Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  They were always civil, even friendly, to their kitchen help, though they would save up their rage for the periods when I did the dishes. Not only because it was one of the few times they were together; their duelling clearly needed a witness.

  Sometimes they threw knives and forks at each other. Once I had to bandage a wound in Monsieur’s left hand. My limited knowledge of the language meant I could only guess at what enraged the knife-throwers and eventually brought them to the brink. Maybe an inheritance going far back in history, to the persecutions of the Huguenots, for instance, or even further, to the never-ending Wars of the Roses.

  Monsieur and Madame used the formal vous with each other. That is how decorous their quarrels were. I could have added a choral commentary and made it a three-hander. My friend Katz would have directed. Besides, our kitchen drama played itself out at one of the most exclusive addresses in Paris: Boulevard Péreire. My address too.

  WHO SWEPT UP the shards? Probably I did with a dispassionate expression. I was less distressed by the daily plate-smashing sessions than I might have been because the ritual wrangling of the Saint-Georges couple took place at a time when wrangling was rampant. Thesis clashed with thesis. Not that I had read Camus by then, but the verbal jousts between him and Sartre were on everyone’s lips, though more as empty phrases than solid information. There was talk of the Absurd and the myth of Sisyphus, the happy stone roller. It was probably Katz who infected me, moving effortlessly from Kleist to Camus, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, and from both to Sartre. Katz loved extremes.

  In the debate among the gods of the existentialist doctrine of salvation, a debate ranging over years and borders, I took sides – first gingerly, then vehemently – with Camus. But I went further: mistrusting all ideologies and rejecting all faiths, I made stone rolling my daily discipline. I liked that Sisyphus. Damned by the gods, as sure of the absurdity of human existence as he was of the sun’s coming up and going down, and thus aware that the stone he rolled up the hill would not stay put – he became a saint to me, a saint I could worship. A hero beyond hope or despair. A man made happy by a restless stone. A man who never gives up.

  It was in Paris that I began to try on politically committed positions, if only incidentally, staking out my own territory during bistro conversations with and without Katz. I gradually came to see that political power relationships could be measured. I joined the fray – or argued with myself if necessary – and lived on cheap food: pommes frites and boudin, the French counterpart to Blutwurst.

  THE PAPER BY-PRODUCTS preserved from my tour of France include a sketchbook plus a pile of medium-size drawings on which gull feathers and a bamboo reed have produced an all but unbroken line forming the heads of men and women who were close enough to sketch for sufficiently long intervals in cafés, on park benches, in the Métro, and in my various sleeping quarters. There are also two dozen watercolours on brown paper showing not only heads with and without hats and half figures but also streets on the outskirts of town. I did several watercolours of the bridge-rich Canal Saint-Martin and of bistro scenes, which from page to page show influences – from Picasso and Dufy to Soutine. They differ from the Indian-ink impressions of my Italian jaunt of the previous year in their heightened expressiveness. All of them were quickly dashed off, yet they were attempts at finding myself or somebody I wanted to be. But who did I want to be?

  My writing during the trip was likewise a groping forward. A series of poems revolving around Odysseus’s helmsman is eminently forgettable. Then came an endless poem during which a present-day stylite develops into a hero of the absurd: a young mason who gives up his job, breaks off all ties with his family and society, that is, becomes a total outsider, erects a pillar in the town marketplace and looks down on its daily activities, that is, on the world, the better to inundate it with metaphor-laden curses from his exalted vantage point. Though he does let his mother feed him with a long pole.

  The only reason I mention this verse epic, a work fed on a diet of early German expressionism seasoned with Apollinaire and García Lorca and accordingly inordinately rich, a work that flexed its muscles but was never completed, is that this static stylite evolved over the years, and through a lengthy fermentation process became a mobile headbirth cursing the world from the opposite perspective – the view from a tabletop – and in prose.

  ON THE WAY home from France I made a little detour. An address was all it took to lure me to Switzerland, to the canton of Aargau and the spotless little town of Lenzburg.

