by Günter Grass
“But what, defendant Flounder, became of your enlightened princes’ alleged achievements? A few years later Thompson’s workhouse, with its rudiments of self-government, had become a common jail where the prisoners were bullied and beaten. And on the state farm at Zuckau serfdom was maintained until well into the nineteenth century. Nay, more: your great genius, your friend of the people Thompson, was chucked out by the Bavarian estates. And Amanda was obliged to look on as an ambitious inspector drove the serfs of the state farm from their individual potato plots. That’s right, with whips. Her little talks with the sweet Lord didn’t help one bit. And as for Thompson, who’d been made a Holy Roman count in the meantime, the best this Count Rumford could do, even in his late years in London and Paris, was to rush into more and more new ideas which, as the defendant has succeeded in proving, were kindled in a Kashubian farm kitchen and exploded in Rumford’s brain.
“We concede that by their division of labor the Woyke-Thompson correspondence tandem were productive—we owe them the slow-combustion stove, the steamer, and the soup kitchen—but what part did the Flounder play in this often pioneering collaboration? He claims to have been the Weltgeist. He claims to have coupled the ambition of a delinquent upstart with the public spirit of a farm cook rooted in her native soil. He tried to play God for Amanda Woyke and to embody social progress in the interest of Count Rumford. A scheming matchmaker, that’s what he was. It’s beginning to look as if he’d sold the Tribunal a bill of goods, as though we feminists had fallen for his flimflam about equality, as though his belated monument to the farm cook had turned us into a lot of gaping fools, as though he, in his Floundery way, were contributing to our emancipation. But let’s not be deceived by appearances. His version simply doesn’t make sense. The intention is too obvious. Here’s what the Flounder is really saying: in the hands of a man, the naïve invention that this dear little woman managed to arrive at over her homely cooking stove—West Prussian potato soup, for instance—becomes social and political achievement, namely, Rumford soup for the poor, which was spooned up for a whole century in Munich, London, Geneva, and Paris. In other words, the defendant wants us to praise, glorify, and perpetuate the inventive little woman’s humility, the admirable inner freedom of a lifelong serf, subservience misrepresented as equality. There’s Flounder morality for you! What a stinking, fishy trick! I move that we rule out all further quotations from letters!”
The motion was overruled. (The Flounder faction in the Revolutionary Advisory Council had already become a powerful enough minority to force majority decisions.) Then the Women’s Tribunal adjourned, because the Flounder claimed to be, or really was, feeling faint; in any case he left his sand bed, showed how his steering mechanism had failed and cast him helplessly adrift, reeled, threatened to capsize and float belly up, and just under the surface of the water whispered over the intercom system: “What deplorable, what painful suggestions! So much injustice almost strikes me dumb. When what I really wanted—ah, me!—if I hadn’t been so gallingly insulted, was to elucidate Count Rumford’s ideology by the example of the Chinese Tower in Munich’s English Gardens. But—ah, me!—all I get is vilification, and I’m too weak to insist on my right of rebuttal and on further quotations from the letters. Ah, me! Ah, me! Has it ever occurred to this feminine and therefore stern court that I, too, the Flounder, the detested male principle, might be mortal?”
Don’t worry, Ilsebill. Naturally the flatfish recovered. And the trial took its course. Further quotations from letters were admitted in evidence. The recipe for Rumford soup for the poor was read: “Dried peas, barley, and potatoes are boiled for two and a half hours until they form a mash; then soured beer is stirred in; then diced stale bread is fried crisp in beef fat and added; then the whole is seasoned with salt.” Amanda’s violent reaction to this mushy perversion of her potato soup was quoted: “I wouldn’t feed such pap to the Devil himself.”
After Rumford’s embittered departure from Munich, his activities in London, his move to Paris and marriage had been discussed rather briefly, and the father’s conflict with Sally, his daughter beyond the seas, had been allowed to flare up in quotations from letters, Rumford’s political creed, his belief in Chinese beneficence from above, complemented by Amanda’s concern for her Kashubian farm hands, became the storm center of the court proceedings.
