by Günter Grass
I had already decided to postpone my visit to the chocolate factory, to give them a wide berth and make for home by way of the overpass and the Aktien Brewery, when Oskar heard an exchange of whistle signals. One group was signaling from the overpass. There was no room for doubt: this troop movement was for my benefit.
I had seen my pursuers, but the hunt had not yet begun. In such situations one tends to enumerate the remaining possibilities of escape with great relish and thoroughness: Oskar might have cried out for Mama and Papa. I might have summoned heaven knows whom, a policeman maybe, on my drum. My stature would assuredly have won me grown-up support, but even Oskar had his principles and occasionally stuck to them. And so I resolved to do without the help of any policemen or other adults who might be within earshot. Spurred by curiosity and flattered at so much attention, I decided to let things take their course and did the stupidest thing imaginable: I went looking for a hole in the tarred fence surrounding the chocolate factory. I found none. Slowly and nonchalantly, the young bandits converged: from the car-stop shelter, from under the trees on the avenue, and at length from the overpass. Oskar moved along the fence, still looking for that hole. They gave me just the time I needed to find the place where the plank was missing. But when I squeezed through, tearing my pants in the process, there were four of these characters in windbreakers on the other side, waiting for me with their hands in the pockets of their ski pants.
Recognizing that nothing could be done about my situation, I ran my hands over my pants, looking for the tear. It was in the seat. I measured it with outspread fingers, found it annoyingly large but put on a show of indifference, and before looking up to face the music, waited until all the boys from the car stop, the avenue, and the overpass had climbed over the fence, for they were too big to squeeze through the gap.
This was in the last days of August. From time to time the moon hid behind a cloud. I counted about twenty of these young fellows. The youngest were fourteen, the oldest sixteen, almost seventeen. The summer of ‘44 was hot and dry. Four of the larger boys had on Air Force Auxiliary uniforms. It was a good cherry year, I remember. They stood round Oskar in small groups, talked in an undertone, using a jargon that I made no effort to understand. They gave each other weird names, only a few of which I bothered to take note of. A little fifteen-year-old with rather misty doe’s eyes was addressed, I recall, as Ripper and occasionally as Bouncer. The one beside him was Putty. The smallest, though surely not the youngest, with a protruding upper lip and a lisp, was called Firestealer. One of the Air Force Auxiliaries was addressed as Mister and another, very aptly, as Soup Chicken. There were also historical names such as Lionheart and Bluebeard—Bluebeard had the look of a milksop—and old friends of mine like Totila and Teja. Two of them even had the impudence to call themselves Belisarius and Narses. The leader was a sixteen-year-old named Störtebeker after the celebrated pirate. He had on a genuine velours hat with the crown battered in to look like a duck pond, and a raincoat that was too long for him.
No one paid any attention to Oskar; they were trying to wear him down with suspense. Half-amused and half-annoyed at myself for bothering with these adolescent Romantics, I sat wearily down on my drum, studied the moon, which was just about full, and tried to dispatch a part of my thoughts to the Church of the Sacred Heart.
Just today He might have drummed and said a word or two. And here I was, sitting in the yard of the Baltic Chocolate Factory, wasting my time with cops and robbers. Maybe He was waiting for me, maybe after a brief introduction on the drum. He was planning to open His mouth again, to elaborate on the ways of imitating Christ. Disappointed at my failure to show up. He was probably, at this very moment, lifting His eyebrows in that arrogant way of His. What would Jesus think of these young scamps? What could Oskar, his likeness, his disciple and vicar, be expected to do with this horde? Could he have addressed the words of Jesus: “Suffer little children to come unto me!” to a gang of young hoodlums calling themselves Putty, Bluebeard, Firestealer, and Störtebeker?
Störtebeker approached, accompanied by Firestealer, his right hand. Störtebeker: “Stand up!”
Oskar’s eyes were still on the moon, his thoughts by the left side-altar of the Church of the Sacred Heart. He did not stand up, and Firestealer, at a signal from Störtebeker, kicked the drum out from under me.
Rising for want of anything to sit on, I put the drum under my smock to protect it against further damage.
