of time.”22
Simultaneous interpretation was an entirely new discipline born during the Nuremberg Trial. It required a novel technology, with everyone wired up with everyone else, which allowed for immediate translation. Separated from the rest of the courtroom by a glass wall, the interpreters could switch between languages with the twist of a knob. A yellow light signalled to the speakers that they should talk more slowly; a red light meant an interruption, for instance, because of technical problems. Previously, interpreters had translated consecutively, with the translation following the original words. A special notetaking technique was used for this. But there was no time for conventional interpreting in Nuremberg since it would have unreasonably delayed the trial.
The interpreters were under enormous pressure—and not just in terms of tempo. They were also required to translate perfectly at the highest of speeds in a war crimes trial of global historical significance. As Siegfried Ramler, Hildesheimer’s fellow interpreter, boss and friend, acknowledged in his autobiography, it was an impossible task. The most important talent of a simultaneous interpreter, he said, was a lack of perfectionism. The second- or third-best choice of an equivalent word was also legitimate. The defendants, whose necks were literally on the line, saw the situation differently. One of the accused in the Major War Criminals Trial, Fritz Sauckel, whose strong Franconian accent proved a major headache for the interpreters, believed until his final breath that he had been sentenced to death because of a mistranslation.
Nor were prosecutors exempt from being misconstrued. Jackson, whose cross-examination of Göring was highly criticized, also owed his perceived failure to a translation. Initially, he sought to connect the former Reich Marshal with German planning for the Second World War. He introduced as evidence a document concerning the “preparation for the liberation of the Rhine”. But Göring spotted a mistake and pointed out that the passage in question had nothing to do with Germany’s 1936 remilitarization of the Rhineland, but rather the freeing of the River Rhine of obstacles. The German word Freimachung had been incorrectly rendered into English.
Every word was a battle in Nuremberg, and the correct choice of terms could be a matter of life and death, so great attention was paid during the selection of interpreters as to whether the candidates would in fact be up to the job. Along with excellent language skills, they also had to possess broad cultural background knowledge and be familiar with specialist legal, political and medical terminology. Although their work demanded extreme concentration, they were forced to perform it amid a constant din since the interpreters’ booth wasn’t sound-proofed. Hildesheimer repeatedly complained in his letters about the strain this put him under. “You can imagine that this is a somewhat nerve-wracking job,” he wrote to his sister. And he added to his parents in July 1947: “I’m extremely worn down and very stressed despite the relatively short working hours.”23
Three teams of twelve interpreters took turns according to a rota. Working hours were in fact not a source of stress. Hildesheimer was only on the job for one and a half hours each in the morning and afternoon. The next day he had off, aside from having to check the transcriptions. But the work was psychologically challenging because the interpreters had no time to comprehend the content of what they translated—that’s how hard they had to concentrate on the sheer act of rendering words from one language in another. It was only later, when they read the transcripts or compared the minutes from the testimony with the audio recordings, that they realized the gravity of what had been said. Those deferred emotions took their toll over time. One symptom was a strange psychological identification with the accused. “Things are in full swing with the Einsatzgruppen, and although it’s very trying, interpreting is very interesting because you involuntarily imitate them,” Hildesheimer remarked. “I’m capable of the entire spectrum from irony to rage to tears. You involuntarily act things out.”24
Hildesheimer didn’t just work in the courtroom. Once in a while, he also had to interpret during interrogations outside the Palace of Justice. In 1948, one assignment of this kind took him to Copenhagen. His short working hours left him with considerable free time, which he used to travel within Germany and also to make trips to Austria and Italy. Via the Red Cross, he worked for a while for an educational programme for children, teaching them to draw. He went to concerts, opera performances and exhibitions, but more than anything he created visual art.
Hildesheimer kept interpreting until the end of his job in Nuremberg in 1949, but his work increasingly shifted to preparing a textual record of the trials, and he was made an editor. In the interest of transparency and general understanding, American authorities had decided to document the subsequent trials in writing. The result was not an unabridged, popularly inaccessible, dry-as-dust collection of transcripts. The fifteen volumes of the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, published by the US government, served as the official documentation of the individual charges and verdicts as well as the relevant administrative materials.
As a member of the editorial team, Hildesheimer was responsible for the selection, compiling, editing and indexing of Volumes Three (the Judges Trial) and Five (the Einsatzgruppen Trial). Later in life he would notice the usefulness of his intense engagement with language as an interpreter and editor for his incipient literary work. He had actually only got to know the German language, he said, when he came back to Germany and compared it with other languages. It was this comparison that had shown him the richness and superb qualities of the German tongue.