A single sentence of the Flounder’s—or, rather, his rhetorical question “Is it not clear that with their utopian descriptions of cultural mass movements and of community kitchens feeding entire populations, Count Rumford and Amanda Woyke foreshadowed Maoism?”—unleashed a tumult and would have broken up the Tribunal if Ms. Schönherr, the presiding judge, had not found words of appeasement. “Defendant!” she shouted into the rising storm. “I assume that by your conjectures you have merely meant to say that the ideas of the great Mao Tse-tung have long lain dormant in the minds of the peoples, but have often, as in Rumford’s case, been absurdly misunderstood and, as in Woyke’s case, been too narrowly confined to the agrarian sector to move the masses to revolution, and that consequently they did not find relevant expression until the present period.”
The Flounder hastened to corroborate the presiding judge’s assumption. Quickly he cited pertinent passages from the letters. “Listen, if you please, to what Amanda has to say about it: ‘And someday there won’t be nothing but farm hands and farm hands’ kitchens.’ And listen to Rumford: ‘Just as today the sons of peasants are impressed into military idleness, no later than tomorrow armies of peasants will be in a position to till and at the same time defend the fields.’ They both had quite a gift of prophecy, though they could hardly foresee that this High Court would for the first time attach to their letters the importance that I, too, for all the skepticism of which I am capable, believe to be their due.”
Who would have thought it possible. The Flounder Party in the Revolutionary Advisory Council gained new support. (You too, Ilsebill, are hesitating.) Those clever girls let the Flounder sell them an image of Rumford as a “restlessly questing spirit” and of my good-as-gold Amanda as a “sand-colored potato heroine.” Even the prosecutor withheld her barbs as the discussion of the Amanda Woyke case neared its positively touching conclusion. There were stirrings of pity for Rumford, whose beastly wife, widow of the guillotined physicist Lavoisier, drove him half mad with her turbulent social life; yet even Amanda’s purple-inked warnings—“a quarrelsome devil she is for sure, a living Ilsebill, a powder-puffy bitch”—had been powerless to talk him out of the rich match. Even Rumford’s opportunism met with the prosecutor’s understanding; his move from menaced England to Napoleonic France was justified as evidence of scientific neutrality, though Amanda expressed herself on the subject in no uncertain terms: “And speaking of Napolyon, I wouldn’t keep no soup warm for that man.”
After the controversial condemnation of the Flounder in the case of Agnes Kurbiella, the Women’s Tribunal had resolved to make a show of objectivity. It was conceded that the accused had meant to serve the cause of the Enlightenment. The count and the farm cook, for example, were termed pioneers in the field of equal rights; the final summation even made mention of the “pre-Maoist component” in their thinking, and no objection was raised to the fable woven by the Flounder as a funeral wreath for Amanda. Immediately after the disastrous battles of Jena and Auerstedt, so his story went, Count Rumford, seized with foreboding, had left Paris and traveled to West Prussia via Munich. He had had the good fortune to reach the Kashubian hamlet of Zuckau before the arrival of Napoleon’s marauding army (and the siege of Danzig). And before dying in his arms, the desperately weary Amanda had been able to tell one last time her dream of community kitchens that would conquer hunger the world over. The dying cook seems even to have forgiven the count for his repulsive, stomach-gluing Rumford soup. Not a blessed word about me, the one-man funeral procession who buried Amanda in the former convent graveyard after my hurried return from Tuchel. Only a touching holding of hands up to the reason-trans
figured end.
The next day the Tagesspiegel commented on the atmosphere in the courtroom. The Women’s Tribunal, according to that worthy organ, had shown indications of deep emotion. The gaze of the usually cold-eyed prosecutor had clouded over. The public, consisting for the most part of women itching to mount the barricades, had actually sobbed. More solemnly than triumphantly, a small group, later joined by the majority, had intoned “We Shall Overcome.” But then the Flounder, though deeply embedded in sand, had sent up a last speech balloon: “After Amanda’s death darkness descended on Europe.”
That was in November. Three months later, on February 24, 1807, when the Prussians had been defeated at Dirschau and the flames of the pillaged city could be seen as far as Kashubia, French grenadiers belonging to the army of Marshal Lefebvre occupied the Zuckau state farm and gobbled up our seed potatoes.
