Free What's to Become of the Boy? by Heinrich Böll Page A

down, and my mother received such dire warnings on account of her tamperings with meter seals that in the end she desisted. It was just at that time that I began to feel so alien to the cozy atmosphere at Grosche’s, legitimate and gracious though it was.

17
    Whatever happened, I didn’t want to jeopardize my graduation, didn’t want to risk too much. For economic reasons, among others, that would have been irresponsible, and, besides, I was simply fed up with school. It was time to put an end to it and enter the deluge that was facing us. Then, right into the midst of my preparations for my final exams, a minor bombshell was dropped: that year the Nazis reduced the secondary school period by one year to eight years; but we had already done nine years, which meant we practically had our graduation in our pockets. The worst that could have happened—failing our final exams—would have meant taking them again two or three months later with the class immediately below us. In that case, failure was unlikely, since it would have meant that the school had declared someone to be ready for the twelfth grade who would drop back to the tenth-grade level. Since the dreaded written tests had been eliminated, it was merely a matter of finding volunteers for the oral tests in the tough subjects of Latin, Greek, and math, so that no one who was weak in those areas would risk being tested in one of them. We came quite openly to an arrangement with our teachers, and at the advice, at the urging almost, of Mr. Bauer I took onLatin; in return he as good as promised not to test me on Juvenal, whom we were then studying.
    I don’t know whether Juvenal was in our curriculum, or whether Bauer had recognized how topical he was and had chosen him for that reason: in Juvenal, arbitrariness, despotism, depravity, corruption of political mores, the decline of the Republican idea, were described with ample clarity, including even a few “June 30’s,” staged by the Praetorians, and allusions to Tigellinus. Then, without looking for it, I came across in a secondhand book bin a Juvenal translation with a detailed commentary, published in 1838. The commentary was almost twice as long as the text and made thrilling historical reading, besides being amusing for its Romantic vocabulary. I couldn’t afford that copious tome but bought it anyhow, and it is one of the few books I managed to bring safely through the war and did not sacrifice to the black market afterward. (In those days—a forbidden look forward to 1945—there was a class of profiteers who had everything except books, which they urgently needed to decorate their fine walls, and we unloaded everything that we knew would be republished: an autographed copy of Buddenbrooks , for example, brought me a tidy little sum!)
    I hung onto my Juvenal. In the twelfth grade I didn’t use it as an aid to translation, that would have been against my principles: I merely devoured the commentary, which read like a thriller. In Greek we read Antigone . That needed no commentary, not even a knowing wink; and, as I have said, the tiring monotony of translating in class (Oh, the bent, bored backs of those who were forcedto go through a classical high school! Why, I wonder?) made me impatient, and I would sit down at home with the dictionary and read on ahead. Brief appearances in class of Gerhard Nebel as a substitute teacher brought a little fire and a refreshing gust of anarchy; for the first time I heard about the Jünger brothers. It was said—and probably correctly—that Nebel had been transferred for disciplinary reasons. He also taught gym and boxing, in neither of which I took part. He claimed, fairly openly, that the recent introduction of boxing was due to a secret, repressed anglophilia on the part of the Nazis. Within a few years the Nazis closed down the school for good—which speaks for the school.
    We ostentatiously took part in the penitent pilgrimages of the men of Cologne that led from