  I went there to see an actress by the name of Rosmarie Loss who had met me in a Düsseldorf cinema that was showing Les Enfants du paradis. In the course of our hasty embraces and continuous verbal battles she must have pegged me for a notorious hunger sufferer, because after her return home I kept getting packages full of Swiss treats. Flute Geldmacher and I were thrilled with the Ovaltine, chocolate bars, grated cheese, and cured beef. I showed my gratitude with the only currency I had: poems long and short.

  In Lenzburg she and her sister’s family lived with her parents. Their private house differed little from the other houses in the town. Her father was a postman, a member of the Gutenberg Book Guild, and a Social Democrat. Her best friend, however, who came to what was intended as an innocent coffee-and-cake farewell party for her, was from solid middle-class stock and only nineteen. She moved like a budding dancer – with pronounced jolts and a head held high at the end of a long neck – and proclaimed, without being asked, that she was making a beeline for Berlin, the reason being that she did not wish to be the teacher her parents expected her to be and had decided to study the expressive barefoot choreography of Mary Wigman, the famous German exponent of modern dance.

  A brave decision! And declared in resonant High German. Whereupon something within me jelled, something that had till then been no more than a vague desire. I announced to the assembled company, the Loss family plus the future student of modern dance, that I, too, would be moving to Berlin and soon: the West German climate did not agree with me.

  Thus began a chat that had its consequences. She or I speculated that we might perhaps meet in Berlin, though Berlin was a big city, one you could easily get lost in. Still, you never knew …

  While travelling through France – and especially while waiting for my next ride – I had drawn a lot of chickens, and I compared the jerky movements of the future dancer with the gait of the fowl I had observed, a comparison I immediately, though unsuccessfully, tried to rephrase as a compliment. Then the coffee and cake were served and the conversation returned to Berlin. Rosmarie Loss divined that my heart might have determined my proposed change of residence.

  After Anna had gone – she had another farewell engagement to attend – the tone turned Social Democratic: the young lady with the wanderlust came from a cultivated bourgeois family, which through a hardware business had accumulated possessions according to good liberal principles. A good match, to be sure. A good catch, especially for impoverished Germans passing through …

  Perhaps a bit of hidden jealousy gave our banter an ominous colouration: Rosmarie and I, pugnacious as we were, would have exhausted each other with relish and speed. And here I was, relaxed, unbeholden to anybody, smoking cigarettes called Parisiennes offered to me out of a yellow pack.

  In any case, the family gathering around the table was still in full swing – the conversation conducted partly in High German, partly in Swiss German – when a boy about three years of age, the son of my clear-sighted moviegoer friend’s sister, entered the smoke-filled room with a toy drum hanging from his neck and struck the round sheet of tin with wooden sticks.

  Twice with the right, once with the left. Disregarding the grown-ups, he crossed the room and repeatedly circled the table, drumming his drum. He was not to be deterred by bribes of chocolate or silly distractions and seemed to be looking through everyone and everything. Then all at once he turned on his heel and retraced his steps out of the room.

  It was a scene that left
its mark, a picture that stayed with me. But it would be a long time before the bolt slid open, the flood of images was released and with the images, words I had been saving since childhood.

  As for Anna Schwarz, however brief her appearance, she had left behind more than her name.

  AND SO MY ill-defined desire to leave the economically miraculous Düsseldorf, with its beery Old Town antics and the fuss over its Academy of Art geniuses, received an unexpected impetus. In Berlin I wanted to find a new, more demanding, ‘absolute teacher’, as I put it later in my application, and discipline my straggling talents in a rawer climate.

  Earlier in the summer, before I left for France, I had been taken with an exhibition of a sculptor by the name of Karl Hartung, and especially with the monumental quality of his small works. I therefore applied to the Berlin School of Fine Arts, where he taught, with a portfolio of drawings, photographs of several plaster castings, a folder of poems, and a brief autobiography in the form of a letter. The acceptance arrived in late autumn.

