The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  At day’s end we note with indignation

  that the weather forecast was wrong, too.

  How letters were quoted in court

  I found them in the bright-colored cardboard box which, along with other loot, I had brought home filled with Saxon sweets after the capitulation of Pirna. Later the box contained pieces of amber from the sandy fields of Kashubia. And later still, after the amber had been dug back into the fields to combat a plague of potato bugs, Amanda Woyke put Count Rumford’s letters into the box and laid her spectacles on top of them. Then she died, while I was in Tuchel on a tour of inspection.

  The first letter was written in Munich on October 4, 1784. The last is dated Paris, September 12, 1806. Up to the summer of 1792 all the letters are signed “Your sincere friend, Benjamin Thompson”; thereafter, having been made a count of the Holy Roman Empire, he signed “Sincerely, Count Rumford.”

  In all I found twenty-nine letters in Amanda’s cardboard box. And since exactly twenty-nine letters signed by Amanda in purple ink were discovered among the papers of Rumford’s daughter Sally after her death, we may assume that not one thought was lost, especially as the letters connect up perfectly, each relating to the last. In the revolutionary year 1789, when Rumford (still under the name of Benjamin Thompson) wrote from Munich, giving a detailed account of the newly laid-out English Gardens and of the light-hearted atmosphere at the opening ceremonies, Amanda inquired in her answer how big the gardens were, and whether the soil was rich or clayey, and the ensuing letter cites the figure of 612 acres of untilled land. “Good pasturage,” Thompson wrote. “Here, apart from the public park, we shall breed bovines from Holstein, Flanders, and Switzerland on a model farm, thus improving the now wretched quality of Bavarian livestock and setting the whole world a veterinary example.”

  After my death as Romeike the correspondence was lost and has never come to light. No biography of Count Rumford mentions Amanda Woyke. And out of jealousy or stupidity, Sally Thompson also helped to suppress her father’s exchange of ideas with a Kashubian cook, though Sally cites in her memoirs certain ideas her father imparted to Amanda, such as “registration forms to be filed with the police will help us to keep track of foreign visitors.”

  All this, Ilsebill, must now be revised, for the lost correspondence has been found. In Amsterdam, where everything comes to light. A secondhand-book dealer unearthed it. At the very start of the trial, the Flounder made inquiries. (He has his agents, you know.) As a result, quotations from letters played a crucial role throughout the deliberations on the case of Amanda Woyke. I was mentioned only marginally, although, on the Flounder’s advice, I had perpetuated serfdom on all the state farms under my supervision by interpreting the king’s edicts and the liberalized provincial law in my own ingenious way, abolished hereditary serfdom only in rare cases, and preferred to issue new regulations that restored it in its older form. In short, I had been a hard-hearted inspector, hated throughout Prussia. Even Amanda had died a serf.

  The Flounder admitted in court that he had used me as an instrument of reaction. The East Elbian rural populations, he maintained, were not ripe for reforms; considering themselves members of a big family, the serfs felt sheltered, secure, and hence relatively happy. The Polish day laborers were a lot worse off, except in the harvest season, when if nothing else they had enough to eat in Zuckau and elsewhere. And the Tribunal could hardly deny that despite the lack of freedom characteristic of her times, the farm cook Amanda Woyke had been capable of grandiose ideas, which to be sure found their public expression in Munich, London, or Paris, that out of naïve affection she had made use of a certain Benjamin Thompson as their channel. He, the Flounder, so he declared, knew more than was on public record or thought fit for schoolbooks. Therefore, with the help of the recovered letters, he wished to erect a monument not only to a certain Thompson, but also and in equal measure to the farm cook Amanda Woyke.

  “A female biography,” said the Flounder, “that, I believe, the feminist movement should take as an example. Amanda Woyke not only gave taste to our potatoes; with her big farm kitchen she also provided a harbinger of the future, already burgeoning Chinese world food solution. (“And when they really get it working,” I said maliciously to Ilsebill, “where will you be with your wishes?”)

  The said Benjamin Thompson was born in 1753 in the British colony of Massachusetts. His father died when he was still a child, and was replaced by a stepfather—or, as Thompson wrote to Amanda, “by my poor mother’s tyrannical husband.” While apprenticed to a merchant, Thompson became interested in methods of storing and shipping salt fish. (In addressing the court, the Flounder did not deny that he had advised the young man—“directly or indirectly; after all, I’m at home in all seven seas.”)

