What's to Become of the Boy?: Or, Something to Do With Books Read online

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  In 1972, Heinrich Böll became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 1917, Böll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of post-war German writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), and The Safety Net (1979). Böll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died in June 1985.

  Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, and the author of several books, including Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction as well as other awards. She has worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator (London), as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist, as well as for several British newspapers. Her work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications.

  The Essential

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  The Clown

  The Safety Net

  Billiards at Half-Past Nine

  The Train Was on Time

  Irish Journal

  Group Portrait with Lady

  What’s to Become of the Boy? Or:

  Something to Do with Books—A Memoir

  The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll

  Translator’s Dedication

  My warm thanks to my husband, William,

  whose skill, knowledge, and patience have

  contributed so much to this translation.

  Leila Vennewitz

  What’s to Become of the Boy?

  Originally published in German as Was soll aus dem

  Jungen bloss werden? by Lamuv Verlag, Bornheim 1981

  Copyright © Lamuv Verlag GmbH., 1981

  Copyright © Heinrich Böll and Leila Vennewitz, 1984

  Introduction © Anne Applebaum, 2011

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House printing: October 2011

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-011-2

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  by Anne Applebaum

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  INTRODUCTION

  by Anne Applebaum

  This is a memoir of Heinrich Böll’s school years. Or rather, it is a memoir of the years 1933 to 1937, when the Nazi party was consolidating its grip on power in Germany, civil society was being dismantled, mass arrests were devastating the political class and, aside from all that, Heinrich Böll went to school in Cologne. “School? Oh yes, that too,” he writes at one point, before addressing another subject. “Yes, school—I assure you I’ll get back to that,” he adds later, before delving once again into stories of how his anti-Nazi family learned to live under Nazi rule.

  This is not, in other words, a traditional German bildungsroman, a memoir of childhood and youth. Though Böll makes glancing references to the bullies, girlfriends, eccentric teachers and other characters of the sort who usually loom large in recollections of adolescence, they are not his central focus. And when he does bring them up, they are inevitably colored by the historical moment. The child Böll dislikes is the one who joins the SS. The teacher he admires is the one who asks his pupils to correct the grammar in Mein Kampf—a task implicitly insulting to the author of Mein Kampf. In his Latin class he is captivated by the work of Juvenal, because his descriptions of “arbitrariness, despotism, depravity, corruption of political mores, the decline of the Republican idea” carry echoes of the world around him.

  But the real drama of this autobiography lies not in school but elsewhere, in the story of how Böll, his parents and his siblings coped with the rise of a totalitarian regime. His parents were liberal Catholics. His mother hated Hitler from the beginning, and referred to him as “turniphead.” His father was a pacifist who had dodged Verdun by simulating an attack of appendicitis on the eve of the battle. Böll exempted himself from the Hitler Youth, and had to come to school every Saturday to carry out community service instead. He never asked the other boys what happened at the rallies he didn’t attend, because, he writes, he was too scared. He dealt with the political pressures of school by frequently playing truant. He wandered the streets of Cologne all day, with the tacit approval of his mother, who understood perfectly why he needed relief from school.

  Böll’s family were not Nazis, but they were not heroes or resistance fighters, or even especially brave or defiant. In Hitler’s Germany, this middle line between collaboration and resistance was not so easy for ordinary people to walk. For refusing to join the regime, the family paid a high price, living at the edge of poverty, counting pennies and arguing over whether a pair of stockings could be considered a legitimate expense. But “material survival took priority over political survival,” and his parents went to great lengths to make sure the family could eat.

  The family also knew its collective lack of enthusiasm was dangerous, particularly for Böll’s father, whose business—he was a cabinetmaker and sculptor—depended on government contracts. Feeling that at least one of them ought to toe the line, his parents appointed Böll’s brother Alois to join the Storm Troopers. Alois resented this for the rest of his life. “He suffered, he really suffered from those mob parades and route marches,” writes Böll, who once slipped Alois’s platoon leader a pack of cigarettes to persuade him to overlook his brother’s frequent absences.

  These kinds of reluctant compromises were surely made by many Germans living under Hitler, far more than we usually assume. In most totalitarian societies, a small portion of people are enthusiastic fanatics, a small portion are brave opponents, and the vast majority want to make sure their children eat dinner every day and graduate from high school. Nazi Germany was no different. Quiet displays of Catholic faith were the only public form of rebellion the Böll family permitted themselves: “We ostentatiously took part in the penitent pilgrimages of the men of Cologne,” Böll writes, “tolerated by the Nazis and watched by informers.” In private, they cursed Hitler and his thuggish friends with what Böll describes as “arrogance,” mocking them and telling jokes.

