Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  The place where my father was now working was an industrial plant that pumped massive amounts of steam into the air from a line of chimneys. It was called Fortuna North as was later a chapter in The Tin Drum, in which a corpse is reburied in the cemetery of the mining village Oberaussem, and as the corpse comes to light piece by piece Oskar Matzerath delivers his variant of Hamlet’s question: ‘To marry or not to marry?’

  IT MUST HAVE been a week after my, if not homecoming, then surprise arrival, that my father returned from work laden with briquettes and what he termed ‘glad tidings’. ‘I’ve found a terrific trainee position for you. In the administration. On the top floor, in the executive offices. It’s nice and warm there …’ He said more, and not without pride, unaware of the higher expectations of his son. His sky-blue eyes were not sparkling.

  Perhaps he tried to buck me up with the slogan often quoted in the business sections of the high-circulation newspapers: ‘The future is in brown coal!’ And irrefutable arguments like ‘You should be glad to land a job like that without having finished school’. But at the time my well-meaning father must have been disappointed when the only thanks he received from his son was a laugh. Yes, the prospect was so remote from my dreams that it sounded funny, and I’m afraid I made fun of him.

  ‘Me, a paper pusher? Ridiculous! Within three weeks I’d take off with all the official documents. You don’t want to make a crook out of me, do you?’

  Whereupon the thankless son spelled out precisely what he had his heart set on.

  But what precisely did I want? Can it be that the prospect of an office job my father so lovingly threatened me with was what gave a precise direction to my desires?

  With a stack of rhymed and rhymeless hemistiches – some in the fair copies the pit foreman’s daughter had typed up – plus a good dozen drawings of solid-looking ‘pals’ from my days as a POW plus any number of my graphic representations of either miniature or monumental figures of all sorts, naked and garbed, standing long-legged, fallen to the ground, keeling over in grief, as well as some half-animal, half-human form with a figurative turmoil in their heads – and since for as long as I could remember my inner world had been rich in characters – I wanted to become a sculptor, someone who turns mere clay into forms which, because of their tangible presence, dominate space.

  Something along those lines was what, no longer laughing, I told my father, who immediately broke into thundering tirades against ‘starving artists’ and ‘obsessive notions’. It was a side of him I had seldom seen.

  Nor was he off the mark in his warning or, rather, prediction of my immediate future: ‘Choosing a profession that can land you in the poorhouse in the best of times, let alone when nobody knows what the morrow will bring. Get that out of your head!’

  As for my mother, who, gazing at the unplastered walls around us, never stopped bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t removed her oleograph of Böcklin’s Island of Death from the wall of the Langfuhr flat, taken it out of its frame, rolled it up, and tucked it away in their luggage, who, sober businesswoman though she was, revered all art as divine, who saw her brothers, all of whom had died so young, live on in a son snatched from the jaws of death by Fate, my mother shared her husband’s concerns on the one hand but on the other could not give up the dream that her darling boy would one day create something beautiful, beautiful and melancholic, something combining the sad and the beautiful. It was a hope that always brought a smile to her lips, one that she nurtured deep within her whenever I and my high-flown plans and rose-coloured promises came under discussion.

  Before long a smile came to erase the anxiety that stemmed from the horrors she had experienced, but sitting at the briquette fire knitting stockings out of undyed sheep’s wool for the peasant woman’s children in exchange for rye flour and oat flakes, she did venture to ask about a prospect that at the time could be reasonably belittled as pie in the sky. ‘Tell me, my boy, do you really think you’ll be able to live off your art?’

  In a newspaper – or could it have been in an illustrated magazine – I found an article saying that the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, which was not too far from where we were, had begun offering instruction again. The article dated from the previous summer and included a picture of a professor of sculpture with a fringe by the name of Ewald Mataré surrounded by students.

  Another picture showed a piece by the master, simple in form, a cow reclining in the grass, something my mother could like. ‘But what makes you think they’ll accept you at a bona fide art academy if you haven’t finished school? They’ll just laugh at you! You’ll never get in.’

