by Günter Grass
Farewell to Franz Witte
Where did you go?
Leaping nimbly through the window
of the mental institution,
as I see you still, leaping
from car top to car top:
a blurred figure impossible to catch,
always off to somewhere else.
Your paintings held great promise.
What might you have become?
Perhaps an El Greco, reborn.
More likely—I fear—the gigolo
in a pleasingly fake bohemia.
I should have taken you with me, my friend,
when I made my getaway.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
Today a newspaper equally committed to capitalism and cultural values carries a report on the situation in Greece. Fewer and fewer people can afford to heat their homes. No work and no pay has sapped their spirit, and cut off their gas as well.
So Greeks young and old have been sitting in freezing darkness since early winter, unable to heat their soup. Driven by necessity, they start open fires in their rooms or try to warm themselves with candles that give off some light; from Athens to Salonika, on islands large and small, homes are going up in flames. Sirens are heard everywhere, often arriving too late. There are reports of deaths.
Yet turning for advice to the paper I’m reading I learn that, with all due sympathy for the country’s situation, a positive lesson may be drawn: the economic restrictions imposed on the all-too-lavish Greeks are working. Moreover, the first signs of economic recovery are evident; the long-awaited gleam of light can be seen at the end of the tunnel.
The admonishing voices from Europe—not least the stern words of our chancellor—have been heard and followed, though still not in sufficient measure.
So anyone in the birthplace of democracy who owns a belt, this widely read newspaper suggests, had better pull it tighter, cinch it in notch by notch.
Mutti
A mildew the rain can’t wash away
coats everything that happens now,
everything that brands the landscape.
Habit incapacitates us,
while consumption everywhere rises.
We grow and shrink at the same time,
good citizens turned good consumers
forking over whatever it costs, driven by desire,
market-oriented democrats
giving in willingly to a woman
who glares at us one day
and smiles kindly the next,
sugarcoating the pill that makes us meek as lambs.
What might disturb us is eloquently silenced;
she says nothing in so many words.
Anyone who gets too close is snapped at,
then fed to the media for breakfast.
She’s surrounded by special interests
sworn to lie in wait for profit,
who, like the Mafia, put the screws to her.
To “Mutti”—mommy, as we call her in jest—
we are a flock of children
who sometimes go astray.
But she has diligent lackeys on hand
to restore order without spilling blood,
pledged to keep us safe and quiet as we sleep.
She’ll deal with anyone till he’s milked dry
and dangling limply on the clothes hanger.
Even the socialists have crawled into bed with her,
paid off with crusts of charity.
A majority coalition, near megalomania,
reflects its power with foolish pride.
Soon we’ll be hearing, as if in passing,
the abdicated Kaiser’s immortal words,
slightly softened in Mutti’s own style:
We’re not quite there yet,
but—used sparingly—we might be
marketed, not as pepper, but as
the salt of the earth.
Homesickness
We’re not descended from apes. We’re extraterrestrial in origin and strangers here, for millions of years and more ago an overpopulated planet had to lighten its load. The old had no wish to die; new generations grew rampant. So it came to pass that airships similar to legendary UFOs flew over a largely overgrown region of green that later, much later, we called Africa. Rich in wildlife, it appeared impenetrable. Barely landed, the ships unloaded their cargo: surplus individuals of both sexes, as well as convicts and bands of teenagers, all more or less resembling us.
At first they made a civilized impression; even the convicts behaved in an orderly fashion, shaved, combed their hair. Their belongings, stowed in shipping crates, were equally sensible: tins of food, mineral water, toothbrushes, toilet paper, makeup kits, battery-driven vehicles and all sorts of technical odds and ends, with their knowledge stored on chips. But deadly weapons were part of their equipment too.
It wasn’t long before they felt the effects of the climate. Supplies ran out. Medicines proved useless. Gear rotted. Their knowledge was not enough. And since their home planet sent no one after them, starvation reduced their numbers. Exposed to an alien environment, few survived. Those who remained were forced to adapt; they turned wild, stopped shaving, no longer bothered to brush their teeth. Shaggy-haired, they forgot where they came from, their nameless planet. Legends were their only reminder.
Time passed unmeasured. As our remaining ancestors increased in number, they split into tribes, drifting from place to place, became hunters and gatherers. They battled each other with hand axes, clubs, and later, much later, sharp metal spears.
This history we know, down to our day. Only when we search for planets light-years away may we see, amid a shimmering galaxy, one that was once our home. Spurred on by homesickness, we send spaceships into the universe—in search, in costly search. Ah, if we had only stayed home, we wouldn’t have to believe in Darwin and his fairy tales about the apes, in the deeply rooted, irradicable once upon a time . . .
