Urchin on the Beat

Starting where the first volume leaves off, we see the author enter his teenage years and the adventures of journalism. The book takes us from the end of 1947 to about 1961 and the building of the wall between East and West Germany.

World War II is over. The author’ s parents are divorced. He lives in the Soviet zone of bombed-out Germany. Every morning, his Communist teacher urges his pupils to beat up the three Christian boys in his class. Uwe Siemon-Netto is one of them. He flees to the West and is separated from his granny, who had shielded him against Nazi ideology and taught him to be a Christian. He winds up in a boarding school with a bizarre religion.

In Urchin on the Beat, he is still a rascal who tries to knock off nuns’ headgear with snowballs to find out if they are hairless and founds a gang of licorice thieves. He leaves the boarding school when his mother escapes from East Germany and settles in the gritty industrial city of Hagen. But he doesn’ t live with her. Instead, he is housed in a freezing attic room without water. He works in a department store and a textile mill to supplement the measly stipend his father pays him. He visits the municipal modern art museum, falls in love with contemporary art, and begins writing short items about it for a local newspaper.

After this, he dropped out of school and went to England and then to France to improve his language skills. Then, his fate takes a happy turn: He trains as a journalist. Two years later, he is a desk editor and reporter at the Associated Press in Frankfurt. Thus begins his stellar career as a foreign correspondent covering world affairs.