  What’s to Become of the Boy ends when Böll finishes school—at last—on the eve of the outbreak of war. Afterwards, he went to work at a bookstore, but not for long. He was soon drafted, and spent six miserable years in the Wehrmacht
before deserting in 1945. His first novel drew heavily on these military experiences, and won him instant fame. From the 1950s onwards, Böll was known as a writer of “Trümmerliteratur”—the “literature of the rubble”—because his writing focused on the war, the aftermath of the war, and the impact of the war on German society and the German psyche. In his lifetime, he was one of the most famous advocates of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, an ubiquitous German word which, roughly translated, means “coming to terms with the past.”

  Yet this short description of the years preceding the war also contains many of the themes which Böll would explore in his later novels. The hypocrisy of public life, as opposed to the authenticity of private life; the stupidity of mobs, and of bureaucrats; even Böll’s dislike of the excesses of capitalism is evident here, in his almost nostalgic portrayal of the joys of life without money. His occasionally sanctimonious vision of himself as an “outsider,” someone who never fit into ordinary German life—whether Nazi Germany or postwar bourgeois Germany—is evident here too. So is his elegant, crisp and authoritative literary style.

  In other words, What’s to Become of the Boy makes an ideal short introduction to Böll, the writer, as well as to Böll, the person. At the same time, it offers an unusual perspective on Hitler’s ascent to power: the rise of totalitarianism and the stultification of civil society, as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy.

  WHAT’S TO BECOME OF THE BOY?

  For Samay, Sara, and Boris

  1

  On January 30, 1933, I was fifteen years and six weeks old, and almost exactly four years later, on February 6, 1937, when I was nineteen years and seven weeks old, I graduated from high school with a “Certificate of Maturity.” This certificate contains two errors: my date of birth is incorrect, and my choice of career—“book trade”—was altered by the school principal, without consulting me, to “publishing,” I have no idea why. These two errors, which I cherish, justify me in regarding all the other particulars, including my grades, with some skepticism.

  I didn’t discover either of these errors until two years later, when, as the 1939 university summer term was about to begin, I looked at the certificate before handing it in to the University of Cologne and discovered the incorrect birth date. It would never have occurred to me to have an error of that kind in such a solemn official document corrected: that error permits me to entertain a certain doubt as to whether I am really the person who is certified thereon as mature. Might the document refer to someone else? If so, to whom? This little game also allows me to consider the possibility that the entire document may be invalid.

  There are a few further points that I must clarify. If it should be regarded as mandatory for German authors to have “suffered” under the school system, I must once again appear to have failed in my duty. Of course I suffered (do I hear a voice: “Who, old or young, does not suffer”?), but not in school. I maintain that I never let things get that far. I dealt with each problem as it arose, as I so often did in later life, aware of the implications. How, is something I shall explain later. I did find the transition from elementary to high school briefly painful, but I was ten at the time, so this is not relevant to the period I wish to describe. I was sometimes bored in school, annoyed, chiefly by our religion teacher (and he, of course by me: such comments are to be interpreted bilaterally), but did I “suffer”? No. Further clarification: my unconquerable (and still unconquered) aversion to the Nazis was not revolt: they revolted me, repelled me on every level of my existence: conscious and instinctive, aesthetic and political. To this day I have been unable to find any entertaining, let alone aesthetic, dimension to the Nazis and their era, a fact that makes me shudder when I see certain film and stage productions. I simply could not join the Hitler Youth, I did not join it, and that was that.

  A further clarification (there is yet another to come!): justifiable mistrust of my memory. All this happened forty-eight to forty-four years ago, and I have no notes or jottings to resort to; they were burned or blown to bits in an attic of 17 Karolinger-Ring in Cologne. Moreover, I am no longer sure of how some of my personal experiences synchronize with historical events. For example, I would have bet almost anything that it was in the fall of 1934 that Göring, in his capacity as Prime Minister of Prussia, caused seven young Communists of Cologne to be beheaded with an ax. I would have lost that bet: it was the fall of 1933. And my memory doesn’t betray me when I recall that one morning a schoolmate of mine, a member of the black-uniformed S.S., exhausted yet with the hectic light of the chase still in his eyes, told me they had spent the night scouring the villas of Godesberg for the former cabinet minister Treviranus. Thank God (as I, not he, thought) without success. But when, to make quite sure, I proceed to look it up, I find that Treviranus had already emigrated by 1933; in 1933, the minimum age for membership in the S.S. was eighteen, though we were only sixteen then; thus, this memory cannot be placed earlier than 1935 or 1936. In other words, either Treviranus must have reentered the German Reich illegally in 1935 or 1936, or the S.S. must have been fed wrong information. The story itself—that strange blend of exhaustion and eyes shining with the light of the chase—I can vouch for, but I cannot place it.

