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Subdued Fires
An Intimate Portait of Pope Benedict XVI
By Garry O'Connor The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Garry O'Connor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9913-0
CHAPTER 1
Shadowland or Fairyland?
'Co-operators in the truth.'
Ratzinger's motto when consecrated bishop
A plaque on the wall of number 11 Markltplatz, Marktl am Inn, near the Austrian border, where on the other side of the River Inn, just less than forty years earlier, Hitler had been born, marks the birthplace of Joseph Ratzinger on Easter Saturday, 16 April, 1927.
That he was baptised on Easter Sunday with fresh holy water blessed the night before, which gave the child special protection, sets a tone which permeates most accounts, including Ratzinger's own, of the very Christian atmosphere of his birth and early years. 'I love the beauty of our country, and I like walking. I am a Bavarian patriot; I particularly like Bavaria, our history, and of course our art. Music. That is a part of life I cannot imagine myself without.'
Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, exactly repeats the sentiments and hobbies of many Bavarians who enthuse about, and are very proud of, their homeland. For example, the 18-year-old Hans Frank, later the first Nazi Bavarian Minister of Justice, wrote in his diary on 6 April 1918, 'We Bavarians, members of a genuine Germanic race, have been armed with a powerful sense of free will; only with the greatest reluctance and under duress do we tolerate this Prussian military dominance. It is this fact above all that constantly renews for us the symbol of the great, unbridgeable dividing line made by the mighty Main River, which separates South Germany from the North. To our way of thinking, the Prussian is a greater enemy than the Frenchman.'
'We remain anchored in our own Bavarian spirit because it is our cultural identity,' wrote Ratzinger in similar terms, in his memoir, Milestones. 'Our experience during childhood and youth inform the lives of each one of us. These are the true riches which we draw on for the rest of our lives.'
The Pope's Bavarian background has been highly and romantically idealised by both he himself and commentators on his life. The Italian writer Alessandra Borghese calls him 'the happy produce [sic] of a land such as Bavaria: Catholic from the start, firm in her faith, serious in her ways, but also warm in her feelings, fond of good music and thus of harmony, and always giving such colourful expression to life.'
Borghese rejoices in the link between Bavaria and her native city, Rome: 'happiness and openness, love of conviviality are shared qualities ... Benedict is often told Munich is Italy,' she asserts.
Joseph's parents by chance (or 'providence') were named Joseph and Maria (Mary in German and Italian). His mother, a miller's daughter, the eldest of eight who had a tough upbringing, worked as a hotel pastry cook in Munich, while his father, from a slightly higher social bracket, came from an old family of poor Lower Bavarian farmers.
Joseph senior served two years in the Royal Bavarian Army before training for the police during the First World War at Ingolstadt. We learn nothing about this. He and his son would often go hiking when he was 'on extended sick leave', when he would tell Joseph 'stories of his early life', although Joseph does not tell us in Milestones what these were. He worked as a constable, or inspector, or commissioner (he is referred to as all three).
Joseph's parents met through an announcement in the press that he was looking for a wife. Forty-three-year-old Joseph, in March 1920 – calling himself 'a low-level civil servant', according to Bavarian State archives – placed an advertisement in a Catholic newspaper for a wife, a girl who knew how 'to cook and also sews a bit', and who shared his faith. Today he would presumably have had to go through a dating agency, or post his details on the Internet.
As a policemen with poor pay he added that he would not 'be displeased if she had some money of her own'. At the age of over forty, advanced in those days, he then wrote to his superior officers requesting permission to marry.
It would seem from the first he was unable to support fully a wife and family, similar to many a policeman today. Maria, still unmarried at the age of 37, came forward.
This was four months after the first advert, when, with little or no success, he had upgraded his CV to 'mid-ranking civil servant'. This is not mentioned in Milestones as an important milestone, but in the Bavarian State archive. She had no money of her own but she did work. They married on 9 November 1920.
Joseph senior was grey-haired with a moustache, not a handsome man but rather scraggly-looking, and tenacious; he was, Joseph said with hindsight, 'very strict, perhaps too strict'. He thought differently from the way one was supposed to think, and with a 'sovereign superiority'.
Maria, on the other hand, was from all accounts cheerful and good-natured. She sang hymns to the Virgin Mary while washing up, which incurred her husband's disapproval. His parents had 'two very different temperaments ... a difference which made them complimentary'. Both valued thrift, honour, and led a life of frugality, which enabled Joseph senior to put money aside and save for a home for his retirement.
