Dog Years

by Günter Grass

  Suspecting at this point that the stranger is troubled by a lack of cultural life here below, Wernicke, the foreman, leads him and the director, who is smiling subtly to himself and holding Pluto loosely by the collar, to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth stalls, which are all situated on the next lower, the twenty-five-hundred-foot level, and provide room respectively for philosophical, sociological, and ideological knowledge, achievements, and antinomies.

  No sooner has he arrived on this level than Matern turns away: the stranger doesn’t want to go on; hell fatigues him; he would like to breathe in the daylight again; but sternly tapping his ebony cane, which only a few hours before belonged to a certain Goldmouth, Brauxel refers to something that Matern is supposed to have done up above: “Has the stranger forgotten under what circumstances he, in the early morning of this very day, threw a pocketknife into the Landwehr Canal, which flows through Berlin, a city situated on the sunlit surface?”

  And so Matern, the stranger, is not allowed to turn away; he is obliged to pass through the gangway and face up to the philosophical insights that dwell loquaciously in the eighteenth stall.

  But not Aristotle, not Descartes or Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel not a soul. From Hegel to Nietzsche: a vacuum! Nor any sign of a neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian, no Rickert of the lion’s mane, no Max Scheler, nor does the phenomenology of any goateed Husserl fill the stall with eloquence, permitting the stranger to forget what hellish torments the vulgarian Eros had to offer; no below-ground Socrates contemplates the world above ground; but He, the pre-Socratic, he multiplied a hundredfold. He capped with a hundred caustic-degraded, once Alemannic stockingcaps, He in buckled shoes, in a linen smock: a hundred times He, coming and going. And thinks. And speaks. Has a thousand words for Being, for tune, for essence, for world and ground, for the with and the now, for the Nothing, and for the scarecrow as existential frame. Accordingly: Scareness, being-scared, scare-structure, scare-view, primeval scare, scaring-away, counter-scare, scare-vulnerable, scare-principle, scare-situation, unscared, final scare, scare-born time, scare-totality, foundation-scare, the law of scare. “For the essence of the scarecrow is the transcendental threefold dispersal of scarecrow suchness in the world project. Projecting itself into the Nothing, the scarecrow physis, or burgeoning, is at all times beyond the scarecrow such and the scarecrow at-hand…”

  Transcendence drips from stockingcaps in the eighteenth stall. A hundred caustic-degraded philosophers are of one and the same opinion: “Scarecrow Being means: to be held-out-into Nothing.” And the anxious question of Matern, the stranger below, who casts his voice into the stall: “But what of man, in whose image the scarecrow was created?” is answered by one and a hundred philosophers: “The scarecrow question calls ourselves—the askers—into question.” At this Matern withdraws his voice. A hundred matching philosophers come and go on the salt floor, greeting each other essentially: “The scarecrow exists self-grounded.”

  With oldtime buckled shoes they have even trampled down paths. Now and then they fall silent, then Matern hears their mechanisms. The principle of sufficient scare is starting up again.

  But before the hundred-times present, moth-scoop-and-caustic-degraded philosopher can run off his built-in sound tape again, Matern escapes to the gallery. He would gladly run for it, but can’t, for he is still a stranger to the mine and would certainly go astray: “The scarecrow comes-to-be in errancy, where, erring in circles, it fosters error.”

  So thrown back upon Wernicke, the mine-wise foreman, and reminded of hell by Pluto’s blackness, he is driven through stalls whose numbers make it clear that no stall is spared him.

  Under the nineteenth roof sociological insights are gathered together. The forms of alienation, the theory of social stratification, the introspective method, the pragmatic nihilism that dispenses with values, pure behaviorism, factual statements, and analyses of concepts, the static and dynamic approach, not to mention sociological ambivalence and divers stratification structures, are embodied as mobiles. Degraded in a variety of ways, modern society listens to lectures on collective consciousness. Habit scarecrows develop into environment scarecrows. Secondary scarecrows correspond to the scarecrow norm. Determined scarecrows and undetermined scarecrows carry on a debate, the outcome of which neither Matern, the stranger below, nor Brauxel the mine-wise director, with dog and foreman, is inclined to wait for; for in the twentieth stall all ideological differences are argued out: a scarecrow controversy which Matern is able to follow, because a similar muddle prevails inside him. Here as in Matern’s interior the question is: “Is there a hell? Or is hell already on earth? Do scarecrows go to heaven? Is the scarecrow descended from the angels, or were there scarecrows before the angels were conceived of? Are scarecrows themselves angels? Did the angels or the scarecrows invent the bird? Is there a God, or is God the first scarecrow? If man was created in God’s image and the scarecrow in the image of man, is the scarecrow not the image and likeness of God?”—Oh, Matern would like to say yes to every question, he would like to hear a dozen more questions forthwith and to answer them all in the affirmative: “Are all scarecrows equal? Or are there elite scarecrows? Are scarecrows the property of the people? Or is every peasant entitled to claim scarecrow ownership? Of what race are scarecrows members? Is a Germanic scarecrow superior to a Slavic scarecrow? Is a German scarecrow allowed to buy from a Jewish one? Don’t Jews lack the gift? Is a Semitic scarecrow even conceivable? Scarecrow sheeny, scarecrow sheeny!” And once again Matern escapes to the gallery; it asks no questions which he must answer blindly, all in the affirmative.

