Previous True Himmler entries: 0, 1, 2, 3.
Gaudeamus Igitur [‘So Let Us Rejoice’]
HE SITS IN THE TRAIN brooding, a few days after his nineteenth birthday in October 1919. There is a young couple seated opposite. He noticed them earlier, on the railroad platform; they are married, and he envies them. He is visiting Eichstatt, a town popular with pilgrims. It has a castle, built by mediaeval princes and clergy—‘impossible with today’s wages and workforce,’ reflects Heinrich Himmler, the teenager. Twenty or more years from now he will command a slave-labour force of millions building much vaster structures.
He has brought along something to read, Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 pamphlet on ‘The Stage as a Moral Institution’—a call for playwrights to purify the German language; both are disciplines after his father’s heart, and the Classics professor may well have pressed this reading matter into his hands. Lingering on rather lower ground, Heini has brought along a ghost story, The White Hand, to read as well.
He and Gebhard are visiting castles and monasteries and family—rattling along on the narrow-gauge railroad to Rebhard-Hofmühle station, and then on to the majestic church at Eichstatt, where their uncle Karl Patin has been a priest since 1894 in the famous abbey of St Walburg’s, named after an English Benedictine missionary whose bones rest here for over twelve hundred years. Uncle Karl is just back from officiating at a funeral, and he invites them in for tea.
Heinrich Himmler is still getting to know his family in October 1919 as he prepares for his years of higher education: men of the cloth and Classical academics, that is his milieu.