Beneath the Wheel (7 page)

This magnificent monastery, hidden behind hills and woods, has long been reserved for the exclusive use of the students of the Protestant Theological Academy in order that their receptive young spirits will be surrounded by an atmosphere of beauty and peace. Simultaneously the young people are removed from the distracting influence of their towns and families and are preserved from the harmful sight of the active life. So it is possible to let them live under the definite impression that their life's goal consists exclusively of the study of Hebrew and Greek and sundry subjects and to turn the thirst of young souls toward pure and ideal studies and enjoyments. In addition there is the important factor of boarding-school life, the imperative need for self-education, the feeling of belonging together. The grant which makes it possible for the academy students to live and study here free of charge makes very sure that they become imbued with an indelible spirit by which you can recognize them forever after. It is a delicate way of branding them. With the exception of the few wild ones who break free, you can distinguish a Maulbronn student as such for the rest of his life.

Boys who still had a mother when they entered the monastery could think back on those days with touching emotions and gratitude. Hans Giebenrath was not one of these; his mother's absence did not move him in the least, but he was in a position to observe scores of other mothers and this made a curious impression on him.

In the wide corridors with their rows of built-in closets, the so-called dormitories, there stood any number of chests and baskets which the owners and their parents were busy unpacking or stacking with their odds and ends. Everyone had been assigned one of these numbered closets and a numbered bookstall in his study room. Sons and parents knelt on the floor while unpacking. The proctor pranced like a prince among them, freely dispensing advice left and right. Suits were spread out, shirts folded, books stacked, shoes and slippers set out in neat rows. Most of the boys had brought the same major articles because all essentials and the clothes you had to bring were prescribed. Tin washbasins with names scratched into them were unpacked and set up in the washroom; sponges, soap dish, comb and toothbrush next to them. Each boy also brought his own lamp, a can of kerosene and a set of table utensils.

The boys were busy and excited. The fathers smiled, tried to be of some help, cast frequent glances at their pocket watches, but were actually quite bored and looked for excuses to sneak off. The mothers were at the heart of all this activity. Piece by piece they unpacked the suits and underwear, smoothed out wrinkles, tugged at strings and then, after deciding on the most efficient placement of each article, distributed everything as neatly and practically as possible in the closet. Admonitions, advice and tender remarks accompanied this flow of laundry.

“You'll have to take extra care of your shirts. They cost three-fifty apiece.”

“You should send the laundry home every four weeks by rail. If you need it in a hurry, send it parcel post. The black hat is for Sundays only.”

A comfortably fat woman sat perched on top of a high chest teaching her son the art of sewing on buttons.

“If you become homesick,” another mother was saying, “all you have to do is write. And remember, it's not so long until Christmas.”

A pretty woman, who was still quite young, took a last look at her son's overstuffed closet and passed her hand lovingly over the piles of linen, jackets and pants. When she was done with this, she began to caress her son, a broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked boy who was ashamed and tried to fend off his mother. He laughed with embarrassment and then, so as not to appear touched, stuck both hands in his pockets. Their leavetaking seemed to affect the mother much more strongly than her son.

With other students just the opposite was the case. They stared dumbly and helplessly at their busy mothers, and looked as if they would just as soon return home immediately. But the fear of separation and the heightened tenderness and dependency were waging a bitter struggle in all their hearts with their shyness before on-lookers and the first proud signs of their defiant masculinity. Many a boy who wanted nothing more than to burst into tears assumed an artificially careless expression and pretended that none of this mattered to him. The mothers, noticing this, merely smiled.

Most boys, in addition to essentials, had also brought a number of luxury articles. A sackful of apples, a smoked sausage, a basket of baked goods, or something on that order would appear from their chests. Many had brought ice-skates. One skinny, sly-looking fellow drew everyone's attention to himself when he unpacked a whole smoked ham, which he made no attempt to conceal.

It was easy to tell which boys had come straight from home and which had been to boarding school before. Yet even the latter, it was obvious, were excited and tense.