Why potato soup tastes heavenly
When Amanda Woyke died, she took nothing with her but her spectacles. She looked all over heaven for the sweet Lord. He had hidden, for he was afraid of Amanda, who wanted to give him a piece of her mind about the lack of justice, and what kind of a sweet Lord was he anyway, and maybe he didn’t even exist. In the halls of heaven she met lots of old friends from Zuckau, Viereck, Kokoschken, and Ramkau. None of them had the slightest idea where the sweet Lord was keeping himself, and they were all standing around looking pretty anemic, because all they had to live on was memory. It wasn’t till she got to the heavenly flour bin, which, however, hadn’t a bit of flour in it, that Amanda found her three girls Stine Trude Lovise, who had died of starvation on earth because King Ole Fritz had kept up his war for seven years, and Pandours, Cossacks, and Prussian grenadiers in turn had eaten the bit of buckwheat and oats grown in Kashubia straight off the stalk.
Stine Trude Lovise, who had turned to meal worms in the heavenly flour bin, cried out, “The bin is empty. Nothing here. Oh, bring us oatmeal, Mother dear!” So Amanda clapped the lid of the flour bin shut and, pushing it ahead of her with a terrible din, went looking for the sweet Lord in all the halls of heaven.
On her way she met King Ole Fritz. He was playing with brightly painted tin soldiers. He still had plenty of ammunition, for he had brought a little sack of black peppercorns with him from down below. With the fingers of his left hand he flipped the peppercorns off the palm of his right hand, hitting Pandours, Cossacks, and white-enameled Austrian foot soldiers until he had finally won the Battle of Kolin. Amanda was furious. “It’s high time you made peace!” she cried and threw all the tin soldiers and the black peppercorns into the empty flour bin, where the three little meal worms Stine Trude Lovise now had company. Then she harnessed the king to the bin like a draft horse. And so with a terrible din, he pulling, she pushing, they continued on through the overpopulated but seemingly empty halls of heaven, looking for the sweet Lord.
On the way they met Count Rumford, who in the meantime had died of a sudden fever in far-off Paris. He was glad to see Amanda and showed her his latest invention: a tiny, shiny, softly purring machine. Pointing to the fiery-red gate of hell, he said: “Just imagine, dear friend, I’ve finally succeeded, with this little machine, in storing up hell-fire, the primal heat, that shameful waste of fuel, compressing it into tablets, and making it available for beneficial use. Down with superstitions! Now at last we can carry out your pet project and set up a giant Kashubian farm kitchen here in the halls of heaven. Now, with the help of hell-fire, dreams will become reality. You and I know what the world needs: the maximum within the minimum. Let us, you and I together, get to work on world nutrition. Unfortunately we still lack the ingredients for your excellent soup, first and foremost our belly-filler: the potato.”
Amanda thought they ought first to ask the sweet Lord’s permission; maybe in return for a moderate amount of corvee labor he’d lease them a few heavenly acres. She’d be glad to dig potatoes. She put the hell-fire utilization machine and the first dozen heat tablets into the flour bin along with the three little meal worms Stine Trude Lovise, the brightly painted tin soldiers, and the black peppercorns, harnessed Count Rumford to the bin alongside of Ole Fritz, and, they pulling, she pushing, they moved on through the halls of heaven with a terrible din, looking for the sweet Lord.
On the way they met me, war veteran and Inspector of Crown Lands August Romeike, who in between the battles of the Seven Years’ War had made Amanda seven children, three of whom had died of starvation and now as meal worms had company in the flour bin. When Napoleon’s Grand Army, returning sorely battered from Russia, reached Kashubia, a gang of looting grenadiers from whom I was trying to save our seed potatoes shot me dead. All I could bring with me to this other world was one sack of spuds, on which I was sitting when Amanda, with Ole Fritz and Rumford harnessed to her flour bin, caught sight of me and started right in chewing me out: “You stupid, scurvy no-good!” But she was pleased with the rescued seed potatoes and a few little bags of seeds, among them chervil, mustard, caraway, parsley, and marjoram, that I’d happened to have in my pocket. And Ole Fritz and Rumford also exclaimed, “Superb!” and “Splendid!” I had to heave the sack into the flour bin, taking care not to hurt the meal worms Stine Trude Lovise or the tin soldiers, and most especially not to damage the diminutive hell-fire utilization machine. Then, between king and count, I was harnessed to the vehicle, and off we went with a terrible din. Now there was no need for Amanda to push.
