The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  It was supposed to have been done near Tolkmit. With a wooden oar, which later became a relic. Don’t make me laugh.

  What next, friend Flounder? It’s all down in black and white: the rutting roar of false and authentic elk bulls, what the character with the boar’s-tusk helmet did to me behind the gorse bush, how I sang to Christian knights. So am I exculpated? Is my guilt any lighter? And the rest of my shame? Intricately tied packages that want to be unknotted. Because after we were forcibly baptized as Christians, our sin only increased. And to Ilsebill I said, “With that Dorothea, who suffered from migraine in the High Gothic period as you do at present, I often knelt penitently on peas.”

  There she comes with blood on her dress. Which I don’t want to remember. But I must.

  * * *

  1 Pomeranian dialect for “potato, rutabaga, mangel-wurzel.”—TRANS.

  2 Bürgerliche Küche (literally “bourgeois cookery”): “simple home cooking.”—TRANS.

  The Second Month

  How we became city dwellers

  AT THE TIME when Mestwina, drunk but with unerring aim, struck down Bishop Adalbert, the region of the Vistula estuary was inhabited, apart from us old established Pomorshians on the left bank and the Prussians who had settled on the right bank of the river, only by vestiges of peoples that had passed through: Gepidic Goths, who had been pretty well stirred together with us Pomorshians, and Saxons who had fled from the missionary zeal of the Franks. Slavic Poles trickled in from the south. And the Norse Varangians raided us whenever they felt like it. They built forts to ward off Prussian incursions but were unable to keep the Prussians from settling to the west of the river valley. The name of the Prussian chieftain was Jagel, a precursor form of the Lithuanian Jagello. And that is why, later on, when the city was founded, the hill came to be known as the Hagelsberg.

  As early as Mestwina’s day the Varangians had disguised themselves as Pomorshian fishermen and murdered Jagel in his robber baron’s castle. But not until the Polish duke Boleslaw Chrobry threw the Prussians back to the right bank of the Vistula was Varangian replaced by Polish rule. For we became subjects soon after Mestwina slew Adalbert, whom the Polish duke had enlisted as a propagandist, and subjects we remained.

  Boleslaw had the wonder-working corpse taken to Gniezno, where it is held in honor to this day. Our territory was elevated to the status of province and named Pomerania—Pomarzanie in Old Polish—after us, because we lived by the sea. With friendly condescension, the pious Boleslaw called us Pomorshians “Kashubs.” We were allowed to appoint our own governors, who, though they all harked back to Mestwina’s womb, soon learned masculine forms of authority by observing others. Their daughters and daughters’ daughters continued to hand down mother right, but only in secret.

  The first of our princes to become known by name was Sambor, who founded the Oliva Monastery and endowed it with privileges—exemptions from custom duties, the right to collect tithes. His son, Subislaw, was sickly and died young, whereupon his uncle, Mestwin I, became prince of Kashubian Pomerania. He barely had time to make his daughter, Damroka, an abbess, and with her at its head found the Convent of Zuckau, where just six hundred years later Amanda Woyke directed the farm hands’ kitchen of the Royal Prussian State Farm, before the Danes invaded Pomerania and took possession of it for ten years, at the end of which Mestwin’s son, Swantopolk, sent them home and appointed himself duke of Pomerania, which displeased the Polish duke Lesko. In truly masculine style the two dukes fought a battle to the death near Gniezno, which was won by Swantopolk and cost Lesko his life. But in the course of his unsuccessful warfare against the still-heathen Prussians, who would not yet recognize the Vistula as a borderline, the now independent Kashubian duke made the same mistake as the Poles: he, too, called the Teutonic Knights, who found themselves unemployed at the end of the Crusades, from Palestine to Kashubia. They came and made a clean sweep of everything Prussian. In the end they defeated Swantopolk several times and took his firstborn son, Mestwin II, prisoner. Set free, Mestwin allied himself with the dukes of Brandenburg against his brother and cosovereign. Thereupon the Brandenburgers dug in, and Polish help was needed to drive them from the city of Danzig, or Civitas Danczik, founded in 1236 near the Pomeranian fortress and endowed with Lübeck law.