Up until that time when they owned a house they lived in local constabularies manned by Joseph senior – 'above the shop', as had happened with Margaret Thatcher, although in Ratzinger's case, and as the father was an important local functionary, the 'copshop' was a grander if more decaying establishment.
***
Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, mentioned that his birth sign, Taurus, was indicative of his personality. Joseph's birth sign was that of Aries, the Ram, representing in its symbolic aspect sacrifice. The popular trait of this star sign promises a gradual and deliberate rather than a spontaneous rise in life, but also a potential leadership complex, which has to be reined in. The combination of an Arien and Taurean, John Paul II, who later became Pope Ratzinger's close colleague, made for an excellent match. At the same time, interpreters of the sign warn of a tendency to temperamental outbursts much to be avoided (or not shown).
Joseph's uncle Georg, Joseph's great-uncle, had been a priest and theologian, a Reichstag deputy and member of the Bavarian parliament. He championed the rights of peasants, and, noted for his richness of thought and animated exposition, and frequent changes of political allegiance, he had once written attacking the political economy of Adam Swift.
Georg was also fiercely anti-Semitic in his writings and thought, blaming Jewish financial power for undermining traditional German values of discipline, modesty, family integrity and the Christian faith. (This is not mentioned in Joseph's memoir, Milestones, published in 1998, nor in Peter Seewald's biography, Benedict XVI.)
'Jews were part of the alien world of Munich rather than rural society,' writes Nicholas Boyle. 'Georg's long and severe involvement with urban and economic affairs must have made him a somewhat suspect character ... If Josef is said to have had "no friends as a boy" it must in part have been because he was repeatedly uprooted and learned to put his trust in no one but the family and the church.'
To have had an avowed intellectual anti-Semite in the family presumably, too, was not a bad credential for survival in the Nazi era, for if necessary, Nazi investigators dug deep into family history. Not that there was any need for or use made of this.
Cultivating an uncritical, detached picture of Joseph's early life runs the risk of being accused of concealing other sides of the story by not bringing attention to them. Today's world is curious and questioning. In 1996, as cardinal, he praised Georg's work supporting peasant rights, and against child labour. 'His achievements and his political standing also made everyone proud of him,' Ratzinger told Seewald. But from what he tells us and what we know we can never properly form a picture of the father and the family, as we can do in the case of Karol Wojtyla. He tells us what he feels he ought to tell us, in view of his position, to form the correct idea of him that we should have.
Just before Joseph was two, his father was posted to Tittmoning, a small and picturesque baroque town that bordered Austria. Joseph had only just survived an attack of diphtheria, which made him unable to eat. They lived once more in the town square, in what was formerly the seat of the town provost. A proud house, Joseph recalled, 'from my childhood land of dreams', although the reality was more often than not that of his aged mother hauling up coal and wood two flights in a dilapidated dwelling with crumbling walls and peeling paint.
On 15 March 1929 Hitler launched an impassioned appeal for the German Army to think again about its rejection of National Socialism, and its support of the Weimar Republic. Even so, the Nazis still floundered – until the Germany economy suddenly collapsed.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 changed Hitler's fortunes. Then, and only then, did Nazism seriously begin to catch fire in the hearts and minds of the German people.
In 1931 Cardinal Michael Faulhaber visited the town to confirm some children. According to legend, Joseph, who welcomed the cardinal with other children by singing songs, was so enamoured of the blood red of the cardinal's cassock, and his black, chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine that he shouted, 'One day I will be a cardinal too!'
Georg, his elder brother, calmed him down by saying, 'I thought you said you wanted to be a house painter.' He had already expressed this desire – perhaps from consideration of the state of the Tittmoning house's interior decoration.
The dwelling also housed a special holding cell for prisoners, who were fed from the frugal family table. On the other hand, Joseph senior's uniform was not exactly short on ceremonial flourish. He wore, for formal parades, not only his green uniform, polished belt and buckle, sabre and revolver, but also the distinct and rather comical Bavarian policeman's helmet.
Whenever the father went out on night patrols, Maria prayed with her children that their father would come home safely. During his day duty on the beat Maria used to man the telephone in the office. It was a very ordered, institutional life from which, in some form or other, the children were never to deviate in the future.
By the end of 1932 his father had been posted again, this time to the less idyllic village of Aschau, where the authorities rented for him and his family part of a pretty farm house a local farmer had built for himself. They lived in second-floor rooms and had running water but no bath. In front of the house stood a roadside cross, and in the garden there was a pond into which one day Joseph fell and almost drowned, leaving him with a lifelong fear of drowning.
