The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  So this is supposedly who I was. And not the recurring runaway monk, kitchen boy, and bed companion? The Flounder must know. And if Margret hadn’t on every posssible occasion reacted to any mention of fathers and fatherhood with scornful farts, I’d gladly have been her father, I’d have been proud of my prodigious daughter, though all she ever gave me was pity and tripe soup. Anyway, the Flounder advised me to leave her with the pious nuns at Saint Bridget’s as soon as she was weaned from the goat. He did it to help me. But when questioned in court, he gave other reasons.

  “But my esteemed prosecutor and judges, please, please! Mere social sentiment—the desire to help the poor devil—would never have led me to dispense a piece of advice so fraught with consequences. The truth is very different: I wanted to offer the little, but later so lusciously upholstered Margarete the best possible prospect of freedom by sheltering her in a convent. For what would have become of her otherwise? She’d have had to marry some unguilded boilermaker. Doomed to four walls and child raising, she’d have pined away in the Wicker Bastion. The marriage bed would have given her no sensual pleasure but only a dismal push-push, no sooner begun than over. The usual fate in those days. Yes, women had a rough time of it in the so-called age of the Reformation, whether they had to put their pouches at the disposal of Catholic or of Protestant husbands. The only free women were nuns, and possibly the little whores in Pepper-town, because they had organized as efficiently as the nuns; in fact they elected their own abbess—later known disparagingly as ‘the madame.’ It wasn’t the cantankerous married women, kept as they were in a perpetual state of jealousy, who practiced the solidarity which today is rightly demanded at feminist congresses and in feminist pamphlets; no, it was the nuns and whores. Without wishing to meddle in the affairs of the feminist movement, I must ask the High Court, before which I have the honor of being on trial, to concede that an astonishing degree of emancipation prevailed, if not in the brothels of the Middle Ages, then at least in the convents of the Middle Ages. As the career of the nun Margarete Rusch shows, my advice to an ignorant blacksmith gave the female sex access to areas of freedom from which at the present time—let’s face it—it is still—or shall we say once again?—barred.

  “Permit me to cite certain facts in evidence.

  “Margarete Rusch was never the property of any man, but a dozen men or more were obedient to her whim and pleasure. The allegedly so confining rules of her order—claustration, exercises, rule of silence—gave her leisure and enabled her to concentrate her thoughts, undisturbed by the bustle of everyday life. True, she brought two girls into the world—a painful business at the time—but child care never chained Fat Gret to any four walls. No paterfamilias imposed his law on her. No patriarchal thumb held her down. She was no domestic harridan with a bunch of keys jangling at her waist. She was free to exercise her physical and mental powers by cooking, by ordaining menus conducive to the pleasure of the flesh, by contributing, not many, I admit, but all the same a few democratic bright spots to the male-dominated, oligarchic, power-oriented political life of her day. Permit me to remind you of the ‘Statuta Karnkowiana,’ which without Fat Gret’s influence would hardly have granted rights to the guilds.

  “In short, my advice accomplished all that. For if I hadn’t saved the girl by sheltering her in the convent, she would never have grown up to be our Fat Gret. And as for this heavenly bridegroom the nuns were betrothed to, please believe me that the convents of the sixteenth century were free from High Gothic mysticism. Ecstasy was a thing of the past. Very little of the girls’ passion went to the Son of God. Flagellation, barefooted asceticism, hysterical Saint Vitus’s dancing—all completely out of fashion. No Dorothea of Montaus demanding to be immured and die to the flesh. Motivated by earthly considerations, the nuns of Saint Bridget’s knew how to increase their wealth and make use of their power. True, there were nuns’ quarrels and nunnish infighting. But as long as Abbess Margarete Rusch was at the head of the convent, the nuns formed a women’s association that looked upon and practiced sisterly solidarity as the highest virtue. United, they were strong. The Dominicans kept their peace, though the whole town stank with their gossip about Fat Gret and her sinful goings-on.”