  My Giotheschants, Gidanie, Gdancyk, Danczik, Dantzig, Danzig, Gdańsk: you were a bone of contention from the very first. We Pomorshian fishermen and basket plaiters stayed in the old Wicker Bastion under the protection of the fort and went on eating grits as we had always done, whereas the new settlers, mostly from Lower Saxony, bearing such names as Jordan Hovele, Johann Slichting, lived as merchants and artisans behind the city walls and ate pork sausages with white beans.

  The last Pomeranian dukes—Mestwin was childless—and the Polish duke Przemyslaw battled the margrave of Brandenburg and the Teutonic Knights, for so history ordained. In addition, the Polish governor Bogussa battled the Kashubian Swenzas until, on November 14, 1308, the grasping Teutonic Knights seized the city and occupied the fortress, from which vantage point they were able to control the city. Though the Polish Wladislaw bewailed the loss of his Pomeranian possessions and appealed to the faraway emperor and pope, he was obliged by the terms of the Peace of Kalisch (1343) to cede Pomerania.

  My Dorothea to be was then three years old, and I, her Albrecht to be, though already of marriageable age, still clung to the apron strings of my Pomorshian mother, Damroka, who had married a city man. My father, the swordmaker Kunrad Slichting, raised me to be a swordmaker, too—a trade with a future. The city was growing quickly and wanted to be defended with handy two-handers.

  The smooth synchronization of a German command to hold on at all costs, of the Soviet army under Marshal Rokossovski, and of English pattern-bombing was needed before the hardy product of bughers’ toil, handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, amassed here behind grandiose façades, there in humbler dwellings and workshops, could fall a victim to a generalized conflagration that smoldered for a whole week, and before all Danzig, its angular Old, Charter, Lower, New, and Outer Cities, down to the brick walls of its big and little churches, could be leveled as though for all time. In the pictures preserved in the archives, the destruction looks total. In aerial photographs, the phases of the city’s expansion in the early Middle Ages are discernible. Only at Leege Gate, near the Church of Saint John, between the fish market and Roaring Brook Street, around Saint Catherine’s, and in a few other places, a fragment or two of something or other had been left standing by chance. But in the very next pictures to be taken, those shown in the memorial exhibition at the Charter City Rathaus, bricks are being cleaned, rubble shoveled off the perrons of Frauengasse, vestiges of façades on Brotbänkengasse are being propped up, and the stump of the Rathaus tower is being encased in scaffolding.

  And thirty years after the fire a young man, speaking into a clip-on mike for the Third Television Program of North German Radio and Television, related how the Inner City had been eighty-percent destroyed. Pan Chomicz, the municipal conservator, is responsible for rebuilding the historical Danzig, which has now become the Polish Gdańsk.

  That morning I had flown in from Berlin-Schönefeld airport on an Interflight propeller plane and landed in the new airfield, where only three years before my great aunt’s Kashubian potato fields had still been moderately productive. What I had in my luggage: gaps in my manuscript, still-undocumented assertions about my earlier life in the days of the High Gothic Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau, and advertisements requesting information about the curly-headed kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella and mentioning Baroque allegories in which she figures. Objections on the part of the Flounder. My Ilsebill’s wishes. And I also had with me a catalogue of questions, for I was planning to sneak away from the TV cameras and meet Maria, who is still canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard. “Tell me, Maria. How was it in December 1970? Was your Jan there when thirty thousand workers sang the Internationale as a protest against the
party? And where exactly was your Jan when the police fired on the workers? And where was he hit?”

  When they started shooting the picture, it all became two-dimensionally present. Historical quotations—1813, the fire on Warehouse Island—became slips of paper to be thrown away. We had set up our three lamps, the sound equipment, and the camera in the restored treasure room of the Charter City Rathaus. For all his assurance about the facts, the municipal conservator stood somewhat embarrassed amid the paneled walls and the Dutch sink-of-inquity paintings. Behind him hung town painter Anton Möller’s Tribute Money, its top forming a half circle; Jesus and his New Testament bunch are standing in manneristic agitation where in actual fact the wide Renaissance Green Gate (Gothic: Koggen Gate) should be separating the Long Market from the bank of the Mottlau. In the direction of the Rathaus, the Long Market narrows into the slightly crooked Long Street, leading to the High Gate. Möller painted this allegory against an urban backdrop immediately after his Last Judgment; this was in 1602, which like the year preceding was a plague year. (But no winding sheets are hanging from the windows. No overloaded carts enliven the background. No doctor is making his rounds with mask and rattle. Nowhere is straw being burned. Warning yellow is nowhere predominant.)