Nice-looking boy, this Störtebeker, Oskar thought. The eyes are a bit too deep-set and close together, but there’s life and imagination in the cut of his mouth.
“Where are you from?”
So they were going to question me. Displeased at this overture, I turned back to the moon, thinking to myself—the moon doesn’t seem to care what one thinks—that it looked like a drum, and smiled at my harmless megalomania. “He’s got a grin on his face, Störtebeker.” Firestealer looked me over and suggested an activity that he called “dusting”. Others in the background, pimple-faced Lionheart, Mister, Bouncer, and Putty were also in favor of dusting.
Still on the moon, I mentally spelled out the word “dusting”. A nice word, but it was sure to stand for something unpleasant. Störtebeker asserted his authority: “I’m the one that says who’s going to be dusted around here and when.” Then he addressed me: “We’ve been seeing quite a lot of you in Bahnhofstrasse. How come? Where you been?”
Two questions at once. Oskar would have to give at least one answer if he was to remain master of the situation. I turned away from the moon, faced him with my blue persuasive eyes, and said calmly: “Church.”
From behind Störtebeker’s raincoat came commentaries on my answer. Firestealer figured out that by church I meant Sacred Heart.
“What’s your name?”
An inevitable question, a question that arises wherever man meets man and that plays a vital role in human conversation. It provides the substance of whole plays, even operas—Lohengrin, for instance.
I waited for the moon to pass between two clouds, let the sheen in my eyes work on Störtebeker for the time it takes to eat three spoonfuls of soup. Then I spoke, intent on the effect, named myself—what would I have got but a laugh if I had owned to the name of Oskar? “My name is Jesus,” I said. A long silence ensued. Finally Firestealer cleared his throat: “We’ll have to dust him after all, chief.”
This time Firestealer met with no opposition; with a snap of his fingers, Störtebeker gave his permission, and Firestealer seized me, dug his knuckles into my arm just above the elbow, and gouged, producing a hot, painful sensation, until Störtebeker snapped his fingers again as a sign to stop—so that was dusting!
“Well now, what is your name?” The chief in the velours hat gave himself an air of boredom, did a little shadow boxing, which made the long sleeves of his raincoat slide up to his elbows, and held up his wristwatch in the moonlight. “You’ve got one minute to think it over,” he whispered. “Then I give the boys the green light.”
Oskar had a whole minute in which to study the moon with impunity, to look for a solution among the craters, to reconsider his idea of stepping into Christ’s shoes. This green light talk was not to my liking, and I certainly was not going to let any half-baked hoodlums put me on a schedule. I waited about thirty-five seconds; then Oskar said: “I am Jesus.”
What happened next was pretty good, but I can’t say I planned it. Immediately after my second announcement that I was Jesus, before Störtebeker could snap his fingers or Firestealer could dust, the air-raid sirens let loose.
“… Jesus,” said Oskar and took a breath. Thereupon my identity was confirmed, successively, by the sirens at the nearby airfield, the siren on the main building of the Hochstriess Infantry Barracks, the siren on the roof of Horst-Wessel High School, the siren on Stemfeld’s Department Store, and far in the distance, from the direction of the Hindenburg-Allee, the siren of the Engineering School. It was some time before all the sirens in the suburb, li
ke a choir of iron-lunged, overenthusiastic archangels, took up my glad tidings, made the night rise and fall, made dreams flare up and crash, crept into the ears of the sleeping population, and transformed the cold, disinterested moon into a merciless light that there was no way to black out.
Oskar knew that the alarm was on his side; not so Störtebeker, the sirens made him nervous. For some of his henchmen the alarm was a call to duty. The four Air Force Auxiliaries had to climb the fence, rush back to their batteries between the car barn and the airfield, and help man the 88’s. Three others, including Belisarius, were wardens at the Conradinum. Störtebeker managed to keep his hold on the rest, some fifteen of them. Since nothing more was doing in the sky, he went on questioning me: “Very well, if my ears do not deceive me, you are Jesus. O.K. One more question: that trick of yours with the street lights and window-panes, how do you do it? You’d better come clean. We know all about it.”
