Whether a child knows how to swim depends on the parents' income. Our author almost drowned when he was a teenager and yet he learned it while he was laughing.

The number of primary school children who do not know how to swim doubled nationally from 2017 to 2022 Photo: Funke Photo Services/imago

The most beautiful thing about spring is the spring flowers. And the best thing about summer is swimming. It wasn't always like this. If someone made a fool of me at school, I would get a painful response, which is why few people dared to make a fool of me. But he had an Achilles heel: swimming. Because there's a reason I played so much soccer: I didn't know how to swim until I was 13.

What I had hidden became clear when I read the following report last week: One in five primary schools in Baden-Württemberg, where I grew up, cannot offer swimming lessons because there are no swimming pools or teachers. The number of primary school children who cannot swim doubled nationwide from 2017 to 2022. There are now signs of improvement.

But according to a survey by the German Lifesaving Society (DLRG) from 2022, children's ability to swim largely depends on their parents' income: in households with a net income of 4,000 euros or more, around twelve percent do not know how to swim, in those with less than 2,500 euros it is almost 50 percent.

At first I felt that not knowing how to swim was a privilege: I no longer had to lie to miss classes. And during the double swimming lesson they allowed me to do stupid things in the non-swimmer pool with my friends, who didn't know how to swim either.

This freedom, which we celebrated with broad chests and appropriate shouts from the non-swimmer pool while the rest struggled to crawl, eventually turned into a disgrace. The fewer of us there were in the pool of non-swimmers, the more contemptuous the looks of others became.

“Brother, jump!”

At one point they looked down on us in the non-swimmer pool, not just literally but figuratively, as they hurried past us to the starting blocks following the instructions of the gym teacher, who had never attempted to teach us how to swim.

Not wanting to end up being the last idiot in the non-swimmer pool, I asked an old non-swimmer friend who had joined the swimmers for help. We agreed to meet at the indoor pool at an inopportune time so he could teach me how to swim without eyewitnesses. When we stood in front of the sign “Water depth 3.9 meters”, he said:

“Brother, now jump, your body will automatically make the right movements, believe me!”

“Swear!?”

“I swear!”

I jumped in, waited for the automatic swimming movements, but there were some panicked ones that made everything worse. I couldn't stay awake, I swallowed water, my short life passed me by. Somehow I managed to escape to the edge of the pool. I do not know how.

After that, I never spoke to my friend again and joined the local swimming club. I was taught to swim by a friendly old man who used to guide the five-year-olds along the length with a stick they could hold on to. One Wednesday afternoon, when it seemed like half the school was practicing in advanced mode, I was hanging on to his cane.

But that night I finally lost my fear of water. And from the laughter of others.