What's to Become of the Boy? Read Online Free

probably didn’t express it clearly enough. (Obviously the author has always irked, and been irked by, church and state. And, being a true son of Cologne, he has never taken secular and ecclesiastical authority very seriously, much less regarded them as important!)
    Merely lowered socially or truly classless? The question remains unanswered. The other subjects, aside from religion? I can’t remember anything special about them. Even in those days I was gradually starting to “orchestrate” school. And, since I did respect the intelligenceof our teacher of religion, who, although bourgeois to the marrow, made no concessions to the Nazis, I began from time to time to attend school mass in the Franciscan Church on Ulrich-Gasse. It made for a change in my usual route along Rosen-Strasse. As for the church, I found it (no other word occurs to me) disgusting, with its corny statues and decorations and the stale smells emanating from the congregation. There is only one word for those smells: fug , trying to pass itself off as fervor. I went there quite pointedly, with only occasionally the aim of offering some slight consolation to our teacher of religion, since I certainly didn’t hate him: it was just that sometimes we had violent arguments. He obviously suffered from high blood pressure, and some of the boys in the Hitler Youth couldn’t resist taking advantage of him: not on their own—they could have done that before 1933—but by virtue of their uniforms and potential rank (there was all that braid!). He was helpless and unsuspecting, had no idea that their attitude was a mark of the “bourgeois” element’s turning against him, that the boys who, until March 1933, had been good young Catholics now were sniffing the “new age” and intended to make the most of it. This harassment didn’t last long, nor did it get worse; it soon died down, but our last lessons with him, barely three years later, were terrible, though for quite different reasons. No doubt he still considered me a Catholic, if not good.
    But it was my own “Catholicity” that I was beginning to doubt, the more so after a further heavy blow: the signing of the Reich Concordat with the Vatican engineeredby von Papen and Monsignor Kaas. After the seizure of power, the Reichstag fire, and the March election, it was, incredibly, the Vatican that accorded the Nazis their first major international recognition. Some members of our family—myself among them—seriously considered leaving the church, but that had become so fashionable among all those Germans who couldn’t wait to join the Nazi Party after the March 1933 election that we didn’t, since it might have been misconstrued as homage to the Nazis. That didn’t exempt us from considerable crises, both existential and political, yet in the midst of that time of crisis, I took part in a procession, strutting proudly along as I carried a great flag (white with an enormous blue Junge Front , the last weekly of Catholic youth until its brave demise. I was recruited for this job by Otto Vieth over streusel cake and ersatz coffee in the garden of St. Vincent’s Hospitalin Cologne-Nippes. The job was also a source of income: the ten pfennigs paid for each copy of the Junge Front didn’t have to be turned in until the following week and helped us over many a straitened weekend.
    At the time there was also a theory, almost officially sanctioned by the church, that one should join the Nazi organizations in order to “Christianize them from within”—whatever that may have meant, for to this day no one seems to know what “Christianization” consists of. A considerable number—among them our principal, I believe—acted on this theory, and after the war many of them, left in the lurch in the denazification process, had to pay for it.
    Although I had long since ceased to be “organized,” I still ostentatiously wore theinsignia on my lapel and more than once had to take abuse from an older student