ABSTRACT
I was not yet quite nine years old when I entered secondary school, Gymnasium. The German educational system was, and largely still is, different from the British and American, and a detailed description would be of interest only to the expert who probably knows about it in any case. School began at 8:00 am and ended at 1:00 pm six days a week. The holidays were six weeks in the summer and shorter periods in winter, at Easter, and in the fall. Since it took me about half an hour to reach school and since I wanted to be there in good time, it meant getting up early. I think I was never late for school; my punctuality, inherited from my father, was slightly obsessive. Only graduates from a gymnasium could study at a university; there were perhaps six such schools in Breslau, and ours was a “humanist” gymnasium, with Latin right from the start, and the teaching of Greek beginning in the fourth form. Ours, the Johannaeum, had a liberal reputation, and comparatively many Jewish boys attended it. In later years the Johannaeum was merged with another gymnasium, the Zwinger. From the point of view of academic quality there was not much to choose from among the various schools. Ours had produced three Nobel Prize winners at one time or another, but we were not overawed, and in any case, the best known of them, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, had been asked to leave at the age of eleven because his work was so much below par; the school could not pride itself on having done a great job.
