by Günter Grass
Bound for Sihlfeld, the procession made its way down Rämistrasse, across the Kai Bridge, down Thalstrasse and Badener Strasse. The churches remained silent except for the Jakobskirche, where the bell ringer was evidently a comrade. Thousands of people lined the sidewalks. Most of the men wore flat straw hats; the women’s hats were adorned with artificial flowers. Not all the men removed their hats as the hearse passed. A year later straw hats of the same type were photographed when many-headed crowds gathered all over Europe to cheer the declaration of war, although only recently the Socialist International, meeting in Basel, had passed a resolution opposing all war, on which occasion Bebel had made a speech denouncing the armaments race and the general war mongering, and concluded as usual with an appeal for action: “So now let’s get to work. Forward! Let’s go!”
At the cemetery in Sihlfeld, Lena Stubbe saw Comrade Rosa only briefly but caught several glimpses of Comrade Michels, who was acquainted with all the delegations and on terms of special intimacy with the French and Italians. Such was the press of the delegations that Lena could not get into the little Greek temple, which would have been hard to identify as a crematorium. She was barely able to hand over her wreath, and later to hear a word here and there of the speeches. The speakers included Hermann Greulich, a member of the Swiss Nationalrat, the Austrian Viktor Adler, the Belgian Vandervelde, the Reichstag deputy Legien, the Russian Plekhanov. Unfortunately Jean Jaurès was prevented by illness from attending. Names that became famous only later were Otto Braun, Karl Liebknecht, Otto Wels, Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann. Clara Zetkin spoke in the name of the socialist women of all countries. She called Bebel the man who “awakened millions of women.” She said, “No one has ever fought with a more sacred fury than you against all the injustices and prejudices that have plagued our sex… .”
His ashes were interred beside those of his wife, Julia. At the end, as August Bebel had requested in his will, the Grütli male chorus sang Gottfried Keller’s song about Ulrich von Hutten:
“Thou luminous shadow, we thank thee… .”
Since she had made the trip, Lena stayed on for another three days as the Losses’ guest. But she saw the mountains only from a distance, in the foehn wind, from the shore of the Zürichsee. For Frieda Lewandowski, her neighbor on Brabank, she bought a cowbell. It was only on the last day that she grew sad and that everything seemed strange to her.
When Comrade Loss took her to the station, she gave her a round loaf of bread, a piece of Appenzeller cheese, and a small jug of light wine from the Herrliberg. In the express to Berlin she sat with strangers. But after a while she took her diary out of her carryall. She found her spectacles in a black silk bag, in with what money she had left, her passport, a few hair clips, and a tube of bicarbonate. She wrote down the recipes that Comrade Loss was accustomed to cook by, such as onion tart, deep-fried cheese balls, sliced liver with Röschti, and a soup made with browned flour. And so Lena rode back to her Otto Friedrich, whom, when the war started taking its toll, she would soon survive.
Where she left her specs
Under potato peelings, in the flour bin, in among the bacon rinds that Amanda Woyke set aside for rubbing pans.
Any number of still lifes with spectacles: I could put Lena Stubbe’s string-mended frames in front of the crooked nail and on top of the rope with a noose at the end.
While chopping onions and doing what all else, they didn’t take off their specs. When picking over lentils, when my Ilsebill studs a leg of mutton with garlic, when sewing up the apple-stuffed Saint Martin’s Day goose, over Lena Stubbe’s spice box, in which marjoram was never lacking, when Sophie Rotzoll went gathering mushrooms.
Her lost specs would be found again in the flour bin, under potato peelings, and where all else: weeks later at the very bottom of the earthenware jar of goose fat, in the stuffed (also with prunes) beef heart that Margarete Rusch served up to the wicked Jeschke at Oliva Monastery; and the specs that Sophie lost while gathering mushrooms were found exactly a century later right beside the liver of a newly bought codfish when Lena Stubbe cut it open because it was Friday.
How many pairs of specs did they wear, mislay, and sometimes find again? Thirteen. The last were broken on Father’s Day 1962, when Sibylle Miehlau, Billy for short, and her glasses were run over by motorcycles.
