Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  The later Henri laughed. Montaigne cited Livy or Plutarch. The elder Mann brother mocked his younger brother’s hard-wearing leitmotifs. I praised the art of quotation.

  My first guest, however, the private I dished up the chanterelles to, told me about the temple ruins on Greek islands, the beauty of Norwegian fjords, the wine cellars in French castles, the highest mountains in the Caucasus, and about his trip to Brussels – where he swore the best pommes frites were to be had. He had marched through half of Europe – that’s how long he’d worn the uniform, how battle-tried and border-resistant he was. After our plates were empty, he regaled his host with the old-time march, ‘A Little Town in Poland’.

  Just as the bulletins of the Wehrmacht High Command had helped to enhance my knowledge of geography, so my guest’s wartime experience had furnished him with the chatty cosmopolitanism served up to us during the sustained period of peace at the home slide shows of manically shutter-clicking tourists. And did he not say then, ‘I want to travel everywhere with my Erna, later, after the gunsmoke has settled’?

  TRUE, THE MUSHROOM dish and thistle spinach made a cook and host of me, but the prerequisites for the pleasure I still take in combining this stew with that, of stuffing this with that, adding this or that ingredient to get the taste I’m after, and imagining living and dead guests as I cook – the prerequisites were already present in the early period of gnawing hunger, when the wounded soldier, healed, was torn from the nurses’ gentle hands and when, having taken the cure in Marienbad, he was sent to the Upper Palatinate hunger colony.

  Among ten and more thousand prisoners of war and after seventeen years of eating my fill – we had seldom had to tighten our belts at home – I learned what it is to be hungry. Hunger, because it had the first and last word, was a source of gnawing pain, but also a source of sparkling inspiration: the more my stomach shrank, the more my imagination grew.

  Not a single one of the ten thousand starved to death, of course, but the want of food gave us an ascetic appearance. Even those not so inclined underwent a spiritual transformation. My new spiritual look must have suited me: my enlarged eyes saw more than was before them, choirs rejoicing beyond the senses. And since hunger brought home the maxim ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ not only as camp cynicism but also as consolatory bromide, many of us felt an increased desire for spiritual food.

  Something happened in the camp. Activities designed to do away with the collective, oppressive tedium arose out of the blue. The listless wandering, the sleepwalking came to an end. The vanquished were pulling themselves together. In fact, total defeat liberated forces that had gone into hibernation during the long war years and were now awakening, as if victory were still possible – though in a different sphere.

  The occupying powers tolerated the activities, which they regarded as proof of what seemed the Germans’ inborn gift for organization.

  We organized ourselves into groups and sub-groups, each with its own field to hoe, fostering general education, art appreciation, philosophy, the renewal of faith, or practical knowledge. Everything ran according to a timetable, everything was thorough and punctual.

  There were courses in Latin and classical Greek and Esperanto. There were study groups for algebra and for higher mathematics. From Aristotle via Spinoza all the way to Heidegger, there was room for high-flown speculation and profound meditation.

  Nor did professional training get short shrift: future shopkeepers were initiated into double-entry bookkeeping, civil engineers into statistics, lawyers into subterfuge, economists of tomorrow made familiar with profit-oriented laws of the marketplace and tips from confident stock market speculators. All this with a view to peace and the potential it had opened up.

  Then there were the Bible circles. And a popular introduction to Buddhism. And because a number of pocket-size musical instruments had survived the losses otherwise sustained during the retreat, a harmonica orchestra gathered daily for outdoor rehearsals and gave performances attended even by American officers and foreign journalists. The band’s repertory of the Soldiers’ Internationale, ‘Lili Marleen’, recent hits, and concert pieces like ‘A Petersburg Sleigh Ride’ and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody was always warmly applauded.

  There were also several singing groups, including an a cappella chorus that regaled a small band of music lovers with motets and madrigals every Sunday.

