Franz Regenholtz

by Doug Guido

A bored high school senior decides to test if his world history teacher can ever say, “I don’t know”—launching an accidental classroom legend.

I guess I’m like many others in that I’ve got a few regrets in my life. I define regret as something I did that I now wish I hadn’t done. In this instance, I regret injuring an undeserving person. Sometimes these situations occur out of happenstance; sometimes they’re planned. This story is about an incident that happened in high school; only it didn’t just “happen”—I caused it to happen.

It was my senior year and I wasn’t thinking much about high school anymore, pondering the great unknown of what was next in life. And while high school was something I had to deal with daily, I tried to make the time there pass as quickly and enjoyably as possible. Certain classes became an ordeal to survive; sleeping through them was a frequently exercised option. I wasn’t the only one—it was common to pass a fellow student in the hall between classes, still blinking himself awake, the imprint of his sweater etched on his face.

“Study hall?” I asked.

“No, History,” came the groggy reply.

History was a tough one for me too. The teacher, Mr. Norton, was a kind and wise man, somewhat older than the other teachers and rightly respected as a senior member of the staff. Unfortunately for us, Mr. Norton was all too comfortable with his teaching style, which featured endless lectures on any era in world history. He would stroll around the room, one arm folded, the other casually gesturing as he droned on in his sonorous monotone, oblivious of us as we dropped our heads and drifted off to sleep.

I happened to be awake when I noticed something odd during one of Mr. Norton’s boring performances. An awake and lucid student had asked him a question about something in current events, unrelated to his topic, but of interest to the student.

“Mr. Norton, I read where President Johnson was going to increase the number of American troops in Vietnam. Do you think that will help us win the war?”

While it was 1967 and the Vietnam War was a hot topic, it was unusual to hear a student ask such a question of Mr. Norton. As he didn’t call on us much (what was the point? We were either asleep, didn’t know, or worse, took a flyer), his voice was pretty much the only one you heard for that hour. Rarely did anyone break into his stream of consciousness, as it were, to question him, especially about current events.

It was while I was half listening to his answer, that I noticed something about the way he answered the question. His answer went something like:

“Well, ah, of course, ah, these things take some, ah, time and ah, understanding to work out. And it would ah, appear that, ah, the president is following the, ah, recommendation of our military leaders.” He continued on for a few more minutes, adding nothing more of substance and pretty much not answering the question.

That’s when it dawned on me: while he didn’t necessarily know the answer (who did? We spent another six years in that hellhole trying to “win”), that didn’t keep him from taking a shot at it. I perked up as he expounded his way through the answer.

Now a teacher winging their way through an answer normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but there was something about Mr. Norton’s answer that made me wonder if there was an opportunity to be explored here: was Mr. Norton unable to say “I don’t know?” I was only 17 and I’d never, repeat, never heard or seen a teacher knowingly make something up in order to keep from admitting that they didn’t know the answer. I’d seen teachers be wrong about a subject, or to simply say “I don’t know.” But never just make something up.

… was Mr. Norton unable to say “I don’t know?”

As I sat there thinking about it, I concluded that there was one way to find out if Mr. Norton couldn’t say “I don’t know.”

I didn’t actually prepare per se to find out—I was far too lazy to do any real work—but I thought about it some and had a plausible little scenario worked up. I knew just enough about history, particularly World War II, to use it as a backdrop to my question. I tried it out on Mr. Norton soon thereafter, raising my hand, amazed at my own audacity and quivering in anticipation.

Would he take the bait? Would there be consequences?

“Mr. Norton,” I began. “I read in the newspaper that a former Nazi, a Colonel Franz Regenholtz, has formed a guerrilla band in the mountains in Yugoslavia and was making trouble for the government there. Have you heard anything about it?”

I think I said it all in one breath, sure that he’d figure it out and call me out on it. I could barely breathe as I awaited my fate.

Silence. Then:

“Yes, ah, Colonel Regenholtz, ah, is a Nazi war criminal now operating in Yugoslavia.” He paused, pursed his lips, stroked his chin, then went on.

“He’s hiding in the mountains with ah, a small band of followers and is, ah, causing problems for the local authorities there.”

And there it was: he couldn’t just say “I don’t know!”

I guess it didn’t occur to him that his students would know anything about current events that he didn’t know about. Nor, to his credit, did it occur to him that one of those students would deviously make something up.

I don’t remember what else he went on to say that fateful afternoon. I do remember being electrified by the realization that I had manipulated a teacher!

At first, I kept my new-found power to myself. I let the subject lie for a day or two before bringing up Colonel Regenholtz again. I primed the pump by adding some new information.

“Mr. Norton, I read in Time magazine that Franz Regenholtz, the Nazi colonel operating in the mountains of Yugoslavia, had blown up a train and robbed its passengers of their money and belongings. Have you heard about this, and what do you think he intends to do next?”

