The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (4 page)

On one occasion at school a mischief-maker was asked to own up to a particular misdemeanour. Silence descended on the classroom and no hands were raised. The teacher threatened the entire class with punishment unless the culprit confessed. The silence deepened. At last Michel stood and owned up to the crime. He was not the guilty party, and both his classmates and the teacher knew it, but he took the punishment. The silence had irritated him. ‘I could not stand cowardice. By standing up to cowards I learned by experience what worked, and the knowledge became a tool.’

His schoolmates saw him as tough and austere, while at home he was preposterously indulged. ‘Somehow I led two lives. At school I was very active in sports and was physically strong, which meant the others looked up to me. Then when I took my friends home they saw me in a different light, with women fussing over me, telling me to keep warm, pressing food on me. I was completely over-mothered. My friends were surprised. My life at home didn’t fit my outside image.

‘I was so pampered that eventually I rebelled against it. I threw out the feather mattress and soft pillows and slept on boards. Even in the depths of winter I slept without heating. My uncle insisted on having the door of my room insulated so that the cold did not permeate the rest of the house. I remember waking one morning with thick ice on the inside of the window pane. One of my ears was frost-bitten and I had to be taken to hospital. I would go skiing in shorts and deliberately leave the windows open in the chalet and have to break the ice in the basin to wash. I took cold showers. I adopted a Spartan regime, more German than the Germans. I overdid it!’

His school friends accepted him as a German, but he did not feel like one. ‘They looked to me as a leader, so I had to be German. Jewishness came up at school - and in sports, and on our trips - yet it never became an issue between me and my friends, and in all my relationships I never made any distinction. I was very close with my German and non-Jewish friends. But in the end I did not feel German - I was not German.’

His aunt and uncle were conservative Jews with liberal values, and kept a kosher household, but they were not religious and relaxed the rules when they ate out. Idessa mixed easily with all types of people, and her closest friend was Mia Von Waldenburg, a scion of the Hohenzollern family.
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The style of the house, like that of his mother, was universal and all-embracing. ‘I was taught that if you don’t need help yourself then you must give help to others - a principle that left a deep impression.’

Both his mother and his aunt had brought him up to respect other religions, on the basis that they represented what was good about human beings and promoted high human values. He was taught to remove his hat in Christian churches and his shoes in mosques. But by the age of thirteen he was thoroughly sick at having to be so reverential, and rebelled. ‘There were so many things I had to respect that I wondered if they all deserved it. Did anything or any person automatically deserve respect? I had to find out for myself.’

He began to question everything. All the rules, opinions and obligations that had been foisted upon him were subjected to a rigorous analysis. ‘I was working out a belief system, a personal philosophy. I seem to have had a very analytical mind as a child. It was an extension, I suppose, of the system I invented when I was six. I would pick a subject and question it, look at it, and try to go into it as deeply as I could. I had a complete system of analytical questioning set up. Questions. Questions. Questions. I particularly questioned my own Jewishness. I threw everything out - including God.

‘I would examine what I was supposed to believe and why. I had my own philosophical thoughts, and after I had pursued them as far as I could only then would I consult books and compare my ideas with other philosophers - Spinoza, Rant, Schopenhauer. I could always leave it off and pick it up, as if reading a book. And I could leave my thoughts and continue the next day, or months later, and know exactly where I left off. I might pick them up again waiting for a bus or a train. I was never bored.’

He made a study of all the major religions, with particular emphasis on early Christianity, and came to the conclusion he was an agnostic. Later, he became both vexed and fascinated by the concept of infinity. ‘What was beyond the beyond? My answer was that humans were limited to the finite and could never know the answer to the question. I came to accept the concept of God and the divine - that which was beyond what we could know. So I stopped being an agnostic. But I decided that how we lived and what we did with our own lives was up to us. And rejected the law of retribution as absolute evil. The idea that a human being only did good acts because he was rewarded by God, or that one’s misfortunes were a punishment from God, I found contemptible. I felt we were responsible for our own acts, and that there was no divine reward or punishment, and that we had to live with the consequences of our behaviour. Especially the consequences of what we failed to do.’

Despite his independence and maturity at fourteen, he still could not be left alone at night because of his sleep-walking. On one occasion when his aunt and uncle went on holiday, an eighteen-year-old girl, who was a friend of the family, was asked to stay. ‘The babysitter. And it happened: my first sexual experience. It was new and exciting but I did not think of it as love. She was too old, after all, and had a fiancé. I realise now she must have been very confused by it all and in great conflict. It went on for a while. I remember that after love-making I felt like rejecting her. And I didn’t like that feeling and didn’t understand it.’

He crept into his uncle’s library, a comfortable, masculine room furnished with leather sofas and chairs, where the bookshelves went from the floor to the ceiling. His uncle used it as a
Raucherzimmer
- smoking room - to receive his male friends, and there were decanters full of liquor and a humidor for cigars on the sideboard. Michel had been allowed to borrow the beautifully bound books on mythology, but others, which he knew were about sex, were hidden away. He now sought these out and found a volume on sexual behaviour and psychology.

Ideal Marriage
, written in 1926 by a Dutch gynaecologist, Dr van de Velde, was a book that purported to confine itself strictly to the marriage bed and described itself in an introduction as ‘sober, scientific and without a scintilla of eroticism’. In fact, it was advanced for its time, advocating equal sexual pleasure for both parties and stressing the need for technique. The importance of prolongation of the act for women was stressed and methods of ejaculation deferment suggested. The pros and cons of circumcision were discussed and elaborate sexual positions described - referred to as ‘attitudes’, as in ‘Equestrian Attitude (of the Woman)’. There was even a section on oral sex, or ‘genital kissing’.
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The teenage Michel had no idea that sex was such a rich field and now made it an area of serious study. ‘I learned a lot. I read that if a relationship was just about physical satisfaction, the person became an object and that this was the reason for feelings of rejection. But this did not happen when sex was combined with feelings of love, which is what my aunt had tried to explain to me at age seven. I took all this into consideration and my whole relationship changed and the act became a whole night’s activity.’

