Youth in Germany

IN JULY OF 1963, a young man of seventeen, tall and skinny as a beanpole, turned his back on La Chaux-de-Fonds and Switzerland. Baptized Catholic, Daniel had only a few months earlier sought out a priest who had finally given him his first Communion, and in Germany an Evangelical charity* in Mönchengladbach, near Düsseldorf, took him in. The Bundesliga had not yet come into existence and, like most German cities, Mönchengladbach was still rising from the ashes. Two-thirds of the town had been destroyed by 65,000 incendiary bombs. In that same year of 1963, Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, was finishing a fourteen-year term largely dedicated to reconstruction. This economic miracle bore fruit, and West Germans entered into a frenzy of consumerism and international travel that has continued to this day. Very few Black people lived in Germany at the time; they had been persecuted and killed by the Nazis in the same way as the Jews and the Romani, and suffered from a public image straight out of a colonial exhibition. “Who’s Afraid of the Black Man?” was a popular children’s game at the time, and, until the 1990s, the term Neger was still part of everyday language. During my studies in Kiel, I struggled to explain to my German colleagues that the word was really too close to its horrible French and English cognates. Yet, even if he was occasionally the target of verbal racism, Daniel never experienced any physical violence and found Germany “friendly and welcoming” overall. The Black people who settled in East Germany or who live in Germany today have not always been so fortunate.

Daniel’s plan was to go to Germany to perfect his language skills, then return to La Chaux-de-Fonds to work as a translator. Even if he was running away, it was not a wild escape; Daniel traveled with his French passport in due form. Like Candide, he arrived in North Rhine-Westphalia, where the Evangelical mission offered young people the opportunity to do a year of charitable service. In Mönchengladbach, he began working at an institution for mentally disabled people run by the Lutheran Church and helped care for a group of young male patients. He was fed and housed, given blue scrubs and seventy deutsche marks’ worth of pocket money each month. His German turned out to be too academic, the result of book learning, but he mastered the language quickly and would later read and write it perfectly. European psychiatric hospitals had not yet undergone the revolutionary transformation of the 1970s, and his new work environment was oppressive and entirely masculine. His coworkers praised his good humor, however, and he often played the clown to help cheer up his patients—a group of twenty or so adolescents and young adults, some of them with Down syndrome, others with hydrocephaly, or victims of accidents like one young man, saved too late from drowning, whose angelic features always remained perfectly expressionless. Patients who made trouble were given heavy-handed treatments that left them dazed and confused. The neighboring group was run by a portly man whom many suspected of abusing certain patients.

Young Daniel’s burgeoning faith did not survive his six months in the Lutheran Church’s institution. Daniel recalls one patient in particular who suffered from a serious developmental disability: “His body and face had no consciousness behind them; he had grown to resemble a wooden plank, the outline of a being without any depth, his functionality limited to his vital organs.” Someone explained to Daniel that God had deliberately made the boy this way in order to inspire empathy in others. Daniel was outraged by the claim that a supposedly benevolent God would use a human being as a tool in that fashion. He found that kind of manipulation totally unacceptable, a sign of divine contempt for the human condition. The church of the time also took an odd approach to managing the sex lives of its young seminarians: those who were in training to be social workers were not allowed to sleep with members of their flock for the first two years. But during year three, they received what everyone called their “hunting license.”

DANIEL LEFT THE asylum, and the Kingdom of God, in early 1964. After a monthlong training course in first aid, he finished the second half of his charitable service as an orderly in a hospital in Wuppertal. He was happy to be in mixed company again, and one Sunday, he overheard a group of girls talking about their approaching baccalaureate exams.* Their words hit Daniel like a freight train—he suddenly felt trapped, without a future. Over the next few days, he asked around and learned about some night classes where young people who were already working could prepare to take the baccalaureate exam, which would then allow them to go on to higher education.

The initiative was associated with a press campaign that encouraged working-class families to keep their children in school. Daniel spoke with the director of the program, who agreed to admit him despite his foreign origins and still imperfect German. “You’ll definitely learn something,” the director told him at the end of the interview. Daniel waited until classes began in autumn of 1964 to leave the hospital in Wuppertal and go back to school. But he still had to put bread on the table, and he started looking for a new job with hours that wouldn’t overlap with his classes, which were from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM, five days a week. At a time when there was full employment, and in the center of one of the largest industrial districts in Western Europe, nothing could be easier.