  To this harangue Prosecutor Sieglinde Huntscha replied promptly and with striking figures of speech. The Flounder, she contended, was trying to ingratiate himself with his claim to have promoted solidarity among women, though she admitted it could do with some promoting. He had brought forward a model, and what a pretty picture he had painted of that model. But if the truth be known, Margarete Rusch was nothing but a political opportunist. By advising the girl’s father to put her in a convent, he, the Flounder, had been responsible for the cooking nun’s misuse of her freedom. To call a spade a spade, she had simply prostituted herself the whole time. Take her dealings with Ferber. How can you call this nun’s lecherous escapades a mark of emancipation? On the contrary, Abbess Margaret’s alleged freedom was almost identical with the petit-bourgeois liberalism of a middle-class housewife who signs on as a call girl to make a little extra pocket money. In a pinch the sexual behavior of this nun could be characterized as protorevolutionary, although it was strictly self- and body-related, and therefore not transferable to other women and their narrow, dependent lives. At no expense to himself, he, the Flounder, after serving the male cause exclusively for three and a half millennia, was trying to publicize himself as a friend of womankind. But Mother Rusch wouldn’t do as a model. How did nuns’ farts contribute to feminine consciousness raising? And the misuse of the vagina as a chalice in the Christian ceremony of the Lord’s Supper could only be regarded as an example of male perversion. “In sum, what execrable taste! And this I say as an atheist, not because I’m afraid of offending anyone’s religious sensibilities.”

  In conclusion, the prosecutor suggested that a time limit be imposed on the accused Flounder. “We cannot afford to let our Tribunal, whose proceedings millions of oppressed women are following with hope and expectation, be misused for purposes of patriarchal propaganda.”

  The court-appointed defense counsel opposed this measure on formal juridical grounds. And a majority of the associate judges were unwilling to anticipate the verdict. The associate judge Ulla Witzlaff, ordinarily rather slow and often behindhand in her reactions, was positively outspoken: “Give him a fair chance. Can it be in our interest to take over the notorious practices of male class justice?”

  And so—over the prosecutor’s objection—all four of the affidavits that the Flounder through his counsel had commissioned from recognized historians were read.

  The first affidavit characterized the activity of the medieval witches as a desperate attempt at female emancipation. A statistical evaluation of the fifteenth-century witch trials showed a surprisingly high percentage of nuns among witches burned at the stake, namely, 32.7 percent, whereas by the sixteenth century the percentage had fallen to 8 percent. The meager data available for the fourteenth century did not lend themselves to statistical treatment.

  The second affidavit showed why conventual witchcraft had diminished in the century of the Reformation. An increase in the number of lay witches was symptomatic of the distress prevailing among uncloistered women, especially those of the artisan class. In convents, which on the surface had preserved their fidelity to the Catholic Church, the Reformation seems to have been a force for emancipation, since it opened the eyes of the nuns to earthly matters and fostered a new type of vigorous, hard-working, shrewd, and enlightened nun. Numerous lay women, on the other hand, could escape only into religious mania or eccentric witchcraft. A list of sources followed.

  The third affidavit took up the political influence of the convents in the Middle Ages, under such headings as “The Convent Kitchen as Power Center,” “The Convents and Their Kitchens as the Scene of Peace Negotiations,” “Conspiracies and Debauches.” The convent, it stated, had proved its worth as an institution where at least at times the woman’s shortfall could be mad
e good.

  The fourth affidavit dealt with the broadening of the nunnish horizon since the discovery of the New World by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and others. In particular, it confirmed the Flounder’s contention that Abbess Margarete Rusch had in 1549 married her elder daughter, Hedwig, for trophopolitical reasons to a Portuguese merchant, who later established a trading post on the Malabar Coast of India. This merchant had solemnly undertaken to supply his mother-in-law twice annually with shipments of spices—pepper, cloves, ginger, cardamom. The author of the affidavit had no doubt that Fat Gret was in correspondence with the New World and that Portuguese merchantmen frequented the port of Danzig from the mid-sixteenth century on.

  Then the Flounder spoke again. Modestly, barely exploiting the success of the affidavits, he spoke of his small part in emancipating and raising the consciousness of the young novice, then kitchen nun, and later abbess Margarete Rusch. He brushed in a picture of Fat Gret, exaggerating the comic aspect. Frivolous anecdotes alternated with grotesque episodes: how when Preacher Hegge incited the populace to smash images, she forced him to eat every crumb of a Saint Nicholas she had made of puff pastry stuffed with sausages; how when patrician Ferber’s pecker hung its head, she made it stand up straight by piling silver guldens and Brabant talers into paradigmatically vertical towers; how after burning down the Oliva Monastery she fried pancakes for the poor over the monastic embers; how Fat Gret plucked geese while riding into the camp of King Stephen Batory on the back of a sow. And more tales, which made the public laugh, for after a short interruption—caused by the Advisory Council, which wanted to dissolve itself—the public had been readmitted.

