Walter did not have to wait too long for the new school year to start; it happened sooner than he expected. The classroom was filled with yelling, squealing, shrieking kids of both genders. The first day he sat, crying, on the lap of a compassionate, welcoming teacher. She explained to the other kids that Walter was a little afraid and new in town. She smiled at him, pressing him close to her heart, and told him there was no need to be scared. Walter loved her immediately.
The next three years went by fast. Walter did well in school and then wanted to attend high school, which was supported by his good grades and the encouragement of well-intentioned teachers.
Although he was able to walk to grammar school through the old town, he now used a secondhand bicycle his parents had obtained for him. The route was four miles, but led through the spa area with its manicured gardens and beautiful trees, some of them imported from exotic places. He passed large park meadows, golf courses, and the famous casino, the Spielbank. At the end of the trip, up a little hill, was the elite school Kaiser Friedrich Gymnasium. Mostly the well-to-do and the nobility sent their offspring to it. Walter, from the blue-collar old town with a shared water closet on the public staircase, had been unaware of these differences until now, though he still did not understand the connection between money, status, and support system.
He innocently began a time of learning and suffering. His first four years in school had passed in a playful way. Now, the demands, schedule, and pace of new subjects, along with his personal limits, made it difficult for him to keep track of what was taught. His parents paid for an afternoon homework group where Walter could get his assignments done by someone else. After time, however, it became obvious in class that young Walter was simply overwhelmed by the prerequisites that he could not deliver.
He started eating during lectures because his stomach hurt when empty, which caused teachers to record him frequently in the class register. The form teacher did not ignore any opportunity to expose Walter’s weakness in front of the class. He called him a dreamer and sleepyhead. Walter’s world turned into a place of torment in which he suffered a lot of pain and humiliation afflicted by a neo-Nazi assistant teacher.
To top it off, his mother followed the habit of listening to and commiserating with strangers who would complain about her son. Walter could not recall a single instance when his mother defended him in any situation. This time she listened to the blond, blue-eyed, young teacher. Frau Herzog had several choices about what to do with her son: let Walter repeat one class, let him switch to middle school, or alternatively, simply send him back to elementary school—, which she did.
Walter’s mother allowed him to purchase a guitar and take lessons with Herr Brandt, a private music teacher. What he wanted to learn was how to play like they did on the rock-and-roll records. Herr Brandt gave him Salem-brand cigarettes without filters or let Walter smoke his own when he had some. During rehearsals, Walter’s talent triggered Brandt’s passion of talking about the old philosophers Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer. He would also play a classical piece on the piano for him—all of which shortened the time he had to count the beat, transmit a note from a page through his brain into his fingers, and then find the right spot on the fret board.
Walter returned to his former grammar school. His class was boys only, and he realized instantly that he looked at an endless four years. For various reasons, many of the youngsters had been demoted for the second and even third time. They were two, three, and more years older than the rest. Coming from a disciplined high school, Walter was in absolute shock for some time. It appeared as though none of the teachers cared what happened behind those closed classroom doors.
Only the religious education teacher, Merkel, enforced strict rules and habits in the Protestant section that Walter attended. Merkel’s specialty was to enter the classroom, pull out his used, large, cotton handkerchief, and blow his nose with a lot of force until the tissue was drenched. Satisfied, he then decorated the hot radiator with it.
Merkel would ask, “Where did we stop last time?”, and when somebody told him, he would order, “Weitermachen!” (“Continue!”).
One of the boys would begin to read aloud stories from the Protestant religion schoolbook. Merkel would place his head between both hands and close his eyes: forty-five minutes of peace, sometimes interrupted by snoring. The boy who was able to keep reading became somewhat of a hero because of the valuable time he gained for the group. In this way, Walter, a proficient reader, secured his entrance into the circle of hard-core boys; now they needed him. He could read flowingly without mistakes and had just the right tone of voice that rocked Merkel into sleep. The boys’ main concern was that someone keeps on reading; keep the flow going, no matter what, because when Merkel found out that something else had gone on, he sought extreme countermeasures, such as hitting fingertips with a wooden ruler or cane stick.
One day a classmate brought a selection of soft pornographic pictures, and all the boys peeked at them. They may have been ripped-out pages of a fashion magazine. All the adolescents in the classroom had been in various stages of puberty for some time already, and hormones in their bodies caused turmoil. Walter, on a reading break, suddenly noticed the wild eyes and red face of the oldest and most bullish one of class. The boy had his huge penis in one hand and was masturbating wildly while staring at the pictures. Then he ejaculated a colossal amount of semen onto the color picture page. When Merkel suddenly woke up due to some involuntary noise or an energy blow-up of sorts, he used the cane stick on fingertips again.