On the other hand, at least in my better days, I never had the least objection to violence. But I preferred it to take place between relative equals; there had to be parity. If, for example, an ear had been lost in a saber fight, it would have certainly affected me as unpleasant but not—as in this case—as revolting. There are nuances, now hardly distinguishable, but nuances frequently make all the difference.
With the absence of equality, the repulsive element gained ground, and this lack of balance produced a sensation of seasickness. The opponent has to be armed or he is no longer an opponent. I loved hunting and avoided slaughterhouses. Fishing was my passion. I became disgusted with it when I heard that brooks and ponds can be fished out by electricity down to the last stickleback. The plain fact, even mere hearsay, was enough for me: from that moment I never again touched a fishing rod. A cold shadow had fallen on the swirling trout streams and backwaters, where moss-grown carp and catfish dream, and had robbed them of their charm. One of our mathematical idiots had been at work again, characteristically confusing fight and murder. Undoubtedly he had been presented with a very high official decoration for it.
When I saw several thugs attack a lone man, or a larger man a small one, or even when a mastiff attacked a toy Pomeranian, not virtue but plain disgust upset my insides. This early variety of defeatism later became an obsolete trait—damaging to me in today’s world. I often blamed myself for it, telling myself that, after all, when one has dismounted the horse and climbed into a tank, one’s mental attitude should change as well. But these matters are difficult to overcome rationally.
When in Rome, do as the Romans, otherwise you’ll have a hard time. This piece of wisdom was taught me first by Atje Hanebut, and with a vengeance. Since this first experience clearly revealed the plain malice of my evil star, it will be mentioned here as an example of all subsequent experiences.
When we think back to all the people who have taught us lessons, we come upon one person who led us from childhood into adolescence. For me and other neighborhood boys this person was Atje Hanebut. At that time he was about sixteen or seventeen, and he ruled absolutely over a gang of twelve-year-olds. He instilled in us a new concept of authority—the admiration for a leader whom one obeys blindly. Such a leader occupies not only our thoughts and ambitions by day, but our dreams by night. This domination, reaching into the world of our dreams, is an unmistakable symptom. As soon as one begins to dream of someone—whether pleasantly or in a nightmare—one becomes a captive. One is even expected to dream of a good author: then he begins to become a force.
We lived on the outskirts of the city, on Wine Street where each house was surrounded by a large garden. At the end of the street was a meadow which every year was flooded for ice skating. When winter set in early, many parts of the meadow were left unmown, and then I could see flowers, a frozen-summer, through the icy surface. My mother complained about these inundations because they drove numerous mice into our home every autumn.
Behind Forrester’s Pond, the meadow led into the Uhlenhorst Moor, which was bordered, along one whole side, by a colony of small gardeners; these colonists we called “Cossacks.” Our nearest neighbor was Doctor Meding, an eminent physician of the old school, who lived in the grand style. He employed a cook and a coachman as well as the regular domestics. In his consulting room stood a high mahogany desk, on the leaf of which prescriptions used to lie, weighted down by gold coins. He treated poor patients for nothing.
We were allowed to play in his large, much neglected garden. The chief attraction was, of course, his horses. We knew every corner of the stable, the coachhouse, and the hayloft; and we were also quite at home in the living-quarters of the coachman. We were lucky to be friends of Wilhelm Bindseil, the son of the coachman.
In the Bindseil family, horses had played an important role since time immemorial. Old Bindseil had served with the dragoons in Tilsit; he could still be seen with a dashing mustache in the photograph of his squadron which hung in the living room. Their motto: “The Dragoons of Lithuania spare no one and do not wish to be spared” was inscribed beneath the picture. To look at old Bindseil, the motto was hard to believe. His talk was rather confused; and the only thing he didn’t spare was the bottle of schnapps.
His brother, Wilhelm’s uncle, was janitor at the Riding Academy. He wore the Iron Cross, First Class, and had taken part in the cavalry charge at Mars-la-Tour. Wilhelm sometimes took us to visit him, and we admired the great man from a respectful distance. My father approved of this, since he gave us presents of books, which stimulated us in a military direction. We read The Life of a German Rider, Memoirs of a Lützow Rifleman, The Great King and his Recruit.