  The conservator, obviously used to such tasks, looked straight into the camera. Neither one nor the other hand took refuge in a pocket. With economy of gestures he called Möller’s painting a document, important for the reconstruction of the center of the devastated city and comparable to Canaletto’s paintings, which had been helpful to the re-builders of the old city of Warsaw. “Astonishing” was his word for the proof provided by this painting that as late as the early seventeenth century nearly all the patrician houses on the Long Market were still graced by Gothic masonry and gables, exceptions being the Artushof and the broad Renaissance-style burgher’s dwelling across from the Rathaus.

  The conservator was explaining with a smile why, in rebuilding, not the Early Gothic, less cost-intensive form but (shunning no expense) the elaborate Baroque facade had been chosen—when in mid-sentence our three lamps went out. A fuse had blown in the Charter City Rathaus (reconstructed in accordance with Möller’s picture). The house electrician was called but did not come. Instead, unannounced and walking ahead of his party, Prince Philip of England entered the historic hall. Some regatta or horse race seems to have been the occasion for his semiofficial stay at the Grand Hotel in Zoppot. Visibly exhausted by his tourist program, Prince Philip winced at the sight of the camera. Although the prince could scarcely have been mistaken for anyone else, our sound technician, whose name was Klaus—“Hey, Klaus! Go get it, Klaus!”—wanted to put him to work as the long-awaited electrician. Before this mistake could be converted into an anecdote and make history, the prince and his escort were gone.

  Later on at the Monopol café, I noted: what if Copernicus or the hoary-headed Schopenhauer had turned up and been mistaken for someone else? Ah, those great historic moments! If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Come to think of it, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler had been in the same place. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English nobleman Henry Derby, long before becoming a character in Shakespeare, arrived here with his retinue to join in hunting down the heathen Lithuanians, a popular Christian winter sport at the time. From Dorothea’s husband, the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting, he bought a gold-plated crossbow, and never paid for it. A story fraught with consequences. Unpaid bills wherever you go.

  While waiting for the right electrician—and because television filming involves so many timeless interruptions—I toddled off down the stairs of history (all the while talking coexistence with our Polish Interpress attaché) until, in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, I saw town painter Möller’s kitchenmaid, then pregnant, coming toward me across the Long Market.

  Agnes Kurbiella has bought a soup chicken unplucked. It persists in being winter, although we were shooting the TV documentary in fine late-August weather, at the height of the tourist season. In January 1636 Agnes is in an advanced state of pregnancy; King Wladimir VI has taken up residence in the Green Gate, thus lending a date to the town’s history. There he is chatting with the Silesian diplomat and poet Martin Opitz von Boberfeld. The king is planning to engage Opitz as secretary and court historian. The admiral of the Polish navy, a Scotsman by the name of Seton, is also present, as are several local patricians with well-fed faces over stiff ruffs. Now that the armistice with Sweden has been extended, the king wants Opitz to negotiate a new schedule of harbor fees. Just a little while ago the poet had submitted some fresh-baked iambics praising the sovereign as a prince of peace, and it is plain that they have won the king’s favor. The patricians assure the poet—recently driven out of Silesia—that here he will be able to live in peace. During a pause in the official deliberations, Admiral Seton, a Catholic well versed in letters, tells the Protestant Opitz, half in amusement, half in real concern, how his sons’ tutor, a young man of the Lutheran persuasion and like Opitz a fugitive from Silesia, is sick in bed because the festivities of the hard-drinking burghers—who couldn’t very well help drinking to the successfully concluded treaty with Oxenstierna’s commissioners, could they?—have been too much for the young man, who is hardly more than a boy; so “at the moment he’s writing bilious sonnets, proclaiming that all is vanity. His verses might interest you, all the more so since young Gryphius doesn’t write in Latin but in plain German.”

