Young Gerber Read online

  FRIEDRICH TORBERG

  YOUNG GERBER

  Translated from the German by

  Anthea Bell

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Translator’s Foreword

  Chapter I: God Almighty Kupfer

  Chapter II: Entry of the Gladiators. Strike the Gong

  Chapter III: Three Encounters

  Chapter IV: Meditations on x

  Chapter V: The Palfrey Stumbles

  Chapter VI: A Young Man Called Kurt Gerber

  Chapter VII: Kurt Gerber, Number 7

  Chapter VIII: The Hard Path to Failure

  Chapter IX: “Wednesday at Ten”, a Trashy Novel

  Chapter X: A Storm on Two Fronts

  Chapter XI: The Palfrey Collapses

  Chapter XII: The Matura Examination

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  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  YOUNG GERBER

  Translator’s Foreword

  Exam pressure on young people is nothing new, as readers will discover from this novel, first published in 1930. Its author, Friedrich Torberg (a pseudonym; his real surname was Kantor), is regarded as an Austrian writer, although as a young man he held Czech citizenship. His family was from the same German-speaking Jewish middle class of Prague as Kafka’s, although Friedrich was born in 1908 in Vienna, where his father’s work had taken them. In his teenage years the family moved back to Prague; his last school years were spent in that city at the German Realgymnasium (grammar school or high school), which still used antiquated educational methods dating from the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Some reforms were already being introduced in Vienna at this time, but Young Gerber contains autobiographical elements.

  After leaving school (he passed his final exams at the second attempt), and abandoning his university studies, Torberg worked as a journalist in both Prague and Vienna. Young Gerber was his first novel, and he was encouraged to send it to a publisher by Max Brod, Kafka’s confidant and the man who famously ignored instructions to destroy all his friend’s unpublished work after his death. Torberg’s novel was a great success, but only three years after its publication it was banned in Nazi Germany at the time of the first book-burnings, along with the works of many other German-language writers of Jewish origin. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Torberg happened to be in Prague, and armed with his Czech citizenship he emigrated first to Switzerland, then to France, before becoming one of a party of “Ten Outstanding German Writers” invited to the United States by the PEN Club in New York. During the war he worked in the States as a translator, freelance journalist and theatrical critic, and took American citizenship, which he retained even after his return to Austria in 1951. He lived there for the rest of his life, and died in Vienna in 1979.

  Young Gerber’s instant success suggests that it aroused painful memories in the minds of those of its original readers who had been through the German and Austrian educational system of those days. Kurt Gerber, the 18-year-old protagonist, is persecuted during his final year at school by a man who, it is to be hoped, would be recognized today as a sadistic psychopath: Professor Kupfer, teacher of mathematics and descriptive geometry. “Professor” was evidently a kind of courtesy title for all the teachers in such secondary schools, and denoted no particular academic rank; we learn that Kupfer did not even have a doctoral degree.

  The school-leaving examination itself, known as the Abitur in Germany, the Matura or Reifeprüfung in Austria, had a firmly established structure at the time described by Torberg. It was in two parts, first the written papers, then an oral examination. The compulsory subjects were mathematics and descriptive geometry (involving the representation of three-dimensional objects, useful if you intended to be an engineer or architect); a foreign language, either classical or modern; as well as German, history and geography. While physics, chemistry and natural history were studied, they did not feature as examination subjects. Only students who had passed the written papers were admitted to the oral part of the exam, which, as Torberg presents it, was vitally important. This fact explains the constant anxiety felt throughout their last year by the students in this novel when they are to be tested in class. Only if they pass the oral examination will they really have gained their Matura.

  The long final chapter describes the course of this oral exam. Best of all was to pass with a distinction (Vorzug); second best was to be passed unanimously by all the examiners (Stimmeneinheit); students who did not quite achieve that could still claim the Matura with a majority of pass marks (Mehrheit). Interestingly, one of the girls in the class, Anny Kohl, is distressed by the prospect of getting only a unanimous pass; she wanted to emulate the other girls who had passed with distinction that day. Evidently girls with academic ambitions had to be competitive; Lisa, whom Kurt loves, has opted out as the book begins, leaving school to work in an arts and crafts studio and be a good-time girl. In Kurt’s class of final-year students there are few girls, only six of them among many more boys (and they sit segregated at the front of the class, where the teachers, all of them men, can have a good look at their legs). Exam pressure may still be felt today, but mercifully such details of the old Austro-Hungarian system are a thing of the past.

  ANTHEA BELL

  The whole world rests upon three things: on truth, on justice, and on love.

  Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel

  The author began writing this book in the winter of early 1929, a year after his first draft of it. Within a single week of that winter, from 27th January to 3rd February 1929, his attention was drawn to newspaper announcements of ten suicides by school students.

  I

  God Almighty Kupfer

  IT WAS A MILD, late-summer morning, and the classroom door was open. Amidst all the noise, no one noticed when young Gerber came in. He went to his desk in the back row, sat down and looked at the scene before him at his leisure. It was just the same as on any other day at school. And Kurt Gerber, in line with the habit he had acquired from much reading of seeing everything that went on around him as if he remembered it, as if it were an account of something already in the past, registered it as almost a recapitulation of previous events.

