My Name Was Five
Page 35
“100 Marks,” Helga said before I could.
“Because one could put 100 Marks into a savings account and still get 127.63 Marks in 5 years,” I quickly added.
“Precisely,” said Mrs. Dietrich, “and that brings us to the second part of our lesson.”
“The reverse process of using the interest rate to turn future Marks into a smaller, but equivalent amount of present Marks is called discounting,” Mrs. Dietrich said, and she put this second formula on the board, along with our second example:
Discounting
Example:
Given an annual interest rate of 5%, 127.63 Marks to be received in 5 years are worth what now?
“However,” said Mrs. Dietrich, “the pure mathematics of interest, although fun, should not blind us to the most important lesson to be learned here today: Like the earning of profit, the charging of interest is a deeply immoral act! Great men–from Moses to Aristotle, from Mohammed to Thomas Aquinas–have recognized this fact over the centuries. So have, more recently, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. The taking of interest, they have pointed out, occurs routinely under Capitalism; it is but another way by which the bourgeoisie exploits the proletariat. But soon, under Communism, where all resources will be owned jointly by the working class, the very concept of interest will disappear.”
I didn’t know at the time how much trouble Comrade Dietrich’s little lesson in morality would bring me in years to come. And that some people would actually end up in concentration camps for their unwillingness to accept the Marxian view of interest!
-----
Ever since Mr. Kalitz had had that wonderful fight with Uncle Herbert in the school auditorium, I had taken to hanging out with him at the grocery store after school. I liked talking with him a lot better than taking the piano lessons long ago, in which I had invariably failed. The day of Mrs. Dietrich’s lesson on interest was no exception. Having heard my story, Mr. Kalitz said he had just what I needed. He sent me to the attic to retrieve his old college textbooks from a big green box and he quickly selected two of them: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of his System, 1898, and, by the same author, Capital and Interest, 4th edition, 1921.
“Now there you’ll meet some common sense,” Mr. Kalitz said.
“Böhm-Bawerk was a famous Austrian economist and once even Austria’s Minister of Finance,” he explained. “He’ll tell you what Karl Marx and your Uncle Herbert have in common. They’re both idiots.”
I spent a fascinating afternoon with Mr. Kalitz. He said he had majored in economics at Berlin’s Humboldt University in the 1920s and he had just loved Böhm-Bawerk. With respect to interest, he said, it arose in all societies and for a good reason: It was not a phenomenon of the class struggle between the haves and the have-nots, as Marxists claimed, but a phenomenon of barter across time. I should read the books and write an essay on the subject for Mrs. Dietrich, he said.
I did and got us both into big trouble. But I kept my essay to this day. It went like this:
Thoughts About Interest
By Hans Keller
The phenomenon of interest occurs in all societies and reflects two facts unrelated to the class struggle and very much related to the inevitable passage of time.
First, there is time preference: Given the uncertainties of life–people are mortal and never know when they will die–consumers everywhere, when given the choice, prefer goods now to identical goods in the future. Therefore, people can be persuaded to save current income, lend it to someone else, and, by this very act, unnecessarily forgo current consumption goods, only by the promise of a future return that exceeds their current sacrifice. In short, impatient, mortal consumers, who hate abstinence and waiting, may, nevertheless, lend out part of the money they now have–as long as they get it back in the future with a sufficiently large interest premium that enables them to acquire an amount of future consumption goods in excess of the amount currently sacrificed.
Second, there is time productivity: It is a technical fact that producers everywhere can permanently raise output by employing indirect, time-consuming methods of production. If they cut the production of consumption goods now, producers can use the resources so released to make capital goods, and they can then employ these capital goods to produce a permanently larger flow of consumption goods in the future. This technological fact enables producers to pay the interest premium that impatient consumers demand before they are willing to give up their claim on current consumption goods.
The famous Austrian economist Böhm-Bawerk told a story like this:
Think of Robinson Crusoe, all alone on his apparently deserted island, surrounded by nothing but natural resources and possessing no capital resources of any kind. With his bare hands, and perhaps a stick, he might catch 8 small fishes a day. Over time, his daily food production might equal 8…8…8…, and so on, forever. Now let him go hungry for a day and sacrifice the 8 fishes he might have caught. He could use his time to make a net and build a canoe. Starting the next day, being the new and proud owner of capital, he could paddle to the middle of a lake or venture onto the ocean on a calm day and catch 16 fishes a day or 8 in half the time. And he could spend the rest of the time repairing net and canoe, making them last forever. So food production could equal the series 8…0…16…16…16… and so on, forever. The 8-fish sacrifice on a single day would have yielded an 8-fish increase in output on all future days, a return of 100% interest per day!
Shortly after I had handed my essay to Mrs. Dietrich, for the kind of extra credit she always solicited, all hell broke out. I was summoned to the principal’s office and Miss Mahler said my essay was an insult to the new Marxist society we were building. She demanded I hand in my Böhm-Bawerk books.
“They should be burned,” she said and she also wanted to know where I had gotten such trash. I didn’t tell her and she said that I had seriously compromised my chances of going to high school.
