A little post-war introspection

Dearest grandchildren.

I wish you could have met my father, Thomas, known to your parents as their beloved "Opa." He truly was "an engineer with the soul of a poet." Somehow, deep in my core, I always knew this, but to us he was just "Dad." It's only now, years after his death, as I go through his materials, that I realize what a romantic he was. 

Unlike my siblings and I, unlike your parents, and (hopefully) unlike you, Thomas wasn't able to make many real choices of his own in his early years. The circumstances all around him made those choices for him. War, survival, and just making his way in a very unstable Germany. He made the best of what he was given and, in this case, at least, even found love and a sense of belonging. 

I believe now that my father always lived a secret "parallel life" from the one he lived with us. Only now do I understand that he left much of his inner life, his romantic soul, in Germany. He and my mother Edith had a solid 53-year marriage (happy at times, but also often fraught with difficulty), but even there he didn't feel free to make his own choices, as Mom was pregnant with my brother Michael and, well, as anyone who knew Thomas knows, he always, always did the right thing.

I wish I'd known more of the man who wrote this!

In December 1946, I was eighteen. I went "home" to Rainer's family in München for Christmas where a letter from Gisela was waiting for me. "Everything,” she wrote, “that I had so carefully dammed up is now back again, only with even greater force. And worst of all, I am completely helpless!" The next day, a letter arrived from Ingrid. "All my thoughts are seeking you,” she wrote. “It is so wonderful that they have a place to go again and don't have to go 'round in circles anymore. I have so much to thank you for! I had lost everything in my life, and in my profound loneliness I cried to God for a human being who would say 'I am here — for you!’”

 My plan was to emigrate to America in a few months. Would I leave two unhappy people behind? My Christmas and New Years thoughts were deeply confused. Last Christmas I was in the refugee camp, transitioning from the Russian zone to the American zone. The Christmas before had been the last one with my father in my childhood home in Chemnitz. Each Christmas during these turbulent years, my hopes and fears had been vastly different, going from the hope for mere survival to excited anticipation of a new life. I had plenty to be thankful for this year, as I was making good headway into adulthood and emigration to America was on the near horizon. But I was deeply torn by my loves of 1946. Three women had loved me, each in her own way. All three had written to me at one time that they were listening to Mozart, and they wished I was with them. I loved each of them honestly — as I understood love — and had given to each and taken from each. At that moment, my life was deeply entwined with Ingrid's, and becoming so with Gisela's. I could sense their different loves enveloping me with the same warmth, but I could not feel good and right about it. I didn't want to hurt either of them, but I knew it was inevitable. Ingrid asked me in a letter to München; “Can you still pray?” If I did, it must have been for help to resolve the tug-of-war in my soul between my "heavenly love,” Gisela, and my “earthly love,” Ingrid.  I had dropped into Ingrid’s life as the support that she so desperately needed, and in giving her that support I found my own direction, with her help. At the end of 1946, when I was in München with Rainer, Ingrid wrote to me, “A letter from Gisela just arrived; I’ll send it to you. If it were from Nora I wouldn’t send it. I don’t like her. She’s hiding something, she’s not genuine. Watch out for her!”

Rainer called me a "widow comforter, “but that's all I remember of that Christmas in Solln with with Ulli, baby Andreas, and his parents, ready to get divorced. I was too self-absorbed in my own torments and elations, my own longings and my fears. I only remember Rainer’s cynicism.

Winter 1946/1947 was bitterly cold. My first duty upon return to Ingolstadt was to split the half-yard of wood that Ingrid had managed to "organize,” meaning to find, steal, trade, or barter. In this case, the wood was as a Christmas present from one of her massage patients. It would heat the kitchen for a while, but the heat didn’t reach the other rooms of the apartment. The kitchen faced south and during the early afternoon it sometimes felt like spring in there, even though the fire had gone out. It was a peaceful and quiet hour, "our sun hour,” as Ingrid called it, when we were alone in the kitchen with its couch.

I did have a bedroom on the north side of the house, but it wasn’t usable in winter except for quickly crawling under the blanket and waiting for cold feet to heat the even colder bed. I remember waking up many a morning with a crackling crust of ice that had formed on my blanket where my breath escaped out into the frozen air. The only warm evenings were the ones when Ingrid could convince her mother to go see a movie, so we could keep each other warm. At least we had electric light most of the time, albeit very strictly rationed, so electric heating was out of the question.