Daniel found work at Herberts Lacke, a paint factory where his shift ran from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon. The main product was automobile paint, and his employer ran a research laboratory next to the production line. Daniel worked there doing quality control on raw materials using large quantities of various solvents. Because he was not a real apprentice, he was given only the most repetitive tasks under the unfriendly eye of the lab manager, an alcoholic Herr Doktor who sometimes burst screaming and shouting out of his office. They worked without any kind of protective equipment, and the chemicals left over from testing were poured down an open sewer that dominated the center of the room. Daniel’s nose bled regularly and abundantly. The big boss, Kurt Herberts, was, however, a judicious man who had distinguished himself during the Nazi period by commissioning paintings from “banned” artists to help them survive. A follower of the theories of Rudolf Steiner, he founded two schools and developed a progressive social policy within his business, establishing a training center for three hundred apprentices. Daniel benefited, albeit indirectly, from Herberts’s enlightened capitalism: the lab manager who replaced the noisy alcoholic left Daniel alone and even gave him permission to do his homework during business hours.

Daniel’s night classes followed the German high school curriculum of the period, with all the classic subjects, including Latin. One hundred and eleven students were divided into two classes; four years later, only twenty-five of them sat for the baccalaureate exam. Daniel slept very little between the factory, his classes, and his ever-accelerating bibliophagy. At eighteen, one cannot really do without friends, and Daniel saw his when he could, usually late at night. He rented rooms from a series of “old harpies”—one of his landladies was even afraid he would stain the sheets with his dark skin by sleeping naked. Tough negotiations were required if he wanted to have any visitors, male or female. The winters in Wuppertal were a little less frigid than the ones in La Chaux-de-Fonds, but most German homes at the time lacked central heating. The young worker-student’s room was equipped with the most sluggish and dusty of coal stoves, and heating his attic apartment proved impossible when he regularly came home after ten o’clock. Daniel left his door open in hopes of catching some heat from the rest of the house while he did his nightly reading—but it was quickly closed again by his landlady. He lived in a state of constant fatigue but pushed through it. With no family to wake this almost adult each morning, he worked without a safety net. Daniel had read Sartre, though, and he took an existentialist approach: once he had decided to get his baccalaureate, nothing could stop him.

Daniel’s most important encounter at the end of 1964 was with Walter Kühhirt, who also worked at Herberts Lacke and lived in the same boarding house on Emilienstraße, not far from the Wuppertal-Barmen train line. Walter was a white African, Daniel a Black European. Both foreigners in Germany, they hit it off right away. Walter was born during the bombardments, near Düsseldorf. His father, a German who grew up in colonial Namibia, fought in the Afrika Korps during the war. He made it out with his life and took his family to live in Windhoek* soon after. Walter was six years old at the time and discovered the old “South West Africa.” His African childhood would influence him for the rest of his life. Walter’s family was mostly made up of missionaries, compassionate but straitlaced people in a country suffering under the yoke of implacable racial segregation. His white enclave on the edge of Windhoek bordered on a Black ghetto that bore a colorful name meaning “old shipyard.” Like District Six in Cape Town, South Africa, this neighborhood was soon emptied by force in order to make room for the expanding white areas. The Black inhabitants were gradually rehoused in the infamous neighborhood of Katutura (“the place we do not want to live” in the Herero language). Walter clearly remembers that night in December 1959 when the “old shipyard” was invaded by soldiers who beat and burned, killing thirteen people. The acts of Black resistance in response were, however, a seminal moment for the SWAPO.* Walter would never forget the blazing sky and the sound of gunfire, nor the moment he saw his father get down his old Mauser to guard the door.

In 1963, Walter was nineteen years old and handsome like a young Steve McQueen. His father had sent him back to Germany to “learn to live independently,” an authoritarian decision that felt like rejection. A grandmother was supposed to take care of him, but he wound up in a boarding house for young workers with four to a room. In the winter of 1963, the Rhine froze over, and Walter suffered from the cold—he never would get used to it. City life was also a shock to him. When he rode the tram for the first time, the motion of the vehicle knocked him over. He explained to the other passengers that he had just come from Africa and had never seen a contraption like this before; they gave him odd looks. Forever an outsider in his native country, he would always have a soft spot for displaced persons.

When I meet him in the train station in Düsseldorf one night in January 2016, this kind, soft-spoken seventy-two-year-old man speaks to me at length about Daniel, but also about the one million refugees that Germany has recently taken in and whose future worries him greatly. Walter gives literacy courses to migrants and he reminds me of my own father, who does the same in France. I feel bad for asking him to meet me in a freezing train station so late at night. We finish our interview in my hotel room, where he also asks me about my work, then I walk him back to the station in the rain. On the way, he tells me that he is not afraid of dying, just of losing his mind. I sense that he appreciated tonight’s recall exercise but found it somewhat disturbing as well. This would be the case with many of Daniel’s friends and family members during my research.

