by Günter Grass
AND THEN, AND then? Then this happened, then that. But before that, in November of ’55, before we moved to the centre of West Berlin and became urban dwellers, my first exhibition opened and made the newspapers …
But to go on like this would be to get bogged down in lists and force things that resist categorization into categories. Besides, others have written about my before, my then, and my after, assigned them precise dates and places, put them in order. As follows: ‘From October 19 to November 8 the Lutz & Meyer Gallery, Neckarstrasse 36, Stuttgart, exhibited the drawings and sculptures of the young and gifted …’
Yes indeed. And so it went. Everything is listed and dated, printed in neat lines, given marks as in school. My beginnings were promising, my plays short on plot, the poems eccentric and playful, the prose scathing or otherwise and, later, its political message too strident. The animals were gathered and called by name: the merits of the early fowl, the walk of the late crabs, the extensive pedigree of the dog, the unscathed flounder and its bones, the cat with its eye on the mouse, the rat I dreamed of, the toad I became, and the snail as well, catching up to us, passing us, and silently hastening on its way …
Which is just what our Schmargendorf landlady’s cleaning woman, who came from East Berlin and read the coffee grounds, predicted: I began to make a name for myself. My years of apprenticeship – my Lehrjahre were over, according to time-honoured guild rules, but there seemed to be no end to my travels, my Wanderjahre.
IN THE LATE summer of ’56 Anna and I left Berlin. My wedding present, the Olivetti portable, came along. With little money but an inner world rich in characters I now sought a first sentence in Paris, a sentence terse enough to blow up the dam and let the words flow. And Anna was resolved to go on enduring the tortures of classical ballet exercises. It was at Madame Nora’s Place Pigalle studio that she would learn to turn perfect pirouettes and stand steadily on her toes.
In Paris we lived first on the rue Alibert, near the Canal Saint-Martin, where one of our favourite films, Hôtel du Nord, with Arletty and Louis Jouvet had been shot. We had sold our Berlin wardrobe and mattress and were looking for an apartment.
Having arrived in August, we found Paris empty. Along the Canal Saint-Martin, among its locks and variously curved bridges, I came upon the bench where Gustave Flaubert had seated his protagonists at the beginning of Bouvard et Pécuchet, in the first sentence, so to speak.
Then we moved to a different part of Paris, where we looked after the studio of a Swiss sculptor on the rue de Châtillon while he was away. Back in Berlin a dancer friend had helped Anna to apply for a job with the Blue Bell Girls, but her legs were a little too short, or not long enough, for their chorus line, which was all the rage in Paris at the time.
I was restless at first, because we were looking for a flat and I was looking for the words to make a sentence that would open doors. Or was I already typing my hymn to ‘The Ballerina’ on the Olivetti, breaking off occasionally to search for an apartment and for words?
There was a war going on then in all the newspapers and in the Paris suburbs, but the previous war was still foremost in my mind, the war that had begun in Danzig, when my childhood came to an end with the defence of the Polish Post Office. Even so I could not find the first sentence.
Then Anna’s father bought us a courtyard building on the avenue d’Italie, with two small upstairs rooms connected by a narrow hallway, next to the tiny kitchen and sitz-bath. A worker lived downstairs with his wife and child. All the windows looked out on the courtyard, which was enclosed by run-down workshops.
I immediately turned the boiler room in the basement into a studio by furnishing it with a stand-up desk and a potter’s wheel, and started working on manuscripts I had begun in Berlin: the five-act Wicked Cooks and a few prose sketches that didn’t know where they were going despite the move. Chantal was the name of the girl who was so regularly beaten by the wife of the worker in the flat below that I wrote a poem entitled ‘Right on Time’.
When my daughter Helene – who cuts a fine figure as an actress – and I recently performed our programme of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, set to music by Stephan Meier, for 900 scholars of German literature in Paris, I made time for a brief visit to avenue d’Italie 111. The courtyard looks pretty now that the workshops are gone, especially as flowers have been planted. But the former boiler room still houses the stand-up desk at which – I don’t know how many times – I thought I’d found that first sentence.
In Paris Anna and I heard from afar that Gottfried Benn and Bert Brecht had died in close succession, thereby orphaning their many followers. I wrote a poem as an obituary to both.
While the war in Algeria was echoing through Paris with plastic bombs and we sat in cinemas watching Soviet tanks – which reminded us of the tanks we had seen in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz not so many years before – on the streets of Budapest, I finally found the first sentence. Standing at the damp, dripping wall of my studio, I wrote: ‘Granted: I am an inmate at a mental institution …’
In Paris we forgot Berlin.
In Paris Paul Celan and I became friends.
In Paris I wrote chapter after chapter once the first sentence had been found.
In Paris my sculptures dried out and crumbled on the armature.
In Paris we were always short of money.
I had to hitch-hike from Paris to Germany and sell my poems for cash to Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Saar-brücken radio stations for their late-night programmes so as to keep us for three more months in fresh sardines, mutton, lentils, the daily baguette, and typing paper.
How did I become an inveterate word-maker in Paris?
In the year 1973 I made an attempt to plead my own case in ‘The Tin Drum in Retrospect, or The Author as Dubious Witness’, which describes our stay in Paris and poses the question of the motivation for the lengthy job of writing a novel. I answered it as follows: ‘The most reliable driving force was probably my petit-bourgeois background, the desire – a musty megalomania aggravated by the fact that I didn’t finish school, that I had three years to go – to produce something stupendous.’