  That didn’t bother me. Nothing bothered me. Decades later, when my sons and daughters started off on their various straight and roundabout paths – Laura, for example, ignoring her father’s advice and choosing to be and remain a potter rather than, talented though she is, an artist – I would recall how recklessly I wrenched myself free of the constrictions of our emergency digs, a potential breeding ground for the conflict between father and son, without giving it a second thought.

  Thus ended a brief guest appearance that had caused everyone to suffer, particularly ‘Papa’s pet’, my sister Waltraut, whom looking back I see as pretty, cheerful bordering on inane, and apparently free of inner strife. The dimple that appeared the moment she smiled. The shoulder-length permed hair that had replaced the plaits. What would become of her? She looked so young and innocent. There was no sign whatever of what she had seen or possibly suffered in Danzig ‘when the Russians came’. It wasn’t something we talked about.

  After two weeks of family life I was trudging through deep snow in the grey light of dawn, with little luggage, the flakes now whirling, now floating onto my duffel bag. My goal was Stommeln Station, four kilometres away. Only the telegraph poles guided me. Progress was slow on the road to satisfying my third hunger, the hunger for art.

  THE THIRD HUNGER

  FROM AN EARLY age it was impossible to deal with, whether by practising ascetic moderation and limiting myself to black-and-white or by yielding to the addiction and staining every piece of paper in sight. Not even stuffing myself with books to the point of verbal nausea could stave it off. There was never enough. I was always greedy for more.

  The ordinary hunger everyone knows could be alleviated for hours by turnip soup with a few sparse globules of fat or even by frost-damaged potatoes, and the desire for carnal love, that panting, unbidden, unyielding onslaught of ever self-renewing lust, could be deadened by a chance encounter or a few flicks of the wrist. My hunger for art, however, the need to make an image for myself of everything standing still or in motion and thus of every object that throws a shadow and even of the invisible, the Holy Ghost and Its Intimate Enemy, that ever evanescent capital – if only by adorning the papal financial headquarters, the Banco di Santo Spirito, as a temple of the obscene with portal figures – this desire to conquer all with images was insatiable, accompanying my conscious self by day and my dreams by night, even as I fed it with promises when I decided to study art – or what I in my limited view considered art. But for a time, the circumstances of the winter of ’46–’47 stood in the way of my wishes.

  Having made the trek to Stommeln Station through knee-deep snow, freezing and sweating at the same time, having bought a one-way ticket and believing thereby that I had run away from my newly found family, I had to accept the fact that at the end of the endless slow-train journey no one was waiting for me in Düsseldorf with open arms.

  And having asked my way through the city, which had been bombed, though not so badly as Cologne, Hanover, or Hildesheim, to the massive building of the Academy of Art – there were no trams whether because of the snow or a power outage – I found the dark box on the edge of the Old Town open but no one in the porter’s lodge to call out a friendly ‘Welcome!’ or ‘We’ve been expecting you!’

  First I knocked on doors, pressed door handles, wandered past locked studios along corridors upstairs and down.

&
nbsp; I can still hear my steps, see my breath disappear into the multi-storeyed ice cellar the building had become. To keep from losing strength and heart, I probably carried on a dialogue with myself: Don’t give up! Hold out! Think of what your friend Joseph once said: ‘Grace doesn’t just fall into your lap …’ And all at once, when I was about to leave, I met Art in the person of an old man who looked like nothing so much as a silent-film cliché of an artist. I could see his breath too.

  Not until two years later did I learn more about him. The man who came up to me wrapped in a black cape with a black scarf wound round his neck and a broad-brimmed black felt hat on his head appeared to be in his mid-fifties. His name was Enseling, he was a professor of art, and he could count on full retirement benefits. He was probably there to go to his studio, where life-size and terrifyingly white naked plaster-of-Paris figures of both sexes stood freezing. Though he may simply have wanted to exchange the cold of his apartment for the cold of the Academy.

  ‘What is your business here, young man?’ he enquired immediately.

  ‘I want to be a sculptor,’ I blurted out. Or did I say something like ‘I’ve decided to be an artist’?

  Give me a moment to think back, to consult the onion. The issue at this crucial juncture was whether to act or to desist. No, more: to be or not to be. What does the onion say on its sweating skin?

  I may have burdened the figure clad all in black with the knowledge of art gleaned from the cigarette cards of my youth, but no matter how often I conjure up the staircase meeting it must be permanently frozen, it yields no quotations. All I can hear is the professor’s sobering response, ‘We are closed due to lack of coal.’

  At the time it sounded final. But someone, who was definitely me, refused to be disheartened or shaken off. I must have reiterated my desire to become a sculptor with such vehemence in that echoing room, that the professor, whom only young eyes could have seen as an old man, apparently believed in my hunger.

  He asked questions. My age, nineteen, seemed either neutral or acceptable. He swallowed my oh-so-significant birthplace without commentary and wasted no breath on religion. The fact that when in school I had done some model drawing with the well-known equestrian painter Fritz Pfuhle, who gave evening courses at the Danzig Institute of Technology, did not elicit so much as an a-ha. Nor was he interested in hearing about the timely end of my more than sufficient war experiences. And – luckily – he asked no questions about the Abitur, the exam that opened all doors.

  Instead he gave me clear directions – take a left, then a right, and on the right-hand side of the street – to the nearby Hindenburgalle employment bureau.

  He told me I should apprentice myself as a stonemason and stone sculptor. It was a trade that never wanted for work. There was always a call for tombstones.

  He concluded, my beardless prophet of an occupational counsellor, by intoning, ‘Once you’ve finished your training, young man, you can apply for admission. We shall certainly have coal by then.’

  No ifs or buts. I, who since the war’s end had shied away from any orders except the advice of the battle-scarred lance corporal, I, the war child badly burned and therefore inexorably attuned to contradiction, I, who had learned over time to suspect any and all promises, I – or whoever I was at the time – followed his directions, though not blindly. The words of the prophet had provided me with the only way to proceed, and no one could possibly have argued me out of it. He spake. I went.

  Oh, if only I had such clear-cut directions to give my grandchildren today, when, just having finished or just about to finish school they ask me what road to take where: ‘Make sure you do this, Luisa, before you …’ ‘Whether or not you have the Abitur, Ronja, you …’ ‘Lucas and Leon, my advice to you …’ ‘And so, Rosanna, if you started later, you …’

  Anyway, within a half-hour I had succeeded in procuring an official document with the handwritten addresses of three stonecutting operations, all of which, given their clientele, were in the vicinity of the municipal cemeteries. There was nothing bureaucratic about the process. School records were not required.

  MEMORY IS STRANGELY moody: the snow suddenly melts, the frost abates; the outages are over, and the trams run again.

  I decided to stick with the first firm I went to see, near the Wersten Cemetery, because in the workshop of the master Julius Göbel I found an old stonecutter by the name of Singer chiselling away at a splendidly muscular Christ with a head facing left. The Christ was part of a bas-relief on a broad stone wall and so true to life you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

  But it wasn’t so much the athletic dolerite Jesus that attracted me as the prospect of learning the craft from his maker. I said yes even though Göbel, who wore formal attire rather than the garb of the guild and rarely put his hand to a stone or a chisel, made it clear I would do nothing but straight-line work during the early stages of my training.

  Looking more like a sweet-talking tomb salesman than a master mason, Göbel showed the future artisan the finished products lined up in front of the establishment waiting for grief-stricken customers. An apprentice was sweeping the already melting snow caps off their tops.

