by Günter Grass
Aren’t there more pressing needs, such as making an over-sated public aware of the hunger in present-day African refugee camps, or giving an overall account of hunger, as I did in my novel The Flounder, of ‘how it spread in print’ and refused to abate, in other words, telling endless hunger stories.
Again my I pushes its way to the fore, asking how long it lasted, this hunger I had never before been and would seldom thereafter be plagued by. Was it from mid-May to early August?
But what would be gained by defining its precise boundaries?
When after all my practice and despite all my misgivings I say ‘I’ – meaning when I try to recall what my state of being was sixty years ago – my I of that time may not be a complete and utter stranger, but it is lost and as distant as a distant relative.
One thing is certain: I found my first camp, the one in the Upper Palatinate near the Czech border, frightening. Its guards, well nourished the lot of them, belonged to the American Third Army. With their casual ways, the Yanks might have come from outer space. At least that was how the prisoners – who numbered, if I may make a rough guess, ten thousand or so – saw them. The setting was somewhat similar to that of the old Grafenwöhr military camp: it, too, once you got past the barbed wire, had been surrounded by a wooded area.
Likewise certain are the following: I was very young at the time of my gnawing hunger, and I had until recently served as a tank gunner of the lowest rank in a division that had existed, under the name of Jörg von Frundsberg, only as a legend.
When weighed as part of a camp-wide delousing operation, during which I made my first acquaintance with a powder by the name of DDT, my skin and bones could muster no more than a hundred and ten pounds, a condition we assumed was in line with the Morgenthau Plan which had been concocted for us.
This means of punishing all German prisoners of war, the brainchild of the American politician it was named after, required the most stringent thrift of everyone affected by it. After roll-call we had to avoid every superfluous move, because we were allotted a daily intake of only 850 calories, the amount calculated to be in three-quarters of a litre of barley soup with here and there a globule of fat floating on the surface, a quarter of a loaf of army bread, and a minuscule portion of margarine or cheese spread or a dollop of jam. There was plenty of water. And no end of DDT.
The word calorie had not been part of my vocabulary before I experienced my gnawing hunger. Hunger was my first teacher. And because I knew little and had picked up a lot of misinformation and was only now – and only by fits and starts – becoming aware of the extent of my stupidity, I began soaking things up like a sponge.
WHENEVER I AM asked the routine reporters’ questions about the end of the Third Reich, as a representative of that soon-to-be-extinct minority still brought together under the rubric of ‘eyewitnesses’, I turn immediately to my camp experience and the all too frugal calorie allotment, because even though I had learned of the unconditional capitulation of the German Reich – or its ‘collapse’, a term that soon caught on – as a wounded soldier in the military hospital centre of Marienbad, it seems to have registered only in passing with me, or have struck me in my ignorance as something temporary, a ceasefire of sorts. I somehow failed to perceive that the adjective unconditional preceding the word capitulation meant final, incontrovertible.
In Marienbad, the combination of spring weather and the nurses’ physical proximity had a provocative effect on me. Fixated as I was on my pubescent discomposure, I felt more beleaguered than released. Peace was an empty concept, the word freedom still awkward. True, I no longer had to fear the military police or the gallows tree, but a fresh start of the sort I felt later as a whole new era, a licence to begin again from scratch, I did not yet feel.
Perhaps the place itself had an effect on my reaction. Formerly a resort where one went to take the waters, and during my Maytime stay a backwater decked in vernal green, it was too soporific a setting for marking the monumental day as the end of one era and the beginning of the next. Then, too, white-and black-skinned Americans – like the Russians in neighbouring Karlsbad – had been in the city for days, and we eagerly awaited their appearance.
Silently they came on rubber soles. What a contrast to our jackboots. We couldn’t get over it. The victors’ nonstop gum chewing made an impression on me, too, as did their reluctance to walk even short distances: they were always lounging in their jeeps. It was like a movie taking place in the distant future.
