by Günter Grass
But nobody suspected that by drawing the blank lot my cousin Tulla had given the signal, had unleashed the beer-hall battle.
Dear Tulla,
all that was within your power. You had the eye and the finger. But what is important for this story is not your beer-hall battle—although you had a part in it, it was a common place affair, indistinguishable from other beer-hall battles—the significant item is that Eddi Amsel, owner of a villa on Steffensweg, was able to take delivery of a beer-sour bundle of battle-scarred and blood-encrusted uniforms: Walter Matern was the slightly injured donor.
This time the loot wasn’t limited to SA uniforms. It included the togs of plain Party members. But everything was brown: not the brown of summer oxfords; not hazelnut-brown or witch-brown; no brown Africa; no grated tree bark, no furniture, brown with age; no medium-brown or sand-brown; neither young soft coal nor old peat, dug with a peat spade; no breakfast chocolate, no morning coffee enriched with cream; tobacco, so many varieties, but none so brown as; neither the roebuck brown that so deceives the eye nor the suntan-lotion brown of a two weeks’ vacation; no autumn spat on the palette when this brown: shit brown, at best clay brown, sodden, pasty, Party brown, SA brown, the brown of all Brown Books, Brown Houses, Braunau brown, Eva Braun, uniform brown, a far cry from khaki brown, the brown shat on white plates by a thousand pimply asses, brown derived from split peas and sausages; no, no, ye gentle witch-brown, hazelnut-brown brunettes, you were not the godmothers when this brown was boiled, born, and dyed, when this dungheap brown—I’m still being polite about it—lay before Eddi Amsel.
Amsel sorted out the brown, took the big scissors from Solingen and made them twitter experimentally. Amsel began to cut into the indescribable brown. A new implement stood voluted beside the genuine Renaissance writing desk supporting Weininger’s always open standard work: the tailor’s horse, the tailor’s organ, the tailor’s confessional: a Singer sewing machine. How the kitten purred when from coarse burlap, onion sacks, and other permeable material Eddi Amsel sewed shirtlike undergarments. And the puffed-up Amsel behind the slender little machine: were they not one? Might not the two of them, born, baptized, vaccinated, educated as they were, have borne witness to the same identical development? And with big stitches and little stitches, he sewed scraps of the horrible brown on the burlap shirts like beauty spots. But he also fragmented the armband-red and the sunstroke-maddened bellyache of the swastika. He stuffed with kapok and sawdust. In illustrated magazines and yearbooks he looked for and found faces, a coarse-grained photograph of Gerhard Hauptmann or a glossy black-and-white print of a popular actor of those years: Birgel or Tannings. He fastened Schmeling and Pacelli, the bruiser and the ascetic, under the visors of the brown caps. He turned the League of Nations High Commissioner into an SA man Brand. Undaunted, he snipped at reproductions of old engravings and played God with Solingen scissors until Schiller’s bold profile or the dandyface of the young Goethe gave its features to one or another of the movement’s martyrs, Herbert Norkus or Horst Wessel. Amsel dismembered, speculated, cross-bred, and gave the centuries a chance to kiss each other under SA caps.
From page 4 of his copy he cut the head of the full-length photograph of the slender, boyish Otto Weininger, author of the standard work, who had committed suicide while still a young man, had the section enlarged to life size at Sonnker’s, and then proceeded to work at length but always with unsatisfactory results, on “SA man Weininger.”
