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

  The news of Hitler’s appointment came as no surprise. After Hindenburg’s “shameful betrayal” of Brüning (that’s what my father called it), after von Papen and Schleicher, Hindenburg was obviously capable of anything. That strange (to this day still somewhat obscure) affair known at the time as the “Eastern agricultural support scandal,” on which even our extremely reticent Kölnische Volkszeitung had reported, had deprived “the venerable old field marshal” of the last shred of what had been at best minimal credit—not politically, merely the shred of moral credit that people had been willing to attribute to his “Prussian integrity.”

  My mother hated Hitler from the very beginning (unfortunately she didn’t live to see his death); she dubbed him Rövekopp, “turnip head,” an allusion to the traditional St. Martin’s torches roughly carved from sugar beets and leaving, wherever possible, something resembling a moustache. Hitler—he was beyond discussion, and his long-time delegate in Cologne, a certain Dr. Robert Ley (try to imagine a character like Ley later in control of the entire German work force!), had done little to render Hitler and his Nazis worthy of discussion: they were nothing more than the “howling void,” without the human dimension that might have merited the term “rabble.” The Nazis were “not even rabble.” My mother’s war theory was hotly denied: the fellow wouldn’t even last long enough to be able to start a war. (As the world discovered to its consternation, he lasted long enough.)

  I forget how long I had to stay in bed. The flu epidemic gave a modest boost to the liquor stores; cheap rum was in demand—in the form of grog, it was said to offer cure or prevention. We bought moderate quantities of it in a shop at the corner of Bonner-Strasse and Darmstädter-Strasse: the proprietor’s name was, I believe, Volk, and he had a son with flaming red hair who went to our school. I forget whether the burning of the Reichstag building, the “excellent timing” of which was noted by many, occurred while I was still sick or during term time or even during vacation (at some point there must have also been the Carnival!). In any event, before the March election I was going back to school; and only after that election—one so easily forgets that the results just barely provided a majority for a coalition between Nazis and the German National Party—in April or May the first Hitler Youth shirts appeared in school, and one or two Storm Trooper uniforms in the higher grades.

  There was also—I forget exactly when—a book-burning, an embarrassing, in fact a pathetic, exercise. The Nazi flag was hoisted, but I can’t remember anyone making a speech, hurling anathemas at title after title, author after author, tossing books into the fire. The books must have been placed there, a little heap, in advance, and since that book-burning I know that books don’t burn well. Someone must have forgotten to pour gasoline over them. I also find it hard to imagine that the modest library of our high school (which, although called the Kaiser Wilhelm State High School, was extremely Catholic) could have contained much “decadent” literature. The background of virtually the whole student body was lower middle class with few “excrescences” either upward or downward. It’s possible that one or other of the teachers privately sacrificed his Remarque or his Tucholsky to feed the funeral pyre. Be that as it may, none of these authors was listed in the curriculum; and after the tangible, the visible and audible, barbarities occurring between January 30 and the Reichstag fire—increasingly so between Reichstag fire and March election—this act of symbolic barbarity was perhaps not all that impressive.

  The nonsymbolic purges were visible and audible, were tangible: Social Democrats disappeared (Sollmann, Görlinger, and others), as did politicians of the Catholic Center Party and, needless to say, Communists, and it was no secret that the Storm Troopers were establishing concentration camps in the fortifications around Cologne’s Militär-Ring: expressions such as “protective custody” and “shot while trying to escape” became familiar; even some of my father’s friends were caught up in the process, men who later, on their return, maintained a stony silence. Paralysis spread, an atmosphere of fear prevailed, and the Nazi hordes, brutal and bloodthirsty, saw to it that the terror was not confined to rumors.

