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
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
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