Alarmed by the intensity of her fourteen-year-old lover, the girl now drew back and began to refuse to see him, eventually locking her door against him. Naturally, this only served to increase his ardour. ‘I would climb up the wall to her window, which is what lovers are supposed to do, but in reality is pretty dangerous.’ At one point in the turbulent affair the girl announced that her period was late. She was reduced to misery by the fear of being made pregnant by an adolescent boy. It also had a sobering effect on the young Lothario. ‘My God! I sat in class surrounded by friends idly dreaming of girls. What did they know about girls? I vowed I would never do it again.’ The panic passed, and the passion with it - but he found the sexual affair had cured his sleepwalking.

Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen Michel allocated the three months of the long summer holiday to solitary travel, a period he called ‘Getting to Know Me’. ‘Friends wanted to come, but I always went alone. I would put myself in all types of situations and evaluate how I acted and reacted in them. I would examine if I had handled myself satisfactorily. And ask myself how I felt about it. Did I get it right? Could I have done it differently? If I found something I didn’t like, or a situation that scared me or that I didn’t do well in, I would attempt to repeat it in order to pass my own tests.’ This personal quest took him all over Europe and the North African countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, where he lived and travelled with Arab camel caravans.

Walking in the south of France on one of these journeys he decided to confront the vexing question of rats. ‘I passed a small cul-de-sac and saw a heap of trash with rats running all over it. I was repelled. Rats! I kept going... and then I stopped. Why did I react that way? Just because I had been told bad things about mice and rats? I had to know for myself what my own genuine reaction was, and whether my disgust was nothing more than a conditioned reflex. So I forced myself to go back and get to know the rats. I sat on the steps beside the trash and waited for them to come out.’ He settled down for the night, and after a while the brave ones - the leaders - ventured out. Slowly, their more timid companions joined them. He watched them for hours, until the rats surrounded him and moved about as if he were not there.

Although Michel had grown to love his adopted country, he became increasingly aware as a teenager of a strong identity problem. He had rejected the country of his birth and embraced Germany, but knew he was not German. ‘So who was I? It became the most important thing in my life to know who I was and to establish my identity. And I found it as a Jew. As a member of a people with a four-thousand-year history. My deeper identity, my ethnic identity was as a Jew. That gave me strength.’

But the Nazis were an ever-growing political force, and to be a Jew was to run the gauntlet in an increasingly hostile world. Jude had become a term of abuse, a contemptuous pejorative. ‘It was as good as saying “dirty Jew”. German Jews at that time called themselves “German citizens of Jewish faith”, and some, “Germans of Israelitic faith”, or even, “Germans of Mosaic faith”. This was not to avoid the strictures of Hitler, but to identify themselves as German. I was not German, and didn’t want to be. So I referred to myself as Jude - and I said it with emphasis and pride.’

By the age of sixteen Michel began to feel that he had outstripped the school he attended and no longer felt challenged. ‘I was anxious to get it over with.’ He developed a plan in which he would take extensive private instruction instead of school work, enabling him to gain a year. He took the idea to the principal, who instantly rejected it.

Undeterred, he started shopping around for alternatives, an outlandish concept for a student at that time. He chose a Gymnasium attended by children of the militaristic upper-class Junkers, a school known to be rigid in its educational methods and unforgiving in its academic standards. (‘It certainly had no Jews.’) But the principal, although a severe disciplinarian of the old school, was sympathetic to a teenager’s passion to learn. He accepted the scheme.

At the same time, Michel sought out a private tutor. He chose a highly educated intellectual in the city, Dr Karl Riesenfeld, a musicologist who wrote opera reviews and literary criticism in the highbrow publications. ‘He was a walking encyclopaedia. I explained I wanted to leave school early and go on to university, and that I wanted him to teach me personally.’ When pressed, Michel admitted that he had not yet spoken to his family about the idea. Not surprisingly, the professor turned him down. Michel refused to take no for an answer.

Riesenfeld tried to brush him off, saying he was busy: ‘Besides, summer is coming and I will be travelling.’

‘Fine,’ Michel said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

He was passionate and persuasive, and the professor finally agreed to talk to Michel’s family, and that if they consented something might be worked out.

That same evening at dinner Michel decided it was a good time to speak to his aunt and uncle about the various far-reaching arrangements he had made for his life. ‘I’ve quit school and I’m not going back.’ He explained he had left his old school and was intending to go to a more demanding establishment, finish a year early and go to university. ‘I gave them my reasons and told them what I had achieved, that a Junkers Gymnasium had accepted my plan, and that this brilliant man was prepared to talk to them about private instruction. I must say they were impressed by my initiative.’ He was granted his wish, and was also allowed to travel with his chosen Aristotle.

They visited the Alpine resorts of Austria, the Italian Dolomites and the cities of northern Italy. Michel studied every day, and discussed history and art, hour after hour. ‘I started looking at history through different eyes than those at school. The professor was a learned man, but brought people and places to life. I began to see great historical personages not as figures detached in time who fought some war, but as real people. I started to question what they were like and what motivated them. I developed critical thinking and evaluation - not accepting what I was told and read, which was very un-German at the time. It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life.’ He had previously been weak in mathematics, a subject he had no interest in and for which he was convinced he had no ability, but the professor changed all that. ‘Through challenge and love I became a reasonable mathematician. He showed me that there is nothing so complicated that it cannot be made simple, and the concept of reducing complexities later became a cornerstone of my teaching.’