Throwing the letter onto the table with an angry laugh, my father remarked, “The bastards will wait a long time for that. They were all once colleagues of mine.” My mother was unable to hide how desperate she was, but she was also obviously greatly impressed by her husband’s intransigence. Occasionally, I saw her in the evening sitting in the easy chair in the drawing room, her face empty and exhausted by the long day; her eyes had fallen shut over her darning things and a kind of swoon, so it seemed, had overcome her. If she felt herself observed, she started up and said, embarrassed, that she hadn’t been sleeping, but only thinking. Then she asked me to keep her company for a few minutes, but I failed in the attempt to come up with an amusing piece of gossip. So I talked about my most recent school essays, about the agreement I had come to with Wolfgang, according to which in future I was no longer supposed to support Schalke 04, but Rapid Vienna instead, and finally that recently one saw so many men with German shepherds.23 In the end my mother said, “Six or seven years and the world and people in it are turned upside down!” It would always be beyond her.
This was also when Walther Rosenthal and his attractive wife said goodbye. They didn’t understand the Germans anymore, he said on the phone, and would leave the country in three days, despite all the difficulties the authorities were putting in their way. They had always considered themselves to be Germans, but that had been overhasty. Then Sonja Rosenthal came to the phone for “one quick word of farewell.” She just wanted to say, she remarked, that the little bit of trust she still had in human beings she owed above all to some Berlin friends. “Not so few at all,” she added. Then she said, “Auf Wiedersehen!,” which almost sounded like a question, and hung up.24
On the whole, however, the summer of 1939 belonged to my brother Winfried. One day he came running into the flat breathless with effort and happiness and shouted, “Done it! At last! I’ve managed it!” For two or three months we had watched him as in wind and rain, with youthful perseverance, he practiced the giant swing on the horizontal bar. Wolfgang, who was not a talented gymnast and only managed the knee circle, had soon given up, and after two weeks I had achieved nothing more than the much easier little giant swing. Only Winfried had gone on struggling and finally performed not only a rotation but two giant swings. The whole family, including my sisters, who had never shown any interest in our boys’ world, followed him down to the garden. Because they were going on to a birthday party they had broad, colored ribbons in their hair, which my mother had been tugging away at before the beginning of the show, so that everything looked “neat and tidy.” Then Winfried jumped onto the high horizontal bar from a chair, swung back and forth a couple of times, and threw himself into the giant swing. When he came down, even ending in a standing position, old Katlewski was so impressed that he offered to register Winfried in the local gymnastic club, Karlhorst Turnverein KTV 1900, and my father aroused our envy by giving Winfried one mark—as much as for ten poems!
The next day Hans Hausdorf, who often made considerable sums dealing in dental instruments and equipment, happened to call, and the giant swing was performed for him. He was so astonished that he took five marks out of his pocket. But when he heard how much Winfried had received from my father, he gave him only one mark. “I can’t give you more than your father,” he said, and Winfried retorted, “You can! You just don’t want to!” After a brief hesitation, Herr Hausdorf added another seventy pfennigs. “But with that you have to buy an ice cream for everyone in the family!”
At around the same time the organist of our church declared himself willing to give me and my sisters piano lessons free of charge. My brothers had responded so negatively to the mere mention of instruction or (in Wolfgang’s case) with such amusement that they were never asked again. Herr Tinz was a lively, charming Rhinelander with a bald spot and curly hair combed up at the sides. He taught me how to sit at the piano, the varieties of fingering, and an appreciation of composers I knew hardly anything about, such as Handel, Telemann, and Schütz.25 More than that, his boundless enthusiasm (which in conversation could be quite trying) taught me that music demanded powerful emotions on the part of both performers and audience and that “without fire” it was nothing more than “blowing at a heap of ashes.” Passion was more important than technique, he said in his high voice. In the course of the lessons our teacher was carried away by his own enthusiasm, and he frequently concluded them by playing a movement from a classical sonata, preferably one marked presto. When I asked my mother whether, after all the artistic thunder and lightning, she could play “Ah, vous dirais-je maman”26 or one of Brahms’s dances, she looked at me from her stove with an almost pitying smile. With unusual curtness she said, “It would no longer be appropriate now!”
