by Günter Grass
To sum it up, the assassin was a dud; but the bomb wasn’t a dud, it went off punctually, cut off several officer’s careers, but removed neither the Führer nor the Führer’s favorite dog from the world. For Prinz, to whom as to all dogs the region under the table belonged, had sniffed at the abandoned brief case and possibly heard an uncanny ticking: in any event, his cursory sniffing commanded him to transact a piece of business that well-trained dogs transact only out of doors.
An attentive adjutant, standing by the shack door, saw what the dog wanted, opened the door a crack—wide enough for Prinz—and closed it without disturbing noise. But his solicitude brought him no reward; for when the bomb said Now!, when it said Time’s up! Pickupthechips! Endoftheline!, when the bomb in the brief case of the assassin who had meanwhile run for it said Amen, the adjutant among others was hit by several splinters, but not a one touched the Führer or his favorite dog.
Air Force auxiliary Harry Liebenau—to get back to the suburb of Langfuhr from the great world of assassins, general staff maps, and the unscathed Führer figure—heard about the unsuccessful attempt on the Führer’s life on the turned-up radio. The names of the assassin and his fellow conspirators were given. Thereupon Harry began to worry about the dog Prinz, descended from the dog Harras; for no special communiqué, not a line in the papers, not so much as a whispered word revealed whether the dog was among the victims or whether Providence had spared him as well as his master.
It wasn’t until the next newsreel—Harry had his induction order in his pocket, was no longer wearing the uniform of an Air Force auxiliary, was making good-by calls, and going often, because there were seven more days to kill, to the movies—that the German Movietone News had something to say, quite marginally, about the dog Prinz.
The Führer’s headquarters with demolished shack and living Führer was shown in the distance. And against the boots of the Führer, whose face under low-pulled cap seemed slightly swollen but otherwise unchanged, rubbed, black with erect ears, a male shepherd whom Harry identified without difficulty as the carpenter’s dog’s dog.
The bungling assassin, however, was taken to the gallows.
There was once a little girl,
whom forest Gypsies palmed off on a high school teacher who was sorting mica stones in an abandoned factory and was named Oswald Brunies. The girl was baptized with the name Jenny, grew up, and became fatter and fatter. Jenny looked unnaturally roly-poly and had to put up with a good deal. At an early age, the plump little girl took piano lessons from a piano teacher by the name of Felsner-Imbs. Imbs had billowing snow-white hair, which demanded to be brushed for a good hour every day. On his advice, Jenny, by way of keeping her weight in check, was sent to a ballet school to learn ballet dancing.
But Jenny went on swelling and promised to become as fat as Eddi Amsel, Dr. Brunies’ favorite pupil. Amsel often came with his friend to look as the teacher’s collection of mica stones and was also present when Jenny tinkled out scales. Eddi Amsel had many freckles, weighted 203 pounds, had ready wit, knew how to draw good likenesses quick as a flash, and in addition could sing clear as a bell—even in church.
One winter afternoon when snow lay all about and new snow kept falling on top of it, Jenny was transformed behind the Erbsberg, near the gloomy Gutenberg monument, into a snow man by playing children.
At the same hour, as chance would have it, fat funny Amsel, on the opposite side of the Erbsberg, was likewise transformed into a snow man; but those who transformed him were not playing children.
But suddenly and from all sides a thaw set in. Both snow men melted away and discharged: near the Gutenberg monument a dancing line; on the other side of the mountain a slender young man, who looked for his teeth in the snow and found them. Whereupon he made them rain down on the bushes.
The dancing line went home, represented herself when she got there as Jenny Brunies, fell slightly ill, soon recovered, and embarked on the arduous career of a successful ballet dancer.
The slender youth, however, packed Eddi Amsel’s suitcase and in the guise of a Herr Haseloff took the train from Danzig via Schneidemühl to Berlin. There he had his mouth filled with new teeth and tried to cure a violent cold he had caught in the snow man; but his chronic hoarseness was there to stay.
The dancing line had to keep on going to school and working hard at ballet exercises. When the Stadttheater’s children’s ballet took part in the Christmas play, The Snow Queen, Jenny danced the role of the Snow Queen and was praised by the critics.