  I did not waste much time on farewells. ‘It’s so far away,’ the mother wailed. ‘Berlin is a “dangerous place”,’ the father said, ‘and not just on account of politics.’ The sister, about to enter the Aachen convent, wished me ‘Godspeed’.

  Both the still unfinished head of St. Francis and the neo-Etruscan figurines in the Stockum studio had dried. I felt drained. Leaving Düsseldorf was easy.

  After an all-night New Year’s Eve celebration, Flute Geldmacher, Scholl the guitar, and the bassist son of the cymbalist gypsy saw me off at the station, each smoking a cigarette, as if it were his last. Franz Witte came too. We played our brand of jazz one last time. The washboard and thimbles stayed behind on the platform. That wasn’t all.

  I departed Düsseldorf on the inter-zone train. It was the first of January nineteen fifty-three, in the middle of the winter semester: with little luggage but rich in words and images that did not know yet where to go.

  BERLIN AIR

  AH, MY FRIENDS! The train was pulling out and Franz Witte was still horsing around: hopping back and forth on the platform, a dodgy character, you couldn’t pin him down, always posing in one way or other. Strutting like a crane or flailing, about to take off, fly away. Yet he stayed behind, turned into a Soonother, as in the book, though now in pictures, in alternating colours, elongated even: another El Greco.

  Not so long before, in one of the smaller studios where Otto Pankok’s special students were left to their own devices, we had gone our separate ways: he dancing over the colours of the rainbow, I racing criss-cross in black and white. I occasionally watched him telling the legends of the saints with a number of brushes at once, spraying the blood of the martyrs as from a fountain.

  On his canvases he spoke with absolute clarity: red next to blue, yellow next to green; otherwise his speech was confusing, recalling poetry of an airy beauty that vanishes on paper. He could fashion cloud towers with words and tumble them syllable by syllable. Though fragile by nature, he proclaimed himself an angel in armour whose will no brute force could withstand. He destroyed his pictures with gusto and a carving knife.

  It was not long after my departure on New Year’s Day – or was it a year later? – that the brick long aimed at him hit him in the head.

  There was talk of a brawl in Düsseldorf’s Old Town near the Church of Saint Lambert, then of a joker named Franz Witte doing a dance along the Königsallee on the snow-decked roofs of closely parked Opels, Borgwards, Mercedeses, and hunchbacked Volkswagens, though because the dancer was light on his feet no chassis were damaged.

  This was later confirmed. But while he leaped from roof to roof making funny faces – he was good at that – a brick or was it a cobblestone? struck the back of his head. That was how the combined rage of the united car owners put an end to his leaps into Nowhere.

  Later, when the wound had healed, externally, he was taken to Grafenberg, delivered by the police as a ‘known criminal’. The year after I left I visited him in the sanatorium, took him some sweets. He looked even more unstable than before. He had a slow, odd way of talking and kept pointing a long finger at the leafy trees outside the hall window.

  And it is through the hall window that Franz, darling of the gods, is said to have jumped. With a running start, along the hall, and finally through the glass. He wanted to fly again, be a bird or air, wind in the trees.

  One of my sons is named after him, my dead friend – after him and the uncle who turned hero against his will in the Polish Post Office. Both Franzes. When I left that day at dawn, I left little Franz – Fränzchen, as we called him – behind on the platform.

  NEXT TO A Franz Witte so hopelessly unsettled he couldn’t sit still stood the rock of Horst Geldmacher, who could do anything – draw with both hands, coax unheard-of tones out of a flute with all his fingers – anything but what his name, Moneymaker, implied: he was hopeless at making money.

  And yet I once used the promising name to scare my poor mother. When she asked me nervously how her darling artist son planned to make a living, how I intended to pay for my monthly tram passes – ‘to say nothing of tobacco and suchlike’ – the only answer I could give was a casual reference to our skill, Geldmacher’s and mine, with paper and paint. We could easily turn out copies of things that looked just like the genuine article.

