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

by Heinrich Böll

  Mainz: that broad-hipped Romanesque cathedral of red sandstone was more to my liking than Cologne Cathedral; even in Cologne I had felt greater affinity with the gray Romanesque churches. My father was a good guide through churches and museums. And for me, coming as I did from an almost completely un-Baroque city, Würzburg was both alien and pleasing: a different world, “occupied” not only by churches and palaces but also by Leonhard Frank’s Robber Band, which we boys had devoured. In Bamberg I was surprised by the coolness of the statue of my namesake to which I was really making a pilgrimage. The princely horseman, whose picture probably hung over the desk or bed of almost every young German, seemed cold to me, clever and competent—he inspired no affection in me. When I got home, I took down his picture from the wall and put it in a drawer. Devout Catholic though he was, he seemed to me—I couldn’t help it—“somehow Protestant,” and, after all, Catholic was what we wanted to be and to remain, in spite of all our derisive laughter and abuse. That was why the appearance, shortly before the end of 1936, of Leon Bloy’s Blood of the Poor hit us like a bombshell, a long way indeed from the Dostoievski bombshell, yet in its effect, similar to it. Add to this the pyrotechnics of Chesterton—a strange mixture, I know, into which German literature, even the banned and officially disgraced literature, didn’t enter. Buddenbrooks did, peripherally, but someone like Tucholsky not at all; Kästner yes. For the rest, though, everything smacked of “Berlin,” and Berlin was not loved, was even less loved since the Nazis had taken it over. Unfair, I know (meanwhile I have learned a bit more).

  15

  For some time now an innovation for secondary schools had existed: training camps. The oldest students from two different schools would spend three weeks together in a youth hostel so as to become acquainted with each other, the countryside, and the local people, as well as attending lectures and taking part in marches and sports. I participated fully in the first one, in Zülpich, where we joined the parallel class of Aloysius College. Father Hubert Becher, that kindly, cultured Jesuit, had a mitigating influence. We marched through the vast sugarbeet fields of that “Merovingian land,” visited Roman ruins, felt the spirit of Chlodwig. We went over an old textile factory in Euskirchen where bales and bales of army cloth were being produced. I passed up another camp in Oberwesel—I forget whether it was the last or the last but one—by more or less extorting an impressive medical certificate from our family doctor. Then there was another one in Ludweiler near Völklingen on the Saar at which I stayed for half the time, but there the loud-mouthed Hitler Youth mentality was already so prevalent that I lost my nerve and simply went home. In Ludweiler the writer Johannes Kirchweng read to us from his works. He didn’t seem—to me at any rate—entirely at ease with the whole thing, and by “thing” I mean all that Nazi business and those claims to lost German territory. Johannes Kirchweng, worker’s son and Catholic priest, seemed a nice fellow, but tired and sad, probably didn’t quite trust his recent fame and was already foreseeing its abuse. He read from an autobiographical novel in which he described the harsh conditions of his father’s working world, that of a glassblower. He did not, as I have just discovered, reach a great age: at his death in 1951 he was fifty-one, so in 1935 or 1936 he must have been thirty-five or thirty-six. I remember him as a very old man, a nice fellow and tired (and that reminds me of Heinrich Lersch, whose novel Hammer Blows was also about his father and his craft, that of a boilermaker).

  In the taverns of Ludweiler or Völklingen, workmen would tell us in whispers that, instead of being able to buy French Riz-La cigarette paper for five pfennigs, they now had to pay fifteen pfennigs for the German Gizeh paper; but of course, they said, they weren’t Frenchmen, you know, they were Germans of course, you know. Völklingen, the Röchling steel works, the strikes and all that, and why didn’t we take a look at the foundry? It certainly wasn’t pleasant or edifying: it smelled of poverty, stale, of a stifling all-pervading Catholicism. There was also—and not only because of the cigarette paper—a certain wistfulness expressed not openly but in whispers.