Gisela wrote from "Russian" Adelsberg: "We have a candle on our table every night this week, because we have evening electricity one week, and morning electricity the next. All the images from the bombing nights are rising up in my mind again, images that were just beginning to fade… along with the happier ones. Maybe, just maybe we could see each other once more before "that ugly America would swallow you up for good,” as she put it. There was some hope, because just then a fateful meeting was taking place in Moscow which would decide whether the borders between the two halves of Germany would ever open again. I was lucky: Gisela had left the back of her letter blank, so I could use it for notes on a history lesson — I had probably used up my ration of school note paper for letters to her!

Rumors were flying around Ingolstadt about Ingrid and me. We were seen in town together, arm in arm, together picking Pitti up from school. I felt very adult, and Ingrid felt very secure. Life was normalizing. For us in the West it was so much better than in the East, where Gisela walked two hours to school through the snow in the morning and two hours home at night. There were no trolleys or buses due to lack of power, gas, tires — lack of everything over there - except ideology.

I decided then that after graduation I would sit down and write the "Life Memoirs of a Nineteen-Year-Old.” Much later, when I would be old, say in twenty or forty years, I would probably enjoy reading them, I said to myself.

Oh yes - after graduation, that's when life would start for real. By then I was back to wanting to become a bridge builder. I decided that I would start working on the Donau Bridge project, getting some of my practical work out of the way by helping to rebuild the bridge that the Nazis had blown up at the end of the war. I don't quite know what "practical work" I imagined, but it didn’t matter, as nothing ever came of it, probably because I found out that it would have consisted of mixing and carrying concrete buckets (no cranes in those days)!

In the last few weeks before the final high school exam, I crammed very hard, and tried to move heaven and earth to pass the exam, having both a heavenly love and an earthly love crossing their fingers for me: a deeply innocent and esoteric love from one, and a womanly, equally profound love from the other. The double-pull must have worked, as I did so well that I didn't even have to take the oral exam. And my math test was the best in class! In retrospect, that wasn't so good. It was a fluke that went straight to my head and lodged there, convincing me that engineering must be my calling.

The year 1946 was a year of intense confusion for me, though I didn’t fully recognize it at the time. Externally, I was totally wrapped up in getting my life plans in order, but internally it was a year of dealing with three women (all of them older than I) who loved me — and whom I loved. I suppose I was mature beyond my years, having lost both parents the year before, and having survived the Holocaust. But the women who occupied my heart were mature in a different, uniquely feminine way.

If those were my defining years, I still had a lot of defining to do in 1947. My letters bespeak a person I don't really know any more - or want to know, to be honest.

What speaks from my letters is a self-important kid who had acquired mannerisms from his father that today, to an American, are terribly German and rather unlikable. I must have thought at the time — assuming I even consciously thought about it — that my reputed "maturity" obligated me to be a stiltedly rational, rigid, morally impeccable guiding light to those around me. That was my father’s influence on me, with all the annoyances that go with it. When my mother called someone a “Schulmeister” (a schoolmaster), she used the term with an inflection in her voice that told even us kids that she was talking about one of my father’s less likable traits.

Today, a good deal of that rigidity remains, but in encountering myself in those letters of sixty years ago, I realize how grateful I am that America rescued me from staying either too firmly on the path of a German schoolmaster's righteousness or on the path of the German other-worldly sentimentalist. I do try, but I have never be able to shed a certain German heaviness that I acquired not only from my parents but from the entirety of all German culture.

It’s interesting to read between the lines of my 60-year-old letters. Already then there was conflict between the poetic and the technical, a conflict I haven't resolved to this day.  The reason is that it's really the story of my life, and that of many immigrants - the desire to be the easy-going, can-do, uncomplicated and practical American, with the realization that just barely under that surface sits the inflexible, ultra-organized, somewhat arrogant and elitist German.  

Many Germans can be defined by where they fit on a two-dimensional rational-sentimental coordinate system. When you add to that the third dimension of leading a life in a pragmatic, materialistic, and money-dominated society, the potential for life-long internal skirmishes becomes apparent. The stool I'm sitting on today has three supporting legs, each supplied by one of the long-term influences in my life: a meticulous father, a romantic mother, and a strong wife of fifty-some years. 

Carl and Irmgard Heumann, Thomas' parents, before his birth - likely around the time of their marriage in 1919.