There was a GI posted in front of the villa that served as our hospital. We couldn’t quite think of him as standing guard because as often as not he was squatting on his heels stroking his sub-machine gun. And we couldn’t help wondering whether he was there to keep us from escaping or to keep the Czech militia, humiliated for so long by the German presence in their country, from taking revenge. When I tried my schoolboy English out on him, he, the conqueror, gave me, the conquered, a pack of chewing gum.
BUT WHAT WAS really going on in the head of the seventeen-year-old youth who claimed to be physically mature and was under the care of Finnish nurses in what had once been a glorified boarding house?
For a while, nothing specific: he is only outwardly there, lying quietly in a row of beds. Soon he is permitted to stand and take his first steps along the corridor, then in front of the house. The wound in his right thigh has as good as healed; his left hand – the grenade-splinter had caused his arm to stiffen from the shoulder down – has to be moved, bent, kneaded, finger by finger.
But all that is soon behind him and forgotten. What remains is the scent of the Finnish Lottas, as the nurses were called: a mixture of plain soap and birch-sap hair lotion.
The war had taken the young women far from their Karelian forests. They spoke little and, smiling sympathetically the while, gave me the no-nonsense treatment, which is probably why its pushes and pulls left a deeper impression on the still-pimpled youth under their healing fingers than the news of the unconditional surrender of all German combat units.
Yet whenever the fateful date came up on the calendar and the eyewitness was asked what ‘liberation day’ meant to him, he would let the question dictate the answer. Instead of reacting with know-it-all hindsight – ‘I was suddenly free of all my anxieties, though I had little idea of what freedom would mean for us now that we were liberated’ – I should have come out and said, ‘I was and remained a prisoner of myself because all day every day and into my dreams I hungered after girls, and “liberation day” was surely no exception. My every thought was of one thing and one thing only. I fingered and longed to be fingered.’
This other hunger, appeasable in the short term with the right hand, outlasted the gnawing variety, which did not take possession of me until – after the satisfying and hence memory-unencumbering hospital meals of what must have been soup and goulash with noodles and, on Sundays, meatloaf smothered in onion sauce and mashed potatoes – Morgenthau’s starvation rations took over our fenced-in existence.
But it may also be that the practically photographic images I had of the nurses in ultra-close proximity, or the beloved face of a schoolgirl in plaits, served as votive pictures in the POW camp and assuaged the gnawing hunger a bit.
In any case, I felt the lack of both one and the other, and one hunger of the two was always wide awake. Yet when I look back on it all, I don’t see myself in constant pain. Just as, though here the image is a bit fuzzy, I handled the one need manually – first with the right hand, then, as the wound healed and as was only natural for a lefty like me, with the left – I took care of the other to some extent by maintaining a supply of goods for barter. The first time I put them on the market was when we were transferred from the Upper Palatinate to a more spacious, open-air camp in Bad Aibling, where we were broken up into manageable groups and moved into fenced-in barracks. Going out to work, we came in regular contact with our guards. I offered my services as interpreter and made it clear that I had a small cache of articles available for exc
hange. Once more my execrable school English passed the test, enabling me to apply the business strategies I had learned at my mother’s knee and strike bargain after bargain.
IT’S AMAZING HOW much can fit into an empty haversack. My stock came from the two short days of anarchy vouchsafed us in Marienbad when German order went up in smoke, the Americans had not yet marched in on their rubber soles, and the insufficiently armed Czech militia failed to fill the gap and take matters into their own hands.
A space suddenly opened up for those of us no longer bedridden. We scoured the neighbourhood for loot. Next door to our villa was another villa-like edifice, complete with turret, bay window, balcony, and patio. Hours before, this architecturally very busy structure had housed the district headquarters of the local branch of the National Socialist Party. Or perhaps only a branch of the party administration. In any case, now that the district leaders and other bigwigs had fled, it was just standing there open. Though it may actually have been standing there locked and somebody had helped things along with a crowbar.