Of course they didn’t know a thing. They had witnessed one or two of my vocal triumphs and that was that. Oskar told himself that he must not be too severe in his appraisal of these junior hoodlums, or juvenile delinquents as we should call them today. Their way of doing things was amateurish, too eager, too direct, but boys will be boys; I was determined to be patient with them. So these were the notorious Dusters that everybody had been talking about for the last few weeks, the gang that the police and several Hitler Youth patrols had been trying to track down. As it later turned out, they were schoolboys, students at the Conradinum, the Petri and Horst-Wessel High Schools. There was a second group of Dusters in Neufahrwasser, led by high school students but made up chiefly of apprentices at the Schichau shipyards and the railroad car factory. The two groups worked separately, joining forces only for night expeditions to the Steffens-Park and Hindenburg-Allee, where they would waylay leaders of the League of German Girls on their way home after training sessions. Friction between the groups was avoided; their territories were marked out with precision, and Störtebeker looked upon the leader of the Neufahrwasser group more as a friend than a rival. The Dusters were against everything. They raided the offices of the Hitler Youth, attacked soldiers found necking in the parks to strip them of their medals and insignia of rank, and with the help of their members among the Air Force Auxiliaries stole arms, ammunition, and gasoline from the AA batteries. But their main project, which they had been maturing ever since their inception, was an all-out attack on the Rationing Office.
At the time Oskar knew nothing about the Dusters, their organization or plans, but he was feeling low and forsaken, and he thought these young men might give him a sense of security, a sense of belonging somewhere. Despite the difference in our ages—I would soon be twenty—I already considered myself secretly as one of them. Why, I said to myself, shouldn’t you give them a sample of your art? The young are always eager to learn. You yourself were fifteen or sixteen once. Set them an example, show them your accomplishments. They will look up to you. Maybe they will choose you as their leader. Now at last you will be able to exert influence, to bring your intelligence and experience to bear; this is your chance to heed your vocation, to gather disciples and walk in the footsteps of Christ.
Perhaps Störtebeker suspected that there was thought behind my thoughtfulness. He gave me time to think, and I was grateful to him for that. A moonlit night toward the end of August. Slightly cloudy. Air-raid alarm. Two or three searchlights on the coast. Maybe a reconnaissance plane. Paris was just being evacuated. Facing me the front, rich in windows, of the Baltic Chocolate Factory. After a long retreat, Army Group Center had dug in on the Vistula. Baltic was no longer working for the retail market, its whole output went to the Air Force. Oskar was having to get used to the idea of General Patton’s soldiers strolling beneath the Eiffel Tower in American uniforms. In response to this painful thought—ah, the happy hours with Roswitha!—Oskar lifted a drumstick. Störtebeker noticed my gesture, his eye followed my drumstick to the chocolate factory. While in broad daylight the Japanese were being cleaned out of some Pacific island, on our side of the globe the moon was shining on the windows of a chocolate factory. And to all those who had ears to hear, Oskar said: “The voice of Jesus will now demolish some glass.”
Before I had disposed of the first three panes, I heard the buzzing of a fly far above me. While two more panes were surrendering their share of moonlight, I thought: that fly must be dying or it wouldn’t buzz so loud. Thereupon I blackened the rest of the windows on the top floor. Awfully pale, those searchlight beams, I said to myself before expelling the reflected lights—probably from the battery near Camp Narvik—from several first– and second-floor windows. The coastal batteries fired, then I finished off the second floor. A moment later the batteries at Altschottland, Pelonken, and Schellmühl let loose. Three ground-floor windows, then the pursuit planes took off and flew low over the factory. Before I had finished off the ground floor, the AA suspended fire to let the pursuit planes take care of a four-motored bomber that was receiving the attentions of three searchlights at once over Oliva.
At first Oskar feared the spectacular efforts of the antiaircraft batteries might distract my new friends’ attention. My work done, I was overjoyed to see them all gaping at my alterations in the chocolate factory. Even when applause and cries of “Bravo” rose up from nearby Hohenfriedberger-Weg as from a theater, because the bomber had been hit and could be seen falling in flames over Jeschkenthal Forest, only a few members of the gang, among then Putty, looked away from the unglassed factory. Neither Störtebeker nor Firestealer, and it was they who mattered, showed any interest in the bomber.
Once more the heavens were bare, except for the moon and the small-fry stars. The pursuit planes landed. Far in the distance fire engines could be heard. Störtebeker turned, showing me the contemptuous curve of his mouth, and put up his fists, disengaging his wristwatch from the long sleeve of his raincoat. Taking off the watch, he handed it to me without a word. Then he sighed and tried to say something, but had to wait for the all-clear signal to die down. At last, amid the applause of his henchmen, he got the words out: “O.K., Jesus. If you feel like it, you’re in. We’re the Dusters if that means anything to you.”
Oskar weighed the wristwatch in his hand, a cute little thing with a luminous dial and hands indicating twenty-three minutes after midnight, and handed it to Firestealer. Firestealer cast a questioning look at his boss. Störtebeker nodded his consent. Shifting his drum to a comfortable position for the homeward march, Oskar said: “Jesus will lead you. Follow Him.”
The Christmas Play
There was a good deal of talk in those days about secret weapons and final victory. We, the Dusters, discussed neither one, but we had the secret weapon.
Oskar’s first move after taking over the leadership of the thirty to forty members of the gang was to have Störtebeker introduce me to the leader of the Neufahrwasser outfit. Moorkähne, a sixteen-year-old with a limp, was the son of an official at the Neufahrwasser pilot office; his physical defect—his right leg was almost an inch shorter than his left—had prevented him from being drafted or taken on as an Air Force Auxiliary. Though a bit ostentatious about his limp, Moorkähne was shy and soft-spoken. There was always an artful smile on his lips, and he was regarded as the best student in the graduating class at the Conradinum. He had every prospect, if the Russian Army should raise no objection, of passing his final examination brilliantly; he was planning to study philosophy.
Like Störtebeker, whose unstinting respect I had won, Moorkähne recognized me as Jesus, first in command of the Dusters. Oskar insisted at once on being shown the storehouse and treasury, for both groups kept their loot in the same place, the spacious cellar of a quiet, fashionable villa on Jeschkenthaler-Wog in Langfuhr. This house, covered with ivy and creepers and separated from the street by a gently sloping meadow, was the abode of Putty’s parents, whose name was Von Puttkamer. Mr. von Puttkamer, a nobleman of Pomeranian, Polish, and Prussian descent and a wearer of the Knight’s C
ross, was off commanding a division in fair France; Mrs. Elisabeth von Puttkamer had been spending the last few months in the Bavarian highlands for reasons of health. Wolfgang von Puttkamer, whom the Dusters called Putty, had been left in charge of the house; as for the elderly, half-deaf maid who ministered to the young gentleman’s needs, she never went below the ground floor, and we never saw her, for we entered the cellar through the laundry room.
In the storeroom were piled canned goods, tobacco, and several bolts of parachute silk. From one of the shelves hung two dozen Army watches, which Putty had orders from Störtebeker to keep running and properly set. Another of his duties was to keep the two tommy guns, the rifle, and the pistols clean. I was shown a bazooka, some machine-gun ammunition, and twenty-five hand grenades. All this and an impressive supply of gasoline in jerrycans was intended for the assault on the Rationing Office. Oskar-Jesus’ first order was: “Bury the arms and gasoline in the garden. Hand over all bolts and firing pins to Jesus. Our weapons are of a different kind.”
When the boys produced a cigar box full of stolen decorations and insignia, I smiled and said they could keep them. But I should have taken away the paratroopers’ knives. Later on they made use of the blades which fitted so neatly into their handles, as though just begging to be used.
Then they brought me the treasury. Oskar ordered a counting and checked it over. The Dusters’ liquid assets amounted to two thousand four hundred and twenty Reichsmarks. This was at the beginning of September, 1944. When, in mid-January, 1945, Koniev and Zhukov broke through on the Vistula, Putty confessed and we were obliged to hand over our treasury to the authorities. Thirty-six thousand Reichsmarks were counted into piles and bundles on the bench of the District Court.