Then I would have to turn to my new friend, I replied, who was at least a year ahead of me on the piano. Wigbert Gans had only recently joined our class. He came from Halle and it so happened that his father, although only the previous year, had been “let go,” as my father had been in April 1933. Wigbert’s face under his long floppy hair expressed superior concentration, and Hans Hausdorf, who once met him at our home, said that Wigbert listened with a fervor which almost made one feel uneasy. Wigbert turned up at our school one day as if from nowhere and after five periods everyone knew that the class had a new top boy. He was not only ahead of us in all the natural sciences and, as it proved, of some of the teachers as well, he was also, contrary to every topboy rule, among the best in foreign languages and even gymnastics. Since he wasn’t a drudge or a show-off he was accepted from the day he arrived. Shortly afterward, when he visited me in Karlshorst for the first time, he introduced himself to my parents with the disconcertingly straightforward words: “I am Wigbert Gans and I’m from a family which is also ‘genuine’ or ‘anti’—whichever you like.”
We quickly became friends and managed to sit together at one of the double desks. We swapped stories of the most diverse experiences, complained about the ignorance of our form master Dr. Appelt, and read the The Song of the Nibelungs, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and Knut Hamsun together.27 Now and then after school we went the few stops to the city center, to Alexanderplatz or Friedrichstrasse, and found the piled-up hair, garish blouses, and green net stockings of the ladies on parade there more exciting than the women themselves. Sometimes we also strolled through the area between Hackescher Markt and Mulackstrasse and looked cautiously into the hallways and cellar homes of this musty world familiar from Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.28 At the entrances hung pathetic pieces of clothing, pots, or linen; from below there rose a sour, poor-people smell. There were occasional cigarette-butt sellers who had spread out their goods on an old tray, neatly arranged according to length and brand; three butts cost a pfennig, a half-smoked cigar three pfennigs. Here and there we passed a group of Jews deep in conversation, nodding their heads; even on hot summer days they wore dark coats and hats. They appeared curiously abandoned, and I felt attraction, dread, and sadness at the sight of them.
Leibniz Gymnasium was an establishment without any reputation, not to be compared to such legendary educational institutions as the Fichte Gymnasium, the Grey Cloister, or Canisius College, whose names were always mentioned with respectfully raised eyebrows. The somewhat unambitious teaching methods of most of the teachers were focused upon learning, and combined acquiring knowledge with a simple system of fair assessment.
The rector of the school, Wilhelm Weinhold, was held to be a crude Nazi without really being one. The military bearing that he was at pains to maintain, his chin determinedly pressed against his neck, made his authority look somewhat forced. The watery eyes with which he liked to stare piercingly when issuing a reprimand also betrayed what an effort it cost him to appear as “Sergeant Major Wilhelm,” as he was called by the pupils. Yet was it really by chance that he entrusted timid Herr Pfaff, whose Swabian accent alone made all pathetic declamations sound ridiculous, with teaching ideological topics? In his lessons, as with a puzzled expression he
interpreted Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century a paragraph at a time, we filled bags with water and hung them up above the classroom door; when they burst, to the howls of the class, he lapsed into completely incomprehensible Swabian.29 His hands at his temples, desperate for help, he would open the door to Rector Weinhold, who, in fact, did nothing more than enter the room with a firm step, his chin pressed against his throat, and order us a few times to “Stand!” and “Sit!,” before concluding the incident with a reference to the war and the good name of the school. He was a former theology student and at the annual Christmas service in the school hall, after the official part with Nazi choruses and political poems, he had the swastika flag removed from the room before giving a sermon between the reading of the Gospel and the Christmas carols.
Apart from that there was the history teacher, Dr. Schmidt, heavy and bald, who wore tweed suits and puttees and liked to relate episodes from his life; also the almost delicate-looking Dr. Hertel, who was responsible for teaching German and Latin. Then there was the geography teacher Dr. Püschel, a gruff man whose eyes would flash when difficult questions arose and then, eyes shut, he would stroke his Vandyke beard with a clenched fist. If the class of smart, big-city boys understood his politically ambiguous remarks all too well, he would boisterously correct himself, though not without linking his correction to some new double meaning: an honest boor, who, in his advancing years, against his character and temperament, tried his hand at being a political tightrope walker.
Finally, one day when we were already in our second year, Fräulein Schneider turned up. She introduced herself as the new gym teacher and, unusually, asked to be addressed as Fräulein—Miss—Doris. She looked delightful and had a figure in which (in Gerd Donner’s expert judgment) “all the right curves were in the right place.” To the amazement of the schoolboys she came to lessons wearing trousers, which the class acknowledged with enthusiasm—her colleagues, however, with unconcealed displeasure. Fräulein Doris enjoyed thinking up new exercises on the box horse, horizontal bars, and climbing frame, on the vaulting horse too, of course, all with long take-offs after which, in support position, she caught the jumpers in a firm embrace. There were some who soon recognized that the bosomy beauty was good not only for keeping us fit, but presented far more exciting possibilities. Schibischewski was the first to grasp the opportunity. He walked back from a long horse jump saying, “Bull’s eye!,” while Jendralski expressed himself more coarsely, and Gerd Donner merely raised two fingers of his right hand, whatever that meant. Only a week later he went to see Dr. Weinhold with a “delegation” of three fellow pupils to request that there should be two additional gym lessons a week, as he understood from “authoritative sources” that they were “politically desirable.” After lengthy negotiations this “exemplary request” succeeded in getting us one extra gym lesson.
In Gerd Donner, the third year of Leibniz Gymnasium had a born leader. He had had to repeat a year at elementary school and was therefore not only older but also more experienced than the rest of us. Apart from that he had a Darwinian instinct for survival, developed in the back courts of the working-class quarter of SO 36—North Kreuzberg. Always something of a dandy in his dress, he was constantly playing with his comb; at every break he would take it out and, his head thrown back, draw it through his long, unparted, wavy hair. A proletarian beau, he relished being admired as an authority on mysterious, all-night bars and exciting experiences with women. His motto was “Always use the back door”—that was the best way to get anywhere. On the way to the station he sometimes took me to see a classmate from his elementary school days. Harry Wolfhart’s father had a collection of several thousand tin soldiers. Small, plump, and sporting a buzz cut, Harry’s father, who was around fifty, spoke with an equal measure of melancholy and wistfulness about endless nights spent drinking long ago. He readily led us past the cabinets of a spacious double room and explained the accurate renderings of flags, uniforms, and cannon to us.
Then he left us alone. Harry explained that for days he had been trying to reenact the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt with almost two thousand soldiers. An account of the battle open at his side, he pointed out Napoleon’s brilliant feints as units moved forward, then avoided contact or dissolved.30 Gerd Donner had warned me on the way there: when a battle was in progress, Harry was sometimes overcome by a violent fit of temper and wanted to play fate; then he would take an old lamp chain from one of the drawers at the bottom of the cabinets and strike out blindly at the ranks of soldiers, until the whole beautiful order of battle was wrecked.
And that is exactly what happened on our visit. Gerd objected that the hitting out had come too soon today, but Harry had wanted to impress us. When I asked why he was so crazy, Gerd replied that Harry wasn’t crazy, he was merely copying life. His father had been a successful businessman, who through a run of bad luck had lost everything, and from the leafy suburb of Dahlem had ended up in this dark corner of Berlin. Indeed, as Harry, quite beside himself, panting, his face bright red, had laid into the battleground, he had shouted, “I am Fate! No one can escape me! I am omnipotent!”