Herr Giebenrath helped his son unpack and set about it in an intelligent and practical fashion. He was done earlier than most other parents and for a while he stood bored and helpless beside Hans. Because everywhere he could see fathers instructing and admonishing, mothers consoling and advising, sons listening in rapt bewilderment, he felt it was only fitting that he too should start Hans out in life with a few golden words of his own. He reflected for a long time and walked in awkward silence beside his son until he suddenly opened fire with a priceless series of pious clichés—which Hans received with dumb amazement. That is, until he saw a nearby deacon break out in an amused smile over his father's speech; then he felt ashamed and drew the speaker aside.

“Agreed, you'll be a credit to the good name of the family? You'll obey your superiors?”

“Of course.”

His father fell silent and breathed a sigh of relief. Now he began to get seriously bored. Hans, too, began to feel lost. He looked with perplexed curiosity through the window down into the quiet cloister, where old-fashioned peace and dignity presented a curious contrast to the life upstairs. Then he glanced timidly at his fellow students, not one of whom he knew so far. His Stuttgart examination companion seemed not to have passed, despite his clever Göppingen Latin. At least Hans could see him nowhere around. Without giving it much real thought, Hans inspected his classmates. They were as similar in kind and number as their accouterments, and it was easy to tell farmers' sons from city boys, the well-to-do from the poor. The sons of the truly wealthy of course entered the academy only rarely, a fact that let you make an inference about their pride, the deeper wisdom of their parents, or about the innate talent of their children—as the case might be. Nonetheless, a number of professors and higher officials, remembering their own years at the monastery, sent their sons to Maulbronn. Thus you could detect many differences in cloth and cut among the forty-odd black-suited boys. What differentiated them even more clearly from one another were their manners, dialects and bearing. There were lanky fellows from the Black Forest, who had an awkward gait; strutting youths from the Alb; flaxen-haired, wide-mouthed, nimble lowlanders with free and easy manners; well-dressed Stuttgarters with pointed shoes and a degenerate—I mean, overly refined—accent. Approximately one-fifth of this select group wore spectacles. One, a slight, almost elegant mother's boy from Stuttgart, wore a stiff felt hat and behaved very politely; he was completely unaware that his unusual decorousness had already laid the ground for future ribbing and bullying from the more daring of his companions.

A more discerning observer could certainly see that this timid little group represented a fair cross section of the youth of the land. Alongside a number of perfectly average faces, those you could spot as earnest drudges even from a distance, you discovered no lack of delicate or sturdy heads behind whose smooth brows presumably existed the still half-asleep dream of a higher life. Perhaps there was among their number one of those clever and stubborn Swabians who would push his way into the mainstream of life and make his ideas, inevitably somewhat dry and narrowly individualistic, the focal point of a new and mighty system. For Swabia supplies the world not only with a fair number of well-prepared theologians but is also graced with a traditional aptitude for philosophical speculation that on more than one occasion has produced noteworthy prophets, not to mention false prophets. And so this productive land, whose politically great tradition has long since passed, still exerts its influence on the world if only through the disciplines of theology and philosophy. You will also find that the people in general are endowed with an age-old taste for beautiful form and for poetry that from time to time has given birth to poets and versifiers of the first order.

Nothing specifically Swabian could be observed in the outward customs and furnishings of the academy in Maulbronn. On the contrary, side by side with the Latin names left over from the time when it had served as a monastery, a number of new classical labels had been affixed. The students' rooms were labeled Forum, Hellas, Athens, Sparta, Acropolis, and the fact that the last and smallest was called Germania seemed to signify a good reason for transforming the Germanic present, if possible, into a Greco-Roman utopia. Yet even these designations were merely decorative—Hebrew names would have been just as scholastically appropriate. As chance would have it, the study called Athens was allotted not to the most articulate and free-spirited boys but to a handful of honest dullards; Sparta did not house warriors or ascetics, but a bunch of happy-go-lucky students who lived off-campus. Hans Giebenrath and nine other pupils were assigned to Hellas.

