What's to Become of the Boy? (2 page)

Final clarification or, if you prefer, warning: the title
What’s to Become of the Boy?
should arouse neither false hopes nor false fears. Not every boy whose family and friends have reason to ask themselves and him this eternally apprehensive question does, after various delays and roundabout approaches, eventually become a writer; and I would like to stress that, at the time it was put, this question was both serious and warranted. In fact, I am not sure whether my mother, were she still alive, wouldn’t still be asking the same question today: “What’s to become of the boy?” Perhaps there are times when we
should be asking it about elderly and successful politicians, church dignitaries, writers, et cetera.

2

So it is somewhat warily that I now enter upon the “realistic,” the chronologically confused path, wary of my own and other people’s autobiographical pronouncements. The mood and the situation I can vouch for, also the facts bound up with moods and situations; but, confronted with verifiable historical facts, I cannot vouch for the synchronization, as witness the above examples.

I simply don’t remember whether in January 1933 I was still or no longer a member of a Marian youth fellowship; nor would it be accurate if I were to say that I had “gone to school” for four years under Nazi rule. For I did
not
go to school for four years; there were, if not countless, certainly uncounted days when—apart from vacations, holidays, sickness, which must in any case be deducted—I didn’t go to school at all. I loved what I might call the “school of the streets” (I can’t say “school of the bushes,” since Cologne’s old town has little, and never had much, in the way of bushes). Those streets between the Waidmarkt and the cathedral, the side streets off the Neumarkt and the Heumarkt, all the streets going right and left down to the cathedral from Hohe Strasse: how I loved roaming around in the town, sometimes not even taking my schoolbag along as an alibi but leaving it at home among the galoshes and long overcoats in the
hall closet. Long before I knew Anouilh’s play
Traveller without Luggage
, that was what I enjoyed being, and I still dream of being one. Hands in pockets, eyes open, street hawkers, pedlars, markets, churches, museums (yes, I loved the museums, I was hungry for education, even if not very assiduous in its pursuit), prostitutes (in Cologne there was hardly a street without them)—dogs and cats, nuns and priests, monks—and the Rhine, that great gray river, alive and lively, beside which I could sit for hours at a time; I used to sit in movie theaters too, in the dusk of the early performances that were frequented by a few idlers and unemployed people. My mother knew a lot, suspected some things but not all. According to family rumors—which, like all family rumors, must be taken with a grain of salt—during the last three years of those four Nazi school years, I spent less than half the time in school. Yes, those were my school days, but I didn’t spend all my days in school, so that in trying to describe those four years, I can only make an “also” tale out of them, for the fact is that I “also” went to school.

3

Forty-eight years going back, from 1981 to 1933, and four years going forward, from 1933 to 1937: in this leapfrog procession some things must fall by the wayside. The man of sixty-three smiles down upon the boy of fifteen, but the boy of fifteen does not smile up at the man of sixty-three, and it is here, in this unilateral perspective which is not matched by a corresponding perspective on the part of the fifteen-year-old, that we must expect to find a source of error.

On January 30, 1933, the fifteen-year-old is ill in bed with a severe case of flu, victim of an epidemic that I consider to have been given insufficient consideration in analyses of Hitler’s seizure of power. It is a fact that public life was partially paralyzed, many schools and government offices were closed, at least locally and regionally. One of my classmates brought me the news as I lay sick in bed. In those days we still had no radio, and homemade efforts to build crystal sets hadn’t yet begun. We didn’t acquire the mini-edition of the so-called people’s radio until shortly before the outbreak of war, our reluctance almost outweighing the necessity. After a second move within two years, we were now living at 32 Maternus-Strasse, facing the dismal rear wall of what was then the engineering school. Nevertheless, we were not very far
from the Rhine, and from our corner bay window we could see the neo-Gothic, tri-gabled warehouse of the Rhenus Line, of which I painted innumerable water colors. Just around the corner was Römer Park, a little farther on, Hindenburg Park, where on fine days my mother could sit among the jobless or people who had been forced into early retirement.

