Five Weeks at Humanitas. Manfred Jurgensen
saying something about the stimulating climate of the North Sea. I did go there and spent two and a half months in a beautiful place called Wittdun (literally ‘white dunes’). I owed the partial recovery of my health to Flensburg’s Public Health doctor with whom I shared my name. (A couple of years later I read in the local paper of a certain doctor who had practised with the public health service under a false name. A Dr Fritz Sawade had been exposed as the medical officer of a notorious Nazi concentration camp. His real name was Professor Dr. Werner Heyde, a mass murderer and standard-bearer of the SS, in charge of the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ program. His trial took place in 1962 in Frankfurt, where the Chief State Prosecutor accused Heyde/Sawade of having murdered ‘at least 100,000 victims’. On 14 February 1964 the Flensburger Tageblatt reported the man who would have ‘euthanased’ my deaf brother had committed suicide in his prison cell.)
That day at the Recruiting Board with my father was a farce. I had no intention of actually serving. My escape plan was by no means secure, but serving in the German air force wasn’t part of it.
Then everything happened at once. I studied hard, anxious to do well in the final exams. At the same time business at the chemist shop took a nosedive and my parents began to fight each other openly. I continued doing the daily chores, shopping, preparing tea, cleaning the apartment. Too many of the salesmen who visited the chemist shop wanted to see me. I took refuge in the home of my favourite teacher, Dr Petersen. He’d joined our school as subject master in German and History during my final two years at Grammar. The entire class thought him the most charismatic teacher we’d ever had. Dr Petersen’s colleagues felt the same, albeit some with barely hidden resentment. I loved and idealised him because he restored my faith in people who really cared for others. He was not only a gifted teacher; Dr Petersen was a trusted advisor, a father figure and a friend who took a genuine interest in me. He sensed that something was troubling me and was anxious to discover what it was. He wasn’t prying; he wanted to help me and needed to know. I trusted him, but something made me hold back. I had spent a lot of time in his home where we talked literature, history and a range of other subjects we were both interested in. He made me forget he was my teacher. More and more I thought of him as a fatherly friend. I remember watching him build a playground for his intellectually-handicapped child. As he assembled the various parts, it seemed a picture of how he wanted to put me back together again. I was deeply moved by his caring temperament.
Dr Petersen must have learned something about my situation at home. I was stunned when he made formal attempts to adopt me. (It wasn’t the first time someone was prepared to take me into his home and become my legal guardian. Many years earlier a refugee couple, the Tormanns, had made an attempt to rescue me. Foolishly I didn’t agree to move to their flat in a new apartment near the beach of Ostseebad. I was afraid of Herr Tormann because he had only one arm and was a bailiff. He was in fact the most kind-hearted person I knew, but to me he was a constant reminder of the war and I didn’t like his profession. To levy a distress upon some poor debtor seemed merciless and cruel, no matter how kind the man who carried out the duty. Perhaps Herr Tormann sensed my reservation because once he told me in his calm and quiet voice, as if to appease himself or his profession, that the whole of Germany was ‘in pawn’. He didn’t realise his comment only helped increase my fear and alienation.) If Dr Petersen had adopted me he might have turned into a carer of two disturbed boys. What kind of a literary playground would he have constructed for me?
My love for my teacher knew no bounds, and Dr Petersen made little attempt to hide that I had become his favourite student. Yet despite his spectacular success as a teacher there was a mysterious aura of ambiguity or ill repute about him. Most of us put it down to envy. Only very rarely did we see in class glimpses of something slightly disturbing. One instant was when he threw his heavy briefcase across the room for no apparent reason, missing my friend Kalle by a fraction. Other moments of concern were when our history teacher seemed to freeze in the middle of a sentence. Once he looked out of the window and proclaimed the world was made of glass. We interpreted these occurrences as part of Dr Petersen’s idiosyncratic teaching method, his peculiar sense of humour even. We were all quite certain he was deeply committed to his class and cared for individual students as if they were his own flesh and blood.