By that time we had already extended our roving expeditions as far as the moor. But these forages were always bound up with risks, and after the business at the barn, we limited our play to the gardens. We had built a little fire on a bank of the moor. Hermann, my younger brother, began to fool around with some smoldering sticks. All of a sudden we saw a dry cluster of reeds flare up. At once, the heather caught fire. First we tried to beat it with branches, but it ate itself into the moor which was dry as tinder; then, when we were already exhausted from our attempts to extinguish the fire and faint from the heat, and the soles of our shoes were red-hot, then the flames began to lick at the barn.
We dropped the branches and ran toward the city as if the devil were after us. But even there we did not calm down: our guilty conscience drove us on. Eventually we consulted our savings and climbed the Gothic tower of our local church, which was a hundred meters high. The fee for going up was ten pfennigs. For this price we had a bird’s-eye view of the grim spectacle of the burning moor and of the three fire brigades that had rushed out to extinguish it. Our knees were shaking from the climb up the countless rickety stairs, and when we heard from far away the tooting of the firehorns and saw the sky all aglow, we almost collapsed. Trembling, we climbed down, crept through the streets of the old part of the town and into our beds. Fortunately no one suspected us. But for a long time afterwards, tortured by dreams of a fire, I would wake up at night screaming; my parents called the Doctor, our neighbor, who eased their anxiety and prescribed an infusion of valerian. In his opinion it was a symptom of puberty.
All this happened when I was still a child. A few months later, when Atje Hanebut had established his reign over us, he would probably have turned the incident into an heroic deed. He set great value on resourcefulness, on not leaving any tracks behind you, and he gave us tasks where we had to prove ourselves. For instance, soon after we became acquainted, he learned that Clamor Boddsiek, son of another neighbor, had stolen a taler from his parents, which he was suspected of having hidden somewhere, so that some time might elapse before he spent it. Atje ordered us to search for it. Today I am still surprised that we found out Clamor’s hiding place. By subtle combinations, which would have done credit to a clairvoyant, we divided the area of his movements into squares which we then scoured. He had concealed the coin in one of the flowerpots in his parents’ front garden. We took it out and delivered it to Atje. This may indicate the degree of our eagerness to curry favor with him. Viewed from the moral angle, this was, of course, worse than the whole conflagration in the moor; but when we saw Boddsiek for days afterward still vainly digging into the flowerpots, we were only proud of our scouting shrewdness.
There were frequent changes of coachmen at Dr. Meding’s—the service was exacting. They often had to wait for him a long time in the open air, while he visited his patients; and particularly in winter, they would help themselves to their bottles, until their master had enough of it. Then they stepped down from their high positions as coachmen to become plain cabmen, who waited in lacquered top hats for travelers in front of the railroad station. This was the reason why old Hanebut had taken the place of Wilhelm Bindseil’s father. Old Hanebut, too, stayed hardly a year, since the Doctor lost his temper when he noticed that his horses were losing flesh. He did not take too seriously t
hat his coachmen were boozers, but the animals should have what was due them.
Mother Hanebut was a woebegone woman who waited upon the Doctor. Father Hanebut scarcely enforced any discipline in his family. Either he drove the Doctor on his rounds or was occupied in the stable; the rest of his time he spent in the pub. Sometimes when the Doctor was called in an emergency, he sent for him there.
The son was his own master. He took small, occasional jobs, delivered magazines for the booksellers and books for the lending libraries. In the fall he accompanied the peasants, who arrived in the city with their carts full of peat or cried “White sand” in the streets. The youngsters who tried to ingratiate themselves with him were high school students of a different social class. This did not prevent him from treating them tyrannically.
My father, who had approved of our friendship with Wilhelm Bindseil, was not too pleased about the new connection. Once I heard him say to my mother in the next room: “This new coachman’s son is bad company—he teaches the boys real proletarian manners.”
