The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Plenty of plums to dry.

  Gathering mushrooms was worthwhile.

  And leading a cow on a rope, the twirly man came back

  from winter quarters, this time as usual invalided.

  Since Zorndorf he’d had two fingers less,

  after Torgau he’d come home one-eyed, laughing.

  Now after Hochkirch there was a scar on his crown

  that made him dopier than ever.

  But all the same, because she lay still,

  he readied his tool

  to make her—nothing to it—baby girls

  who were named Lisbeth, Annchen, Martha, and Ernestine,

  and lived.

  So that the sweet Lord was good for a prayer again:

  He must have had His reasons for so much suffering.

  He had His cross to bear forever and ever.

  He rewarded toil

  and had so much love, heavenly flour bins full of it… .

  There was lots of kingdom and power in it,

  later a handy rhyme for potato flower—

  and just a grain of hope

  that Stine Trude Lovise were angels by now, and

  getting plenty to eat.

  Ole Fritz

  Patata, potato, tartuffel, pomme de terre, spud … Raleigh or Drake is supposed to have brought them to Europe. But since they come from Peru, it must actually have been Spanish contemporaries of the abbess Margarete Rusch. Shakespeare must have known them as objects of religious awe, for he makes Falstaff say, “Let the skie raine Potatoes!”—though here it needs to be pointed out that Shakespeare was thinking of the sweet potato, a delicacy that was already being sold for high prices when our common potato, like all exotic Solanaceae (tomato, eggplant, et cetera), was still under suspicion, put to the question by the Inquisition, condemned, burned at the stake, and even despised as cattle feed.

  First to plant them were the starving Irish. Parmentier gave them to France, whereupon Queen Marie Antoinette decked herself out with potato blossoms. Count Rumford taught the Bavarians to grow them. And who helped us Prussians?

  Today we eat mealy boiled potatoes, grated raw potatoes, parsley potatoes, or plain potatoes in their jackets with cottage cheese. We know steamed potatoes with onions or in mustard sauce, buttered potatoes, potatoes au gratin, mashed potatoes, potatoes boiled in milk, baked in aluminum foil, old potatoes, new potatoes. Or potatoes in green sauce; or mashed potatoes with poached eggs. Or Thuringia, Vogtland, or Henneberg potato dumplings in cream sauce, with bread crumbs. Or sprinkled with cheese in flameproof-glass pannikins, or, as the Nostiz brothers made them, dotted with crayfish butter and baked. Or (in wartime) potato marzipan, potato cake, potato pudding. Or potato schnapps. Or my Amanda’s mutton with potatoes, when (on holidays) she browned flank of mutton in kidney fat, added quartered potatoes, filled the kettle with water, simmered until the broth was soaked up, and only then moistened with dark beer. Or her potato soup, which the domestics of the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau spooned up evening after evening, as the sky poured forth its ink and the forest moved closer and closer.

  That was after the second partition of Poland. The farm was expected to become different in every way, more orderly, more profitable, in short, Prussian. The mismanaged conventual estate (founded in 1217 by Mestwina’s daughter Damroka) had been secularized and turned into a state farm. This was termed progress, and progress had to be inspected and supervised—by Him in person.

  When He came to Zuckau, it was raining. It had been raining for days, so that the potatoes had to be got out of the ground. The royal farm hands chopped, dug, gathered the potatoes in baskets, carried the dripping baskets on their backs to the edge of the field—sad giant crows, among whom common crows sought their share, while the king’s clay-encrusted, springless four-horse carriage, though ready for retirement and already a legend, was nevertheless approaching. This time it came on the highway from Karthaus, limped over potholes, turned off to the right, stumbled along the cart track leading to Zuckau, where the farm hands were stretching their limbs in the rain-soaked fields as the royal vehicle appeared between the birches, vanished in a sunken lane, reappeared looking bigger—an event!—and stopped in a chain of mud puddles. Behind the steaming horses the right-hand door of the carriage was opened from within, and, preceded by his hat, which everyone knew, feared, and saluted, the old king, Frederick II, Fredericus Rex, His Majesty, Ole Fritz, with his cane hung on his coat, as he would later be painted in oils, alit and plodded into the potato field; his aide-de-camp and I, August Romeike, veteran of his wars and therefore his inspector, plodded behind him.

