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

over the place on my bike, for once (why “for once” will be explained—patience!) even in the center of town, at the Heumarkt, the Neumarkt, the cathedral, the railway station. Something was in the air, people were talking in whispers and undertones, full of hope—until at last Hitler spoke and the “special editions” appeared on the streets. I bought one and when I got home took the little bundle of Alva cigarette cards out of my desk drawer, the series showing all the prominent Nazis. I sorted out all those who had been shot: it was a tidy little pile. The faces that remain in my memory are those of Heines and Röhm.
    That was—and we were aware of it—not merely the final seizure of power but also the ultimate test of power, the final unmasking of von Papen and Hindenburg. Klausener, Jung, and Schleicher were among the murdered, and apparently no one said a word, at least not audibly; no one said a word, nothing happened. It was the dawn of the eternity of Nazism. Did the middle classes, the Nationalists, know what was happening, the pass they had come to? I am afraid they still don’t know: one of the most ludicrous days in German history, the day of Potsdam, March 21, 1933, when Hindenburg handed Germany over to a gentleman in a tailcoat, must have blinded them all.
    That same year, right after June 30, according to a decree that had been made before June 30, the weeklyNational Youth Day was introduced; it didn’t become law—that, I believe, didn’t happen until 1939; it was merely decreed . Just try to imagine the situation: a state in which a character, a jerk, like Baldur von Schirach, was in control of the entire youth of the country! We knew, although meanwhile it appears to have been forgotten, that he was a poet: a German poet in control of German youth! From among his many poems there was one line we knew by heart, and we would hum and recite it sotto voce: “I was a leaf so free, searching for my tree.” (Must I at this point come to the aid of praiseworthy lyric interpretation and explain who the leaf so free was and who the tree? I will if you like!) Sometime before 1933, when the University of Cologne was still on Claudius-Strasse, only a minute away from us, Schirach had been beaten up by “leftist students” after a poetry reading. So it was this jerk of a Schirach who had complete control over German youth, and German parents allowed him to hold sway over their sons and daughters.
    Of the approximately two hundred boys at our school there were three who on National Youth Day were not exempted from classes to allow them to be “on duty.” Being “on duty” probably meant participating in some sort of paramilitary sports: I don’t know exactly, I never asked the other boys about it, not even those I did my homework with. We talked about movies and girls, not about politics, and when one of them tried to raise the subject I shut up. I was scared, whereas at home I could talk, even if one of them was present: surely no one would dare denounce our family. Today I sometimesthink that some relatively high Nazi, who never revealed himself, must have “held his hand over our family.”
    So on Saturdays (Saturday being a regular school day) we three, Bollig, Koch, and myself, had to go to school and, under the supervision of a teacher, who obviously found it a bore and a nuisance (I suppose otherwise he would have had the day off), tidy up the school library. Every Saturday for three years we three tidied up that tiny little library housed in a room next to what used to be the caretaker’s quarters. Not one title, not one author, not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory. No, I certainly didn’t suffer, and I met with no difficulty whatever, not the slightest. I assume that after two Saturdays there was nothing left to tidy in what was from the start a tidy library; so we would smoke cigarettes (if we had any), drink school cocoa, go out for some ice cream, kill time.