 

 

 

Thomas and Edith Heumann (my parents), around 1995 or 2000.

 

The three legs are not, and have never been, equal in length or in strength. The ups and downs and imbalances in my life were in large part due to the constant shifting of that tripod. It's a good thing that a tripod never wobbles or rocks; it can slant, it can teeter, it can be firm or precarious, but it can never wobble.

My letters of the late 1940s preached and kvetched of self-importance, only to suddenly flip into the warm and thoughtful ponderings of a poet. How could Gisela, with her dreamy, unrealistic flights of fancy and optimism, love me? How could warm and down-to-earth Ingrid love me? They both did, and both must have been more accepting and forgiving than I gave them credit for. They were mature enough to make the allowances I wasn't willing to make.

 

Guess what? You are a German citizen!

Dear grandchildren,

Let’s take a little break from my father’s writings for this important message: 

YOU ARE A GERMAN CITIZEN! SO AM I! 

(I grew up as a German American - including wearing dirndl dresses to school.) 

I know- I was as shocked to find this out as you are. 

Katharina Schuss, the German Consulate in San Francisco, expressed it most concisely in an email she wrote to me yesterday after reviewing  numerous documents I sent her that showed that my parents were German citizens when I was born. 

“Dear Ms. Snider,

I reviewed all your handed in documents, your questionnaire and all correspondence with my colleagues.

 The facts are the following: 

1.       Your parents got married July 13^th, 1951  in München

2.       You were born in wedlock on November 29^th, 1956 in Berkeley, CA

3.       Your father was a German citizen at the time of your birth (here we need a proof of his citizenship e.g. a copy of his German passport valid in at the time of your birth)

4.       Your father was naturalized US-American citizen in 1959 (naturalization date: 17 April 1959)  

 Acc. to § 4 chapter 1 of the German Citizenship Law effective at the time of your birth, you might have become German citizen through your German father. You are an US American citizen due to the fact of being born in the USA.

In contrast to the United States, German citizenship is not established through birth on German territory, but by descent from a German legal father.

Based on the information you provided, there is a good possibility you are already in possession of German citizenship. 

However, we as a Consulate are not allowed to make legally binding decisions in citizenship matters. For everyone living outside of Germany, this can only be done by the Federal Administration Office in Cologne.

As your claim to German citizenship is based on your father, I would therefore recommend you apply for a so-called “Certificate of Citizenship.” Once the Certificate of Citizenship is issued, you can apply for a German passport.

In your case, we need the following documents to support your application:

·         Proof of your father’s German citizenship (ideally his old German passport if still available)

·         Your father’s US certificate of naturalization

·         Your parents’ marriage certificate

·         Your father’s birth certificate (the long version stating who his parents were)

·         Your mother’s birth certificate (the long version stating who her parents were)

·         Your birth certificate (the long version stating who your parents are)

·         Your current US passport

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Further information you find on our website:https://www.germany.info/us-en/service/03-Citizenship/certificate-of-citizenship/933536

 Mit freundlichen Grüßen/ Sincerely

Katharina Struß

Vice Consul – Deputy Head of Legal and Consular Affairs

Consulate General of Germany

1960 Jackson Street, San Francisco, CA 94109

So unbeknownst to me, I’ve been a German citizen all along because I was born to a father (I think it’s been amended now to include mother, as well) who was a German citizen on the day of my birth! It turns out that all I need to do is affirm, acknowledge, and accept my German citizenship! This process takes about two years at this point, due to a severe backlog, but when all is said and done, I *and all my direct decedents* will be able to get German passports! Think of it as my Germanness being forgotten or dormant, but in effect since my birth. Then my descendants - YOU! - will have the same status because, like me, you were born to a German parent without being aware. 

My father kept just about every important document he was ever issued. There is a binder on my bookshelf filled with hundreds of these documents. His German passport is not among them. I believe that he (and Mom) were ordered to surrender their German passports upon receipt of their American passports in 1959, and that’s why they can’t be found in Dad’s document binder, but one way or another, I’ll need to find those passports - or copies of them. I’m sure some Bundesamt (official government office) in Germany has them!   

Why am I going through all the trouble to affirm my (and thus your) German citizenship? (Yes, you can have dual citizenship.) Because way back in 1938, when things looked pretty bad in Germany, some lucky people left. After that, it was impossible to leave unless you had the necessary papers, the most obvious and helpful of which was a passport from another country. Who knows when - or if - you or your parents (or even your children!) will want to leave the US? This is definitely not the country it was when my parents immigrated here in 1953 with such high hopes, and I fear the worst for America these days. I want you to have options! 