  The students in their last year at High School XVI had assembled in their classroom. They were sitting or standing around in groups, their conversations were loud, excited and incessant, even headlong; they had so much to tell each other after two summer months, their final long school holidays. For the last time they knew, with familiar certainty, that the end of those months meant the beginning of a new school year, but they also knew for the first time, and with an intriguing sense of novelty, that it would be their last.

  Their last school year! Those four words had always had a magical aura—they were about to enter the world of reality, and the face and behaviour of every one of the thirty-two eighth-year students reflected that fact. Between 28th June and 1st September they had visibly been adjusting to adulthood, and now, in high spirits, they acted as if they already had this last year behind them. As if there were not another ten months still ahead of them, ten more months of being the school students they had been for the last seven years. Except that everything would carry the extra significance of being for the last time: preparing for exams, taking them, making mistakes, skipping lessons, homework, entries in the register, work marked from Very Good to Unsatisfactory. All that, thought Kurt, looking at the eighth-year students as they cheerfully talked, would be as it had always been since their first year. And not so very much had changed about themselves either, although Körner sported a moustache, and Sittig was kissing the hands of the Reinhard sisters who had just come in (they
hadn’t grown any prettier in all that time). They would all behave badly, and less frequently well, just as they did before, and they would quake with fear of the exams and laugh at their teachers’ jokes. However, if Rimmel hooted with shrill merriment as he was doing now when Schleich recited the latest double entendres in a song about a randy landlady, and if it wasn’t a teacher’s joke he was laughing at, then first he would get his face slapped, and second he would have a black mark entered against him in the register—which in the eighth class, just before the final examination, was a far more serious matter than before. I’d happily give you a black mark myself, you toady, thought Kurt Gerber. Well, there we are. And now let the school year begin…

  Kurt Gerber looked around. None of the chattering groups particularly attracted him.

  Where was Lisa Berwald?

  When he got home, he had found a picture postcard from Italy sending him her warm good wishes. “I’m afraid I don’t know where you are spending the summer,” she wrote, “or I might have looked in there myself. Well, see you when we’re back home again.” He wanted to know whether she would really have visited him on holiday, or if those were only empty words, like just about everything she said to him and did. But Lisa Berwald wasn’t here yet.

  So who to talk to? It was simplest to join the group on his left by the window. Kaulich was there, with Gerald, Schleich and Blank.

  After loud greetings the conversation was soon in full flow. Soon Hobbelmann, who had obviously just arrived, joined them.

  “Hello, Scheri! I have news for you!” (Scheri was Kurt’s nickname. It had started out “Geri” with a hard “g” sound, short for Gerber, and then, Heaven knows why, had become Scheri, with a soft initial sound.) “Who do you think is going to be our class teacher?”

  “No idea.”

  Hobbelmann looked around. “None of the rest of you, either? Go on, then, have a guess!”

  “Seelig?” asked Kurt.

  “Wrong.”

  “Mattusch?”

  “Wrong again.”

  “Unless you’re going to say you don’t know either—who is it?”

  “God Almighty Kupfer.”

  Kurt jumped. His head shot forward. He felt the blood rising to his face. Next moment he had seized the startled Hobbelmann and was shaking him. “What did you say? Who?”

  Everyone knew that although Professor Kupfer had never taught Kurt Gerber, he did not like him– but the effect of this sudden explosion was so funny that everyone burst out laughing. That brought Kurt to his senses. He let go of the gasping Hobbelmann, struck the top of the desk in front of him and cried, with comically exaggerated emotion, “Then all my wishes are finally granted!”

  And his account of a meeting with Kupfer during the summer holidays came pouring out. The Professor stalked past him three times, ignoring him, and even when he came upon Kurt in the forest, and they were on their own, he did not return his civil greeting but said only, in a sharp tone of voice, “It appears that you have recovered very well from the seventh-year examinations,” and walked on before Kurt could say anything—“I could have hit the conceited fool”. And later, when by chance Kupfer was introduced to Kurt Gerber’s father, and his first words were: “Oh… Gerber? The father of that lad going up into the eighth year? Well, your son would have nothing to laugh about in my form. I know how to bring slackers like that into line!” there had been an argument. His father wanted him to change to a different school, but Kurt had persuaded him that, after all, it was far from certain that Kupfer was really going to be his class teacher—and now there he was, God Almighty Kupfer…

  Silence reigned for a while. Then there was a buzz of voices.

  “I heard there was going to be a new teacher.—How does Hobbelmann know, anyway?—It’s not set in stone.—Why not Mattusch as our class teacher again?—God Almighty’s not so bad, you just have to keep on the right side of him.—That’s true.—I’m staying out of this.—God Almighty Kupfer is all right.—Don’t expect me to swallow that. He’s failed me once already.—Let’s go on strike.—Down with Kupfer.—Don’t be ridiculous.—I’m telling you, Rothbart will stay where he is and Niesset will be our form master…”

  Then the bell rang, only faintly audible at first in all the hubbub, but it soon died down. Eight o’clock. School was beginning. Someone closed the classroom door from the outside, and now all was quiet.