  The streets left and right off Severin-Strasse, along which I walked to school (Alteburger-Strasse, Silvan-Strasse, Severin-Strasse, Perlen-Graben), constituted a far from “politically reliable” area. There were days, after the Reichstag fire and before the March election, when the area was entirely or partially cordoned off, the least reliable streets being those to the right of Severin-Strasse. Who was that woman screaming on Achter-Gässchen, who that man screaming on Landsberg-Strasse, who on Rosen-Strasse? Perhaps it is not in school but on our way to school that we learn lessons for life. It was obvious that along those streets, people were being beaten up, dragged out of their front doors. After the Reichstag fire and the March election it grew quieter, but it was still far from quiet. One must not forget that, after the November 1932 election, the Communist Party had become the second-strongest party in a city as Catholic as Cologne (Center Party 27.3 percent; Communists 24.5 percent; Nazis 20.5 percent; Social Democrats 17.5 percent), a state of affairs somewhat similar to that in Italy today. Despite its Catholic reputation and all the clerical machinations, Cologne was and still is a progressive city. Then in March 1933 the Nazis obtained 33.3 percent, the Center Party still as much as 25.6 percent, and the Communists and Social Democrats, despite terror and purges, 18.1 and 14.9 percent: the “unreliable area” was still far from being “normalized,” there was plenty of work left for the Storm Troopers to do. (There would be a lot more to say about Cologne, but in my opinion, after the Cathedral Jubilee, Pope John Paul II’s visit, and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne has had ample publicity. Moreover, the Rhine flows on.)

  It must have been about this time that the father of one of my older sister’s school friends, a quiet, reliable police officer with a Center Party background, took early retirement because he could no longer stand the sight of the “bloody towels” in his precinct: those, too, were not symbolic signs; the “bloody towels” were related to the screams I had heard from Achter-Gässchen, from Rosen-Strasse and Landsberg-Strasse.

  By now it will have become increasingly evident to the reader that, as far as school is concerned, this is no more than an “also” story, that, although it deals with my school days, it doesn’t deal only with the days I spent in school. Although school was far from being a minor issue, it was not a primary issue during those four years.

  • • •

  A clean-up operation of a quite different kind brought considerable changes in my daily walk to school: the crackdown on the cigarette smugglers who stood at street corners or in doorways whispering offers of “Dutch merchandise.” The cheapest legally acquired cigarette cost at least two and a half pfennigs, a feeble object, half as firmly packed as a Juno or an Eckstein, which cost three and a third pfennigs each. The Dutch product was pale gold, firm, a third plumper than an Eckstein, and was offered at one to one and a half pfennigs each. Naturally that was very enticing at a time when Brüning’s penny-pinching policies were still having their effect, so my brother Alois would sometimes give me money to buy him illegal Dutch cigarettes. Between Rosen-Strasse and Perlen-Graben, the focal point being somewhere around Landsberg-Strasse, with scattered outposts extending as far as the Eulen-Garten (the smugglers’ headquarters that were located close to our school on Heinrich-Strasse), I had to be both wary and alert, had to appear both confidence-inspiring and eager to buy. Apparently I succeeded, and that early training or schooling (which, as I say, cannot be acquired in school but only on the way to school), that education, if you prefer, turned out to be very useful to me in later years in many of the black markets of Europe. (I have dealt elsewhere with the fact that a dedicated feeling for legality does not form part of the Cologne attitude to life.)

  So the Dutch merchandise would reach home safe and sound, and I would receive my cut in the form of fragrant cigarettes. On one occasion, I must admit, I was diddled: the neat little package with its Dutch r
evenue stamp contained, instead of twenty-five cigarettes, approximately twenty-five grams of … potato peelings! To this day I fail to understand why potato peelings, and not, say, sawdust or woodshavings. They had been carefully weighed, evenly distributed, packed in foil. (Contempt for wax seals, lead seals, bailiff’s seals, revenue stamps—also a kind of seal—ingrained in me by my mother, turned out, after the war, to be my undoing when I broke the seal of an electricity meter and tampered with it—unfortunately in a detectable manner. Bailiff’s seals were promptly removed as a matter of course.) I was enjoined by my brother in future to check the goods and was still puzzling over how, since everything had to be done so quickly, when suddenly the entire smuggling operation was smashed. Certain streets were virtually under siege, and I recall at least one armored vehicle. Police and customs agents—in the end without shooting—cleared out the whole smugglers’ nest: there were rumors of millions of confiscated cigarettes and numerous arrests.

