by Günter Grass
Oskar never gave a photo to the waitress at the counter or to the foxy young redhead with the cigarette tray, for women shouldn't be given photos—they always mistreat them. Klepp, however, who, for all his portliness, could never stop showing off for the ladies, was communicative to the point of folly, and was ready to bare his chest and heart to any of them, must have given a photo to the cigarette girl one day without my knowledge, for he got engaged to the saucy green slip of a thing, and even married her, because he wanted his photo back.
I've got ahead of myself and devoted too many words to the final pages of my album. Those stupid snapshots aren't worth it, except to make clear by way of comparison how grand and unrivaled—yes, even artistic—the portrait of my grandfather Koljaiczek on the first page of the album appears to me to this day.
Short and stout he stands beside a small, elaborately carved table. Unfortunately he had himself photographed as Wranka the volunteer fireman, not as the arsonist. So he's missing his mustache. But the tautly stretched fireman's uniform with its medal for bravery and the fireman's helmet transforming the table into an altar almost compensate for the arsonist's whiskers. How gravely he gazes out, how deeply aware of all that turn-of-the-century suffering. That look, proud though tragic, seems to have been both beloved and common during the Second Reich, for Gregor Koljaiczek, the drunken gunpowder maker, who appears relatively sober in his pictures, sports it too. More mystic in tone, having been taken in Częstochowa, is the image captured of Vinzent Bronski, who holds a votive candle. A youthful portrait of the slender Jan Bronski bears witness to a consciously melancholy manliness, captured by means of early photography.
The women of that period were seldom as successful at finding a look that matched their demeanor. Even my grandmother Anna, who, God knows, was a real person, sits primly behind a silly, pasted-on smile in pictures taken prior to the outbreak of the First World War, offering no hint of the breadth of her four cascading skirts and the refuge they offered.
Even during the war years women were still smiling at the photographer as he danced about under his black cloth, snapsnapping away. I have another photo, double postcard size on stiff cardboard, showing twenty-three nurses in the Silberhammer Military Hospital, Mama among them as an auxiliary nurse, timid, clustering around the staff doctor, who offers a point of support. The hospital ladies seem slightly more relaxed in a posed shot at a costume ball in which convalescent warriors also appear. Mama ventures a wink, pursing her lips for a kiss that in spite of her angel wings and tinseled hair seems to say: Even angels have a sex. Matzerath, kneeling before her, has chosen a costume he would all too happily wear in daily life: he appears as a cook in a starched chef's hat, brandishing a spoon. In uniform, on the other hand, decked out with the Iron Cross Second Class, he too, like the Koljaiczeks and Bronskis, gazes out with a knowingly tragic look, and is superior to all the women in the photos.
After the war people wore a different look. The men appear slightly demobilized, and now it's the women who know how to pose for photos, who have reason to gaze out gravely, who, even when smiling, make no effort to conceal an undertone of the sorrows they've suffered. It was quite becoming, that melancholy air of women in the twenties. Did they not manage, sitting, standing, and half reclining, with the crescents of their little black spit curls pasted to their temples, to fashion a harmonious blend of Madonna and harlot?
The picture of my twenty-three-year-old mama—it must have been taken shortly before she became pregnant—shows a young woman who bows her round, smoothly shaped head slightly forward on her firm, fleshy neck, yet looks directly at the viewer, belying the merely physical with the aforementioned melancholy smile and a pair of eyes that, more gray than blue, seem accustomed to regarding the souls of her fellow beings, as well as her own, as solid objects—a coffee cup, say, or a cigarette holder. Of course the simple word soulful would not suffice here, were I to place it as an adjective before my mama's gaze.
