by Günter Grass
The only thing that made me homesick was the Eiffel Tower. Not that I climbed it and let the vista awaken in me an urge to head for home. Oskar had climbed the tower so often on postcards and in his mind that an actual physical ascent could only have resulted in a disappointed descent. At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, but without Roswitha, standing or even squatting alone beneath the boldly curved base of the iron structure, that vault, through which I could indeed see, but which still covered me, became the sheltering hood of my grandmother Anna: when I sat beneath the Eiffel Tower, I sat beneath her four skirts, the Champ de Mars was transformed into a Kashubian potato field, a Paris October rain slanted down tirelessly between Bissau and Ramkau; on such days it seemed the whole of Paris, including the metro, smelled of slightly rancid butter, and I turned silent, meditative, while Roswitha treated me with kindness, aware of my sorrow, for she was a sensitive soul.
In April of forty-four—amid reports that our lines were being successfully shortened on all fronts—we had to pack up our theatrical gear, leave Paris, and regale the Atlantic Wall with Bebra's Theater at the Front. We began the tour in Le Havre. Bebra seemed taciturn, distracted. Although he never gave a bad performance, and kept the laughers on his side as always, his age-old Narses face would turn to stone the moment the final curtain fell. At first I saw him as a jealous man, and worse yet, one ready to capitulate to the vigor of my youth. Roswitha cleared things up for me in whispers, knew nothing for sure, just rumors about officers visiting Bebra behind closed doors after his performances. It looked as if the master was emerging from his inner emigration, as if he was planning some direct action, as if the blood of his ancestor Prince Eugen was stirring within him. His plans had taken him so far from us, had led him into a realm of such broad and far-reaching import, that Oskar's narrow and purely personal relationship with his former Roswitha might at most have lured a weary smile to his wrinkled face. When—in Trouville it was, we were lodged at the spa hotel—he surprised us intertwined on the carpet of the dressing room we all shared, he waved off our attempt to pull apart and spoke into his makeup mirror: "Enjoy each other, my children, kiss while you can, for it's concrete tomorrow, then concrete grit between your lips, and an end to joy in kissing."
That was in June of forty-four. In the meantime we'd slogged all along the Atlantic Wall, from the Bay of Biscay to Holland, but remained for the most part in the hinterlands, saw little of the legendary pillboxes, and it wasn't till Trouville that we performed right on the coast. We were offered a chance to inspect the Atlantic Wall. Bebra accepted. A final performance in Trouville. We moved that night to the little village of Bavent, just short of Caen, four kilometers from the sand dunes. We were billeted with farmers. Broad meadows, hedgerows, apple trees. Calvados, the apple brandy, was distilled there. We drank some and slept well. A brisk breeze came through the window, a frog pond croaked till morning. Some frogs can really drum. I heard them in my sleep and told myself: You have to go home, Oskar, your son Kurt will soon be three, you have to give him his drum, you promised! When, thus admonished, Oskar the tormented father would awake from hour to hour, he felt beside him to make sure his Roswitha was still there, breathed in her smell: Raguna smelled faintly of cinnamon, crushed cloves, and nutmeg; she smelled like the cake spices that heralded Christmas, retained her fragrance even in summer.
In the morning an armored personnel car pulled up in front of the farmyard. We all stood shivering slightly at the gate. It was early, cool, we chatted into the breeze coming off the sea, climbed in: Bebra, Raguna, Felix and Kitty, Oskar, and a Lieutenant Herzog, who was taking us to his battery west of Cabourg.
When I say Normandy is green, I pass over in silence the brown-and-white-spotted cows engaged in their ruminant profession on both sides of the country road that ran straight as a string through the slightly misty meadows wet with dew, cattle that greeted our armored car with such indifference that the armor plates would have turned bright red with shame had they not previously received a coat of camouflage. Poplars, hedgerows, creeping underbrush, the first of the hulking, empty beach hotels, their shutters banging; we turned onto the promenade, climbed out, and followed behind the lieutenant, who showed Captain Bebra a slightly overbearing but still properly military respect, plodding through the dunes into a wind filled with sand and the sound of the surf.
