What's to Become of the Boy? by Heinrich Boll

Author:Heinrich Boll [Boll, Heinrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781612190112
Google: KHTqRN5tpXgC
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-12-05T16:00:00+00:00

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Yes, school too. At times I even obtained quite good grades in German literature. Not that I’ve retained much from my reading of it: there are only a few authors I can still call to mind, one of them by the name of Adolf Hitler, author of Mein Kampf, compulsory reading. Our teacher, Mr. Schmitz, a man of penetrating, witty, dry irony (for some authors a little too dry!), used the hallowed texts of Adolf Hitler the writer to demonstrate the importance of concise expression, known also as brevity. This meant we had to take four or five pages from Mein Kampf and reduce them to two, if possible one and a half: “condense” that unspeakable, badly convoluted German (there also exists some very nicely convoluted German!). Think what that meant: “condensing” the Führer’s texts! Taking that kind of German apart and tightening it up appealed to me. So I read Mein Kampf minutely, which, again, didn’t increase my respect for the Nazis by one iota. Just the same, I can thank Adolf Hitler the writer for a few badly needed B’s in German literature; perhaps also—something else I learned in school for my life—for some qualification to be a publisher’s reader and a liking for brevity. To this day I am surprised that no one noted the lack of respect implied in the process of “condensing” the Führer’s texts, and it was many years before I realized this myself, realized all the implications of such an assignment. And it was a great many years later, when my former teacher Karl Schmitz, plagued by terrible headaches, would sometimes come to see us on Schiller-Strasse, after 1945, for a cup of black market coffee, that I could show him my respect and gratitude.

Another author, but one I cannot thank for good grades, was a certain Hanns Johst, whose play Schlageter we had not only to read but see performed: every school in Cologne was virtually herded through the theater, and, if I remember rightly, there were even morning performances. My impression: a very weak play. The hero, who was executed by the French in the occupied Rhineland in 1923 for sabotage, impressed me neither as a Catholic nor as a saboteur; on the other hand, he wasn’t weak enough to impress me as an anti-hero.

For some of my good grades in German literature (which were rare enough), I have Jeremias Gotthelf to thank. No longer under Schmitz, we made a thorough study of those nineteenth-century rustic novels Uli the Plowboy and Uli the Tenant Farmer and wrote essays on them. No doubt about it, Vreneli the maid appealed to me more than Uli did. I filled pages and pages with Vreneli’s generosity of spirit as compared to Uli’s timid pettiness, thinking what men often think: that girl was too good for him! And I elaborated (may God and Gotthelf forgive me!) on the differences between the two being “milieu-conditioned.”

I presume that Gotthelf found his way into the curriculum because some Nazi

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