No more interesting, but easier to assess and therefore more revealing, are the group photos of that period. It's amazing how much more beautiful and bridal the wedding dresses were when they were signing the Treaty of Rapallo. Matzerath still wears a stiff collar in his wedding picture. He looks handsome, elegant, almost intellectual. His right foot is thrust forward, looking like some movie actor of his day, Harry Liedtke, say. Dresses were short back then. The bridal dress of my mama the bride, a white skirt with a thousand pleats that barely reaches past her knees, shows off her shapely legs and dainty dancer's feet in white strap shoes. The entire wedding party crowds into other prints. Amid the urbanely dressed guests striking various attitudes, my grandmother Anna and her blessed brother Vinzent are always conspicuous for their stern provinciality and guileless insecurity. Jan Bronski, who like my mama comes from the same potato field as his aunt Anna and his heavenly-Virgin-addicted father, manages to hide his rural Kashubian origins behind the festive elegance of a Polish postal clerk. No matter how small and endangered he stands among the robust occupiers of space, his unusual eyes and the almost feminine regularity of his features become the focal point of every photo, even when he's standing off to one side.
For some time now I've been looking at a group photo taken not long after the marriage. The matte brown rectangle compels me to reach for my drum, to try to conjure with drumsticks on lacquered tin the tristar constellation visible on the print.
The photograph must have been taken at the corner of Magdeburgerstraße and Heeresanger near the Polish student hostel, in the Bronskis' apartment, for a balcony typical only of those pasted onto the fronts of flats in the Polish quarter serves as a background, sunlit and half-overgrown with pole beans. Mama is seated, Matzerath and Jan Bronski are standing. But how she sits, and how they stand! For a time I was silly enough to try to plot the constellation formed by this triumvirate—for Mama gave the full value of a man—with a school compass Bruno had to buy for me, and a ruler and triangle. The angle of inclination of the neck, a triangle of unequal sides, led to divergent parallels, to forced congruencies, to circles of the compass that closed significantly outside the triangle, that is, in the greenery of the pole beans, and produced a central point, because I was seeking a point, believed in the point, was addicted to the point, longed for a reference point, a departure point, perhaps even a viewpoint.
Nothing resulted from this dilettantish series of measurements but tiny yet annoying holes that I dug into the most important areas of this precious photograph with the point of my compass. What was so special about this print? What made me seek, and, if you will, actually find, mathematical and, ridiculous as it seems, even cosmic references in this rectangle? Three people: a seated woman, two standing men. Her dark hair marcelled, Matzerath's curly blond, Jan's chestnut brown, combed back close to his head. All three are smiling: Matzerath more than Jan Bronski, both showing their upper teeth, the smile of the two together five times broader than Mama's, of which you see only a hint at the corners of her mouth, and nothing at all in her eyes. Matzerath rests his left hand on Mama's right shoulder; Jan is content to place his right hand lightly on the back of the chair. She, with her knees to the right, facing forward from the waist up, holding a notebook in her lap that I long took for one of Bronski's stamp albums, later for a fashion magazine, and finally for a cigarette-card collection of famous film stars. Mama's hands seem poised to turn the pages the moment the plate is exposed and the picture taken. All three appear happy, commending one another for their mutual immunity to surprises of the sort that arise only if one partner in the Triple Alliance resorts to secret drawers or keeps things concealed from the start. Since they form a set, the only reason they need the fourth person, namely Jan's wife, Hedwig Bronski née Lemke, who may have already been pregnant at the time with the future Stephan, is to point the camera at the three of them and the happiness the three display, so that, at least photographically, their tripartite happiness can be captured and held fast.
I've detached other rectangle
s from the album and placed them beside this one. Scenes in which Mama can be observed with Matzerath, or Mama with Jan Bronski. In none of these pictures is the inevitability, the sole possible outcome, as clear as in the balcony scene. Jan and Mama in one: it smells of tragedy, of gold at the end of the rainbow, and the reckless abandon that leads to surfeit, to a surfeit of reckless abandon. Matzerath next to Mama: a trickle of weekend conjugality, the Wiener schnitzels sizzling, a bit of grumbling before dinner, some yawning after the meal, a few jokes before bedtime, or complaints about the tax situation to give some intellectual substance to the marriage. Nevertheless I prefer this photographic tedium to an indecent snapshot of later years that shows Mama on Jan Bronski's lap, against the backdrop of Oliva Forest near Freudenthal. Even though the lewdness—Jan has allowed his hand to disappear under Mama's dress—records only the mad, blind passion of the unhappy pair, adulterous from the first day of Matzerath's marriage, for whom, I presume, Matzerath serves here as benumbed photographer. None of the tranquility, none of the gentle, knowing gestures of the balcony picture are visible, which were no doubt only possible when both men were standing behind or beside Mama, or lying at her feet, as on the beach at the Heubude baths; see photo.
