Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  The art student in his second and then third semester, though still obsessed by art and fitfully addicted to new, often flash-in-the-pan influences, probably remained love-hungry and dance-mad, but I can’t be sure whether I took sides during those years on issues like the break-up of the country, the onset of the Cold War here, and the far-off war in Korea, or if I did, what arguments I used. It was the time of high-handed ‘Ami go home’ slogans.

  I had an instinctive feeling of repulsion for the types who found the economic miracle, which happened to take hold first in Düsseldorf, to their nouveau riche liking. True, I never strayed from that feeling, but now that he was entitled to cast a ballot, did the potential voter exercise his entitlement in the first Bundestag elections? Probably not. I was completely and utterly taken up with my own existence and the attendant existential questions and could not have cared less about day-to-day politics. When rearmament became first an issue and then a reality, the youthful war veteran, the child with burnt fingers, could have been counted among the admittedly large but nonetheless politically passive crowds of the ‘count me out’ movement.

  Chancellor Adenauer was like a mask hiding everything I detested: the hypocrisy disguised as Christianity, the mendacious claims of innocence, the effusive philistinism of a band of wolves in sheep’s clothing. Amidst so much counterfeiting the only thing that seemed real to me was my lack of money. Machinations behind closed doors and Catholic corruption passed for politics. A detergent produced by the Düsseldorf company Henkel and bearing the name Persil gave rise to the term Persil certificate. With its help more than a few brown stains were washed white, and entered public life with clean hands.

  And the Socis? The Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher, whom I had heard when I was a coupler boy against the backdrop of Hanover’s ruins and whom I count today among the unsung heroes of our time, put me off in the early fifties with his national emotionalism. I found anything with a whiff of the national repugnant. I also turned up my nose at democratic trivialities. Indeed, anything that smacked of politics I rejected out of hand. The Social Democratic views that had been forced down the coupler boy’s throat on a potash mine floor 950 metres below ground might as well have fallen into a bottomless pit. Egomaniac that he was, he saw and felt only himself. I would not have wanted to meet him, but had I met him, we would have fought.

  During those late-night sessions when so much tea was drunk and tobacco smoked we also imbibed all the clichés existentialism had to offer. Once more the debate was about the whole of life, though this time – or so we thought – on a higher plane. And when we disagreed, it was not over the crimes of the war that lay behind us, let alone the party squabbles of the society that lay before us; we splashed about in the conceptual approximate.

  Oh, our nightly word extravaganza may have had a vague anti-Fascist and abstract philo-Semitic tinge to it. Trying to make up for its past, our once failed resistance was now all boastful courage and heroics and did not need to substantiate its claims. I was probably one of those loudmouths, whose pronouncements memory, that indiscriminate glutton, has mercifully forgotten.

  Things would begin to change when I came under the influence of a new teacher, Otto Pankok, but at this point I was still the pupil of my respected but not particularly spectacular or charismatic master Sepp Mages. He never spoke about art. His firm, immutable concept of form upheld the plain and simple, and in the early sixties he published a book under the title Monuments in which the plain and simple in stone found expression. Under his supervision I learned my craft and remained a hard worker.

  But what was my life like outside the studio? I read what I could get my hands on and what Father Stanislaus slipped to me. Rowohlt put out cheap paperbacks of Faulkner’s Light in August and Greene’s Heart of the Matter. I produced a continuous stream of poetry that bore traces of Trakl or Ringelnatz or the two combined. I still took my meals at Caritas House and could pick up enough to live on at occasional jobs like window-dressing or working as a stonecutter in construction and by doing portraits of pot-bellied beer drinkers and their swaying wives, arms linked, at shooting contests on the banks of the Rhine: two marks apiece. The money I made was sufficient to cover a monthly tram pass, movie and theatre tickets, weekend dances, and – yes, by now – tobacco.

  Or did I first become a smoker when my father’s miners’ guild – he was still working for the brown-coal people on the lower Rhine – awarded me a stipend of fifty marks a month?

