Essen is where Werner Pfennig’s uncertain future is submitted to an eight-day institutional test. In a sweltering dance hall, the National Political Institutes of Education assess a hundred boys through athletic trials and racialized bodily measurements; Werner leaves convinced he is not good enough, yet the letter that follows makes Essen the point of departure for his new life at Schulpforta.

The examination setting

The entrance examinations take place in Essen, eighteen miles south of Zollverein, inside a dance hall heated by three enormous radiators plugged into the back wall. One radiator clangs and steams throughout the day despite attempts to shut it off. War ministry flags hang from the rafters, turning an ordinary public venue into a stage for the state’s selection process.

A representative in a black uniform arranges the hundred all-male recruits in ranks four deep. Medals chime on his chest as he paces. He announces that the exams will last eight days and that only the purest and strongest will be accepted. The boys are issued white shirts, shorts, and socks, and change where they stand. The hall’s heat, uniforms, ranks, and inspection together make the candidates appear less like individuals than bodies being sorted for use.

Werner among the candidates

Werner counts twenty-six boys in his age group. All but two are taller than he is, all but three are blond, and none wears eyeglasses. The comparison gives the selection’s physical ideal an immediate, personal scale: before the tests begin, Werner can already see that he differs from most of the boys around him.

The athletic trials sharpen that sense of inadequacy. The recruits run, crawl beneath obstacles, do push-ups, and climb ropes suspended from the ceiling. Werner places ninth in the shuttle run but comes second to last in the rope climb. The contrast between those results does not reassure him; he concludes that he will never be good enough. The exams make his abilities legible as rankings, with each performance seemingly deciding whether he belongs.

The next morning’s examinations turn the candidates’ bodies into objects of measurement. Inspectors make Werner raise his arms and keep from blinking as a penlight is shone into his pupils. Technicians measure his temples and head, assess his lips, feet, fingers, and facial proportions with calipers, and quantify the angle of his nose with a wooden protractor. His eye color is matched to a scale of roughly sixty shades of blue; his is recorded as himmelblau, or sky blue. A technician cuts a lock of his hair and compares it with a board of hair samples arranged from darkest to lightest. The procedure presents racial classification as technical scrutiny, while the candidate has little to do but submit to being examined.

A night away from Zollverein

After the first day, other boys leave the hall with parents in automobiles or set off in purposeful pairs. Werner goes alone to a spartan hostel six blocks away, paying two marks for a bed among itinerants. It is his first night outside Zollverein. The unfamiliar sounds of pigeons, bells, and traffic accompany his thoughts of Jutta Pfennig, who has barely spoken to him since discovering that he smashed their radio. He understands her accusation as a charge of betrayal, even as he has told himself he was protecting her.

That separation gives the examination a cost beyond its formal tests. Werner is alone in Essen while the relationship with his sister remains strained, and his possible escape from Zollverein is entangled with the choice that caused her anger. The night does not settle the question of what his success would mean; it leaves him waiting, uncertain both of the result and of what he may be leaving behind.

The letter and the threshold

Werner returns from Essen believing he has failed. Five days later, a letter is hand-delivered to Children’s House in a crisp envelope marked with an eagle and cross. Its arrival finds Frau Elena doing laundry, the younger children gathered around a new radio, and Jutta away at a puppet show with Claudia Förster and some of the girls. Jutta has spoken to Werner only sparingly since his return.

The letter orders Werner to report to the National Political Institute of Education at Schulpforta. He stands in the parlor of Children’s House, among cracked walls, a sagging ceiling, and benches that have borne generations of children from the mine’s orphanage, trying to absorb the news. Essen thus functions less as a destination in its own right than as a threshold: the place where the institution tests Werner, and the remembered point from which his acceptance opens a way out of Zollverein. His conviction that he has failed gives way to a future he could not yet know how to judge.