He probably meant the jackboots which Atje wore and for which we had pestered our mothers so long that they finally bought them for us; for we imitated him in everything. In these boots one could walk through thick and thin, through swamp and underbrush: they were indispensable for “pathfinders.”
This word, which Atje had brought into use among us, was used by him to mean red pathfinders rather than white. When he saw us running to the Riding Academy, he made no bones about his dislike of soldiers.
“They have to stand at attention. A pathfinder does not, except at the stake.”
He would also say: “Soldiers have to lie down. A pathfinder lies down only when he wants to stalk someone, and not by command—a pathfinder never accepts any commands at all.”
And so we were introduced to the jungle. Soon after, some Indians were exhibited at the shooting match of a country fair. They were introduced, in front of a tent, by a barker who called each one by his name and praised him chiefly for the number of scalps he had taken . Sounding as if he had a hot potato in his mouth, the barker cried : “Black Mustang, little chief—a very bright fellow who has taken the scalp of seven white men.”
The warriors, who presented themselves impassively to the gaze of the public, were decorated with war paint and wore feathered headbands. Atje Hanebut had taken us there. It was certainly different from the Riding Academy and Uncle Bindseil—the more so, since the Indians held their own on horseback as well. One of our favorite topics was whether or not they could cope on horseback with the Mexicans and other white men. We were convinced they could, and these long talks served the purpose of confirming their superiority against any possible objection. Another result was that we began to read different books.
After supper we used to gather in the loft above the stable, re the harness hung. We sat on the trestles, or on a pile of horse blankets which was Atje’s bed, and he read to us Son of the Bear Hunter. What a book! High up there it smelled of horses, hay, and leather, and in winter the iron stove glowed, for the Doctor had plenty of wood. Atje sat with the book near the stable lantern; we listened to him all agog. A door opened into a new world. Dressed only in shorts and our jackboots, we crouched half-naked in the overheated loft; now and then, to make us tough, Atje made us run around the ice-cold park.
In summer we were again on the moor. We knew every corner, every peat bog, every ditch. We also could build a fire which did not smoke. On sultry days we lay in wait to catch the poisonous adders which were one of our chief’s sources of income. The Mayor of Uhlenhorst paid three pfennigs per head. Atje Hanebut combined this hunt with testing our courage.
The adders came out at certain times and lay on the banks of the moor, either stretched out or in a coil. It took an experienced eye to see them. At first we caught them by holding them down with a forked willow twig and killing them by blows with a switch. Then we learned how to grab them behind their heads and to hold them, still alive, until Atje let them slide into a bag. These were specimens for the terrarium; they were worth more. Finally we had to pick up the swift-moving reptile by its tail and lift it high with outstretched arm. This was a safe grip; the adder, hanging free, could raise itself only a third of its length. In this position it was submitted to the expert judgment of Atje. If it was a specimen for a terrarium, that is, if it was distinguished by its large size or its coloring, it went into the bag; otherwise it was hurled to the ground and massacred. There were pure black specimens, the “hell-adders,” whose zigzag band blended with their ground color.
They were particularly in demand by snake fanciers.
Anyone who had taken part in these excursions into the moor for some time and was thought worthy by Atje Hanebut, was allowed to enter the great test of courage. Atje knew what is common knowledge among snake catchers: that a snake which is lowered on the supporting hand, settles on it as on any other surface, provided one doesn’t move one’s hand. The reptile does not regard the hand as a hostile object.
Atje then selected the most skillful of us, and the test became a question of picking up an adder, pointed out by the Chief, and lowering it slowly with one’s right hand to the palm of the left, on which the adder was supposed to nestle. It was a miracle that no one was ever bitten; but, as I said, Atje did not allow just anyone to take the test. He knew what he could impose on a person.
As for me, I remember these as some of the most disagreeable moments in a life full of such moments; I disliked these creatures from the bottom of my heart, and they appeared in my dreams as nightmares. A sensation of annihilation ran through me like a blade when I felt the cool, triangular head on my hand. But I stood as motionless as a statue, so great was my desire to please my Chief, to catch his smile, to distinguish myself in his eyes. Having passed this test, we were then allowed to call him by his war name, which we pledged never to betray to others; we also received names and joined his inner circle. Already as a boy he had known how to get a hold on others.
