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By Root 1556 0

World Exposition of 1908). Rightly, because, while providing good training it was not, unlike its British equivalents, particularly interested in competitive races and it provided a wonderful opportunity for junior and senior boys to meet on equal terms. The club had somehow acquired a meadow, known as ‘unser Gut’ (our estate) on the small fishery-protected Sakrower See, accessible only by special permission through a narrow waterway. Groups of friends made up crews to row there or meet there at weekends, to talk, look at the summer skies and swim across the green waters before returning to the evening city. For the first and only time in my life I could see the point of a sports club. An old boy of the school, Dr Wolfgang Unger, a physician at the Spandau hospital, kept an eye on the training of new recruits. I understand that, after being removed from his hospital post on racial grounds in 1934, he committed suicide, unwilling to leave his country, Germany.

A Prussian school with military connections was naturally Protestant in spirit, deeply patriotic and conservative. Those of us who did not fit this pattern – whether as Catholics, Jews, foreigners, pacifists or leftwingers, felt ourselves as a collective minority, even though in no measurable way an excluded minority.3 Nevertheless it was not a Nazi school. (Few of the boys I knew showed much enthusiasm for Hitler and the Brownshirts, except Kube, the unusually dense son of a man who was Hitler’s Gauleiter of Brandenburg, and who made it his business to get a literature teacher at the school fired on the grounds that he ‘favoured’ the surviving Jewish students and taught chiefly the degraded literature of the Weimar Republic. He was to become the notorious boss of occupied Belorussia during the war, until eventually assassinated by his patriotic local mistress.) On the contrary. Whatever sympathy the school might have had for the national revival promised by Hitler did not survive the forcible purging, not long after I left for England, of the highly respected and popular headmaster, Oberstudiendirektor Dr Walter Schönbrunn, a political undesirable under the new regime. He was replaced by an imposed and bitterly resented Kommissarischer Leiter. One can hardly call the PHG of the 1930s a centre of dissidence, but it is characteristic that Franz Marc’s ‘Tower of Blue Horses’ – I remember it well from the school hallway – banned as ‘degenerate art’ by the new authorities, was rescued from a storeroom by one form and hung in its own classroom. Pupils protested against the dismissal of Professor ‘Sally’ Birnbaum, the popular mathematics and science teacher: signatures were collected all over the school for a petition to retain him. In the winter of 1936–7 the entire lower first form still made a collective visit to his home in the Rosenheimerstrasse. (He survived in Berlin until 1943 when he and his wife were loaded on to 36. Osttransport, destination, presumably, Auschwitz.) Indeed, there is some evidence that the school went out of its way to treat Jewish students and teachers well, at least while they remained. However politically unacceptable to a would-be teenage revolutionary, who would never have dreamed of wearing the peaked school cap (rather in the yachtsman’s style with a soft top), it was a decent school.

This was undoubtedly due to what the Hitler regime recognized in Schönbrunn (generally known as ‘der Chef’ or ‘the boss’) as the anti-hierarchical and socially suspect spirit of Weimar. The boat club was one expression of it. The stress on student self-government and participation in disciplinary cases was another. The unforgettable camping and youth-hostelling class journeys through the Mark Brandenburg and Mecklenburg were a third. (Not for nothing had Dr Schönbrunn, equally qualified to teach German, Latin, Greek and mathematics, published a work with the title, whose tone is virtually untranslatable into non-German languages, Jugendwandern als Reifung zur Kultur (Youth Ripening into Culture by Hiking). I did not, personally, warm to this smallish man with