by Günter Grass
HAD WE AGREED to meet or did Chance, once again, play director? The man sitting opposite me was someone to be approached with caution. In the sparsely occupied inter-zone train to Berlin either he or I could easily have ended up in another compartment.
Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber – Lud for short – was two decades older than me. He was a painter and sculptor who belonged to a generation of artists too unformed to be banned in ’33; by the time he was no longer able to exhibit in the Galerie Stuckert or at Mother Ey’s, the war had begun, and he spent the entire war in the army.
Recently he had been named professor and begun training future art teachers in an undamaged Grunewaldstrasse building, but I had met him as a heavy drinker at the Czikos, where he usually sat by himself, moistening his forehead with brandy between each gulp, as if he felt in need of constant rebaptizing.
Once, during a break, I laid my washboard and thimbles aside and gathered up the courage to go and speak to him. When he heard I wished to go to Berlin to study with Hartung, he was surprisingly helpful. It was he who advised me to include a handwritten letter along with the required portfolio: it would make a good impression, he said, make it more personal.
Now I was sitting face to face with him. He was smoking Rothändle, I rolling anaemic cigarettes from my supply of Schwarzer Krauser. We avoided each other’s eyes.
Lud sighed now and again, was silent. I wanted to say something, but didn’t dare.
In Düsseldorf, where he was known and feared as a loner easy to rile and fast to strike, he had been visiting his mistress, who was married only on paper. Lud, too, lived apart from his wife. He commuted between Berlin and Düsseldorf, studio and mistress.
As the train pulled out, I could probably have seen her stranded on the platform like the friends who had come to see me off with banjo, flute, and bass. I knew her narrow face from brief encounters and, in profile, from his small wooden sculptures. Itta, which is what he called her, would surely have accompanied him to the station, if not all the way to the platform.
It wasn’t until we got to the Ruhr that a pallid light broke through the January morning. Lud had been friends with the painters Goller, Macketanz, and Grote since before the war. The Nazi years and then the war had held them back. They made a belated attempt to distance themselves from their influences. In Lud’s paintings, fine gradations in colour had to hold their own against austere structures.
I own two Schrieber watercolours that date from his time as a prisoner of war in England. They are park landscapes done in bright hues economically applied. Later, after we had become friends and after three or four glasses of Doppelkorn, he spoke about the lost years and grew so enraged that he toppled several innocent bystanders in the pub with karate chops by way of compensation.
During the first part of the trip we didn’t talk much. Could we have been sleeping? Not likely. Did the inter-zone train have a Mitropa dining car? No.
Once in snowy Lower Saxony, he hinted at something to do with physical changes. I thought he intended to apply some more plaster to one of his sculptures to increase its girth. But then I realized he was trying to say that his mistress was pregnant. All of a sudden he was humming; then he sang something Catholic about celebrating the arrival of an Emanuel. But when his and Itta’s son was born, they baptized him Simon.
Lud’s wife, like Itta, had a narrow face and a stern profile. Her eyes were close together and slightly bulging. I had seen her at an opening, lost and speechless in the bustle of lively conversations.
We got through the East German border check at Marien-born without incident, though Lud frowned as he grudgingly pulled his passport out of his pocket. Neither of us had much in the way of luggage.
Scattered in with the shirts and socks I had stuffed into my little black bag were a few tools, including a stippling iron, a roll of drawings, my folder of poems, and a slice of roast lamb between two pieces of bread with caraway seeds, compliments of the Czikos. The suit I was wearing came from my Caritas days.
I wish I knew what was going through my head at the time besides the desire for a change of scene, the desire to put the stultifying atmosphere of Düsseldorf behind me, but no matter how I try, not even the echo of a thought comes back to me.
I am only externally present: in the black bag on the luggage rack and the herringbone of the suit. Though it is also true that during the trip from west to east the constant pressure of words nearly blasted my skull apart: the fragments of thoughts, the din of isolation, the frightened souls I saw running next to the train – headbirths that would not let me be.
