home.
Before I dilate on the value of fifty pfennigs, let me merely point out that eight years later the hourly wage of an unskilled nursery-garden employee wasn’t much higher—rather lower, in fact—than fifty pfennigs, and that weekly unemployment assistance for a family of three, including rental allowance, amounted to less than seventeen marks. At the time I am speaking of, my sister Mechthild, an unemployed junior high school teacher, always loyal to the family, was working as a governess in an aristocratic family in Westphalia for thirty marks a month, of which she sent home twenty-five. So a weekly extra income for a totally “unskilled” person (who was later able to increase his rate to seventy-five pfennigs an hour) of four or five marks was, considering it was pure pocket money, not to be sneezed at. It even permitted me to open an account with a modern secondhand bookstore, where I was allowed to pay in installments. I have no intention here of playing off hard times against good times, a ridiculous pastime for veterans, in my opinion.
Fifty pfennigs meant two or three secondhand books—a Balzac for ten pfennigs and a Dostoievski for twenty are what I still remember from the book bin of a secondhand bookstore on Herzog-Strasse next door to the Skala movie theater. Fifty pfennigs meant a ticket to the cheapest seats in the movies plus three cigarettes; it meant a piano recital on a student ticket (Oh, Monique Haas!), two cups of coffee plus three cigarettes, but also—and I sometimes treated my mother and my sister Gertrud—four fresh rolls and three or four slices of boiled ham, since, the Lord be both praised and reproached, we always had an appetite. My sister Gertrud would often reciprocate. And well-informed sources assured me that the minimum price for bought love in the back rooms of certain cafes in certain districts—provided by amateurs, I might add—had dropped to fifty pfennigs; of course only in “politically unreliable” areas—in a Germany that had just “awakened”!
12
I have come to the conclusion (at this late date!) that it really was living far, far beyond our means to let all the children in the family finish high school and then go on to university. Both my parents had only gone to elementary school: in their parents’ eyes, secondary school was only for sons, and university was only considered if one of them wanted to study theology. (As a result, a boy with a passion and great talent for law became a not very happy priest, and a potential theologian became an atheistic high school teacher.) No doubt my parents had suffered more severely from this and other limitations than they admitted, and they wanted to see us children free, “unfolding freely.”
The only reliable source of income was from time to time the “furnished gentlemen,” but they didn’t even cover the rent, and of the three small apartment buildings my father had built to take care of his old age (at the time he was already approaching seventy), only one remained, an old tenement house, 28 Vondel-Strasse, which also contained his workshop and office. But that building was rarely in our own hands, and then only for a short time; hardly ever was it not in receivership. There were the inexorable municipal taxes, the mortgage interest, the insurance premiums—there was always someonebringing down an iron fist upon us. What glorious times those were when the building happened to be free and my sister Gertrud went around collecting rents! Glorious but very brief times, for soon that fist would come crashing down again. Times didn’t improve until later, after the period I am describing, when my brothers and sisters were earning a bit of money.
Clever people will say—and rightly so—what clever people were always saying at the time, that we were not sensible . That’s right, we weren’t, for we were even crazy enough to buy books and to read them: almost everything published by Jacob Hegener, as well
Before I dilate on the value of fifty pfennigs, let me merely point out that eight years later the hourly wage of an unskilled nursery-garden employee wasn’t much higher—rather lower, in fact—than fifty pfennigs, and that weekly unemployment assistance for a family of three, including rental allowance, amounted to less than seventeen marks. At the time I am speaking of, my sister Mechthild, an unemployed junior high school teacher, always loyal to the family, was working as a governess in an aristocratic family in Westphalia for thirty marks a month, of which she sent home twenty-five. So a weekly extra income for a totally “unskilled” person (who was later able to increase his rate to seventy-five pfennigs an hour) of four or five marks was, considering it was pure pocket money, not to be sneezed at. It even permitted me to open an account with a modern secondhand bookstore, where I was allowed to pay in installments. I have no intention here of playing off hard times against good times, a ridiculous pastime for veterans, in my opinion.
Fifty pfennigs meant two or three secondhand books—a Balzac for ten pfennigs and a Dostoievski for twenty are what I still remember from the book bin of a secondhand bookstore on Herzog-Strasse next door to the Skala movie theater. Fifty pfennigs meant a ticket to the cheapest seats in the movies plus three cigarettes; it meant a piano recital on a student ticket (Oh, Monique Haas!), two cups of coffee plus three cigarettes, but also—and I sometimes treated my mother and my sister Gertrud—four fresh rolls and three or four slices of boiled ham, since, the Lord be both praised and reproached, we always had an appetite. My sister Gertrud would often reciprocate. And well-informed sources assured me that the minimum price for bought love in the back rooms of certain cafes in certain districts—provided by amateurs, I might add—had dropped to fifty pfennigs; of course only in “politically unreliable” areas—in a Germany that had just “awakened”!
12
I have come to the conclusion (at this late date!) that it really was living far, far beyond our means to let all the children in the family finish high school and then go on to university. Both my parents had only gone to elementary school: in their parents’ eyes, secondary school was only for sons, and university was only considered if one of them wanted to study theology. (As a result, a boy with a passion and great talent for law became a not very happy priest, and a potential theologian became an atheistic high school teacher.) No doubt my parents had suffered more severely from this and other limitations than they admitted, and they wanted to see us children free, “unfolding freely.”
The only reliable source of income was from time to time the “furnished gentlemen,” but they didn’t even cover the rent, and of the three small apartment buildings my father had built to take care of his old age (at the time he was already approaching seventy), only one remained, an old tenement house, 28 Vondel-Strasse, which also contained his workshop and office. But that building was rarely in our own hands, and then only for a short time; hardly ever was it not in receivership. There were the inexorable municipal taxes, the mortgage interest, the insurance premiums—there was always someonebringing down an iron fist upon us. What glorious times those were when the building happened to be free and my sister Gertrud went around collecting rents! Glorious but very brief times, for soon that fist would come crashing down again. Times didn’t improve until later, after the period I am describing, when my brothers and sisters were earning a bit of money.
Clever people will say—and rightly so—what clever people were always saying at the time, that we were not sensible . That’s right, we weren’t, for we were even crazy enough to buy books and to read them: almost everything published by Jacob Hegener, as well
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