Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  As for true art, the cause of my continuous hunger, I got my first idea of what it entailed when an anonymous client commissioned several copies of a ninety-centimetre torso. Herr Moog acted conspiratorial as he removed the woollen blanket in which it had been wrapped.

  It was clearly the work of the once widely recognized, even acclaimed sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose art had been banned from all museums during the Nazi period and whom I had met as a schoolboy, if fleetingly, in the banned art journals my teacher Lilli Kröhnert had shown me. She had called him one of the truly great.

  Nobody at Moog’s actually mentioned the name, though there were rumours about its lineage. ‘Hey presto!’ one of the journeymen joked. ‘First one, then three.’

  So many sandstone sculptures were being made. The order must have come from an art dealer who trafficked in copies that he sold as originals on the black market. In those post-war years there were plenty of gullible buyers, either native nouveaux riches or the imported American variety. It was a time of fakes.

  In any case, the three copies in bright sandstone were snapped up before they could be put on display.

  The armless torso went from mid-thigh to the crown of a slightly turned head. The tilt of the pelvis gives the contrapposto effect. A Lehmbruck of the middle period, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, probably done in Paris.

  As usual, we transferred the many points we had pencilled on the surface of the plaster model to the stone using the three-legged machine with its movable needle.

  Our work was supervised by Master Moog himself. The apprentices from stonemason families may have known plenty of tricks, but the moment Moog the heavyweight put in an appearance all tricks went by the board. He would raise his overlapping eyelids with two fingers, check every detail, and let first one, and then the other eyelid fall. He looked like a Buddha. He never resorted to the needle attached to the end of the swivelling metal arm, he never missed a single error.

  To my shame I must admit that I made quite a few blunders on the calm yet mobile surface of the torso’s back. These had to be reworked, which meant that the stone layer between the shoulder blades had to be evened out, but what had been removed from the surface was gone for good.

  I WONDER WHO is enjoying my Lehmbruck, one of the copies, today. The client of the anonymous dealer of yore or, if it has since been resold, a new owner. But I would give anything to be able to ask Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who took his own life shortly after World War I, to forgive me my trespass.

  I really should use my at times successful method of issuing a ‘subjunctive’ invitation to him, whom Lilli Kröhnert praised as incomparably great, and to the painters Macke and Morgner, who fell in battle at Perthes-les-Hurlus and Langemarck, respectively, to break bread with me at my imaginary table.

  We would fall into conversation about current events – how enthusiastically we went to war – then only about art. What has happened to it since. How it survives every attempt to ban it, yet once the external constraints are removed has on occasion contracted into a dogma or vanished into the abstract.

  We could then laugh at the junk assembled for installations, the fashionable shallowness, the restless videomania, the event-hopping – the beatified scrap metal, that is, in the overfilled void of the ever contemporary art business.

  Then it would be my privilege as host and cook to treat my guests on their leave from death to a fine meal: a bouillon of cod heads seasoned with fresh dill, for starters; next, a leg of lamb larded with garlic and sage, lentils simmered in a spicy marjoram sauce; and to top it all off, a fine chèvre with walnuts. With brimming glasses of aquavit we would toast one another and rail at the world.

  From Lehmbruck, the dour Westphalian, we would have only the briefest of pronouncements; from August Macke, who liked to talk, an account of light patterns and other adventures on the short trip to Tunis with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet in April 1914, a few months before the war broke out; and Wilhelm Morgner would let us in on what sort of paintings he would have done – abstract, perhaps? – had he not been in the trenches in Flanders and …

  But no word about Lehmbruck’s unhappy love affair with the beautiful actress and child-woman Elisabeth Bergner. They say he took his life on account of her, but I doubt it. It was the war, which in his head, in many heads would not end …

  After the meal I would surely find an opportunity to thank him, the chance master of my apprenticeship who set the standard by which I learned to fail …

  AND THEN? THEN came the currency reform. Nineteen forty-eight, a date separating the before from the thereafter, putting an end to everything and pledging a new start to everyone, devaluing what was and giving what was soon to be new value, letting a trickle of nouveaux riches filter through a mass of starving poor, pulling the rug out from under the black market, promising a free market and thereby giving both wealth and poverty long-standing status, consecrating money and making consumers of us all and giving business a general shot in the arm – witness the case of the Bittweg stonemasons, whose prices until then had been determined by barter, trade in kind.