But in the 1960s, Walter was the life of the party and Daniel was not to be outdone. They didn’t talk much about their painful childhoods, preferring instead to discuss the different girls they’d met. Walter is the only man with whom Daniel would discuss his emotions freely, a degree of closeness and mutual trust that the pair rediscovered forty-five years later during a short vacation on the North Sea coast. In the Wuppertal of their youth, daily life was marked by a turbulent yet joyful pauperism. Always on the lookout for free entertainment, they joined a union for foreign students. Walter had read Bertrand Russell, and the two friends soon developed a reputation as atheist troublemakers. They had the most fun in a discussion group about religion. During one meeting, each person was supposed to talk about why he believed what he did: an easygoing Ghanaian explained that he was Muslim because that’s how it was in his family and quickly caught flak from his Iranian classmates for his lack of fervor.

Soon, the winter ice gave way to a gray drizzle, which then evaporated in the summer sun—it was time for a vacation, and Daniel and Walter decided to hitchhike around Europe, like a whole generation of Baby Boomers. During the summer of ’65, they set their sights on England, then the next year, on Sweden, which Daniel absolutely insisted they cross from end to end in order to visit a girlfriend of his in Finland. The girl in question would wait a long time—the Nordic roads were so deserted (or the drivers so racist?) that they never made it out of the southern half of the country. After three days of waiting on the side of the road, the duo threw in the towel and beat a slow retreat back to Northern Germany. Just back over the border, they were getting ready to sleep under the stars yet again when they encountered a group of police officers who took pity on them: the jail cells down at the station were empty, and they offered to let the travelers stay the night. Daniel’s first encounter with the law was quite funny. . . and very unlike the one that awaited him back in France.

IN FACT, DANIEL’S relatively calm life in Wuppertal was soon to come to an end. Even if he rarely talked about them, Daniel had not forgotten his French origins. Looking for his mother, he wrote to the public authorities, but never received a response. Then, in 1965, the French army tracked him down through the embassy in Bern with some help from the German government, which requires all residents to declare their address: at nineteen years old, Daniel, like all young Frenchmen his age, was called up for a year of mandatory military service. He ignored the French government’s first letter—they had never done anything for him, so why should he respond? The pastor at his high school in Wuppertal, putting Daniel’s increasingly obvious atheism aside, offered to help and tried to obtain a dispensation that would allow Daniel to finish his studies. Nothing came of it, though, and at the end of 1966, things went south—he was declared a draft dodger and lost his French passport. Left with only a laissez-passer, he was ordered to return to France immediately. Around the same time, the army barged into his mother’s home in Paris, searching the apartment twice under the fearful eyes of brothers and sisters who were still unaware of their eldest sibling’s existence. Renée Pauly, who had still not been told that her son was in Germany, wrote to Madame G’s sister, begging her to find Daniel. The woman had moved from Paris to La Chaux-de-Fonds, and though she had no idea where Daniel was, she kept the letter.

Around Christmas of 1966, Daniel put his studies on hold one more time, left his job at Herberts Lacke, and returned to France via La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he still had a few friends. He ran into the G--- aunt and she gave him his mother’s letter, which turned his world upside down. He arrived in Paris on a Friday in January of 1967, only twenty years old and already leaving several lives behind him.

Daniel does not go into detail when discussing his reunion with his family but admits that everyone cried a lot. His brother Gérard, the third oldest of the siblings, who was seventeen at the time, is more forthcoming. When I visit them near Aix-en-Provence in February of 2016, Gérard and his wife, Jocelyne, have just come down from their home in La Rochelle to look after their grandchildren. Up to this point, I have done most of my interviews in noisy public places, and I appreciate the calm of their rented cabin in the countryside. Gérard is a retired house painter and maintenance man, tall like all the Paulys, and athletic, with a kind voice and eyes.

Daniel’s arrival in Paris, as Gérard describes it, was a family fiasco. Renée revealed the existence of Daniel to her other children at the last minute. On the day of, she left with two of her daughters to wait for him at the Gare de l’Est, leaving her husband at home with the rest of the clan. They missed each other at the train station, and Daniel found his own way to the family home in Maisons-Alfort, where he introduced himself and asked if this was the Pauly residence. They invited him in and he sat down to wait, grim-faced and stiff as a board. Daniel had a list of very specific questions designed to determine if, yes or no, he had really found his French family. The ambiance remained tense until Renée arrived and locked herself in the kitchen with her adult son. She showed him the letters from the G---s, proof of their maneuvering, lies, and threats, as well as of her own efforts to find him. We can only imagine how strange they must have felt, reunited at last, joyful and angry all at the same time.