  But then the noise swelled again. It was a familiar phenomenon, and its nonsensical nature hadn’t changed since the students’ first day at school: as soon as the bell rang they went to their places—without any pushing and shoving—where they continued the conversation they had broken off. Real silence fell only when the class teacher, often several minutes later, opened the door. And today of all days, when there were no lessons, only the class teacher’s official opening of the year of studies, which—as if to lead them gently from leisure to hard work—always began a little late, so that you didn’t really know whether to count it as a school day or still the holidays—well, today of all days, then, there was no real reason to preserve an anxious silence. Soon there was general conversation again.

  Only Kurt Gerber sat there in silence. His thoughts were in confusion, he tried in vain to gather them all together and begin sorting them out, he could grasp nothing clearly but that name, the idea of it, the quintessence of that idea: Professor Kupfer, God Almighty. What to do? How was he to behave to him? Submissively? Knuckling under from the start, without waiting for the first blow, ducking so that it would fall on empty air? That would mean he didn’t even find out whether Kupfer really meant “to deal with” a “slacker” like him! Or, on the contrary, should he fight back? Brace himself to resist at the first occasion for it: I am not going to duck! But, for Heaven’s sake—this was the last year at school, the crucial year when you had to, had to pass the final examination, known in Austrian schools as the Matura. What should he do? Wait and see, that’s best, he thought. Maybe he won’t really be as bad as all that, and I’ll be able to get along with him without losing face. Some people speak well of him. Yes, and anyway—who says for certain that he’s going to be our class teacher? Why shouldn’t Mattusch stay with us, or maybe it will be the descriptive geometry master Rothbart, or Hussak who teaches maths and physics? Why is it to be Kupfer all of a sudden teaching us maths and descriptive geometry and being our class teacher? Why? Just because Hobbelmann wanted to show off by imparting a sensational piece of news? Nonsense. God Almighty Kupfer won’t be coming here…

  “Here comes God Almighty Kupfer!”

  Mertens, who had been keeping watch outside the door, rushed in and sat down in his place as good as gold. The noise broke off abruptly.

  So it was true. Or maybe he was on his way to another class?

  He ought to be here by now.

  Was Mertens trying to fool us?

  There—now… nothing.

  The sound of the door handle being pushed suddenly down was like a shot breaking the deep silence. Kurt started with alarm, and his knees felt weak as he got to his feet.

  The others had risen as well and stood motionless as Professor Artur Kupfer, known among the students as God Almighty Kupfer on account of the infallibility to which he often and emphatically laid claim, strode past the right-hand row of students to the teacher’s desk.

  Professor Kupfer was about forty years old, and rather too corpulent for a man of medium height. Areas of his short fair hair bore witness to unsuccessful efforts with the brush to arrange it neatly at the back of his head. His moderately high forehead, like the whole of his rather bloated face, was an undistinguished red in colour, despite the attention he obviously devoted to it, and on his thin, prominent, aquiline nose that effect was enhanced by the little red veins running over it. Steely blue eyes behind oval, rimless glasses looked persistently for something that wasn’t present. Today he wore a casual pale-grey suit with a matching tie. He had draped a raincoat over the arm in which he was clutching the large green class registe
r; his free hand, as usual, was plucking at his carefully trimmed blond moustache.

  Professor Kupfer had reached the lectern that was the teacher’s desk. He mounted the step up to it, still with his back turned to the students, and threw the raincoat carelessly over the back of his chair. Then he swung swiftly round, looked expressionlessly at all of them now standing to attention, and said very quietly, with a slight nod of his head, “Sit down!” For the first time that remark, heard five times every day for hundreds of weeks, had a special effect on the students. It was almost a relief, coming from the mouth of the man whose appearance had imposed such unusual and almost paralytic rigidity on the eighth-year class. He actually speaks, they thought, God Almighty Kupfer speaks like any human being. Doesn’t make his stern will known in brief gestures. Says just, “Sit down”, like the other teachers, and now there he stands saying nothing, as any human being might say nothing.

  “I will wait until we have total peace and quiet,” says Professor Kupfer in a sharp voice, without moving, without looking at anyone. And only when the class is sitting as motionless as it was standing before, only then does he move, apparently in order to illustrate the contrast between the students, who must sit still at his bidding, and him, whom no one here can command, and who now moves all the more freely.

  Kurt Gerber had not looked away from him yet; he was staring at him spellbound, as if looking for some vulnerable spot in the enemy with whom he was about to enter the ring for a ten-month wrestling match.

  Now Professor Kupfer made a movement like a man waking from profound and distant thought, leant against the tall lectern, hands in his jacket pockets, and suddenly began to smile. Instantly, he had so transformed both himself and the mood of the class that all he had previously said and done became an artificial prelude, one he had performed almost without thinking. Now, however, now that God Almighty Kupfer was really here, now the real game began.