Tangible, and therefore certain, was the man sitting opposite me, Ludwig Gabriel Schrieber, whom only after we became first tentative, then fast, friends did I call Lud.
Though shortened to Lud and lengthened to Ludkowski, Ludström, Prelate Ludewik, and drinking buddy Ludrichkait, to Ladewik the Hangman or Ludwig Skriever the woodcarver, and changed from century to century, he is woven into the story I was telling and at the same time became a participant in my novel The Flounder, which I worked on during the mid-seventies. One of its short chapters bears the title ‘Lud’ because my friend died out from under me as I was writing away.
Lud is gone. Lud lives in my memory, so I can’t give him up. The way I described him is the way I experienced him during my early Berlin years, when we got together often and got too close at times: ‘Like a man buffeting a strong wind. Bent grimly forward when entering closed rooms like the studio full of pupils. Prominent forehead and cheekbones, but all finely modelled. Light hair and soft. Eyes red because there was always a strong headwind. Delicate mouth and nostrils. As chaste as his pencil sketches.’
All contour with few details sketched in – that was more or less how he looked as he sat facing me in the inter-zone train to Berlin, though he was twenty years younger than when I wrote that obituary. Billows of smoke in a compartment empty except for us.
Was it underheated, overheated?
Did he rail at non-representational artists as if they were the original iconoclasts or did he hold off until our bar-room discussions?
Did we share the lamb sandwich?
Outside, the landscape lay flat under sparse snow, inhabited by fictions because people were nowhere to be seen. After Magdeburg, whose remains we could only imagine, Lud spoke: about the son – he was sure it was a son – he had begotten and would name, with great fanfare, Emanuel; about the art of the Hittites and the great form we lost; about Mycenae and the joyous grace of Minoan miniatures; he spoke in half-sentences about Etruscan bronzes, then moved on to the Romanesque sculptures of southern France and to his time as a soldier there and later in Norway and at the Arctic front – where ‘you could hardly make out the Ivans camouflaged in their white anoraks’ – to end up, after a meaningful reference to the Naumburg Cathedral and its Early Gothic figures, in Greece, though glossing over the military operations on this or that island to praise archaic austerity, form coming to rest, and the inner sensation of joy it still arouses in us. ‘We are too late,’ he said, ‘followers, Ptolemaists …’
And between the stops of this grand tour of Europe, which, though a tour of duty seemed to have been focused solely on art, he would quote, without glasses brimfull, the toast of the old baas in his favourite book, Charles de Coster’s Uilenspiegel, in the Flemish: ‘Tis tydt van te beven de klinkaert …’ He, the experienced drinker, could talk himself drunk without schnapps.
Then came Potsdam and sobered us up. A platform full of Vopos, the People’s Police. Announcements in Saxon dialect translated by loudspeakers into military German. After pulling out our passports again for the border guards, we were on our way through West Berlin: pine woods, allotments, the first ruins.
Lud kept interrupting himself and sighing habitually, then suddenly and for no apparent reason took to grinding his teeth, thus becoming the character known as the Grinder in the future novelist’s Dog Years, and when the train pulled into the Zoologischer Garten station he casually offer
ed to put me up for the night in his Grunewaldstrasse studio.
How did he know I had nowhere to sleep? Was he afraid to be left alone among his unfinished sculptures?
There we drank tumblers of Doppelkorn with an especially high alcohol content and without the Uilenspiegel quotation, and ate the supplies he had brought with him: smoked mackerel with eggs that he salted, peppered, and stirred in a small pan on the hotplate in the kitchenette. Then I lay down on one of the two plank beds at the far end of the studio and fell asleep, but not before watching him standing there amidst a number of veiled clay figures, sanding down a plaster bust that looked like his distant beloved in profile.
THE NEXT DAY I found a room on Schlüterstrasse that a widow with wavy white hair sublet to me for twenty marks a month. ‘No women allowed, of course,’ she said.
