What's to Become of the Boy?: Or, Something to Do With Books

by Heinrich Böll

  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.)

  The decision to take me out of school was dropped, as the result of my own strenuous objections and those of my older brothers and sisters. Employment of any kind inexorably meant being organized, and that was a condition I had always avoided and intended to go on avoiding. I enjoyed studying but wasn’t that keen on school, started being bored for long periods of time, and might actually have dropped out if it hadn’t been for the Nazis. But I knew, and was fully aware of the fact: school, that school at any rate, was the best hiding place I could find, and so, strictly speaking, I have the Nazis to thank for my graduation. Perhaps that is why I wasn’t interested in the graduation ceremonies or in my certificate, submitting it unread when I later applied for a job as an apprentice.

  From then on, after having acquired “my lower school-leaving certificate,” I began to orchestrate the school for my own ends. Three more years to graduation, how many more years to war—perhaps less than three? And I was too much of a coward to risk becoming a conscientious objector. That much I knew: the mute, stony-faced men released from concentration camps, the idea of possible torture—no, I didn’t have the guts. To escape the war, no matter where, was simply beyond the realm of the imagination. (Not long ago we were asked by Frank G., aged thirty-seven, born in the last year but one of the war, why we hadn’t emigrated, and we found it hard to explain that such an idea was simply beyond the realm of our imagination: it was as if someone had asked why I hadn’t ordered a taxi to the moon. Of course we knew that people had emigrated: Jewish friends—didn’t I regularly read Der Stürmer in the display box on Severin-Strasse?—and even a man like Brüning, but us? Where to and in what capacity? We were, in a funny way, a Catholic family that happened to be against the Nazis; but all that is hindsight. At the time it was simply way beyond our thoughts. Later I did very briefly consider, and reject, a variation of emigration: desertion to a foreign army. You won’t be that welcome over there, I thought, so I deserted in the other direction—to my home.)

  That same year, 1934, all those who had believed that Hitler wouldn’t last long were refuted: June 30 swept all those hopes away, a summer day rife with rumors, tensions, and a strange, indefinable admixture of euphoria. Surely that couldn’t be true: that so many leading Nazis were criminals and even homosexuals? (That Röhm was one we knew, of course: the slogan “Wash your asses, Storm Troopers, Röhm’s coming!” had been appearing on the walls of buildings before and even after 1933.) When all was said and done, the openness with which dirty linen was now being washed in public was truly amazing. Perhaps it was a sign of weakness. Within a few hours we realized the obvious: it was a sign of strength, and at long last we knew the meaning of a Party purge.

  We still had no radio, and that day I was all over the place on my bike, for once (why “for once” will be explained—patience!) even in the center of town, at the H
eumarkt, the Neumarkt, the cathedral, the railway station. Something was in the air, people were talking in whispers and undertones, full of hope—until at last Hitler spoke and the “special editions” appeared on the streets. I bought one and when I got home took the little bundle of Alva cigarette cards out of my desk drawer, the series showing all the prominent Nazis. I sorted out all those who had been shot: it was a tidy little pile. The faces that remain in my memory are those of Heines and Röhm.

  That was—and we were aware of it—not merely the final seizure of power but also the ultimate test of power, the final unmasking of von Papen and Hindenburg. Klausener, Jung, and Schleicher were among the murdered, and apparently no one said a word, at least not audibly; no one said a word, nothing happened. It was the dawn of the eternity of Nazism. Did the middle classes, the Nationalists, know what was happening, the pass they had come to? I am afraid they still don’t know: one of the most ludicrous days in German history, the day of Potsdam, March 21, 1933, when Hindenburg handed Germany over to a gentleman in a tailcoat, must have blinded them all.

  That same year, right after June 30, according to a decree that had been made before June 30, the weekly National Youth Day was introduced; it didn’t become law—that, I believe, didn’t happen until 1939; it was merely decreed. Just try to imagine the situation: a state in which a character, a jerk, like Baldur von Schirach, was in control of the entire youth of the country! We knew, although meanwhile it appears to have been forgotten, that he was a poet: a German poet in control of German youth! From among his many poems there was one line we knew by heart, and we would hum and recite it sotto voce: “I was a leaf so free, searching for my tree.” (Must I at this point come to the aid of praiseworthy lyric interpretation and explain who the leaf so free was and who the tree? I will if you like!) Sometime before 1933, when the University of Cologne was still on Claudius-Strasse, only a minute away from us, Schirach had been beaten up by “leftist students” after a poetry reading. So it was this jerk of a Schirach who had complete control over German youth, and German parents allowed him to hold sway over their sons and daughters.

  Of the approximately two hundred boys at our school there were three who on National Youth Day were not exempted from classes to allow them to be “on duty.” Being “on duty” probably meant participating in some sort of paramilitary sports: I don’t know exactly, I never asked the other boys about it, not even those I did my homework with. We talked about movies and girls, not about politics, and when one of them tried to raise the subject I shut up. I was scared, whereas at home I could talk, even if one of them was present: surely no one would dare denounce our family. Today I sometimes think that some relatively high Nazi, who never revealed himself, must have “held his hand over our family.”

  So on Saturdays (Saturday being a regular school day) we three, Bollig, Koch, and myself, had to go to school and, under the supervision of a teacher, who obviously found it a bore and a nuisance (I suppose otherwise he would have had the day off), tidy up the school library. Every Saturday for three years we three tidied up that tiny little library housed in a room next to what used to be the caretaker’s quarters. Not one title, not one author, not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory. No, I certainly didn’t suffer, and I met with no difficulty whatever, not the slightest. I assume that after two Saturdays there was nothing left to tidy in what was from the start a tidy library; so we would smoke cigarettes (if we had any), drink school cocoa, go out for some ice cream, kill time. Usually the teacher in charge left us to our own devices from ten o’clock on and went home or to a café, putting Mirgeler the caretaker in charge, who in turn let us off by eleven o’clock at the latest.