Maria checks prices with the naked eye. Agnes, who could neither read nor write, didn’t wear specs. After her immurement the Lenten cook Dorothea could have done with a pair of specs when scribbling her confessions of sins by the light of a tallow candle; her Dominican confessor had taught her High Gothic letters. The Flounder claims that Wigga and Mestwina were also nearsighted. But who—and not only because her image belongs to the Stone Age—can conceive of Awa in specs?
And so Sophie, who had once again mislaid her specs, sorted with clouded eyes the basket of mushrooms that had made its way to the city in spite of the siege, which had consequences, whereas Lena Stubbe, with no spectacles on her nose, cut her Otto down from the nail before it was too late.
They wiped their specs with woolen sleeves or whatever came to hand when their vision was obscured by cooking steam, grease spots, fog, or fly shit.
Mother Rusch, who had inherited her specs from the patrician Ferber, wiped them with the tail feathers of a duckling. Before addressing a fresh petition to the commandant of the Graudenz fortress, the elderly spinster Sophie Rotzoll took a hare’s paw to clean her specs with. Billy borrowed my handkerchief. Amanda Woyke rubbed her misty lenses with a silk kerchief that Count Rumford had sent her from Munich, London, or Paris. And before sitting down at the writing desk in the parlor, Lena Stubbe, who like Amanda and Sophie had ruined her eyesight at an early age reading works of an educational, revolutionary, agitational, or strictly scientific character, wiped her specs with a red scarf that had once been worn by her dashing first husband.
Clever women, the whole lot of them, who inscribed their household accounts on slates and lined paper, in copybooks, or on slips cut out of blue sugar-bags, wrote letters, petitions, recipes, and careful footnotes. Before copying it out in her Sunday handwriting, Lena Stubbe wrote the first draft of her “Proletarian Cook Book” on the backs of old leaflets and strike proclamations.
They used their specs when immersed in the newspaper, in the almanac, in the Klug Hymnal, when searching children’s scalps for lice—and where all else?
In the toilet, for inspecting their own feces, the diarrhea of their respective menfolk, and the children’s little sausages; for reading aloud from the Bible, as Mother Rusch and Amanda Woyke did while lambs’ tongues, tripe, pigs’ feet foamed in their broth; for learning about me and my vicissitudes from the letters of their daughters and daughters’ daughters—I wrote seldom, or only when in my flights I had once again got myself into trouble and debt.
To bone up on Bebel, Lena Stubbe put on her specs as she sat beside the bubbling kettles of the Ohra and Wallgasse soup kitchens or her own family pot. Here’s how I see her: anxiously devoted to progress, which she viewed through nickel frames that kept slipping. But when dishing out soup-kitchen soups with her half-liter ladle, Lena took off her specs, and her light-blue eyes, rather watery in later life, peered into our future.
An obituary for Lena
Some time or other, our Awa died. The story is that we ate her half raw and half cooked, because hunger drove us to it. Wigga died of blood poisoning. She who was always warning us against the Gothic fire eaters wounded herself with a rusty roasting spit, left behind by the Goths on the alluvial soil of the Vistula estuary.
Mestwina was first baptized by force, then beheaded, because she had killed Bishop Adalbert with a cast-iron spoon.
When Dorothea of Montau had herself immured in Marienwerder Cathedral, the space for the last brick was left open. To this gap in the masonry we owe closely scribbled papers, wildly ecstatic outpourings, sweet-Jesus rhymes, and coded messages in which, mingled with obscene prayers, shot through with screams for freedom, an
d connected by words of abject repentance, were inscribed recipes for the dishes that Dorothea wanted to be served to her in her cell, until the day when she ceased to accept food, ceased to evacuate even the scantiest waste, and lay stiff in her vestigial corporeity.
The ex-abbess Margarete Rusch choked on a fishbone on February 26, 1585, when King Stephen Batory of Poland concluded a peace treaty with the city of Danzig and celebrated the happy occasion over a fish dinner (pike) with the patricians.
When the poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, the merchant Nordermann, the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, and her somewhat crackbrained daughter, Ursula, were burned under the open sky in Moscow on October 4, 1689, the men as conspirators, the women as witches, Agnes, still in pursuit of a fish recipe (her pyre had already been kindled), was said to have quoted from the poems of Martin Opitz: “His dearest love am I for all eternity. For fish and pleasure he depends on none but me. Come, dearest, come, let us at table stay. In sumptuous repose and pass the time away.”
