by Günter Grass
I as monk. What name in Christ would they have given me? What would I have been assigned to sculpt besides the standard saints? Would I, like the Master of Naumburg, have paired important personages from business and politics on the pedestal: Chancellor Adenauer with the much acclaimed pollster Frau Noelle-Neumann? Or his big-bellied successor Ludwig Erhard with the long-legged film star Hildegard Knef? Or made bas-reliefs for cathedral doors: the Descent into Hell or Adam and Eve busy under the Tree of Knowledge, developing a taste for the Original Sin?
I wouldn’t have had to worry about the first hunger, and as far as the third goes, I would have become a moderately pious painter, but the second hunger, so keen on flesh of another kind, would have led me astray whenever the opportunity, offered or sought, arose, and therefore dragged me helpless back into the world.
HOW I BECAME A SMOKER
PEOPLE REQUIRED BY their profession to exploit themselves learn over the years to value fragments. Not much was left. Whatever tangible material enabled me to configure, disfigure, and finally – jumping forward, then back – pass on, has been swallowed up and excreted in cascades of words by the all-consuming monsters called novels. The lyrical gave way to the epic. After all that excrement – all grist to the mill – one hoped to have cleaned the system out, written oneself empty.
And yet there are remnants overlooked by chance: an ID card dating from the winter semester of ’48–’49 and bearing the stamp of the State Academy of Art, Düsseldorf. Folded over, fraying at the edges, falling apart, it has a passport-size photo of a young man whose brown eyes and dark hair would lead one to believe he comes from the south, more Balkan than Italian. He has done his best to look presentable by wearing a tie, though he seems to be in the mood which shortly after the war was fashionable under the name of existentialism and visible in the faces and gestures in neo-realist films, so godforsakenly gloomy and self-absorbed is his gaze into the lens.
The physical characteristics entered by hand and the emphasis given to the downstroke in the signature confirm it beyond a doubt: this odd, ominous character is none other than myself in my first semester as an art student. The tie may have come from the charitable Father Fulgentius’s used-clothing box. It was knotted for a quick shoot at a shop called Photomaton. The subject is clean-shaven, hair neatly parted, utterly noncommittal, allowing plenty of room for conjecture.
The long-standing affinity that I and my kind felt for existentialism – or what passed for existentialism at the time – was based on a French import adapted to German rubble conditions and could be worn as a mask becoming to us, the survivors of the ‘dark years’, as one of the circumlocutions for the period of Nazi hegemony had it: it fostered tragic poses. You saw yourself at a crossroads or before the abyss, according to your mood. All mankind was supposed to see itself in jeopardy. The poet Benn and the philosopher Heidegger furnished quotes for the apocalyptic mood. The background to it all was the thoroughly researched and soon to be expected death by the atom.
Crucial to this lively going-out-of-business sale was a cigarette dangling from the lower lip. The dangle showed the direction we were headed in, though the cigarette, lit or cold, bobbed up and down in nightlong conversations, during which human existence was summarized as ‘the thrownness of things being’. They dealt with meaning in what is meaningless, the individual and the masses, the lyrical I and the omnipresent nothing. Suicide would recur as a figure of speech, also called ‘free death’. To contemplate it while smoking with friends was considered bon ton.
It may have been in the course of just such discussions, discussions so deep they would descend into the absurd, that the young man in the passport photo, celebrating an endless finale in the company of his friends, became first a tea addict and then a smoker, but I have trouble dating his initial, constantly postponed reach for a cigarette.
And in general, sticking to the chronological course of events constrains me like a corset. If only I could row back to one of the Baltic beaches where I built those sandcastles as a child … If only I were still sitting beneath the attic window utterly lost in my reading in a way I have not been since … or back with my friend Joseph under a tent, rolling the dice, for a future that seemed dew-fresh and unspoiled …
In any case, I had reached the age of twenty-one and thought of myself as an adult, yet I was still a card-carrying non-smoker when, along with a girl from Krefeld whose animal sculptures – does and foals – had made a favourable impression on the admissions committee, I gained entry into Professor Sepp Mages’s sculpture class. We were the youngest.
Somebody, presumably Father Fulgentius, had persuaded me to try the invigorating qualities of glucose instead of tobacco. (I assume it was Father Fulgentius, as he was the one who kept me supplied: like the powdered milk, it came from the Canadian fathers.)
But I couldn’t help noticing that everyone else in the class, including a war invalid with a glass eye, was a smoker. The nude model, a portly housewife, would also light up during the break following each half-hour of contrapposto posing, though I always gave her some of my glucose.
One of the students – quite a bit older than the others, who tried to mother me and wore her hair piled high on her head in what during the war had been mockingly called an ‘all-clear’ hairdo – played the grande dame by using a cigarette holder. Her friend, who was the professor’s pet and possibly his mistress, rolled her own and puffed away at them nervously until Mages entered the studio, at which point she would stub them out in a lump of clay. Everybody smoked. One of us even smoked a pipe.
