Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  And after once more going through various incidents of our childhood, keeping them alive by juxtaposing our personal versions of them, I told her the story of how as a seventeen-year-old POW I had sought refuge from the rain under a tent with a boy my age and how we chewed caraway seeds to stave off our hunger. My sister doesn’t believe my stories on principle, and she tilted her head distrustfully when I said his name was Joseph, he had a marked Bavarian accent, and was a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic.

  ‘So what,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of them about.’

  But, I protested, nobody could be so downright fanatical and at the same time tender and loving when referring to the Only True Church as my pal Joseph. ‘He came, if I’m not mistaken, from somewhere near Altötting.’

  That made her even more suspicious. ‘Are you sure? Sounds a bit far-fetched to me. Just like one of your stories.’

  ‘Well, if my camp experiences under Bavarian skies are of no interest to you …’ I said.

  To which she replied, ‘Oh, go ahead.’

  I conceded a certain lack of confidence to make myself more believable – ‘We were just two among thousands’ – but refused to rule out the possibility that my pal Joseph, who was as lice-ridden as I was, whom continuous hunger had driven to chewing caraway seeds from a bag, and whose faith was as securely bunkered as the Atlantic Wall once was, might well have had the surname Ratzinger and so be the man who today as pope claims infallibility, if only in that familiar shy way of his, speaking softly, the better to enhance its effect.

  Whereupon my sister laughed as only off-duty midwives can: ‘It’s just another one of those yarns you told to pull the wool over Mama’s eyes.’

  ‘Who knows,’ I conceded once more. ‘I can’t swear that the spindly kid I sat with in early June ’45 in the Bad Aibling camp, looking out over the Bavarian Alps when the sun was out and huddled in a tent when it rained, actually had the name of Ratzinger, but that he wanted to become a priest, was not interested in girls, and was planning to study all that damned dogmatic claptrap the moment he was released from captivity – of that I’m sure. And that this Ratzinger, who had previously served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and now held sway as pontiff, was one of the ten thousand interned in the Bad Aibling camp – of that I’m sure as well. Apparently,’ I added, again to make myself more credible, ‘that’s what the tabloids say.’

  And then – while the children, innocent of my early encounter with Catholic fundamentalist theology, poked about in the seaweed, and Luisa, Rosanna, and Frieder proudly showed us their meagre finds – I told my sister about the cigar box full of Siegfried Line souvenir pins and the three ivory dice and leather dice-holder I had lifted when the occasion presented itself in Marienbad, shortly before or after the war ended. ‘And since we had nothing better to do, Joseph and I, we rolled dice to tell the future, our future. Even then I wanted to be an artist and famous, and he a bishop and more, the devil only knows what. We also fantasized about exchanging roles.’

  I may have gone a bit overboard with my constantly suspicious if loving sister when I asserted that gazing up at the less than communicative sky, behind which Joseph saw the heavenly abode while I saw a gaping void, we both responded by writing ostentatious verse, which, however, proved insufficient. That is why we let the dice make the final decision as to who would become what. To needle my pal, I claimed that, as church history demonstrated, even an atheist could become pope.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said to bring my account of those early years to a close, ‘Joseph threw three points more. Call it bad luck or good. So I became a mere writer, whereas he … But if I had thrown two sixes and a five, then today I and not he would be …’

  My sister’s response was curt: ‘You’re lying through your teeth!’ Then she was silent, but I could tell she was working on one of her irrefutable objections and had something up her sleeve.

  Just before Zoppot, as we got to the promenade and the children were showing one another rice-kernels of amber, she peered over the top of her glasses at me and pointed out that this nice family outing, the whole Whitsun trip with all the sweet grandchildren, would have been impossible had her brother and not that Joseph character been pope. ‘Or are you saying that even as pope you’d have brought a brood like this into the world?’

  Then we went back to digging around in the attic of our young years, and as usual came up with opposing memories. But when I called Sister Alfons Maria, the supervisor of novices, a sanctimonious bitch we broke out in harmonious laughter.

