Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt

Deutsche Chronik #8

by Walter Kempowski

Genres: History

219 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 1999

About the author

Walter Kempowski was a German writer. He was known for his series of novels called German Chronicle ("Deutsche Chronik") and the monumental Echolot ("Sonar"), a collage of autobiographical reports, letters and other documents by contemporary witnesses of the Second World War.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

What remained of the time at school?

This is the third and final interview book in the series called German Chronicle by Walter Kempowski. The author posed this question to about 1000 people in 1973 and presents 750 of the answers in this book, more or less ordered by school subject. Apart from telling the professions and years of birth the interviewed remain anonymous.

Overall it was a good read, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking (when it comes to the punishment methods some teachers used), but this one wasn’t as engrossing as the other two interview books, the ones about seeing Hitler and knowing about the Nazi concentration camps. This is simply because in general I don’t much like to hear about other people’s stories from school.

But one thing the book has miraculously achieved. While reading the answers I suddenly remembered quite a few details from my own time at school of more than 40 years ago. For our 30th anniversary we visited our old school building but even the photos I took that day (of which some ended up on the cover of a book called The Last Teacher) don’t work like the little stories in this book. I suppose this wasn’t the author’s intention, but reading this was a nice trip down memory lane for me.


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[Manybooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt (and the book title basically implies that with regard to school, the person uttering this comment basically cheated his/her way through, as the verb mogeln means to cheat in German) is the third and as such also the final of the non fiction "interview" books of Walter Kempowski's German Chronicle series (but that yes, I chose to read Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt before tackling either Haben Sie Hitler gesehen?: Deutsche Antworten or Haben Sie davon gewußt?: Deutsche Antworten, even if that is kind of out of chronological date of publication so to speak. Because for me personally, the school themed subject matter of Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt is a lot easier to textually digest and to deal with (as a person of German background) than Haben Sie Hitler gesehen?: Deutsche Antworten and Haben Sie davon gewußt?: Deutsche Antworten, than the two tomes regarding Adolf Hitler and Nazi atrocities (and what Germans knew and/or did not know), with Walter Kempowski for Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt interviewing around 1000 Germans in 1973, asking them what they recalled about their primary and secondary school experiences (both negative and positive) and then presenting more or less ordered by school subject 750 of those responses as the main text for Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt (anonymously featured, but with Kempowski providing professions, years of birth and also the nationalities of interviewees who had immigrated to Germany as adults and thus of course did not attend school in Germany).

And generally speaking, Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt has been a very decent and also a nicely informative and educational reading experience for me, with the presented remembrances of Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt being sometimes (and actually quite often) funny, though also often provokingly shocking, even heartbreaking and saddening at times (and not to mention that my own elementary school experiences in a small German village school from 1973 until we moved to Canada in 1976 when I was ten years old and just starting the fourth grade are certainly mirroring many of the featured remembrances of village schools and sometimes rather eccentric teachers found in Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt). And indeed, with the heartbreaking and saddening anecdotes I am alluding to, these have most prominently been the case with me when in Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt what school life was like during the Nazi era (from 1933 until 1945) is being described by the interviewees and how, for example, students who were not adept and talented regarding in particular sports, if they had any kind of even suspected mental or physical health challenges or were the children of parents considered dissidents, considered undesirable either culturally or politically were routinely ignored, kept back and denied advancement, denigrated (or indeed worse) and that draconian punishment methods used by some teachers, as well as instances of bullying by both classmates and by school officials seem not to be just a German but also often and sadly a pan global problem and issue (both then and now). But finally, to tell the truth, I do have to admit that although Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt with its short little textual "memory" snippets has been both a very easy and also a very fast (and generally equally sufficiently interesting) read and is in my opinion suitable for anyone above the age of fourteen or so with a high intermediate and above fluency in German, that there is quite a bit of repetitiveness to be encountered in Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt, this does tend to get a bit dragging, a bit tedious (and so much so that after a while, I started skimming through the interviews, and that in my opinion, if Walter Kempowski would limit his presented interviews in Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt to, say, at most 400 anecdotes, I would definitely be enjoying the featured educational memories more and not find Schule: Immer so durchgemogelt so annoyingly tedious as the book progresses and one gets same-old-same old rather consistently).

[Gabriele Goldstone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short snippets of German society, through the school system, in the Nazi years in a school setting. I read this mostly to imagine my dad as a student in northern Germany (Schleswig Holstein). Worth reading, but a tad repetitious. Curious to see what stays in a person's memory about school. The authenticity of these memories is was kept me reading.