I lay in bed and read—probably Jack London, whose works we borrowed in the book club edition from a friend, but it is also possible—oh raised eyebrows of the literary connoisseurs, how gladly I would smooth you down!—that I was
simultaneously
reading Trakl. The great tiled stove in our corner room had, for once, been lit, and from it, using a long paper spill, I took a light for my (forbidden) cigarette. My mother’s comment on the appointment of Hitler: “That’s war,” or maybe it was: “Hitler, that means war.”

The news of Hitler’s appointment came as no surprise. After Hindenburg’s “shameful betrayal” of Brüning (that’s what my father called it), after von Papen and Schleicher, Hindenburg was obviously capable of anything. That strange (to this day still somewhat obscure) affair known at the time as the “Eastern agricultural support scandal,” on which even our extremely reticent
Kölnische Volkszeitung
had reported, had deprived “the venerable old field marshal” of the last shred of what had been at best minimal credit—not politically, merely the shred of moral credit that people had been willing to attribute to his “Prussian integrity.”

My mother hated Hitler from the very beginning
(unfortunately she didn’t live to see his death); she dubbed him
Rövekopp
, “turnip head,” an allusion to the traditional St. Martin’s torches roughly carved from sugar beets and leaving, wherever possible, something resembling a moustache. Hitler—he was beyond discussion, and his long-time delegate in Cologne, a certain Dr. Robert Ley (try to imagine a character like Ley later in control of the entire German work force!), had done little to render Hitler and his Nazis worthy of discussion: they were nothing more than the “howling void,” without the human dimension that might have merited the term “rabble.” The Nazis were “not even rabble.” My mother’s war theory was hotly denied: the fellow wouldn’t even last long enough to be able to start a war. (As the world discovered to its consternation, he lasted long enough.)

I forget how long I had to stay in bed. The flu epidemic gave a modest boost to the liquor stores; cheap rum was in demand—in the form of grog, it was said to offer cure or prevention. We bought moderate quantities of it in a shop at the corner of Bonner-Strasse and Darmstädter-Strasse: the proprietor’s name was, I believe, Volk, and he had a son with flaming red hair who went to our school. I forget whether the burning of the Reichstag building, the “excellent timing” of which was noted by many, occurred while I was still sick or during term time or even during vacation (at some point there must have also been the Carnival!). In any event, before the March election I was going back to school; and only after that election—one so easily forgets that the results just barely provided a majority for a coalition between Nazis and
the German National Party—in April or May the first Hitler Youth shirts appeared in school, and one or two Storm Trooper uniforms in the higher grades.

There was also—I forget exactly when—a book-burning, an embarrassing, in fact a pathetic, exercise. The Nazi flag was hoisted, but I can’t remember anyone making a speech, hurling anathemas at title after title, author after author, tossing books into the fire. The books must have been placed there, a little heap, in advance, and since that book-burning I know that books don’t burn well. Someone must have forgotten to pour gasoline over them. I also find it hard to imagine that the modest library of our high school (which, although called the Kaiser Wilhelm State High School, was extremely Catholic) could have contained much “decadent” literature. The background of virtually the whole student body was lower middle class with few “excrescences” either upward or downward. It’s possible that one or other of the teachers privately sacrificed his Remarque or his Tucholsky to feed the funeral pyre. Be that as it may, none of these authors was listed in the curriculum; and after the tangible, the visible and audible, barbarities occurring between January 30 and the Reichstag fire—increasingly so between Reichstag fire and March election—this act of
symbolic
barbarity was perhaps not all that impressive.

The nonsymbolic purges were visible and audible, were tangible: Social Democrats disappeared (Sollmann, Görlinger, and others), as did politicians of the Catholic Center Party and, needless to say, Communists, and it was no secret that the Storm Troopers were establishing
concentration camps in the fortifications around Cologne’s Militär-Ring: expressions such as “protective custody” and “shot while trying to escape” became familiar; even some of my father’s friends were caught up in the process, men who later, on their return, maintained a stony silence. Paralysis spread, an atmosphere of fear prevailed, and the Nazi hordes, brutal and bloodthirsty, saw to it that the terror was not confined to rumors.