  Shortly before the momentous date Moog received a contract for the facelift of a bank building still the worse for its war wear. The moguls were ashamed of their façade. The coming event was to be greeted with a beautified exterior, on time and on budget.

  The sections of the shell-lime blocks damaged by bomb fragments had to be chiselled out and filled with rectangles of malleable shell-lime, cemented in perfectly flush with the surface. What was our client’s name? Let’s say it was the Dresdner Bank, newly rebaptised the Rhein-Ruhr Bank.

  Only one photograph from this period survives. It shows a young man high up on a steel scaffolding looking out at the world as if he owned it. To signal his profession, he holds a wooden stonemason’s mallet in his left hand – he is left-handed – and a stippling iron in his right.

  A colleague must have snapped the picture. A chiselled indentation in the background makes it clear how strong the natural-stone exterior of the building is: although its interior was completely destroyed by fire, the tall building survived the hail of bombs, and is now greedy for fresh capital and renewed profits.

  The young stonecutter stands alone because the board of directors of this monetary bastion, which had served all systems in power, including one of organized crime, did not wish to be photographed; they wished to remain behind the scenes. They were content with having all external damage removed from the bank’s façade. They were interested in re-establishing their reputation, at least externally.

  The gaunt young man in the peaked cap and work clothes perched self-confidently on the scaffolding, master of all he surveys, is none other than me, shortly before the currency reform. An action self-portrait.

  The bank’s upper floors I stand before, small yet recognizable, in this black-and-white photo, were not yet ready for use because fire damage had yet to be taken care of, but the main hall on the ground floor was due to be opened to the public shortly.

  On the storey above we stonemasons sat through the lunch break spooning our Henkelmanns empty. Since there was a hole covered with boards in the ceiling between the ground floor and ours, we could see through the narrow cracks.

  And so several days before the Great Day I saw the new currency – both banknotes and coins – being sorted, counted, bundled, and packed in rolls on long tables by the employees making ready for the wonder-working cash gush. And so I became a witness.

  What we would have given for slightly longer arms – or fishing rods. The newest articles of faith, so near and yet so far. We would have turned, well, not bank robbers but Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to aid the poor.

  At that point my hourly wage at construction sites was ninety-five Reichspfennigs an hour. With overtime, my weekly income came to about fifty Reichsmarks. Before long they were worth nothing.

  Did I have any idea that down there in the main hall of the Dresdner Bank, and at a thousand and more distri
bution points all over the country, it was the future that would be paid out, a future that would thenceforth have its price?

  SUDDENLY EVERYTHING, NEARLY everything was for sale. Yesterday’s shabbily stocked shop windows now boasted articles long hoarded. Items came out of nowhere to attract the new currency. All the shortages suddenly seemed to have been manufactured, to be a deceptive relic of the past. And since everything belonging to the past had lost its worth, everyone looked bravely – hard as it might be – to the future.

  I don’t know what I bought with the forty new deutschmarks hard cash each citizen received in the name of a blinking justice. Genuine Faber Castell pencils and a new eraser, perhaps. Or was it a Schmincke watercolour set with four-and-twenty little bowls?

  No, most of it probably went to tickets for a trip to Hamburg I had invited Mother to take with me. She wanted to visit her sister Betty and Aunt Martha, the wife of my father’s eldest brother, Uncle Alfred, a police officer who had lived with his cousins in a Hohenfriedberger Weg terrace house and was now somewhere in the north, in Stade, not far from Hamburg.

  The Hamburg ruins stretched far and wide, like the ruins in Cologne. It wasn’t till I looked again that I saw the tall chimneys that had remained standing while one after another apartment building crumbled floor after floor to the ground.