  As everywhere, he came to Zuckau unannounced. He kept his visits secret to avoid petitions, garlands, maids of honor, and the representatives of the provincial estates. He didn’t care for fuss and bother. He had his legend to live up to. And so, though racked with gout, he plodded across the fields with his cane, enjoined the farm hands with short barking noises not to gape but to go on digging and piling, and did not stop until he reached the baskets full of spuds. His first words: observations about the sandy soil of Kashubia, which he compared to the soil of eastern Pomerania. Instructive stuff, gleaned from informative treatises on crop rotation and the benefits of clover that had been translated (for him) into French from the English and Dutch. The aide-de-camp took notes in the rain. I, the inspector, was obliged to reel off yields per acre. He wanted to hear precise figures that would demonstrate the increasing trade in seed potatoes. When I didn’t know how many gulden-pfennigs more the Dutch varieties (among them the ancestors of the present-day “bintje”) cost at the Hanover market, he hit me with his cane. That, too, became an anecdote, though later on a different reason was given for the royal beating.

  Then, glistening under the Kashubian rain, he asked for a certain woman who had set the new Prussian provinces an example with her pioneer work in potato culture, whereby she had demonstrated not only the hunger-stilling power of the potato but its tastiness as well.

  I led him to Amanda. She was sitting as usual on the stove bench in the farm kitchen, peeling potatoes for the daily soup. Not in the least surprised, she said, “So here’s Ole Fritz after all.”

  By then she had invented home-fried potatoes. Potato pancakes were also Amanda’s invention. And she seems to have made the first potato salad, into which she mixed cucumber, onions, finely chopped lovage, and sunflower oil—food for the gods. She imparted diversity to the daily potato, lending it more and more new tastes with caraway seed, dill, mustard seed, marjoram, and parsley. But fundamentally Amanda’s potato soup with bacon rinds remained true to itself, for she kept peeling and adding day after day; the pot was never empty.

  She should just go on peeling, was the king’s order, and he made himself at home on the footstool beside the potato basket. He was dripping wet, and a puddle formed at his feet. Amanda’s daughter Ernestine lit tallow candles, for it was already getting dark in the farm kitchen. Amanda wore her spectacles while peeling potatoes. First Ole Fritz examined the peelings for thickness and apparently found the waste minimal. Then, while his clothes dripped and Amanda’s daughters, Lisbeth, Anna, Martha, and Ernestine, gaped, he tilted his old man’s head and listened, for, setting her knife in motion, Amanda began to tell of former days, when there had been nothing but too little millet and buckwheat, and her stories were as long and circular as the potato peelings that curled over her knife blade.

  First the old hunger stories. She lamented the death from starvation of her babies Stine Trude Lovise. After listing means of combating potato bugs (amber dug into the fields, et cetera) and claiming that rubbed-in potato flour helped to keep cholera away, she addressed the king directly: good that he’d finally come, too bad about the rain, but that was part of it, would he like a pair of dry socks? Then she came to the point. He’d done right, she said, in confiscating the run-down convent—she herself as a girl had been made to embroider chasubles with tulip patterns, and there’d only been four, five nuns
left, no use to anybody, and they’d have died soon anyway—and turning it into a decent state farm; but what she couldn’t understand was why Ole Fritz had let the inspector, the dope, take the last bit of land the peasants owned as well as the fields they had leased from the convent, all of which had lain fallow ever since and were overgrown with nettles. So naturally the peasants weren’t going to work for nothing; they’d gone off to Elbing and Danzig and waited for the administration and this prize dope that called himself an inspector to get some sense into their heads. So then (but not before) they’d taken her advice—for she, Amanda, knew what was wrong—and divided up the land around the cottages and given it to the serfs at a low rental in return for a written promise to grow only potatoes on their lots, same as on the state farm, which they tilled for nothing. And indeed they’d grown nothing but spuds for the last four harvests, except for a bit of oats and barley for porridge. But unfortunately this lout, who had the gall to call himself an inspector—here she pointed her potato knife at me—had thought up a rotten scheme, and Ole Fritz had better hear about it, because they were doing it all in his name. The inspector and the rest of the so-called farm administration, especially the old colonel in his armchair who couldn’t get warm even in August, had decided to join all the lots together again, because that way the land could be administered more efficiently. That’s why the peasants had been expressly forbidden to grow anything on their own. That’s why there were no more self-supporting peasants in Zuckau, but only bonded serfs. And to make matters worse, hereditary serfs. Surely that couldn’t have been what Ole Fritz wanted. Yes, she cooked for the whole lot of them. Not just for the Polish day laborers and brickmakers. For the children, too, and the old folks and the old colonel in his armchair. Seventy-eight mouths. Which also had its advantages, because, as Ole Fritz must know, a big kitchen like that saved fuel; she could reckon up the exact amount of peat consumed and the exact saving in cordwood, if he wanted her to.

