What's to Become of the Boy? (8 page)

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Authors: Heinrich Boll

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BOOK: What's to Become of the Boy?

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Our own family were turning their backs more and more on the bourgeoisie, and Grosche’s study, equipped in the classic manner with piles of books and journals, and all that saturated culture flowing toward us from the lectures given by the Catholic Academic League—all that was not only well meant but also helpful, and it was good; yet I knew, or rather, merely suspected, that I didn’t belong there.

At home, things were far from always being “comfortable”: that explosive mixture of petty-bourgeois vestiges, Bohemian traits, and proletarian pride, not truly belonging to any class, yet arrogant rather than humble, in other words almost “class conscious” again. And of course, of course, in spite of everything, Catholic, Catholic, Catholic. There was no room for that “confounded” serenity of existence
sub specie œternitatis
. We lived
sub
specie œtatis
. And I don’t know whether I am in trouble again with my synchronization in assuming that it was during that summer that we became addicted to Pervitin, unwittingly—at least my mother, my older sister, and I did; the rest of the family didn’t. The brother of a friend, a doctor, told us about this “stuff” used in hospitals, where they put it into the coffee of obstinate malingerers to encourage them to leave voluntarily. Apparently the “stuff” worked, and we bought it. Today it is one of the most strictly controlled prescription stimulants, but in those days it could be bought over the counter in any pharmacy: thirty tablets for 1.86 marks. We took it, and it worked: it induced a tremendous euphoria, and we could use some euphoria; it had a drier, I might almost say “more spiritual,” effect than alcohol. (I used it well into the war, obtaining prescriptions for it from a young woman with whom I was friendly, a doctor’s assistant, after prescriptions became required. Thank God I ran out of supplies one day, and I kicked the habit. It was dangerous stuff, and one of our best friends succumbed to it.)

Again and again our electricity was cut off, a harsh penalty for a family of such voracious readers: candles were expensive and quickly burned down, and my mother received such dire warnings on account of her tamperings with meter seals that in the end she desisted. It was just at that time that I began to feel so alien to the cozy atmosphere at Grosche’s, legitimate and gracious though it was.

Whatever happened, I didn’t want to jeopardize my graduation, didn’t want to risk too much. For economic reasons, among others, that would have been irresponsible, and, besides, I was simply fed up with school. It was time to put an end to it and enter the deluge that was facing us. Then, right into the midst of my preparations for my final exams, a minor bombshell was dropped: that year the Nazis reduced the secondary school period by one year to eight years; but we had already done nine years, which meant we practically had our graduation in our pockets. The worst that could have happened—failing our final exams—would have meant taking them again two or three months later with the class immediately below us. In that case, failure was unlikely, since it would have meant that the school had declared someone to be ready for the twelfth grade who would drop back to the tenth-grade level. Since the dreaded written tests had been eliminated, it was merely a matter of finding volunteers for the oral tests in the tough subjects of Latin, Greek, and math, so that no one who was weak in those areas would risk being tested in one of them. We came quite openly to an arrangement with our teachers, and at the advice, at the urging almost, of Mr. Bauer I took on
Latin; in return he as good as promised not to test me on Juvenal, whom we were then studying.

I don’t know whether Juvenal was in our curriculum, or whether Bauer had recognized how topical he was and had chosen him for that reason: in Juvenal, arbitrariness, despotism, depravity, corruption of political mores, the decline of the Republican idea, were described with ample clarity, including even a few “June 30’s,” staged by the Praetorians, and allusions to Tigellinus. Then, without looking for it, I came across in a secondhand book bin a Juvenal translation with a detailed commentary, published in 1838. The commentary was almost twice as long as the text and made thrilling historical reading, besides being amusing for its Romantic vocabulary. I couldn’t afford that copious tome but bought it anyhow, and it is one of the few books I managed to bring safely through the war and did
not
sacrifice to the black market afterward. (In those days—a forbidden look forward to 1945—there was a class of profiteers who had everything except books, which they urgently needed to decorate their fine walls, and we unloaded everything that we knew would be republished: an autographed copy of
Buddenbrooks
, for example, brought me a tidy little sum!)

I hung onto my Juvenal. In the twelfth grade I didn’t use it as an aid to translation, that would have been against my principles: I merely devoured the commentary, which read like a thriller. In Greek we read
Antigone
. That needed no commentary, not even a knowing wink; and, as I have said, the tiring monotony of translating in class (Oh, the bent, bored backs of those who were forced
to go through a classical high school! Why, I wonder?) made me impatient, and I would sit down at home with the dictionary and read on ahead. Brief appearances in class of Gerhard Nebel as a substitute teacher brought a little fire and a refreshing gust of anarchy; for the first time I heard about the Jünger brothers. It was said—and probably correctly—that Nebel had been transferred for disciplinary reasons. He also taught gym and boxing, in neither of which I took part. He claimed, fairly openly, that the recent introduction of boxing was due to a secret, repressed anglophilia on the part of the Nazis. Within a few years the Nazis closed down the school for good—which speaks for the school.

We ostentatiously took part in the penitent pilgrimages of the men of Cologne that led from the Heumarkt to the Kalk Chapel and back—tolerated by the Nazis and watched by informers.