On one occasion he informed us he’d been the national champion in boxing. We expected another original teaching analogy of our master in unusual didactics. He’d won the final bout in Berlin by knockout after having been hammered by his opponent in earlier rounds. At this stage we all thought we knew where he was going. But then, after a dramatically prolonged moment of silence, Dr Petersen looked at his class and declared: ‘I was a Nazi.’ Having outed himself, his big bodily frame froze. We sat in silence, devastated and strangely hurt. Only Hannelore, sitting in the front row, began to sob. I was waiting for the bell to ring. This confessional showdown had to end! Our respected teacher, the star of Grammar, had knocked himself out. Our collective disappointment was in urgent need of consolation. We all remained silent. We continued to be stunned, unable to respond. Why weren’t we told we could leave the classroom? None of us knew what to do. Then Dr Petersen spoke again. This time he took off his glasses and adopted a terrifying grimace. ‘I’m also a nutcase, an idiot, crazy, mad, kaputt.’ I felt goosebumps on my back as I instinctively called out: ‘No!’ Eerily, there was no other response from the class. We all kept sitting there, unable to move. ‘I shouldn’t be allowed to teach.’ Was that Dr Petersen’s voice? It sounded so different it couldn’t have been him. ‘Well,’ the crazy voice continued, ‘I wasn’t allowed to teach.’ He stared at us almost triumphantly, then froze again. When at last the bell rang Dr Petersen suddenly stormed out of the classroom as if chased by the devil himself. He’d said, ‘I was a Nazi.’ I wondered whether a Nazi could ever cease being one. Could Hitler have become a normal, average, decent member of society?
Years later, in Melbourne, I received a long letter from my former teacher. He was now working in a small private boarding school at Timmendorf near the Baltic Sea. The letter consisted mainly of quotations from the Bible, many of them underlined in red, and complaints about the behaviour of students in the dormitory. An old classmate had already informed me that some time ago Dr Petersen’s wife had filed for divorce. Only a short while ago my cousin Ingrid, who had graduated from Flensburg’s Danish grammar school, then passed her German Abit-ur (school-leaving examination) at Goethe Grammar, wrote she too had been taught by the charismatic history teacher whom she had come to admire greatly. It appears Dr Petersen was passed around several of my hometown’s secondary schools.
My own problems caught up with me in my final year at Old Grammar. One day I collapsed in my attic. When I was found the next day, the local doctor was called. A week later I was sent on a rest cure to a sanatorium in the small Saxon town of Bevensen.
The clinic, run by a motherly woman in her fifties who had lost her own son during the war, made every effort to make it appear as if it were not institutionalised. Located in a picturesque landscape, surrounded by cornfields and small woods, part of the treatment was to let nature take its course. Mens sana in corpore sano. I went for early morning runs through the woods, ate a hearty breakfast and presented myself to a group of doctors an hour later. After lunch patients were asked to take a two-hour nap followed by snacks in the dining room and ‘constitutional strolls’ through the park and gardens. Some were allowed to visit the neighbouring village of Medingen during the afternoon. I remember the sanatorium as a very pleasant, caring place that allowed its residents maximum freedom. After my first medical I was given ‘the tower’, located in a quiet and peaceful part of the main building, as my habitation. Completely overgrown with thick ivy and featuring two high windows, it offered magnificent views across the countryside.
My time at the clinic was perhaps too quiet, with too much leisure to think. It seemed I was responding well to the personal program of recovery designed by the doctors. I was well enough to make jokes about my room, referring to it as ‘my Holderlin tower’, an allusion to the great German poet who during his madness spent years in a turreted building in Tubingen. I don’t know what made me climb out of the window so high above the ground, especially as I suffer from vertigo. Somehow I found myself hanging from the window-sill almost twenty metres above ground. I fell down a considerable distance. The drop would almost certainly have been fatal had I not instinctively clung to the sturdy stems of