  Surprisingly enough there was a theatre open, and since my mother had always been attracted to theatres, to plays, operas, and operettas – she once took me to a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen at the Danzig Municipal Theatre when I was a child – we went to see a play by Strindberg, The Father, with Hermann Speelmans in the lead role. She cried when the curtain fell. I have no memory of the relatives we visited, but I do remember the train ride there and back.

  On the way there we soon passed through the bombed-out Ruhr and came to the Westphalian flatlands, which gave the impression that nothing world-shaking had occurred. I watched my mother sitting opposite me in silence.

  She didn’t care for my questions and was trying to get me to see the landscape as a ‘sight for sore eyes’. ‘Look at those meadows! All that grass! All those cows!’

  But I persisted. ‘What was it like when the Russians came? What actually happened? Why does Daddau just tell funny stories? Why does Papa beat around the bush? What was it like for Daddau, and for you? Did the Russians ever come and … And when the Poles came …’

  She could find no words. The most she would let on was: ‘That’s all in the past now. Especially for your sister. Don’t ask so many questions. It doesn’t make things better. In the end we had a little luck … We’re still alive … The past is the past.’

  Then on the way back she asked me to go easy on my father. He’d been through a lot and lost everything. The shop had meant as much to him as it had to her. Not that he complained. No, and all he cared about was the son. He enjoyed his visits even if they were rare – ‘No fighting next time, please’. The past was over and done with. ‘Just be nice to him, won’t you? Or let’s play a quiet game of skat. He’s always so glad to see you …’

  Not once during the few years she had left did my mother ever so much as drop a hint or utter a word that might indicate what had gone on in the empty shop, in the basement, or in the apartment, nothing that might indicate where and how often she had been raped by Russian soldiers. It was not until after she died that I learned – and then only indirectly from my sister – that to protect her daughter she had offered herself to them. There were no words.

  Nor could I bear to come out with things long lurking within me: the questions I had failed to ask … my petrified faith … the Hitler Youth campfires … my desire to die a hero’s death like Lieutenant-Commander Prien of the submarines – and as a volunteer … the Labour Serviceman we called Wedontdothat … how Fate had saved the Führer … the Waffen SS oath of allegiance in the jangling cold: ‘If Others Prove Untrue, Yet We Shall Steadfast Be’ … And the Stalin organ and all the deaths it caused, mostly among the young and unprepared like me … the song I sang out of terror in the woods until an answer came … the lance corporal who saved me but lost both legs to a Russian grenade while I was spared … my belief in the final victory to the bitter end … the lightly wounded soldier’s feverish dreams of a girl with black plaits … the gnawing hunger … a game of dice … the disbelief at the pictures of Bergen-Belsen, at the piles of corpses – look at them, go ahead look at them, don’t turn away, just because – to put it mildly – it is beyond description …

  NO, I DIDN’T look back, or else took only a short, frightened peek over my shoulder. From the time I received my hourly stonecutter’s wage in new currency and shortly thereafter at seven pfennigs more an hour, I lived exclusively in the present, or, as I thought, looked to the future. And there was no shortage of work.

  Once the Reichsmark fell, Moog started getting even more contracts for non-cemetery-related projects. Façades all over the city were in need of repair. Façades were a lucrative business. Scaffolding sprang up everywhere, and traces of the war disappeared on a piecework basis. The first monstrosities of the soon popular façade art saw the light of day, an especially sought-after material being travertine, the Führer’s favourite marble.

  We also moonlighted after work, delivering large slabs of dappled marble to a newly opened butcher’s shop whose owner wanted bright, colourful walls and counters, or building high tuff walls round the private residences being bought up by the nouveaux riches.

  But I was never able to practise art. All the war-wounded sandstone figures had been given back heads, knees, and the folds of their garments; the Lehmbruck torso, which bore my faulty signature, had found a buyer who believed it an original; the Caritas greybeards, who could now buy cigarettes without ration coupons, would no longer model for me beneath the chestnut trees.