Much love, 

Omi

Eighteen and evolving in Ingolstadt

Dear grandkids,

What is it with this father of mine and his wide open heart?!

Gisela, Nora, Gisela again… and now Thomas meets 28-year-old Ingrid, mother to 4-year-old Karola!

I believe that Dad’s year in Ingolstadt as protector of “broken” Ingrid and Karola influenced him very deeply. It was an important year of maturity, growth, and self-knowledge that, I believe, stayed with him throughout his life.

As Dad writes, “In our rapport, she became younger and in need of a centering bond and I grew older and stronger, reveling in my role of provider of the bond we both needed. And we both felt loved for the role the other played.”

Here are his words:

In August, 1946, Gisela and I tiptoed into a very tentative, very hesitant exchange of letters again. We wrote, with a bit of a cool superiority, about how unforgettable the days of 1944 were, that their luster would never tarnish, and isn't it wonderful that we can now be such good friends.

Gisela was in the middle of her "conversion to a natural authority,” as they called her teacher education, and she was alternately scared and "longing for the new and unknown, for that big unexplored land," as she called the future ahead of her. On the same day that Gisela wrote that, Nora wrote that yes, I'm right, she probably has changed, and "feels like a doll who has learned to say a few sentences, but basically just has to sit in an armchair with a pretty smile and look attractive to men." Of course, they were both exaggerating, but they couldn't have expressed the difference in their personalities and ambitions more clearly.

For me, the future was literally a "big unexplored land.” It looked like we would really emigrate to the USA in the spring of 1947, just after I finished high school.

“We”? Who did Dad mean by “we”? Who would emigrate to American in 1947? He and his siblings? Ulli did eventually emigrate (and became a huge part of our lives), while Rainer stayed in Europe (Switzerland), but was the plan for all three of them to emigrate together in 1947? Obviously that didn’t work, as it wasn’t until 1953, after Dad met Mom and my oldest brother Michael was born, that they finally emigrated. But “they” consisted of people not even in Dad’s life in 1946. Curiouser and curiouser!

At the time, I was leaning toward studying Pharmacology which would require a couple of years of hands-on work to earn some money and get to know people and language "over there,” before starting the actual college work. That suited me just fine and gave me all the incentive I needed. I was anxious, I wrote in my diary, to replace the old European horse-and-buggy romanticism with the romance of experiencing something new, even if that new kind of "romance" is colder and more pragmatic than the German Romanticism we knew. But first, I just absolutely had to pass the exam at the end of the Special Course that was about to start.

The course began in September, and it was quite exciting. We read Homer in Greek, we read the Bible in Greek in place of the traditional religion class, we read Socrates’ Apologia, we practiced analytical geometry, and we focused deeply on German composition.

It was good to have older classmates, and I felt quite at home among them. I was just turning eighteen, while the other ten students were between 20 and 28. Among them, I mused, I had the feeling that I could see the outlines of the thinking and its character of the person I hoped to become. It was boys my own age that I had trouble with. If I couldn't be with older friends, I'd rather be with animals, or even with children, whose body, mind, and soul were still in balance. I was becoming a bit set in my outlook. Gisela, on the other hand, felt she was on a never-ending internal journey and felt sorry for people who couldn't relate to her flights of fancy. We were both trying to understand the directions in which our emerging personalities were pulling us. We were experiencing changes in ourselves, and we tried to build bridges from 1944, when everything for us was "eternal,” to our current lives when our focus had to be more pragmatic, realistic, and future-focused.

When fall came and all the students’ rooms were cold or couldn't be heated, five or six of us would go to the Hauptstrasse and study for hours at the coffee house (no, they didn’t have real coffee, of course, only Ersatzkaffee). Sometimes girls from the local girls’ high school sat at the table next to us and tried to study, too, or so they said. It was harder to concentrate then, especially when the girl in the red-white-and-black-striped sweater was there, the petite one with the brown eyes and the short dark hair. But that was just one good reason for doing the homework there. The other reason was that I didn't want to walk the long way home and back again for the afternoon classes.

