One day, several months before our homeroom teacher Fräulein Beyle was “transferred” out of our school, she announced that it was time for us to prepare for our traditional annual Elternabend (parents’ night), during which pupils from each grade would entertain parents with skits, small plays, poems, and musical renditions. After picking a simple play written in Hamburger Platt (Low German) about a boy’s excitement over the first snowfall of the year, Fräulein Beyle held auditions to determine who would get which of the play’s three parts. After reading each part, I was awarded the lead role and told that I had exactly two weeks to memorize my part. I could hardly wait to tell my mother. Mutti, in her new role as a proud stage mother, spread the word of my pending starring debut to Tante Möller and some of her closest friends. About a dozen or so said they would be delighted to come, and asked me to get them the required thirty-pfennig tickets while the getting was still good.
Leaving nothing to chance, Fräulein Beyle had assigned an understudy for each part and had us rehearse over and over until we knew every word of the play backward. The day before the big event, while we were in the midst of rehearsals, Herr Wriede entered the classroom. Motioning Fräulein Beyle not to interrupt us, he seated himself directly in front of me. Until that moment, I had been completely free of stage fright. But now that I looked into Wriede’s cold, unsmiling eyes, a strange sensation of panic took hold of me. After telling myself that I had nothing to be afraid of since I had my lines down pat, I quickly regained my composure and went through the rehearsal without a hitch.
Before Wriede left the class, he asked Fräulein Beyle to accompany him out to the corridor. When she returned to the classroom, she looked perturbed, but didn’t say anything. Somehow, I couldn’t escape the uneasy feeling that her changed demeanor had something to do with Wriede’s visit and me. I couldn’t have been more correct. When the class ended, she asked me to stay. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she started apologetically after a long pause, “but Herr Wriede wants me to give the lead part to Gerd [my blond, blue-eyed understudy]. He thinks Gerd would be better for the part.”
“How does he know Gerd would be better for the part if he didn’t even watch him rehearse?” I interjected meekly in a futile attempt to sway an unreasonable judgment against me with reason.
“I didn’t agree, or else I wouldn’t have given you the part to begin with,” responded Fräulein Beyle, “but there is nothing I can do. Herr Wriede is the Schulleiter and I must follow his orders.”
When I told Mutti what happened, she became livid with anger but cautioned me not to let Wriede’s cruelty get to me and, above all, not to let my dislike for Wriede cause me to dislike school. “School is a wonderful place and most teachers are decent men and women, like Fräulein Beyle,” she assured me. “You can take my word,” she added, “that sooner or later, Wriede will get his punishment.”
She then contacted Tante Möller and her other friends who had planned to attend the parents’ night and offered to make restitution for the tickets since my performance had been canceled. They wouldn’t hear of it, especially after they learned the apparent reason why I had been given the boot. Tante Möller, who never minced her words, put her thoughts exceedingly graphically when she told my mother that since her little Hans-Jürgen wasn’t allowed in the play, they could keep her thirty pfennig and “stick them up their Nazi behinds.”
The next time Wriede went out of his way to pick on me was when he stopped me in the hall and, in front of several of my classmates, jabbed a long index finger into my chest. “You are not to wear this shirt in school anymore,” he snarled at me without further explanation. The khaki-colored shirt, a birthday gift from Tante Möller, was similar to those worn by the Hitler Youth, and the principal was obviously under the impression that I was wearing part of a Nazi uniform.
When my mother showed up at the principal’s office the next day to have a word with him about the incident, he immediately launched an attack. “The Hitler Youth uniform,” he shouted at her, “symbolizes our proud young Aryan generation. By letting your son wear that uniform you are making a mockery of everything that uniform stands for. I must therefore advise you to see to it that he doesn’t wear that shirt to school ever again.”
When the principal had ended his tirade, my mother reached into her bag, pulled out the freshly laundered item in question and calmly put it on the principal’s desk. At close inspection, it was easy to see that the shirt was not part of a regulation uniform but simply an ordinary, khaki-colored shirt. Unwilling to apologize for his mistake, Wriede tried to hide his embarrassment by insisting that the potential for confusion made it unwise for me to wear the shirt, even if it was not official Nazi garb.
