My Name Was Five
Page 36
What I didn’t know was that my mother had been talking to Aunt Liesel behind my back and that Uncle Herbert, the new SED mayor, had the final say in the selection process. So one day, as I was checking out his ever-growing collection of books, he came over from the Town Hall and told me that Helga Vogt and I would be among those going to high school in the fall. I was flabbergasted.
“Your rank in class couldn’t have been topped,” he said.
He must have seen the look of amazement on my face.
“It takes worker or peasant blood,” I said.
“Or it takes pull,” he grinned, “and I have a lot of that.”
I was still staring in disbelief.
“You saved my life that night,” he said, quite unexpectedly.
Considering the way I did it, putting him in the latrine, it was mighty decent of him to think so.
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Later that summer, the whole village population got new ID booklets, each complete with a photograph and a fingerprint. We were supposed to carry them at all times, but they were good only for a 10 kilometer radius from home. Anyone who wanted to venture out farther, in order to visit an aunt in Brandenburg, perhaps, had to get a special permit from the People’s Police and also had to register upon arrival at the destination. Helga and I, therefore, got a special stamp on page 3, authorizing us to travel back and forth by train between Ziesar and Burg. We also got a rubber stamp on the front page, which classified us as “Intelligentsia.” Other people were classified as either “Workers” or “Peasants.” That’s how I discovered that my father was a worker after all.
“So the classless society still has classes,” he said to my mother. “I can count three of them.”
“Hush,” my mother said, “don’t get into any trouble now.”
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And thus, one morning at 6 A.M., enveloped in a cloud of black smoke, Helga and I rode off in the Iron Horse for the trip to Burg. I made sure to sit next to her, and we compared the provisions our mothers had managed to put together for us. My rucksack was filled with two jars of string beans, and my mother had packed a lot of potatoes around them. I also had two loaves of bread and a jar of red currant jam, but they were crammed into my leather satchel, along with Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and a brand-new text, published by a Berlin/Leipzig Workers’ Cooperative and entitled Textbook of Physics for High Schools, Part I, containing 309 illustrations. Helga had turnips and carrots and a big bundle of Suppengrün [soup greens], a common item then found in grocery stores, consisting of a bunch of vegetable stalks–celery, kohlrabi, parsley, red beets, and such–that were held together with a rubber band and were said to be perfect ingredients for a delicious soup. She also had a loaf of soggy rye bread, a hundred or so sheets of piano music, and our old Russian book. I suggested we have our meals together and benefit from the variety. I figured she knew that I wasn’t really thinking of food; and she didn’t say no. Then I took her Russian book and read the first page aloud.
“I love the Russian language, the language of our great neighbor to the east,” it said.
The Russian soldiers in our compartment laughed, just as the commandant had when I tried the sentence on him some time ago.
At the railroad station in Burg, we could still read the slogans the Chain Hounds had painted. They had painted them in white, but someone had carefully covered each letter with tar. We could read the messages just as well in black.
WHEELS MUST ROLL FOR VICTORY, one sentence said.
THE FÜHRER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, said another.
RIFLES TO THE PEOPLE, said the third.
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My new Monday-through-Friday home was a room in the Fischers’ second-floor apartment, located on a little side street not very far from my new school. Just as the rest of the apartment, my room was super clean. It had light, newly polished oak floors and light birch wood furniture to match: a twin bed with a single blanket, a desk, a wash basin with an oval mirror, and a water pitcher.
“Worthy of a monk,” I thought, and that’s when I noted the picture of Wartburg Castle hanging on the wall, the place where Martin Luther translated the Bible and threw an ink bottle at the devil. It seemed to be everywhere.
There were two windows in my room, without curtains, shades or screens, looking down onto the cobblestone street. The sun was shining when I first got there, and the room looked bright, friendly, and peaceful. Across the street was a bottling company which I was to visit often during my high school years; they spent all day filling heavy glass bottles with my favorite green woodruff drink. But I didn’t know that at first. What I did see was the slogan on their white-washed wall, carefully painted over, but legible, nevertheless.