  Thus encouraged, the Flounder went on: “You see, dear ladies, who have managed to smile after all: that’s the sort of woman the cooking nun Margret was, heart-warmingly cheerful, because it was in nobody’s power to oppress her. We might think of her as a sister of the parish priest of Meudon, François Rabelais, not only because they were the same age, but more because she shared his enlightened way of life. Ah, if only he had known her! I’m sure he would have conceived a female companion piece (and a worthy one) to Gargantua in the form of Fat Gret, and that she, too, would have grown into a stout volume. For literature is short on comic female protagonists. Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Falstaff and Oskar Matzerath—it’s always a man who makes comic capital of our despair, while the ladies perish in unrelieved tragedy. Mary Stuart or Electra, Agnes Bernauer or Nora, all are in love with their tragedy. Or they pine and sigh over their sentimentalities. Or madness drives them to the moors. Or sin gnaws at them. Or a masculine power-hunger is their undoing—take Lady Macbeth. Utterly devoid of humor, they are handmaidens of suffering: saint, whore, witch, or all three at once. Or trouble turns them to stone, they are hardened and embittered, a wordless plaint. Sometimes their author allows them to go off their rockers like Ophelia and babble incoherent verses. Only the ‘grotesque old crone,’ far removed from all pleasures of the flesh, and the flighty chambermaid might be cited as examples of the female humor that is supposed to be ‘imperishable.’ But whether old and grotesque or young and flighty, only minor roles fall to woman’s wit. And yet we need this comic female protagonist, we need her desperately! And the same goes for the movies. Why should it always be the men, the Charlie Chaplins or the Laurels and Hardys, who are privileged to supply the comic aspect of tragedy. I call upon you, dear ladies, to stage at long last the great feminine comedy. Let the woman comic triumph. Give the knight of the mournful countenance a woman’s skirt and let her battle the windmills of male prejudice. I offer you the cooking nun Margarete Rusch, Fat Gret. Her laughter gave women scope, it gave them freedom in which humor—and now women’s as well as men’s—could explode its firecrackers and unleash its obscenities!”

  Possibly the Flounder expected friendly applause or at least half-amused agreement. But his speech was followed by silence, then by throat clearing. Finally the prosecutor, more or less as an aside, as though preferring to minimize an unfortunate incident, said: “Doesn’t it strike you as poor taste, defendant Flounder, to come here and crack literary jokes at the expense of the world’s oppressed women? Yes, yes, we know the so-called lords of creation find our fight for equal rights amusing. We’re used to that. But to us it is serious, not deadly so but objectively. We cannot sit idle while Electra or Nora is disparaged as just another tragic figure. There has been no shortage of quixotic women. Just stop offering us roles. Pretty soon you’ll be wanting to sell us a female Dr. Faustus, or a Mephista in sparkling evening dress. But let’s get back to the point! Considered in the light of her times, your cooking nun is important to us; we can’t let you make her ridiculous with your distortions. Look. Margarete Rusch deliberately killed two men in execution of a long-matured plan. It was largely the fault of those two men that her father, the blacksmith Peter Rusch, had been sentenced to death on April 29, 1526, and beheaded. Three years later, in the course of coitus, she smothered Eberhard Ferber, the former mayor of Danzig, who had retired after the judicial murder. Margarete Rusch was then thirty, the same age as the prelate Kaspar Jeschke, abbot of Oliva Monastery, whom she fattened to death fifty-three years later. That, Mr. Flounder, is your oh-so-comical Fat Gret, your witty nun, your laughter-loving mountain of fat. No, she was a woman of serious and unflagging purpose. A woman who knew how to hate her enemies. And what, I ask, was your part in these two politically necessary acts? Did you prod Margarete Rusch’s heroic memory with your voluble advice? We demand the truth. And nothing but the truth. No escaping into comedy.”

  Here the Flounder admitted that he had advised patrician Ferber and Abbot Jeschke as well. True—the Flounder assured the court—Ferber hadn’t taken his advice. In his lecherous old age he had put himself in Fat Gret’s power. Nor had the Flounder’s advice prevailed on Abbot Jeschke. But it wasn’t lust that had chained the old man to the aged Margarete; no, it was the gluttony and love of pepper so widespread at the time.