  4

  Yes, school, I know—I’ll get back to that. I was still in the eighth grade, and my route to school became even quieter. For a time I must have been walking with my head down, since one day my father offered me a prize if I could name twenty-five stores between St. Severin’s Church and Perlen-Graben. I lifted my head once again and won the prize: I also lifted my head to read Der Stürmer, the newspaper in its display case outside the former trade-union building on Severin-Strasse, not far from the corner that goes off to Perlen-Graben. What I read did not enhance my sympathies for the Nazis. (Today, alas, that area is a desert; war and the Nord-Süd freeway saw to that. Yet that little square outside the Church of St. John the Baptist used to be bustling with life.)

  Not always with the prior but always with the subsequent approval of my mother, I went often to the school of the streets. (As reported elsewhere, my mother anyway used to run a kind of center for non-family truants under the coffee grinder that hung on the kitchen wall.) So, if I went to the school of the streets, it wasn’t because my high school was particularly Nazist or Nazi-tainted. It was not, and I remember most of my teachers without any resentment at all. I don’t even feel resentment toward our teacher of religion, although I argued with him—to the point of being kicked out of the classroom. The points of dispute were not the Nazis; on that score he was not vulnerable. On the contrary, I recall an excellent lecture he gave on the sentimental and commercial background to the Day of the German Mother. What aroused my ire was the overriding bourgeois element in his teaching. It was against this that I rebelled so inarticulately; he had no idea what I meant or how I meant it, he was more confused than angry.

  The cause of my rebellion could be found in the totally indefinable social situation in which we found ourselves: had our financial plight lowered our social status or made us classless? To this day I don’t know. We were neither true lower middle class nor conscious proletarians, and we had a strong streak of the Bohemian. “Bourgeois” had become a dirty word for us. The elements of those three classes, to none of which we truly belonged, had made what might be called “bourgeois” Christianity absolutely insufferable to us. Our teacher of religion probably never understood what I had in mind, and I probably didn’t express it clearly enough. (Obviously the author has always irked, and been irked by, church and state. And, being a true son of Cologne, he has never taken secular and ecclesiastical authority very seriously, much less regarded them as important!)

  Merely lowered socially or truly classless? The question remains unanswered. The other subjects, aside from religion? I can’t remember anything special about them. Even in those days I was gradually starting to “orchestrate” school. And, since I did respect the intelligence of our teacher of religion, who, although bourgeois to the marrow, made no concessions to the Nazis, I began from time to time to attend school mass in the Franciscan Church on Ulrich-Gasse. It made for a change in my usual route along Rosen-Strasse. As for the church, I found it (no other word occurs to me) disgusting, with its corny statues and decorations and the stale smells emanating from the congregation. There is only one word for those smells: fug, trying to pass itself off as fervor. I went there quite pointedly, with only occasionally the aim of offering some slight consolation to our teacher of religion, since I certainly didn’t hate him: it was just that sometimes we had violent arguments. He obviously suffered from high blood pressure, and some of the boys in the Hitler Youth couldn’t resist taking advantage of him: not on their own—they could have done that before 1933—but by virtue of their uniforms and potential rank (there was all that braid!). He was helpless and unsuspecting, had no idea that their attitude was a mark of the “bourgeois” element’s turning against him, that the boys who, until March 1933, had been good young Catholics now were sniffing the “new age” and intended to make the most of it. This harassment didn’t last long, nor did it get worse; it soon died down, but our last lessons with him, barely three years later, were terrible, though for quite different reasons. No doubt he still considered me a Catholic, if not good.

