What's to Become of the Boy? (3 page)

4

Yes, school, I know—I’ll get back to that. I was still in the eighth grade, and my route to school became even quieter. For a time I must have been walking with my head down, since one day my father offered me a prize if I could name twenty-five stores between St. Severin’s Church and Perlen-Graben. I lifted my head once again and won the prize: I also lifted my head to read
Der Stürmer
, the newspaper in its display case outside the former trade-union building on Severin-Strasse, not far from the corner that goes off to Perlen-Graben. What I read did not enhance my sympathies for the Nazis. (Today, alas, that area is a desert; war and the Nord-Süd freeway saw to that. Yet that little square outside the Church of St. John the Baptist used to be bustling with life.)

Not always with the prior but always with the subsequent approval of my mother, I went often to the school of the streets. (As reported elsewhere, my mother anyway used to run a kind of center for non-family truants under the coffee grinder that hung on the kitchen wall.) So, if I went to the school of the streets, it wasn’t because my high school was particularly Nazist or Nazi-tainted. It was not, and I remember most of my teachers without any resentment at all. I don’t even feel resentment toward our teacher of religion, although I argued with him—to
the point of being kicked out of the classroom. The points of dispute were not the Nazis; on that score he was not vulnerable. On the contrary, I recall an excellent lecture he gave on the sentimental and commercial background to the Day of the German Mother. What aroused my ire was the overriding bourgeois element in his teaching. It was against this that I rebelled so inarticulately; he had no idea what I meant or how I meant it, he was more confused than angry.

The cause of my rebellion could be found in the totally indefinable social situation in which we found ourselves: had our financial plight lowered our social status or made us classless? To this day I don’t know. We were neither true lower middle class nor conscious proletarians, and we had a strong streak of the Bohemian. “Bourgeois” had become a dirty word for us. The elements of those three classes, to none of which we truly belonged, had made what might be called “bourgeois” Christianity absolutely insufferable to us. Our teacher of religion probably never understood what I had in mind, and I probably didn’t express it clearly enough. (Obviously the author has always irked, and been irked by, church and state. And, being a true son of Cologne, he has never taken secular and ecclesiastical authority very seriously, much less regarded them as important!)

Merely lowered socially or truly classless? The question remains unanswered. The other subjects, aside from religion? I can’t remember anything special about them. Even in those days I was gradually starting to “orchestrate” school. And, since I did respect the intelligence
of our teacher of religion, who, although bourgeois to the marrow, made no concessions to the Nazis, I began from time to time to attend school mass in the Franciscan Church on Ulrich-Gasse. It made for a change in my usual route along Rosen-Strasse. As for the church, I found it (no other word occurs to me) disgusting, with its corny statues and decorations and the stale smells emanating from the congregation. There is only one word for those smells:
fug
, trying to pass itself off as fervor. I went there quite pointedly, with only occasionally the aim of offering some slight consolation to our teacher of religion, since I certainly didn’t hate him: it was just that sometimes we had violent arguments. He obviously suffered from high blood pressure, and some of the boys in the Hitler Youth couldn’t resist taking advantage of him: not on their own—they could have done that before 1933—but by virtue of their uniforms and potential rank (there was all that braid!). He was helpless and unsuspecting, had no idea that their attitude was a mark of the “bourgeois” element’s turning against him, that the boys who, until March 1933, had been good young Catholics now were sniffing the “new age” and intended to make the most of it. This harassment didn’t last long, nor did it get worse; it soon died down, but our last lessons with him, barely three years later, were terrible, though for quite different reasons. No doubt he still considered me a Catholic, if not good.