Unfortunately, Mr. Kalitz’s name was found in the books and my Uncle Herbert, the mayor, had no trouble making the connection. The People’s Police searched Mr. Kalitz’s house. He wasn’t home at the time, but they knew how to get in. From the looks of it, they busted open the door with their boots; the wood was ripped from all the hinges. And later that week, Mr. Kalitz had to bring his ID papers to the Mayor’s office. Uncle Herbert put a red rubber stamp on the front page.
“Enemy of the People,” it said.
-----
“So it’s starting again; it’s starting all over again,” my father said. “They are burning books, and the Gestapo has been replaced by the People’s Police.”
My parents told me to stay away from Mr. Kalitz, but I lied when I said I would. He was just too interesting and we went back a long time, all the way to the days of the war when we had listened to the BBC. But my father said he would help me with my history essay for Mr. Hirsch; so I let him.
Mr. Hirsch had said that Marxism was now conquering the world because of the historic inevitability thing, Capitalism collapsing from its inner tensions and Communism taking its place. He had put a long list of countries on the blackboard to prove his point: Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany–all these, he said, were ready to embrace the New Society. And others would surely follow: Western Germany, Italy, France–everywhere Communist Parties were flourishing. He wanted us to explain these trends.
But I shouldn’t have asked my father. My father said it was a psychological thing. The Communists were focusing their attention on the poorest workers everywhere. And they explained the harshness of their lives not by natural circumstances–such as lack of education, lack of training, lack of health, lack of fertile land and fancy tools to work with. Nor did they explain it by the workers’ personal failings–such as their own stupidity or laziness, perhaps. They explained the workers’ miserable lives rather by their exploitation by greedy capitalists. As the Communists put it, the workers are poor not because they produce so lit
tle, but because they produce a lot and the bourgeois capitalists routinely steal most of their output!
“Now,” my father said, and one could just hear the old SPD man coming back to life, “contrast this analysis with Marx’s vague vision of a better future: Although he provides no detail, he holds before the poor workers the promise of a classless society (no more thieving capitalists), a society run by joyful workers (no more being bossed around by harsh commands or coaxed to work by some minimum wage). Marx promises a society where workers–the proud owners of all resources–produce a lot and gladly share their riches (no more hunger and misery).”
“That’s a powerful story,” my father concluded. “How could one not join the Communist Party?”
He said so mockingly and he sounded just like Mr. Kalitz. That’s when my mother joined in, which was a first on matters like this and, therefore, a big surprise.
“Do you know what a Rorschach test is?” she asked.
And when I said no, she told me about the inkblots and different people interpreting them differently and psychologists analyzing these interpretations in order to look into people’s minds.
“Well,” she said, “when Marxists paint that vague picture of an ideal future, they are handing people a Rorschach inkblot into which they can then project their fondest dreams. And when they compare these dreams with all-too-real defects of actual societies, how can they possibly reject that future?”
“But no,” she said, “you can’t write any of this.”
And I didn’t, but my reservations about the New Society had just grown stronger still.
-----
By the spring of 1947, I had a run-in with Mr. Wolf as well. He had dictated a few sentences in German about “Communism–the final stage of historical evolution” and he wanted us to translate all that into Russian.
“But Mr. Hirsch has taught us never to be fooled by outward appearances,” I said, being the all-too-smart little troublemaker I had become. “We are always supposed to look for inner tensions that foreshadow further developments. Therefore, shouldn’t we also look for inner tensions in Communism? From such tensions, perhaps, we could predict the disappearance of Communism and its replacement by something else.”
“Just as we can predict the demise of the tadpole and the emergence of the frog,” I added.
Mr. Wolf was not happy. He said I was disrupting the class and that there were no inner tensions in Communism–by definition!
I should have let it go, but I didn’t.
“You can’t define away the truth,” I said–what a teenager I had become–and then I asked about all the farmers in Ziesar being hopping mad now that the land reform had expropriated them and had created the giant Ziesar Collective Farm, where nobody owned anything and everybody worked like a Marxian wage slave.
“Isn’t that a kind of inner tension?” I asked.
That really made Mr. Wolf angry! He said I was a known rabble-rouser and I would be dealt with in due course. Within days, I was assigned to work with the carpenter after school to drain my excess energy. The carpenter was putting up a giant portrait of Karl Marx, because our school had just been renamed from People’s School Ziesar to Karl Marx School Ziesar. In addition, I had to write an essay on the life of Karl Marx, to be handed in at the principal’s office within two weeks.
That’s why I had another consultation with Mr. Kalitz who, in my view at least, knew everything. He did not disappoint me.
-----
“Marx’s father was actually a prosperous lawyer,” Mr. Kalitz said. “He had refused to become a rabbi and thus broken a long family tradition. Karl loved him, they say, but hated his Dutch mother who would not support her son’s lifelong tendency to live off others. My God, for years, that guy lived off his parents, then his in-laws, and then his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Ironically, the Engels family owned textile factories in Germany and England, but Marx wasn’t bothered by taking all their exploitation money.”
