School for Barbarians

by Mann Erika

The third grade is to draw an aerial attack upon a factory…. “In order to link this to the subject matter of the chemistry course, let us dwell upon the Haber-Bosch process” (forgetting that Haber was a Jew who died in exile) “in the greatest of all chemical factories the Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik…. This factory is a monument to German industry and German intelligence, startling lo the rest of the world, and of enormous material benefit to German industry. The envy of our enemies will be aroused by it as long as the factory continues to exist. To destroy it would be easy for the powerful aerial armaments of our enemies: it would take only a very few minutes! We leave it to each individual to picture for himself the misery, suffering, and cruel destruction which would result.”

This is the instruction of a country at war, in the grip of terror, surrounded by atrocity and a delusive enemy.

The bombproof cellar is set before the second grade in far more detail: “It is night. There is only a dim light, just sufficient to carry out the measures necessary for defense, but not sufficient to make it possible to read. A wounded man has just been brought in on a stretcher. His nose and mouth are bandaged and he seems to be asleep. A physician is doing his utmost for him. Beside him, on another stretcher, is another wounded man. There is a sheet thrown over his body. Perhaps he is sleeping forever. Another man is attempting to calm the women, who are always trying to meddle in the affairs of the busy men. There is no end to their everlasting questions as to how things stand…. In the corner there is a child asleep, with his wooden horse under his arm. Perhaps he is the happiest of them all.”

The highest class is to concentrate on gas masks. They are “eminently suitable for portrayal, since they simplify the more difficult form of the human head. Naturally the form of the skull is clearly recognizable as an ellipsoid. Then we concentrate our attention upon the interchangeable filters and the oxygen mask. Here the part meant to protect the nose is even more visible than in the case of the S. Mask. The entire suit of the volunteer, so made that he is protected against corroding gases, is very good for our purposes, being so very simple…. The sensitive mind of the young man is given a remarkable opportunity to set down the entire scale of possible movements, beginning with the nervous haste of those offering aid; through the weak collapse of some poor victim, in whose limbs a faint stream of life still trickles; and, finally, the rigor of death. We cannot and do not desire to train artists, just as we do not desire or attempt to train poets in our German classes. There is one thing rightfully demanded of a German composition: an avowal of the spiritual forces of reason, will, and emotion latent in man; and it is exactly the same thing that we demand of the instruction in drawing. Namely: the training of imitative power, the cultivation of the sense of beauty, and a single-minded point of view toward all that is false — these are the permanent values given Youth on its way through life.”

This close hardly seems possible, even to a person familiar with the methods of National Socialism. This twist, this whiplash, at the end of a corridor of bombproof cellars and scenes of torture! Things stand like this in Germany. And the “people” in their obedience have been assimilated by this machine.

THE PUPILS

The school bases its power on endless, hypnotizing propaganda, and the radio and movies are in the service of the same machine. The voices of the teachers are relieved by the School Radio, with its themes: “Germany, Land of Beauty,” “A People Without Territory,” “The Art of a People Grows From Its Soil,” “The German Spirit of Unity and Will to Sacrifice,” “The Miracle of Faith That Saved Germany,” “Party Day in Nuremberg,” “The Reich, the German Idea of a State,” “Unity of Blood in the German People,” “Keeping Watch Over Germany” — nine of the themes issued for the school year 1937-38 by the Leipzig Reich Radio (with the Reich Administration of the N.S.L.B. and the Reich Radio Administration). The tenth theme is “Life Is Work — Work Is Happiness.”

But the work of the children is a tragedy for their minds and spirits — a threatening tragedy that darkens the future.

The schools, with their rules and formulas, their new texts and missions, are the shell. The lives of the pupils are in reality the school. At present, in 1938, the pupils are almost exclusively “Aryan.” Enrollment of new “non-Aryans” is an impossibility; and a little ghetto of Jewish schools has sprung into being for new pupils, while the Jewish children already in Nazi schools are permitted to remain in a life of humiliating torture and painful isolation.

Dr. Rust declared on Party Day in 1937: “The establishment of a National Socialist school community, based on the foundation of the educational ideas derived from the concept of German nationhood, is possible only if a clear-cut division in accordance with the racial origin of the children is brought about. I, therefore, intend to carry out this complete division in accordance with the racial origin of the children for all pupils in all types of schools in Germany. The so-called ‘quarter-Jews,’ who have only one Jewish grandparent, will not be included in the separate schools. A separate Jewish elementary school is to be established wherever a sufficient number of Jewish children are to be found in one community or within the area of one urban or rural educational district. It will be necessary, in this case, to put children of different school ages in one classroom, because, for the establishment of these separate Jewish schools, twenty schoolchildren are to be considered as a sufficient number.”