  The names and dates of the dead were still to come. Matte or polished to a high gloss, metre-high, pillow-shaped, or wider than long, their prices varied. The bereaved who came to buy had more than Göbel’s line at their disposal: his Bittweg establishment bordered on several others, their wares similarly displayed. There was a brisk business in the fleeting quality of human existence, the euphemistic phrase used in the trade for death, even in times of need.

  Göbel would list the varieties of marble and granite and show us the differences between sandstone and limestone. He would bemoan the shortage of malleable material and point to a pile of cast-off tombstones in a luxuriant weed-bed, their antiquated inscriptions in need of removal before they could be reused. He would refer to each part of a tool by its name and complain that a Swedish-made flat chisel with a specially tempered steel core, known as widia, had been unavailable for years for want of hard currency.

  LATER, MUCH LATER, when I was finally able to get it word by word out of my system, I wrote an entire chapter about tools like bush hammers and embossing-and drove-chisels, about Silesian marble and Belgian granite, travertine and dolomite. I couldn’t have done it had it not been for my somewhat ghoulish professional experience. After all, the lifeblood of literature is nothing if not a stray button, the horseshoe of an Uhlan’s mount scraped free of rust, human mortality, and, therefore, weathered tombstones.

  The Tin Drum – a book whose contents made waves before it ended up between covers, from the moment it learned to walk – is constantly crossing the wanderer’s now straight, now winding path to art and the narrow track between literature and reality, Dichtung und Wahrheit.

  In it, for example, I released Korneff, senior journeyman, from Göbel’s employ and set him up in his own small-time workshop so he could show the hunchbacked hero of my first novel how to take a coarse but malleable slab of stone and turn it into a polished metre-high monument over an individual grave by using a straight-edge, chisels both pointed and toothed, and a gouge. That loquacious hero, Oskar Matzerath, who has come to detest black marketeering as a means of existence, is as eager to learn as I was when, though without a hump and other novelworthy life experiences, I began my training.

  One never knows what will make a book. For example, the transformation of lived life, life in the raw, into a text undergoing constant revision and coming to rest only between covers, can come from a tombstone belonging to an unsightly pile of tombstones shunted off to their side, their time having passed. Because master craftsman Göbel so willed it, the deeply carved, wedge-shaped inscriptions had to be so radically removed that the stone’s face contained no trace whatever of a man by the name of, say, Friedrich Gebauer, born 1854, died 1923. Various tools then served to make the dolerite into a shiny surface, in which the name and dates indicating a new lifespan could be
carved in cuneiform, eternal until the officially determined statute of limitations ran out again. Renewable carved stone becomes the basis for the limited span of our afterlife. Names move on, inscriptions – such as: ‘Death is the Gate to Life’ – do not need to be removed, chiselled off.

  Just as I have described the interplay between material declared dead and material revived, so I could go into the interplay among flesh-and-blood persons. For now, let me limit myself to one, my journeyman Korneff, though I am uncertain what his name really was. What is certain is that he suffered from boils. His neck was particularly susceptible to them and was notched with thick scars. Every spring, and thus in the spring of ’47, he developed abscesses the size of dove’s eggs that you could almost feel by looking at them and that would yield a good schnapps glass of pus. As soon as the boils began to sprout, the brazen apprentices would parade up and down Bittweg singing, instead of ‘Spring’s come again, parting is pain’, ‘Spring’s come again, Korneff’s in pain …’

  I also know for a fact that Göbel, whose firm is called Wöbel in the novel, proclaimed the name of the enterprise in capital letters on his sign. More businessman than craftsman, he was instrumental several years later in giving a number of new buildings travertine façades and marble floors with the help of a stone sawmill he had purchased in nearby Holthausen. His rapid rise during the initial stages of the German economic miracle would make an interesting novel.

  WHEN I SIGNED the apprentice papers, I was attracted to Göbel’s firm for another reason: besides the laughable monthly salary of a hundred marks, which is the amount the miserly small-timer Korneff paid his trainee Oskar, I was promised a hearty meat-and-vegetable soup twice a week, with second helpings guaranteed.