Be that as it may, all the walking wounded, myself among them (as I have indicated, I could by now grasp things with my left hand), rummaged through the offices, the conference room, the pigeon-infested turret room, and finally the basement, which had a room the officials had furnished with couches and wickerwork for gemütlich evening get-togethers: group photos of party comrades in uniform lined the walls. I seem to remember having seen a Faith and Beauty poster showing girls with bouncing breasts doing gymnastics. Only the obligatory portrait of the Führer was missing. And the usual flags and pennants. There wasn’t a single item worth lifting. When we got there, the cupboards were bare, literally. ‘Nothing to drink,’ cursed a sergeant, whose missing left ear is encapsulated in the omnium-gatherum of my memories.
Then on the top floor I struck gold. In the lowest drawer of a desk at which some party chief must have sat out the war in comfort I came upon a cigar box containing approximately fifty glittering silver pins, whose heads were faithful reproductions in miniature of an embossed bunker. The inscription stamped under each tiny bunker confirmed it beyond a doubt: they were Siegfried Line souvenirs, popular pre-war collectors’ items. I recognized them from having seen the bunkers in newsreels.
During my childhood, the fortification of the Reich’s western frontier with staggered tank barriers and bunkers of all sizes provided the regular impetus for flickering pictorial reports and brash verbal commentaries accompanied by a rhythmically aggressive score. Now the nickel-silver commemoratives had a kind of heroic futility about them: they had been devised to honour the virtuous workers who built the fortifications along the French border, a labour force that after 1938 had doubtless included Sudeten German volunteers. I can still see the newsreel images: men shovelling, cement-mixers churning, huge concrete blocks.
My friends and I were thrilled to see this bulwark rising against our traditional arch enemy, France. We thought the kilometres of tank barriers blending into the rolling countryside were indomitable. We played at sighting targets through observation slits: if we didn’t get sent to the submarines, then at least we could man the bunkers heroically.
Six years later, those pins must have reminded me of my pre-war games and dreams as they now remind me – I can almost count them in their cigar box – of the immediate post-war years.
I found little else of interest in the drawers, though I was able to fill up my haversack with two small blank notebooks, some elegant writing paper, and a few pencils, if not the Pelikan fountain pen I had been hoping for. I’m not sure whether I managed to grab an eraser and a pencil sharpener.
Others lifted teaspoons, pastry forks, and various useless items like napkin rings. Some even took rubber stamps and stamp-pads, as if they could issue passes for leaves and business trips.
Oh yes. I also came away with three ivory dice and a leather dice cup. Did I have time for a lucky throw? Two sixes, a three, or even a five?
Later, after we had been transferred from the Upper Palatinate camp, I used them to play dice with a boy my age, the friend I had so longed to have in the dark pine wood, who now actually had a name, Joseph, and spoke a bookish, Bavarian-tinted German. It rained a lot. We dug a hole and would huddle under his tarpaulin for shelter. We talked about God and the world, about our experiences as altar boys – his permanent, mine very much auxiliary. He believed I thought nothing was holy. We both got deloused. It didn’t bother us in the slightest. Like me he wrote poems, but we had very different plans for the future, which later, and then only gradually, became history. For the time being the Siegfried Line pins were more important.
AT FIRST I was only vaguely aware of the value of my sudden windfall, but once I had been transferred from Bad Aibling to a labour camp and had joined a work detail charged with felling adolescent beech trees, I was able to use my English again – ‘This is a souvenir from the Siegfried Line’ – to find buyers for three of the shiny pins.
The guard assigned to us, a good-natured Virginia farm boy who had as yet no war souvenirs to show the folks at home, was willing to part with a whole pack of Lucky Strikes for a single pin. Back in the camp, I swapped it for a loaf of army bread. For the non-smoker, that meant four filling daily rations.
When another guard, a black truck driver with whom, as a matter of principle, the pink-skinned farm boy exchanged not a word, traded me a rather doughy loaf of cornmeal bread for two Siegfried Line pins, an old-timer in the camp advised me to toast it. He sliced it up and cut the slices in two, then laid them out on the top of the cylindrical cast-iron stove that was kept lit even in the summer months, because come evening the men in the wood-felling commando would cook up everything they could find – thistles, dandelions and the like – into a spinach of sorts. Some even threw in roots.