Then came the war. But nothing changed, or at most the ballet audience: Jenny danced in the Red Room of the Zoppot casino before high-ranking officers, Party leaders, artists, and scientists. The chronically hoarse Herr Haseloff, who had escaped from the Amselian snow man, had meanwhile be come a ballet master in Berlin. As a prominent member of the ballet world, he had been invited to the Red Room, and now he said to himself over the long-lasting final applause: “What amazing sparkle! What heavenly arm movements! That line in the adagio! Somewhat lacking in warmth but classical to the finger tips. Clean technique, still rather self-conscious. Instep not high enough. Definitely talented. It would be a good thing to work with the child, work and bring out everything she’s got.”
Only after Dr. Brunies had been questioned by the police in connection with an embarrassing affair—he had diverted vitamin tablets intended for his pupils to his own mouth—arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to Stutthof concentration camp, did ballet master Haseloff find an opportunity to carry Jenny off to Berlin.
It was hard for her to part from the suburb of Langfuhr. She wore mourning and had fallen in love with a high school student by the name of Harry Liebenau. She wrote him many letters. Her tidy script told of a mysterious Madame Neroda, who headed the ballet, of the pianist Felsner-Imbs, who had followed her to Berlin, of little Fenchel, her partner in the pas de deux, and of ballet master Haseloff, who, chronically hoarse and always rather weird, directed exercises and re hearsals.
Jenny wrote of progress and minor setbacks. All in all she was getting ahead; there was only one trouble and there was no help for it. For all the praise Jenny earned with her entrechats, her instep was still flat and feeble, a source of dismay to the ballet master and to the dancer, because every true ballerina—ever since the days of Louis XIV—has had to have a fine high instep.
Several ballets, including some early German country dances and the usual bravura pieces from the venerable Petipa’s repertory, were rehearsed and performed for the soldiers who had occupied half Europe. Long trips took Jenny all over. And from all over Jenny wrote her friend Harry, who answered now and then. Between rehearsals and during performances Jenny didn’t sit there like a bonehead leafing through illustrated magazines; diligently she knitted baby clothes for a school friend who was expecting a baby.
When the ballet group returned from France in the summer of ‘44—taken unawares by the invasion, it had lost several sets and a number of costumes—ballet master Haseloff decided to work up a ballet in three acts, with which he had been fiddling ever since his childhood. Now, after the washout in France, he was in a hurry to put his childhood dream on its feet. He decided to call it The Scarecrows or The Revolt of the Scarecrows or The Gardener’s Daughter and the Scarecrows, and expected it to open in August.
Since there were no suitable composers available, he had Felsner-Imbs arrange a blend of Scarlatti and Handel. The costumes that had been wrecked or badly damaged in France fitted nicely into the new ballet. The survivors of a group of midgets, who had belonged to Haseloff’s propaganda unit and had also suffered losses at the beginning of the invasion, were taken on as acrobatic extras. This ballet was intended to tell a story with the help of masks, twittering machines, mobile automata, and a large illusionist stage.
Jenny wrote to Harry: “The curtain rises on the wicked old gardener’s colorful garden, which is being looted by dancing birds. Half in league with the birds, the gardener’s daughter—that’s me—is teasin
g the wicked old gardener. As the birds whirl about him, he does a frantically funny solo dance and fastens a sign to the garden fence: ‘Scarecrow wanted!’ Instantly, jumping over the fence with a grand jeté, a young man in picturesque rags appears and offers his services as a scarecrow. After a choreographic discussion— pas battus, entrechats, and brisés dessus-dessous—the wicked old gardener agrees, exits left, and the young man scares away— pas chassé, and glissades in all directions—all the birds, the last being a particularly impudent blackbird— tours en l’air. Of course the pretty young gardener’s daughter—that’s me—falls in love with the bouncing scarecrow— pas de deux in among the wicked old gardener’s rhubarb stalks—sweet adagio: attitude en promenade. With a show of timidity, the gardener’s daughter shrinks back, then surrenders and is led away over the fence, another grand jeté. The two of us—little Fenchel plays the young man—exit right.