I had trouble with people who considered themselves "wise and experienced.” That was as close as I remember getting to teenage rebellion. One of those sages was my principal, who called me to his office because I had attended a political meeting "without having obtained the prior approval of the Director of the School.” Oh, how I longed for the freedoms of America! And my landlord, Herr Bürger — “Bürger,” a provincial petit-bourgeois, what a fitting name! — was grinding on my nerves. He taught music he didn't understand to kids he didn't understand. He was small and narrow-minded, with closely-set eyes, and seemed to personify the type of person about whom we had just read in a Horace ode: Odi profanum et arceo — “I hate all that’s commonplace and keep it away from me.” I kept him away from me by moving closer into town.

I forgot how I made the connection for finding the room in town, just a block from the cathedral. Somehow, it must have been through the school. One didn't just find a room through an ad or a note on a bulletin board, but always had to go through official bureaucratic channels. One of the professors at the Gymnasium — not one of mine — had just died, which meant that the family was no longer entitled to the entire floor space of the apartment, and had to take in someone: me. On the first of December I moved to Grießbadgasse 32, into the third-floor apartment where the widow of the professor lived with her daughter Ingrid, and Ingrid's daughter Karola, age four.

The kitchen was the only heated room in the apartment, and the kitchen table was the only place to do my homework, making my integration into the family easy and natural. Little Karola, or Pitti as she was called, was obviously seeking a father figure in her life, and I loved the role. I chopped wood for the kitchen stove, our only heating appliance. I cut up newspaper into toilet paper. I even went shopping for our "family” because, as a "victim of the Nazi regime,” I had a pass that entitled me to go to the front of food lines. I sat and listened, I read stories to little Karola, and I took her for walks to the old town fortifications. I automatically fell into my position in the tribal network: man in the house.

I have to wonder whether I was named – at least partially – after this Karola, who my Dad spoke of lovingly. He never specifically told me I was… nor did I ever ask. But when you think about it, this is the first young child he really knew and loved as an adult. There’s a likely connection, yes?

Why did the Lodging Office assign me to a place with three generations of women?! Did they figure it was an important part of my education? It turned out to be. In fact, what I learned in that apartment in Griesbadgasse was more important for my human development than all the humanistic school wisdom I was working so hard to understand at the Gymnasium.

Ingrid was 28, ten years older than I. She was in a bad state of imbalance because of everything she had been through lately. Four years ago, she had married the man she loved, having known him for five years, a promising stage actor in her beloved homeland of Silesia. They had their little girl Karola. Ingrid was working as Physical Therapist when the war machine rolled over her homeland. Silesia had been designated by the Allies to become a part of Poland. Along with millions of others, Ingrid's family was expelled. They had to flee into the German heartland on foot, taking only what they could carry or put in a small hand-pulled cart. Shortly after that flight, Ingrid's husband left her. The divorce was in process as I met her. And now, on top of the loss of home and husband, her father had died, and she had to care for an old mother and a young daughter at a most precarious and difficult time. Only Ingrid's level-headed, down-to-earth practicality was keeping her above water, and just barely. Then, just in time, I came along as the straw she could grab.

The straw itself was vulnerable. I was terribly lonely for human contact, although I was beginning to experience the new blossoming of the old romance with Gisela. That budding relationship had the drawback of being all by mail, and I was, shall we say, a curious young man.

The more Nora turned away from me, the more I remembered what I had - cruelly - sacrificed for Nora: Gisela, my real love, whose photo I had carried in a pouch around my neck all through the months of camp and on the walk through Saxony after liberation. I felt that I went through all this just for her. Gisela, the first girl to whom I had become engaged on a magic early-August day of 1944. Our innocent and pure love was the first for both of us, romantic as none since then, secret and defiant to our parents who objected strongly to what they didn’t know. That was what I wanted, she was I, she was my alter ego — why could I ever have felt otherwise?

It was with a delicious hint of melancholy that I now saw the feminine tenderness in all Gisela’s exuberant curiosity for unknown experiences and far-away places. She would not turn down the America I dreamed of, but would incorporate it in dreams of her own. How could I ever have left the one human being who, at one time, had been the angel of my pure and overflowing love? I started courting her again, tentative at first, not daring to think that she would be able to take me back now. In defiance of my real thoughts, I pretended that we were good friends now, and I called our mutual first love two years earlier “cheering to heaven, heartsick to death.” Which it was, at least in my own role as Gisela’s Cherubino.