The ground floor was occupied by the office and an auxiliary policeman, an ardent atheist and Nazi, who outside in the garden performed military exercises with his wife. This policeman attended Catholic Mass to spy on the priest and make notes on the sermon with a view to inform, in case it was seditious. To do this he had to genuflect before the Stations of the Cross, which caused some merriment in the family.
Joseph, who had attended kindergarten, began primary school in Aschau. He noticed how his father more frequently, as time went on, had to 'intervene' at public meetings in disturbances caused by the violence of the Nazis. As usual, he does not say what actually happened, and what form his father's intervention took. When he became an altar boy, he witnessed the Nazis beat up his parish priest. Again, there was no resistance in the Ratzinger family.
It was during this time Jews began to leave, or were driven out of their homes and businesses. Or maybe it was the Communists who suffered. Erich Röhm's Brown Shirts, the SA or Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment or Assault Division), were now a self-proclaimed, auxiliary police force.
We take Ratzinger's word for it that from the start his family were conscientious objectors to Nazism, although there is no other proof of this than his word. But at heart, while unwilling to conform, they were quietists rather than active or clandestine opponents during the rise of Nazism, and later against the Reich.
On Sunday Joseph senior smoked a Virginia cigarette and read the anti-Nazi Gerade Weg. The parents never discussed the declining political situation, as they did not want, so Joseph later wrote, to involve the children. Yet to think of the many millions of children who were to perish later, as a result of the acquiescent attitude of many millions of Germans, is mind-boggling.
'Man lives on the basis of his own experiences,' said the Polish John Paul II, who was Ratzinger's direct predecessor in the papacy. Joseph's experience in childhood was that you didn't discuss such matters. Joseph senior and Maria weren't people who came forward to assert their views. They were Mr and Mrs Bavarian Everyman. They didn't discuss politics, certainly not in front of the family. They questioned a bit, but not too much. Their religion gave them faith in modest circumstances and they took heart and found security in finding them similar to those of their saviour. Obedient to the Catholic catechism, they surrounded their family with an atmosphere of love and attention. The two boys were intellectually very able and academically very clever, so the daughter took on a subsidiary role as they did everything they could to further the boys' education, trying to make sure nothing would get in their way.
This was the early stage, when and where the resistance was needed. As the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller wrote in a poem which became world-famous:
When the Nazis came for the Communists
I was silent.
I wasn't a Communist.
When the Nazis came for the Social Democrats
I was silent.
I wasn't a Social Democrat.
When the Nazis came for the Trades Unionists
I was silent.
I wasn't a Trade Unionist.
When the Nazis came for the Jews
I was silent.
I wasn't a Jew.
When the Nazis came for me
There was no one left
To protest.
From early on in his life, the colouring of Joseph's speech probably came from his mother's South Tyrolese idiom, which 'mixed with the dialect of Upper Bavaria and the accented colouration of the vowels, later became virtually his trademark'. The accent was provincial. The mindset of his early years, too, was markedly Bavarian, by which I mean baroque. This cultural influence over his thought and character went deep, but more important was the unconditional love of his parents and the refuge his family supplied.
With his Bavarian background, and first eighteen years spent in Nazi Germany, he shared a culture with Hans Frank which had a very different outcome, yet still exerted a deep influence over his thought and character.
The 'true riches' of his childhood and youth had a dark side, and it could possibly be that, in the future, sometimes in drawing on that past he lacked sufficient self- knowledge to be clear what exactly he was drawing on.
CHAPTER 2
The Pied Piper of Lower Bavaria
Unfortunately, the narcissistic personality ... formed in the earliest years is heavily endorsed by our society with its emphasis on imagining ourselves. The vast, technically empowered world of advertising stresses day and night the importance of being with the 'right' people, in the 'right' clothes, in the 'right' car, in the 'right' job etc. I must be forever improving my image, learning more and more to see myself in the image of the good life. Sebastian Moore, Must I Tell You Who I Am?
Four years before Joseph was born, in 1923, when his older brother Georg was in early infancy, there happened in Bavarian history an extremely important event, which must have involved Joseph senior, as a Bavarian state policeman, in some way, possibly a very personal way – although we have no record of this. The momentous event took place in Munich, which was not very far away.
It would serve, even at this early time, to bolster up for the family and for the future Pope, the Catholic Church, both as a symbol and as a shelter and insulation from the traumatic experiences of their fellow Germans.
In the long term how strong and secure it would prove to be was another consideration.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Subdued Fires by Garry O'Connor. Copyright © 2013 Garry O'Connor. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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