It was in this spirit that his father had encouraged him to become a government official. In debt, like so many other small craftsmen, he had suffered the humiliation of having to close his workshop and had become a worker in an industrial factory. Rapid industrialization was marginalizing craftsmen. The army, the principal client for the leather industry, preferred large suppliers. Fritz’s childhood neighborhood of Luisenstadt in Berlin had been full of barracks, and every morning he was awakened by military trumpets.
Of all the “Prussian virtues,” blind respect for authority was the one that Fritz appreciated the least. “My father always told me that the principal defect of the Germans was their submissive spirit,” he said. Of the few books he had been given to read as a child, he remembered particularly Michael Kohlhaas, the story of a rebel fighting to the death to obtain justice, which had made quite a mark on him.
Ernst Kocherthaler was beginning to get a better sense of Fritz Kolbe. This man, with his typical Berliner’s caustic air, was hostile to all forms of authoritarian pomposity and display, Kocherthaler thought. In the course of the conversation, he was finally amused by Kolbe’s adolescent side, the suppressed energy that showed itself in lively little gestures, his twinkling eyes, and a sometimes sharp tone. He often struck his left palm with his right fist. He seemed a determined person, not at all cerebral. Indeed, Fritz referred to himself as a “go-getter.”
Feeling for his part that he could trust Ernst Kocherthaler, Kolbe took a few family photographs out of his wallet. He showed him a picture of his wife, Anita. She had a gentle face, with blue eyes and large sad lids. She had been suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis since 1933, which forced her to spend long periods in a sanatorium in Germany. A son, Peter, had been born in Madrid in April 1932. Kolbe told of meeting Anita in 1918, in a Berlin military hospital.
Another photo showed him in his 1918 soldier’s uniform. He had belonged to an engineering battalion. The photo showed twenty other young men, and Kocherthaler noticed that they were all looking at the camera, except for one, who had his eyes fixed on an invisible spot in the distance. That was Fritz Kolbe.
In another, he could be seen doing calisthenics and wearing shorts. Kolbe was passionate about physical training. He did not smoke, drank very little, and got a lot of exercise—swimming, gymnastics, running—almost to the point of obsession. To celebrate the birth of his son he had run a marathon alone in a Madrid stadium.
The idea that one had to have a healthy body, live simply, and give priority to physical health was instilled in him during a formative childhood experience, his time in the Wandervogel. This German equivalent of the Boy Scouts was where, he said, he learned “the secret of a successful life,” “inner truth.” He told Kocherthaler now that his time with the Wandervogel had been one of great freedom.
Kocherthaler listened to this story with a puzzled look. This naïve and generous overgrown boy scout seemed to him frankly a little foolish, and in the course of the conversation, he had caught an expression about “international high finance” that had sent a chill down his spine. Scouting, in Kocherthaler’s mind, with its veneration of youth and völkisch ideology, seemed a precursor of the Hitler Youth.
Kolbe was taken aback by the suggestion that his passion for sports was comparable to the Nazi cult of the body and violence, and though some of his old friends had joined the Freikorps following the war, and some had even become “arrant Nazis,” “others became communists,” he pointed out.
Kolbe explained to Kocherthaler that the Wandervogel had enabled adolescents to escape from the burdens of prewar society: school, factory work, the army…. Even as a youth, he knew people were stifled under Wilhelm II and detested the bourgeois conformity and pompous militarism of the imperial age. He was fourteen when he joined, just at the outset of the First World War. During the war, he had not been in the trenches, but had wandered down forest paths and slept in hay barns. The events of the outside world had not much affected him. He was a patriot like everyone else, but he felt himself above all a member of the human race. For him, the war had represented the collapse of the present and the promise of a rebirth. This hope was soon buried when he saw the thousands of wounded men who returned from the front to populate Berlin with their ghostly presence. What he loved was nature, escape, harmony with everything alive, which had nothing to do with the Hitler Youth! With some hesitation, Ernst Kocherthaler accepted this explanation, although he remained a bit skeptical.
The Wandervogel had also introduced him to boys from different social backgrounds—the sons of teachers and lawyers from Steglitz and other wealthy Berlin neighborhoods—and taught him “to think for myself,” explained Fritz.
One unforgettable moment of his life among the scouts was still fresh in his mind. In the winter of 1920, Fritz and his friends had gone cross-country skiing in the Harz Mountains. “We were following each other without speaking. In the snow, the silence among the trees was profound. Our little group was looking for its way, when a solitary skier came out of the edge of the forest.” He was an Englishman. “A real gentleman in any case, a little older than we were, and who spoke perfect German,” Fritz recalled. He had read the works of Baden-Powell and told the young Germans, who were dumbfounded, about the adventures of the great English “chief scout” in Afghanistan, India, and South Africa. He explained some techniques for survival in hostile terrain that Baden-Powell had brought back from his journeys and set out in the book Scouting for Boys that had had great success in England. It taught how to light a fire without matches, how to find your way in the jungle, identify the cardinal points, administer first aid to a wounded friend, and the like. Fritz remembered the Englishman’s story as though it were a revelation.
The next day, Fritz realized that he had just met a foreigner, for the first time in his life.
Madrid, November 1935
Fritz Kolbe and Ernst Kocherthaler saw each other again several times during the fall of 1935. Spain had felt civil war coming for at least a year. Rebellions in Asturias and Catalonia had been bloodily put down. The Falangists were parading in the streets, and the right increasingly resorted to violence. Rumors of a coup d’état were circulating. The camp of moderate republicans, to which Kocherthaler felt closest, could no longer find a place in a context of widespread radicalism. The era, even in Spain, was growing extraordinarily tense.
Nazism brought its enemies together, especially outside Germany. There is nothing more favorable than a crisis atmosphere for uniting expatriates. One day in a café Fritz Kolbe told his new friend that the local NSDAP cell in the embassy had just summoned him to question him about his refusal to join the “movement” and to actively support the National Socialist “Revolution.” He had long been under friendly pressure, but now the situation was becoming more threatening. The head of the local party cell had learned through the indiscretion of a secretary that Kolbe had called Mussolini a “pig.” He had told him threateningly that he risked being kicked out of the consular service. Fritz Kolbe denied some of the accusations and had for a time stuck to rather vague answers. He learned that he was criticized for associating with “Jewish” or “Marxist circles.” Apparently, his meetings with Ernst Kocherthaler had been observed. His superiors wanted to know why he had been absent from the small celebration for the führer’s birthday on April 20, 1935. Fritz Kolbe answered that his associations were his business, and above all that the state of his wife’s health deprived him of any desire to celebrate. “I’m an official, I do my work well, but I would not like to look like an opportunist by joining the party now, when I was not a member before the NSDAP came to power,” he told the three interrogators who came to see him. The Nazis had been visibly embarrassed by this rather wily answer. Fritz recalled that at the end of this painful discussion, he had been asked what was his “vision of the world” (Weltanschauung). “I pretended not to understand anything,” he explained to Ernst Kocherthaler. “I told them that I did not know what a ‘vision of the world’ was and that I could therefore not give them an answer. I beat around the bush so much that they finally left, looking exhausted. They probably thought I was simpleminded.”