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

by Heinrich Böll

  7

  Yes, school. I had no problems, either educational or political; no one bothered me anymore. It was taken for granted that I must have passing grades; we couldn’t afford for me to fail a year, yet the idea was tempting: it would have extended the duration of my hiding place by a year provided that … it must not be forgotten that we were moving toward war, it was a matter not of après nous but avant nous le déluge. I was determined not to learn for dying, which for many if not all German high school graduates had been preached as the highest goal in life. So in life I was learning for school, and in school—as will be shown—a few things for living. I concentrated entirely on the subjects I liked: Greek, Latin, math, history, studying for these subjects even when I didn’t go to school. I enjoyed translating a Latin text for my own pleasure, with no direct benefit. In later years I sometimes stayed home to continue working by myself on Sophocles’ Antigone, because the slow rate of progress in school made me impatient. In the other subjects I did enough not to slip below a C and, if it happened to suit me, turned up for tests.

  If I pushed things too far, the principal would phone my mother and ask whether I was really that sick. I had an almost unshakable, permanent alibi, known in those days as chronic sinus infection, which actually did bother me for years, causing headache and nausea whenever I attempted to bend down. Today I sometimes think that condition was Nazi-induced (let doctors and psychologists mull that one over: I am sure there are such things as politically- or system-induced illnesses). There was one advantage to that condition: it released me from gym, which I hated. Yes, I admit it: I disliked gym, it always smelled of male sweat, of strenuous efforts, so the illness, even when I suffered no attacks for months on end, suited me down to the ground. (Oh those heat lamps, those hot camomile douches!) What I did miss, though, was track and field, and games—and my beloved streets of Cologne. On one or two occasions during my roamings, one of those Nazi hordes happened to come marching around the corner, and everyone ran to the curb to raise their right arms while I just barely managed to duck into a doorway. The horror lay deep (it still does!), and even the remotest possibility of such a horde suddenly turning up soured me toward the streets of Cologne.

  It was a kind of banishment, so from being a pedestrian I became a cyclist, taking refuge in distant suburbs in the “green belt,” riding up and down along the Rhine between Niehl and Rodenkirchen, across to Deutz. I came to love cycling, and cycling became my sole regular sport. I had enjoyed field sports (as for gym, Oh, that ludicrous virile earnestness!)—soccer and other games (including rounders), track and field: all that came to an end after the introduction of National Youth Day. The two afternoon periods known officially as “Games” came to an end; how often we had extended them far beyond the set time, on summer afternoons on the Poll Meadows, and had played many of those games outside of school hours, rounders especially. Meanwhile it was verboten to pursue “unorganized” sports. My brother Alois was once briefly taken into custody when he went off with a few boys from the parish to play soccer on the Poll Meadows: it wasn’t anything ominous, merely a sign, and meant, as he was firmly told, as a warning.

  So cycling became my only sport. I explored unfamiliar suburbs, rode up or down beside the Rhine to quiet places along the banks, and I read (yes, Hölderlin too). With repair kit, pump, and a carbide lamp, I was independent—almost, with only a few books on the carrier and a bit of tobacco in my pocket, almost a “traveller without luggage.” And I could also go for a swim: totalitarianism was not yet quite complete.

  8

  Yes, school too. At times I even obtained quite good grades in German literature. Not that I’ve retained much from my reading of it: there are only a few authors I can still call to mind, one of them by the name of Adolf Hitler, author of Mein Kampf, compulsory reading. Our teacher, Mr. Schmitz, a man of penetrating, witty, dry irony (for some authors a little too dry!), used the hallowed texts of Adolf Hitler the writer to demonstrate the importance of concise expression, known also as brevity. This meant we had to take four or five pages from Mein Kampf and reduce them to two, if possible one and a half: “condense” that unspeakable, badly convoluted German (there also exists some very nicely convoluted German!). Think what that meant: “condensing” the Führer’s texts! Taking that kind of German apart and tightening it up appealed to me. So I read Mein Kampf minutely, which, again, didn’t increase my respect for the Nazis by one iota. Just the same, I can thank Adolf Hitler the writer for a few badly needed B’s in German literature; perhaps also—something else I learned in school for my life—for some qualification to be a publisher’s reader and a liking for brevity. To this day I am surprised that no one noted the lack of respect implied in the process of “condensing” the Führer’s texts, and it was many years before I realized this myself, realized all the implications of such an assignment. And it was a great many years later, when my former teacher Karl Schmitz, plagued by terrible headaches, would sometimes come to see us on Schiller-Strasse, after 1945, for a cup of black market coffee, that I could show him my respect and gratitude.

  Another author, but one I cannot thank for good grades, was a certain Hanns Johst, whose play Schlageter we had not only to read but see performed: every school in Cologne was virtually herded through the theater, and, if I remember rightly, there were even morning performances. My impression: a very weak play. The hero, who was executed by the French in the occupied Rhineland in 1923 for sabotage, impressed me neither as a Catholic nor as a saboteur; on the other hand, he wasn’t weak enough to impress me as an anti-hero.