From the past Atje had inherited a quarrel with the Cossacks. This had existed for generations, perhaps even from prehistoric times when different tribes had settled on both shores of the swamp. But Atje, although he was really much better suited to the other side, made himself our leader. Over there was a jumble of miserable huts, sheds, gardens, and small pubs into which we, as high school students, couldn’t intrude without causing brawls. Because of our red caps they called us stupid bullfinches. No one from either faction would have dared to enter the territory of the enemy alone. The clashes took place mostly during the skating season or sometimes in early autumn when we flew kites.
When Atje Hanebut joined us in our feuds, he introduced some improvements, among which were scouting duty as “pathfinders” and a new weapon, the slingshot—a V-shaped twig equipped with a rubber band. For shot we used marbles or pellets of lead. And as always happens with such improvements, slingshots soon turned up in the camp of the Cossacks, who simply shot with pebbles. All this led to never-ending skirmishes.
Brawls of this kind are usually crowned by excess and also terminate with it when neutral powers intervene. Here it was the same. One morning, rumor spread that a third-grade student—of all people Clamor Boddsiek, the boy of the taler story—had lost an eye because of a slingshot. It turned out later that the injury was less serious than was first believed, but on that first day feeling ran high.
Immediately after lunch we gathered at Atje Hanebut’s place; he at once ordered a punitive expedition. It was my mother’s birthday, and we were going to have a big coffee-party; my parents had also bought me a new suit. But after I had swallowed my last mouthful, I slipped, like all the other boys, into my jackboots, without changing my clothes, and put the slingshot in my pocket. The business of the eye occupied my whole mind. There was no room for other things.
After we were all assembled, we left the Doctor’s garden through the defective hedge, following Atje in Indian file. It was a hot day and we were boiling with rage, Atj
e perhaps the least of all.
Bordering the Doctor’s property, on the meadow side, was the garden of a Privatdocent. On very warm days, he used to study in his conservatory, which jutted out into the garden, its two doors always wide open. Since we were in a great hurry and since a straight line is the shortest, Atje Hanebut burst into the study. The horrified scholar jumped to his feet to save his papers which were flying about, and before he realized what had happened, Atje had stormed out through the other door, a dozen boys in jackboots rushing after him. Then we broke through the bordering hedge, and crossed the large meadow to invade the Cossack territory.
The paths between the hedges and fences lay bright in the midday light. We were now in the forbidden domain. Our band had split. With three or four others I ran along behind Atje Hanebut. At a bend in the road, we saw a Cossack coming toward us. He was alone, a schoolboy, with a knapsack slung over his shoulder. Most likely he had been kept in after class; if so, it was an unlucky day for him.
As soon as he recognized us, he turned around and, quick as a weasel, ran back the same way. We rushed after him. He could certainly have escaped had not another bunch of our gang burst out from a side path, barring his passage. He was rounded up. One boy got hold of him by his knapsack, the others arrived from both sides, and blows fell as thick as hail. Our wrath was tremendous.
At first I thought it was quite right that he should suffer—and with a vengeance—for Clamor Boddsiek’s eye. A slightly built boy, who hardly defended himself, he first lost his knapsack and then his cap. His nose also began bleeding, though not violently. Incidentally, it was not I who first noticed it, but a boy who hadn’t passed the test of courage and who didn’t care either; he had joined us rather by accident. His name was Weigand; he wore glasses and, strictly speaking, didn’t belong with us. It was this Weigand who first noticed the blood; I heard him call: “But he’s already bleeding.”
Now I saw it too, and the whole scene disgusted me: the forces were distributed too unequally. I saw our Chief lifting his arm for another blow; the Cossack was now standing with his back against a garden fence. He really had had enough. I hung onto Atje’s arm and kept repeating: “But he’s already bleeding.”