Not I (18 page)

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 of 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.

12
Friedrich von Matthisson (1761–1831); Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty (1748–76), author of ballads and emotionally evocative poems; the Stolberg brothers, Counts Christian (1748–1821) and Friedrich Leopold (1750–1819), are best known as Goethe’s travel companions; both dabbled in poetry and drama.

13
August Count von Platen (1796–1835) was a master poet who preferred demanding forms like sonnets and ghasels; he also wrote popular ballads and political songs. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, whose complex and profound works span a wide variety of forms; the poems cited here and later are an integral part of any educated German’s cultural vocabulary.

14
This is actually the last line of Goethe’s poem “Nachtgesang” and the first line of a poem by Hoffmann von Fallersleben written in 1840.

15
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–98) is famous for his tightly constructed, powerful prose and poetry, including oft-quoted ballads blending form, rhythm, and content in masterful fashion. Emil Strauss (1866–1960) was a minor prose writer, mainly known for the novel mentioned here.

16
This complex of several large museums, dedicated to major exhibits of ancient monuments and art as well as paintings through the ages, is located on an island and constitutes the heart of Berlin’s immense collection of cultural treasures even today.

17
The reference here is to the de facto dictatorship of Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, the plenipotentiary ruler of Hungary from 1920 through 1944.

18
This reference to Hungary’s national dance, the
csárdás
, invokes the popular stereotype among German speakers of the Hungarians’ alleged fiery temperament, in love and argument.

19
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), writer and pacifist, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 before his novels were discovered by British and American youth of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, especially his novel
Steppenwolf
.

20
Thomas Mann (1875–1955), novelist and antifascist exile, received the Nobel Prize in 1929 and became controversial politically with his public pronouncements in critical essays; after 1918 he offended the German patriots on the right, after 1945 he was distrusted by the left. His many novels and novellas reflect on the incompatibility of ordinary life and the life of the spirit or mind, especially as manifested in the artist’s sensibilities. Refusing the blandishments of both postwar German states, he settled in neutral but German-speaking Switzerland.