  For some of my good grades in German literature (which were rare enough), I have Jeremias Gotthelf to thank. No longer under Schmitz, we made a thorough study of those nineteenth-century rustic novels Uli the Plowboy and Uli the Tenant Farmer and wrote essays on them. No doubt about it, Vreneli the maid appealed to me more than Uli did. I filled pages and pages with Vreneli’s generosity of spirit as compared to Uli’s timid pettiness, thinking what men often think: that girl was too good for him! And I elaborated (may God and Gotthelf forgive me!) on the differences between the two being “milieu-conditioned.”

  I presume that Gotthelf found his way into the curriculum because some Nazi “blood and soil” strategist believed that through him we would be brought closer to peasant emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Our study of Gotthelf culminated in a final essay entitled “City and Land, Hand in Hand” (a popular Nazi slogan). In this essay I made an impassioned plea for the city, boldly (and erroneously, as I have long since realized) declaring Vreneli to have been an urban type. (It would be worth while making a study someday of the stupid mistakes and superficial ideological assumptions that allow certain books to be “permitted” or to “slip through” under dictatorships, as, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, whom we promptly took to be a woman, or Bloy and Bernanos, whose anticlericalism was thoroughly misinterpreted.)

  9

  Yes, school too. Times got colder, tougher, even financially, and we were moving toward the war. Much remained: the loyalty of my parents and my brothers and sisters, of friends, even those who had long since joined Nazi organizations. There remained the irreplaceable, almost sacred bicycle, that swift vehicle of mobility, an escape-vehicle light of build, worthy of many a paean and, as I found out by 1945, the only reliable and the most valuable mechanical means of locomotion. Think of everything an automobile requires! How clumsy it actually is, dependent on a thousand minor factors, to say nothing of fuel, of roads: on a bicycle a person can go anywhere. And let us not forget: the Vietnam war was won on bicycles against tanks and planes. Repair kit, pump, lamp—easy to carry, almost no luggage at all. And how about all the things you can, if you have to, hang onto a bike or load onto it?

  The sinus condition remained too, right through my stint with the glorious Labor Service and the equally glorious Army; but the moment I became a prisoner of war, in that strange state of simultaneous liberation and imprisonment, and in the years after the war and up to
this very day: gone without a trace! Was it really Nazi-induced? It may well have been, for I was also allergic to the Nazis.

  While still living on Maternus-Strasse, we used to walk across the grim-looking South Bridge, along the Rhine past Poll, through Poll, between wheat fields fragrant with summer, on dusty field paths, the water tower as a landmark ahead of us, toward the fortifications where my brother Alfred was doing his “voluntary” labor service. (Completion of this “voluntary” labor service happened to be “merely” a requirement for entering university.) Those dim, dank casemates built in the 1880s, from which—contrary to expectations since my brother wasn’t yet eligible to leave camp—we asked for him to be summoned! He would emerge looking to me like a convict, thoroughly cowed. As a high school graduate he was automatically an “intellectual” and, as such, had to take a lot of abuse and do the heaviest work. At the camp entrance stood two—always the same two—young yet already worn-out whores, pathetic creatures who for a pittance would lie down in the bushes with anyone who managed to bribe or persuade the sentry. That conglomeration of underground, damp, dismal Wilhelminian fortifications, the smell, the depressing atmosphere, the two whores who weren’t even minimally “dolled up” (they were the only ones available for miles around)—all of that was anything but uplifting. We would take along a few cigarettes, chat dejectedly for a while, conscious of the barbarity of visits in or outside any barracks. (Oh, Lili Marleen, don’t you know we never stood “by the lantern?” Who would ever choose to stand with a girl, let alone his girl, by the lantern outside “the heavy door?” In the darkest corner along the wall, that’s where we stood—and it wasn’t sweet either: out of your arms back into that stale, sweaty male atmosphere!) Depressed, we would wend our way home, along the railway embankment, the dust of summer on our lips, the smell of the wheat fields—I had it in my heart, my brain, my consciousness, that foretaste, which, only a few years later, turned out to be correct: I knew that I would be caught up in it, that I lacked the strength and the courage to elude the two uniforms in store for me.

  We walked home, summer evening, water tower, railway embankment, wheat fields, the Rhine. Had they already started building the barracks in Poll-Porz that year? That rumor led to many an interrogation and arrest of those who were already claiming something that soon turned out to be true: barracks were being built there, although the Rhineland was still a demilitarized zone. Were the foundations already being laid at that time for the Cologne–Rodenkirchen autobahn bridge, that strategic opening toward the West?

  Once again, and again: school, too, yes. With the two real Nazis among the teachers (both the loudmouth, roughneck type), we had nothing to do, so I had no problems with my teachers, though they may have had some with me. Whenever a student tried to offset his miserable Greek or Latin with his uniform (which didn’t happen very often), Mr. Bauer, whom I had as a teacher from the fourth to the twelfth grades, would catch my eye. There was no need for words between us; he was a democrat, a humanist, not even remotely obsessed with war. He pointed out how relevant to our own time was the element of parody in Greek comedy; sometimes he would talk about smoking cigars and drinking sherry; he overlooked impudence; and later he read Juvenal with us. Juvenal and Tacitus were his Latin favorites. (I saw Bauer one last time, in the late fall of 1944, from a moving hospital train: he was in a wheelchair on the station platform in Ahrweiler or Remagen.)