Contrary to his expectations, a surprisingly strange feeling gripped his heart when he entered this cool, sparse dormitory with the nine others for the first time and lay down in his narrow schoolboy's bed. A big kerosene lamp dangled from the ceiling. You undressed in its red glow. At a quarter to ten it was extinguished by the proctor. There they lay now, one bed beside the other, between every second bed a stool with clothes on it. Along one of the pillars hung the cord which rang the morning bell. Two or three boys who knew each other from home whispered timidly among themselves, but not for long. The others were strangers and each lay slightly depressed and deathly quiet in his bed. You could hear those who were asleep breathing deeply, or one would suddenly lift an arm and the linen rustled. Hans could not fall asleep for a long time. He listened to his neighbors breathing and after a while heard a strangely anxious noise coming from a bed two away from his. Someone was weeping, his blanket pulled over his head, and Hans felt oddly affected by these moans which seemed to reach him from a remote distance. He himself did not feel homesick though he missed his quiet little room. He only felt a slight dread of such an uncertain and novel situation and of his many new companions. It was not yet midnight and everyone in the hall had fallen asleep. The young sleepers lay side by side in their beds, their cheeks pressed into striped pillows: sad and stubborn, easygoing and timid boys vanquished by the same sweet, sound rest and oblivion. Above the old pointed roofs, towers, bow windows, turret, battlements and gothic arcades there rose a pale half-moon and its light lodged in cornices, on window ledges, poured over gothic windows and romanesque gateways and trembled pale-golden in the generous bowl of the cloister's fountain. A few stripes and spots of yellowish light fell through three windows into Hellas' sleeping quarters and kept the slumbering boys neighborly company, just as it had accompanied the dreams of generations of monks.

*   *   *

Next day, in the oratory, the boys were solemnly received into the academy. The teachers were dressed in their frock coats, the headmaster gave an address, the students sat rapt in thought in their chairs and stole an occasional glance at their parents, sitting way in the back. The mothers looked with pensive smiles at their sons; the fathers sat very erect, followed the speech closely and looked serious and determined. Proud and praiseworthy feelings and high hopes swelled in their breasts and it did not occur to a single one of them that this day he was selling his child for a financial advantage. At the end of the ceremony one student after the other was called by name, stepped up and was accepted into the academy with a handshake by the headmaster and was pledged that, provided he behaved himself, he would be duly sheltered and cared for by the state for the rest of his days. It did not occur to any of the boys, nor to their fathers, that all this would perhaps not really be free.

Much more serious and moving was the moment when they took leave of their departing parents. These were now disappearing—some on foot, some by coach, others in any kind of transportation they had been able to arrange in the rush. For a long time handkerchiefs continued to flutter in the mild September air until finally the forest swallowed up the last of the travelers and the boys returned to the monastery in a gently pensive mood.

“So, the parents have left,” said the proctor.

Now they began to look each other over and become acquainted; first, of course, the boys within each room. Inkpots were filled with ink and the lamps with kerosene, books and notebooks were laid out. They all tried to make themselves at home in their new rooms, a process during which they kept eying each other with curiosity, started their first conversations, asked each other where they were from, what school they had attended, and kept reminding each other of the state examination through which they had sweated together. Groups formed around certain desks and entered into extended conversations; here and there a boyish laugh ventured forth, and by evening the roommates were better acquainted than passengers at the end of a long voyage.

Four of Hans' companions in Hellas made an outstanding impression; the rest were more or less above average. First there was Otto Hartner, the son of a Stuttgart professor, a talented, calm, self-assured boy with perfect manners. He was tall, well-proportioned, well-dressed and impressed the room with his firm and decisive manner. Then there was Karl Hamel, the son of a mayor of a small village in the Swabian Alb. It took some time to get to know him for he was full of contradictions and would drop his seemingly phlegmatic attitude only rarely. Yet when he did he would become impassioned, extroverted and violent, but not for long; then he would crawl back into his shell and there was no telling whether he was merely being cagey or a truly dispassionate observer.