  The king listened and signaled his aide-de-camp, by glancing at him in his own special way, to make a note of certain remarks relating to the savings at the farm kitchen and the possibilities of community kitchens in general. Amanda’s method of making potato flour was recorded, and the aide also put his pen to work when Amanda made a laughingstock of me (and even more of the king) by referring to “the inspector’s carcass” as a picture book in which all the battles the king had fought for his glory were inscribed in the form of scars. For in addition to the eye he had lost at Kolin, the inspector had contributed a finger or two on either hand to the treasury of Prussian history, with the result that, no longer able to pick his nose and meditate, he was getting stupider than ever, for which reason he tormented the poor and made dopey speeches. He could distill potato schnapps for his cronies, and that was about all he was good for.

  Then Amanda spoke again of hailstorms and plagues of mice and told again how three out of seven of her children—all of whom Romeike had pumped into her quick-quick between glorious battles, when she was still a stupid girl—had died on her and the Lord had shown no mercy. Because in those days there’d been no spuds, just too little millet and not enough buckwheat.

  Finally, when the basket was almost empty and the potato peelings formed a pile as jumbled as my cerebellum, when Amanda’s daughter Lisbeth (begotten after the Battle of Burkersdorf) had cut the washed potatoes into the big, gently boiling kettle on the kitchen stove, when Annchen (begotten after the Battle of Leuthen), now pregnant by an itinerant schnapps dealer with the future Sophie Rotzoll, began to fry chopped onions glassy in beef fat, and Marthchen (begotten after Hochkirch) rubbed marjoram off its stems into the soup, while Ernestine (begotten between the capitulation of Saxony at Pirna and the Battle of Kolin) scrubbed the long farm-hands’ table, when finally and meanwhile the king’s clothes had dried, for he was sitting close to the stove, Amanda called on Ole Fritz to fight no battles but potato battles from then on. She mapped out a country of the future, extending from the March of Brandenburg through Pomerania and Kashubia to Masuria, all planted with potatoes and promising from harvest to harvest to supply community kitchens after Amanda’s heart: “There won’t be any more hunger then. Everybody will be full, and the sweet Lord will love Ole Fritz.” (If Amanda had known more than the know-it-alls of her day thought they knew, she would have talked to the king about carbohydrates, protein, vitamins ABC, and about the minerals sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, and iron, all of which are contained in the potato.)

  It is not true, as was later bruited about in anecdotes, that the old king wept when the farm cook told him he had fought enough bloody battles and he should finally conquer hunger. It is true, however, that after the last potato had been peeled, diced, and dropped into the big soup kettle, she commiserated with him over his loveless childhood: “and nobody to pet and mother the poor little tyke.” With an all-understanding glance she appraised the drenched king, now drying in her kitchen. With genuine tenderness she called him “my little Ole Fritz” and “my little tyke,” for Amanda was a good head taller than His Shrunken Majesty.

  A king who kept taking snuff, as though in response to an order from within. With dripping, watery eyes he sat listening to her warmhearted words of cheer. We heard her whisper to him as to a child, “You’ll feel better soon. Don’t you worry. Come on, Ole Fritz, you’ll get some nice hot soup. It’s good. It’ll cheer you up.”