But that was only the beginning: the following Monday, Daniel made his way to the army barracks, where he was arrested and put under guard like a dangerous criminal by two soldiers armed with submachine guns. Torn from his mother and thrown in prison, Daniel lived through a terrifying week. He was completely lost in that big, man-grinding machine; he “didn’t know the first three notes of ‘La Marseillaise,’” saluted with his left hand, and, when entering a colonel’s office, politely asked if he might have a seat—after which everyone yelled at him. But once again, someone reached out a helping hand: Daniel was saved by an army psychologist who recognized that they weren’t going to get much out of this born nonconformist. He offered to declare Daniel mentally unfit for service, which would leave a permanent mark in his file but save his skin. Daniel accepted and was out by the end of the week. Four months later, he went to trial for dodging the draft. A public defense attorney he’d never seen before represented him half-heartedly. The military judge was, Daniel remembers, “a big Black man from the French Caribbean dressed in a red robe,” who let him off with a two-month suspended sentence—after all, the reasoning went, he was the eldest of eight and belonged at home. The Jehovah’s Witness and conscientious objector whose case was heard just before Daniel’s did not have the same luck: he had already been behind bars for two years and was given three more, the whole affair wrapped up in about five minutes. Relieved, Daniel told himself that the Reign of Terror* wasn’t just a thing of the past.

Freed from his military obligations, he still had to wait for a new passport before returning to Germany, and the whole adventure cost him another school year. In the meantime, he stayed with the Paulys, who squeezed a little tighter into their apartment, where there were now ten of them, to make room for Daniel. He found work at the DDE (Department of Transportation and Infrastructure), evaluating the traffic exiting Paris on the east side to help prepare for the construction of the A4, France’s second-longest autoroute. He enjoyed counting cars in the field, but not the tedious task of inputting data on the enormous mechanical calculator.

During evenings at home, Daniel’s mother, “a real chatterbox,” told him all about the family history of the Paulys and the Cléments. His brothers and sisters got to know him and were soon fascinated by this intelligent and cultured young man who shared their mother’s talkative nature. Daniel’s visit left a strong impression—he was a window on the world for all his siblings. Work began and ended early at the DDE, so Daniel took advantage of his afternoons off to explore Paris with his brothers and sisters. Barefoot, his nose in a book (preferably a tough read), he would ride the metro with his siblings, then guide them through the Louvre and the Palais de la découverte. On weekends, they built a whole collection of photographic equipment, including a waterproof housing for a camera that could take pictures underwater, buying raw materials at the flea market and putting them together under Daniel’s watchful eye. He had learned a thing or two about mechanics and assembly at Incabloc and from his years of building model airplanes. His two youngest brothers, Gilbert and Christian, developed a passion for photography that would stay with them all their lives. For his part, Daniel was favorably impressed by Louis Pauly, a “good guy” who had married Daniel’s mother and recognized him as his own. The two of them got along right away, and Daniel admired this new father, who woke up early each morning to fight the good fight as a heavy industry worker at the metallurgy company Tréfimétaux. Louis’s heart and his ballot leaned left, and he harbored a distrust of intellectuals that Daniel would never forget.

For summer vacation, the ever-loyal Walter and another friend came down from Germany to perfect the tableau. Walter was a wild one and shocked the Paulys right off the bat by imitating a whole host of different characters. Redbeard the pirate and the British comedian Marty Feldman were among their favorites, though it’s hard to imagine how Walter managed to imitate Marty’s bulging eyes. Amid the collective frenzy, Daniel continued digging into his family history. He bought a scooter and went alone to meet Renée’s father, Henri Clément, the man whose racism had kicked off this whole psychodrama. In Avize, his grandfather received him coldly but received him all the same, and Daniel returned to Paris with another item crossed off his emotional checklist. Eventually, the money he made counting cars allowed him to trade his scooter for a small three-horsepower van. Daniel’s German girlfriend, Ute, had not forgotten about him during his stay in France, and came to join him for a trip to England. The Paulys thought she was a little quirky, but very sweet.