  All this and more was available on a daily basis: we had time to burn. In the Upper Palatinate camp we were not permitted to work on the outside; we were not even allowed out to clear rubble in nearby Nuremberg. There was nothing for us to do but sit around in our tents, barracks, and spacious stalls – the camp must originally have been the garrison of a cavalry regiment – bravely learning to battle hunger and its gnawings.

  Few opted out of our programme, only those who took pleasure in lamenting their lot and grieving over battles lost. Some even thought they could win the battles – the tank encounter at Kursk or even the Battle of Stalingrad – after the fact with their sandbox tactics. Many more, however, signed up for more than one course – taking, say, stenography in the morning and Middle High German poetry in the afternoon.

  And what made a scholar out of me? Given that I had pretty much turned my back on school since the handsome uniform of the Luftwaffe auxiliary graced my frame, the sensible thing to do would have been to go for mathematics and Latin, my two weak subjects, and to develop my knowledge of art by attending the lecture series ‘Early Gothic Sculpture in the Naumburg Cathedral’. I would also have profited from a therapy group dealing with the widely spread camp phenomenon of ‘Behavioural Disturbances During Puberty’. But hunger drove me to a course in the art of cooking.

  I found the tempting announcement on the noticeboard in front of the camp administration building. It stood out because of the stick figure wearing a chef’s hat. This wildest of all courses was to meet for two two-hour sessions daily in the former veterinary ward. Bring your own writing paper.

  How fortunate that when pilfering the silver Siegfried Line pins to barter with I had not disdained the dice cup and ivory dice or, even more important, a pile of standard typewriter paper, two small notebooks, and a handful of pencils.

  ALTHOUGH MY MEMORY is porous in one or another area and I no longer know, for example, whether my adolescent fuzz needed shaving during my camp stay or even when I first acquired a razor and shaving brush of my own, I need have no recourse to my usual stratagems to evoke the stark, all but empty room of the veterinary ward. The walls were of white tile, rimmed at eye level with a blue glazed border. Although I can say nothing about most of the pedagogical accessories, I can see the blackboard opposite the wide window and imagine it serving the instruction of future army veterans with illustrations of all things equine – the intestinal tract, the hocks, the heart, the hooves, the bite – and questions about the quadruped’s illnesses and habits: How does one treat colic in a horse? When do horses sleep?

  Confident as I am about the room’s appearance, I am not certain whether it was left vacant after our two-hour ‘Cooking for Beginners’ sessions or whether other subjects – classical Greek, say, or civil engineering – were taught there. Perhaps the blackboard was the site of the first profit-margin calculations of the coming Economic Miracle, or early intimations of fusions in the coal and steel industries, or the popular current practice of hostile corporate takeover, though the versatile space may as easily have been used for church services of one or another denomination, the high, pointed windows giving the rectangle of a room with its slight echo and Lysol rather than equine smell a sacred quality.

  In any case, the place has served me repeatedly as a backdrop for scenes that go off in all kinds of directions: I have never lacked for characters. In Local Anaesthetic, for example, the story of what took place there is sketched out rather than told in all its glory by the teacher named Starusch, who transfers the ‘Cooking for Beginners’ course to the camp at Bad Aibling – to Upper Bavaria, in other wo
rds – and leaves out the blackboard.

  What follows is an attempt at using believable facts to refute this fictitious account, in which a faceless Herr Brühsam appears as the master chef. After all, I am the one whom hunger drove to take the abstract cooking course.

  I CAN SEE him clearly, the master chef – one of a kind, though his name escapes me. I see him standing at the blackboard, gangling and emaciated, a middle-aged apostolic figure in military dress who demanded that his pupils call him Chef. But there was nothing militaristic in the curly-headed greybeard’s demand. His eyebrows were so long you wanted to comb them.

