Soon after Hitler took power Fest "was twice summoned to the local education authority, and later to the ministry, and questioned on his attitude towards the Government." On his return from the third meeting he told his wife, Elisabeth Straeter Fest, that he refused to back down and described the new government as a "rabble". His four principles were militant republicanism (he had detested the kaiser), Prussian virtue (taken with a spice of irony), the Catholic faith and German high culture as inherited by the educated middle class." (3) Neal Ascherson, has pointed out: "He (Johannes Fest) dominated his family, an imperious patriarch given to terrific rages at the dining-table but unbending in his attachment to straightness, good behaviour and democracy. (1) In the 1920s he was a member of the Reichsbanner, a cross-party pressure group opposed to fascism. His father, the head teacher of the Twentieth Elementary School, was a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler and was outspoken critic of the Nazi Party. Joachim Clemens Fest, the son of Johannes Fest, a conservative Roman Catholic, was born in Karlshorst, near Berlin, on 8th December 1926.
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