I can only suppose that, overzealous beginner that I was, I imitated the way my fellow students picked up or rolled cigarettes just as I imitated the white, knee-length smocks they wore, standing in a semicircle before their modelling stands, looking up at the naked housewife, and going into physical detail with their wooden and wire modelling tools. We were not unlike a bevy of nurses and interns awaiting the visit of the head physician, because Mages, too, dressed in white, down to his beret.
In the overalls and garish wool-end sweater I had fished out of the Caritas clothing box I felt decidedly second-rate, and since the son felt the lack of a proper uniform so acutely, the mother, proud of her ‘fledgling art student’, made a snow-white smock for him out of perfectly decent bed sheets, frayed only around the edges. Pictures taken at the time show me thus attired.
WHAT I CAN see more distinctly than the belated beginning of my career as a smoker is the first assignment I received, namely, to copy in modelling clay a larger-than-life late-Roman plaster head of a woman that Professor Mages had dug out of the antiquities room of the Academy and more or less foisted upon me.
A scaffolding of iron tubing that rested on a wooden stand and was criss-crossed by wooden sticks – we called them butterflies – provided stability for the clay. The slight twist of the head and copious curls in combination with a tilted profile made the bust difficult to reproduce.
I got some help from compasses and a plumb line, especially as the angle of the shoulder indicated a moderate turn of the body to the right. Another problem was the new material: soft, moist clay, which we covered with damp cloths when we left the studio at night.
Having had figures and heads very different from those of the late-Roman period in mind, I cursed my fate, but the more time I devoted to the plaster cast with a hint of a double chin, the more I learned. I grew curious and found hidden beauty in details, in the curve of the eyelids, for instance, and the set of the dangling earlobes.
The apprentice stonecutter had to chisel away a lot of hard material; the apprentice art student had to mould soft material, to model green-grey clay, and, like God the Father, fashion out of that clay if not an Adam then the head of an Eve.
A FLURRY OF activity, because saints’ days – Saint Martin’s? – were being celebrated somewhere, but then all was quiet and concentration in the Academy’s venerable building. Gradually the copy took shape, came to resemble her plaster sister. At the sa
me time, there were drawings of nudes and studies of a complete male skeleton we called Tünnes or Schäl, after two popular Rhineland figures whose heroic deeds were the butt of numerous jokes at the time.
Then there was everything the city had to offer: exhibition after exhibition at the Kunsthalle. The painters of the Rheinische Secession, the ‘Junges Rheinland’ group, Expressionists, the ‘Mother Ey’ collection, Düsseldorf’s local celebrities. I saw the works of Goller, Schrieber, Macketanz, the sculptor Jupp Rübsam. A painter by the name of Pudlich was all the rage.
One gallery exhibition featured the watercolours of Paul Klee, who had taught at the Academy until the Nazis kicked him out. Before Wilhelm Lehmbruck moved to Paris, he was said to have been the star pupil of a Professor Janssen in our very workshop, and August Macke, another legend, was said to have learned what there was to learn here, for a brief spell at least. They were spoken of in hushed tones, perhaps because their brilliant careers had been nipped in the bud.
Sometimes I ventured to visit other studios. In one of them, a holy fool by the name of Joseph Beuys was considered a genius, though he was merely a pupil of Ewald Mataré. Who would have thought he would later occasion a precipitous rise in the price of artificial honey and various fats and felt?
I would look in on Otto Pankok’s menagerie, a reserve where talents flourished in rank proliferation and gypsy families traipsed in and out. No one would be seen dead in a white smock there.
In the class of the man who had given me a short but sweet bit of professional advice on my first day in Düsseldorf, Enseling, I met Norbert Kricke, who, true to nature and his teacher, turned live naked girls into plaster naked girls until he grew tired of them a few years later and switched to decoratively twisted wire figures in the spirit of the times.
There was a genius on every street corner, but none seemed willing to accept the fact that the ‘Moderne’, from Arp to Zadkine, was by now one big museum piece. Disciples posed shamelessly as dazzling innovators.
Did I too take a running jump into the heavenly heights, or was my hunger for art satiated now that I could be sure of a trough that was at least half full?
Perhaps my training as a craftsman working in resistant stone saved me from dreams of grandeur. Mages, who came from a Palatinate stonecutter’s family, also helped to keep my feet on the ground. And then there was that mundane quality that stood at the top of the German catalogue of virtues: hard work drove me on.
Even though I still inhabited the ten-bed Caritas House room deprived of daylight, the spacious studio, with its large windows facing north and the smell of clay, plaster, and wet rags, had become my true home. Having grown accustomed during my stonecutting days to rising early, I was always the first to get to the modelling stand. Yet I was often the last to cover the day’s work with those wet cloths. Where else could I grab a few hours alone? Well, not entirely alone: all ten of my fingers were actively involved with a malleable mass, with clay. It was akin to bliss.
Shortly before the Academy closed on Saturday, I would open the lower window facing the street wide enough for me to slip into the studio the next morning after scrambling up the bumpy natural-stone exterior.
This sounds daring, the material for a film sequence: the wild enthusiasm of the façade climber, another Luis Trenker scales the north face of the Eiger. But since both the sculpture studios and the plaster-and bronze-casting rooms were located on the ground floor, my Sunday climb was child’s play. Nor was I the only one to do it – I just did it more often than most. No one took umbrage, and the janitor turned a blind eye.
About halfway through my first semester I persuaded one of my Löwenberg dance partners to take part in my Sunday climb and pose for me on our rotating wooden platform in the studio – which, though chilly, was at least minimally warmed by an electric heater. She was devoted enough to climb and pose, though not without complaint.
Unlike the housewife who posed for us during the week and whose mounds of flesh corresponded to the ideal of both the French master Maillol and my teacher, the weekend substitute shivering through her contrapposto contortions was slight of build, her collarbone, hipbones, and backbone all clearly visible. There she stood, slightly knock-kneed, while I turned her to catch the light that would show her gawky beauty to the best advantage.
Nervous by nature, she tended to cry when standing in a fixed position became too much for her. I worked quickly and in silence. As soon as she started fidgeting, I would offer her glucose instead of a break. Her mop of curls and her bush of pubic hair were flaming red.
Such was the self-centred determination that gave rise to the first independent piece of sculpture by the art student bearing my name. Our session over and the façade behind us – we never used the studio as a love nest – we would take the tram to Grafenberg, where ragtime was played until past midnight. My weekend model was easy to lead on the dance floor, too: supple and light-footed.
ELSBETH’S PROPORTIONS – WAS her name Elsbeth? – provided the basis for several clay figures, one of which, Girl with Apple, was cast in plaster and later recast in bronze. Also derived from those figures, under the supervision of my usually morose professor with beret, was my first large – just short of a metre high – sculpture, The Laughing Girl.
There she stood with hollow back and hanging arms, as far as she could be from Maillol’s rotundity. Mages accepted that. The man who had to answer for several Nazi war memorials and two gigantic musclemen for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Stadium took pleasure in my undersized girl. What is more, my statue, with its somewhat foolish smile, and a statue the same size of a girl with markedly broader hips done by my classmate Trude Esser, received belated recognition when they appeared in the Academy’s end-of-year report as outstanding class projects in the winter of ’49–’50. Photographed head-on, the plaster casting, dyed and therefore looking deceptively like bronze, posed, angular and insolent, in contrapposto. The laughing girl had a whole page to herself.
The publication of the Academy brochure did not seem particularly momentous to me at the time, but looking back I can appreciate its importance. It was the only evidence, the only substantiation of my artistic ability – a mere claim until then – that pre-dated my mother’s death: she died of cancer at the end of January 1954. Though concerned and even anxious, she had put up with my eccentricities and flights to what she called cloud-cuckoo-land and never swerved in her faith in her son. Now there was something she could show relatives and neighbours with a modicum of pride: ‘Look at what my boy has done …’
Who can tell how this one piece became an icon for my mother. If only I had been able to offer her more to show around. But the sketches I did with a brush or reed pen were abhorrent to her: she found them too dark, too morose. At her request I borrowed some oils from a friend of mine, Franz Witte, and painted a lifelike bouquet of asters, her favourite flowers, onto a board made of pressed shavings. It was to be my only oil painting.
For more than two years my parents had been living near the Fortuna North brown-coal mine in an apartment that came with my father’s job there, a two-room place with kitchenette, small but easy to heat, in Oberaussem, a village that was home to many miners. The rent was low, and little by little they added one piece of furniture to the next.
Whenever I turned up there – my visits were mostly unannounced – the Academy report would be lying on the table next to the couch, open to the page with my sculpture, as if Mother had sensed I was coming. She had always hoped her darling son would amount to something, and now that he had she hoped for more.
The tangible proof of accomplishment and the name of the accomplisher in print also seemed to have mitigated the long-standing discord between father and son and softened the tone of our conversations. My sister, who had begun an apprenticeship in business at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Düsseldorf, could enjoy the familial peace and quiet occasioned by the Academy brochure when all four of us gathered. The harmony extended even to the times father or son lost
ignominiously to mother at our kitchen-table skat games. Skat was a game I had learned by watching my mother play. She was known for making outrageously risky bids – and almost never losing them.
It is probably because she kept such zealous watch over the brochure that the ever laughing, scant-metre-tall girl has retained its significance all these years, although back then it and the rest of my medium-sized plaster figures meant so little to me that I left them all behind in the studio at the end of ’52, when I made my next move. A fellow student took the little orphan with him.
A decade later, when I had a name and sufficient funds, he told me he had it, so a bronze casting could be made to ensure her continued existence. The same happened to Girl with Apple, the product of my wall-scaling skills: Edith Schaar, who had posed a short time for our class and later became a versatile artist in Spain and northern Germany, rescued the plaster casting shortly after my sudden departure, thus helping me remember a time that otherwise, for want of tangible mementoes, would have become as murky as an underexposed photograph.
TOO LITTLE CAN be nailed down. Moods at best, rippling through the interstices – some heavy and oppressive, some playfully light, but all unclear; no incident to brand me as player or victim; no memory of what I once recalled in excruciating detail. The onion balks. I can only speculate what happened outside my studio or Caritas House. I even see myself as only one of many sketches, each as far as the last from the original.