  But it was my own “Catholicity” that I was beginning to doubt, the more so after a further heavy blow: the signing of the Reich Concordat with the Vatican engineered by von Papen and Monsignor Kaas. After the seizure of power, the Reichstag fire, and the March election, it was, incredibly, the Vatican that accorded the Nazis their first major international recognition. Some members of our family—myself among them—seriously considered leaving the church, but that had become so fashionable among all those Germans who couldn’t wait to join the Nazi Party after the March 1933 election that we didn’t, since it might have been misconstrued as homage to the Nazis. That didn’t exempt us from considerable crises, both existential and political, yet in the midst of that time of crisis, I took part in a procession, strutting proudly along as I carried a great flag (white with an enormous blue ), accepting as an honor the occasional, not general, mockery of the spectators. I don’t even remember in what procession or what group I was “performing”; all I can be sure of is the pride, the flag, and the recollection of one particular bunch of mockers on St. Apern-Strasse. It is quite possible that I was still a member of that Marian fellowship to which I had so enthusiastically belonged: those weekend outings, “leaving gray city walls behind,” those amateur theatricals, puppet shows, hiking over hill and dale, the singing, pennants, campfires! I left the fellowship when it brought in a paramilitary drill that even included “wheeling” on almost a company scale. And during that time of crisis I agreed to help out the parish of St. Maternus by taking over the distribution of the Junge Front, the last weekly of Catholic youth until its brave demise. I was recruited for this job by Otto Vieth over streusel cake and ersatz coffee in the garden of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Cologne-Nippes. The job was also a source of income: the ten pfennigs paid for each copy of the Junge Front didn’t have to be turned in until the following week and helped us over many a straitened weekend.

  At the time there was also a theory, almost officially sanctioned by the church, that one should join the Nazi organizations in order to “Christianize them from within”—whatever that may have meant, for to this day no one seems to know what “Christianization” consists of. A considerable number—among them our principal, I believe—acted on this theory, and after the war many of them, left in the lurch in the denazification process, had to pay for it.

  Although I had long since ceased to be “organized,” I still ostentatiously wore the insignia on my lapel and more than once had to take abuse from an older student who, not surprisingly, had been a particularly enthusiastic member of the Catholic youth movement. That was the extent of what I had to put up with in school. I had no trouble with my classmates; they had known me and I them for five or six years; there were arguments but no attempts at conversion. Some disapproved of my occasional flippant remarks about Hitler and other Nazi bigwigs, but none of them, not even the S.S. member, would ever, I believe, have dreamed of denouncing me. I felt no resentment, not even toward the teachers.
We still thought it possible that the Nazis wouldn’t last; sometimes we’d even laugh in anticipation of further opportunistic contortions of the “bourgeoisie” when … But who would then take over none of us tried to predict.

  I kept up my friendships with several of my classmates even after graduation (although I avoided that S.S. fellow: in the three years preceding graduation I doubt if I exchanged more than two sentences with him). We pored over our homework together, and I tried to help some of them over that strange German math trauma, with the zeal of the convert: not long before, my brother Alfred had cured me of this trauma by systematically and patiently “probing back” to my basic knowledge, discovering gaps, closing them, and thus giving me a firm foundation. That had led us to such an enthusiasm for math that we spent weeks trying to discover a method of trisecting the angle, and sometimes we felt so close to the solution that we spoke only in whispers. The “furnished gentleman” living in the next room had a degree in engineering, which might have enabled him to appropriate our discovery.

  Yes, I pored over textbooks with them, crammed for math and Latin (another of those traumatic subjects that fortunately never developed into a trauma for me). Sometimes we spent the evening in my father’s office in the rear courtyard of the building at 28 Vondel-Strasse. Money being scarce and cigarettes and tobacco expensive, we would buy the very cheapest kind of cigars (five pfennigs each), cut them up with a razor blade, and roll them into cigarettes. (Today I am sure we were suffering from an economic delusion.) The tiny office building was seductively cozy, built entirely of wood, something between a log cabin and a shed. It contained fine, solidly built closets, with sliding doors of green glass, for the storage of metal fittings and drawings: little neo-Gothic turrets, miniature columns, flowers, figures of saints; designs for confessionals, pulpits, altars and communion benches, furniture; and there was also an old copying press from pre–World War I days, and a few remaining cartons of light bulbs for bayonet sockets, although we had shot hundreds of them to pieces in the garden on Kreuznacher-Strasse. Green desk lamps, a big table with a green linoleum top; slabs of glue, tools. When it came to gluing, the generational conflict between my father and my brother Alois was concentrated on the “barbaric, revolutionary” invention of cold glue, which my father didn’t trust, while my brother demonstrated its reliability; but my father insisted on hot, boiled glue, the way it had to be prepared in the glue pot, with constant stirring, from the honey-colored slabs. There was no lack of other conflicts, but they have no place here.