But it was my own “Catholicity” that I was beginning to doubt, the more so after a further heavy blow: the signing of the Reich Concordat with the Vatican engineered
by von Papen and Monsignor Kaas. After the seizure of power, the Reichstag fire, and the March election, it was, incredibly, the Vatican that accorded the Nazis their first major international recognition. Some members of our family—myself among them—seriously considered leaving the church, but that had become so fashionable among all those Germans who couldn’t wait to join the Nazi Party after the March 1933 election that we didn’t, since it might have been misconstrued as homage to the Nazis. That didn’t exempt us from considerable crises, both existential and political, yet in the midst of that time of crisis, I took part in a procession, strutting proudly along as I carried a great flag (white with an enormous blue
Junge Front
, the last weekly of Catholic youth until its brave demise. I was recruited for this job by Otto Vieth over streusel cake and ersatz coffee in the garden of St. Vincent’s Hospital
in Cologne-Nippes. The job was also a source of income: the ten pfennigs paid for each copy of the
Junge Front
didn’t have to be turned in until the following week and helped us over many a straitened weekend.

At the time there was also a theory, almost officially sanctioned by the church, that one should join the Nazi organizations in order to “Christianize them from within”—whatever that may have meant, for to this day no one seems to know what “Christianization” consists of. A considerable number—among them our principal, I believe—acted on this theory, and after the war many of them, left in the lurch in the denazification process, had to pay for it.

Although I had long since ceased to be “organized,” I still ostentatiously wore the
insignia on my lapel and more than once had to take abuse from an older student who, not surprisingly, had been a particularly enthusiastic member of the Catholic youth movement. That was the extent of what I had to put up with in school. I had no trouble with my classmates; they had known me and I them for five or six years; there were arguments but no attempts at conversion. Some disapproved of my occasional flippant remarks about Hitler and other Nazi bigwigs, but none of them, not even the S.S. member, would ever, I believe, have dreamed of denouncing me. I felt no resentment, not even toward the teachers. We still thought it possible that the Nazis wouldn’t last; sometimes we’d even laugh in anticipation of further opportunistic contortions of the “bourgeoisie”
when
 … But
who
would then take over none of us tried to predict.

I kept up my friendships with several of my classmates even after graduation (although I avoided that S.S. fellow: in the three years preceding graduation I doubt if I exchanged more than two sentences with him). We pored over our homework together, and I tried to help some of them over that strange German math trauma, with the zeal of the convert: not long before, my brother Alfred had cured me of this trauma by systematically and patiently “probing back” to my basic knowledge, discovering gaps, closing them, and thus giving me a firm foundation. That had led us to such an enthusiasm for math that we spent weeks trying to discover a method of trisecting the angle, and sometimes we felt so close to the solution that we spoke only in whispers. The “furnished gentleman” living in the next room had a degree in engineering, which might have enabled him to appropriate our discovery.

Yes, I pored over textbooks with them, crammed for math and Latin (another of those traumatic subjects that fortunately never developed into a trauma for me). Sometimes we spent the evening in my father’s office in the rear courtyard of the building at 28 Vondel-Strasse. Money being scarce and cigarettes and tobacco expensive, we would buy the very cheapest kind of cigars (five pfennigs each), cut them up with a razor blade, and roll them into cigarettes. (Today I am sure we were suffering from an economic delusion.) The tiny office building was seductively cozy, built entirely of wood, something between a log cabin and a shed. It contained fine, solidly built closets, with sliding doors of green glass, for the storage of metal
fittings and drawings: little neo-Gothic turrets, miniature columns, flowers, figures of saints; designs for confessionals, pulpits, altars and communion benches, furniture; and there was also an old copying press from pre–World War I days, and a few remaining cartons of light bulbs for bayonet sockets, although we had shot hundreds of them to pieces in the garden on Kreuznacher-Strasse. Green desk lamps, a big table with a green linoleum top; slabs of glue, tools. When it came to gluing, the generational conflict between my father and my brother Alois was concentrated on the “barbaric, revolutionary” invention of cold glue, which my father didn’t trust, while my brother demonstrated its reliability; but my father insisted on hot, boiled glue, the way it had to be prepared in the glue pot, with constant stirring, from the honey-colored slabs. There was no lack of other conflicts, but they have no place here.