There's yet another rectangle that shows the three most important figures of my early years forming a triangle. Although less concentrated than the balcony picture, it still radiates the same tense peace that can no doubt only be concluded among, and possibly signed by, three people. Complain all you want about the much-loved love triangle in the theater; what are two persons alone on stage to do but talk themselves to death or secretly long for a third to appear? In my little picture the three of them are together. They are playing skat. That is, they are holding their cards like well-arranged fans, but instead of checking their trumps to gauge the strength of their hands, they are looking at the camera. Jan's hand lies flat, except for his raised index finger, beside a pile of change, Matzerath is digging his nails into the tablecloth, Mama indulges in a little joke, which strikes me as rather good: she has drawn a card and shows it to the camera lens but not to her fellow card players. How easy it is, with a single gesture, by simply showing the queen of hearts in skat, to conjure up an unobtrusive symbol, for who would not swear by the Queen of Hearts!
The game of skat—which, as you probably know, can only be played by three people—was not just the most suitable game for Mama and her two men; it was their refuge, the harbor to which they always returned when life tried to lead them astray into such silly games as Sixty-six or Morris, where they were merely paired with one or the other.
That's enough for now about these three, who brought me into the world although they lacked for nothing. Before I come to myself, a word about Mama's friend Gretchen Schemer and her master-baker husband, Alexander Schemer. He baldheaded, she laughing with equine teeth, a good half of which were gold. He stubby-legged, never reaching the carpet when he sat on chairs, she in clothes she knitted herself in patterns that could never be busy enough. Later on, photos of both Schemers in deck chairs or by lifeboats on the Strength through Joy ship Wilhelm Gustloff, or on the promenade deck of the Tannenberg of the East Prussian Line. Year after year they took trips and brought souvenirs from Pillau, Norway, the Azores, or Italy safely back to their house on Kleinhammerweg, where he baked rolls and she embroidered pillowcases with tiny loops called mouse teeth. When Alexander Schemer wasn't talking, he was forever licking his upper lip with the tip of his tongue, a habit Matzerath's friend Greff, the greengrocer who lived across the way from us, found obscene and disgusting.
Though Greff was married, he was more scoutmaster than husband. A photo shows him stout, dry-skinned, and healthy, in a uniform with shorts, his scoutmaster cords, and his scout hat. Beside him, similarly outfitted, stands a boy of perhaps thirteen with overly large eyes, whom Greff, his left hand around the boy's shoulder, pulls toward him with obvious affection. I didn't know the boy, but I later met Greff through his wife Lina and came to understand him.
I'm losing myself in snapshots of Strength through Joy tourists and testaments to tender Boy Scout eroticism. Let's flip forward a few pages and come to me, my very first photographic image.
I was a handsome child. The picture was taken on Whitsuntide, nineteen twenty-five. I was eight months old, two months younger than Stephan Bronski, who appears on the very next page in the same format, radiating an indescribable ordinariness. The postcard has a scal loped edge, its verso lined for the address, no doubt printed in bulk for use by the family. The photographic portion of the extended rectangle is in the shape of an overly symmetrical egg. Nude and symbolizing the egg's yolk, I lie on my tummy on a white fur pelt that some arctic polar bear must have donated to an East European professional specializing in children's photographs. As with many photos of that period, they have chosen for my first image the warm, unmistakable sepia tone that I would term human, as opposed to the inhuman glossy black-and-white photos of our day. Dull, blurred foliage, no doubt painted, provides the dark background, relieved by a few flecks of light. While my smooth, healthy body rests tranquilly angled on the fur pelt, basking in the polar bear's native habitat, I hold my rounded baby's head strained upward, and regard with shiny eyes the various spectators of my nakedness.