The streets left and right off Severin-Strasse, along which I walked to school (Alteburger-Strasse, Silvan-Strasse, Severin-Strasse, Perlen-Graben), constituted a far from “politically reliable” area. There were days, after the Reichstag fire and before the March election, when the area was entirely or partially cordoned off, the least reliable streets being those to the right of Severin-Strasse. Who was that woman screaming on Achter-Gässchen, who that man screaming on Landsberg-Strasse, who on Rosen-Strasse? Perhaps it is not in school but on our way to school that we learn lessons for life. It was obvious that along those streets, people were being beaten up, dragged out of their front doors. After the Reichstag fire and the March election it grew quieter, but it was still far from quiet. One must not forget that, after the November 1932 election, the Communist Party had become the second-strongest party in a city as Catholic as Cologne (Center Party 27.3 percent; Communists 24.5 percent; Nazis 20.5 percent; Social Democrats 17.5 percent), a state of affairs somewhat similar to that in Italy today. Despite its Catholic reputation and all the clerical machinations, Cologne was and still is a progressive city. Then
in March 1933 the Nazis obtained 33.3 percent, the Center Party still as much as 25.6 percent, and the Communists and Social Democrats, despite terror and purges, 18.1 and 14.9 percent: the “unreliable area” was still far from being “normalized,” there was plenty of work left for the Storm Troopers to do. (There would be a lot more to say about Cologne, but in my opinion, after the Cathedral Jubilee, Pope John Paul II’s visit, and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne has had ample publicity. Moreover, the Rhine flows on.)

It must have been about this time that the father of one of my older sister’s school friends, a quiet, reliable police officer with a Center Party background, took early retirement because he could no longer stand the sight of the “bloody towels” in his precinct: those, too, were not symbolic signs; the “bloody towels” were related to the screams I had heard from Achter-Gässchen, from Rosen-Strasse and Landsberg-Strasse.

By now it will have become increasingly evident to the reader that, as far as school is concerned, this is no more than an “also” story, that, although it deals with my school days, it doesn’t deal only with the days I spent in school. Although school was far from being a minor issue, it was not a primary issue during those four years.

• • •

A clean-up operation of a quite different kind brought considerable changes in my daily walk to school: the crackdown on the cigarette smugglers who stood at street
corners or in doorways whispering offers of “Dutch merchandise.” The cheapest legally acquired cigarette cost at least two and a half pfennigs, a feeble object, half as firmly packed as a Juno or an Eckstein, which cost three and a third pfennigs each. The Dutch product was pale gold, firm, a third plumper than an Eckstein, and was offered at one to one and a half pfennigs each. Naturally that was very enticing at a time when Brüning’s penny-pinching policies were still having their effect, so my brother Alois would sometimes give me money to buy him illegal Dutch cigarettes. Between Rosen-Strasse and Perlen-Graben, the focal point being somewhere around Landsberg-Strasse, with scattered outposts extending as far as the Eulen-Garten (the smugglers’ headquarters that were located close to our school on Heinrich-Strasse), I had to be both wary and alert, had to appear both confidence-inspiring and eager to buy. Apparently I succeeded, and that early training or schooling (which, as I say, cannot be acquired in school but only on the way to school), that education, if you prefer, turned out to be very useful to me in later years in many of the black markets of Europe. (I have dealt elsewhere with the fact that a dedicated feeling for legality does not form part of the Cologne attitude to life.)

So the Dutch merchandise would reach home safe and sound, and I would receive my cut in the form of fragrant cigarettes. On one occasion, I must admit, I was diddled: the neat little package with its Dutch revenue stamp contained, instead of twenty-five cigarettes, approximately twenty-five grams of … potato peelings! To this
day I fail to understand
why
potato peelings, and not, say, sawdust or woodshavings. They had been carefully weighed, evenly distributed, packed in foil. (Contempt for wax seals, lead seals, bailiff’s seals, revenue stamps—also a kind of seal—ingrained in me by my mother, turned out, after the war, to be my undoing when I broke the seal of an electricity meter and tampered with it—unfortunately in a detectable manner. Bailiff’s seals were promptly removed as a matter of course.) I was enjoined by my brother in future to check the goods and was still puzzling over
how
, since everything had to be done so quickly, when suddenly the entire smuggling operation was smashed. Certain streets were virtually under siege, and I recall at least one armored vehicle. Police and customs agents—in the end without shooting—cleared out the whole smugglers’ nest: there were rumors of millions of confiscated cigarettes and numerous arrests.