  No wonder my poor mother connected the name of her son’s friend with the worst thing she could imagine: a basement forgery operation, where she pictured this moneymaker and her son – her problem child and his henchman – hard at work. If he got caught counterfeiting, whether passes or banknotes, I’d go down with him. Many years after Mother’s death my sister told me that she had long expected every ring at their Oberaussem door to be a member of the local constabulary or, worse, the criminal police.

  In fact, Flute Geldmacher was a danger only to himself: he would bang his head against plaster walls or bare masonry to prove how tough it was. This occurred at irregular intervals; otherwise he was a gentle, exceedingly courteous soul, who would greet people several times over with great ceremony and not only painstakingly wipe his shoes on the mat before entering his host’s residence but repeat the process on his way out. His comings and goings were further slowed by another self-imposed rule: whether arriving or departing, he never failed to knock.

  His flutes, on the other hand, he treated as inconsiderately as he did his head. More than once I saw him snapping them in two and hurling the pieces off the Rhine Bridge, only to mourn their passing.

  He played entirely by ear, but the way his music infused these German children’s ditties, Christmas carols, and saccharine love songs with the rhythms and harmonies of black cotton pickers, you’d think it came from a freshly minted score. He was also a skilful decorator with a passion for detail: he could turn the most common Old Town beer hall into a Wild West saloon worthy of Hollywood or into the cabins of a luxurious Mississippi steamboat. Düsseldorf had not only the moneyed clientele but also the perfect spirit for ‘illusionary gastronomy’.

  He was John Brown and John Brown’s mother in one; he was Old Moses and Buffalo Bill; he was Jonah in the whale; he wept with Shenandoah, the Indian chief’s daughter, that her river might return to its source. Long before pop art came on the scene, he had invented it in private, outlining his flat saturated colours in black.

  In the year The Tin Drum appeared and – as a cleaning woman had once predicted from my coffee grounds – I began to be marked with notoriety, I managed to get Dieter Weller-shoff, then an editor with Kiepenheuer, to slip Geldmacher’s O Susanna into their list. This work of art, a combination of jazz images and blues, spiritual, and gospel scores, is now available only in antiquarian bookshops and on the Internet.

  Flute hung on longer than Franz. He came to Berlin in the early sixties, when I was beginning to lose myself in the manuscript of Dog Years, and visited us on Karlsbader Strasse, bloated from too much beer. In that already terrifying half-ruin, inhabited to the rafters by the horrors
of war, he terrified Anna, the boys, and little Laura, born in the Year of the Wall, a serious child who never smiled more than tentatively.

  It was because he himself was so terror-stricken and anxiety-ridden that he inspired terror and anxiety in others. He thought he was being persecuted and would leave rooms backwards and avoid city streets or, when that was impossible, try to cover his tracks. He would rub his fingerprints off things and begged me to hide him in the small upper-level room of my studio to protect him from the shady characters who were after him. He tried to get me to buy him a special and far from inexpensive camera that would enable him – here he lowered his voice to a whisper – to photograph the streets through his trousers. He laughed and cried at the same time. He banged his forehead against the wall harder than ever, was lost without his flutes and disappeared one day, never came back.

  Shortly before that, however, he had a lucid interval; that was when the two of us made a record in honour of Willy Brandt, then the mayor of West Berlin – he playing on a number of flutes, high and low, I reading ten or twelve poems from my third book, Gleisdreieck, which contains my credo, ‘Asceticism’. Another tape, made in the late fifties, of the sugar-sweet glaze and shrill forced tones he composed for The Goose and the Five Cooks, a ballet libretto I wrote for Anna, was unfortunately lost. It debuted in Aix-les-Bains, although – again unfortunately – without Anna.

  It’s all gone. Nothing left but a few LPs, collector’s items I covet. Nothing but them and two friends I left behind, sitting in my memory, a crowded prison from which no one is released.