“In the second act—as you’ll soon see—the young man’s true nature comes out. He is the prefect of all scarecrows and rules over their underground realm, where scarecrows of every variety have to spin around ceaselessly. Here they engage in leaping processions, there they assemble for a scarecrow mass and sacrifice to an old hat. Our midgets, with old Bebra in the lead, combine to form a midget scarecrow, sometimes short, sometimes long, but always closely knotted. They weave picturesquely through history: shaggy Germani, baggy-panted lansquenets, imperial couriers, moth-eaten mendicant friars, mechanical headless knights, bloated nuns possessed of epilepsy, General Zieten emerging from the woods, and Lutzow’s intrepid band. Many-armed clothes trees are on the march. Cupboards vomit forth whole dynasties with court dwarfs. Then they all turn into windmills: the monks, the knights, nuns, couriers and lansquenets, the Prussian grenadiers and Natzmer uhlans, the Merovingians and Carolingians, and in between, popping like weasels, our midgets. Air is moved with wild wings but no grain is milled. Yet the big mill hopper is filled with rag entrails, lace clouds, flag salad. Hat pyramids and pants porridge mix into a cake, which all the scarecrows noisily devour. Growling rattling howling. A whistling of keys. A stifled moaning. Ten abbots belch. Farting of the nuns. Goats and midgets bleat. Raiding, scraping, guzzling, neighing. Silk sings. Velvet buzzes. On one leg. Two in one skirt. Wedded in pants. Sailing in a hat. They fall out of pockets, they multiply in potato sacks. Arias tangled in curtains. Yellow light bursts through seams. Trunkless heads. A jumping luminous button. Mobile baptism. And gods too: Potrimpos, Pikollos, Perkunos—among them a black dog. And right in the middle of this exercising, acrobatic, complexly ordered confusion—unclassical vibrati alternate with richly varied pas de bourrée—the prefect of all scarecrows, little Fenchel in other words, deposits the kidnaped gardener’s daughter. And I, the gardener’s daughter, am scared on frantic slippers. For all my love for the young man and prefect—only on the stage, mind you—I’m awfully frightened. After the nasty scarecrows have hung a moth-clouded bridal dress on me and crowned me with a rattling nutshell crown, I dance a terrified regal solo—the midgets carry my train—to solemnly tinkling court music; and with my dancing I, that is to say, the crowned gardener’s daughter, succeed in dancing to sleep all the scarecrows, some standing singly, others in groups, one after the other: last of all, little Fenchel, that is, the prefect. Only the shaggy black dog, who is a member of the prefect’s retinue, tosses restlessly about among sprinkled midgets, but is unable to stand on his twelve diabolical legs. Then, out of a perfect arabesque, I as the gardener’s daughter bend down over the sleep ing prefect, blow a sorrowful ballerina’s kiss—without ever touching little Fenchel—and run away. Too late the black dog howls. Too late the midgets squeal. Too late the scarecrow mechanisms start up. And much too late the prefect wakes up. The second act ends with a furious finale: leaps and acrobatics. Music warlike enough to chase away Turkish armies. The hectically excited scarecrows scatter, boding trouble in the third act.
“The scene is the wicked old gardener’s garden again. Sad and defenseless against the birds, he twists and turns in vain. Then shamefacedly—I have to play it half repentant, half defiant—the wicked old gardener’s young daughter comes back in raggetly bridal dress and sinks down at her gardener father’s feet. She clasps his knees and wants to be lifted up: pas de deux, father and daughter. A choreographic conflict, with lifts and promenades. In the end the old man’s evil nature comes out: he rejects me, his daughter. I’m sick of living and I can’t die. A roaring from behind: scarecrows and birds in strange alliance. A fluttering, chirping, whirring, squeaking, hissing monster rolls across the stage, holding up an enormous empty bird cage supported by the claws of innumerable scarecrows, bulldozes the garden, and catches the gardener’s daughter with nimble midgets. The prefect shouts for joy when he sees me in the cage. Black, the shaggy dog describes swift circles. Triumph in every joint, the thousand-voiced monster rattles and squeaks away, taking me with it. Leaving the ruined garden behind. Leaving behind a limping figure in rags: the wicked old gardener. The teasing birds come back again—pas de chat, pas de basque—and encircle the old man. Wearily and as though to defend himself, he lifts his arms wrapped in tatters: and lo and behold, the very first movement frightens the birds, scares them away. He has turned into a scarecrow, forever after he will be gardener and scarecrow in one. On his macabre scarecrow solo—Herr Haseloff is toying with the idea of dancing this role—the final curtain falls.”