Eddi Amsel’s self-portrait was more successful. In addition to the Renaissance desk and the Singer sewing machine, his equipment included a tall, narrow mirror, reaching up to the ceiling paneling, of the kind to be found in tailor shops and ballet schools. Before this responsive glass he sat in a self-tailored Party uniform—among the SA uniforms he had found none capable of containing him—and hung his full-figure likeness on a naked skeleton which, in the middle, as a sort of solar plexus, lodged a winding mechanism. In the end the authentic Amsel sat Buddhalike tailor fashion, appraising the constructed and still more authentic Party Comrade Amsel. He stood blown up to capacity in burlap and Party brown. The shoulder strap circumscribed him like a tropic. Insignia of rank on his collar made him into a modest section chief. A pig’s bladder, daringly simplified and daubed only with a few suggestive black strokes, supported, an excellent likeness, the section chief’s cap. And then in the Party comrade’s solar plexus the winding mechanism began to operate: the breeches came to attention. Starting at the belt buckle, the right rubber glove, full to bursting, moved jerkily, by remote control, to chest, then to shoulder level, presented first the straight-arm, then the bent-arm Party salute, returned sluggishly, just barely in time, for the mechanism was running down, to the belt buckle, gave a senile tremor or two and fell asleep. Eddi Amsel was in love with his new creation. At the narrow studio mirror he imitated the salute of his life-size facsimile: the Amsel quartet. Walter Matern, to whom Amsel displayed himself and the figure on the floor as well as the mirror images of himself and the figure, laughed, at first overloudly and then with embarrassment. Then he just stared in silence at Amsel, at the scarecrow, and at the mirror by turns. He stood in civilian clothes among four figures in uniform. The sight provoked the inborn grinding of his teeth. And grinding he gave it to be understood that he could take a joke but that too much was enough; Amsel should stop harping on one and the same theme; after all there were plenty of people in the SA and the Party as well who were seriously striving for an ideal, good guys and not just bastards.
Amsel replied that precisely this had been his artistic purpose, that he hadn’t intended criticism of any kind, but merely wished, through his art, to create a hodgepodge of good guys and bastards, after the manner of life itself.
Thereupon he tinkered with a prefabricated frame until he had turned out a bullish-looking good guy: SA man Walter Matern. Tulla and I, who were peering from the night-black garden into the electrically lit up and oak-paneled studio, saw with round eyes how Walter Matern’s uniformed likeness—blood spots still bore witness to the brawl at the Kleinhammerpark—bared the teeth of his photographed face with the help of a built-in mechanism and ground its mechanically moved teeth: yes, we only saw it—but anyone who saw Walter Matern’s teeth heard them too.
Tulla and I saw
how Walter Matern, who with his SA sturm had to do guard duty at a monster mass meeting on the snow-covered Maiwiese, caught sight of the uniformed Eddi Amsel in the crowd. Löbsack spoke. Greiser and Forster spoke. Snow was falling in big flakes, and the crowd shouted Heil so long that snowflakes slipped into the open mouths of the Heil-shouters. Party Comrade Eddi Amsel also shouted Heil and snapped after particularly large snowflakes, until SA man Walter Matern fished him out of the crowd and pushed him off the slushy field into Hindenburgallee. There he gave him hell and we thought in another minute he was going to slug him.
Tulla and I saw
Eddi Amsel in uniform collecting money for the Winter Aid in the Langfuhr market. He jiggled his can, distributed his little jokes among the populace, and took in more coins than the genuine Party comrades; and we thought: if Matern should turn up now and see this, well…
Tulla and I
surprised Eddi Amsel and the grocer’s son in a snow squall on Frobelwiese. We were huddled under a trailer that was wintering on the Frobelwiese. Amsel and the gnome were silhouetted like shadows against the snow flurries. No shadows could have been more different than those shadows. The gnome shadow held out his shadow drum into the snowfall. The Amsel shadow bent down. Both shadows held their ears to the drum as though listening to the sound of December snow on white-lacquered tin. Because we had never seen anything so silent, we too kept still, with frost-red ears: but all we could hear was the snow, we couldn’t hear the tin.
Tulla and I
kept an eye peeled for Eddi Amsel when between Christmas and New Year’s Day our families went for a walk in Oliva Forest; but he was somewhere else and not in Freudental. There we drank coffee with m
ilk and ate potato pancakes under deer antlers. There wasn’t much doing in the outdoor zoo, because in cold weather the monkeys were kept warm in the basement of the forestry house. We shouldn’t have taken Harras with us. But my father, the master carpenter, said: “The dog needs a run.”