Right into this heartbreaking decision between Nora and Gisela dropped Ingrid.

She was the one who was present in my life and she was the one with the greatest need of a strong arm around her shoulders, even if that arm was 10 years her junior. For two years she dedicated her mind, body, and soul to support a huge almost untenable load. Ingrid delighted in that young man who had fluttered into her house and life. She attached herself to me, and I found myself in a new role. Although I was much younger, I reveled in the feeling of being a real support to someone. I began to understand what Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach meant when she had said that "the people to whom we are a brace give us our support in life.” Before Christmas came, we had become very important to one another.

(Ingrid, Karola, and Thomas – Ingolstadt, 1946)

It was warm and tender and liberating. Ingrid was the first real woman in my life. It was a wonderful experience to take her under my wing, while she took me under hers. And Ingrid did not say, as Nora had, "You are still so young!" In our rapport, she became younger and in need of a centering bond and I grew older and stronger, reveling in my role of provider of the bond we both needed. And we both felt loved for the role the other played. Why was it that all girls I had known were looking for more guidance and strength from me (I thought), but the only mature woman, Ingrid, said that the strongest bond she felt to me was her sense of feeling harbored and protected?

Thomas the philosopher

Dearest grandchildren,

In this post, my father gets philosophical – and I get melancholy.

When I was looking for a meaningful reading for Dad’s funeral in 2017, I only had to go as far as his words in this little chapter of his book, The Rim of the Volcano. And reflecting on that reading made me reflect on his death… which made me reflect on his life… which made me realize that, in many ways, I am only really beginning to understand my father now, four years after his death, as I examine and ponder every word of his writings.

I chose to read the bolded words in this entry at Dad’s memorial because they so perfectly describe his philosophy about religion, science, compassion, knowledge, faith, order/chaos, nature, physics, and… well, the electromagnetic and space-time spectrum!

I share all of Dad’s philosophies that he describes here. Is that because he quietly and carefully imparted them upon me over the years? Or is it just happenstance, since we lived in the same family and community at the same time, even though we were separated by a generation? I don’t know, but I do know that I am grateful to Dad for urging us to always think, to question, to ponder, and to reflect. He reflected by writing, and I am grateful to have “inherited” that passion.

I decided to include photos from Dad’s memorial in this post because this important time in Ingolstadt is where Dad began to formulate his life philosophy that was brought full circle at his memorial.

I wish Dad could pull up a chair in my office and sit with me for a bit as I try to bring his words to life for his great-great grandchildren. Oh, how he would have loved you!

God, I miss him.

Here you go, dear grandchildren. Here are your great-grandfather’s words. Remember to always question, ponder, and reflect!

The summer of 1946 was terribly lonely for me. There was no picture of a woman in my room that summer. Nora’s picture had been dethroned. The picture I saw in my mind was that of Gisela, but it had become hazy. My first love. My pure love. My oh-so-innocent love. Would there ever be a chance that she would enter my life again? The eighth of August 1944 -- so very, very long ago, still smoldered in my soul, buried under two years of intensive living.

Professor Klatt from Vienna, a friend of my parents, had written in one of his books that "a young person who is still in the process of developing needs a great deal of solitude." I wrote that into my collection of poems and aphorisms at the time as a sort of consolation – the very wise Professor Klatt said it, so it must be true for me! But I didn't like this “important” solitude one bit. What did he think I should do with my riches of solitude? Brood? Think? Dream? Ruminate over all the newness one must digest when one is young? Why is it better to do that at home alone, in the quiet of one’s lonely little room? I didn't get it and I fought it. It wasn't until later that I realized that, while you learn about others in groups, you learn about yourself by meditating alone.

Two powerful influences on me during this time consisted of a Catholic student and a Priest teacher. Both were after me to save my half-Jewish, Protestant-raised soul. I had lengthy discourses with both, but the more they tried, the more they moved me away from the believes of my childhood. I still felt comfortable being called a Protestant (there wasn’t a drop of religion in the half-Jewish part of me), but I had practiced no religion for many years now, other than admiring Baroque churches, getting to know more of Bach's music, and looking at the religious pictures in my father's collection. My religious feelings were -- and still are! -- quite well summarized by Immanuel Kant: "There are two things which fill me with ever greater admiration, the more my mind contemplates them: the starry sky above me and the moral imperatives within me."