  WHAT CAME BEFORE, what after? The onion cares little for sequence. Sometimes house numbers are written on it, sometimes snatches of idiotic pop songs and film titles such as The Sinner Woman – the names of legendary football players, but seldom an accurate date. I have to admit that I have a problem with time: many things that began or ended precisely didn’t register with me until long after the fact.

  The older I get, the less stable is that crutch, chronology. Even when I open yellowing art catalogues or pore over several issues of the journal Der Monat from the mid-fifties on the Internet, one event that had a great impact on my life remains mired in the approximate. Only the following is certain: before Anna and I set off for the south with our reddish-orange tent, Berlin had become the scene of an art controversy that lasted well into the next year, no, longer, beyond Karl Hofer’s death, and even today it must rankle with the former avant-gardists, so fiercely was the claim to ‘the modern’ disputed. I took sides, if only from a distance.

  Offended and hence angry, Hofer defended representational art, art determined by the human form, against the absolute priority of non-representational art at the time, whose approach was termed l’art informel and praised in art catalogues as the most modern stage of Modernism. His opponent in the controversy was an art critic named Will Grohmann who accepted only what Hofer felt would result in ‘a slide into the misty distance of nothingness’. Hofer lambasted the reigning intolerance in a number of articles, even warning of a rapprochement with the ‘Nazi Gauleiter state’.

  He waged his war not as an official, as director of our school, but as an individual. He regarded art as endangered by ‘surface decorators’ like Kandinsky, and defended Paul Klee, whom he called a ‘painting poet’, against the Russian’s ‘death-tinted kitsch’.

  He was subsequently condemned from many corners as ‘senile and behind the times’, ‘blind with rage against the modern’, and, in a word, ‘reactionary’. It was a period when words, concepts, the latest -isms were vying with one another. The controversy reached the Artists’ Union. Members started resigning.

  When Hofer went so far as to accuse America of being the source of the fashionable dogma – in America anything that was new was ipso facto good and good for society – he was decried as a crypto-Communist. There was another suspicion at the time, one that was, as was then customary, nipped in the bud but which returned a few decades later among scholars doing archival research, namely, that the CIA had promoted the non-representational school called l’art informel in Germany because of its harmless, decorative quality and because the concept of the modern was and promised to remain the property of the West.

  Looking back on the controversy from today’s perspective, I can see what a strong influence the quarrel between Hofer and Grohmann, the adamant figure painter and the art pope of the period, had on the direction of my work as a visual artist. Just as in the quarrel between Camus and Sartre that determined my later political position, I sided with Camus, so here I chose Hofer.

  His cry ‘O holy Klee, if only you knew what was being done in your name!’ became a byword. And what he told us art students in the early fifties – ‘The central problem of the visual arts is and remains man and the human, the eternal drama’ – has retained its ring, lofty as it may sound, into my old age. Perhaps that is why I remember more or less exactly what the controversy meant for me and how it split teachers and pupils at the school into factions until afte
r Hofer’s death and the choice of his successor – and not only because I took part in the student protest against the choice of an artistic nobody to replace Hofer.

  When Karl Hartung decided it was time for me to submit some of my chalk drawings – including Haystacks Over the City and K the Beetle, pictures based on poems – to the Artists’ Union so they could be exhibited in the forthcoming annual show, he was forced to report in a few weeks that while the jury had recognized their quality it had rejected them as ‘too representational’. From then on I kept my distance from all dogmatic constrictions, maligned all popes, for instance, the media-savvy one who later took it upon himself to judge the literary firmament exclusively according to his standards, and made my peace with the risk of having to resist the Zeitgeist as an outsider. Which had its consequences: the only way my work as an artist could gain exposure was in one-man shows, steering clear of fashion. It has remained on the fringe to this day.

  EVEN THAT FIRST year in Berlin I went my own way. It was not so much the work we did with models – the standard contrapposto nude girl, which was supposed to teach us everything there was to learn – as the massive chicken, then the body of a bird stretched out on a stick and the flatfish with a piece missing in the middle, that made me the artist I am. The fish was based on early drawings later relevant to the themes of The Flounder; and in poems like ‘Hurdy-Gurdy Shortly Before Easter’ and ‘The Flood’, the latter a text that led to my first piece of theatre, I found the tone I had been seeking, if only playfully. The Berlin air laced with brick chips helped.

