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

ever established who had actually shot the two men. The trial began in July; in September, seven of the seventeen accused were condemned to death, and on November 3 they were beheaded with an ax. All pleas for mercy had been rejected. There was no pardon. Göring, Minister-President of Prussia, declared: “As a result of these incidents I have decided not to wait another day but to intervene with an iron fist. In future anyone who lays violent hands on a representative of the National Socialist movement or a representative of the State must realize that he will lose his life in short order.”
    The reason for my placing that event one year later, in the fall of 1934, may have something to do with June30, 1934, that ultimate brutal step to the seizure of total power. That day has remained in my memory as a crucial signal—perhaps because the time up until June 30 seemed relatively quiet to me. Nowadays I often think of those seven young Communists in view of the miserably embarrassing palaver over recognition of the resistance group known as the Edelweiss pirates.
    One thing I do know, even if the date has shifted in my memory: on the day of the executions, shock hung over Cologne, fear and shock, the kind that before a thunderstorm makes birds flutter up into the sky and seek shelter. It became quiet, quieter; I no longer made flippant remarks about Hitler, except at home, and even there not in everyone’s presence.
    One of the executed men, the youngest, aged nineteen, wrote poems in his death cell. The place where they were written, the fate of the author, lift those lines far beyond what one might patronizingly call “touching,” which is why, for fear of diminishing their deadly seriousness, I won’t quote them. The poems, written by a Red Front fighter, reveal the “Italian” nature of Cologne Communism (as it then was). In one poem he gives thanks for the candles lighted for him in church, admitting that he was present at the deed and declaring that he did not commit murder; at the end of the poem he thanks his friend, a Red Front fighter, for having prayed with him at night—and asks that the Lord’s Prayer be said at his grave.
    For Göring, whose soldier-emperor fantasies seemed, in the observations of many of his contemporaries, comical if not almost endearing—for that robber, that murderer,that bloodthirsty fool, I and many other Cologne school-kids were soon lining the streets. During those few hours in Cologne, he changed uniforms three if not four times. It surprises me that some waggish moviemaker has not yet discovered this character: that masklike face with its glittering morphine addict’s eyes, that “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that inflated Nimrod, known later as “Herr Meyer”—surely the perfect subject for a movie farce! As it was, his scenes with Dimitroff, the Bulgarian Communist, during the Reichstag fire trial did much to enhance our considerable political amusement. At the time when the executions were announced, however, the entire city trembled under that bloody fist—it’s possible, of course, that I was crediting the whole city with my own horror.

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    School? Oh yes, that too. Soon I had reached that level of education known as “lower school-leaving certificate.” For serious economic reasons my family considered taking me out of school and putting me to work as an apprentice. One possibility being considered was land surveying (“You’ll always be out in the fresh air”—my aversion to fug being well known—“besides, it’s a nice way of earning a living, what with math and all that, which you’re so fond of”). Another suggestion: a commercial apprenticeship with a coffee wholesaler on (I forget whether Grosse or Kleine) Witsch-Gasse, where a friend of ours had some connections. Land surveyor: that really didn’t sound too bad, and for a few hours I wavered, until I realized that it would mean a more or less bureaucratic occupation: that smelled of being