When, as Required by Law
millions of tomcats and stray dogs
were castrated, first here, then everywhere,
the razor-sharp thought occurred,
with an eye to mankind,
that in light of overpopulation,
similar cuts might be necessary;
soon it will be law, first here, then elsewhere.
These Are Facts
The butterfly’s question “Is life just a dream?” has been transformed into a popular form that eats facts, then digests and excretes them as fiction. We are told that our egos exist only in cyberspace; everything that lives and communicates is digital; anything outside the Internet just feigns existence. We are immortal only if we are registered and stored as data.
So street fighting in Aleppo and Homs merely feeds data banks; the bombs exploding daily in Iraq and the dead laid out under sheets are fake corpses, copied from computer games, which are real; Gaza is just a hoax, ridiculed by millions of users, just one more shitstorm.
In order to speak at all, such common doubts must be swept aside. For if I say, in the somewhat questionable guise of a real person, that once the so-called German army has withdrawn from a far distant land, thousands of Afghanis who aided our returning soldiers will be left exposed to the hate and revenge of the Taliban because we deny them asylum, I am stating facts for which we bear responsiblity, even if those facts have already been turned into easily digested fodder for the giants bred in Silicon Valley.
In spite of this, some friends and I wrote an appeal entitled “Emergency Call” in nonfading ink on paper that actually rustled. Yet a nationally distributed newspaper refused to publish it: “We don’t publish appeals!”
Before It’s Too Late
Let no one say, as too often in the past,
we didn’t know.
Not one among the silent righteous
will be spotless.
No one can spend the week in silence
and be absolved on Sunday.
We must never again buil
d memorials
to victims we treated thoughtlessly.
No one will look in the mirror
without reflecting guilt.
The shame in flowerpots
is rooted in the past.
Covered Losses
We had two or more thieves in our house recently—in our cellar to be precise, which has an outside entrance.
They managed to break in unnoticed, though we were sitting in front of the TV that night watching an old crime movie—set in Paris of course—about a jewelry robbery, in suspense-filled black and white.
Nothing was missing from the cellar but the two long boxes we had built, one of birch, the other of pine.
We asked ourselves: What will the thieves use them for? As there was no snow on the ground, they left no tracks.
Since then the winter months have trundled along with only moderate frost. The loss troubles us. The two dozen dahlia bulbs my wife was storing in the box built for her are also missing. They were waiting, like us, for the coming spring. Of course we’re insured against theft, but only the losses in wood are covered.
A Winter Too Mild
How sparse the woods are.
Bare-branched they await the snow
now falling elsewhere, on palm-trees
says the weather report.
The Owl’s Stare
Beyond the scurrying mouse
and the curled worm
its stare reflects us,
visiting the zoo on Sunday,
looking for answers.
About Clouds
our Hans Magnus has written the most beautiful poems. They change as you watch, which pleases him. He loves how they bow first to one wind, then another. They’re not for sale. Their shapes constantly shift. The sunset’s makeup tinges them but briefly.
In my youth, dominated by Baltic weather I always remember as “clear to cloudy,” though our schoolboy holidays were often overcast and gloomy, I liked to spend time “pushing clouds,” as my son Franz did much later on. That was our phrase for making mischief, a job that paid by the piece. Things changed of course, but I was always dependent on the mood and goodwill of the weather.
Ah, how dull the cloudless sky that spreads over us today.
Rising to Heavenly Heights
Clotted on the horizon
they rise to the mountains
or, in loosely gathered mounds,
are wind-driven east to west.
Silvery white,
framed in gray.
Plucked cotton
—plucked by whom?—
arranged in rows.
Who was the boy
lying on his back in the sand,
trying to direct
the traffic in that
wash-blue sky?
Tiepolo too, rising to heavenly heights,
lay on his back on the scaffold,
painting his celestial visions.
Behold, you who are weighed
down by leaden soles,
how his heavenly host,
enraptured, have found
among the clouds
a softly cushioned home.
On Writing
I started setting down words early on. At first in Sütterlin script, its long loops with me still. A diary was lost in the war, near Weißwasser, during the retreat. Then came the peace, which had to be absorbed. Hunger helped, chewed up everything, including books. And when I fell for art and love at the same time, an Olivetti arrived as a wedding present. She was and is my favorite product from the fifties, sleek and elegant in form, as if Leonardo da Vinci had invented the typewriter on the side.
I’ve remained true to her. I took her on trips with me. The drafts I wrote by hand she ate like fodder. Her clatter was music to me. I often hit the wrong key. I still do, even if I’m not writing now, but just trying to go on.
Over time, many things have disappeared. Long-playing records and cast-iron skillets for example. Her ink ribbons were in short supply too, given her insatiable appetite for what I rolled in and out; ribbons turned scarce, threatened to disappear entirely, so that even used, they brought a high price at flea markets.