  No matter how much the new money jangled as I bought surprise presents for my parents, it could not, not even with overtime, assuage my third hunger. It was façades, façades, and more façades. Until I finally heard from the Academy of Art.

  WELL BEFORE THE deadline, I had submitted a portfolio of pencil sketches – the gallery of old men who posed between sneezes – and three small sculptures, the two female torsos, both modelled freely after Lehmbruck, and the expressive head, and appended a certificate attesting to my training and signed by Master Moog. In addition, as he assured his favourite lodger, Father Fulgentius had included a good word for my application in his morning prayers to Saint Anthony, who stood life-size in the Caritas House chapel in all his plaster glory and had charge of all sorts of things.

  When I told the good father how fierce the competition had been – only two of the twenty-seven applicants had been accepted – and that although the admissions committee had recognized the potential evident in the portraits it pointed out that my experience in stonecutting was decisive, but that Professor Mataré was unfortunately unwilling to accept new pupils, which meant I would be unable to enter the sculpture programme until the winter semester and then not with Professor Mataré but with a Professor Mages, whom I didn’t know, the Prior of the Düsseldorf-Rath Caritas House proposed another possibility, another way I might serve art.

  We had often had conversations during which he would explain, or at least make plausible, the miracle of grace, the deeper meaning of the Trinity and other mysteries, and the joy God takes in the Franciscan vows of poverty.

  These chats – sometimes he poured us each a small glass of liqueur – reminded me of the conversations I’d had over dice with my Bavarian friend Joseph when we were POWs together: he too tried to sniff out my childhood belief in the Sacred Heart and the Holy Virgin Mother of God and even then had a dozen or so theological tricks up his sleeve.

  And like Joseph in the camp near Bad Aibling, Father Fulgentius, though less of a know-it-all, more peasant-sly and wily, tried to win me over. In the large bay window of the main building, which he called his office, he outlined a vision of the future wh
ose medieval dimensions had a rare, attractive charm and reminded me of my schoolboy fantasies.

  Recently, he told me, a sculptor brother, Father Lucas by name, had died at an advanced age in the main monastery of the Franciscan order. His studio, with its skylight and modelling stand and full box of clay, with its access to the open air and the monastery garden, was ready and waiting, waiting for a creative hand to put its full range of tools and stock of stone to use. Thanks to charitable contributions, that stock even included marble from the quarries of Carrara, the great Michelangelo’s favourite. I had only to come to it in a spirit of joy. Faith would surely grow, gain strength as I worked on the Madonnas, and was eventually commissioned to do a Saint Francis and a Saint Sebastian. The pious devotion and unremitting diligence required by the work would inevitably lead to enlightenment. The rest, as he knew from his own experience, was grace.

  At first he dismissed my doubts as to his view of my future and the outcome he desired, but when I began making reference to my secondary hunger and called it chronically incurable, when I painted my addiction to young girls, mature women, to the female sex as such in all its infernal carnality, outdoing the temptations of Saint Anthony by drawing on congress with animals and fabulous beasts from the Flemish workshop of Hieronymus Bosch, Father Fulgentius gave up his attempts. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘the flesh,’ and tucked his hands into the sleeves of his habit. That is the first thing monks do when they are tempted by the Devil.

  Decades later, however, when success had become a habit, fame boring, and popular resentment repellent and ridiculous, when the struggle with political opponents on the right and on the left had temporarily died down, when as an artist with a dual profession, as husband, father, homeowner and taxpayer, prizewinner and breadwinner for a growing family enmeshed in the business of day-to-day existence, I made excuses day and night, I wondered what my life would have been like had I listened during our games of dice to my Bad Aibling pal Joseph, who had since become a bishop, and swallowed his anti-doubt pills like a good boy, revived my childhood faith, and with or without academic training followed the Prior’s advice, embraced his offer, and – first under probation, as a novice, then as a sworn-in regular – taken refuge in the monastery studio he had so praised …