What's to Become of the Boy? Read Free

“Eastern agricultural support scandal,” on which even our extremely reticent Kölnische Volkszeitung had reported, had deprived “the venerable old field marshal” of the last shred of what had been at best minimal credit—not politically, merely the shred of moral credit that people had been willing to attribute to his “Prussian integrity.”
    My mother hated Hitler from the very beginning(unfortunately she didn’t live to see his death); she dubbed him Rövekopp , “turnip head,” an allusion to the traditional St. Martin’s torches roughly carved from sugar beets and leaving, wherever possible, something resembling a moustache. Hitler—he was beyond discussion, and his long-time delegate in Cologne, a certain Dr. Robert Ley (try to imagine a character like Ley later in control of the entire German work force!), had done little to render Hitler and his Nazis worthy of discussion: they were nothing more than the “howling void,” without the human dimension that might have merited the term “rabble.” The Nazis were “not even rabble.” My mother’s war theory was hotly denied: the fellow wouldn’t even last long enough to be able to start a war. (As the world discovered to its consternation, he lasted long enough.)
    I forget how long I had to stay in bed. The flu epidemic gave a modest boost to the liquor stores; cheap rum was in demand—in the form of grog, it was said to offer cure or prevention. We bought moderate quantities of it in a shop at the corner of Bonner-Strasse and Darmstädter-Strasse: the proprietor’s name was, I believe, Volk, and he had a son with flaming red hair who went to our school. I forget whether the burning of the Reichstag building, the “excellent timing” of which was noted by many, occurred while I was still sick or during term time or even during vacation (at some point there must have also been the Carnival!). In any event, before the March election I was going back to school; and only after that election—one so easily forgets that the results just barely provided a majority for a coalition between Nazis andthe German National Party—in April or May the first Hitler Youth shirts appeared in school, and one or two Storm Trooper uniforms in the higher grades.
    There was also—I forget exactly when—a book-burning, an embarrassing, in fact a pathetic, exercise. The Nazi flag was hoisted, but I can’t remember anyone making a speech, hurling anathemas at title after title, author after author, tossing books into the fire. The books must have been placed there, a little heap, in advance, and since that book-burning I know that books don’t burn well. Someone must have forgotten to pour gasoline over them. I also find it hard to imagine that the modest library of our high school (which, although called the Kaiser Wilhelm State High School, was extremely Catholic) could have contained much “decadent” literature. The background of virtually the whole student body was lower middle class with few “excrescences” either upward or downward. It’s possible that one or other of the teachers privately sacrificed his Remarque or his Tucholsky to feed the funeral pyre. Be that as it may, none of these authors was listed in the curriculum; and after the tangible, the visible and audible, barbarities occurring between January 30 and the Reichstag fire—increasingly so between Reichstag fire and March election—this act of symbolic barbarity was perhaps not all that impressive.
    The nonsymbolic purges were visible and audible, were tangible: Social Democrats disappeared (Sollmann, Görlinger, and others), as did politicians of the Catholic Center Party and, needless to say, Communists, and it was no secret that the Storm Troopers were establishingconcentration camps in the fortifications around Cologne’s Militär-Ring: expressions such as “protective custody” and “shot while trying to escape” became familiar; even some of my father’s friends were caught up