At this point my mother exploded. “I said to him,” she recounted later, “that until a law was passed that expressly forbade the wearing of khaki-colored shirts by unauthorized persons, you were going to wear that shirt in school as often as you felt like it, whether he liked it or not.” Knowing Mutti, I have no doubt that she told Wriede exactly that and probably a great deal more. At the time, she merely told me that she’d leave it up to me to decide what I wanted to do about the shirt. Since I knew that my wearing it was a sure way of getting Wriede’s goat, I chose to wear it often—so often, in fact, that within a few months its khaki color had faded to off-white from frequent laundering and it got so threadbare that Mutti decided it was time to retire it.
EMPEROR HEINRICH AT CANOSSA
As a dyed-in-the-wool arch-Nazi, Wriede was on a constant alert to weed out anything that conflicted with his deeply entrenched conviction of German superiority. On one such occasion, he was pinch-hitting for another teacher who was teaching us medieval German history. We had been studying the trials and tribulations of the German emperor Heinrich IV (1050-1106), who, according to our text, had been excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII in some jurisdictional dispute. The ban caused many of the emperor’s vassals to withdraw their support from him. In order to regain their allegiance and his imperial clout, Heinrich was obliged to throw himself at the mercy of the pope and beg for lifting of the ban. This he did by journeying as a simple penitent to the temporary papal residence at the castle of Canossa in northern Italy.
Prior to Wriede’s arrival, a student orderly had, on instruction from our regular history teacher, put up a large illustration that depicted a wretched-looking Emperor Heinrich, dressed only in a thin pilgrim’s shirt, standing barefoot in deep snow next to a castle. In the foreground a resplendently robed and mitered Pope Gregory looked down on the emperor from one of the castle’s turrets. The artist’s rendering of the historic event was a typical visual aid in use in German public schools, but one that apparently had been overlooked by the censors of the Nazis’ Ministry of Education.
Entering our classroom, Wriede spotted the illustration and immediately flew into a rage. Ripping it from its stand and throwing it to the floor, he shouted, “Lügen, Lügen, nichts als Lügen (Lies, lies, nothing but lies)!” The rest of the hour he denounced the entire historic episode as “a fabrication by a bunch of lying monks.” No German emperor, he ranted, would have humiliated himself like that before an Italian pope. The only reason we were reading such nonsense in our history books, he explained, was that Catholic monks were among the relatively few literate people at the time and, therefore, were the only ones who recorded “history.” Consequently, he told us, they wrote “history” not the way it was but the way they wished it had been.
Despite my personal dislike of Wriede, his view of recorded history, which caused him to reject any historical data he found inconsistent with his ideas of German superiority, made a great deal of sense to me at the time. It was quite comforting to me and my budding sense of patriotism to be reassured that “our” emperor did not behave like a wimp.
Wriede’s attempts to demoralize and wear me down with his frequent verbal attacks achieved just the opposite. The more he picked on me, the tougher I became, until I felt that I could tak
e just about anything he was able to dish out. Fortunately, Wriede was not typical of the teachers I encountered during my eight years in Hamburg’s public schools. Most were professional educators who treated me like everybody else. And there were a few, like Fräulein Beyle, who—sensitive to my particular plight—went out of their way to make my life a little easier.
Among the latter was Herr Schneider, a goateed man with erect, military bearing who taught us zoology, biology, botany, and, in a roundabout way, about the birds and the bees. Despite his being a bona fide World War I hero who had distinguished himself as an infantry first lieutenant on the western front, he was a most gentle soul as he introduced us kids to the flora and fauna of the earth. He won my undying affection when, while trying to explain what the people of India looked like, he said, “They have the same beautiful, smooth brown skin as your classmate Hans-Jürgen.” After that, he couldn’t do any wrong as far as I was concerned, even when he kept us several hours after school just to watch a couple of birds feed their newborn chicks.