And when Amanda Woyke expired peacefully in the arms of her enlightened pen pal, Count Rumford, she is believed to have beheld a vision of giant atomic-powered kitchens the world over and to have proclaimed the end of human hunger.
And Sophie Rotzoll, who lived so dangerously and kept death in the form of mushroom recipes in readiness for her enemies, died quite normally of old age in the fall of 1849. (Later on there was some argument as to whether her last words had been “Long live the Republic!” or “Venison in aspic!”)
And Lena? Lena Stubbe went on living for several years, though she would have preferred to die immediately after her chairman, August Bebel, or at any rate right after his funeral in Zurich.
And then came the war, then there was hunger, and then there were strikes. Then the Revolution was proclaimed. Then everything turned out entirely differently. Then there was more hunger. Then came the League of Nations. Then the Free City was proclaimed. Then the hunger let up a little. Then the money lost its value. Then new money was printed. Then Lena became a great-grandmother. And still she dished out soup. Her always fair measure. Almost a century. Already a monument in her lifetime: the woman with the soup ladle.
For just as Lena Stubbe had dished out soup in soup kitchens during the four war years, and just as during the inflation she had cooked and dished out cabbage and barley soup for the Workers’ Aid in the Red waterfront suburb of Neufahrwasser, in Ohra, and in Troyl, so she continued to ladle soup when, in compliance with the Winter Aid program, the SA, the League of National Socialist Women, the National Socialist Welfare Organization, and the Hitler Youth distributed pea soup with bacon at field kitchens on so-called one-dish Sundays. At these ceremonies, which became more and more popular after 1934, the Free City police band, conducted by Kapellmeister Ernst Stieberitz, played march music and merry tunes so blaringly loud that just as a certain three-year-old boy, pounding furiously on his tin drum, could not make himself heard above the noise, no one could hear the almost ninety-year-old woman who cursed into the air between ladleful and ladleful, yet dished out fairly and without so much as a glance at anyone’s coat collar.
It wasn’t noticed or reported until considerably later that, just to be helpful, Lena Stubbe was cooking kosher soups at the emergency kitchen of the Jewish community on Schichaugasse for poor East European Jews, who since April 1939 had been waiting in vain for visas to America and various other places. And when, after the start of the Russian campaign, Lena made flour and bread soups, the ingredients for which she had begged or saved out of her own rations, for the Ukrainian slave laborers, when as though in defiance the old woman, like the hungry workers from the East, wore a big cloth patch with the letters E A S T painted on it, when at the age of ninety-three Lena Stubbe grew childish and started speaking her mind openly, she was arrested at her home on Brabank and sent without a trial to the nearby Stutthof concentration camp. For reasons of public welfare, as her granddaughter Erna Miehlau was told in answer to her inquiries. (Lena’s great-granddaughter Sibylle was then twelve years old and still playing with dolls).
In Stutthof, Lena Stubbe continued to dish out soup. For exactly a year she ladled blue-green barley soups into tin messkits. All the prisoners, and not just the politicals, trusted her. The ladle was never out of her hands. She couldn’t help being fair. Her half-liter measure. Born in ’49. A century of watery hope. Her way of ladling. How her memory remained serviceable to the end. How she always and only had good things to say of her husbands, killed in two wars. How she told tales about earlier soups. How, in dishing out soup, she quoted from the writings of the man who, as though no time had elapsed, was still her chairman.
Died on December 4, 1942, of old age. According to a different version, a kitchen Kapo, who as a common-law prisoner belonged to the privileged class of inmates, beat Lena Stubbe to death when she tried to stop the Kapos from pilfering the already meager kitchen rations of margarine and beef fat. With a beech log. Two political prisoners, who knew Lena from her Workers’ Aid days, found her battered body behind the latrines. They had to shoo the rats away. Her string-mended specs lay beside her, in pieces.
When the Second Soviet Army occupied Danzig and the tarpaper-roofed workers’ houses on Brabank burned down, Lena’s “Proletarian Cook Book,” which had failed to find a publisher, burned with them.
Apart from Amanda and Sophie, so much violent death: the poisoned blood, the starved body, the burnt flesh, the stifled laugh, the headless trunk, the slain tender loving care. Ugly realities that can’t very well be glossed over. Totted-up losses. The violence account.