The more my two Catholic friends talked, the more I doubted. They only managed to instill three things in me: first, a thorough dislike for people with missionary zeal; second, a growing feeling that people had to invent religions to make themselves feel good; and most importantly, the realization that our own perceptions of heaven and earth are conditioned by a mind that could not possibly conceive of how huge the space-time spectrum is. I was just learning about the electromagnetic spectrum. It told me that our senses, being optimized for the great experiment called "evolution" (we didn't know about DNA in those days) can only perceive that minuscule part of the spectrum which we require for procreating and evolving. We happen to live in three dimensions, so the mind cannot visualize another dimension any more than a dog, say, can know what "reading" is.

The older I got, and the more I learned about the ingenious balance between order and chaos in the "big experiment" of nature and physics, and the more respect I gained for the grandeur behind the experiment. I developed an awe for realizing that vastly larger realities we cannot comprehend must exist, but I cannot get myself to worship them so they are benevolent to me, or ask their protection or forgiveness. But then — every time I watch the goldfish in the pond and observe their behavior, I think: ‘They have no idea I'm watching them. They hide when I approach, and they compete for the food I give them, but they don’t understand my presence. Is someone watching me in my fish bowl? And if someone is watching my behavior, is someone also watching that someone’s behavior?!’ It all felt so convoluted and yet, it made so much sense.

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I have never felt the need to develop a more profound theology than that in all of my adult life, but I'm not completely comfortable with it. What if there really is a God, and now he's mad at me? When I was eighteen years old, I longed for more, because my conscience and my surroundings told me I should. But even then, I found it hard to relate to any of the organized beliefs. I wanted knowledge, not faith. Today I find it interesting to study religions as a means of studying people. Isn't it presumptuous to say you "know" something that nobody can truly know? But I envy religious people for the peace their blind faith gives them, and I'm thankful for religions to have inspired the world's most magnificent art.

Handel wrote in the “Messiah,” that wonderful aria, “I know that my redeemer liveth.” What did he “know”? Did he really know? Did he think he knew? Did he believe he knew? Did he question whether he actually knew? Did he think questioning was a sin? What inspired that beautiful aria?

Don't I believe in anything then? Yes, I do, but you can’t really call it a religion. It seems that we establish the outlines of a belief system rather early in life and have it undergo its own evolution as we experience the world and people. I was well over 50 before I found the perfect credo for myself, and I have had it in front of me under the glass on my desk ever since.

Sir Kenneth Clark expressed it with a clarity that cannot be improved upon:

"I believe that order is better than chaos, and creation is better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. Overall, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human compassion is more valuable than ideology.

"I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last 2000 years, and so we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

"I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feeling by satisfying our own egos. And that we are part of a great whole which, for convenience, we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters.

Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible."

Thomas continues… from Ingolstadt in 1946.

I digress. Yes, life for me was very intense back in Ingolstadt 1946, and it was about to get more so.

The school year was over in mid-July. My report card was… well, charitable. It said that I was a “meticulous and well-behaved student who achieved, thanks to his great diligence, satisfactory results, except for the old languages which presented some difficulties.” That was an understatement. I got Ds in Latin and Greek, Cs in English and German, and just “satisfactory” in the rest of the subjects. The automatic “A” in Religion (despite my agnosticism!) didn’t make up for it.

Worse was the pre-printed reminder on the bottom of my report card: “To repeat Junior year, as required by law.”

The reason for that little legal wrinkle was this: Few of Germany’s universities had survived the war intact. During the four years of the war, millions of young men had to give up college for military service. Now, all at once, they came back to the ruins of their homes and their colleges. At the same time, a wave of new high school graduates was ready to graduate to compete with the returnees. Clearly, something had to be done. So West Germany — not the Russian Eastern zone — held the wave back by legislating an intensified extra year in high school which, for Seniors, could often count as a semester of college. At the same time, they arranged special crash programs for returning soldiers who had been drafted into the army out of high school. It was the way to get them a high school diploma fast before the younger students would graduate.

Here was my chance. We wanted to emigrate to America in 1947 and I couldn’t wait until summer 1948 to get my high school diploma. Using the interruption of my education under the Nazis as a justification, I used my summer vacation to apply for and pursue a very special permission from the Bavarian Ministry of Education to attend one of those Special Courses. It worked. Instead of spending two full years with high school kids to get the piece of paper entitling me to enter a university, I got permission to attend a six-month high-pressure crash course along with former soldiers.