It was no gentle Baltic, bottle-green and sobbing like a maiden, that awaited me. The Atlantic was testing his age-old maneuver: storming forward at high tide, retreating at low.
Then there it was, our concrete pillbox. We could admire it and pet it: it held still. "Achtung!" someone cried out inside, and flew forth at full stretch from the pillbox, which was shaped like a flattened turtle, lay between two sand dunes, was called "Dora Seven," and gazed out on high and low tides with its gun embrasures, observation slits, and small-caliber hardware. It was a man named Corporal Lankes, reporting to Lieutenant Herzog and to our Captain Bebra.
LANKES, saluting: Dora Seven, sir, one corporal, four men. Nothing special to report!
HERZOG: Very good! At ease, Corporal Lankes. You hear that, Captain, nothing special to report. It's been like that for years.
BEBRA: But even so, high and low tides. The performances of Nature.
HERZOG: That's just what keeps our men busy. That's why we keep building one pillbox after another. We're already sitting in each other's line of fire. Soon we'll have to blow up a few pillboxes just to clear room for new concrete.
BEBRAknocks on the concrete; his troupe does likewise: And you have faith in concrete, Lieutenant?
HERZOG: That's hardly the right word. We haven't much faith in anything anymore. Right, Lankes?
LANKES: Yes, sir, not anymore!
BEBRA: But they keep on mixing and pouring.
LANKES: Just between you and me: We're getting valuable experience here. I never knew how to build anything, spent some time as a student, then the war broke out. I'm hoping to use my knowledge working with cement when it's over. Everything's going to have to be rebuilt back home. Just take a look at that concrete, take a close look. Bebra and his troupe with their noses right on it. You see that? Seashells. We've got everything right at our doorstep. Just have to gather and mix it. Stones, seashells, sand, cement ... What more can I say, Captain, you're an artist and an actor, you know how it is. Lankes! Tell the captain what we put in the concrete.
LANKES: Yes, sir! Tell the captain what we put in the concrete. We put puppies in. There's a puppy buried in the foundation of every pillbox.
BEBRA'S TROUPE: A puppy?
LANKES: Soon there won't be another puppy between Caen and Le Havre.
BEBRA'S TROUPE: No more puppies.
LANKES: That's how hard we've been working.
BEBRA'S TROUPE: That's how hard.
LANKES: We'll have to start using kittens soon.
BEBRA'S TROUPE: Meow!
LANKES: But cats aren't as good as puppies. So we're hoping there's some action here soon.
BEBRA'S TROUPE: The gala performance! They applaud.
LANKES: We've rehearsed long enough. And if we run out of puppies ...
BEBRA'S TROUPE: Oh!
LANKES:...we can't build any more pillboxes. Cats are bad luck.
BEBRA'S TROUPE: Meow, meow!
LANKES: But if you'd like to know in a nutshell, sir, why we use puppies ...
BEBRA'S TROUPE: Puppies!
Lankes: Personally I think it's all bunk ...
Bebra's Troupe: Phooey!
LANKES: But most of my comrades are country boys. And even today, when they build a house or a barn or a village church, they feel they have to wall in something living, and...
HERZOG: That will do, Lankes. At ease. As you've heard, Captain, we indulge in what you might call superstition here on the Atlantic Wall. Just like you people in the theater, where you don't dare whistle before an opening night, and actors spit over their shoulders before the curtain goes up...
BEBRA'S TROUPE: Toi, toi, toi! They s
pit over each other's shoulders.
HERZOG: But all joking aside. You have to let the men have their fun. And even the little seashell mosaics and concrete decorations they've started adding to pillbox entrances are tolerated by orders from the very top. People need to keep busy. And so I always say to our CO, who doesn't like the concrete curlicues: Better curlicues in concrete than in their brains, Major. We Germans like to tinker. What can you do.
BEBRA: Well, we're trying to do our bit too, entertaining the waiting army at the Atlantic Wall ...
BEBRA'S TROUPE: Bebra's Theater at the Front sings for you, plays for you, rallies you to final victory!
HERZOG: You're certainly right about that, you and your troupe. But the theater alone is not enough. We're on our own for the most part, so we do what we can. Right, Lankes?
