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

forcibly organized. Yet, even today, when I drive through the countryside and see land surveyors at work with their instruments and measuring rods, I sometimes indulge in the fancy that I might have become one of them; the office of the coffee wholesaler on (Grosse or Kleine) Witsch-Gasse, when in later years I happened to pass by it, would provoke a strangely gentle nostalgia in me: that would have been , that might have been: although I was firmly resolved to become a writer, the detour via land surveying and thecoffee business wouldn’t have been any worse than other roundabout routes I subsequently took. (It is only now that I can appreciate, comprehend, how utterly horrified my family must have been when, between quitting my bookseller’s apprenticeship and starting my stint in the Labor Service, between February and November 1938, when I was not yet twenty-one—and in the very midst of firmly entrenched Nazi terror—I actually set out to be a free-lance writer.)
    The decision to take me out of school was dropped, as the result of my own strenuous objections and those of my older brothers and sisters. Employment of any kind inexorably meant being organized, and that was a condition I had always avoided and intended to go on avoiding. I enjoyed studying but wasn’t that keen on school, started being bored for long periods of time, and might actually have dropped out if it hadn’t been for the Nazis. But I knew, and was fully aware of the fact: school, that school at any rate, was the best hiding place I could find, and so, strictly speaking, I have the Nazis to thank for my graduation. Perhaps that is why I wasn’t interested in the graduation ceremonies or in my certificate, submitting it unread when I later applied for a job as an apprentice.
    From then on, after having acquired “my lower school-leaving certificate,” I began to orchestrate the school for my own ends. Three more years to graduation, how many more years to war—perhaps less than three? And I was too much of a coward to risk becoming a conscientious objector. That much I knew: the mute,stony-faced men released from concentration camps, the idea of possible torture—no, I didn’t have the guts. To escape the war, no matter where, was simply beyond the realm of the imagination. (Not long ago we were asked by Frank G., aged thirty-seven, born in the last year but one of the war, why we hadn’t emigrated, and we found it hard to explain that such an idea was simply beyond the realm of our imagination: it was as if someone had asked why I hadn’t ordered a taxi to the moon. Of course we knew that people had emigrated: Jewish friends—didn’t I regularly read Der Stürmer in the display box on Severin-Strasse?—and even a man like Brüning, but us? Where to and in what capacity? We were, in a funny way, a Catholic family that happened to be against the Nazis; but all that is hindsight. At the time it was simply way beyond our thoughts. Later I did very briefly consider, and reject, a variation of emigration: desertion to a foreign army. You won’t be that welcome over there, I thought, so I deserted in the other direction—to my home.)
    That same year, 1934, all those who had believed that Hitler wouldn’t last long were refuted: June 30 swept all those hopes away, a summer day rife with rumors, tensions, and a strange, indefinable admixture of euphoria. Surely that couldn’t be true: that so many leading Nazis were criminals and even homosexuals? (That Röhm was one we knew, of course: the slogan “Wash your asses, Storm Troopers, Röhm’s coming!” had been appearing on the walls of buildings before and even after 1933.) When all was said and done, the openness with which dirty linen was now being washed in public was trulyamazing. Perhaps it was a sign of weakness. Within a few hours we realized the obvious: it was a sign of strength, and at long last we knew the meaning of a Party purge.
    We still had no radio, and that day I was all