  But, worn down by the long war, Opitz is too distraught to ask for copies of the sonnets. Through the tall windows of the Green Gate, he looks out (in the perspective of town painter Möller when he painted his Tribute Money picture) on the wintry Long Market, across which the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella in an advanced state of pregnancy is still plodding through the wet snow with an unplucked soup chicken. Now she is passing the Rathaus, where three centuries later we are waiting for the house electrician. Now she is turning onto Beutlergasse. She is planning poached chicken breast in chervil sauce with oaten porridge. Soon Agnes will be cooking light, easily digested dishes for Opitz. That summer, shortly before the departure of the recovered Andreas Gryphius, the diplomat takes up lodgings in the house of the preacher Canassius. By then he has entered the service of Sweden as well as Poland: a double agent.

  When the electrician finally arrived and our three lamps, plugged into an auxiliary line, were again shedding light on the municipal conservator and on Anton Möller’s Tribute Money scene on the Long Market, I had just left the seventeenth century with its varied religions and was back in the early fourteenth century—May 17, 1308, to be precise—watching the execution of the sixteen Pomeranian knights, all members of the widely ramified Swenzas family. One reason for my interest was that it is still uncertain whether the Teutonic Knights, as their first contribution to the history of the city of Danzig, beheaded only the sixteen Swenzases, or whether they butchered over ten thousand urban Pomorshians, all of whom lived between Saint Catherine’s and the old Pomeranian castle, which soon became the castle of the Teutonic Knights. The Pomorshian part of the Old City was still known as the Wicker Bastion. For when the sixteen nobles or ten thousand Pomorshians were executed, there was still no Charter City, although the Teutonic Knights had already decided to found a new city governed by Culm law to the south of the Pomorshian settlement.

  In any event, more than sixteen Pomorshian-Kashubian counts and less than ten thousand Kashubian-Pomorshian inhabitants of the Wicker Bastion were executed or otherwise slaughtered. History, to be sure, tells us with chronological precision that on February 6, 1296, the Polish king Przemyslaw was murdered in Rogasen, but the figures for the mass slaughter remain crude guesswork; just as in recent times I was unable to find out by random questioning of resident Poles (which I kept up as long as we were shooting the television film) how many workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk and how many shipyard workers and longshoremen in nearby Gdynia were shot in mid-December, when the police and army of the Peop
le’s Republic of Poland were ordered to fire on the striking workers. For fire they did, and not without effect. Maria lost her Jan, who, when hit, was quoting the Communist Manifesto through a megaphone. What ideological contradictions provide whom with dialectical (in the Marxengelsian sense) entertainment when in a Communist country the state power gives orders to fire on workers, thirty thousand of them, who have just been singing the Internationale outside the party building in proletarian protest?

  In Gdańsk five or seven seem to have been killed outside the shipyard entrance on Jakobswall, where the shipyard already had its entrance in the old days; in Gdynia the exact number—between thirty and forty killed—has been kept secret. Details were not discussed. The whole thing was subsumed and deplored under the head of “December Events.” And the Teutonic Knights were also quick to proceed to the order of the day. The facts and Realpolitik argued in their favor: Pomorshian Danzig was allied with the Swenzases and Brandenburgers against Lokietek, king of Poland. On the advice of the Dominicans, who were loyal to the king, his burgrave Bogussa had called on Plotzke, the provincial master of the Teutonic Knights, for help. The Knights had sent a battalion, which fought its way into the besieged fortress, forced the Brandenburgers to withdraw, drove Bogussa and his Poles out of the fortress, and seized the Pomorshian Swenzases. After the Swenzases were beheaded, and after a massacre whose victims cannot be numbered, the Knights made the inhabitants remove the city’s walls, bulwarks, and other fortifications, and finally demolish their many defenseless mud huts and few frame houses. What was left of the population dispersed and a few years later was again decimated, by the famine that raged throughout Europe. And when, beginning in 1320, the first streets of the new Charter City were laid out at right angles to the Mottlau—Brewer Street (later renamed Dog Street), Long Street, Brotbänkengasse, Holy Ghost Street—only sparse remnants of the Old City population, but large numbers of Lower Saxons, driven eastward by hunger, came to settle there. And at the same time the Wicker Bastion section, outside the new Charter City, rose up anew on the ruins of the old Pomorshian settlement.