But there was another, equally important motivation: after I found the first sentence at that dripping wall, the words never stopped coming. I had no trouble writing from dawn till dusk. Page after page. Words and images pushed and shoved one another, trod on one another’s heels: there was so much that wanted to be smelled, tasted, seen, named. And while I scribbled chapter after chapter in the boiler room and the cafés of the thirteenth arrondissement and then typed them on the Olivetti, and at the same time kept up my friendship with Paul Celan, who could speak of himself and the unutterable only in his verse and of his grief only in solemn pared-down passages, as if placed between candles, our twin boys, Franz and Raoul, turned us into parents, something we had not yet learned to be in Berlin or Paris.
The twins screamed alone or together, which drove the now thirty-year-old father to grow a moustache, which, as the years passed, gave rise to many self-portraits, pencil-drawn, copper-etched, and printed as lithographs from Solnhof quarry limestone: me with a walrus moustache and a snail-shell in my eye, me opposite the flounder, me with coffin nails and dead bird; me while the rat dreams of me, me with cap and toad, me and my walrus moustache hiding behind a cactus, and finally me with knife and half an onion.
In Paris walrus moustaches were common. In Paris we bought a used baby carriage with enough room for the two very different twin brothers to lie next to each other. Our few Parisian friends were amazed to see Anna and me appear as parents so suddenly and in an unrehearsed play. And Paul Celan, whose anguish could only be assuaged for a few hours at a time, gave me courage when work on the manuscript began to falter because of the two screaming children and in spite of the dripping wall.
Shortly after the birth of the twins, Konrad Adenauer won an absolute majority in the West German elections, which from Paris made Germany look very bleak, lapsing into old ways.
; During writing breaks I would draw nuns, preferably Vincentians, whose winglike wimples had been on my mind since the death of my poor mother in Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Cologne and whom I now sketched in the Paris Métro or the Jardin du Luxembourg. And it was there, not far from Rilke’s carousel, that I sometimes managed to lure Paul Celan out of the cycles in which he saw himself as persecuted and from which he believed there was no escape.
As soon as Franz and Raoul started walking, we bought a wooden playpen, and in August we took our nearly one-year-old twins to Switzerland, where, gazing up at a backdrop of Ticino mountains shimmering in the heat, I fed to my Olivetti chapters in which snow fell upon snow and the Baltic lay under a sheet of ice.
Back in Paris again Anna danced under the stern tutelage of Madame Nora while I wrote, though listening out for the twins. Every so often friend Höllerer came through, scribbling postcards with purple ink and dispatching them all over the world. He once bought a dress for Anna which we called the Höllerer dress.
It was from Paris that I travelled to Gdańsk via Warsaw in the spring of ’58 looking for traces of my lost city. I would sit in the undamaged Municipal Library and observe myself as a fourteen-year-old sitting in the Municipal Library. I kept finding and finding, and when I found my Kashubian great-aunt Anna I had to show her my passport, so grown-up did I look to her and such a stranger. Her house smelled of sour milk and dried mushrooms. I got more ideas from her than I would have from a book.
I returned to Paris with a large supply of material: fizz powder, the sound of Good Friday and carpet-beating, the escape route of the money-order postman who survived the battle for the Polish Post Office, paths to and from school, the newspapers kept by the Municipal Library, the films being shown in the autumn of ’39. Along with whispers in confessionals, inscriptions on tombstones, the smell of the Baltic, and bits of amber from the waves between Brösen and Glettkau.
And it all became words and stayed fresh, as if preserved under a cheese dome in Paris. And I wore myself out, but was not yet empty, and though still writing by hand, I was then a mere tool and beholden to my characters, especially the one who – why I can’t tell – was called Oskar. I have little to say about how things came and come about; if I tried I would have to lie …
And when in October of that year I travelled from Paris by way of Munich to a Bavarian or Swabian backwater called Grossholzleute to read the chapters ‘The Wide Skirt’ and ‘Fortuna Nord’ to a Group 47 gathering, the author of a nearly finished novel was awarded the Group’s prize: 4,500 marks, contributed spontaneously by publishers. My first windfall. It helped me to retype the whole thing on the Olivetti in peace. To make a clean copy.
The prize money also paid for an elegantly designed Braun record-player known as ‘Snow White’s coffin’ that I bought in Munich after my first reading on the radio and brought back to Paris, where we listened to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Bartók’s Bluebeard over and over. We were no longer poor and could afford calf’s liver and records.
In Paris Anna and I danced often and close. In Paris we were happy and knew not for how long. In Paris de Gaulle came to power and I learned to fear police truncheons. In Paris I grew visibly more political. In Paris a number of tuberculomas got a foothold in my lungs while I stood at the dripping wall, and were not ousted until we got back to Berlin. In Paris the twins would run along the avenue d’Italie in different directions and I didn’t know which to chase first. In Paris Paul Celan was beyond help. In Paris before long there was no reason to stay.
And when the first edition of the novel The Tin Drum came out in the autumn of ’59, Anna and I went from Paris to the Frankfurt Book Fair and danced till morning.
And when we left Paris for good a year later and took up residence, now as a family, in Berlin in another half ruin, this one on Karlsbader Strasse, I immediately began to draw and write in the one of our five rooms allotted me, because back in Paris with my Olivetti, the wedding gift, I had made a start …
And from then on I lived from page to page and between book and book, my inner world still rich in characters. But to tell of all that, I have neither the onions nor the desire.
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Copyright © Günter Grass 2007
English translation copyright © Harcourt Inc., and Harvill Secker
Günter Grass has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published with the title Beim Häuten der Zwiebel in 2006 by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen
First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2007
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library