The first computers were on the market and seemed sure to dominate the future. Then something wonderful happened, not here, but in Spain: a small group of students who had read in magazines about the old-fashioned way I wrote book after book sent me a foil-wrapped package of brand-new ribbons, and though their number decreases year by year, they should see me through to the end.
Grandpa’s Beloved
I have to sit out the rest.
One orphaned standing desk
is simply storage space now,
the Olivetti cries for attention on the other,
except when my half-grown grandchildren,
here on a visit, stare in awe
at my playmate from a time
when windfowl were still around.
She’s still beautiful
and—always ready—wants
a fresh ribbon, of which
seven remain.
But she’s new to the children,
invented just yesterday.
They put in a sheet of paper
and type with one finger: clack clack.
I read: This was once Grandpa’s beloved.
He even took her on holidays.
Sometimes he strokes her.
He had a lot of children with her;
they grew up long ago.
Now she’s sad because,
he tells her with a wink,
he can think of nothing more to say.
Yours and Mine
Once I dreamed my wife and I were in a concert hall. I saw us in the front row, then again farther back. At a lighted podium, a tenor was singing to piano accompaniment. No, he was a baritone. I’m not sure if his vocal cords were trained on Dichterliebe or the Winterreise. My wife, if she weren’t dreaming too, could recall it more accurately, for where music was concerned she set the tone for our love from the start.
After the concert, with nothing noted or of note having happened during the intermission, the dream swept us into a reception, apparently in honor of the celebrated singer. Guests were standing around, relaxing and discussing local affairs rather than the songs we’d just heard. I stood there with an empty glass feeling left out. Suddenly I noticed my wife was gone, and I searched for her in vain. Queries drew only shrugs. I started to think I’d wandered into the wrong dream when I turned and saw her slim figure poised beside the equally slim singer. They were engaged in conversation, or rather, the conversation engaged them, held them captive. In beautiful harmony, with no wish to be disturbed, they stood in mutual admiration.
Nevertheless, I approached the couple now conversing so intensely. Enthusiasm inflamed them, an inner fire, the devil knows what it was.
My dreaming ear took in the nuances of the performance that had just faded away. For example, whether the pianist, who would be either fired or never hired again, had played too loudly or, in certain passages, too softly.
Their heads were drawing near, too near. Their voices died out breathlessly. Their fingers spoke silently. I saw myself shunted aside, tried to dream up something different, a rugged landscape with a waterfall. But when my wife approached me, after a movie-like cut, I was hardly surprised to hear the clear and emphatic statement that she was leaving at once and moving to Leipzig with the singer—that’s right, not to the German Democratic Republic of dreams but to the real one; it was her desire and privilege to accompany the singer on the piano from now on.
I quickly gathered what little wits I had about me, struggled to free myself from a numbing jealousy, availed myself of an inward logic countering that of the dream, and heard myself say: I’m coming with you to Leipzig.
She accepted it. Just like that. A small smile, characteristic of my wife in real life, announced agreement.
Then the dream grew more complicated. My request for permission to leave at once for the ot
her Germany led me to various departments where I was forced to undergo interrogation-like interviews. The decor of the rooms smacked of offices in East Berlin.
In the end, I had to assure them in writing that I would make no public appearances on socialist soil and, moreover, would refrain entirely from writing. Rapidly and without hesitation, moved by a love beyond doubt, I signed various papers. Seals were affixed with a bang. I renounced everything with dream-like ease; as the song says, I kept my eyes on the prize.
From then on, we formed a ménage à trois, one in which bed scenes were off-limits. I saw myself cooking for the two of them: no doubt a bland diet. And wonder of wonders, after a short time, insofar as time can be measured in a dream, I could read music. My enjoyment of music had always been passive, but now I heard harmonies when I looked at the page. Ah, if only I could have retained that gift when awake!
Wolfgang, called Wolfie by my wife, was a singer whose fame knew no bounds. As a result, he was allowed to travel abroad on tours that brought in hard currency. In my dream I traveled with this exportable duo as their page-turner. So I continued to be of use, expertly and as inconspicuously as possible turning the pages from time to time when such immortal numbers as Winterreise and Dichterliebe graced the program. I was an essential part of the whole.
We took the stage in Paris, Milan, Edinburgh, even in Sidney and Tokyo. The world seemed a beautiful dream. I also enjoyed a small advantage that was a constant source of pleasure: Wolfgang, or Wolfie, was so worried about his voice that he avoided all drafts, any sudden changes in the weather, and the smog of great cities. When not rehearsing or performing, he spent all his time in temperature-controlled hotel rooms, where our wife pampered his vocal cords with herbal tea and an inhaler. All this left me free to visit museums, cathedrals, Buddhist temples, and other places of interest. The glimpse into the gloomy dungeons of the Tower of London was unforgettable. Something I never dreamed of: a stroll through the White Nights of Saint Petersburg, called Leningrad back then.