  And in the evening at the youth hostel there was all that whooping and hollering of the triumphant Hitler Youth, and their threats against us—me and my friend Caspar Markard—because when they sang the Horst Wessel Song we would start up with: “If all are now unfaithful, then faithful we’ll remain.” I lost my nerve (as often happened later), I suppose one might say I was “hypersensitive”—or was I more than just an outsider, was I already an eccentric? At any rate, I simply went home, again with a taste of things to come. Yes, we sang: “If all are now unfaithful,” and I wrote not only love poems but patriotic ones too, and I read Stefan George, whom I never for a moment regarded as a Nazi. Caspar Markard had been expelled from Brühl High School on account of political remarks and activities that were dubbed “Communist,” and our school had accepted him.

  16

  It must not be forgotten that we were moving toward war. I bought Barbusse and Remarque. Barbusse impressed me more than Remarque. In school—that’s how it seemed, or how it seems to me today—the last vestiges of strictness, of severity even, disappeared, the kind that had been prevalent from teacher to student. There were arguments, but they were between younger and older adults; they were serious ones, they had lost their schoolboy character.

  Our math teacher, Mr. Müllenmeister (known as MM), who was considered unusually strict and bore the marks of World War I but never talked about it, proved to be the mildest of all: during the late summer and fall he hardly disguised his efforts to familiarize us with the geometry and algebra questions we might expect in our final exams. In the eleventh grade, almost a third of the class, five or six students, had been failed, perhaps because the school wished to present a trim, secure graduating class: thirteen of us remained, awaiting graduation. That last school summer, the last school fall, seem to have lasted forever. There was not only the cultural pilgrimage to the statue of Heinrich II in Bamberg, not only the usual preparations for our final exams during which, using dictionaries as a concordance, we tried to work out what Latin and Greek texts to expect: there were also the Olympic Games, with the enormous, utterly depressing propaganda success, both at home and abroad, of the Nazis. And in a “postlude” in the Cologne stadium we saw the totally un-Germanic Olympic winners Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, the latter making the sign of the cross before the start of the race. A champion who was a Catholic and a Negro!

  That summer my friend Caspar Markard took me along to meet Robert Grosche, the priest who had retired from the city to live in the country at Vochem near Brühl, where he used to receive a small group of students for a sort of weekly seminar. Grosche, the classic Rhinelander, the classic, highly educated abbé, the Claudel translator and expert, one of Germany’s first truly ecumenical priests, yet intensely Roman: his study, crammed with books and always filled with pipe smoke, was an island that fascinated and at the same time intimidated me. We discussed “salvation arising from the Jews,” he lent us books to which he had drawn our attention. As a sideline Grosche was also editor of the Cologne bookdealers’ “literary guide.” Those were unforgettable evenings. Grosche was very West European yet very German, with a surprising admixture of nationalism; very Catholic, witty, of high caliber, courageous. We were sure he was a “born” cardinal, born to be the future Bishop of Cologne. But no: when Cardinal Schulte died, he was followed by Frings. Maybe Grosche was too lofty for the Vatican, perhaps even too cultured, and whether he would have suited the Nazis, who, according to the Concordat, had a say in the matter, is uncertain.

  Here I will permit myself a brief speculation beyond the year 1937: Grosche, rather than Frings, Cardinal and Archbishop of Cologne after 1945; Grosche, who certainly favored and would have favored the Christian Democrats, as the decisive figure beside Adenauer in German postwar Catholicism? Things would have turned out differently. Whether better is something I dare not say. Even in those days, on leaving that marvelous, comfortable Vochem study, full of books and tobac
co smoke, to go home to Cologne by train or on my bike, I would feel a bit intimidated by so much cultured composure, by that hint of nationalism, and the unmistakable if gentle over-ripeness of the bourgeoisie. It was tremendous to be there, to be with him, but it was not what I was looking for.

  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.

  17

  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.

  18

  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.