  In any case, I began smoking regularly when the young man bearing my name decided smoking was the thing to do. My favourite tobacco, Schwarzer Krauser, was finely cut and thus suitable for rolling one’s own. Factory-rolled cigarette brands like Rothändle and Reval were beyond my means, even in packs of five.

  I smoked as if I had come to it early in life. No crisis forced me into it. No affairs of the heart, no doubts. No, it was clearly the heady talk and its superficial profundity, that triggered the desire to belong to the community of smokers and reach periodically for tobacco and cigarette papers. That was what got me hooked – or, to put it more politely, made a regular smoker out of me.

  Schwarzer Krauser came in a packet that was blue on the outside and silver on the inside and that I, left-handed as I was, kept readily accessible in my left-hand pocket. I had seen any number of soldiers and miners roll their own, so the coupler boy had no trouble keeping his locomotive driver supplied.

  In the mid-seventies, when I switched to a pipe, fearing smoker’s leg, I wrote an obituary for my many years with cigarettes under the title ‘Roll-Your-Own’: ‘When you roll your own, you have to radically renounce all the fluffy pieces that refuse to fit in. Only then, when the tobacco is firmly ensconced along the bottom third of the paper, firm to the touch – only then do you take your tongue and moisten the strip of adhesive along the far edge of the paper, using your index finger behind it as backing.’ In this obituary, I praise ‘a type of cigarette paper you can get in Holland, which doesn’t have any adhesive but still sticks’ and end by describing a special advantage that comes of rolling your own: ‘self-rolled stubs are all unique, each is artistically curved, and every day my ashtray lets me know how my crisis is progressing.’

  Looking back – if I divide my life up to now into three periods: the non-smoker period, the roll-your-own period, and the pipe period – the war and post-war non-smoker period was the best. By trading his cigarette coupons and the cigarette ration cards that later replaced them, the non-smoker could count on all kinds of benefits – there was a time, for instance, when a single active cigarette, which is what factory-made products were called, would bring an egg, whereas the only advantage you could put down to smoking was the brief pleasure derived from each puff. Yet it was a vice I was loath to renounce.

  Only after a doctor’s admonition did the fifty-year-old, for whom rolling his own had become an obsession, a kind of substitute for religious fervour, give up the daily rolling and inhaling and with the help of broken-in models sent to him by a friend of sorts make the transition to the pipe, which to this day he sets aside and allows to go out only when he is forming clay figures – human or animal – and all ten fingers are satisfied.

  In retrospect I might speculate as to whether, had I never left the stonecutting trade in favour of the one-or two-handed writing and typing of manuscripts that took on epic proportions and encouraged the nervous habit of reaching out for tobacco (there was a time when I smoked cigars and cigarillos too), I would now be spared asserting my rights to the self-appointed morals police who (how civilized of them) have narrowed their sights to a ban on the consumption of nicotine and even made provisions for incorrigible offenders in the form of highly restricted smoking zones, though who can tell what solicitous punishment they may eventually – or tomorrow – come up with.

  As a virtuous non-smoker who had given up the obsessive writing habit in time, I would cough less, expectorate no grey-speckled spittle, and walk more nimbly on my pain-free left leg … But eno
ugh!

  WHILE STILL A non-smoker – or only shortly after I gave in to nicotine’s regular pleasures – and under the sullen eye of Professor Sepp Mages, I was subject to his daily rounds and the laconic instructions he would give about keeping the moist clay surface of the sculpture rough as long as possible, because if it was smooth too soon it tricked the eye: ‘It only seems finished,’ he would say.

  I later transferred his method to my manuscripts, constantly roughing up the text, keeping it in flux from version to version, and I write at stand-up desks because I am used to working on my feet. Mages would not allow us to sit at the modelling stand.