  Love drove me on: I wrote and drew for Anna, who was wrapped up in dance. Her teacher, Mary Wigman, was commissioned to choreograph the Venusberg scene for the Bayreuth Festival the following year, and Tannhäuser, making his way among a wild mass of barefoot and virtually naked girls, was going to experience unbridled lust.

  Ulli Härter and I went to see his Herta and my Anna just before the dress rehearsal. They were both suffering from all the stomping required but were eager to perform.

  In a park Ulli and I saw a group of oddly dressed figures standing in a row. They had velvet berets on their heads and were draped in black cloaks: latter-day Wagner disciples conducting invisible orchestras, as if they had a large audience behind them. Some had scores open on stands they had brought with them; others were conducting from memory.

  Otherwise, all I took home from Bayreuth and the repulsive posturing of the nouveau riche rabble around the monstrous cult barn was hysterical disgust. The men in bloated dress shirts, the women laden with jewels, the moneyed nobility, everything was on display. But the memory of a ramble through the neighbouring woodlands that began innocently enough rates an onion skin all its own.

  We had been roaming through a forest dark as a fairy tale when we came upon a clearing from which noise and an oom-pah band announced a shooting contest. People dressed in folk costumes and hats with tufts of chamois hair were sitting at long beer tables. Booths invited you to topple pyramids of tin cans or shoot at targets to win artificial flowers and other prizes.

  Although I had been taught how to shoot humans at a tender age, I had never fired a shot. Here the targets could not be harmed: the guns were air guns and the ammunition of the lowest calibre. I hesitated at first – should I pick up the butt, touch the barrel? – but in the end stepped up to the stand hoping to win a rose for Anna.

  I carefully aligned the sights and squeezed the trigger, but fate directed my shot to a target that won me a stork with a tiny basket containing twins hanging from its beak. This was before the pill and the age of contraception.

  Who was frightened more? Not even the rose, which I won immediately thereafter, could comfort Anna. The prophetic reference to the birth of our sons Franz and Raoul three years later could not be washed away with steins of beer or joked away with a reference to the poet Jean Paul’s archetypical adolescents Walt and Vult. Nor did a reference to Wunsiedel, the poet’s nearby birthplace, serve to dissolve the fatal shot in irony. Never again did Anna allow me to shoot for a rose.

  THE YEAR BEFORE, Bayreuth had been nothing more than a vague promise on the horizon. Summer holidays began shortly after the workers’ uprising in East Berlin and shortly before West Berlin’s mayor, Ernst Reuter, died. Anna went to Switzerland, and a little later I too hitched south with our tent in my rucksack.

  In Lenzburg Anna prepared her parents for my visit – quite what she told them I don’t know. Much as they tried to bridge the distance with hospitality, the have-not from Germany who showed up at their door in corduroys and with a rucksack couldn’t have struck them as more alien. To soften my appearance, I had shaved off the luxuriant beard I grew more as a whim than as an existential gesture. Now I felt naked the moment anyone looked at me. Luckily, Anna’s sisters – one of whom was somewhat older, the other much younger – helped ease me into the unwonted surroundings.

  During an introductory visit to Anna’s widowed paternal grandmother, a Calvinist from the south of France who had married into this Zwinglian family, we sat on the terrace of the upper-middle-class house speaking a French that flew over my head as if I were air. Scarcely a word settled on the new arrival, who felt miscast in a comedy of manners, drinking weak tea, nibbling away at pastries, and glancing furtively towards an out-of-reach brandy bottle or the garden and its gate, concealed by rhododendron bushes, that gave onto the road for Wildegg and Brugg.

  I had just hitch-hiked from there. The gate was tempting. Why not flee? There and then. I was agile enough. All it would have taken was a vault over the terrace wall into the garden.