My Ilsebill, who’s not out of the fairy tale but comes from Swabia, likes to settle accounts with men. “The one thing you’re good at is starting fights. Your eternal Waterloo. Your heroic defeat.”
And now the Flounder has made out my account: “Let’s have a look at your balance sheet, son. It’s not a pretty sight. I’m afraid you’re in the red.”
Those words were spoken after the Tribunal had wound up the case of Lena Stubbe. Sieglinde Huntscha had (secretly, at night) let me in to see him again. (She stayed in the box office: “Don’t mind me. Just talk talk talk!”) He rose from his sand bed and seemed to be in high spirits from top to tail fins, though he’s sure to be convicted soon and his health has suffered visibly from long confinement: his pebbly epidermis has paled, and his bone structure stands out as though he were trying to prove his credibility by becoming transparent.
When I tried to read him my next chapter, the story of my poor Sibylle, he interrupted me: “There’s been enough dying!” Then he started bandying clichés like “ultimate audit” and “hour of truth.” Once again he reviewed his mission, from the neolithic Awa to the early-socialist Lena. He listed his achievements—patriarchy, the state, culture, civilization, dated history, and technological progress—and went on to deplore the sudden turn from grandiose to monstrous action. “I gave you knowledge and power, but all you wanted was war and misery. Nature was entrusted to you, and what did you do, you despoiled, polluted, disfigured, and destroyed it. With all the abundance I made available to you, you haven’t even succeeded in feeding the world properly. Hunger is on the increase. Your era is ending on a sour note. In short: you men are finished. How can there be order with so much waste motion? In capitalism and Communism alike, everywhere I find madness impersonating reason. That’s not what I wanted. It’s no use advising you men any more. The male cause is bankrupt. Time to knock off, my son. To abdicate. Do it with dignity.”
Then he suggested that I end the book named after him with the case of Lena Stubbe, and after the Women’s Tribunal handed down its verdict, let him say the last word: “You can blame me for Alexander and Caesar, the Hohenstaufens and Teutonic Knights, even for Napoleon and Wilhelm II, but not for Hitler and Stalin. There I disclaim responsibility. Their crimes were none of my doing. The present is not mine. My book is closed; my history is done.”
At that I cried, “No, friend Flounder. No! The book goes on, and so do
es history.”
Ah, Ilsebill! I dreamed the Flounder was talking to you. I heard the two of you laughing. Smooth was the sea. And there you were, working out the future. I was sitting far away; I’d been written off. Present only in retrospect. A man and his story: Once upon a time …
The Eighth Month
Father’s Day
ON ASCENSION DAY, which is a holiday, we celebrate Father’s Day. Innumerable men, gaunt ones, all bone and sinew, fat ones, who have cushioned themselves against everything, men with laughter lines, men with scars, shriveled men, foursquare men, men weighed down by their appendages, a whole nation of men, men and only men, are on their way to the open spaces: in festooned carriages, on bicycles decked with pennants, in club strength, in horse-drawn wagon-loads, in motor vehicles old and new.
From early morning, beer-tipsy hordes are on the move, crowding into subway and elevated trains. Double-decker buses are jam-packed with singing men. Swarms of teenagers on motorcycles: leather-jacketed, swathed in their noise. Here and there a resolute footslogging loner. Veterans of the last wars, frenzied half shifts from Borsig and Siemens, employees of the municipal waterworks, garbage men, truck drivers, post-office clerks, the management of Schering & Co., whole shop committees, fans of the Hertha and Tasmania teams, bowling clubs, credit unions, skat clubs, stamp collectors, embittered pensioners, exhausted heads of families, young shop clerks, pimply apprentices—men, all men, wanting to be among themselves, without Ilsebills, without skirts or curlers, far from the breast and cunt, far from all knitting, the dishwashing, the hair in the soup; they want to go wild and to the country, to Tegel and Wannsee, to the Teufelsberg, Krumme Lanke, Britz, and Lübars, to the shores of the Griebnitzsee, Schlachtensee, Grunewaldsee, with bottles and sandwiches, cowbells and trumpets, in stripes and checks, to the woods, to sit under trees on moss or pine needles, or fat-assed on bandy-legged camp chairs, to let loose the monstrous inner pig, to be great and glorious, disumbilicated from Mama.