At the beginning of the 1967 school year, Daniel returned to his night classes in Germany, but Herberts Lacke wouldn’t have him back—after all, he was only going to leave again after graduation. He was forced to take a much more tiresome job in a brush and broom factory. The owner was appalling and Daniel found new employment as soon as possible, this time as an office-furniture deliveryman. The social exclusion he experienced, his life as an adolescent worker, and his reunion with his working-class family naturally pushed Daniel toward Marxism, and it was during these years that his political views began to take shape.

IN 1968, STUDENT protests were heating up all over Europe. In May, Daniel and Ute loaded up an old Volkswagen with extra fuel (most gas stations were closed because of labor strikes) and headed to Paris to see the revolution in action. With Daniel’s Pauly siblings Gérard and Anita, they participated in four or five demonstrations, mostly as spectators, amid occasional onslaughts from the riot police and the metallic smell of tear gas hanging in the air. Troublemakers mixed with the protesters, “throwing cobblestones a lot further than the students could have.” These games of hide-and-seek contrasted sharply with evenings at the Pauly residence, where the family often wondered how they would manage to feed everyone the next day. Daniel also took Gérard to the Odéon theater, which was being occupied by student protesters. Getting in was no easy feat, but Daniel passed himself off as a German journalist accompanied by his “assistant,” who didn’t say a word. Gérard was struck by the beauty of the place and by the content of the discussions going on there, in which the revolutionaries were already assigning themselves cabinet positions in their future government. Daniel, however, was underwhelmed by their Maoist diatribes, which he found childish and . . . well, theatrical. He couldn’t resist standing up to tell them about how his German comrades were organizing. Some of them had, in fact, declared war on “the establishment” the year before. In November 1967, during a public university meeting in Hamburg in the presence of the city’s crème de la crème, two students took advantage of the university rectors’ arrival to roll out a banner that said, “Under their gowns, a thousand-year-old stench.”* The reference to the thousand-year Reich and the Nazi past of some postwar faculty was clear and would be remembered by posterity—the student revolution in Germany had found its battle cry.

In his last year of high school, Daniel received a scholarship from the German government, and his life took on a less frenetic pace. To avoid losing his edge, and because stagnation made him nervous, he taught private French classes part-time for a few months, though he didn’t particularly enjoy it. When spring brought the baccalaureate exams, Daniel did well overall but panicked on the math test and received a mediocre score.* He was mortified, and a long way from imagining that later he would publish volumes stuffed full of equations. The local newspaper in Wuppertal covered the event with the headline, “No special treatment for late graduates.” The article, from the spring of 1969, specifies that twenty-four of the twenty-five candidates, with an average age of twenty-five, passed the nine written tests and almost as many orals. Only a few of the candidates were interested in going on to higher education. A single student is named in the article, one Daniel Pauly from Paris, France, who declared that he had paid for his own schooling and wanted to go on to study biology. Daniel was also photographed for the article: he appears thin, with short hair, a white button-down shirt, and a skinny black tie. He is deep in conversation with his classmate, Sabine Jensen, a pretty young woman in a black vest who is running a nervous hand through her white-blond hair. Daniel’s hands are stretched out in front of him, palm to palm, fingers spread.

His high school diploma in the bag, Daniel was thrilled to finally move on to university, but before that, he still had a few skeletons to chase out of the closet. In June of 1969, he set off for the United States in the company of the faithful Walter to search for his father, Winston McLemore, and his African American heritage.


* Diakonisches Werk.

* The baccalaureate is an academic qualification that students are required to pass in order to graduate from high school in Germany, France, and other European countries. (TN)

With the slogan “Schick Dein Kind länger auf bessere Schulen” (“Send your child to better schools for longer”).

* Now the capital of Namibia.

South West Africa was a German colony between 1884 and 1915. After World War I, it became a mandate of the Union of South Africa, and in 1990, gained its independence as the Republic of Namibia.

Die alte Werft.

* South West Africa People’s Organization, the party currently in power in Namibia.

* Reign of Terror (1793–94): One of the darkest periods of the French Revolution, during which frivolous accusations of treason led to multiple massacres and executions. (TN)

Ulysses by James Joyce was one of the books he read around that time, and he would gladly go on and on about the famous chapter that lacks punctuation.

*Unter den Talaren, der Muff von 1000 Jahren.

* Four out of six, with one being the best.

“Senior”–Abiturienten wurde nichts geschenkt–Mit Cicero, Algebra und Goethe zur nachgeholten Studienreife.

A gesture also often made by Barack Obama, another mixed-race boy who grew up without his father, in Hawaii.

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