HERR GOSAU
Another teacher who made no secret of his fondness for me was Herr Gosau, our school choir director, a handsome, mild-mannered gnome of a man with impeccably groomed gray hair and mustache. His only concession to Nazi regimentation was his rendering of the mandatory Heil Hitler salute at the beginning and end of each class. Without asking for Wriede’s approval, he had made me a member of the choir, insisting that I had not only a good singing voice but above average musical ability. In addition to music, Herr Gosau instructed us in a course called “Religion,” but which was really a course in biblical history.
He never brought up the subject of race, but I instinctively felt that he was on my side. This was especially apparent after an incident during a weekend school outing at the sprawling Jugend Park (Youth Park) in suburban Langenhorn, during which we pupils entertained our parents with a variety show in an open-air theater. Following our choir’s rendition of several songs, I took my seat beside my mother in the audience. The finale of the show was announced by Wriede as a “humorous song-and-dance number” by the senior class choreographed by none other than Herr Wriede himself.
The act started with a chorus line of eighth graders walking rhythmically toward the audience while mumbling an unintelligible chant. Suddenly, the line opened in the center and a short boy, totally covered with black paint and clad only in a grass skirt over swim trunks, leaped out. To the beat of tom-toms, the Ersatz African put on a frenzied performance jumping and gyrating while the chorus line droned on wildly in gibberish that was obviously meant to sound African.
As soon as the Negertanz started, many eyes in the packed outdoor auditorium turned to me and my mother. At first my mother wanted us to walk out, but she changed her mind, perhaps realizing that our leaving would draw even more attention. So we sat through the whole thing, which, it seemed to us, would never end. When it finally did end, the performers and Herr Wriede received a rousing ovation.
Still devastated by the demeaning spectacle, my mother and I rode quietly home on the city train, each deep in thought, when she was approached by Herr Gosau, who had witnessed the show. After introducing himself as my music teacher, he said, “Your son is musically very gifted,” without making any reference to the racist show we had just seen.
Herr Gosau’s words were just what my mother needed to hear. “I’m glad to hear an expert say that,” she replied, “because I have always felt that Hans-Jürgen has musical talent.”
In the course of their conversation, Herr Gosau offered to give me violin lessons in his spare time, free of charge, provided my mother would buy me a violin. Without discussing it with me, my mother assured Herr Gosau that I would have a violin and would be ready for my first lesson no later than a couple of months hence.
I hated the very idea of learning to play the violin. Among my peers in the street, a violin was for sissies. The mere thought of being seen in the street with a violin case—that we kids contemptuously called a Kindersarg (children’s coffin)—gave me the creeps. But the matter was out of my hands. My mother was determined that I take violin lessons and that was it.
The hardest part was accumulating enough money to buy a violin, since violins, even secondhand ones, weren’t cheap. Although Mutti had found a permanent job as a factory worker at the nearby Hamburg-New York Gummiwaren Fabrik, a hard rubber factory, she barely made enough money to make ends meet. Under the piecework system, called Akkord, she was paid according to her daily output, and the only way she could earn more money was to force herself to work at the highest speed her nerves could endure. By driving herself to her limits at work and after considerable scrimping and saving, she proudly handed me a violin—a rather handsome instrument, I had to admit—replete with bow and Kindersarg, which she had bought on a layaway plan from a neighborhood secondhand shop. Since I didn’t have the heart to hurt her feelings or to turn down Herr Gosau’s generous offer, I made gute Miene zum bosen Spiel (smiled in the face of adversity), to quote Mutti, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Once a week after school for nearly a year, I joined three other “lucky” students for two hours of intense violin studies under Herr Gosau’s tutelage. While I genuinely loved music, I detested the marrow-jarring sounds I produced. Finally, after a particularly gut-wrenching session during which I tried unsuccessfully to bend my stubborn fingers to the uncooperative instrument as Herr Gosau instructed, he took me aside and, without any sign of annoyance, announced that he was throwing in the towel. “You are musically extremely gifted,” he assured me, “and I urge you to continue your musical development in some form or another, but the violin simply doesn’t seem to be your instrument.”