5

Yes, also school, but first, in that horror-year of 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power, the Reichstag fire, terror, the March election, and the body blow of the Reich Concordat, something happened that caused even the middle classes of Cologne to tremble. In July—the Concordat had been completed but not yet signed—the trial took place in Cologne of seventeen members of the Red Front Fighters’ League, for murder in two cases, attempted murder in one: the murders of Storm Troopers Winterberg and Spangenberg, who had just recently converted from the Communist Party to the Nazis. But seventeen murderers? Nobody believed that, nor was it ever established who had actually shot the two men. The trial began in July; in September, seven of the seventeen accused were condemned to death, and on November 3 they were beheaded with an ax. All pleas for mercy had been rejected. There was no pardon. Göring, Minister-President of Prussia, declared: “As a result of these incidents I have decided not to wait another day but to intervene with an iron fist. In future anyone who lays violent hands on a representative of the National Socialist movement or a representative of the State must realize that he will lose his life in short order.”

The reason for my placing that event one year later, in the fall of 1934, may have something to do with June
30, 1934, that ultimate brutal step to the seizure of total power. That day has remained in my memory as a crucial signal—perhaps because the time up until June 30 seemed relatively quiet to me. Nowadays I often think of those seven young Communists in view of the miserably embarrassing palaver over recognition of the resistance group known as the Edelweiss pirates.

One thing I do know, even if the date has shifted in my memory: on the day of the executions, shock hung over Cologne, fear and shock, the kind that before a thunderstorm makes birds flutter up into the sky and seek shelter. It became quiet, quieter; I no longer made flippant remarks about Hitler, except at home, and even there not in everyone’s presence.

One of the executed men, the youngest, aged nineteen, wrote poems in his death cell. The place where they were written, the fate of the author, lift those lines far beyond what one might patronizingly call “touching,” which is why, for fear of diminishing their deadly seriousness, I won’t quote them. The poems, written by a Red Front fighter, reveal the “Italian” nature of Cologne Communism (as it then was). In one poem he gives thanks for the candles lighted for him in church, admitting that he was present at the deed and declaring that he did not commit murder; at the end of the poem he thanks his friend, a Red Front fighter, for having prayed with him at night—and asks that the Lord’s Prayer be said at his grave.

For Göring, whose soldier-emperor fantasies seemed, in the observations of many of his contemporaries, comical if not almost endearing—for that robber, that murderer,
that bloodthirsty fool, I and many other Cologne school-kids were soon lining the streets. During those few hours in Cologne, he changed uniforms three if not four times. It surprises me that some waggish moviemaker has not yet discovered
this
character: that masklike face with its glittering morphine addict’s eyes, that “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that inflated Nimrod, known later as “Herr Meyer”—surely the perfect subject for a movie farce! As it was, his scenes with Dimitroff, the Bulgarian Communist, during the Reichstag fire trial did much to enhance our considerable political amusement. At the time when the executions were announced, however, the entire city trembled under that bloody fist—it’s possible, of course, that I was crediting the whole city with my own horror.

6

School? Oh yes, that too. Soon I had reached that level of education known as “lower school-leaving certificate.” For serious economic reasons my family considered taking me out of school and putting me to work as an apprentice. One possibility being considered was land surveying (“You’ll always be out in the fresh air”—my aversion to fug being well known—“besides, it’s a nice way of earning a living, what with math and all that, which you’re so fond of”). Another suggestion: a commercial apprenticeship with a coffee wholesaler on (I forget whether Grosse or Kleine) Witsch-Gasse, where a friend of ours had some connections. Land surveyor: that really didn’t sound too bad, and for a few hours I wavered, until I realized that it would mean a more or less bureaucratic occupation: that smelled of being forcibly organized. Yet, even today, when I drive through the countryside and see land surveyors at work with their instruments and measuring rods, I sometimes indulge in the fancy that I might have become one of them; the office of the coffee wholesaler on (Grosse or Kleine) Witsch-Gasse, when in later years I happened to pass by it, would provoke a strangely gentle nostalgia in me: that
would have been
, that
might have been:
although I was firmly resolved to become a writer, the detour via land surveying and the
coffee business wouldn’t have been any worse than other roundabout routes I subsequently took. (It is only now that I can appreciate, comprehend, how utterly horrified my family must have been when, between quitting my bookseller’s apprenticeship and starting my stint in the Labor Service, between February and November 1938, when I was not yet twenty-one—and in the very midst of firmly entrenched Nazi terror—I actually set out to be a free-lance writer.)