NATIONAL SOCIALIST ORDER OR BOLSHEVIK CHAOS, it said.
Actually, there was someone else destined to live in my room, but I didn’t learn about that till three months later when Mr. Fischer came home from his tour.
Mrs. Fischer loved all the food I had brought and showed me pictures of her husband. He was a huge man, very much like Mr. Albrecht, but he was made of muscles instead of fat. I could tell because he was almost naked in all the pictures. Believe it or not, he was wrestling with a circus bear and doing all kinds of amazing stunts!
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The Hans and Sophie Scholl High School, a large building made of dark red bricks, looked just like my school in Berlin. Even my classroom was identical, except that a picture of Ernst Thälmann had replaced that of Frederick the Great. I had never heard of the man, but that omission was soon remedied in our Modern History class. Ernst Thälmann, we learned, was a famous Communist, born in Hamburg in 1886. As a young man, he joined the Transport Workers’ Union and the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany]. Later, during the Weimar Republic, he became the leader of the newly formed KPD [Communist Party of Germany], a member of the Reichstag, and even the Party’s presidential candidate in 1932, when he garnered 13.2 percent of the vote as compared to Hitler’s 30.1 percent. In 1933, he was dragged to Gestapo headquarters at Berlin’s Prinz Albrecht Strasse and terribly tortured. In the end, he was held in solitary confinement at the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed in 1944.
Dr. Hertling, our History teacher, also explained the name of our school. Hans and Sophie Scholl had been university students and members of a secret anti-Hitler group, called the White Rose. In February 1943, following student demonstrations against Hitler in Munich, they were arrested and instantly beheaded. But Dr. Hertling didn’t usually tell such gruesome stories. In fact, he was a sweet old man with white hair, who taught not only History, but also German, English, Latin, and Geography. Being Head Teacher, he also graded us on Behavior, Cooperativeness, Industry, and Penmanship.
We had only three other teachers, despite the fact that we spent 3 hours each per week on 13 subjects. In addition to Dr. Hertling, we had Dr. Kahlenberg (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics), Dr. Schablin (Art and Music), and Newteacher Mr. Klaus (Russian and Sports).
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Dr. Hertling, I soon discovered, was not only kind, but also incredibly smart. He certainly deserved the “intelligentsia” label. Consider how he taught the subject of Geography.
“In your schooling so far,” he said, “you have all studied Geography with the help of maps drawn on two-dimensional pieces of paper. That was good enough for learning the names and locations of all the countries of the world and of their major cities and rivers and mountain ranges and such. But, as you well know, the earth is not a flat plane. It is a globe, and this fact requires us to rethink much of what you have learned so far.”
Then Dr. Hertling placed a large globe on the table and, turning to the blackboard, seemed to turn into a teacher of math.
“You are all familiar with the facts,” he said, “that the sum of angles in a right triangle comes to 180 degrees and that all kinds of computations about specific angles within such a triangle, and about the lengths of specific sides of such a triangle, can be made with the hel
p of certain trigonometry rules about sines and cosines and such.”
As a reminder, he wrote this on the board as he spoke.
Concerning a right triangle on a plane:
1) Choose any acute angle (i.e., any angle of less than 90 degrees) in such a triangle. Then the ratio of the length of the side opposite to this acute angle to the length of the hypotenuse is called the sine.
2) Choose any acute angle (i.e., any angle of less than 90 degrees) in such a triangle. Then the ratio of the length of the side adjacent to this acute angle to the length of the hypotenuse is called the cosine.
“Well, guess what?” Dr. Hertling continued, as he turned around to face his globe and us at the same time. “Once you leave behind the blackboard-like plane and turn to the more realistic globe, all those rules change!”
“Once you consider spherical triangles, such as triangles drawn on this globe, for instance,” he said, “all of their sides are curves rather than straight lines, and the sum of angles in such triangles can lie anywhere between a minimum of 180 degrees and a maximum of 540 degrees!” That certainly was a surprise, at least to me!