  Boston just then was aboil with anti-British sentiment. While tinkering with fireworks designed to celebrate a victory of the American colonists over the colonial administration—the Whigs had just defeated the so-called Stamp Act in the British Parliament—Thompson suffered an accident. From that time on he sided with the colonial power, became a spy for the British, and as such tested his latest invention, an invisible ink that showed up after a certain lapse of time.

  After his burns had healed, he studied at Harvard College during his spare time and became a schoolmaster at Concord, New Hampshire, which had previously borne the name of Rumford. A rich widow soon took the young teacher as her husband, an event that seems to have had the effect of another premature explosion of fireworks, for he enlisted in the army, was appointed a major in the second New Hampshire regiment, wore a scarlet coat, and looked upon himself for a short time as the father of his daughter Sally. Then, despised by his countrymen, he fled, was arrested by the so-called Minutemen, tried by a Concord court, and released, though still under suspicion of having served the British as a secret agent and written the British governor coded letters in his invisible ink.

  On the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Thompson took the last ship out of besieged Boston. Before the Women’s Tribunal, the Flounder justified this flight on the strength of youthful ambition. Thompson, so he claimed, had sought broader fields for his talents. In the Old World, strange to say. In London he was appointed secretary of the colony of Georgia. Regrettably, Thompson had been responsible for suggesting the use of Hessian mercenaries; he had also recruited them and organized their crossing. Still, his election to the Royal Society shows that he had engaged in scientific activity as well.

  To which the prosecutor replied, amid general laughter: “Scientific activity! Let’s call it by the right name. Mr. Thompson improved the construction of muskets by figuring out the best place to put the vent. From childhood on he had a thing about gunpowder. When he grew up, he still wanted to play at war. He set up a regiment in New York, though the war was already lost. And let me tell you about his one act of heroism: building a fort in the graveyard at Huntington. Do you know what he built it with? Tombstones. Even the oven was made of tombstones. Later on the incised names of the departed—Josiah Baxter, John Miller, Timothy Vanderbilt, Abraham Wells, and so on—could be read in raised mirror-writing on the freshly baked loaves, so bearing witness to Colonel Thompson’s scientific enterprise. In recognition of this grandiose achievement, he was pensioned for life at half a lieutenant colonel’s pay the moment he arrived back in England. When they wouldn’t let him play war games in India, he crossed over to the continent in the hope of European wars. He had his riding horses with him. As ridiculous as ever in a scarlet uniform. Went to Vienna via Strassburg and Munich. Cut a figure wherever he went. But nothing came of the war against the Turks. After getting himself knighted in England, he entered the service of Maximilian, elector of Bavaria, and settled in Munich as Sir Benjamin.

  “So much, defendant Flounder, for the early life of your magnificent protégé Mr. Thompson. A hidebound reactionary. A spy. An adventurer and a charlatan. A conceited fop. A morose philanthropist, morose because he’d been deprived of his war games; n
ot untalented, quick to learn languages, for by the autumn of his first year in Bavaria he wrote the farm cook Amanda Woyke a stilted letter asking for advice: how, he asked, might the benefits of potato culture, as exemplified in Pomerania and West Prussia, be conferred upon the people of Bavaria?” The prosecutor quoted: “‘I, no, the world knows of your agronomic achievements, thanks to which war-sick Prussia has recovered so admirably.’”

  Believe me, Ilsebill, it wasn’t the Flounder, it was I who gave Thompson Amanda’s address. But since the Women’s Tribunal recognized only my particular incarnations and not my obstinate survival, I was not allowed to appear as a witness. Too bad. I’d have told the girls a thing or two. They wouldn’t have cut me down to manikin size. Why, it was me with my dragoons who brought seed potatoes to the state farms in West Prussia at the king’s orders. Whereupon I (as a nine-times-wounded veteran) was appointed inspector. I invigorated Prussia with potatoes. I organized the transportation and marketing of the surpluses. I brought order into the Polish economy. My balance sheets were mentioned with praise at the Chamber of Crown Lands. I traveled widely; why, I went as far as Hanover. And at meetings with fellow veterans I discussed Thompson’s experiments with gunpowder to measure recoil and muzzle velocity and determine the best place to put the vent in the common musket.