And so we looked for the sweet Lord throughout the halls of heaven, until we came to a body of water that made little waves like the Baltic and smelled the same, too.
“Sweet Lord! Sweet Lord!” cried Amanda over the Baltic-green sea. “Where ya hiding. Come on out! Come on out!”
But the sweet Lord didn’t show himself, for he didn’t exist. Only a flatfish jumped out of the sea and gave them a slanting look. It was the Flounder out of the fairy tale, and he said with his crooked mouth, “Since the sweet Lord doesn’t exist, I can’t very well be your sweet Lord. But I’ll be glad to help if something’s wrong. What’s wrong?”
And then, before the three men harnessed to the flour bin could speak, Amanda told the Flounder first her earthly, then her heavenly woes: how she had put up with everything and in spite of plague, famine, hunger, war, and long-lasting injustice always stood by the sweet Lord, how she’d been looking for him in heaven, but all she’d found was King Ole Fritz, his dopey inspector, and her old pen pal, the well-known inventor of the slow-combustion stove, and she’d harnessed them to an empty flour bin in which were assembled her meal worms Stine Trude Lovise, the king’s tin soldiers and peppercorns, the dopey inspector’s sack of potatoes, a few little bags of seeds such as marjoram, chervil, mustard, caraway, and parsley, and the pen pal’s hell-fire utilization machine along with some heat tablets: “So what’s to happen now? If you can’t be our sweet Lord, then be our sweet Flounder, and help us.”
Thus flattered, the Flounder said, “What you could not do on earth, you shall do here in heaven. Your sweet Flounder will provide as if he were the sweet Lord.”
Thereupon he vanished into the Baltic-green sea. Instantly the halls of heaven were transformed into proper Kashubian sandy acres—gently rolling, already fertilized and plowed, hedged around with gorse and blackberry bushes. Out of the flour bin jumped King Ole Fritz’s tin soldiers, and they began to till the soil like peasants, planted the seed potatoes out of the dopey inspector’s sack, and put in an herb garden off to one side. And Count Rumford set to work building for Amanda an enormous heavenly kitchen to feed the world’s hungry. As fuel he used the compressed heat tablets, three of which were spat out each second by the hell-fire utilization machine.
In the meantime the meal worms Stine Trude Lovise were growing up to be dear little girls, as pretty as pictures and so clever besides that Ole Fritz didn’t have to govern any more, or Count Rumford to invent, and the dopey inspector didn’t have to bully anybody, for there in the heavenly Kashubia Amanda and her three laughing daughters took care of everything.
Each day there was plenty of potato soup, for herbs and turnips were soon growing, pigs were grunting miraculously, and even onions were taking heavenly root. While peeling potatoes, Amanda told her old sweet-Lord stories, but now they’d become sweet-Flounder stories. And the children weren’t the only ones who knew Amanda’s sayings by heart. For instance: “Marjoram and parsily, good for the whole family”; or “Equal as the spuds we be—only the kingdom of heaven is free.”
So day after day they all spooned up the same soup, and only King Ole Fritz’s peppercorns lay around unused and dangerous, for they were as big as cannon balls, until one heavenly day Amanda rolled them down to hell, whereupon the fires burned even better than before.
But the Flounder, who told this fairy tale before the Women’s Tribunal by way of exculpating himself, said in conclusion, “In short, dear ladies, I took the liberty, in heaven at least, of creating Kashubian Maoist conditions. I won’t say yes and I won’t say no, but if you choose to conjecture that I am Amanda Woyke’s sweet Lord, go right ahead.”
Starvation
Always the flour bin has spoken
words of consolation out of an empty stomach
and snow has fallen as if in corroboration.
If starvation were limited to Holy Week,
fasting would be a pleasure, eating