  That’s it! A standing jump and I’m on my way. A few short steps across the lawn, through the gate, and into the street, where the first or maybe second car, or a lorry from the nearby Hero jam factory, picks me up and I’m released from the embarrassment of being on display, I’m unattached, free again.

  What was I doing there, anyway? What show of mercy would have redeemed a hard-boiled doubter like me? What business did a pagan Catholic have among Zwinglianists and Calvinists? A lone Papist from the Huguenot wars. And not a shot of brandy within reach. No, he had to get out of here!

  I had surreptitiously patted the breast pocket of my jacket to make sure I had my passport; in my head I was ready for the leap, only my legs were trembling. I took a deep breath, doing my best not to look at Anna, who may have felt for me and sensed there was something wrong, when her grandmother turned a face framed in silver curls to mine, fixed me with an amused and curious gaze, and – her mouth in a smile, her curls trembling slightly – said in a High German purged of all but the trace of an accent, ‘My son Boris tells me you are studying art in the former capital of the Reich. During my youth I was acquainted with a man who went up in balloons. He too was from Berlin …’

  Suddenly my carefully planned – and mentally executed – flight had gone up in smoke. There was no backing out now. The moment Grandmother addressed me, I had been accepted into a rock-solid family founded on property, a family that, as was the way with their countrymen, lived modestly on the interest from their savings, and was as tolerant, true to tradition, of my origins as if the Edict of Nantes had never been repealed on a whim by the Sun King.

  So I acquiesced, though still mindful of a possible vault into safe territory. Besides, the Berlin balloonist’s heir always had accommodation in the form of the reddish-orange tent Anna and I would be taking with us to Italy.

  The day of departure was set, the rucksacks packed. Their contents included some old-fashioned guidebooks plus Burck-hardt’s Culture of the Renaissance in Italy to heighten our sense of the beautiful. But before we could set off, Anna had to allay her mother’s fears about what might happen in the tent at night. She did so with an explanation as innocent as could be, namely, that the two poles keeping the tent up would also keep us apart. To Greti Schwarz’s credit, she believed her.

  FROM CAPO CIRCEO we continued south to Naples, and no matter where we pitched our tent – on the beach, under
the pines, in the ruins of abandoned houses – we grew closer and closer, unimpeded by the imaginary line of demarcation between the two poles. But since our love was and remains ours, Anna’s and mine, and resists all attempts at putting it into words, the only thing I will say about the tent is that the canvas bore a number of blood-red splotches that no rain could remove: unmindful of the consequences, we had pitched it under a mulberry tree full of overripe fruit.

  One day we were cooking on the beach – fish was cheap – and a band of young Fascists brought us some driftwood for the fire. They gave us quite a scare. These kids in their black shirts – their greeting still smacking of Mussolini, of their Duce – were as incorrigible as I had been in my brown Jungvolk shirt. Weeds do not die; they keep coming back, keep spreading. And not only Italy offers a conducive climate.

  ALTHOUGH WE COVERED a lot of ground, we didn’t see that much: Anna and I were still discovering each other, experiencing each other with amazement. She was sensation enough for me, I for her, and there was little that could distract us from each other. Even sketching or painting, we would sit close together.

  Apart from the usual hitch-hiking incidents – frightened by two Neapolitan men, Anna surreptitiously passed me her Swiss Army knife – and an encounter with a bearded Capuchin monk who took us down into his catacomb and, laughing a great resonant laugh, proudly showed us the pile of skulls he had collected – the only thing I remember about our trip down and back was the visit we paid to Giorgio Morandi, a painter we greatly respected. We were young and brash enough to seek out his house in Bologna and present ourselves unannounced.

  We were received by the maestro’s sisters. After we had made it clear in response to their enquiry that we were not americani and Anna, who was fluent in Italian, pulled the name of the Swiss collector Floersheim, an acquaintance of one of her aunts and a known Morandi collector, out of her sleeve, the two rather scatterbrained ladies ushered us into the maestro’s studio. Although all he had to show us were blank canvases on stretchers, he assured us, tittering like an elf, that the as yet unpainted pictures – there were a dozen or more – had been sold. To americani, of course.