box. The Blaupunkt migrated to my parents’ bedroom, three walls away. At the crack of dawn I heard the wake-up broadcast from Radio Munich. The program was called Morning Gymnastics, and the floor began to vibrate rhythmically. Led by the gymnastics instructor in the Blaupunkt, my parents performed their exercises. And since I was too chubby and they wanted me to be more soldierly, my parents sent me once a week to a private exercise class that most people called Gymnastics for Cripples.
Yesterday an officer wearing a green cap the size of a cake platter gave a speech at the roll-call grounds, the Appellplatz. He spoke about peace and FUSSKULTUR, which sounded to us like the culture of feet. Tur Prikulitsch couldn’t interrupt, he stood next to the man like a devout acolyte, then summarized the contents of the speech: Fusskultur strengthens our hearts. And in our hearts beats the heart of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Fusskultur steels the strength of the working class. Through Fusskultur the Soviet Union will blossom in the strength of the Communist Party and in the peace and happiness of the people. Konrad Fonn, the accordion player, who came from the same region as Tur Prikulitsch, told me that Y in the Cyrillic alphabet was like our U, and that the speech was all about the power of physical training, which the Russians call FISKULTURA. The officer had evidently tried to re-create the word in German and come up with PHYS-KULTUR, but had read the German Y like a Cyrillic U, and Tur didn’t dare correct him.
I knew all about FUSSKULTUR from the cripple gymnastics and from our Volk course in high school, which we had to attend every Thursday. We drilled in the schoolyard: lie down, stand up, climb the fence, squat, lie down, push up, stand up. Left, right, march, sing songs. Wotan, Vikings, Germanic ballads. On Saturdays or Sundays we would go on marches out of town. We trained in the brush on the hills, we used branches for camouflage, we practiced finding our way with owl calls and dog barks, and played war games wearing red and blue woolen threads. If you tore the thread off an enemy you had killed him. The person with the most threads was decorated as a hero, a blood-red rose hip serving as a medal.
Once I simply decided not to go. It wasn’t easy. There had been a big earthquake the night before. An apartment house had collapsed in Bucharest and buried a number of people. In our town all that collapsed were a few chimneys, and at home two pipes fell off the stove, but I used the earthquake as an excuse. The gym instructor didn’t inquire further, but I was already feeling the effects of my special training: my act of disobedience only reinforced my sense of being crippled.
In these exciting times my father photographed girl gymnasts and Transylvanian Saxon girls in folk costume. He had even purchased a Leica to do so. And he became a Sunday hunter. On Mondays I’d watch him skin the hares he had shot. Stretched out without their fur, stiff and tinged with blue, the hares looked like the Saxon gymnast girls at the barre. The hares were eaten. The pelts were nailed to the wall of the shed and after drying got stored in a tin chest in the attic. Every six months Herr Fränkel came to pick them up. Then he stopped coming. No one wanted to know anything more. He was Jewish, reddish-blond, tall, and nearly as slender as a hare. Little Ferdi Reich and his mother, who lived in the rear of the building, were no longer there either. No one wanted to know anything more.
It was easy not to know anything. Refugees arrived from Bessarabia and Transnistria, they were given lodging, stayed a while, and went on. Then German soldiers came from the Reich, were given lodging, stayed a while, and went on. Neighbors and relatives and teachers went off to fight for the Romanian Fascists or for Hitler. Some came home on leave from the front and others didn’t. There were also rabble-rousers who avoided the front but stirred things up at home and wore their uniforms to the ballrooms and cafés.
Our science teacher, too, wore a uniform when he taught us about the yellow lady’s slipper growing in the moss. And the edelweiss. The edelweiss was more than a plant, it was a fashion. Everyone wore some kind of talisman: