Growing Up, part 11

A German Youth

Grown up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s

   From a research point of view it is actually very interesting how the different children coped with the facts of constantly fighting individuals as the result of a two stubborn parents who never did fully comprehend the consequences on their children. 
   My father simply lived his own world; as a provider he has done what he should do - to earn money. He was so full of himself that he was not even interested to remember the birthdays of each of his children. One morning my mother reminded him that today it was his son's birthday. He grabbed his wallet, gave me a 5 German Mark coin like he occasionally tipped someone helping him unloading goods from his truck and said, seemingly embarrassed,  'Happy birthday!'         
   My elder sister started to party at a very early age. After finishing the secondary school she learned and work in the same transport company as my father and the elder half-sister. As she had some income she bought her first 2nd hand car and made friends with US soldiers some 70km from home. She dared to bring them home occasionally. While my mother liked the friends she called my sister with very bad names, and, as with my step sister, had occasionally physical fights over trivial matters.
   I stayed mostly in my room, read my books and struggled in school. Generally I did o.k. until the 7th grade (around 14 years of age), from the 8th grade I really had to invest more time on my school books just to pass some tests and get some acceptable grades. My weakness was clearly Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, while the languages and my forth chosen major, Biology, was going acceptable. 
   For one semester the director of the school was our German teacher. He liked to give us us a subject on an essay and let us write for 40 minutes on it while he followed his own interests. As I liked reading I took these essays very seriously and let my imagination run wild. One day he returned me my notebook and said "Correcting your last essay I got interested in reading your other essays again. I've noticed that because of your small handwriting I believed that your contents were more than I've previously recognized. So I've decided to give you higher grades to all of your essays."
   In 8th grade our German teacher let us write an essay about 'evening'. We could freely choose between the form of a composition or a piece of poetry. My classmates started writing immediately while I was just sitting and started to think. Everyone would choose a composition which is much easier to write but would take the hard work of at least one A4 page. A poem would only take 16 lines, and no-one would choose it anyway. It was winter a that time and as I looked out of the school window there was a new snow covering everything. I went to Judo lessons every Thursday evening after training and as I walked through the city street to the bus station it was snowing. So I just wrote this feeling walking the dark streets when I've noticed the snow falling from heaven. I don't remember the whole poem but it finished with ..."falling snowflakes like crystals." I was the first to return in the paper and could leave because it was the last lesson of the day. To my surprise I not only got the highest grade of everyone but every classmate got one copy from my poem 'as an example' after the teacher read it out loud in class!

 A skinny teenager

   It was, looking at the age, a time when I was growing up from boyhood to became a young man. Mostly left alone I did not have anyone to turn to and had to figure out too many things by myself. Some of my classmates already started to experience girl- or boyfriends, I was more a bystander. I was the guy who was all the time the last you think of, or, as Sylvester Stallone said in one of his Rocky movies:" You are invited to a party but it really does not matter if you go or not because no-one will care anyway."
   I've met the nice girl beside the ice skating hall but the situation in my family and the failure of my own parents scared the hell out of me to commit myself into a relationships. So it did not last long because somehow I thought that it would be irresponsible to drag someone cute and innocent into my own confusing, sad and violent environment. At least until I would be independent, having an own income and would be in charge of my own life...
   As my stepsister bought a stereo she gave me her old tape recorder with a radio. I listened constantly to it and occasionally sampled some English songs from the radio on tapes. I've liked many different direction of music only classical music let me fall asleep. Disco was modern but there was a also counterculture like Rock in its different forms (Hard Rock, Heavy Metal), Punk was arriving and even Rock n' Roll made its comeback. The end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s was musically the most interesting era in my opinion. On some school excursions I took my sampled tapes with me and the bus driver was willing to put them in his machine and let my classmates listen to my tapes. In the absence of any studio and only created by a 2nd hand tape recorder they seemed all right, many classmates praised me for my music taste.
   In sports we all played soccer or European football. Because I was never a real sprinter I was chosen to be goalkeeper. I could 'read' the game, could anticipate the direction of the ball and sense when to leave the goal in cases of a high ball or in a one-on-one situation. We even made it into the semi-finals of the school tournament. We could make it into the finals but because the two 'stars' had an argument they rather played for themselves than as a team.

(to be continued)