“And the difference between the sum of the angles of a spherical triangle and the sum of the angles of a plane triangle is called spherical excess,” Dr. Hertling added.
I was amazed. That day, we reviewed all sorts of rules for sines and cosines in triangles drawn on a plane and learned about new and different rules, called Napier’s Rules, which applied to sines and cosines in triangles found on a globe.
“John Napier,” Dr. Hertling said, “was a Scottish mathematician, who lived from 1550 to 1617. He invented logarithms as well as the rules of spherical trigonometry, which we shall apply now to the globe called Earth.”
And so we did, after Dr. Hertling put this graph on the board:
“Consider Chicago and Rome,” he said. “They are located on a globe with a radius of 6,370 kilometers. Both cities lie on the same latitude of 41.87 degrees north of the equator. Their longitudes differ by a = 100.1 degrees. Now focus on the shaded spherical triangle that is formed by the longitude lines going through Chicago and Rome, respectively, and the latitude line between the two. Notice how much we already know about this triangle:
1) We know that alpha = 100.1 degrees, the difference between the two longitudes.
2) We know that beta = 90 degrees; it is, after all, the angle between Chicago’s longitude line (pointing due North towards the North Pole at N) and its latitude line (pointing due East towards Rome).
3) We know that gamma = 90 degrees; it is the angle between Rome’s longitude line (pointing due North towards the North Pole at N) and its latitude line (pointing due West towards Chicago).
4) We also know the distance between Rome and the North Pole (and the identical distance between Chicago and the North Pole); it is 90 degrees (the North Pole to Equator angle) minus the Rome/Chicago latitude of 41.87 degrees. Thus it is 48.13 degrees.
And here are some questions:
1) What is the distance between the two cities, if one travels along their common line of latitude?
2) What is the shortest distance between the two cities along the grand circle going through point X?
3) What is the take-off course flown by an airplane that wants to fly the grand circle to Chicago?
4) Where on this grand circle will the airplane reach the northernmost point?”
Using Napier’s Rules, we found the answers in no time:
a) a = 8,287 km
b) b = 7,745 km
c) c = 308.55 degrees, or Northwest, if we call East 90 degrees, South 180 degrees, West 270 degrees, and North 360 degrees
d) d = at point X, at latitude 54.39 degrees north of the equator, comparable to the latitude of the Baltic seaport of Kiel
Before our first month was up, Dr. Hertling helped us compute dozens of similar problems. One involved a trip in the southern hemisphere, between Cape Town and Sydney, both of them located on the same 33.9 degrees of latitude south of the equator, but separated by 8.8483 degrees of longitude. Other problems involved Berlin (latitude 52.41° north; longitude 13.11° east), Hong Kong (latitude 22.30° north; longitude 114.17° east); Moscow (latitude 55.76° north; longitude 37.57° east); New York (latitude 40.76° north; longitude 73.97° west), Paris (latitude 48.84° north; longitude 2.34° east); Stockholm (latitude 59.34° north; longitude 18.06° east); and Vienna (latitude 48.23° north; longitude 16.34° east).
I figured that an airplane flying the grand circle between Hong Kong and Paris would fly a distance of 9,628 kilometers and would, in the absence of wind, need a northwesterly take-off heading of 322.26 degrees, while landing on a southwesterly heading of 239.35 degrees. And I kept dreaming of being a pilot one day.
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Dr. Kahlenberg’s Physics class was equally fascinating. Once again, I figured right away that he was very, very smart; not because of the many subjects he taught, but because of the way he taught them. Our new textbook was filled with pictures of Russian geniuses who had invented and discovered everything, from the microscope to the phonograph and steam engine, from electromagnetism to Jovian moons and the frequencies of sound. But Dr. Kahlenberg kept telling us about the stupid capitalists who had attributed these feats to men like Jansen, Edison and Watt, or even Maxwell, Galileo, and Hertz. But he always had a twinkle in his eye.