  Final clarification or, if you prefer, warning: the title What’s to Become of the Boy? should arouse neither false hopes nor false fears. Not every boy whose family and friends have reason to ask themselves and him this eternally apprehensive question does, after various delays and roundabout approaches, eventually become a writer; and I would like to stress that, at the time it was put, this question was both serious and warranted. In fact, I am not sure whether my mother, were she still alive, wouldn’t still be asking the same question today: “What’s to become of the boy?” Perhaps there are times when we should be asking it about elderly and successful politicians, church dignitaries, writers, et cetera.

  2

  So it is somewhat warily that I now enter upon the “realistic,” the chronologically confused path, wary of my own and other people’s autobiographical pronouncements. The mood and the situation I can vouch for, also the facts bound up with moods and situations; but, confronted with verifiable historical facts, I cannot vouch for the synchronization, as witness the above examples.

  I simply don’t remember whether in January 1933 I was still or no longer a member of a Marian youth fellowship; nor would it be accurate if I were to say that I had “gone to school” for four years under Nazi rule. For I did not go to school for four years; there were, if not countless, certainly uncounted days when—apart from vacations, holidays, sickness, which must in any case be deducted—I didn’t go to school at all. I loved what I might call the “school of the streets” (I can’t say “school of the bushes,” since Cologne’s old town has little, and never had much, in the way of bushes). Those streets between the Waidmarkt and the cathedral, the side streets off the Neumarkt and the Heumarkt, all the streets going right and left down to the cathedral from Hohe Strasse: how I loved roaming around in the town, sometimes not even taking my schoolbag along as an alibi but leaving it at home among the galoshes and long overcoats in the hall closet. Long before I knew Anouilh’s play Traveller without Luggage, that was what I enjoyed being, and I still dream of being one. Hands in pockets, eyes open, street hawkers, pedlars, markets, churches, museums (yes, I loved the museums, I was hungry for education, even if not very assiduous in its pursuit), prostitutes (in Cologne there was hardly a street without them)—dogs and cats, nuns and priests, monks—and the Rhine, that great gray river, alive and lively, beside which I could sit for hours at a time; I used to sit in movie theaters too, in the dusk of the early performances that were frequented by a few idlers and unemployed people. My mother knew a lot, suspected some things but not all. According to family rumors—which, like all family rumors, must be taken with a grain of salt—during the last three years of those four Nazi school years, I spent less than half the time in school. Yes, those were my school days, but I didn’t spend all my days in
school, so that in trying to describe those four years, I can only make an “also” tale out of them, for the fact is that I “also” went to school.

  3

  Forty-eight years going back, from 1981 to 1933, and four years going forward, from 1933 to 1937: in this leapfrog procession some things must fall by the wayside. The man of sixty-three smiles down upon the boy of fifteen, but the boy of fifteen does not smile up at the man of sixty-three, and it is here, in this unilateral perspective which is not matched by a corresponding perspective on the part of the fifteen-year-old, that we must expect to find a source of error.

  On January 30, 1933, the fifteen-year-old is ill in bed with a severe case of flu, victim of an epidemic that I consider to have been given insufficient consideration in analyses of Hitler’s seizure of power. It is a fact that public life was partially paralyzed, many schools and government offices were closed, at least locally and regionally. One of my classmates brought me the news as I lay sick in bed. In those days we still had no radio, and homemade efforts to build crystal sets hadn’t yet begun. We didn’t acquire the mini-edition of the so-called people’s radio until shortly before the outbreak of war, our reluctance almost outweighing the necessity. After a second move within two years, we were now living at 32 Maternus-Strasse, facing the dismal rear wall of what was then the engineering school. Nevertheless, we were not very far from the Rhine, and from our corner bay window we could see the neo-Gothic, tri-gabled warehouse of the Rhenus Line, of which I painted innumerable water colors. Just around the corner was Römer Park, a little farther on, Hindenburg Park, where on fine days my mother could sit among the jobless or people who had been forced into early retirement.

  I lay in bed and read—probably Jack London, whose works we borrowed in the book club edition from a friend, but it is also possible—oh raised eyebrows of the literary connoisseurs, how gladly I would smooth you down!—that I was simultaneously reading Trakl. The great tiled stove in our corner room had, for once, been lit, and from it, using a long paper spill, I took a light for my (forbidden) cigarette. My mother’s comment on the appointment of Hitler: “That’s war,” or maybe it was: “Hitler, that means war.”