Amen. I couldn’t have agreed with him more. I felt badly, though, for disappointing the old gentleman and especially my mother, who had to give up her secret dream of one day having a violin virtuoso for a son. That evening I told her that my violin lessons had come to a halt; she was clearly saddened, but accepted the inevitable without any recriminations. “Be sure to thank Herr Gosau for his kindness” was all she said.
HERR HARDEN
And then there was Herr Harden, my first English teacher. An equal opportunity tyrant, he was in a class all by himself. The most positive thing I remember of him is that he hated all the other boys as much as he hated me. Harden was an obese, bull-necked man who, except for thick glasses that made his eyes appear like a series of concentric rings, bore an amazing resemblance to a caricature of John Bull. Herr Harden was a fanatic practitioner of the “spare the rod and spoil the child” philosophy, and—backed by a system that condoned, if not encouraged, corporal punishment—literally made the rod the centerpiece of his pedagogy. As a result, he was the most despised and feared teacher on the Kätnerkamp faculty. He was also the first teacher who got a piece of my hide during my eventful eight-year elementary school career.
Actually, I had nobody but myself to blame for meeting up with Herr Harden’s lethal weapon. Taking lessons in English, French, or Spanish was entirely voluntary and a special privilege reserved for pupils with top marks in German rhetoric. Had I not signed up for English classes, our paths would never have crossed and I would have been spared much grief. But once we signed up, we were not allowed to drop the course.
It wasn’t long before I realized I had made a catastrophic mistake. With each of Herr Harden’s violent outbursts at the slightest provocation, my initial enthusiasm for learning English diminished rapidly until I wished the language didn’t even exist. Whenever we mispronounced a word while reading aloud in class, Herr Harden would immediately go into one of his choleric seizures and correct us at the top of his voice as if he were teaching a class of the severely hearing impaired. Poking his thumb at us, he would bellow over and over, “This is the thumb! This is the thumb! and not, Zis is ze sumb!” If a pupil, for whatever reason, failed to do his homework and got caught, Herr Harden without exception would call him to the front of the class, order him to bend down and touch his toes
, and administer three slashing licks with a wicked-looking yard-long switch. The sound of that switch and the screams of the hapless victim made me determined never to give Harden any reason to try his switch on me. But the odds were against me.
In order to attend English classes, we pupils were obliged—much to our regret—to rise an hour earlier twice a week, since all foreign-language classes were scheduled before regular classes so as not to interfere with the regular curriculum. During the winter months it was still dark when we arrived at school, where we had to wait for Herr Harden to let us into the building. Usually, he would arrive a few minutes before class began at 7 A.M., after a rather lengthy bicycle trip from his suburban home.
It had long been our fervent hope that one morning Harden would get run over by a truck or at least oversleep. According to school policy, if a teacher did not show within twenty minutes after the beginning of class, early class was automatically canceled. Several times we thought we might get our wish when Harden hadn’t shown up by the time the nearby church bell struck 7 A.M. But each time we were disappointed when, just in the nick of time, Harden’s bulky silhouette rounded the corner on his bicycle.
One fateful morning, however, our time had come. It was fifteen minutes past seven and no Harden in sight. Since none of us had a watch and it was still too dark to see the church clock, we had to rely on our instincts to gauge the passage of five minutes. Finally, when all of us agreed that at least five minutes had elapsed and there was still no sign of him, we dispersed like rats leaving the sinking ship.
Our joy over our successful coup was considerable but short-lived. Two days later, as we faced Harden in class, following his arrival at 7 A.M. on the dot, he went into an apoplectic rage that made us fear for his sanity and our lives. With veins bulging at his forehead, he shouted that his patience with us had finally come to an end and that if we thought we could make a fool of him, we were sadly mistaken. He then insisted that we had left that morning well ahead of his arrival “before 7:20 A.M.” With that, he ordered all twenty or so of us to come forward, row by row, and reap our well-deserved reward.
Destined to Witness Page 10