Freudental was a popular place for excursions. We took the Number 2 streetcar to Friedensschluss and then walked through the woods, between trees with red markings, until the valley opened and the forestry house and the outdoor zoo lay before us. As a carpenter, my father was unable to look at any good-sized tree, whether beech or pine, without estimating its utility in cubic feet. This put my mother, who looked upon nature and hence trees more as the adornment of the world, into a bad humor, which was dispelled only by the potato pancakes and coffee. Herr Kamin, the concessionaire of the forestry house and inn, took a seat between August Pokriefke and my mother. Whenever guests appeared, he told the story of how the zoo had come into being. And so Tulla and I heard for the tenth time how a Heir Pikuritz from Zoppot had donated the male bison. The zoo hadn’t started with the bison, though, but with a pair of red deer, given by the director of the railroad car factory. Next came the wild boar and the fallow deer. Somebody contributed a monkey, somebody else two monkeys. Nikolai, head of the forestry commission, had provided the foxes and the beavers. A Canadian consul had furnished the raccoons. And the wolves? Who gave the wolves? Wolves that later broke out of the enclosure, tore a berry-picking child to pieces, and, once shot, had their picture in the papers? Who gave the wolves?
Before Herr Kamin can tell us that the Breslau zoo had donated the two wolves, we are outside with Harras. Past Jack, the bison bull. Around the frozen pond. Chestnuts and acorns for wild boar. Brief barking at the foxes. The wolves’ den barred. Harras turned to stone. The wolves restless behind iron bars. Pace longer than Harras’. But the chest not so well developed, the stop not so clearly marked, eyes set at a slant, smaller, more protected. Head more thickset, trunk barrel-shaped, height to the withers: less than Harras, coat stiff, light gray with black clouds, on yellow undercoat. A hoarse whining Harras. The wolves pace restlessly. One day the guardian will forget to close… Snow falls in plaques from firs. For the time it takes to glance, the wolves stop still behind bars: six eyes, quivering flews. Three noses curl. Breath steams from fangs. Gray wolves—black shepherd. Black as a result of consistent breeding. Oversaturation of the pigment cells, from Perkun by way of Senta and Pluto to Harras of Queen Louise’s mill, gives our dog his stiff, unclouded, unbrindled, unmarked black. My father whistles and August Pokriefke claps his hands. Tulla’s family and my parents standing outside the forestry house in winter coats. Restless wolves stay behind. But for us and Harras the Sunday walk isn’t over yet. In every mouth an aftertaste of potato pancakes.
My father led us all to Oliva. There we took the streetcar to Glettkau. The Baltic was frozen as far as the misty horizon. Sheathed in ice, the Glettkau pier glistened strangely. Consequently my father had to take his camera out of its leather case and we had to group ourselves around Harras against the fantastic sugar candy. It took my father a long while to get focused. Six times we were told to hold still, which Harras did with ease—he was used to having his picture taken from the days when the press photographers had courted him. Of the six pictures my father took, four turned out to be overexposed: the ice shed extra light.
From Glettkau we walked across the crunching sea to Brösen. Black dots as far as the ice-bound steamers in the roadstead. A good many people had had the same idea. No need for the gulls to go hungry. Two days later four school boys on their way to Hela across the ice got lost in the fog and, despite a search with private planes, were never seen again.
Shortly before the Brösen pier, which was also wildly ice-covered—we were meaning to turn off toward the fishing village and the streetcar stop, because the Pokriefkes, especially Tulla, had a horror of the Brösen pier, where years before the little deaf-mute Konrad—after my father with flat wood working hand had indicated the new line of march, at approximately four in the afternoon, shortly before New Year’s, 1937, on December 28, 1936, Harras, whom my father had been holding on the leash because there were so many other dogs about, broke loose, leash and all, took ten long flat leaps over the ice, disappeared in the screaming crowd and, by the time we caught up to him, had merged with a fluttering overcoat to form a black snow-spewing bundle.
Without a word from Tulla, Felsner-Imbs, the pianist and piano teacher, who with Dr. Brunies and ten-year-old Jenny had come out for a Sunday excursion like ourselves, was attacked a third time by our Harras. This time the damage was not confined to a swallowtail coat or umbrella that had to be replaced. My father had every reason to call the unfortunate episode an expensive joke. Felsner’s right thigh had been badly mangled. He had to spend three weeks in Deaconesses’ Hospital, over and above which he demanded exemplary damages.