  For a good Kashubian hour (which in terms of normal time is more than an hour and a half) she mothered him as the soup kettle bubbled. She even removed a few snuff spots from his coat with cold malt-coffee. Maybe he dozed off for a while as she was chopping parsley, toward the end. The old cottagers along the walls and in the adjoining feed kitchen whispered among themselves, aware that this was a historical hour. Each was holding his spoon. And with their tin spoons they knocked softly on the wood of the kitchen table. The soup basins were ready on the long farm-hands’ table, seven dishes to a bowl, one bowl to every seven farm hands.

  Then the king spooned up Amanda’s potato soup with all of us—for at nightfall the hands had come in from the fields. A dish of his own was set before him. He sat beside Amanda, a prematurely aged man who trembled and splattered himself with soup. From time to time he transformed his reddened, dripping eyes into big blue king’s eyes (recorded in later portraits). Since everybody slurped, his slurping attracted no attention.

  I was sitting too far away to hear what the two of them were mumbling between spoonful and spoonful. Supposedly he complained to Amanda of the Prussian landed gentry, who weren’t carrying out his edicts. At the very least, he is supposed to have said, serfdom should not be hereditary. They should stop grabbing the peasants’ lands. How could you keep an army in decent shape when the country people were treated like cattle? For Prussia had many enemies and needed to be always in arms, always on its guard.

  In reality—as Amanda told us later while peeling potatoes, and also wrote to her pen pal, Rumford—Ole Fritz merely wanted the recipe for her potato soup, which was wholesome, he said, and soothed his gouty bones, though he wished it could have been peppered to his taste. That couldn’t be done. The farm kitchen of the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau was without pepper, either crushed or in grains. Amanda seasoned her food with mustard seed and caraway seed, and with herbs such as marjoram or parsley. (Of course sausage can be boiled with the soup or bits of fried bacon stirred in. Sometimes Amanda cooked carrots in the soup, or leeks and celery for seasoning. In the winter she put in dried mushrooms, or a few handfuls of greenies and morels.)

  When the king rode away in his springless carriage, it was still raining. I, Inspector Romeike, was given no snuffbox. Amanda found no ducats in her apron. No hand was laid on the heads of daughters Lisbeth, Anna, Martha, and Ernestine. No chorale was sung by the still-drenched farm hands. No spontaneous edict did away with serfdom. No miracle of enlightenment occurred under absolute rule. Nevertheless, the date of the historic encounter was handed down by the aide-de-camp.
On October 16, 1778, immediately after the king’s departure from rain-drenched Zuckau, an edict was promulgated declaring Amanda Woyke’s potato soup to be the king’s mainstay, whereupon it became a universal stand-by far beyond the confines of West Prussia.

  And because the case of Amanda Woyke was taken up at carnival time, the Women’s Tribunal, instead of the usual Women’s Mardi Gras, staged a special women’s celebration in costumes of Amanda Woyke’s day, and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb, who might well have directed a farm kitchen, cooked Amanda’s potato soup in her pots, which were more accustomed to Czech seasonings. Everybody, including the whole Revolutionary Advisory Council and even the court-appointed defense counsel, was invited to the Osslieb tavern, rechristened “Ilsebill’s Barn” for the occasion. Not we men, of course. It seemed that Helga Paasch dressed up as Ole Fritz. Ruth Simoneit came as August Romeike. Ms. Witzlaff wore a wreath of marjoram and parsley. Naturally Therese Osslieb was done up in potato color as Amanda. And after the soup, the women seem to have danced the polka with one another.

  Speaking of the weather

  All of a sudden nobody wants the right of way.

  Where are we going, anyway, and what’s the hurry?

  It’s only in the rear—but where is the rear?—

  that they’re still pushing.

  Is it the right thing

  to prevent those many people

  in distant places who are starving

  but otherwise attract little attention

  from starving? The question

  is often asked in conversations.

  Nature—the Third Program will tell you as much—

  will find a way out.

  Be realistic.

  There’s so much to be done at home.

  All these broken marriages.

  Systems decreeing that two times two is four.

  In a pinch something about the civil-service law.