  So I wrote to the Royal Society. (Or a soldier friend who knew English wrote.) And Thompson answered from Munich. Promising precise data on vents for Prussian muskets, he asked in return for information about potato culture in Kashubia after the partitions of Poland. So then, in addition to pointers on farm management, I was so foolishly kind as to send him Amanda’s address. By return mail he told me how to improve our musket. Their high-and-mightinesses in Potsdam failed, however, to act on his advice—a bit of negligence that was to be dearly paid for at Jena and Auerstedt. But nobody would ever listen to me. They all ran to her. She knew. She remembered. She prophesied. She saw the future. She had visions.

  Unfortunately, I lost all my baggage, including Thompson’s letters, after a solid night’s drinking in Leipzig, where I had gone for the Fair. Only his letters to Amanda and her answers were quoted before the Women’s Tribunal. When asked to account for this correspondence, the Flounder explained that through intermediaries he had sent Sir Benjamin a detailed account of the king of Prussia’s October 1778 visit to the state farm at Zuckau. That was how the British American in the service of Bavaria had learned of the memorable conversation between the Kashubian farm cook and Frederick II of Prussia. Indeed, Thompson speaks of the meeting in his first letter to Amanda: “It has come to our attention, honored friend of the useful potato, with what admiration His Majesty has spoken of your accomplishments. In the document before me, the Great Frederick writes, ‘A Kassubian female cooks a potato potage, which should make peace delicious for our peoples.’ But what amazes me, dear friend, is how quickly you have succeeded. How were you able in so short a time to move the countryfolk to grow potatoes? Here superstition and Catholic fears prevail. Our beneficial tuber is said to induce rickets and consumption, leprosy and cholera. Can you perchance advise me? By the elector’s favor I am in command of a cavalry regiment consisting of young peasants impressed into military service. They are lying about on garrison duty, doing nothing, for since the curious War of the Austrian Succession, here known as the ‘Potato War,’ nothing has happened in Bavaria; only the curse of beggary has increased.”

  Addressing the Tribunal, the Flounder was able to prove that Amanda’s advice, as adapted by Sir Benjamin Thompson, had provided the impetus for the introduction of potato culture in Bavaria. The land donation wrested from the Crown Lands Administration (and from me), the leasing of plots of fallow land to the landless serfs of the Zuckau farm on condition that they grow nothing but potatoes—presents I later took back—all these ideas were adopted by Thompson, who divided the wasteland that was later to become the English Gardens into military garden plots. Every private soldier and corporal, during his period of service, enjoyed the use of 365 square feet of potato field. The harvest belonged to him alone, and every discharged peasant returned home with sacks full of seed potatoes, to the amazement of his fellow villagers. (When I took the serfs’ plots away from them so we could plant on a large scale, Amanda said, “The sweet Lord won’t like it.”) She also communicated her panacea for plague, cholera, and leprosy—rubbing the whole body with potato flour—to her pen pal, who must have smiled.

  Late in the summer of 1788, Thompson was appointed Bavarian minister of war and police, made a member of the Privy Council, and promoted to the rank of major general. After listing these titles, the Flounder declared to the Women’s Tribunal: “That kind of thing probably doesn’t mean much to the ladies. I can already hear you saying, ‘A typical male career!’ Maybe so. Thompson’s ambition sometimes went to ridiculous lengths. And yet his correspondence with the farm cook Amanda Woyke made a great change in him, the kind of change that is ordinarily produced only by love letters. It is indeed my contention that Amanda, then a sturdy forty-five, and our American, some ten years her junior, were impelled by passionate reason to write each other love letters revolving around the problems of human nutrition. For once no soul music, no sob stuff, no pens dipped in heart’s blood. Listen to what he wrote to Zuckau:

  “‘To you alone, esteemed friend and benefactress, I owe the great, the crucial insight that no political order can be truly good unless it redounds to the common weal. I have undertaken to combine the interests of my regiment with those of the civilian population and to make our military might serve the public welfare even in time of peace, by seeing to it that every garrison in Bavaria maintains soldiers’ gardens and therein, apart from the estimable potato, cultivates not only rutabaga but also, by way of crop rotation, clover for cattle feed. I take the liberty of sending you, my friend and benefactress, a few seeds and young rutabaga plants by the same post. This highly nutritious root plant has, not without my help and advice, been bred from rape. Rest assured that only my diplomatic tact deters me from proclaiming to the Bavarian people what my heart knows full well, to wit, that they are indebted to an estimable Prussian woman not only for the potato, but for the potato dumpling as well. In conclusion: do you know of a rational way of eradicating the plague of beggary with which Munich is now afflicted? A mere police action would accomplish nothing.’”