  Soothingly, as though director and foreman wished to bandage the exhausted visitor’s wounds, the twenty-first stall opens up to him: a feast for the eyes, to be contemplated in silence. Here the turning points in history are scarecrowified. Degraded yet dynamic, scarecrow history unfolds in its proper order, reciting dates, defenestrations, and peace treaties. After caustic bath and moth feast, old-time brooch and Wellington hat, Stuart collar and rakish sombrero, Dalmatic and two-cornered seafarer’s hat embody fateful hours and years of destiny. They revolve and bow according to the fashion. Winged words—here Guelf, here Ghibelline!—Under my rule every man can save his soul according to his own lights… Give me four years’ time…! occupy the air and are replaced by others. And all the striking poses, still or in pantomime: The bloodbath at Verden. The victory on the Lechfeld. Canossa. Young Konradin rides and rides. Gothic madonnas make no attempt to economize on drapery. Sable predominates when the council of Electors is established. Who is stepping on the fathoms-long train of that houppelande? Hussites and Turks influence customs. Knights and rust mate. Splendor-loving Burgundy contributes red, brocade, and silk tents lined with velvet. But when codpieces swell and braguettes can scarcely contain their exuberant contents, the monk nails his theses to the door. O Hapsburg lip casting its shadow on a century! Bundschuh goes round, scratching pictures from walls. But Maximilian tolerates slit doublets, jerkins, and low-crowned caps bigger than haloes. Above the Spanish black stand foam-born and thrice-starched ruffs. The rapier replaces the broadsword and ushers in the Thirty Years’ War, which whimsically modifies the styles. Outlandish plumes, leather jerkins, and top boots move into winter quarters here and there. And no sooner have the Wars of Succession designed the full-bottomed periwig than the three-cornered hat, in the course of three Silesian wars, becomes more and more severe. But bag wig, baigneuse, and trompeuse are no safeguard against scissors-grinders and sansculottes: heads must fall. Represented in a striking mobile in the twenty-first stall. And yet, for all its discolored Bourbon white, the Directoire hatches the flowery Restoration. The Congress dances in split skirts and calf-pinching nankeen. The swallowtail survives the censorship and the riotous days of March. The men of the Paulskirche speak into their top hats. To the strains of the Yorck March, the Düppeln redoubts are scaled. The Ems Dispatch, teacher’s pet of all history teachers. Bismarck resigns in a cape. In frock coats enter: Caprivi, Hoh
enlohe, and Bülow. The Kulturkampf, the Triple Alliance, and the Herero upris ing yield three color-saturated images. And don’t forget to mention the red dolman of the Zieten Hussars at Mars-la-Tour. And then in moth-degraded Balkan environment shots are fired. Victory bells are sounded. That little river is the Marne. Steel helmets replace spiked helmets. The gas mask has come to stay. In wartime crinoline and high boots, the Kaiser leaves for Holland, because of the dagger thrust from the rear. Whereupon cockadeless soldiers’ councils. Kapp makes his putsch. Spartacus rises up. Paper money crackles. The Stresemann suit votes for the Enabling Act. Torchlight parades. Books burn. Brown predominates. A November tableau: a kaftan stuffed with straw. Then fancy-dress balls. Then prison stripes. Then army boots, special communiqué’s, Winter Aid, earmuffs, snow hoods, camouflage uniforms, special communiqués … And in the end the radio symphony orchestra in its brown work clothes plays something from Götterdämmerung. That is always appropriate, a leit- and murder motive that flits like a spook through the entire history, imaged and resurrected in scare crows, which fills the twenty-first stall.

  Thereupon Matern, the stranger below, bares his head and with company-owned scarf dries the beads from his scalp. Even in his schooldays, historical dates dropped from his book to the floor and vanished in cracks. Only his family history finds him in command of figures; but here scarecrows do not mime regional Materniads, here the war of investitures and Counterreformation are enacted; mechanically and by means of fist-size electric motors negotiations are carried on: the Peace of Westphalia; in scarecrow fashion assemble those who—when, where, with whom, against whom, without England—voice grievances, make proclamations, put under ban, in brief make history; appropriately costumed from turning point to turning point.

  And when the corny round begins anew, flits across the Lechfeld to Canossa, and makes the young Hohenstaufen scarecrow ride again, the stranger is unable to behead his ever-ready comment: “A hell! This is indeed a hell!”

  And he has similarly infernal words at his command when with dog they leave the twenty-second stall, which, made to look like the floor of a stock exchange, seems to be too small for the investing, market-conquering, and prosperity-creating potential leaders. The mere sight of scarecrow-nimble trust formation, the acoustic charm of slight market fluctuations, the board of directors meeting raised to monumental stature wring from Matern the unminerly cry: “This is hell. Hell AG.”

  He is no more loquacious when discharged by the twenty-third stall, which, fifty feet in height, houses, between over hanging salt and underlying salt, a highly acrobatic discipline that calls itself “internal emigration.” One might suppose that only scarecrows could knot themselves so inextricably, that only scarecrows would have the power to crawl into their own viscera, that scarecrows alone could give the subjunctive body within and clothing without. But since—according to the statutes—the scarecrow mirrors the image of man, there must be similar walking subjunctives on the sunlit surface of the earth.

  The stranger below has loaded his voice with scorn: “Your hell hasn’t forgotten anybody. Not even the ichneumon.”

  And Brauxel, the director, replies with shadow-casting ebony cane: “What can we do? The demand is great. The catalogues we distribute internationally are remarkable for their completeness. We have no remainders. The twenty-third stall is especially vital to our export program. People still emigrate internally. It’s warm inside, you know your way around, there’s nobody to bother you.”

  But though equally double-jointed, the goings-on are less sedentary in the twenty-fourth stall, the stall of the degraded opportunists. Here reaction speed is tested. At regular intervals, lamps hanging from the roof, not unlike the traffic lights of the upper world, flash sharp colors and political symbols: and naked scarecrows, whose inborn mechanism hangs unconcealed within their skeletons, have to change their rags at high speed under the prodding of the second hand and make parts in their caustic-degraded hair: for a time the hairdo was divided on the left side; now the part is worn on the right; shortly thereafter a part in the middle becomes the fashion; and every shading: half-left, half-right, and hairdo without any part at all can also, or might, be in demand.

  This act amuses Matern—“What diabolical fun!”—all the more so as his yellow-varnished hard hat protects a skull, the forehead of which has been considerably heightened by the raging succession of opinions characteristic of conditions above ground, until with the help of the fair sex, as Matern has to admit, the whole meadow refuses to grow. The stranger is deeply relieved at the thought that no one will ever again be able to make him change his hairdo, to shift his part in accordance with a trend. “If you have rehearsed still other farces, I shall gladly look upon hell as a play house.”

  Matern is beginning to feel at home below ground. But Wernicke, the foreman, raises his buzzing carbide lamp. On the twenty-five-hundred-foot level, he has only one horror play left—in the twenty-fifth stall. This virtually plotless one-acter, which under the title Atomic Particularities has been on the program since potash-mining days, stifles Matern’s high spirits at once, although the words of a classical poet provide the background for the silent action. What above ground is called absurd has the taste of reality below; separate members act independently. Jumping heads, for whose particularity even a neck was too much, are unable to scratch themselves. In short: each of the items that make the body a composite structure lives on independently. Arm and leg, hand and torso pose to an accompaniment of high-sounding words which, ordinarily spoken in front of the footlights, are here recited behind the curtain: “O God, O God! This marriage is terrible, but eternal.” “Welcome, my worthy friends. What important business brings you all to me?” “But soon I will come among you and hold terrible muster.”

  In Schiller, to be sure, there is the parenthetical instruction: “They exit trembling.” But these obstinate scarecrow fragments are long-playing mimes, which never exit. An inexhaustible repertory of quotations permits of solitary genuflections. Solo hands speak for themselves. Heads heaped up like chunks of rock salt lament in chorus: “No greater sorrow than to recall happy days in a time of misery.”

  During a brief descent—with a double stroke of the bell, the trammer announces the pit bottom, where lies the fill level and hence also the hope that hell may be exhausted and ascent decided upon—Matern, wedged into the cage between director and foreman with dog, is informed that the mobile scarecrow fragments he has just seen have recently been in great demand, especially in the Argentine and in Canada, where the wide expanse of the wheatfields necessitates echeloned scarecrows.

  And as the three of them with dog stand on the twenty-eight-hundred-foot level, the director gives Wernicke the cue for the lines introducing the final phase of the tour of inspection, and the foreman complies: “We have followed the stages of production on the three upper levels and have witnessed the various kinds of degradation as well as the assembly process. We have tried to make it clear that all the disciplines, from the athletic to the atomic-particular, are based upon the three central motives. We still have to show how the scarecrows are familiarized with the tasks they will have to perform on the surface. In the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh, and twenty-eighth stalls we shall witness object lessons, tests from which no scarecrow produced by Brauxel & Co. has ever been exempted.”

  “That is cruelty to animals,” says Matern even before the twenty-sixth stall is opened. “Leave the animals in peace,” he shouts up at the roof when he is compelled to hear that sparrows, which Brauxel calls “our dear, unassuming citizens of the world,” cannot stop chirping even below ground.

  And the director says: “Here our export scarecrows are made acquainted with sparrows and with the varieties of wheat that they will soon have to guard against the depredations of bkds. Each scarecrow to be tested—here a collection of Zealand rye scarecrows, whose sphere of action will be southwestern South Africa—is expected to protect a limited radius of attraction, rendered alluring by rye se
ed, from the incursion of test sparrows. In the course of this shift, as I see, still other collections are being tested: twelve assortments of Odessa scarecrows, which will have to prove their mettle over South Russian Girka wheat and Ukrainian Sandomir wheat. In addition our La Plata scarecrows, very much in demand, which have helped the Argentines to achieve record wheat harvests. Further, eight assortments of Kansas scarecrows will be familiarized with the protection of the Kubanka variety, a summer wheat which, I might add, is also grown in South Dakota. Smaller lots of wheat scarecrows will have to keep sparrows at a distance from Polish Sandomirka and from the bearded and frost-resistant Banat wheat. Here as in the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth stalls, we shall test collections that are in demand for two-rowed Poltava barley, for Northern French brewer’s barley, Scandinavian panicled oats, Moldavian corn, Italian cinquantino corn, and the North American and Soviet varieties of corn, grown in southern Russia and the Mississippi lowlands. While in this stall only sparrows are to be excluded from the radius of attraction, in the next stall birds of the pigeon family, especially rock pigeons, which also prey on rape seed, flax seed, and peas, are applied to the export scarecrows to be tested. Occasionally crows, daws, and meadowlarks are admitted as test material, while in the twenty-eighth stall thrushes and blackbirds test our orchard scarecrows and starlings our vineyard scarecrows.—But we can set the stranger’s mind at rest: all of our test birds, from the sparrows to the rock pigeons, finches, larks, and starlings, have been brought down from the surface with the approval of the authorities. The S.P.C.A. of Hanover and Hildesheim inspects our testing stalls every three months. We are not unfriendly to birds. We co-operate with them. Our scarecrows have the utmost contempt for air rifles, lime twigs, and bird netting. Indeed, I am proud to say that Brauxel & Co. has repeatedly and publicly protested against the barbarous catching of song birds by the Italians. Our success on all continents, our Ohio and Maryland scarecrows, our Siberian Urtoba scarecrows, our scarecrows in Canadian Manitoba wheat, our rice scarecrows, which protect Javanese rice and the Italian ostiglione variety grown near Mantua, our corn scarecrows, which have helped Soviet corn harvests to approach the records set in America, all our scarecrows, whether they protect native rye, Moravian Hanna barley, the Milton oats of Minnesota, the celebrated Bordeaux wheat, the rice paddies of India, the Cuzco corn of southern Peru, or Chinese millet and Scottish buckwheat from the depredations of birds, all the products of Brauxel & Co. without exception are in harmony with nature; they themselves are nature: crows and scarecrows form a harmony; indeed, were it not for the scarecrow, there would be no crows; and both, crow and scarecrow—created by the same God—contribute to solving the mounting problem of feeding the world. The bird pecks the larvae of the corn fly, the black corn borer, and the malignant wild mustard seed, while over the ripening corn the scarecrow turns off all bird song, the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of sparrows, and banishes the starlings from vineyards, the blackbirds and thrushes from cherry trees.”