  I remained his pupil until the end of 1950, by which time a number of skinny girls were finished or seemed so. Every day during this period, while I consistently refused to imitate the Maillol-like curves of the generally pudgy-to-portly models, one of my classmates, the veteran with the glass eye, would whistle themes and motifs from all nine Beethoven symphonies, as well as the piano concertos. His technique was amazing. He could whistle whole suites and sonatas, everything classical music had to offer, from Bach to Brahms, so vividly and with such skill that from then on I had no trouble differentiating Beethoven’s Third from his Fifth or Schubert from Schumann. He whistled with a reserved passion, that is, not loudly but not to himself. He would take requests, repeating especially engaging melodies, this or that adagio, the Kreutzer Sonata, Eine kleine Nachtmusik. He could – if I remember correctly, that is, without my notorious tendency to exaggerate – whistle whole sections of Bach’s Art of Fugue.

  While the veteran whistled melodies known to the others but new to me, he would use his flat wooden modelling tool to smooth down the surface of a life-size clay figure, a walking woman who had something Egyptian, something mummylike about her, until a jaunty allegro induced him to roughen up the surface with a jagged wire modelling tool. Then a slow movement would return him to his smoothing. The only time the virtuoso interrupted his concert programme was when Mages made his rounds.

  That is how I acquired my musical education incidentally and, hungry for learning as I was, I would have profited even more from the whistler had I not had a run-in with my teacher.

  Not that I provoked him. He also seemed perfectly satisfied with me and my regular attendance and hard work. When a plaster model he had done, large kneeling women in bas-relief, was ready to be transferred to shell-lime, he asked me to take part in the process, at a decent wage. The deadline was fast approaching. His piece was to decorate the portal of a government building on the Mannesmann Embankment, and I worked on the scaffolding next to two men from the Küster firm, chiselling away at the Grenzheim shell-lime, a stone of insidiously varying density.

  When, after quite a few standing girls in modelling clay, I added a reclining woman with gaping thighs, Mages took offence at the exposed vagina and the – to his mind – vulgar pose, which ran counter to a ‘plain, closed form’. He strongly urged me to close the thighs. When the pupil refused to honour the professor’s sense of decency and form, it came to a showdown. ‘Nothing like this ever happens under my supervision,’ the professor said. ‘And never shall,’ he added.

  Or he may even have taken matters into his own hands and pressed shut what, to his mind, should never have been open: clay is soft and yields.

  The memory offers a number of versions, some more flattering to him, others to me. In one of them I restored the position of the thighs immediately after his attempt to correct the offence: because clay yields.

  Although the dispute between teacher and pupil was subdued in tone, each stood his ground: they were not made of clay; they were not soft or yielding. Nor did attempts to reconcile them, made by the glass-eyed veteran and gifted whistler, who saw himself as the spokesman for our class, bear fruit.

  And so I changed teachers. Mages helped me to gain entrance to Otto Pankok’s studio. I was no longer eager to study with Mataré, who had adopted the ascetic Christian, even an-throposophical, trappings of his then dominant pupil, Joseph Beuys. It was time to break free of standards imposed from above and seek a path – or detour – of my own.

  Although Pankok was no sculptor – he worked almost exclusively in charcoal and woodcut and was even said to be colourblind – he attracted pupils who were more intense than most and known, as I now was, for having a will of their own. I remained friends with my former classmates Beate Finster, a wallflower, yet constantly in bloom, and, especially, Trude Esser and her handsome Manfred, a curly-haired Viking from northern Friesland who was later kidnapped – a story in itself – and transported to Paris.

  MY NEW TEACHER must have been in his mid-fifties, though his full, prematurely grey beard made him look older, and imposing, a bit like God the Father. Yet there was nothing of biblical severity about him: he was easygoing, even lax, with his pupils, who thought of him more as a role model than a teacher. And it was not only his height that made him overlook a lot.

  The reason the early Christians were dogged by mockers is that they appeared – or, more precisely, revealed themselves as – highly principled in the way Pankok was. He radiated a revolutionary but gentle spirit. His pacifist credo, which found expression in Christ Breaking the Sword, a woodcut that reached a wide audience as a poster against German rearmament, served me as a standard for a long time, throughout the protests against Soviet and American medium-range missiles in the eighties or even longer. In the last years of the last century, when setting up a foundation for the Roma and Sinti peoples with prize money I didn’t particularly need, I found it only natural to call the prize we planned to award every two years the Otto Pankok Prize.

