What's to Become of the Boy? (7 page)

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 school: 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.

Mainz: that broad-hipped Romanesque cathedral of red sandstone was more to my liking than Cologne Cathedral; even in Cologne I had felt greater affinity with the gray Romanesque churches. My father was a good guide through churches and museums. And for me, coming as I did from an almost completely un-Baroque city, Würzburg was both alien and pleasing: a different world, “occupied” not only by churches and palaces but
also by Leonhard Frank’s
Robber Band
, which we boys had devoured. In Bamberg I was surprised by the coolness of the statue of my namesake to which I was really making a pilgrimage. The princely horseman, whose picture probably hung over the desk or bed of almost every young German, seemed cold to me, clever and competent—he inspired no affection in me. When I got home, I took down his picture from the wall and put it in a drawer. Devout Catholic though he was, he seemed to me—I couldn’t help it—“somehow Protestant,” and, after all,
Catholic
was what we wanted to be and to remain, in spite of all our derisive laughter and abuse. That was why the appearance, shortly before the end of 1936, of Leon Bloy’s
Blood of the Poor
hit us like a bombshell, a long way indeed from the Dostoievski bombshell, yet in its effect, similar to it. Add to this the pyrotechnics of Chesterton—a strange mixture, I know, into which German literature, even the banned and officially disgraced literature, didn’t enter.
Buddenbrooks
did, peripherally, but someone like Tucholsky not at all; Kästner yes. For the rest, though, everything smacked of “Berlin,” and Berlin was not loved, was even less loved since the Nazis had taken it over. Unfair, I know (meanwhile I have learned a bit more).

15

For some time now an innovation for secondary schools had existed: training camps. The oldest students from two different schools would spend three weeks together in a youth hostel so as to become acquainted with each other, the countryside, and the local people, as well as attending lectures and taking part in marches and sports. I participated fully in the first one, in Zülpich, where we joined the parallel class of Aloysius College. Father Hubert Becher, that kindly, cultured Jesuit, had a mitigating influence. We marched through the vast sugarbeet fields of that “Merovingian land,” visited Roman ruins, felt the spirit of Chlodwig. We went over an old textile factory in Euskirchen where bales and bales of army cloth were being produced. I passed up another camp in Oberwesel—I forget whether it was the last or the last but one—by more or less extorting an impressive medical certificate from our family doctor. Then there was another one in Ludweiler near Völklingen on the Saar at which I stayed for half the time, but there the loud-mouthed Hitler Youth mentality was already so prevalent that I lost my nerve and simply went home. In Ludweiler the writer Johannes Kirchweng read to us from his works. He didn’t seem—to me at any rate—entirely at ease with the whole thing, and by “thing” I mean all that Nazi business and
those claims to lost German territory. Johannes Kirchweng, worker’s son and Catholic priest, seemed a nice fellow, but tired and sad, probably didn’t quite trust his recent fame and was already foreseeing its abuse. He read from an autobiographical novel in which he described the harsh conditions of his father’s working world, that of a glassblower. He did not, as I have just discovered, reach a great age: at his death in 1951 he was fifty-one, so in 1935 or 1936 he must have been thirty-five or thirty-six. I remember him as a very old man, a nice fellow and tired (and that reminds me of Heinrich Lersch, whose novel
Hammer Blows
was also about his father and
his
craft, that of a boilermaker).

In the taverns of Ludweiler or Völklingen, workmen would tell us in whispers that, instead of being able to buy French Riz-La cigarette paper for five pfennigs, they now had to pay fifteen pfennigs for the German Gizeh paper; but of course, they said, they weren’t Frenchmen, you know, they were Germans of course, you know. Völklingen, the Röchling steel works, the strikes and all that, and why didn’t we take a look at the foundry? It certainly wasn’t pleasant or edifying: it smelled of poverty, stale, of a stifling all-pervading Catholicism. There was also—and not only because of the cigarette paper—a certain wistfulness expressed not openly but in whispers.