  Problems with teachers? No. Even my problem with our teacher of religion subsided. I didn’t even have one with our gym teacher: although I was “exempt from gym” (hence, in the eyes of a gym teacher, almost asocial), he would sometimes invite me to his home or ask me to take part illicitly in a rounders match against another school. I wasn’t a bad batter—it ran in the family, my two older brothers being practically rounders stars, and we had played a lot on the meadows of the Vorgebirg Park. So there I would be, illicitly hitting the ball beside Aachen Pond or in Blücher Park in a game against one of the Cologne high schools.

  One thing I must make clear: I never thought of myself as being better than my classmates, or even “untainted,” merely—oh, tiny “merely”!—alien, everything going on outside of me seemed alien and became more and more alien. Only my bike and my truancy saved me from shutting myself away in my room, yet now I was spending more time there, translating Latin or Greek texts for my own pleasure, and, long before I reached eighteen, I must have been well on the way to turning from an outsider into an eccentric. My bike wasn’t my only salvation; there were also a few girls.

  However, my progress was far from reassuring. My family, our friends, were justifiably worried, and more and more often the question was asked: “What’s to become of the boy?” My brothers and sisters all either had a profession or were clearly on the road to one: schoolteacher, bookkeeper, cabinetmaker, theology student. Theology? Not so farfetched, and it would have offered an escape, but within minutes I had decided and declared that theology was not for me. As a study it had its attractions, but in those days theology and the priesthood were synonymous, and to that there was an obstacle that I would like to define as discreetly as possible: the beauties and other charms—profound and less profound—of the female sex were no secret to me, and I was of no mind to renounce them. Celibacy—what a horrifying word that was! To start out by contemplating double moral standards was beyond all consideration, and in those days such a thing as laicization (but then why become a priest if you are already speculating about laicization?) was as unimaginable as a trip to the moon. And finally: vestigia terrebant. The traces were frightening. I knew of cases of entanglements with family and friends, of those who had “tripped,” “stumbled,” “slipped,” “fallen”; and many a one essaying a trip to the moon had landed flat on his face.

  My father had done a lot of work for churches and monasteries, and his knowledge of that world, which he did not withhold from us, was more than adequate; probably it explained why he had strictly forbidden us to act as altar boys (an activity, by the way, that had never even remotely appealed to me). And then, of course, there was—an option that was vigorously discussed, there being plenty of theology students around—the path of “sublimation,” but I hadn’t the slightest desire to sublimate that.

  10

  The view is occasionally expressed that, after January 30, 1933, the day of Hitler’s seizure of power, some kind of economic miracle took place. However, as far as our family is concerned, I cannot affirm this. The fact of my brother’s having joined the Storm Troopers availed us nothing (variation of the Rosary line: “Thou who hast joined the Storm Troopers for our sakes in vain”). We were worse off than before 1933, and that can’t have been due entirely to “political unreliability.” My father had many well-disposed, old friends in government positions. Nevertheless, our most time-consuming and laborious occupation continued to be: opening up new credit for groceries or paying off old accounts so we could buy on credit again, and then the never-ending burden of: the rent.

  To this day I don’t know what we lived on. How? To say we lived “from hand to mouth” would be euphemistic. There is no doubt—and I suggest the political economists cudgel their brains before they shake their heads—that we lived beyond and below our means. One thing is verifiable: we survived, so those years were a kind of survival training. If there were any films, data, or bookkeeping relative to that time, I would gladly study them in order to discover how, but there are no records: there were merely repeated family councils where lists were drawn up, budgets decided upon, and pocket money—according to age and sex (“But the girls need stockings!”)—was entered in my father’s little black notebooks. All that might be called quite “literary.” But as for being an economic miracle, far from it. There were frequent quotations from Dickens, especially Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, who, as we know, was a mathematical wizard, a financial genius—although unrecognized—able to calculate to the last penny precisely how one rose to affluence, descended to poverty—and who was forever landing in t
he debtors’ prison. My father was in no sense a Mr. Micawber: he was serious and conscientious, desperate too, with a certain inclination to “escape into the never-never,” preferring to live beyond rather than below his means.

  And so in 1936 we moved again—for the third time in six years. It was the last time my parents moved house, the bombs took care of the rest; it was an “escape into the never-never,” into a somewhat more expensive area, to Karolinger-Ring, into an apartment that had been built thirty years earlier as “high-style accommodation.” Having had two “furnished gentlemen” on Ubier-Ring and one on Maternus-Strasse, we now permitted ourselves the luxury (might as well go down in style!) of having none at all. In view of our financial situation, which was anything but improved, that move was certainly not logical, but it was consistent. We had the mad, perhaps even criminal, desire to live and to survive. Somehow we managed.