  Pankok was forbidden to paint or exhibit during the Nazi period. He had lived with gypsies and travelled with them, and he made pictorial poetry out of the lives of this long persecuted and in the end decimated minority in countless woodcuts and charcoal drawings. It was only because he knew them so well that he could transform their trials and tribulations into a series of images depicting Christ’s Passion, large sheets full of endless shades of grey between black and white.

  Gypsies, young and old, made up his cast of characters, and not only his own studio but also his pupils’ studios were visited regularly by the Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors of their greatly reduced line. They belonged to the wild and woolly Pankok clan. They were more than models. It was a time when the old, or so we hoped, shattered principles of order were making a comeback, all nice and polished, before our very eyes, but we were behaving like the wayward children of the Restoration.

  SCENE CHANGE ON a stage where the characters appear in my memory, first in one costume, then in another, and help themselves from the props box. And because under the protection of the kind man with the outlandishly curly beard anything and everything in thought and image was possible, a while later when the ink started flowing from my pen, an invented personage found a place in the Pankok menagerie. Not only did he fill chapter after chapter of the time-hungry novel, occupying centre stage in each, the be-all and end-all whether passive or active, Oskar Matzerath also got himself a job as a model in the studio.

  Coveted by painters and sculptors alike, he was ideal for emotionally charged, symbolic representation. Small and hunchbacked, he embodied the madness of the past era and the era just beginning. And because he was both, he could also be the converse of it all. Meeting him was like standing before a concave mirror: in his presence everyone took on a new shape.

  Otto Pankok too became a caricature of himself when he tried to turn Oskar into his vision of a model: he became the coal dust-inhaling Professor Kuchen. And the moment Oskar heard the artist’s Siberian charcoal rasp along the paper, he sketched an alternative picture, blackening everything in sight with words.

  He did the same with the professor’s pupils, whose easels showed their mentor’s stylistic influence. He steered clear only of the gypsies, sensing they could see through his tricks, his games with words and images, and, worse, fearing they would shatter his magic.

&nb
sp; I, too, Pankok’s most receptive pupil, was excluded not only from the chapters in which Professor Kuchen inhaled coal dust; I disappeared entirely into the endless torrent of words that, pruned into a novel, eventually reached the book market. I was just a writing implement following the trajectory of the plot and allowed to forget nothing, neither the facts poured in concrete nor the deceptions apparent when backlit: Oskar’s entrances.

  He determined who was to die, who to be granted miraculous survival. It was Oskar who compelled me to haunt the misty corners of my early years. He gave me leave to put everything which laid claim to truth between question marks. He, the twisted metaphor personified, taught me to view everything twisted as beautiful. He, not I, turned Pankok into Kuchen, the gentle pacifist into a volcano whose explosions blackened any sheet of paper with brute expressive power. His mere presence unleashed orgies in black; he saw black and made black; his hump threw pitch-black shadows.

  Incidentally, Oskar also worked as a model for Mages, whom he immediately renamed Maruhn. Several of my classmates to whom he displayed his hump in Maruhn’s and Kuchen’s classes later served as vehicles for his naming mania: my friend Franz Witte, for instance, who shared a studio with me under Pankok’s lenient supervision and who plays a ghostly role in the novel; or my friend Geldmacher – more of whom later – who turned into Klepp, the bedridden spaghetti cook who, Communist though he was, revered the queen of England and managed to quote ‘God Save the Queen’ in his flute rendition of the ‘Internationale’.

  Even if an author eventually becomes dependent upon the characters he creates, he must answer for their deeds and misdeeds. And if on the one hand Oskar was clever enough to use me, on the other he had the generosity to leave me the copyright to everything that occurred in his name. If you write, you renounce your self. Only tax officials refuse to accept the fact that an author’s existence is mere say-so, that is, fiction, and therefore non-taxable.