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

Usually the teacher in charge left us to our own devices from ten o’clock on and went home or to a café, putting Mirgeler the caretaker in charge, who in turn let us off by eleven o’clock at the latest.
    Mirgeler was a kind, gentle person, one of the few disabled veterans who didn’t talk about his war experiences. One could feel he was on our side, not explicitly—that would have been too dangerous and we didn’t expect it of him. And of course one could always be sick on Saturday or get sick. With Mirgeler and several of the teachers, there was no need for explicitness, the expression on their faces was enough. For some of the teachers, as well as for Mirgeler, we were, at least after the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, morituri , and that softenedmany a severe reprimand or punishment that would have been deserved in “normal times.” If I were to say that, with the introduction of Schirach’s National Youth Day, the pressure was increased, it would be an exaggeration. From time to time—not often, later not at all—we were summoned to the principal, one by one, and he would try to persuade us to join the Hitler Youth or, later, the Storm Troopers. He did not really press us, it was more of a plea, alluding, not very convincingly, to its being “for our own good.” Obviously he was running into trouble, we three were lousing up the statistics. Quite clearly he didn’t feel at ease on these occasions, and his pleas were in vain: we remained adamant all the time we were in school. I have always wondered why no personal friendships developed among us three. They didn’t. Moreover, one or another of us was always absent those Saturdays, sometimes two of us or even all three. Eventually there was hardly so much as a pretense of checking up on that strange “library work.”
    The pleas in the principal’s arguments were more dangerous than threats would have been, for—and I’m sorry to say he probably never discovered this—I rather liked him. He was gentler than he sometimes pretended or had to pretend to be, the type of person known as strict but fair, yet easily moved to tears: a good history teacher, and, besides Latin and math, history was one of my favorite and deliberately orchestrated courses. It is he whom I have to thank for my early insight into the nature of colonialism as exemplified by the Roman Empire; insight into the parasitic bribed-vote existence ofthe rabble of ancient Rome. He was probably what today I would call “blinded” by Hindenburg, a fatal attribute of many decent Germans: patriotic, not nationalistic, certainly not Nazist, but very much the veteran, fond of telling us about tight situations in trench warfare where as a young officer he had been wounded in the head; yet also Catholic, a Rhinelander with a gentle “von” to his name.
    When the first former student of our school was killed in the Spanish Civil War, a member of the Condor Legion who was shot down—possibly over Guernica—he organized a memorial service and, with tears in his eyes, made a moving speech. I didn’t feel comfortable at this service, didn’t want to share his emotion although I had known the dead man, who had been a classmate of my brother’s. Today I interpret that vague feeling of discomfort as follows: school prepared us not for life but for death. Year after year, German high school graduates were being prepared for death. Was dying for the Fatherland the supreme merit? To put it flippantly: at that service one might have gained the impression that our principal was sad at not having been killed at Langemarck. I know that sounds harsh, but I am not being unfair to a dead man: in the final analysis, the fatal role played by those highly educated, unquestionably decent German high school teachers led to Stalingrad and made Auschwitz possible: that Hindenburg blindness. I can’t swear to the degree of truth contained in the following supposition: it has been said that the principal was