Requiem for a German Past: A Boyhood among the Nazis

2. Discovering Social Class

2 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPO Discovering Social Class I WAS six YEARS OLD WHEN, following the long-established German custom, my parents escorted me right after the Easter holidays to my first morning in thezyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONML Volksschule, the public primary school on Wolfenbuttel's Karlstrafie. The Volksschule was the common school for all youngsters between the ages of six and ten. In the province of Braunschweig, where the Evangelical-Lutheran Church was the established denomination, the Volksschule offered religious instruction in the Protestant faith. Catholic children went to a parochial school associated with St. Peter's Catholic Church. But since my parents were Protestants the Volksschule was the school for me. As we marched along the street I carried in my arms a two-footlong Zuckertiite, a gayly colored cone made of molded cardboard. It was called sugar cone not because it was made of sugar, but because inside were Easter eggs, chocolate candy, sugar canes, and licorice, my favorite. I was not supposed to eat any of these sweets until I got home again. But I was to show them off to the other little boys and girls on their first day of school, and I was to admire their Tilten and what goodies they contained. I was mortified when I discovered lollipops in most of them—lollipops which I never was allowed to suck because , my mother claimed, they would make my teeth grow crooked. I also carried a brand-new backpack that smelled of fresh leather and held my books, paper, and a wooden box with a lid that slid back and forth in grooves. Inside the box were my pencils, one with a hard and sharply pointed lead tip for writing and another one soft for drawing . There also was a metal pencil sharpener and a piece of rubber for erasing. Over my shoulder hung a sandwich case that matched my backpack. In it were Butterbrote, dark brown rye bread slices with sa27 Beginning school, with class cap andzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH Zuckertute, 1934 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVU 28 Discovering Social Class zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV lami, liver sausage, or cheese between them. I would eat those during the mid-morning break. On my head I wore the Schiilermiitze, a bright red cap with a white and black ribbon around it, telling everyone that I was a pupil in the Volksschule's first grade. I was very proud of it because now I was somebody, no longer just a little kid, but a pupil who belonged somewhere other than just at home. Everybody had a home, I told my mother, but not everybody went to the first grade of the Karlschule. The next year I would exchange the red cap for a dark blue one with a yellow and green ribbon that signified the second grade. But I never wore the orange third-grade cap because the Nazis banned it. My father said the Nazis did that because they believed that colored caps accentuated class divisions. I wasn't quite sure who these Nazis actually were—except, of course, for Uncle Gerhard in Chemnitz, who sometimes wore a brown Nazi shirt but, I assured myself, had never said anything against wearing school caps—but I disliked them anyway because I wanted to wear that orange third-grade cap. Now, my father explained, the Nazis didn't mean the differences between first and second and third class in the Volksschule. They meant, he said, the difference between those boys and girls who, like myself, after the fourth grade would transfer to a secondary school and those who would continue to go to the Volksschule. The caps would make it easy and obvious to tell whose parents could pay to send their children to the Gymnasium or the Lyceum, the Latin secondary schools for boys and for girls, and whose parents belonged to the working classes and sent their children to the tuition-free Burgerschule, as the upper four grades of the Volksschule were called. Secondary schools prepared their students for middle-class careers and if, on graduation, the students passed the final leaving examination called the Abitur, they could then go to a university. Obviously, they were better off than the children in the Burgerschule. So the Nazis didn't want us to wear our Schiilermutze. When I entered the third grade I wore nothing on my head, and when it snowed in the winter my mother gave me a green knit cap. By the time I turned...