Abstract
I was born in the house of my grandparents, a large director’s villa near the entrance to the coal mine where both my father and grandfather worked. There was a large orchard behind the house (with delicious red and black currents and goose berry bushes and a tall pear tree) and a small kennel for Hector, my grandpa’s hunting dog.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Around 1920 Hitler became member # 7 of the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (German Worker’s Party) which he soon re-christened National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (abbreviated as NSDAP)—a clever name, seemingly uniting the opposing political poles: National and Socialist. Hitler also designed the Swastika flag, the swastika derived from the Germanic sun-wheel still rolled down the hillsides at summer solstice in Nordic countries. (The Hindu swastika has a different parentage, I believe.)
- 2.
In the eighteenth century, some Jesuits, who were sent by the Vatican to the Qing imperial court in Beijing to convert the Chinese to Christianity were, instead, themselves “infected” by Confucianism.
- 3.
On my father’s low salary we couldn’t of course afford a Pension, let alone a hotel, right on the Strandpromenade (“board walk”). In fact, the whole trip was KdF sponsored.—The next year we took another Kraft durch Freude vacation in Strobl on the Wolfgangsee. We were lodged with a small-time farmer (where I caught Asthma from their moldy bedding). One day, at the end of August, I saw a long line of cars at a filling station. The reason? Impending war, I was told. In the meantime we enjoyed the lovely Wolfgangsee, the nearby mountains—especially a gorgeous view of the Dachstein glacier. And in Austria they were still serving strawberries and whipped cream (Schlagsahne, the real thing).
- 4.
The place where Hitler stood during the mammoth parade on the Ost-West-Achse (later Strasse des 17. Juni) is now occupied by a massive Soviet monument to their victory over Germany—constructed, fittingly, with marble slabs from Hitler’s Neue Reichskanzlei.
- 5.
Earlier, in Rotenburg, I was “working on my railroad” by collecting Blaubeeren (blueberries) for 32 Pfennig a (metric) pound.
- 6.
The date was also marked by one of the more important events of the “Russian campaign” (as the Germans liked to call the war on the Eastern front): October 16th saw the most serious riots in the history of the Soviet Union. In the general mayhem, the cars of party-bureaucrats fleeing Moscow were overturned by frantic Russians fearing the arrival of the Wehrmacht within a few days. Government departments and foreign embassies had already been evacuated to Kuybechev and a train was readied for Stalin to leave Moscow. But the Supreme Leader, after inspecting the train, made one of the most fateful decisions of the war: he decided to stay in the city and if necessary, perish with it. Soon Russian forces rallied and, only 2 months later, dealt a devastating blow to the German army just west of Moscow—the first major Nazi defeat in the war.
- 7.
Neuzelle was descended from Frederick the Great’s famous Potsdam Kadettenanstalt. (The king had once offered Giacomo Casanova a position as a teacher of French (and good manners!) in Potsdam, but the great lover declined when Frederick showed him around one of the dormitories—with unemptied chamberpots. Giacomo fled Prussia forthwith for the better smells of St. Petersburg.)
- 8.
This getup was already highly unusual in Nazi Germany where a closely cropped chevellure was de rigeur.
- 9.
The Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose (and friend of Gandhi before they parted ways) offered his services to Hitler for “liberating” India. The plan, however, fell through because the Germans failed to reach India. Bose was then shipped by submarine to Japan, where he formed a “Free India” division which actually saw action in India but was defeated by the superior weapons of the British.—The other day I asked an Indian sales clerk in a supermarket whether he knew S.C. Bose and he answered without hesitation: “Yes—a great man!” In fact, S.C.B. is still held in high regard by many Indians, because he was ready to fight the British by the force of arms—as opposed to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.—Another famous Bose was Satyendra Nath Bose who invented Bose-Einstein statistics and for whom bosons are named, such as the particles of light, the photons. S.N. Bose was also a close family friend of S.C. Bose, the nationalist leader. (From Dwarka N. Bose, University of Calcutta, in Physics Today, June 2007, page 12.)—(My acquaintance Amar Bose of loudspeaker renown is apparently unrelated to the two more famous Boses.)
- 10.
One day before the German surrender, Hitler had promoted Colonel General von Paulus to Field Marshall, hoping that von Paulus would kill himself because no German field Marshall had ever capitulated. That way, Hitler could claim that everybody had fought the Bolsheviks until their last breath—a legend Nazi-propaganda spread anyhow. It was only after the war that it became widely known that the 100,000 surviving troops (out of 300,000) had actually surrendered. To fortify their despicable lie, the Nazis, in one of their most heinous crimes against their own people, withheld letters and postcards from the prisoners to their families. (They were discovered long after the war in East Germany.)—The Nazis offered to exchange Yakov Stalin, whom they had taken prisoner, for Marshal Paulus (to court-martial him?). But father Stalin refused the deal. Later Yakov was killed while trying to escape the German POW camp. Stalin is said to have been relieved when the news reached him. A prisoner of war was considered a traitor and many were, in fact, shot out-of-hand when the Western Allies shipped them back (often against their will) to the motherland after they were “liberated” at the end of the war. The shootings sometimes took place in the presence of the American officers and truck drivers who had delivered the poor souls (personal communication).—(Galina Dzhugashvili, Yakov’s daughter, who died in August 2007, maintained during her entire life the fiction that her father fell in battle, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary (New York Times, CNN, August 28, 2007.)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schroeder, M.R. (2015). School Years. In: Xiang, N., Sessler, G. (eds) Acoustics, Information, and Communication. Modern Acoustics and Signal Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05660-9_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05660-9_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05659-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05660-9
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)