Amid the useless items of furniture crowding the subtenant’s room there was, at least, an old-fashioned bed. The clock did not work and presumably remained on the wall to confirm the impression that time had stopped. ‘Only my husband was allowed to wind it,’ I was told, ‘nobody else, myself included.’
She would, however, heat up the tile stove on weekends, she promised – for a fee, of course.
My miner’s guild stipend had recently been raised from fifty to sixty marks a month. In addition, Otto Schuster’s widow – the owner of the Czikos had lost his life in an unexplained accident – had handed over a tidy sum for a portrait in relief I had done of her husband. I paid the rent and heating fee in advance.
The ornate plaster design decorating the exterior of the apartment house that had just provided me with a steady address had been only lightly damaged by bomb-splinters, but the buildings on either side of it had been completely destroyed at the end of the war, and it stood there like a lone molar. Later, when spring came, I saw from my window a surviving chestnut tree in the courtyard with plump, shiny blossoms.
Facing the apartment house were the remains of a façade with nothing to the left or right of it: the rubble had been cleared, leaving empty spaces through which the wind whirled, first powdery snow and later dust, which spread so evenly over the city that wherever I went – the school nearby or the registration office – I would soon be grinding chips of brick between my teeth.
Masonry dust blanketed all of Berlin, the eastern and the three western occupation zones. But when snow fell the air was again true Berlin air, dust-free, as celebrated in the hit song blaring from my landlady’s kitchen radio: ‘Das ist die Berliner Luft, Luft, Luft …’ Not until a decade later did I write a long poem entitled ‘The Great Rubble Lady Speaks’ as an amen to the situation. The final stanza reads: ‘Berlin lies there scattered./Dust flies up,/And then a calm sets in./The great lady of the rubble is canonized.’
Everything stretched farther in Berlin: the city had a shabby, gap-toothed, closer-to-the-war look about it. Large, empty spaces between extensive firewalls. Few new buildings, lots of shacks and makeshift stalls. The Kurfürstendamm was having a hard time rebuilding its image as an elegant promenade, though on Hardenbergstrasse near Steinplatz, between the Zoologischer Garten station and the Am Knie – later Ernst-Reuter-Platz – station, I did see the scaffolding behind which the many-storeyed monstrosity that became the Berliner Bank was taking shape.
At Aschinger’s you could get pea soup and all the bread rolls you could eat for pfennigs. Everything was cheaper, even Max Krause-brand writing paper: WRITE LETTERS QUITE EXTRAORDINARY, USE MAX KRAUSE STATIONERY rode on double-decker buses with me from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.
I ARRIVED. AND the moment I arrived, I shook the dust of Düsseldorf off my feet. Or did I always have an easy time casting off ballast, never looking back, arriving and being there and only there?
In any case, the School of Fine Arts building took my arrival so for granted that it might have survived the bombing especially for me. My new teacher, Karl Hartung, also made little fuss, introducing me to his pupils and the nude model, who happened to be taking a break and was knitting something socklike.
I was given a hook in the wardrobe for my work trousers and a modelling stand. Lothar Messner, who came from the Saarland and rolled his own, like me, offered me some tobacco. I was accepted into a men’s club to which Hartung’s only female pupil, Vroni, could also belong, thanks to her robust constitution.
Behind the school’s main building and a courtyard full of trees were the studios for both students of sculpture and professors – Scheibe, Sintenis, Uhlmann, Gonda, Dierkes, Heiliger, and Hartung. We had a view of the Technical University on the far side of an empty plot of land to our left and a corner of the School of Music to our right. In the distance we could also see uncleared rubble, half hidden by bushes.
The clay sculptures produced by Hartung’s pupils during the live model sessions had a certain independence to them, though they still bore traces of their master’s sense of form. The only female pupil endowed her reclining nude with the ample proportions of her own body. She struck me as the most gifted. The atmosphere in our studio was quite sober. No bohemian pretences, nobody playing the genius. The youngest of us, Gerson Fehrenbach, came from a Black Forest family of wood carvers. Two or three students came from East Berlin and received meals at the Technical University canteen. Fehrenbach showed me a nearby shop, Butter-Hoffmann, where I could buy inexpensive bread, eggs, margarine, and cheese spread.