Here I must mention, as a little epitaph for one of Cologne’s first air-raid victims, our friend Hans S., who owned a beaver collar. This collar was our last, our very last reserve when we couldn’t scrape up any more money and had nothing more to pawn; it brought in two marks at the pawnshop, and that meant three movie tickets and two packs of cigarettes, or four movie tickets without cigarettes, or four concert tickets—and we went to the movies a lot: it was dark in there, and even the Nazis had to keep quiet and were not distinguishable.

Our schooldays seemed to be drawing to a peaceful close; the arrangements with our teachers had been made. In the choice of careers, which had to be declared for inclusion in our graduation certificates, it turned out that we were the first graduating class in living memory, if not since the school’s existence, not to provide a theologian. Traditionally the school had been a reliable supplier for the theological seminaries in Bonn. The fact that we sent no one there could have had nothing to do with the Nazis, for the class following us was once again a supplier. And it happened to be in religion that our schooldays came to a nasty rather than a peaceful close.

Among the members of the Hitler Youth, the Storm Troopers, and the S.S., there were, of course, not only superficial opportunists but also true believers, believers both as Nazis and as Catholics, and there were conflicts that we discussed in class, such as obedience, the Day of the German Mother (which our teacher of religion buried in a theologically convincing manner), and, since he was neither stupid nor humorless nor in the slightest degree opportunistic, something in the nature of a “skeptical trust” had been formed: we knew where we stood with each other, and there were neither boorish
gibes nor denunciations. But all this was destroyed in a single hour, when he felt himself obliged or—as I am more inclined to believe since he did it with such painful reluctance—was obliged by the curriculum to enlighten us on sexual matters. Maybe that “enlightenment” had been on the twelfth-grade curriculum since 1880; I can’t imagine the Cologne high school graduates of 1880 being any less enlightened than we were. Be that as it may, he did it, he enlightened us: blushing with embarrassment, keeping his eyelids lowered, he spoke about the fact of there being two different sexes. He spoke with dignity, not ludicrously at all, and we were still disposed to concede that he was carrying out this long overdue task with a painful sense of duty.

But then came the moment of disaster when, in connection with the sex organs and their functions, he spoke of “strawberries and whipped cream.” The youngest among us was at least eighteen, the oldest twenty-two, and we had grown up in a city famous and notorious not only for its sanctity but also for its tradition of widespread and widely varied prostitution. Whereas during the less embarrassing parts of his talk, during the awkward, stammered explanations, we had just managed to suppress our laughter, now it burst forth: cynical, cruel, almost lethal. Even the most hardened among us—and there were some hardened ones, of course—felt this comparison to be both an insult and a slur on their experiences, no matter how “dirty” these may have been. Our revenge was appalling: five filthy jokes were each reduced to a key word plus a number; word and number were
written on the blackboard; and in the few remaining religion classes someone would mention one of the five numbers, whereupon the whole class remembered the entire obscenity and burst out laughing. I admit to having shared not only in the laughter but also in the choice and condensing of the obscenities.

During this cruel game, our teacher—and in retrospect I have to admire him—never lost his sense of humor, wanted to share in the cause of our laughter, went to the blackboard and read out—Oh disaster!—key words and numbers, looked at us in puzzlement, asked why we were laughing. It was cruel: a totally innocent man was being crucified, but perhaps that kind of innocent person should not be charged with enlightening twelfth-graders. It should not have been permitted: that “strawberries and whipped cream” was an insult to anyone who had or knew a girl; culinary comparisons in this “area” cannot be anything but revolting. As a further revenge, some of us brought binoculars to class to observe the somewhat inadequately dressed ladies in the rear windows of the buildings along Perlen-Graben, as they leaned out their kitchen windows or hung washing on their laundry racks, facing the school yard—permanent objects of young male curiosity, and we would comment on their visible feminine charms and their petticoats. In those days bras were not yet so common.

If I have since found that
almost nothing
of our music and drawing lessons has remained with me, I have no wish to blame the teachers for this: it is sad and a pity, and I am still suffering from that “wasted time.” Perhaps
it was because the “social status” of those teachers as non-academics among academics—that deplorable German resentment—made them and us uncertain. I can’t help it:
almost nothing
has remained.

In December I started sending off applications for an apprenticeship in a bookstore: handwritten, with a photo, of course, and a notarized copy of my pre-graduation report, which my sister Gertrud obtained for me. All that cost money and, moreover, destroyed one illusion: obviously I would at the very least be automatically absorbed into the Nazi Labor Front. I dreamed of some quiet bookstore, not too big, with an owner who at least wasn’t a Nazi. It was not so easy to find an apprenticeship: there was no economic miracle in that particular field. But finally I did find a shop, quiet, not too big, and not even remotely Nazi: on the contrary, neither the boss nor any of the staff was of that stripe, and I made a good friend there!

When it came, the final exam was not much more than a formality; it started at eight in the morning, and by one or two o’clock everything was over, for all of us. We were taken in alphabetical order, so my turn came first; I was given a passage from Cicero, was told all the words I didn’t know, and passed. Regulations required that I also be examined in biology (everyone was examined in biology), so I reeled off the Mendelian laws, drew the appropriate red, white, and pink circles on the blackboard. I was through by eight thirty. At lunchtime we met for a glass of beer in a tavern: it was all over. I didn’t even bother to attend the graduation ceremony: my brother
Alfred, who went there for a class reunion, accepted the certificate on my behalf and brought it home.

Sometimes I still wonder whether the manufacturers of school supplies noticed a boom in pink chalk: in how many thousands of schools—and not only during final exams—was Mendelian pink drawn on the blackboard by how many hundreds of thousands of students?