  The first thing he did was give us a rundown of his career. He had gone from Bucharest to Sofia to Budapest and had arrived in Vienna a chef much in demand, though he dropped the names of luxury hotels in other cities as well and claimed to have been the personal chef of a Croatian or Hungarian count in Zagreb or Szeged. He even cited Vienna’s Hotel Sacher as proof of his artistic qualifications. I cannot be certain whether he also cooked for illustrious passengers in the dining car of the legendary Orient Express and thereby witnessed the intricate plots and complicated murders that even detectives with the proper literary credentials and devilishly clever sleuthing abilities had trouble untangling.

  What I do know for certain is that our master chef was active only in south-eastern Europe, that is, a region of many peoples where razor-sharp distinctions apply to more than cuisines, yet mixing is also in evidence.

  If his background information was to be trusted, he came from far-off Bessarabia. This made him what was called at the time a trophy German, who, like the Germans from the Baltic countries, had been called heim ins Reich, ‘home to the Reich’ as a consequence of the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. Though what did this young ignoramus know about the consequences, evident to this day, of the Hitler-Stalin Pact?

  Shortly after the war broke out, as everyone – even I – knew, Polish peasants from the hinterlands of my native city, starting in the Kashubian region but reaching as far as the Tuchel Heath, had been turned out of their farms to make room for the Baltic trophy Germans. Their broad accent was easy to imitate, it was so close to our Low German; besides, for a short time I had shared a school bench with a boy from Riga.

  But our master chef’s Deutsch – or Deitsch, as he pronounced it – was like none I had ever heard: he had trouble with the definite article, for example, and used Austrianisms – bisserl for bisschen (‘a little’), Kapuster for Weisskohl (‘cabbage’), and when making a point at the blackboard, waving his arms eloquently in the air, he spoke through his nose like the movie star Hans Moser.

  This master chef – demoted, as he put it, ‘from gunner to goulash-cannon’ and destined to remain a private to the bitter end – may have seemed a sadist out to torture his famished pupils with visions of exquisite dishes like prime rib with horseradish sauce, pike croquettes, shashlik, wild rice with truffles, and glazed breast of pheasant with wine-cured sauerkraut, but to him we were meat-and-potatoes philistines in need of enlightenment. Coarse pleasures of the palate he relegated to the margins of his elucidations, which emphasized the principles of cooking, though they also tended to feature the slaughter of the animal to be consumed.

  We, the famished, took it all down. Page after scribbled page. First you put … then you add … let it simmer for two and a half hours …

  If only I had managed to hold on to even one of the two notebooks of my Marienbad inheritance. But of all the voluble two-hour sessions, attended by more than one venerable paterfamilias alongside us whippersnappers, only two or three survived on record, though survive they did, down to the last drop of rendered fat.

  He was a master of evocation. Single-handedly he would hurl force-fed dreams under the knife. He could squeeze flavour out of nothing, whip the creamiest soups out of air. Two or three of his nasal words would soften any stone. Were I able to invite the critics who have grown old with me to sit down with him at table, I would ask him, as guest of honour, to enlighten them on the miracle of freehand imagination, that is, white-paper sorcery, but incurable know-it-alls that they are they would listlessly lap up my chickpeas stewed with lamb chops and reach immediately for their literary cholesterol counters.

  ‘MY TOPIC FOR today’, he said by way of introduction, ‘is pig,’ and with a sure hand but much screeching of chalk he covered the board with the outline of a full-grown sow. Then he divided the beast into Roman-numeralled parts. ‘Number one is tail, best appreciated when cooked in your usual lentil soup.’

  He proceeded to the legs, from the trotters up to the knee joint – that, too, suited to simmering in soup. Next he went from the knuckle of the front leg to the haunch of the back leg, then from the neck to the loins, ribs, and stomach, peppering his commentary with irrefutable bits of wisdom: ‘Neck is juicier than rib.’ ‘Fillet of pork should be wrapped in dough and baked in oven.’ And other tips I follow to this day.

  He advised us, who had no more than a ladleful of watery cabbage or barley soup to look forward to, to slit each joint of pork across its length and breadth with a sharp knife so that the fat would come out and ‘make nice crispy crust’.

