Neumann, nicknamed Neumeli: Who can keep from rolling with laughter when describing this teacher? Neumann is our gym teacher and simultaneously our penmanship teacher; he has red hair and gloomy, careworn, sharp facial features. He is a very, very unhappy man maybe. He always gets so insanely angry. We have him completely under our thumbs; he is completely in our power. People such as him instill no respect, only occasionally fear, namely when they seem like they’re about to go out of their minds with rage. He cannot keep himself under even the slightest bit of control, instead all his feelings seem to plunge down into a pit of anger at the slightest opportunity. Of course we do give him reasons to get angry. But why does he have such ridiculous red hair? Such an excessively henpecked manner? One of my classmates is named Junge; he says he wants to be a cook when he grows up. This Junge has a wonderfully pronounced backside. Whenever he has to do forward bends, Junge’s backside sticks out even more crazily. You laugh when that happens, and Neumann has a terrible hatred for students laughing. It really is something dreadful — such total, intermingling and interringing classroom laughter. When a whole class laughs out loud like that, what kind of means should a teacher use to quiet it? Dignity? That’s no use. Someone like Neumann has no real dignity. I like gym class very much and I want to kiss dear Junge. Immoderate laughter is so pleasant. I am nice to Junge; I like him very much. We go for lots of walks together, and when we do we talk about what real life has in store for us.
Wyß the rector is as tall as a tree trunk and holds himself like a soldier. We fear and respect him; these two upstanding feelings are a bit boring. I can no longer imagine the rector of a progymnasium as being anything other than just like Rector Wyß. Incidentally, he has an excellent understanding of corporal punishment. He takes you across his knee and thrashes terribly but not quite barbarically away. The blows from Wyß have something proper and fitting about them; while you are tasting his lash you have the pleasant feeling that this is a reasonable, just punishment. Nothing horrific happens. The man who knows how to beat a student so masterfully must be to a certain extent humane. I believe that too.
A very strange figure and a rare example of teacherhood, it seems to me, is Herr Jakob, the geography teacher. He is like a hermit or a brooding old poet. He is more than seventy years old and has big, shining eyes. He is a handsome, splendid old man. His beard reaches down to his breast. Think of all the things this breast must have felt and fought for! I, as a schoolboy, find myself unintentionally trying to imagine it and so I share in his experience in my thoughts. It is truly monstrous to think how many boys this man has already inculcated with the noble art of geography. Many of these boys are already grown men by now; they are long since right in the middle of life and some of them might have been able to put their geographical knowledge to use. The map hangs on the wall right next to old Herr Jakob — we call him Kobi, by the way — so that it’s utterly impossible now to picture Jakob without his accompanying map. There stands torn, multicolored, variously shaped Europe; big broad Russia, far-reaching Asia, dainty Japan like a bird with a beautiful tail, Australia hurled up out of the ocean; India and Egypt and Africa, which feels dark and unexplored to you even on the disembodied map; finally North and South America and the two mysterious poles. Yes, I have to say, I love geography class with a passion and I learn the lessons there without needing to try at all. It is as though my mind is a ship captain’s mind: It goes that smoothly. And old Herr Jakob understands so well how to make the class interesting by weaving in adventurous stories he has read about and experienced in person! His old, big eyes roll meaningfully back and forth, and it seems like this man has seen every country and every ocean on earth with his own eyes. There is no other class that fills us students to bursting with sympathetic imagining in the same way. There we really experience something every time; there we sit quietly and listen; obviously — an old, wise person is talking to us and that automatically makes you pay attention. Thank God that in this progymnasium we don’t have any young teachers. That would be unbearable. What can a young man who has barely seen anything of life himself have to communicate and impart? A person like that could only give a cold, superficial knowledge, unless he is a rare exception and knows how to be captivating with his mere presence. To be a teacher: It’s a hard job, that’s for sure. God, we schoolboys are so demanding. How abominable we are really! We even make fun of old Herr Jakob now and then. Then he gets terribly angry, and I don’t know anything more sublime than the rage of this old schoolmaster. He trembles horribly in all his fragile limbs, and afterwards we’re involuntarily ashamed of ourselves for having worked him up and made him angry.
Our drawing teacher is named Lanz. Lanz should be our dancing instructor: He can hop back and forth so magnificently. Speaking of which: Why don’t we get any dance instruction? It seems to me they don’t do anything to teach us grace, posture, and good behavior. We are real brats and likely to stay that way. But back to Lanz: He is the youngest and most confident of all our teachers. He believes we respect him. I hope the idea makes him happy. Incidentally, he has absolutely no sense of humor. He’s not a schoolteacher, he’s an animal trainer; he should work for the circus. Hitting us gives him, as far as we can tell, spiritual pleasure. That is brutaclass="underline" reason enough for us to tease him and despise him. His predecessor, old Herr Häuselmann, nicknamed Hüseler, was a pig; one day he had to stop teaching. This Hüseler permitted himself some very peculiar things. I myself can still feel on my cheek his old, bony, repulsive hand, with which he used to stroke and caress us boys in class. Then, when he took the liberty of doing what no pen can describe, he was removed from his position. Now we have Lanz. One was an abomination, but this one is vain and uncouth. Not a teacher! No real teacher could be so taken with himself.
Our brashest and most hilarious classmate is named Fritz Kocher. This Kocher stands up from the school bench, usually in math class, mutely raises his index finger in the air, and asks Herr Bur, the math teacher, if he may please be excused: He has the runs. Bur says that he knows what Fritz Kocher means by his runs, and tells him to just sit down. We others all laugh dreadfully loud, of course, and — miracle of miracles! — here’s a teacher who simply laughs along with us. And strangely: that fills us practically on the spot with respect and affection for this rare man. We stop laughing, because Bur understands brilliantly how to bring our attention back to serious matters. His teacherly seriousness has something captivating about it, and I think it’s because Bur is a man of extraordinarily strong and upright character. We listen eagerly to his words, since he seems almost mysteriously intelligent to us; also he never gets mad, on the contrary he is always lively, happy, and cheerful, which gives us the happy feeling that this man finds his classroom duties pleasant. That flatters us mightily, and we think that we should feel grateful to him for not seeing us as tormenting spirits who embitter his life, and so we behave ourselves. How funny he can be when he wants to be! But we also feel in such cases that he is acting a little for our benefit, to let us have some innocent fun. We see that he is practically an artist; we can tell that he respects us. He is a truly great guy. And you grasp and learn so much in his class! He knows how to give the most disembodied, abstract things shape and sense and content, so that it’s a real pleasure. He likes Fritz Kocher for how unbelievably bold his crazy ideas are, while another teacher would curse and persecute him. That seems important to me: that such a competent, experienced man can sympathize with rascally behavior. He must have a great and noble soul, Bur. He possesses goodness and serenity. He also has a lot of energy. He turns almost all of us into sharp little arithmetickers in a relatively short time. And he treats the more stupid students among us gently. It would never occur to us to pester this Bur; his behavior never even lets us so much as think of such a thing.