An NCO who, as he put it, had chalked up some wonderful years in France as an occupier, pulled a dozen wriggly frogs out of his haversack, cut them up alive, and threw the legs in with the spinach.
The barracks, in which two rows of plank beds replaced the bunk beds we were used to, had been occupied until the war’s end by forced labourers. We found Cyrillic inscriptions carved in the wood of the planks and beams, and some soldiers who had returned from Smolensk and Kiev maintained the men had been Ukrainians.
The stove had been brought here for the labourers. We pretty much saw ourselves as their successors: we, too, carved inscriptions in the planks and beams – the names of the girls we longed for plus the usual obscenities.
I hid my toasted cornmeal bread in newsprint covered with the bold-faced Stand Firm headlines of the last days of the war and tucked it away between a plank and the straw mattress to supplement my daily ration. Only with such economies could I keep my hunger within limits.
When our column returned from wood felling the next evening, there was not a trace of the bread or its packaging. The soldier who had shown me how to toast the bread and received a quarter of the loaf for his pains reported the disappearance to the sergeant in charge of the barracks, a sergeant of the traditional, disciplinarian school.
At which point all the straw mattresses and clothes of anyone who had remained in the barracks – because they had been sick or assigned to fatigue duty instead of felling wood or clearing rubble – were searched.
The remains of the toast-cum-newsprint were found under the straw of a Luftwaffe flying officer – the camp mixed common soldiers with officers all the way up to captain in rank – who until then had made a show of being unfailingly jaunty.
In our unwritten laws, what he had done was called comrade theft. There was nothing worse. It was a crime that demanded immediate condemnation and retribution. Though personally involved as victim and eyewitness, I cannot or will not remember whether once the verdict had been delivered by a duly appointed barracks court I took part physically in delivering lashes with the Wehrmacht belt to the bare arse.
True, I can picture weals on festering flesh, but they may have been painted in af
ter the fact, because once experiences of this sort blossom into stories, they take on a life of their own and flaunt one detail or another.
In any case, the fury felt by the common soldier towards every officer he had known was transferred to the thief, and the thrashing was excessive: a war’s worth of hatred was venting itself. As for me, who had until recently known nothing but unconditional obedience, having been drilled in it from my days in the Hitler Youth, I lost my last vestige of respect for the officers of the Wehrmacht of the Great German Reich.
Shortly thereafter the ‘Luftwaffe guy’, who had been transferred to the infantry as a last-ditch Hermann Göring Fund contribution, was moved to another barracks.
The cornmeal toast didn’t taste bad, slightly sweet, a bit like zwieback. The Siegfried Line pins were responsible for many more portions of toast, which I would dunk in mushroom soup. I had found chanterelles in a stand of short-trunked conifers and, versed as I was in mushrooms and Kashubian mushroom specialities since childhood, I even made a dish from agarics of the lactarius variety and, later, from puffballs, frying them like chanterelles on the stove in the dollop of margarine we received as part of our daily ration. I also came to like thistle spinach. These were the first dishes I made on my own. The private contributed salt, and I shared my mushroom feast with him.
I HAVE ENJOYED cooking for guests ever since. And not only for those who bring the here and now into the house, but also for characters I have invented or called up from history. So recently I had Michel de Montaigne, the young Henri de Navarre, and – as the biographer of the mature Henri, Henri the Fourth – the elder Mann brother as guests at my table – a small but garrulous group that indulged in quotations.
We talked about kidney-and gallstones, the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, the other Mann brother and their Hanseatic background, then back to the Massacre and the endless trials of the Huguenots, and finally the similarities between Bordeaux and Lübeck. Along the way we cursed lawyers as the plague of society, compared hard stool with soft, evoked the Sunday chicken in every French pot, and bemoaned – even as we delighted in the sweetbreads smothered in agarics that followed the fish soup – the woeful state of enlightenment after so much progress. We also debated the ever timely question of whether Paris was worth a mass. And along with the latest yield of our Behlendorf walnut tree – which accompanied the cheese platter – the topic of Calvinism as the midwife of capitalism was laid on the table.