  “Still,” said the Flounder, “I did manage in ’77 to persuade the old fool to escape, after telling him they had set fire to his monastery. But his gluttony—and he knew the nun had resolved to fatten him to death—was beyond the best-intentioned advice. I tried to prevent both murders, because I had no wish to see Margarete Rusch’s impressive contribution to democratic progress darkened by this long-drawn-out vengeance. She worked hard and well—though in vain—for the powerless guilds. By guile and cookery she obtained a liberal peace from King Stephen Batory. And not least: for the cloistered nuns of the sixteenth century she won freedoms that even today seem worth striving for. On the other hand, she accomplished nothing by encompassing the deaths of two old men. The only worthwhile action is one that emancipates! And if, as I hope, the High Court wishes with this trial to help oppressed womanhood, I urge you to take note—even if you do not follow it—of my experienced advice. For aren’t we all interested in seeing the shortfall of womankind at long last made good?”

  The Flounder’s plea was granted. And so one can read in the minutes of the debate on the case of Margarete Rusch how the accused Flounder advised the international women’s movement to establish throughout the world feminist convents with exclusively earthly aims, so creating an economically powerful counterweight to the Männerbünde that are now everywhere dominant. Thus and thus alone, he declared, in a state of economic and sexual independence, would women be able to revive their forgotten solidarity and through it to usher in equality between the sexes. That and that alone would clarify the ambivalent structures of the feminine consciousness. The shortfall specific to the female sex would be overcome. And the consequences would be very funny.

  What cannot be found in the minutes is that immediately after this session several members of the public seem to have applied for jobs as abbesses. The Tribunal adjourned.

  Yes, yes, Ilsebill, suppose it happened; suppose first in ten, then in a hundred, then in a thousand places from Swabia to Holstein, feminist convents sprang up, in which, say, fiv
e hundred thousand organized women rejected marriage and with it male-organized sexual intercourse; and suppose that in these convents you women were able to liberate yourselves in this respect and shake off your thousand-year-old dependence on male property rights and patriarchal customs, on the whims of the pecker, on household money, fashion trends, and in general on male high pressure; and suppose you succeeded, before you knew it, in creating economic power centers, either by building up a feminist consumer-goods industry or by gaining control of the consumer-goods market, which (though perhaps unwittingly) is bound to be woman-dominated in any case, wouldn’t a first phase of the Flounder’s project of setting up convents on the model exemplified by Margarete Rusch, abbess of Saint Bridget’s, as counterpoles to the dominant male groups of today, have been realized?

  For suppose, Ilsebill, that feminine solidarity should become the rule in more and more feminist convents and conventual workshops, so that woman can no longer be played off against woman in accordance with the rites of sexual competition or on the basis of a usually doll-like ideal of beauty such as men keep dreaming up in their need to cloak the unchanging dependency of women in ever-new disguises; suppose, Ilsebill, there were feminist convents all over the world and that these convents wielded economic power; suppose that traditional patriarchal marriage were observed only by a vanishing minority of the population, that children engendered by free choice but without obligation or paternity claims grew to adulthood in these convents, and that female reason, possibly abetted by a male intelligence aware of its own inadequacy, ushered in a new, nunnish matriarchy, and consequently that male-dated history would stop happening, that there would be no more wars, that male ambition and progress mania would stop sending rockets and super-rockets out into mindless cosmic space, that commodities would stop terrorizing mankind, that people would lose their fear of being inferior to one another, that from this time on no one would want to possess anyone, that the battle of the sexes, that time-honored drama, would lose its audience, that only tenderness would increase, that there would be no victors in bed, that the very meaning of victory would be forgotten, and that time would no longer be counted; suppose, Ilsebill, that all this were possible, calculable, and demonstrable; suppose computers (superfluous at a later stage) could be programmed to spit out this New Order; suppose the Women’s Tribunal gave its wholehearted support to the Flounder who was only yesterday in the dock, and took his fish-mouthed advice; suppose, I repeat, that feminist convents, memorials to the abbess Margarete Rusch, sprang up on every hand, and that you (though more than two months pregnant—by me) were to enter such a convent tomorrow in order to be free, liberated, no longer subjugated or possessed by me or anyone else, would you then—supposing all this came to pass—let me, simply as a man, drop in on you for a little while?