LANKES: Yes, sir! We do what we can!
HERZOG: You see. And now if you'll excuse me, sir. I have to go over to Dora Four and Dora Five. Take your time looking over the pillbox, it's worth it. Lankes will show you everything...
LANKES: Everything, sir! Herzog and Bebra exchange salutes. Herzog exits right. Raguna, Oskar, Felix, and Kitty, who had been standing behind Bebra, spring forward. Oskar holds his tin drum, Raguna carries a picnic basket, Felix and Kitty climb up onto the concrete roof of the pillbox, start practicing their acrobatic exercises. Oskar and Roswitha play in the sand beside the bunker with a little pail and shovel, make it plain they're in love, call out happily, and tease Felix and Kitty.
BEBRA, offhandedly, after he has inspected the pillbox from all sides: Tell me, Lankes, what do you do for a living?
Lankes: I'm a painter, sir. But that was long ago.
Bebra: You paint houses?
LANKES: Houses too, sir, but more in the way of art.
Bebra: Hear, hear! So you emulate the great Rembrandt, or Velázquez perhaps?
LANKES: Sort of in between the two.
BEBRA: But my God, man! Why are you mixing, pouring, and guarding concrete? You should be in the Propaganda Corps. War artists are what we need!
LANKES: Haven't got it in me, sir. My stuff's too oblique for present tastes. Got a cigarette, sir? Bebra hands him a cigarette.
BEBRA: Oblique? You mean modern?
LANKES: Who knows what's modern? Before these people turned up with their concrete, oblique was modern for a while.
BEBRA: It was?
LANKES: Yep.
BEBRA: Do you lay it on thick? With a spatula, maybe?
LANKES: That too. And I work with my thumb, just press it in and stick in nails and studs, and before thirty-three I stuck barbed wire on cinnabar for a while. Got good reviews. A private collector in Switzerland has them now, soap manufacturer.
BEBRA: This war, this terrible war! And now you're pouring concrete. Hiring out your genius for fortification work. Well, I must admit that Leonardo and Michelangelo did the same in their day. Designed mechanical swords and erected bulwarks when they didn't have a Madonna on commission.
LANKES: You see! There's always a niche somewhere. A true artist has to express himself. Take a look at those ornaments over the bunker entrance, sir. I did them.
BEBRA, after thorough study: Amazing! What richness of form, what rigorous power of expression!
LANKES: You could call the style Structural Formations.
BEBRA: And does your creation, this relief, this image, have a title?
LANKES: Like I said: Formations, or Oblique Formations, if you like. A new style. No one's ever done it before.
BEBRA: But that's just it, you're the creator, you should give the work a distinctive title...
LANKES: Titles, what's the point of titles? If it weren't for exhibition catalogues they wouldn't exist.
BEBRA: Now don't put on airs, Lankes. Think of me as an art lover, not an officer. Cigarette? Lankes takes it. Well?
LANKES: Well, if you put it that way. What I thought to myself was this: When this is all over—and it will be over someday, one way or the other—these pillboxes will still be standing, because pillboxes always remain standing, even when everything else collapses. And then Time will come into play. The centuries will pass, I mean—He tucks away the last cigarette. Got another cigarette, sir? Much obliged! And the centuries will come and go as if they're nothing. But the pillboxes will remain, just as the pyramids have always remained. And one fine day a so-called archaeologist will arrive and say to himself, What an artistically impoverished age that was back then, between the first and the seventh world wars: dull gray concrete, a few amateurish, awkward curlicues in folk style over bunker entrances—and then he'll run across Dora Four, Dora Five, Six, Dora Seven, he'll see my structurally oblique formations, and say to himself: Let's have a look at this. Interesting. One might almost say magical; menacing, yet imbued with striking spirituality. A genius, perhaps the only genius of the twentieth century, expressed himself here clearly, and for all time. Does the work bear a title? Did the master reveal himself through a signature? And if you'll look closely, sir, and tilt your head at an oblique angle, then between these rough Oblique Formations ...
BEBRA: My glasses. Help me, Lankes.
LANKES: All right, here's what it says: Herbert Lankes, anno nineteen hundred and forty-four. Title: Mystical, barbaric, bored.
BEBRA: You have given our century its name.
LANKES: You see!
BEBRA: Perhaps five hundred or a thousand years from now, when restoration work is under way, they will find a few puppy bones in the concrete.
LANKES: Which will only reinforce my title.
BEBRA,excited: What is our age, and what are we, dear friend, if not our works ... but look: Felix and Kitty, my acrobats, are doing gymnastics on the pillbox.
KITTYFor some time now a piece of paper has been passing back and forth between Roswitha and Oskar, between Felix and Kitty, all of whom have been writing on it. Kitty, in a slight Saxon accent: See, Herr Bebra, what you can do on concrete. She walks on her hands.
FELIX: And nobody ever did a salto mortale on concrete before. He does a somersault.
KITTY: We need a real stage like this.
FELIX: Though it's a bit windy up here.
KITTY: But it's not as hot and smelly as those stupid movie houses. She ties herself in knots.
FELIX: And we even wrote a poem up here.
KITTY: What do you mean, we? Oskar made it up, and Signora Roswitha.
FELIX: Well, we helped when they needed a rhyme.
KITTY: Just one more word and it's done.
FELIX: Oskar wants to know what those spikes on the beach are called.
KITTY: He has to put them in the poem.
FELIX: They're too important to leave out.
KITTY: So tell us, soldier, what are those spikes called?
FELIX: Maybe he can't, because enemy ears are listening.
KITTY: We won't tell anyone.
FELIX: Otherwise it won't scan right.
KITTY: He's worked so hard, has Oskarnello.
FELIX: And he can write so beautifully, in Sütterlin script.
KITTY: I wonder where he learned it.
FELIX: The only thing he doesn't know is what those spikes are called.
LANKES: Do I have your permission, Captain?
BEBRA: Unless it's some vital military secret.
FELIX: Oskar really wants to know.
KITTY: The poem won't work without it.
ROSWITHA: We're all so curious to know.
BEBRA: I'm making it an order.
LANKES: All right, we put them up to ward off tanks and landing craft. And we call them Rommel asparagus, because that's what they look like.
FELIX: Rommel...
KITTY: ...asparagus? Does it fit, Oskarnello?
OSKAR: It fits! He writes the words on the paper, hands the poem to Kitty on the bunker. She ties herself into a tighter knot and recites the following lines like a school poem.
KITTY:
ON THE ATLANTIC WALL
Still staring from g
uns, with camouflaged teeth,
Rommel asparagus, poured concrete,
we're already off to the Land of Slippers,
with scrambled eggs and Friday's kippers,
and Sunday's roast with leaves of bay:
The bourgeois life is on its way!
Still sleeping in snarls of sharp barbed wire,
We plant our mines in latrine mire
while dreaming above of garden bowers,
of bowling teams and lovely flowers,
of pretty gargoyles, birds in May:
The bourgeois life is on its way!
Though Death has many still to take,
and many a mother's heart must break,
at least Death's always nicely dressed
in parachute silk that's properly pressed,
ruffled with feathers of peacock and jay:
The bourgeois life is on its way!
Everyone applauds, including Lankes.
LANKES: It's low tide now.
ROSWITHA: Then it's time we had breakfast! She swings the large picnic basket, which is decorated with bows and artificial flowers.
KITTY: Yes, let's picnic outside.
FELIX: Nature whets the appetite.
ROSWITHA: O sacred ritual of dining, which binds all nations, as long as men eat breakfast.
BEBRA: Let's have our feast on concrete. It will provide the proper foundation! Everyone except Lankes climbs up on the bunker. Roswitha spreads out a bright, flowered tablecloth. She pulls small cushions with tufts and fringes from the bottomless basket. A parasol, pink and bright green, is opened, a tiny gramophone with speaker is set up. Little plates, little spoons, eggcups, napkins are distributed.
FELIX: I'd like some of that pâté de foie gras.
KITTY: Is there any of that caviar we rescued from Stalingrad?
OSKAR: Don't spread the Danish butter on too thick, Roswitha.
BEBRA: That's right, son, watch out for her figure.