What's to Become of the Boy? Read Free Page B

only on the way to school), that education, if you prefer, turned out to be very useful to me in later years in many of the black markets of Europe. (I have dealt elsewhere with the fact that a dedicated feeling for legality does not form part of the Cologne attitude to life.)
    So the Dutch merchandise would reach home safe and sound, and I would receive my cut in the form of fragrant cigarettes. On one occasion, I must admit, I was diddled: the neat little package with its Dutch revenue stamp contained, instead of twenty-five cigarettes, approximately twenty-five grams of … potato peelings! To thisday I fail to understand why potato peelings, and not, say, sawdust or woodshavings. They had been carefully weighed, evenly distributed, packed in foil. (Contempt for wax seals, lead seals, bailiff’s seals, revenue stamps—also a kind of seal—ingrained in me by my mother, turned out, after the war, to be my undoing when I broke the seal of an electricity meter and tampered with it—unfortunately in a detectable manner. Bailiff’s seals were promptly removed as a matter of course.) I was enjoined by my brother in future to check the goods and was still puzzling over how , since everything had to be done so quickly, when suddenly the entire smuggling operation was smashed. Certain streets were virtually under siege, and I recall at least one armored vehicle. Police and customs agents—in the end without shooting—cleared out the whole smugglers’ nest: there were rumors of millions of confiscated cigarettes and numerous arrests.

4
    Yes, school, I know—I’ll get back to that. I was still in the eighth grade, and my route to school became even quieter. For a time I must have been walking with my head down, since one day my father offered me a prize if I could name twenty-five stores between St. Severin’s Church and Perlen-Graben. I lifted my head once again and won the prize: I also lifted my head to read Der Stürmer , the newspaper in its display case outside the former trade-union building on Severin-Strasse, not far from the corner that goes off to Perlen-Graben. What I read did not enhance my sympathies for the Nazis. (Today, alas, that area is a desert; war and the Nord-Süd freeway saw to that. Yet that little square outside the Church of St. John the Baptist used to be bustling with life.)
    Not always with the prior but always with the subsequent approval of my mother, I went often to the school of the streets. (As reported elsewhere, my mother anyway used to run a kind of center for non-family truants under the coffee grinder that hung on the kitchen wall.) So, if I went to the school of the streets, it wasn’t because my high school was particularly Nazist or Nazi-tainted. It was not, and I remember most of my teachers without any resentment at all. I don’t even feel resentment toward our teacher of religion, although I argued with him—tothe point of being kicked out of the classroom. The points of dispute were not the Nazis; on that score he was not vulnerable. On the contrary, I recall an excellent lecture he gave on the sentimental and commercial background to the Day of the German Mother. What aroused my ire was the overriding bourgeois element in his teaching. It was against this that I rebelled so inarticulately; he had no idea what I meant or how I meant it, he was more confused than angry.
    The cause of my rebellion could be found in the totally indefinable social situation in which we found ourselves: had our financial plight lowered our social status or made us classless? To this day I don’t know. We were neither true lower middle class nor conscious proletarians, and we had a strong streak of the Bohemian. “Bourgeois” had become a dirty word for us. The elements of those three classes, to none of which we truly belonged, had made what might be called “bourgeois” Christianity absolutely insufferable to us. Our teacher of religion probably never understood what I had in mind, and I