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

who, not surprisingly, had been a particularly enthusiastic member of the Catholic youth movement. That was the extent of what I had to put up with in school. I had no trouble with my classmates; they had known me and I them for five or six years; there were arguments but no attempts at conversion. Some disapproved of my occasional flippant remarks about Hitler and other Nazi bigwigs, but none of them, not even the S.S. member, would ever, I believe, have dreamed of denouncing me. I felt no resentment, not even toward the teachers. We still thought it possible that the Nazis wouldn’t last; sometimes we’d even laugh in anticipation of further opportunistic contortions of the “bourgeoisie” when  … But who would then take over none of us tried to predict.
    I kept up my friendships with several of my classmates even after graduation (although I avoided that S.S. fellow: in the three years preceding graduation I doubt if I exchanged more than two sentences with him). We pored over our homework together, and I tried to help some of them over that strange German math trauma, with the zeal of the convert: not long before, my brother Alfred had cured me of this trauma by systematically and patiently “probing back” to my basic knowledge, discovering gaps, closing them, and thus giving me a firm foundation. That had led us to such an enthusiasm for math that we spent weeks trying to discover a method of trisecting the angle, and sometimes we felt so close to the solution that we spoke only in whispers. The “furnished gentleman” living in the next room had a degree in engineering, which might have enabled him to appropriate our discovery.
    Yes, I pored over textbooks with them, crammed for math and Latin (another of those traumatic subjects that fortunately never developed into a trauma for me). Sometimes we spent the evening in my father’s office in the rear courtyard of the building at 28 Vondel-Strasse. Money being scarce and cigarettes and tobacco expensive, we would buy the very cheapest kind of cigars (five pfennigs each), cut them up with a razor blade, and roll them into cigarettes. (Today I am sure we were suffering from an economic delusion.) The tiny office building was seductively cozy, built entirely of wood, something between a log cabin and a shed. It contained fine, solidly built closets, with sliding doors of green glass, for the storage of metalfittings and drawings: little neo-Gothic turrets, miniature columns, flowers, figures of saints; designs for confessionals, pulpits, altars and communion benches, furniture; and there was also an old copying press from pre–World War I days, and a few remaining cartons of light bulbs for bayonet sockets, although we had shot hundreds of them to pieces in the garden on Kreuznacher-Strasse. Green desk lamps, a big table with a green linoleum top; slabs of glue, tools. When it came to gluing, the generational conflict between my father and my brother Alois was concentrated on the “barbaric, revolutionary” invention of cold glue, which my father didn’t trust, while my brother demonstrated its reliability; but my father insisted on hot, boiled glue, the way it had to be prepared in the glue pot, with constant stirring, from the honey-colored slabs. There was no lack of other conflicts, but they have no place here.

5
    Yes, also school, but first, in that horror-year of 1933 after Hitler’s seizure of power, the Reichstag fire, terror, the March election, and the body blow of the Reich Concordat, something happened that caused even the middle classes of Cologne to tremble. In July—the Concordat had been completed but not yet signed—the trial took place in Cologne of seventeen members of the Red Front Fighters’ League, for murder in two cases, attempted murder in one: the murders of Storm Troopers Winterberg and Spangenberg, who had just recently converted from the Communist Party to the Nazis. But seventeen murderers? Nobody believed that, nor was it