This ballet, so sympathetically described by Jenny to her friend Harry, this ballet in three acts, so meticulously rehearsed, this sumptuously staged ballet—Haseloff in person had designed noise-making mechanisms and button-spitting automata—this scarecrow ballet was never to open. Two gentlemen from the Reich Propaganda Ministry, who attended the dress rehearsal, found the first act charming and promising, cleared their throats for the first time in the second act, and stood up right after the final curtain. In general, they thought the latter part of the story too sinister and allusive. The life-affirming element was absent, and the two gentlemen declared in unison: “Soldiers at the front want something gay, not some gloomy rumbling underworld.”
Negotiations were carried on. Madame Neroda brought her connections to bear. The top authorities were showing signs of approving a new version when, before Haseloff had time to tack on a happy ending consonant with the situation at the front, a bomb hit demolished the costumes and sets. And the ensemble also suffered losses.
Though the rehearsal ought to have been interrupted during an air-raid alert, they kept right on: the gardener’s daughter is dancing the scarecrows, the hellhound, all the midgets, and the prefect to sleep—Jenny was doing admirably, except that her instep still wasn’t high enough and left the impression of a slight but disturbing blemish—Haseloff was just about to arrange the new and positive plot—Jenny was supposed to handcuff all the scarecrows and the prefect, after which she would put them to work for the benefit of the upper world, in other words, the formerly wicked gardener, who was now so good butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth—just as Jenny, laden with cumbersome handcuffs, was standing alone on the stage, uncertain because of the changes that had been made, the bomb, meant for the radio tower next door, fell on the exhibition hall, which had been rigged up as a theater workshop.
The storeroom containing the sensitive mechanisms, flimsy costumes, and movable sets sank to its knees, never to rise again; Felsner-Imbs the pianist, who had accompanied all the rehearsals with ten fingers, was flattened aganst the keyboard for all time. Four little holes, two stoppers, the midget Kitty, and three stage hands were injured, only slightly thank heavens. But ballet master Haseloff came off with a sound skin and, as soon as the smoke and dust had settled, went looking for Jenny with hoarse cries.
He found her recumbent and had to extricate her feet from under a beam. At first they feared the worst, a ballerina’s death. Actually the beam had only crushed her right as well as her left foot. Her ballet slippers had grown too tight for her swelling feet, and at long last Jenny Angustri appeared to
have the perfect high instep that every ballerina ought to have.—Float hither, ye airy sylphides. Approach like brides, Giselle and Coppelia, or weep from enamel eyes. Grisi and Taglioni, Lucile Grahn and Fanny Cerito, come and weave your Pas de Quatre and strew roses on pitiful feet. Palais Gamier, burst into all your lights that the stones of the pyramid may join in the grand défilé; the first and second quadrille, the hopeful coryphées, the petits sujets and the grands sujets, the premiers danseurs, and, as embittered as they are unattainable, the Stars: Leap, Gaetano Vestris! Far-famed Camargo, still in command of the entrechats huit. Vaslav Nijinsky, slowly leaping god and specter of the rose, have done with butterflies and black spiders. Restless Noverre, break off your journey and make a halt here. Turn off the suspension machine, that moonbeams light as sylphides may cast their coolness. Wicked Diaghilev, lay your magical hand upon her. Anna Pavlova, for the time of this sorrow forget your millions. Chopin, once again, by candlelight, spit your blood upon the keys. Turn away, Bellastriga and Archisposa. Once again let the dying swan swoon away. And now, Petrushka, lie down beside her. The last position. Grand plié.