IN MY VERY first week I gave the traditional newcomer party, at which I served green herrings rolled in flour and fried on a hotplate. I bought the herring fresh at the weekly market for thirty-five pfennigs a half-kilo, and it became a staple of my diet.
No sooner had I settled in than I began to work on a chicken, an independent project apart from the standing nude model. The red potter’s clay was later pressed into a plaster mould and fired to become my first terracotta. The chicken sketches from my French journey had proved their worth, and I would continue to be stimulated by roosters and chickens, verbally as well as visually, right down to my poem ‘The Merits of Windfowl’.
One day, after making his rounds, Hartung, who usually kept his distance, told us the story of his visit to the Paris studio of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi. ‘As a member of the occupying forces,’ he added, to be totally aboveboard. Brancusi’s formal language, the ‘condensation of the basic form’, had made a deep impression on him. Then, pointing to my chicken in progress, he said: ‘Natural, yet aware.’
He used words in the same sober way the northern light shone through the large studio window. His goatee was always neatly shaped and clipped. He was able to apply the then fashionable concept of ‘abstract’ to every object or body that could be abstracted. That I remained representational was in accordance with his understanding of abstraction. He did, however, take offence at the smell of fried herring wafting through the door connecting his studio to ours, but then understood our need and occasionally treated us to Buletten with potato salad from Butter-Hoffmann. He was friends with Schrieber and tolerated his growing influence on his pupils.
AT SOME POINT in January I had to take an oral exam because I had entered mid-semester. The school’s director, Karl Hofer, who said not a word, and three or four professors carried on an exploratory conversation with me in the course of which the poems I had included in my dossier piqued the curiosity of Professor Gonda. He praised passages from the stylite cycle and quoted several genital metaphors, calling them ‘bold, even audacious’, which I found embarrassing: I felt I’d gone beyond that kind of imagery.
From the other professors’ ironic comments I gathered that Gonda had written and even published a novel years before. He also turned out to be a Rilke enthusiast. This enabled me to bring up The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a work which Father Stanislaus had used to draw his book-hungry charge into conversation. We then moved on to Rilke’s place as Rodin’s secretary and biographer. Gonda and I pelted each other with quotes, which I no longer remember, though they most likely included the line from the Paris merry-go-round
poem ‘And then and when an elephant all white …’
Throughout this exchange the rest of the examining committee remained mute. Then Hofer broke the silence and declared, ‘Enough, one could talk endlessly about Rilke, the candidate has passed.’
I am still surprised by this exam that was no exam, and the uncritical approval of poems that were, all of them, suffering from an advanced case of metaphoritis. Perhaps the new arrival got extra points for what they considered his potential as a poet, what he might yet become.
I was even more surprised by the patience with which Karl Hofer, who seemed completely isolated from the other committee members, tolerated my at first timid and then self-assured performance. I would have been stricter with myself.
I remember Hofer’s face, a face marked by loss. Present yet distracted, he sat there looking as if his paintings destroyed in the bombings were passing before his mind’s eye, as if he had to repaint them, one after the next, in his head.
I seldom saw him after that, and when I did it was only as he walked slowly through the school. Soon he would be hard hit by a dispute with a pope of the art world. He never got over it, and it has not been settled to this day.
ON MY VERY first day I noticed the telephone booth to the left of the main entrance. I was relieved when I saw it occupied, comforted when there were three or four people waiting for it. Another tactic was to avoid looking in its direction. Because as soon as it was empty and ready for use I would be tempted and tell myself: Now, now, now …
Many times I screwed up my courage and dialled the number, which I knew by heart, but hung up after the first ring. Once or twice the office answered, but got no response from me. A waste of coins.
But I couldn’t avoid the telephone booth for ever. There it was, waiting patiently, waiting for the procrastinator. A trap. After a while I started picturing it on my way to school or from the studio to class.