Gerd said that eighty to one hundred tin soldiers fell victim to each of his friend’s outbreaks. Some could be soldered, stuck together, painted, and more or less restored. But almost half of the “seriously disabled” remained lost. And of the twenty or so buildings that were distributed across the battlefield of Auerstedt, all were gone. Harry’s father, added Gerd, often stood by in tears when his armies were smashed. But he let it happen.
1 The Hitler Youth had taken over both the organizations and the songs of the independent German youth movements of the years after the First World War. After the second war the German Boy Scouts would continue the tradition.
2 Heinrich Hoffmann (1809–94) was a medical doctor and author of satirical and children’s books, including the universally popular and familiar Struwwelpeter, translated into most European languages.
Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908) was a painter and writer whose satirical and humorous exposure of self-importance and pettiness, among other things, made his illustrated stories told in simple doggerel household items throughout the German-speaking world, especially Max und Moritz (1865).
3 Almost unknown in the English-speaking world, the adventure stories of Karl May (1842–1912) have had an unbreakable hold on the imagination of adolescents in Central Europe since the late nineteenth century.—Trans.
4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) represent the absolute pinnacle of German and European culture in the nineteenth century to educated Germans; together they constitute the German Klassik or classical period. They serve here as a counterpoint to the “other” reading of young Joachim, such as Gottfried Keller (1819–90), a Swiss prose writer who actually did work in the spirit of Goethe’s large prose works, and to the popular literature cited immediately afterward.
5 From the poem “The Fisherman”; there’s a famous setting by Schubert.—Trans.
6 The Anschluss or union of Austria and Germany had been forbidden by the Allies in the peace treaty of Versailles, at the urging of France in particular; it proved to be a major success as a propaganda slogan of the Nazi agitation against that treaty and aided their rise at the polls.
7 December 6 is St. Nicholas’s Day, celebrated in Germany with the appearance of a figure, most often dressed as a bishop, accompanied by some coarse fellow with a sack and cudgel; they would reward the good, usually with nuts, dried fruit, and sweets, and punish the bad with taps with the cudgel and the threat of being put in the sack and taken away.
8 Johann Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen (1621–76) was Germany’s greatest Baroque prose writer, best known for his exuberant novel Simplicius Simplicissimus. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was one of Germany’s foremost theoreticians and practitioners of drama, a great Enlightenment humanist, best known for his parable of tolerance Nathan the Wise, which advocates the peaceful coexistence o
f Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
9 Kristallnacht, so called because of all the broken glass, was the first massive and overt Nazi attempt at hurting the Jews of Germany physically and publicly, following the previous legalistic and administrative systematic reduction of their civil and property rights. As an attempt at arousing the German public to a general pogrom it failed; its intimidating effects, however, were significant.
10 Many modern German artists, especially painters, were patronized by Germany’s Jewish upper-middle class, which was an additional reason for Hitler and National Socialist cultural officials to deride their work as non-Aryan and ban it from museums and public sales. Nazi taste ran more toward the gigantic and heroic representational in both painting and sculpture.
11 Emanuel Geibel (1815–84) is best known as the poet of German unity under Prussia and for popular nature poems and songs. Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) is the author of many narrative poems on patriotic themes, but also of the Kindertotenlieder (Songs of dead children), set to music by Gustav Mahler, and his translations introduced Persian and Arabic poetry to German readers. Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (1715–69) was a transitional figure combining Enlightenment and early Romanticism in his fables, novellas, and plays. Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94) is famous for some of the best-known ballads in the German language, especially his “Lenore” and his version of the travels of the notorious Baron von Münchhausen, teller of tall tales. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) wrote primarily poems but is best known for her novella Die Judenbuche (The Jew’s beech); she was also a close friend of the writer Levin Schücking.
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