Hildesheimer heard from Otto Ohlendorf once, indirectly, after the latter was sentenced to death on 10th April 1948. As interpreter Peter Uiberall reported, the interpreters received a letter specifically addressed to them in which Ohlendorf expressed his gratitude that, thanks to their work, he had been given a fair say.25
In October 1949, when his work as an editor was over, Hildesheimer moved to the town of Ambach on the Starnberger See. In 1957 he turned his back for good on Germany, moving to Switzerland, where he lived reclusively until his death in 1991. His motivation for emigration was indirectly related to his experiences in Nuremberg—at least in the estimation of his fellow interpreter Henry A. Lea. Lea, who later taught German Literature in the USA and published on Hildesheimer’s works, saw the post-war German desire for a return to the good old days and Hildesheimer’s own abiding fear of anti-Semitism as motivations for his relocation. Lea had worked with Hildesheimer on numerous court sessions during the Einsatzgruppen Trial and had observed his reactions up close. “When he was asked in 1964 why he didn’t live in Germany, [Hildesheimer] replied ‘Ich bin Jud’ [I’m a Jew],” Lea told German author Hermann Kesten for his anthology Ich lebe nicht in der Bundesrepublik (I Don’t Live in the Federal Republic). “Two-thirds of all Germans are anti-Semites. They always were and always will be.” In an unrelated interview, Hildesheimer reaffirmed his accusation of general anti-Semitism, commenting that it was “inherent in Germans and will never be expunged”.26
Ironically, it was the son of one of the Nuremberg defendants who injected a bit of hope into Hildesheimer’s political outlook the year before the latter’s death. In 1990, a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, German President Richard von Weizsäcker—whom Hildesheimer most likely had met in Nuremberg when as a lawyer he defended his father, Ernst von Weizsäcker, in the Ministries Trial—invited the interpreter-turned-author to give a reading at his official residence in Berlin. The event came at a very symbolic point in Germany’s history, with a host of leading cultural and political personalities in attendance. Hildesheimer read from his fictional biography Marbot. It was a great source of satisfaction for him as a Jewish author, who had left Germany for reasons including anti-Semitism, to be invited to a celebration of German reunification. This was a gesture for the future.
Richard von Weizsäcker and his wife found it very important to offer Hildesheimer a public forum and had worked hard to find an appropriate date. The two men’s admiration was mutual. Wolfgang Hildesheimer called Weizsäcker “the best president since Heuss”—the groundbreaking journalist, democrat and the first man to hold that largely symbolic but influential office in West Germany. Hildesheimer singled out Weizsäcker’s historic speech on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War as his crowning achievement. In that address, Weizsäcker had become the first German leader to portray 8th May 1945 as a day of liberation for everyone, including Germans.27
Notes
1 On Roman Karmen’s stay in the press camp see F. Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, p. 136.
2 For example, Richard Tüngel, co-founder of the respected German weekly Die Zeit, Harold Kurtz, who would become a renowned biographer, and the historian and professor Paul G. Fried.
3 http://www.rijo.homepage.t-online.de/pdf/EN_NU_45_occwc.pdf
4 S. Braese, Jenseits der Pässe, p. 152.
5 Hildesheimer to Böll, 7th September 1953 in W. Hildesheimer, Briefe, p. 39.
6 A. Merritt and R.L. Merritt (eds), Public Opinion in Occupied Germany, p. 160 ff.
7 K. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, p. 19.
8 See H. Arendt and K. Jaspers, Briefwechsel, 1926–1969.
9 W. Hildesheimer, Die sichtbare Wirklichkeit bedeutet mir nichts, pp. 292, 332 f.
10 Ibid., p. 486.
11 L. Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory, p. 237.
12 S. Bräse, Jenseits der Pässe, p. 463 f.
13 Hildesheimer sketched out his Jewish idenity in a 1978 radio piece “My Jewishness” and a 1984 lecture “The Jewishness of Mr Bloom” at the Ninth International Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt. See W. Hirsch, Zwischen Wirklichkeit und erfundener Biographie, p. 107 f.
14 W. Hildesheimer, Gesammelte Werke in sieben Bänden, Vol. 7: Vermischte Schriften, p. 163.
15 R. Ogorreck and V. Ries, “Fall 9: Der Einsatzgruppenprozess (gegen Otto Ohlendorf und andere)”.
16 W. Hildesheimer, Die sichtbare Wirklichkeit bedeutet mir nichts, pp.
278, 341.
17 https://he.bdue.de/fileadmin/verbaende/he/Dateien/PDF-Dateien/fotoausstellung/BDUE_Fotoausstellung_Frankfurt_Begleitheft_Web.pdf
18 S. Bräse, Jenseits der Pässe, p. 145.
19 W. Hirsch, Zwischen Wirklichkeit und erfundener Biographie, p. 261.
20 S. Bräse, Jenseits der Pässe, p. 518.
21 W. Hildesheimer, Die sichtbare Wirklichkeit bedeutet mir nichts, pp. 285, 288, 295.
22 P. Schmidt, Der Statist auf der Galerie, p. 45.
23 S. Bräse, Jenseits der Pässe, p. 138.
24 W. Hildesheimer, Die sichtbare Wirklichkeit bedeutet mir nichts, p. 344.
25 Ibid., p. 342.
26 W. Hirsch, Zwischen Wirklichkeit und erfundener Biographie, p. 112. See also H.A. Lea, Wolfgang Hildesheimers Weg als Jude und Deutscher.
27 S. Bräse, Jenseits der Pässe, p. 546 ff.
XIV
A Kind of Afterword: Golo Mann’s Plea for Rudolf Hess
“It had always been my view that the whole Third Reich was a scandalously stupid episode in German history, woven from a series of accidents, mistakes and avoidable idiocies, and by no means the inevitable result of what happened before.”