I was taking notes furiously.
“Also, we should note that Marx led a wild student life,” Mr. Kalitz said, “carousing and drinking and engaging in fist fights and duels and sinking heavily into debt. I think that’s why he had to leave the university at Bonn and then Berlin, but, finally, he got a philosophy degree at Jena, a well-known diploma mill.”
That diploma mill part required some explanation, and I just loved it.
“Then what?” Mr. Kalitz asked himself. “Oh yeah, he was a newspaper editor for a while, which got him into trouble with the Prussian authorities. So he emigrated to France, Belgium, and England, where he settled down in the British Museum, reading and writing for years. He’s buried in London, too. Saw his grave once.”
“And one more thing,” Mr. Kalitz added. “They have told you, no doubt, about all the religious fervor that made the workers put out the Communist Manifesto of 1848? Well, in fact, it was not written by workers at all, but by Karl Marx and a tiny group of radical intellectuals, all under the age of 30 at the time and all of them the offspring of privilege, calling themselves the proletariat.”
“And here’s a joke for you,” Mr. Kalitz said. “When you’re 20 and not a Communist, you have no heart. When you’re 30 and still a Communist, you have no brain.”
I just loved that man!
“My God,” he added, “just look at what’s happening on Ziesar’s new collective farm! Do you think anybody, and I mean anybody, will ever again spend all weekend lovingly washing and waxing those new tractors or repairing and painting the barns? When they were privately owned, that’s exactly what happened. Now that nobody owns them, they’ll fall into disrepair in no time. Just watch and see!”
This time around, I used my head. I put none of this into my essay. Instead, I paraphrased an essay on the life of Karl Marx from a pamphlet at the House of German-Soviet Friendship. Miss Mahler was real happy and gave me a gold star.
-----
I should get to the letter I mentioned earlier. In June of 1947, just before graduation time, we received a letter from Aunt Martel and it shocked us all. She was working then for the tax department of West Berlin; that part was fine. But her friend Eva, now living in East Berlin, had a new job in Oranienburg and had told her that the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was back in business!
There were tens of thousands of prisoners, she had told her. Some of the new prisoners were German officers transferred from Western Allied camps, others were former Nazi officials. There were also Nazi collaborators, like film and theater directors and SS doctors. But many of the prisoners, and this was the shocking thing, were alleged anti-Communists, who had confessed under torture. Still others were alleged werewolves, who had been denounced by someone for “acts against the Soviet occupation forces.” In addition, and perhaps even more surprising, there were thousands of Russian inmates. They included former POWs who had been classified as Nazi collaborators, because they hadn’t fought to the death, and large numbers of regular soldiers who had contacted venereal diseases in Germany.
“There we go again,” my father said. “Now they do it in the name of Marx.”
“What are venereal diseases?” I asked.
My mother told me to ask my father and my father told me to ask my mother.
38. The Intelligentsia
[August 1947 – March 1948]
In the summer of 1947, the teachers of Ziesar’s Karl Marx School had a faculty meeting. There had been thirty graduates and, as was customary at the time, 10 percent of them were to be selected to go on to high school and then the university. The rest would spend four years in various apprenticeships, work for two more years as journeymen, and emerge, by age 20 or so, as Masters in their fields–as fully qualified bakers, blacksmiths, butchers, carpenters, electricians, farmers, plumbers, and the like. Temporarily, I was assigned to work with the village carpenter, but that faculty meeting would determine the rest of my life.
My parents wanted me to go on to high school–as the crow fli
es, the nearest one was 33 kilometers away in Burg near Magdeburg–but my chances of selection seemed slim. For one thing, only three of us could go; for another, the commandant had made it clear that children of workers and peasants were to be preferred. Would my father at least qualify as a worker?
Beyond that, I was convinced that many teachers hated me. I thought of Pastor Jahn, the new Geography teacher, and how often I had annoyed him till he was red in the face. I remembered asking him whether Hitler and Stalin had been appointed by God (Romans 13: There is no government authority except from God, and wherever governmental authority exists it has been instituted by God)…..asking him how Noah got all those animals to go into the ark…..asking him how to link up the “three gods,” Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with his ice-water-steam analogy…..and asking him whether we might examine the usefulness of prayer by finding out how many loved ones in our village had been prayed for or not at all and how many members of each group had survived the war….He had called me an “impudent brat” and “a rotten city kid,” and even “a Satanic child.” He had beaten me up when he could. Why would he vote for me now?
And I thought similarly of Newteacher Wolf, whom I had pounded with questions about the chain reaction evaporating the Pacific and our groundwater alike and then all of it raining right back, and, more recently, about Communism having inner tensions and, therefore, not being the last stage of history.
And then there was, of course, that flap about interest and the Böhm-Bawerk books, which had gotten me into trouble with Math teacher Mrs. Dietrich and principal Miss Mahler, and, last but not least, there was the hooliganism thing with Physics teacher Clausen, who had been furious with me for questioning that “1 meter per second per second” thing and had called me an “anti-social parasite” for helping to hang him out of the window. Things didn’t look good.