A baby picture like any other, you might say. Please observe the hands: you must admit that my earliest likeness differs distinctly from the usual crop of droll little creatures in countless photo albums. You see me with clenched fists. No little sausage fingers playing absent-mindedly with tufts of polar-bear rug in response to some still obscure haptic urge. The little clutched hands hover gravely gathered at my temples, ready to strike, to sound the beat. What beat? The drum beat.
I still don't have what was promised me at birth beneath light bulbs for my third birthday; but it would be a simple matter for anyone skilled in photomontage to add a suitably reduced image of a toy drum without having to retouch the position of my body in the slightest. Only the silly stuffed animal I'm ignoring would have to be removed. It's an alien element in this otherwise harmonious composition, which strikes the theme of the astute, clearsighted age when the first milk teeth are about to come through.
Later I was no longer placed on polar-bear rugs. At eighteen months I must have been pushed along in a high-wheeled baby buggy past a fence whose pointed laths and crossbars are so clearly outlined by a layer of snow that I can only assume the picture was taken in January of nineteen twenty-six. The crude construction of the fence, its wood smelling of tar, connects it for me, on further observation, with the suburb of Hochstrieß, whose extensive barracks once sheltered Mackensen's Hussars and in my time the Free State Police. Since I can't recall anyone who lived in that suburb, however, the picture must have been taken on the occasion of a single visit my parents paid to people they never saw again, or saw only rarely.
Mama and Matzerath, flanking the baby buggy, are not wearing winter coats, in spite of the cold. On the contrary, Mama is dressed in a long-sleeved Russian blouse whose embroidered decorations suggest another wintry scene: in deepest Russia a picture is being taken of the Tsar's family, Rasputin holds the camera, I am the Tsarevich, and behind the fence crouch Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, rigging homemade bombs, plotting the destruction of my aristo-autocratic family. Matzerath's correct, Middle European, petit-bourgeois exterior, bearing, as we shall see, the seeds of the future, interrupts the telling point of the photo's moral tale. They were in the quiet suburb of Hochstrieß, had emerged for a moment, without donning their winter coats, from their hosts' flat so the master of the house could take their picture on either side of little Oskar, who obliged them with a droll expression, and were soon deliciously warming themselves with coffee, cake, and whipped cream.
There are another good dozen snapshots of Oskar lying, sitting, crawling, walking, aged one, two, two and a half. Some pictures are better than others, but taken as a whole they are a mere preliminary to the full-length portrait they had taken of me on my third
birthday.
There, I have it now, my drum. There it hangs, brand-new, zigzagged white and red, on my tummy. There I am, self-assured, my face solemn and resolute, my drumsticks crossed upon the tin. There I am in my striped sweater. There I stand in gleaming patent-leather shoes. There my hair stands, like a brush ready for action atop my head, there, mirrored in each blue eye, a will to power that needs no followers. There I am back then, in a stance I found no reason to abandon. There and then I decided, there I declared, there I decreed, that I would never be a politician and most certainly not a grocer, that I would make a point instead of remaining as I was—and so I did, remained that size, kept that attire, for years to come.
Little people and big people, Little Dipper and Big Dipper, little and big ABCs, Little Hans and Karl the Great, David and Goliath, Hop-o'-My-Thumb and the Giant; I remained the three-year-old, the gnome, Tom Thumb, stayed the half-pint that's never topped up, all to bypass distinctions like big and little catechisms, to flee the clutches of a man who, while shaving at the mirror, called himself my father, to avoid, as a so-called grownup of five foot eight, being bound to a business, a grocery store that Matzerath hoped would become the grown-up world for Oskar at twenty-one. So as not to have to rattle a cash register, I stuck to my drum and didn't grow a finger's breadth from my third birthday on, remained the three-year-old, who, three times as smart, was towered over by grownups, yet stood head and shoulders above them all, who felt no need to measure his shadow against theirs, who was inwardly and outwardly fully mature while others driveled on about development well into their dotage, who merely confirmed for himself what others learned with difficulty and often painfully, who felt no need to increase his shoe and trouser size from year to year just to prove he was growing.