GOLO MANN
On 24th November 1945, a few days after the start of the Nuremberg Trial, Thomas Mann was asked by Associated Press for a statement of his position on the event. The resulting article, abridged and framed as an interview, appeared in the New York Daily News five days later. Taking up the heated discussions at the time about the legality of the International Military Tribunal, Mann explained why he thought the Allies’ general approach was correct. Mann took seriously the criticism aimed at the four Allies that the trial was a legal farce in which the victors were merely flexing their muscles. In his opinion, though, such objections were outweighed by the trial’s purpose as a moral crucible. He confided to his diary: “In this trial, the issue is what should come next and what the primary intellectual and moral state of reality was at the point when fascism impiously rose up against it. It is taking place on the threshold of the future.”1 In other words, the trial was an event with a broad pedagogical intent, driving home a political and moral point.
Erika Mann supported the tribunal more unreservedly than her father. As she wrote in the synopsis for her planned book “Alien Homeland”, “Germans cannot be trusted to take proper care of their own war criminals.”2 To her mind, incorrigible Nazis, such as were still be found in German courts, could hardly be expected to render judgments about their former peers. Erika also spoke out against US Senator Robert A. Taft, who had been an opponent of America’s entry into the Second World War, when he criticized the Nuremberg Trial in October 1946.3
Her brother Golo Mann (1909–94) was far more critical. The third of the Mann children and a prize-winning historian and journalist, by his own admission he suffered all his life under the burden of being Thomas’s son and the sibling of Erika and Klaus, who achieved fame at an early age. He knew he wasn’t his father’s favourite. In his old age, while editing Thomas’s diaries for publication, he could read his father’s opinion of him in passages like this one of 24th January 1920: “Golo, more and more a problematic personality, dishonesty, uncleanly and hysterical.”4 Even if their relationship had improved over the years, with Thomas developing respect for his son’s historical writings, Golo’s adolescence had been a struggle to emancipate himself from the family patriarch. From an early age he became a loner, both within the family and intellectually. Many conventional German historians shunned him because of his narrative style—his biography of Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, the Bohemian military leader and statesman during the Thirty Years’ War, included a fictional interior monologue. That earned him an unjust reputation for being a popular historian without academic credibility. Swinging back and forth between the political Left and Right, he remained an individualist who defied all labels throughout his life. He also cultivated this image. Significantly, in his final years he agreed to be buried in Kilchberg cemetery with the other Manns, but not in the family mausoleum where Thomas, Katia and his siblings Erika, Monika, Elisabeth and Michael were laid to rest.
In the autumn of 1945, Golo began working as a programme director and censor at Radio Frankfurt in Bad Nauheim. Before that, while serving as a US soldier in London, he was an announcer for the German division of the American Broadcasting Station. After a short stay in Luxembourg, where he took part in the so-called “war of the airwaves”, he wanted to help establish a free German radio broadcaster, which he envisioned being open to journalists of all political stripes except former Nazis. True to this aim, Communists like Hans Mayer and Stephan Hermlin were also welcome. Mann was tasked with monitoring their contributions and those of their colleagues. As all three men later admitted, they often had to grit their teeth to work together, but they treated one another fairly.
Mann frequently travelled to Nuremberg, and one foggy day in December 1945 he was involved in a car accident that left him with an injured leg and put him in hospital for weeks. It is impossible to say whether he ever stayed overnight at or even visited Schloss Faber-Castell. Most of his correspondence from 1944 to 1946 was lost. In a letter to Katia on 6th December 1945, he wrote that he hoped to see Erika in Nuremberg, which might indicate that he went out to the press camp, especially as he knew others who resided there. As a US citizen, Golo would in any case have been admitted to the building, and he did in fact meet with his sister. On 9th December he conducted a fourteen-minute radio interview with her in which she discussed her impressions of Mondorf-les-Bains and the legal particularities and global historical importance of the Nuremberg Trial.5
Thirty-six years old at the time, Golo was sceptical about what he saw and heard from the press section of the courtroom, although, as a censoring authority taking direct orders from US occupiers, it wouldn’t be until later that he could freely state his views. In an interview he confessed that after eight months he had tired of his identity as one of the victors and his hatred for Germany had “melted away like snow in the May sun”.6 Whereas Erika regarded Germans as a people culpable for the crimes of Nazism and Thomas Mann didn’t believe Germany would be able to reform itself, Golo rejected the collective guilt thesis as oversimplifying the many facets of Germany’s historic downfall. He preferred the term “collective liability”, suggested by his teacher Karl Jaspers. “Liability and guilt—guilt in the criminal sense—are two fundamentally different concepts,” Golo wrote in 1987, “and after their victory as well as during the war, the Allies were no angels themselves.”7 War crimes committed by the victors were never mentioned in Nuremberg, he complained. Golo Mann’s biographer, Urs Bitterli, cited another passage from his private correspondence in which he attacked “the deeds of this mob of victors”, while cautioning, however, that the crimes of the Nazis should not be relativized in any way.8