  At that point he let his gaze wander, looking each of us in the eye, sparing no one, me included, and said, ‘I know, gentlemen. My mouth is watering as much as yours,’ whereupon, after a carefully measured pause during which each of us heard himself and the others swallow, he announced out of pity and in recognition of our common need, ‘But enough about fat. Let us now turn to throat-slitting.’

  Even though the notebooks are gone, the onion primes my memory and helps me to recite the master’s hammered-out adages. In retrospect I see how he used pantomime too, demonstrating with his arms the urgency of collecting the blood while it was still warm (‘Hot blood’s good blood!’), the importance of stirring it tirelessly to keep it from clumping (‘You must stir, keep stirring!’).

  We would sit on stools and boxes or the tiled floor stirring the blood to the left and right and crosswise in imaginary troughs as it poured steaming out of the imaginary stab wound and gradually diminished to a trickle. We could almost hear the pig’s screeches dying down, feel the heat of the blood, breathe its smell.

  Going to slaughter feasts in later years was always a disappointment for me: the reality of it lagged far behind the master’s evocations. It was mere butchery, a pale echo of his words.

  We learned to reduce the blood by boiling it with marjoram-seasoned oats and to stuff the newly cleaned intestines with the resulting mushy paste so it could be bound into sausages. His last bit of advice for the sausage filling was ‘Remember, gentlemen, thirty grams of raisins to every five litres of blood’.

  My taste buds were so primed in anticipation that I have gobbled down oatmeal-and-blood sausages with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut ever since, and not only because I was constantly hard up in the fifties and it was a cheap meal: even today in the unavoidable Paris-Bar in Berlin I savour the French boudin. The North German dish of pork preserved in blood thickened with shredded kidneys is one of my favourites. And if I have guests, various and sundry card players from various and sundry times in my life, I enjoy putting this coarse fare on the table.

  Oh, the pleasure of a double-or-nothing hand followed by steaming fried or boiled sausages, of watching the tightly tied casing burst or be slit open and the raisin-and-oat filling, thick and lumpy with blood, ooze out. Yes, that Bessarabian chef in the Upper Palatinate camp conditioned my taste buds for life.

  ‘BUT ONE MORE thing, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘another possibility. We are not through with pig yet.’

  Just as Salome points her long finger at the head of John the Baptist, so he pointed his at the pig’s head he had drawn with chalk and numbered, the way he numbered the neck, haunch, and curl of a tail. ‘Now we make delicious pig’s-head brawn, but please, gentlemen, no gelatin from factory …’ It was a matter of principle that the brawn should generate a jelly of its own from the fat cheek, snout,
and earlobes. He then proceeded to celebrate the process whereby the pig’s head is split in two, placed in a large pot, covered with salted water, and simmered for a good two hours with cloves, bay leaves, and an unsliced onion for flavouring.

  During the late sixties, the days of protest, when anger, rage, and fury were as cheap as headlines and sauerkraut, I wrote a long poem entitled ‘The Jellied Pig’s Head’, in which I had everything stew in the traditional spices but added a ‘knife tip of clotting, thickened, leftover rage’ and healthy portions of the indignation that had run wild because people felt so helpless against government-sanctioned violence, and of the anger that had led to the ranting red banners of the revolutionaries of ’68.

  When it came to the more prosaic deboning of the head, however, the pupil followed the master. Using both hands, our chef mimed how to remove the meat and fat from the bone and the snout from the cartilage once they had cooled and how to scrape the jelly from the jelly-rich ear flaps – his every gesture purposeful. He made fast work of the jawbone, scooped the congealed brains out of the brainpan, emptied the eye sockets, held up first the tongue, after detaching it from the gullet, next the large lump of a cheek, after freeing it from its layer of fat, and then, while skilfully cubing the entire spoils, launched into an enumeration of what constituted the simmering stock that the lean meat from the breast or neck was swimming in: finely chopped leeks, sliced pickled gherkins, mustard seeds, capers, grated lemon rind, and coarsely ground peppercorns.