And in the evening at the youth hostel there was all that whooping and hollering of the triumphant Hitler Youth, and their threats against us—me and my friend Caspar Markard—because when they sang the Horst Wessel Song we would start up with: “If all are now
unfaithful, then faithful we’ll remain.” I lost my nerve (as often happened later), I suppose one might say I was “hypersensitive”—or was I more than just an outsider, was I already an eccentric? At any rate, I simply went home, again with a taste of things to come. Yes, we sang: “If all are now unfaithful,” and I wrote not only love poems but patriotic ones too, and I read Stefan George, whom I never for a moment regarded as a Nazi. Caspar Markard had been expelled from Brühl High School on account of political remarks and activities that were dubbed “Communist,” and our school had accepted him.

16

It must not be forgotten that we were moving toward war. I bought Barbusse and Remarque. Barbusse impressed me more than Remarque. In school—that’s how it seemed, or how it seems to me today—the last vestiges of strictness, of severity even, disappeared, the kind that had been prevalent from teacher to student. There were arguments, but they were between younger and older
adults;
they were serious ones, they had lost their schoolboy character.

Our math teacher, Mr. Müllenmeister (known as MM), who was considered unusually strict and bore the marks of World War I but never talked about it, proved to be the mildest of all: during the late summer and fall he hardly disguised his efforts to familiarize us with the geometry and algebra questions we might expect in our final exams. In the eleventh grade, almost a third of the class, five or six students, had been failed, perhaps because the school wished to present a trim, secure graduating class: thirteen of us remained, awaiting graduation. That last school summer, the last school fall, seem to have lasted forever. There was not only the cultural pilgrimage to the statue of Heinrich II in Bamberg, not only the usual preparations for our final exams during which, using dictionaries as a concordance, we tried to work out what Latin and Greek texts to expect: there
were also the Olympic Games, with the enormous, utterly depressing propaganda success, both at home and abroad, of the Nazis. And in a “postlude” in the Cologne stadium we saw the totally un-Germanic Olympic winners Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, the latter making the sign of the cross before the start of the race. A champion who was a Catholic and a Negro!

That summer my friend Caspar Markard took me along to meet Robert Grosche, the priest who had retired from the city to live in the country at Vochem near Brühl, where he used to receive a small group of students for a sort of weekly seminar. Grosche, the classic Rhinelander, the classic, highly educated abbé, the Claudel translator and expert, one of Germany’s first truly ecumenical priests, yet intensely Roman: his study, crammed with books and always filled with pipe smoke, was an island that fascinated and at the same time intimidated me. We discussed “salvation arising from the Jews,” he lent us books to which he had drawn our attention. As a sideline Grosche was also editor of the Cologne bookdealers’ “literary guide.” Those were unforgettable evenings. Grosche was very West European yet very German, with a surprising admixture of nationalism; very Catholic, witty, of high caliber, courageous. We were sure he was a “born” cardinal, born to be the future Bishop of Cologne. But no: when Cardinal Schulte died, he was followed by Frings. Maybe Grosche was too lofty for the Vatican, perhaps even too cultured, and whether he would have suited the Nazis, who, according to the Concordat, had a say in the matter, is uncertain.

Here I will permit myself a brief speculation beyond the year 1937: Grosche, rather than Frings, Cardinal and Archbishop of Cologne after 1945; Grosche, who certainly favored and would have favored the Christian Democrats, as the decisive figure beside Adenauer in German postwar Catholicism? Things would have turned out differently. Whether better is something I dare not say. Even in those days, on leaving that marvelous, comfortable Vochem study, full of books and tobacco smoke, to go home to Cologne by train or on my bike, I would feel a bit intimidated by so much cultured composure, by that hint of nationalism, and the unmistakable if gentle over-ripeness of the bourgeoisie. It was tremendous to be there, to be with him, but it was not what I was looking for.