Well, of course he’d heard about it – he’d heard about everything.

“Ah, yes, that’s right. He’s now ah, taken to sabotaging train routes and ah, robbing people. He’s apparently accumulating cash to ah, buy more weapons.”

And he went on. His fertile imagination had been unleashed by the specter of this former Nazi criminal on the loose in the Balkan Mountains. It only occurs to me now that we weren’t the only ones bored by the dry subject of high school world history: he was too! He’d only covered the same topics for the past 30 years or so, and this Regenholtz guy was fresh material.

… we weren’t the only ones bored by the dry subject of high school world history: he was too!

I was able to keep my dastardly deed to myself for only a week or so before sharing it with a fellow classmate. Steve was the senior class president and one of the smartest kids in the school. I last saw him at the University of Chicago, where he was enrolled in the nuclear physics grad program. Today he’s probably under that mountain on the Swiss-French border, looking for Higgs boson. He’d be good at that.

“Wow!” he exclaimed upon hearing the details. “I wondered where you came up with that shit! You don’t even read the newspaper, do you?”

“Sometimes, but what’s the diff? You didn’t know and, more importantly, Mr. Norton doesn’t know.” I was high on smugness.

The next day, Steve, sitting behind me, raised his hand. Mr. Norton quickly acknowledged his brightest pupil. What he didn’t know is that he had turned into a deviant.

“Mr. Norton, I was reading that this Franz Regenholtz guy killed a bunch of people this past weekend in Yugoslavia. Do you think that this will cause a war between Austria and Yugoslavia, a sort of replay of the start of World War 1?”

A brilliantly nuanced question from a brilliant mind. I was so proud!

And of course Mr. Norton ran with it. Coming from Steve it must have seemed like validation that this was a real story, of a real guy, actually doing this stuff. I guess it never occurred to Mr. Norton that, outside of this senior world history class, he’d never seen or heard anything about a Franz Regenholtz.

Over the next couple of weeks, the Regenholtz saga took on a life of its own. Without any word from Steve or me, other students gradually figured out that this was a bull story and began asking their own Franz Regenholtz questions. The avoidance of world history boredom was pervasive, causing amazing details of Regenholtz adventures to emerge from active teenaged minds. A female student, who may not have even been in on the joke, asked if anyone had heard anything lately about that Nazi colonel. Hands shot up as students vied to provide their own accounts of Regenholtz’s mythic adventures. Debates ensued between students as to the intentions behind his “actions”; since he was “fighting” communists, was he good or bad? It was impossible to keep a straight face at the outrageousness of some their accounts of Regenholtz’s adventures.

I watched Mr. Norton during these times, wondering what he was thinking. While it was clear that he supported the student interaction, he had to notice the outright silliness of some of their tales and the laughter it frequently caused. There were moments when it seemed that the students were running the class, as tale after tale was offered up, preventing him from teaching history.

It wasn’t long before word got out that Steve and I were putting one over on Mr. Norton. I knew we were heading out of control when first thing one Monday afternoon, Mark, an original sweater face who slept more than anyone, raised his hand—a first—and cleverly asked Mr. Norton if he’d “heard anything more about Franz Regenholtz?” No pump priming, no nuance, nothing.

I’ve since learned that crude behavior such as that is a harbinger of bad things to come. Not long after Mark’s awakening, Mr. Norton intercepted Steve and me at the door before class and asked us to wait there while the rest of the class was seated. After the bell, he came out into the hallway, closed the door, lined us up against the wall, and in his sternest voice said:

“I understand that you two, and some others, (Mark?), have been pulling my leg about this Colonel Regenholtz fellow. Well, I must have confused him with another man, a man named Regenhartz.”

Before either one of us could say, “that must be who we meant,” Mr. Norton waved off our potential protestations with an even more sternly worded admonition:

“In any case, there’ll be no more talk of this in my class. Is that understood?”

We sheepishly nodded our heads, realizing that we’d been found out and busted. There was no point in furthering this good man’s embarrassment, and we wisely didn’t try. After he made a similar announcement to the class, that he’d confused one man with the other, nothing more was said. And there was no other kind of repercussion for Steve or me, grade-wise. I guess Mr. Norton was confident enough in who he was that this “incident” with two minor characters such as us, wasn’t sufficient to cause him to be vindictive in return.

I thank him for that. And apologize.

Originally from Detroit, Doug Guido graduated from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, after cramming a 4-year education into 6 years. Subsequently he set off on a Siddartha journey through North America in a ’64 Corvair Greenbriar camper van, covering 20,000 miles in six months. After arriving in Houston, Texas, he entered the homebuilding field in the roaring ’70’s and ended up in Tampa in 1981. He has written short stories over the past thirty years, reflecting on various incidents in his life that he hopes are entertaining. His self-published memoir, I’m Only Living Once, is available in paperback on Amazon books.