as Mauriac, Bernanos, and Bloy, plus Chesterton and Dickens and Dostoievski, even old Weininger and Claudel and Bergengruen (as long as he was available), even Hammer Blows by Lersch and, as I mentioned before, Evelyn Waugh and Timmermanns, Ernest Hello, Reinhold Schneider, Gertrud von Le Fort and, of course, Theodor Haecker. No, it wasn’t at all sensible, and sensible people borrowed the books from us, enjoyed dropping in at our place for discussions, and then sometimes a fractional Nazi, a quarter, a half, or even a whole Nazi, would come in for some abuse.
Those were lively sessions, yet at the same time a paralyzing pessimism lay over everything. We also played cards all night long, for money, although we knew that none of us would keep our winnings, and gaming debts piled up and were canceled, yet we went on playing as if in earnest. And I suppose it wasn’t sensible either for a brother and sister of mine to work for my father—mybrother in the workshop and my sister in the office—in a business where there was so little to do. Yet it was necessary for them to be there so as to keep the income derived from renting out the excellent machinery by the hour from getting into the hands of the bailiff. Things remained that tight until war broke out. (In wartime—and here I am going beyond 1937—money always flows easily, of course, and soon there was plenty to repair in Cologne. Wars also solve unemployment problems, a fact that is sometimes forgotten or suppressed when people talk about Hitler’s “economic miracle.” And wars also regulate the prices of cigarettes, which ultimately rose from one or one and a half pfennigs for the pale Dutch ones to eight hundred pfennigs for a single American cigarette.)
13
Yes, school too—I assure you, I’ll soon get back to that. After all, I was still a pupil, a pupil of life so to speak, subject to despondency and recklessness, yet bound and determined not to become a pupil of death—if that could possibly be avoided. So, once again: somehow we managed. What was vitally important (I will forgo a few dozen anecdotes), and also a good schooling, was that our financial difficulties made us not humble but arrogant, not undemanding but demanding, and in some non-sensible way they made us sensible. No, we weren’t expecting the pot of gold, but we did always expect more than we were entitled to or more than others considered we were entitled to (“others” being, for instance, the mathematical acrobats who worked out a subsistence minimum for us), and in the family we used to say: “Oliver Twist is asking for more.” We developed an arrogance that assumed hysterical proportions, we made derogatory or blasphemous remarks about public institutions and personalities, and we needed no alcohol: words were enough.
After an evening of smearing and smirching, of more and more feverish, even frenetic, laughter at the expense of church, state, institutions, and personalities, my brother Alois, in a kind of hiatus of exhaustion, said something that then became a household phrase: “Nowlet’s be Christians again!” And another expression for naïve, credulous, idealistic Nazis that we all hung onto was: “A blissful idiot.” Those occasions were not only not comfortable, they were never harmonious; they were marked by a permanently dissonant loyalty. The three different elements blended in varying proportions in the individual members of the family, resulting in friction and tensions. Many a time, more than words flew through the air—bits and pieces, sometimes even quite sharp objects. Within each of us and among all of us, the elements clashed. Within each of us and among all of us, there was a class struggle. And then there were also periods influenced by alcohol, when we happened to have some money; on those occasions the products of the Hermanns distillery near the Severin Gate castle set the tone.
Yes, school. I didn’t want the time I was spending there to be wasted,
Those were lively sessions, yet at the same time a paralyzing pessimism lay over everything. We also played cards all night long, for money, although we knew that none of us would keep our winnings, and gaming debts piled up and were canceled, yet we went on playing as if in earnest. And I suppose it wasn’t sensible either for a brother and sister of mine to work for my father—mybrother in the workshop and my sister in the office—in a business where there was so little to do. Yet it was necessary for them to be there so as to keep the income derived from renting out the excellent machinery by the hour from getting into the hands of the bailiff. Things remained that tight until war broke out. (In wartime—and here I am going beyond 1937—money always flows easily, of course, and soon there was plenty to repair in Cologne. Wars also solve unemployment problems, a fact that is sometimes forgotten or suppressed when people talk about Hitler’s “economic miracle.” And wars also regulate the prices of cigarettes, which ultimately rose from one or one and a half pfennigs for the pale Dutch ones to eight hundred pfennigs for a single American cigarette.)
13
Yes, school too—I assure you, I’ll soon get back to that. After all, I was still a pupil, a pupil of life so to speak, subject to despondency and recklessness, yet bound and determined not to become a pupil of death—if that could possibly be avoided. So, once again: somehow we managed. What was vitally important (I will forgo a few dozen anecdotes), and also a good schooling, was that our financial difficulties made us not humble but arrogant, not undemanding but demanding, and in some non-sensible way they made us sensible. No, we weren’t expecting the pot of gold, but we did always expect more than we were entitled to or more than others considered we were entitled to (“others” being, for instance, the mathematical acrobats who worked out a subsistence minimum for us), and in the family we used to say: “Oliver Twist is asking for more.” We developed an arrogance that assumed hysterical proportions, we made derogatory or blasphemous remarks about public institutions and personalities, and we needed no alcohol: words were enough.
After an evening of smearing and smirching, of more and more feverish, even frenetic, laughter at the expense of church, state, institutions, and personalities, my brother Alois, in a kind of hiatus of exhaustion, said something that then became a household phrase: “Nowlet’s be Christians again!” And another expression for naïve, credulous, idealistic Nazis that we all hung onto was: “A blissful idiot.” Those occasions were not only not comfortable, they were never harmonious; they were marked by a permanently dissonant loyalty. The three different elements blended in varying proportions in the individual members of the family, resulting in friction and tensions. Many a time, more than words flew through the air—bits and pieces, sometimes even quite sharp objects. Within each of us and among all of us, the elements clashed. Within each of us and among all of us, there was a class struggle. And then there were also periods influenced by alcohol, when we happened to have some money; on those occasions the products of the Hermanns distillery near the Severin Gate castle set the tone.
Yes, school. I didn’t want the time I was spending there to be wasted,
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