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

the Heumarkt to the Kalk Chapel and back—tolerated by the Nazis and watched by informers.
    Here I must mention, as a little epitaph for one of Cologne’s first air-raid victims, our friend Hans S., who owned a beaver collar. This collar was our last, our very last reserve when we couldn’t scrape up any more money and had nothing more to pawn; it brought in two marks at the pawnshop, and that meant three movie tickets and two packs of cigarettes, or four movie tickets without cigarettes, or four concert tickets—and we went to the movies a lot: it was dark in there, and even the Nazis had to keep quiet and were not distinguishable.

18
    Our schooldays seemed to be drawing to a peaceful close; the arrangements with our teachers had been made. In the choice of careers, which had to be declared for inclusion in our graduation certificates, it turned out that we were the first graduating class in living memory, if not since the school’s existence, not to provide a theologian. Traditionally the school had been a reliable supplier for the theological seminaries in Bonn. The fact that we sent no one there could have had nothing to do with the Nazis, for the class following us was once again a supplier. And it happened to be in religion that our schooldays came to a nasty rather than a peaceful close.
    Among the members of the Hitler Youth, the Storm Troopers, and the S.S., there were, of course, not only superficial opportunists but also true believers, believers both as Nazis and as Catholics, and there were conflicts that we discussed in class, such as obedience, the Day of the German Mother (which our teacher of religion buried in a theologically convincing manner), and, since he was neither stupid nor humorless nor in the slightest degree opportunistic, something in the nature of a “skeptical trust” had been formed: we knew where we stood with each other, and there were neither boorishgibes nor denunciations. But all this was destroyed in a single hour, when he felt himself obliged or—as I am more inclined to believe since he did it with such painful reluctance—was obliged by the curriculum to enlighten us on sexual matters. Maybe that “enlightenment” had been on the twelfth-grade curriculum since 1880; I can’t imagine the Cologne high school graduates of 1880 being any less enlightened than we were. Be that as it may, he did it, he enlightened us: blushing with embarrassment, keeping his eyelids lowered, he spoke about the fact of there being two different sexes. He spoke with dignity, not ludicrously at all, and we were still disposed to concede that he was carrying out this long overdue task with a painful sense of duty.
    But then came the moment of disaster when, in connection with the sex organs and their functions, he spoke of “strawberries and whipped cream.” The youngest among us was at least eighteen, the oldest twenty-two, and we had grown up in a city famous and notorious not only for its sanctity but also for its tradition of widespread and widely varied prostitution. Whereas during the less embarrassing parts of his talk, during the awkward, stammered explanations, we had just managed to suppress our laughter, now it burst forth: cynical, cruel, almost lethal. Even the most hardened among us—and there were some hardened ones, of course—felt this comparison to be both an insult and a slur on their experiences, no matter how “dirty” these may have been. Our revenge was appalling: five filthy jokes were each reduced to a key word plus a number; word and number werewritten on the blackboard; and in the few remaining religion classes someone would mention one of the five numbers, whereupon the whole class remembered the entire obscenity and burst out laughing. I admit to having shared not only in the laughter but also in the choice and condensing of the obscenities.
    During this cruel game, our teacher—and in retrospect I have to admire him—never lost his sense of humor, wanted to