  Here I must interpolate the fact that thanks to Thompson’s express package, rutabaga took hold in West Prussia and soon gained popularity under the name of Wruke: Wruken with Gänseklein, flank of mutton with Wruken, tripe stewed with Wruken. But also, in the rutabaga winter of 1917, Wruken cooked with nothing at all.

  Of that the Flounder made no mention before the Tribunal. But Thompson’s great achievement—suddenly arresting all the beggars in Munich, registering them, and moving them to a workhouse—was celebrated in quotations from letters which made it clear that the minister of war and police had derived his inspiration from Amanda. For this is what she wrote Thompson: “My dear Sir: If enny tramps or beggars turn up here in Zuckau, they haff to chop wud and unravvel nitted yarn in the junkroom if they want enny of my potato soup.”

  This little hint sufficed to start Thompson off in the right direction. He replied: “Ah, dearest friend. If you could see how ubiquitous the crime of beggary is here. Parents put little children’s eyes out or maim their limbs so as to arouse pity by exhibiting them. The situation is generally thought to be hopeless. Thoughtful persons have come to regard beggary as an intrinsic feature of our social order. It is widely held that wicked persons must first be made virtuous before they can be made happy. But why, in response to your excellent advice, should I not attempt to reverse the order? Made happy by work, my sinners will become virtuous.”

  The rest is known. Thompson requisitioned a run-down Pauline monastery in the suburbs and transformed it into a military workhouse with shops for turners, smiths, dyers, saddlers, and so on, as well as dormitories, a refectory, and a community kitchen
with a masonry cooking stove that Amanda later had copied (from Thompson’s blueprints) for her farm kitchen: horseshoe shaped with numerous openings and fire grates. He then established welfare committees in Munich’s sixteen districts, put up a sign in gold letters over the gateway of the workhouse saying, “No alms accepted here!,” and finally, on January 1, 1790, arrested twenty-six hundred beggars in a sweeping roundup, had them registered on previously prepared blanks, and sent them to the workhouse the following day.

  In a letter to Amanda, Thompson wrote, “We are making footstools, horse blankets, and uniforms for the whole Bavarian army. We wind yarn and spin wool. Fourteen hundred permanent inmates are industrious and happy. Even the little children help. It is to be hoped that my success will encourage others to follow my example.”

  What was discussed before the Women’s Tribunal, however, was not the successful police action but the accused Flounder’s contention that by advising Thompson to give the beggars and other paupers work, wages, and food, a farm cook, who was not only a Kashubian but a serf as well, had prevented the French Revolution from spreading to Bavaria.

  Protected by his bulletproof glass, the Flounder said: “If such advice had been given to an able Frenchman, if the French mob had been provided with well-heated workhouses and ample community kitchens, if they had been guaranteed full soup kettles with smiling eyes of fat floating on top, there would have been no revolution, the guillotine would not have had to function many thousands of times, no Robespierre, no Napoleon would have become known to us; instead, enlightened princes would perforce have resolved to promote the public welfare. As it was, Amanda Woyke’s advice benefited only the Bavarian people. While elsewhere the Furies raged, the beggars of Munich were made over into useful citizens.”

  You’re right again, Ilsebill: carrot and stick. It would be easy to imagine Ms. Huntscha, the prosecutor, taking a strictly materialistic approach and demolishing the Flounder’s speculations—“If the dog hadn’t shat, he would have caught the hare,” and so on. But she adopted an entirely different tone. “Excellent reasoning,” she said. Then she dissociated herself from “male revolutionary rites,” expressed her horror of Robespierre and Napoleon, exposing the one as a hypocrite, the other as a little man who wanted to be big. After that, she wound up for a haymaker: