I went to high school, which is called Gymnasium. Gymnasium at that time meant that you start with old languages like Latin...
[Q] Greek...
Greek, yes, and very... not much mathematics and natural sciences, which I liked too. At the same time with ten years they draft you to the youth organisation of the Nazis, and... Jungvolk, but I was lucky, I came into an orchestra, so... which I later even got to organise myself, and we played there classical music all the time and so we had a very good time. The school was no problem. We sometime had a very good mathematics teacher, and I was brilliant in mathematics, then we got a bad teacher and I was lazy...
[Q] Uninterested...
Yes. I mean I was not interested in trivial type of problems. Natural sciences was not very good, although I liked myself chemistry. I had a laboratory at home, and...
[Q] A little box...
No, it was a real laboratory already, which sometimes my mother didn't like it at all when something exploded in the kitchen. That was the time, I remember both my parents told me terrible things about the Nazis. They say they are driving to war, and that was different from what I learnt at school, where they, of course, hailed them, and I had to become fifteen, sixteen years old to find out that my parents were right, but this was already then towards the end of the war.
[Q] So there was a sort of internal or even open opposition from you personally towards your parents, or were you respectful enough not to show?
Yes. Well, I told them what I heard in school, and they told me that's... they told me also your teachers have to say this, otherwise they will be in prison...
[Q] Out of job...
Or they will be out of job or so, yes. As a small boy you want to make your experience yourself and, the war started when I was twelve in '39.
[Q] Yes, just a question. Was this discussion every day, or just that you had once a week such a discussion? Did you... did one avoid to talk about it, or do you remember this now a posteriori? Because how you say it, it seems so as if it was every day a problem.
We always had lunch together, when I came out of school I had to hurry to get home because my father wanted that the family is united at lunch. And of course they often came home, my father, and say they heard something terrible going on and so there was a discussion at the table and we brought stories home from school, yes, but my youth was very much directed towards learning in school, and I liked it also, and towards music.
