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

  School? Yes. Studying was still important to me, even if I did my best to avoid school. I pored over math books and Latin texts, and there was one subject in which my desire to learn, indeed my craving for knowledge, was not satisfied in school: geography. I loved atlases, at times collected them, tried to find out how and on what people lived where. I suppose that’s called economic geography. I hunted through encyclopedias and—somehow—got hold of reading material. In my father’s library (which, on the whole, I despised), I found a multivolume anthropological work by a missionary that I devoured in my search for accounts of expeditions—all this on the side, of course.

  Also on the side I became “secretary” to Chaplain Paul Heinen of St. Maternus Church. I set up a filing system for him, took care of some of his correspondence, and from time to time he would give me a coin or two from his pittance of a salary. It wasn’t much more than a “game” and an escape: the deluge was not yet behind us, it still lay ahead. At some point in 1936 I saw Heinen for the last time, ran into him on Severin-Strasse. I was surprised at his haste, the way he could barely wait to say good-bye. A few days later I learned that on that very day he had been on his way out of the country, to emigrate via Holland to America. I believe he must have been too friendly with (then still Chaplain) Rossaint. I never heard any details.

  11

  Material survival took priority over political survival. There were grim days, weeks, and months; there were many pleasures and friends. There were the cheap, magnificent concerts in Gürzenich Hall, surprisingly bold lectures at the Catholic Academic League initiated by the priest Robert Grosche. There were movies, and at night, after dark, when you no longer had to worry about the Nazi hordes, you could go for a carefree walk, perhaps even with a girl. Cologne was still a livable city. And within a short time there appeared on the scene that special girl, called Annemarie. But that would take me too far beyond the time I am describing, and if I were to go beyond that period—back long before 1933, if possible as far back as 1750, and forward beyond 1937, perhaps up to 1981—if I were to go beyond that period, it would lead to an enormous family tome: interesting perhaps, as interesting as any family history, but no more interesting than that. So I will limit myself to the period in question, as far as possible to its externals, revealing only those internal goings-on that form part of, or arise from, the externals. Not even a hint, therefore, of the tensions, conflicts, problems, and semi-tragedies; and if I have a stab at those four years and some gaiety should show up here and there, it’s nothing but the truth. However, that gaiety was often of the desperate kind seen in some medieval paintings, where the laughter of the redeemed is sometimes akin to the expression on the faces of the damned.

  So somehow we managed, and after each move not only our relatives and friends but also the bailiff and the beggars were quick to discover our new address: my mother never sent anyone away, and she had an unruffled way of neither regarding bailiffs as enemies nor treating them as such. As a result, we received much good advice from them, and the pawnshop remained a familiar place to us. I can’t say it was a good time. We were both depressed and reckless, not the slightest bit sensible. At the very moment when we could least afford it, we would go out to a restaurant for a meal. We would invite “furnished gentlemen,” as long as we had any, for a game of cards, slyly intending to win twenty pfennigs for a pack of Alvas or Ecksteins, until we found to our amusement that they had similar plans, so we would pool our resources and enjoy a smoke together.

  Every opportunity to make money was seized on; the worst catastrophe of all was an attempt we made to earn some, perhaps even acquire wealth, by addressing envelopes. We did own a typewriter, the one I later used to type my first short stories, influenced by Dostoievski, later by Bloy. (But I also wrote a novel, by hand, somewhat to the surprise of my future wife because the “hero” had two women.) The enterprise ended in disaster. Our employer, who was unemployed, also hoped to get rich with homemade birch rods for St. Nicholas to use on naughty boys. Not only did he expect us to type the addresses: we also had to pick them out of a telephone directory and supply the stationery. Question: who needs birch rods for St. Nicholas? Bakeries, pastry shops, grocery stores—a laborious job. Eventually it turned out that our employer was even worse off than we were—I don’t know whether he ever unloaded any birch rods, and we never asked for more than the agreed wage, which came nowhere near covering our expenses.

  And of course we helped in the workshop, if any help happened to be needed. With a wobbly two-wheeled handcart (which also did duty during our moves), we conveyed great stacks of new or repaired furniture to government offices. (Memories of Revenue Offices South, Old Town, and North! And the Regional Finance Administration on Wörth-Strasse, past which we sometimes stroll today on our way to the Rhine.) At night in the cashier’s office of Revenue Office South (originally a Carthusian monastery secularized in 1806), we renovated the floor, which was said to date from Napoleonic times. We hoped to find coins, old ones if possible, overlooking the fact that Carthusian monks of the eighteenth century weren’t likely to have walked around with purses in their habits, and that latter-day visitors to the Revenue Office kept a tight grip on their pennies.

  I was somewhat more successful in giving private lessons. The demand was small, the supply enormous: there was a plethora of unemployed teachers, B.A.’s, M.A.’s, and students, as well as sufficient not unemployed elementary and high school teachers anxious for some extra income. Immense supply, tiny demand, and that, of course, pushed down the prices (Oh, free market economy!). I found my first pupil through an advertisement, a nice boy whom I coached in Latin and math for fifty pfennigs an hour. I was more scared of his tests in school than he was; the result of those tests was the mark of success for which his parents were watching and waiting. I applied the method my brother had used with me: opening up gaps, closing gaps, and lo, he improved. An attempt at tutoring in French failed miserably, due to that boy’s mother’s excellent knowledge of French; she was quick to discover my gaps, graciously paid me off, and sent me home.

  Before I dilate on the value of fifty pfennigs, let me merely point out that eight years later the hourly wage of an unskilled nursery-garden employee wasn’t much higher—rather lower, in fact—than fifty pfennigs, and that weekly unemployment assistance for a family of three, including rental allowance, amounted to less than seventeen marks. At the time I am speaking of, my sister Mechthild, an unemployed junior high school teacher, always loyal to the family, was working as a governess in an aristocratic family in Westphalia for thirty marks a month, of which she sent home twenty-five. So a weekly extra income for a totally “unskilled” person (who was later able to increase his rate to seventy-five pfennigs an hour) of four or five marks was, considering it was pure pocket money, not to be sneezed at. It even permitted me to open an account with a modern secondhand bookstore, where I was allowed to pay in installments. I have no intention here of playing off hard times against good times, a ridiculous pastime for veterans, in my opinion.

  Fifty pfennigs meant two or three secondhand books—a Balzac for ten pfennigs and a Dostoievski for twenty are what I still remember from the book bin of a secondhand bookstore on Herzog-Strasse next door to the Skala movie theater. Fifty pfennigs meant a ticket to the cheapest seats in the movies plus three cigarettes; it meant a piano recital on a student ticket (Oh, Monique Haas!), two cups of coffee plus three cigarettes, but also—and I sometimes treated my mother and my sister Gertrud—four fresh rolls and three or four slices of boiled ham, since, the Lord be both praised and reproached, we always had an appetite. My sister Gertrud would often reciprocate. And well-informed sources assured me that the minimum price for bought love in the back rooms of certain cafes in certain districts—provided by amateurs, I might add—had dropped to fifty pfennigs; of course only in “politically unreliable” areas—in a Germany that had just “awakened”!

  12

  I have come to the conclusion (at this late date!)
that it really was living far, far beyond our means to let all the children in the family finish high school and then go on to university. Both my parents had only gone to elementary school: in their parents’ eyes, secondary school was only for sons, and university was only considered if one of them wanted to study theology. (As a result, a boy with a passion and great talent for law became a not very happy priest, and a potential theologian became an atheistic high school teacher.) No doubt my parents had suffered more severely from this and other limitations than they admitted, and they wanted to see us children free, “unfolding freely.”

  The only reliable source of income was from time to time the “furnished gentlemen,” but they didn’t even cover the rent, and of the three small apartment buildings my father had built to take care of his old age (at the time he was already approaching seventy), only one remained, an old tenement house, 28 Vondel-Strasse, which also contained his workshop and office. But that building was rarely in our own hands, and then only for a short time; hardly ever was it not in receivership. There were the inexorable municipal taxes, the mortgage interest, the insurance premiums—there was always someone bringing down an iron fist upon us. What glorious times those were when the building happened to be free and my sister Gertrud went around collecting rents! Glorious but very brief times, for soon that fist would come crashing down again. Times didn’t improve until later, after the period I am describing, when my brothers and sisters were earning a bit of money.

  Clever people will say—and rightly so—what clever people were always saying at the time, that we were not sensible. That’s right, we weren’t, for we were even crazy enough to buy books and to read them: almost everything published by Jacob Hegener, as well as Mauriac, Bernanos, and Bloy, plus Chesterton and Dickens and Dostoievski, even old Weininger and Claudel and Bergengruen (as long as he was available), even Hammer Blows by Lersch and, as I mentioned before, Evelyn Waugh and Timmermanns, Ernest Hello, Reinhold Schneider, Gertrud von Le Fort and, of course, Theodor Haecker. No, it wasn’t at all sensible, and sensible people borrowed the books from us, enjoyed dropping in at our place for discussions, and then sometimes a fractional Nazi, a quarter, a half, or even a whole Nazi, would come in for some abuse.

  Those were lively sessions, yet at the same time a paralyzing pessimism lay over everything. We also played cards all night long, for money, although we knew that none of us would keep our winnings, and gaming debts piled up and were canceled, yet we went on playing as if in earnest. And I suppose it wasn’t sensible either for a brother and sister of mine to work for my father—my brother in the workshop and my sister in the office—in a business where there was so little to do. Yet it was necessary for them to be there so as to keep the income derived from renting out the excellent machinery by the hour from getting into the hands of the bailiff. Things remained that tight until war broke out. (In wartime—and here I am going beyond 1937—money always flows easily, of course, and soon there was plenty to repair in Cologne. Wars also solve unemployment problems, a fact that is sometimes forgotten or suppressed when people talk about Hitler’s “economic miracle.” And wars also regulate the prices of cigarettes, which ultimately rose from one or one and a half pfennigs for the pale Dutch ones to eight hundred pfennigs for a single American cigarette.)

  13

  Yes, school too—I assure you, I’ll soon get back to that. After all, I was still a pupil, a pupil of life so to speak, subject to despondency and recklessness, yet bound and determined not to become a pupil of death—if that could possibly be avoided. So, once again: somehow we managed. What was vitally important (I will forgo a few dozen anecdotes), and also a good schooling, was that our financial difficulties made us not humble but arrogant, not undemanding but demanding, and in some non-sensible way they made us sensible. No, we weren’t expecting the pot of gold, but we did always expect more than we were entitled to or more than others considered we were entitled to (“others” being, for instance, the mathematical acrobats who worked out a subsistence minimum for us), and in the family we used to say: “Oliver Twist is asking for more.” We developed an arrogance that assumed hysterical proportions, we made derogatory or blasphemous remarks about public institutions and personalities, and we needed no alcohol: words were enough.

  After an evening of smearing and smirching, of more and more feverish, even frenetic, laughter at the expense of church, state, institutions, and personalities, my brother Alois, in a kind of hiatus of exhaustion, said something that then became a household phrase: “Now let’s be Christians again!” And another expression for naïve, credulous, idealistic Nazis that we all hung onto was: “A blissful idiot.” Those occasions were not only not comfortable, they were never harmonious; they were marked by a permanently dissonant loyalty. The three different elements blended in varying proportions in the individual members of the family, resulting in friction and tensions. Many a time, more than words flew through the air—bits and pieces, sometimes even quite sharp objects. Within each of us and among all of us, the elements clashed. Within each of us and among all of us, there was a class struggle. And then there were also periods influenced by alcohol, when we happened to have some money; on those occasions the products of the Hermanns distillery near the Severin Gate castle set the tone.