  Mirgeler was a kind, gentle person, one of the few disabled veterans who didn’t talk about his war experiences. One could feel he was on our side, not explicitly—that would have been too dangerous and we didn’t expect it of him. And of course one could always be sick on Saturday or get sick. With Mirgeler and several of the teachers, there was no need for explicitness, the expression on their faces was enough. For some of the teachers, as well as for Mirgeler, we were, at least after the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, morituri, and that softened many a severe reprimand or punishment that would have been deserved in “normal times.” If I were to say that, with the introduction of Schirach’s National Youth Day, the pressure was increased, it would be an exaggeration. From time to time—not often, later not at all—we were summoned to the principal, one by one, and he would try to persuade us to join the Hitler Youth or, later, the Storm Troopers. He did not really press us, it was more of a plea, alluding, not very convincingly, to its being “for our own good.” Obviously he was running into trouble, we three were lousing up the statistics. Quite clearly he didn’t feel at ease on these occasions, and his pleas were in vain: we remained adamant all the time we were in school. I have always wondered why no personal friendships developed among us three. They didn’t. Moreover, one or another of us was always absent those Saturdays, sometimes two of us or even all three. Eventually there was hardly so much as a pretense of checking up on that strange “library work.”

  The pleas in the principal’s arguments were more dangerous than threats would have been, for—and I’m sorry to say he probably never discovered this—I rather liked him. He was gentler than he sometimes pretended or had to pretend to be, the type of person known as strict but fair, yet easily moved to tears: a good history teacher, and, besides Latin and math, history was one of my favorite and deliberately orchestrated courses. It is he whom I have to thank for my early insight into the nature of colonialism as exemplified by the Roman Empire; insight into the parasitic bribed-vote existence of the rabble of ancient Rome. He was probably what today I would call “blinded” by Hindenburg, a fatal attribute of many decent Germans: patriotic, not nationalistic, certainly not Nazist, but very much the veteran, fond of telling us about tight situations in trench warfare where as a young officer he had been wounded in the head; yet also Catholic, a Rhinelander with a gentle “von” to his name.

  When the first former student of our school was killed in the Spanish Civil War, a member of the Condor Legion who was shot down—possibly over Guernica—he organized a memorial service and, with tears in his eyes, made a moving speech. I didn’t feel comfortable at this service, didn’t want to share his emotion although I had known the dead man, who had been a classmate of my brother’s. Today I interpret that vague feeling of discomfort as follows: school prepared us not for life but for death. Year after year, German high school graduates were being prepared for death. Was dying for the Fatherland the supreme merit? To put it flippantly: at that service one might have gained the impression that our principal was sad at not having been killed at Langemarck. I know that sounds harsh, but I am not being unfair to a dead man: in the final analysis, the fatal role played by those highly educated, unquestionably decent German high school teachers led to Stalingrad and made Auschwitz possible: that Hindenburg blindness. I can’t swear to the degree of truth contained in the following supposition: it has been said that the principal was told by high, if not the highest, clerics to join the Nazi Party, “in order to salvage what could be salvaged.” (As we have since discovered, there was nothing to be salvaged; and I also know that it is easy enough to say that with hindsight.) We discussed the problem with our friends, found the idea not dishonorable but foolish. However, we didn’t withdraw our friendship from those who were persuaded by the argument.

  Incidentally, even our own family didn’t withstand the pressure: when the Kölnische Volkszeitung and the Rhein-Mainische Zeitung ceased publication, we too subscribed to the Westdeutsche Beobachter and got mad at the ingenious articles by the Catholic author Heinz Steguweit. (“A swastika, a lovely sight, before which kneels Heinz Steguweit.”) Following the insistent “advice” of our block warden, we too acquired a swastika flag after 1936, albeit a small one: on days when displaying the flag was compulsory, sentiments could also be ded
uced from the size of the flags.

  By that time my father, insofar as he received any orders at all, had almost ceased working for churches and monasteries; almost all his orders were now government ones. And when those orders became even scarcer, he was urged to have at least one member of his family join a Nazi organization. A kind of family council was called, and my brother Alois became the victim of its decision, since, after some miserable receivership proceedings, he was officially the owner of the business. He was elected by the family to join the Storm Troopers. (To the end of his days he bore a grudge against us for this, and he was right: we should at least have drawn lots.) Of all the members of our family, he was the worst suited for that mimicry: the person least suited for a uniform I have ever known, and he suffered, he really suffered from those mob parades and route marches. I don’t know how often he actually took part in those route marches—certainly not more than three times. Nor do I remember how often I went to see his platoon leader, a very recently converted former Communist who lived in a tiny attic above Tappert’s drugstore at the corner of Bonner-Strasse and Roland-Strasse. There, on behalf of my brother, I would bribe that character—whom I remember as being depraved but not unfriendly—with a pack of ten R6 cigarettes, available in those days in nice-looking, flat, red packs, positively luxurious, to list my permanently absent brother as present. He did so, and among our flippant variations of the Rosary decades we included the words: “Thou who hast joined the Storm Troopers for our sakes.” And the “Full is Her right hand of gifts” was changed to: “Full is thy right hand of R6’s.”