Tulla,
it’s snowing. Then and now it snowed and is snowing. Snow drifted, is drifting. Fell, is falling. Came down, is coming down. Swirled, is swirling. Flakes floated, are floating. Powdered, is powdering. Tons of snow on Jäschkental Forest, on the Grunewald; on Hindenburgallee, on Clay-Allee; on Langfuhr Market and on Berka Market in Smaragdendorf; on the Baltic and on the lakes of the Havel; on Oliva, on Spandau; on Danzig-Schidlitz, on Berlin-Lichterfelde; on Emmaus and Moabit; Neufahrwasser and Prenzlauer Berg; on Saspe and Brösen, on Babelsberg and Steinstücken; on the brick wall around the Westerplatte and the rapidly built wall between the two Berlins, snow is falling and lies on the ground, snow was falling and lay on the ground.
For Tulla and me,
who were waiting for snow with sleds, snow fell for two days and remained on the ground. Occasionally the snowfall was slanting, resolute, hard-working, then for a time the flakes were large and aimless—in this light, toothpaste-white with jagged edges; against the light, gray to black: a damp sticky snow, on top of which more resolute slanting snow came powdering down from the east. Through the night the moderate cold remained gray and spongy, so that in the morning all the fences were freshly laden and overloaded branches snapped. Countless janitors, columns of unemployed, the Emergency Technical Aid, and every available municipal vehicle were needed before streets, car tracks, and sidewalks were again discernible. Mountain chains of snow, crusty and lumpy, lined both sides of Elsenstrasse, concealing Harras completely and my father up to his chest. Tulla’s woolen cap was two fingers’ breadths of blue when there was a slight dip in the ridge. Sand, ashes, and red rock salt were strewn. With long poles men pushed the snow off the fruit trees in the Reichskolonie kitchen gardens and behind Abbot’s Mill. And as they shoveled, strewed, and relieved branches, new snow kept falling. Children were amazed. Old people thought back: When had so much snow fallen? Janitors grumbled and said to one another: Who’s going to pay for all this? There won’t be any sand, ashes, rock salt left. And if it doesn’t stop snowing. And if the snow thaws—and thaw it will as sure as we’re janitors—it’ll all flow into the cellars and the children will get the flu, and so will the grownups, like in ‘17.
When it’s snowing, you can look out of the window and try to count. That’s what your cousin Harry is doing, though he’s not really supposed to be counting, he’s supposed to be writing you letters. When the snow is coming down in big flakes, you can run out in the snow and hold up your open mouth. I’d love to, but I can’t, because Brauxel says I’ve got to write you. If you’re a black shepherd, you can run out of your white-capped kennel and bite into the snow. If your name is Eddi Amsel and you’ve built scarecrows from childhood up, you can build birdhouses for the birds at times when the snow falls breathlessly, and perform acts of mercy with bird food. While white snow is falling on a brown SA cap, you can grind your teeth. If your name is Tulla and you’re very light, you can run through and over the snow and leave no trace. As long as vacation lasts and the sky keeps coming down, you can sit in a warm study and sort out your mica gneiss, your double spar, your mic
a granite and mica slate, and at the same time be a schoolteacher and suck candy. If you’re paid for working in a carpentry shop, you can try to earn extra money on days when suddenly a pile of snow is falling, by making snow pushers out of the wood in the carpentry shop. If you have to make water, you can piss into the snow, engrave your name with a yellowish steaming stroke; but it has to be a short name: I wrote Harry in the snow in this manner; whereupon Tulla grew jealous and destroyed my signature with her shoes. If you have long eye lashes, you can catch the falling snow with long eyelashes; but they don’t have to be long, thick eyelashes will do; Jenny had that kind in her doll face; when she stood still and gaped in amazement, she was soon looking out sea-blue from under white, snow-covered roofs. If you stand motionless in the falling snow, you can close your eyes and hear the snow fall; I often did so and heard plenty. You can see the likeness of a shroud in the snow; but you don’t have to. If you’re a roly-poly foundling who’s been given a sled for Christmas, you may want to go coasting; but nobody wants to take the foundling along. You can cry in the middle of the snowfall and nobody notices, except for Tulla with her big nostrils who notices everything and says to Jenny: “Do you want to go coasting with us?”