  Yes, school. I didn’t want the time I was spending there to be wasted, and my graduation certificate might survive—with me!—both the war and the Nazis, although it didn’t look like it. The Nazis had become an eternity, the war was to become one, and war plus Nazis were a double eternity—yet I wanted to try to live beyond those four eternities (besides, for ten years my graduation certificate brought me the advantage of the flexible and useful occupational category of “student.” But we aren’t there yet).

  • • •

  Aside from school, Nazis, economic crises, there were other problems; for example, the ageless one of … amore. I tried—with what success I don’t know—to keep all that a secret from the family, who were tearing their hair out anyway at the thought of my future—Oh my God, girls too? Or women even? There were many blows to come: after the introduction of conscription, the final blow was the occupation of the Rhineland, which we perceived as just that, an occupation. It may not have meant much, but, after all, the Rhineland had up to then, 1936, remained a demilitarized zone, and the last British occupation forces had taken their ceremonial departure only six years earlier. For my father, who, after Brüning’s dismissal, had almost given up hope, the occupation of the Rhineland was the last straw, and now he too no longer doubted the imminence of war. Nazis disguised as Prussians, Prussians disguised as Nazis, in the Rhineland! We—I, at any rate—would have preferred to see the French—in spite of Schlageter!—or the British march in from the other side.

  At this time my father would sometimes act out for our benefit again how, as a reservist en route to Verdun, he had caused himself to be carried off the train in Trier with a simulated attack of appendicitis—and it had worked: although he had to undergo an operation, he was never sent to the front. Final and very impressive memory of Maternus-Strasse: an illegal meeting of the leaders of a Catholic young men’s association; the deep, ineradicable impression made on me by Franz Steber: serious, determined, with no illusions—and he paid dearly for that determination. Shortly afterward, he was arrested, and during five years of imprisonment by the Gestapo, his serious eye trouble advanced to almost total blindness.

  Less serious, but serious enough: shortly after our move, which was followed not much later by my passing into the twelfth grade, I picked up an acute inner ear infection while on an extended weekend outing (by bike and with a girl) into the Bergische Land on a sleety Shrove Tuesday. This infection kept me in bed far beyond Easter. When I was allowed to get up again, my love had evaporated (yes, a pity, but it had simply evaporated), and I was moved up to the twelfth, with the serious warning that I would have to work hard.

  I did, I caught up with the class, became used to my new, quiet route to s
chool: Karolinger-Ring, Sachsen-Ring, Ulrich-Gasse, Vor den Siebenbürgen, Schnur-Gasse (past the pawnshop), a few yards along Martinsfeld as far as Heinrich-Strasse, which I now entered from the other, very quiet end. The worry about “what’s to become of the boy?” grew ever more serious, more justified. Heinen, before disappearing out of the country, had also participated in the discussion and suggested the career of librarian, but he had forgotten about the book-burnings, and wasn’t the profession of librarian an endangered one? Was I supposed to spend my life lending out Hanns Johst or Hans Friedrich Blunck, or concerning myself with the collected articles of Heinz Steguweit? After I had rejected a libarian’s career, someone in my family—I don’t know who—came up with the idea that it should be “something to do with books.” Too bad that, given the circumstances, the boy couldn’t be persuaded to take an interest in theology.

  14

  That summer, shortly after the move, which entailed the usual chaos (new curtains for the big windows, allocation of rooms, frequent, and fruitless family budget councils), I went off on my bike, by myself on a sort of study trip via Mainz, Würzburg, through the Spessart and Steigerwald hills to Bamberg; and, since I wished to avoid the mixture of Hitler Youth and League of German Girls in the youth hostels, my father obtained a letter of introduction for me to the “Kolping houses” along the way. As an old member of the Kolping (a Catholic guild of journeymen-artisans), he had good connections with its headquarters in Cologne. This meant I had access to cheap bed-and-breakfast; I also became acquainted with the activities of the Kolping Brothers, and gratefully accepted coffee and bread, soup and milk, in canteens from the hands of South German nuns.