“But one thing is true,” he said, just in case someone had missed that twinkle, “the first successful transmission of information via electric waves occurred in 1895 and was made by the Russian physicist Alexander Popov. His Italian colleague, Guglielmo Marconi, repeated the experiment two years later and over a longer distance.”
Dr. Kahlenberg’s teaching of astronomy was even more intriguing. He called it Outer Space Science and his teaching also involved a large globe, but this one was all black and was called the celestial sphere. We were to imagine us earthlings near the very center of this globe, at some point of observation, called X, with the zenith, Z, directly above us and the nadir, Z’, directly below us, diametrically opposite the zenith. By projecting the earth axis onto point P, the position of Polaris, also known as the North Star (and always sitting at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper), we were to imagine the World Axis, PP’. And, at a right angle to that axis, we were to picture the Heavenly Equator (on which the three prominent stars of Orion were sitting).
“The celestial sphere rotates around the world axis,” Dr. Kahlenberg said after he had finished painting the picture of it all on the blackboard.
Before long, we learned about the paths of various celestial objects, their culmination (“the highest point they reach above an observer’s horizon”), their declination (“the angular distance to the object, measured north or south from the heavenly equator”), their eccentricity (“the deviation of the object’s path from a perfect circle”), and so much more. In the end, we knew about star days and sun days (“the time between two successive culminations”) and even the computation of Central European Time!
“When and where does the sun rise and set in Berlin on October 25?” was one of my homework assignments.
“It rises at 6:54:37 Central European Time in a southeasterly direction of 109.95 degrees. It sets at 16:46:37 CET in a southwesterly direction of 250.05 degrees,” was my answer.
Helga had a different assignment: “On which days of the year does the sun rise in Göttingen in a direction of 111.66 degrees and at what times does it rise?”
We figured out the answers together: “The days were February 2 and October 29. The respective times were 7:43:32 CET and 7:13:2 CET.”
Then we went to the movies. Astronomy and movies went together perfectly, for the movies were shown in the planetarium, and we could look through the telescope afterwards. We loved the fairy tale movies the Russians showed, and we loved to look at the moon. She let me hold her hand.
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But I had other extra-curricular activities as well. On the last day of November, the day
on which the United Nations voted to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews, Mr. Fischer appeared, having finished his circus tour, and he was delighted at having me for a “son.” On many a Saturday morning, before Helga and I took the train back to Ziesar, Mr. Fischer took me out to the forest to catch rabbits. Because guns were not allowed, he used a pink ferret as a substitute. When Mr. Fischer found a warren, and somehow he always did, he covered all of the exits with nets and sent in the ferret. Sometimes, we would get a dozen fat rabbits in ten minutes. The ferret always sucked their blood, but we ate a lot of rabbit meat. Unlike in later years, when I had rabbits as pets and struggled with the thought that animals, just like people, surely had souls–an idea that my Uncle Eddy vehemently denied–I didn’t feel any sympathy with their plight. Perhaps we had been too hungry too often, which made our sudden rabbit wealth seem like a special gift at Christmas time, not unlike the fatted geese we all used to eat way back in Berlin.
But there was one drawback. Mrs. Fischer made Mr. Fischer put the ferret in my room at night, and it ran back and forth a lot, making a racket with its claws on the bare floor. I often wondered whether it would suck my blood while I slept and I didn’t sleep well at all.
Mr. Fischer also brought home a lot of other things. He went on several trips to West Germany and crossed the Iron Curtain at night in a manner he wouldn’t discuss. Once–I remember the day in late January of 1948 because the radio was full of stories about Mohandas K. Gandhi having been killed by a Hindu–Mr. Fischer came back with mountains of cigarettes, coffee, and oranges. On another trip, he got dozens of bicycle inner tubes–an extremely rare and precious commodity at the time–and a suitcase full of herrings. I went to Burg’s Russian quarter to pick him up whenever he came back from one of these outings, which was strange considering how afraid everybody still was of the Russians, but it was the proper way to do things around there. Mr. Fischer couldn’t very well walk out of the front of the railroad station with all the German policemen milling about and showing off their newly acquired rifles and bayonets.