by Günter Grass
flatbread with nothing on it;
but starvation covers my region like a pall
all winter until March,
while elsewhere the granaries are sly
and the markets glutted.
Much has been written in defense of hunger.
What beauty it confers.
How free from slag its concept.
What dullness comes of three square meals.
And always there have been Swiss
doing good in the eyes of God
(or someone else): only
the indispensable has been lacking.
But when at last there was enough,
And Amanda Woyke went out to the potato fields
with basket, hoe, and daughters, some gentlemen somewhere else
were sitting around a table, worrying about the falling price of millet.
Ultimately, said Professor Bürlimann,
everything’s governed by demand,
and he smiled a liberal smile.
The Great Leap Forward and the Chinese world food solution
Toward the end of February, after buttered potatoes in their jackets with cottage cheese and caraway seed, in the course of one of the few after-dinner walks Ilsebill has brought herself to take since she became pregnant—I had just come back from a congress at which the future of socialism was discussed point for point—on a clear, sunny day with a foretaste of spring (shortly after 2 P.M.), my Ilsebill leaped, despite my shouts of “Please, please, don’t jump! Don’t, don’t!,” across one of the many ditches known as Wettern that serve to drain the lush Wilster Marsh, the pasture land between the Elbe and the Geest. Despite her bulk she managed to clear the roughly five-foot ditch but landed on her face, though on soft ground, to be sure.
Later, the question of guilt came up: I had allegedly provoked her leap with my obsessive insistence on slow, gradual, deliberately procrastinating change.
As we crossed the marshy meadows, there had been talk of the socialist congress and its resolutions. (What might have been if the opposite hadn’t happened.) When I said: “The Prague Spring probably came too suddenly and seems, in the days preceding the Soviet occupation, to have had a certain erratic character, a failure to take account of the overall development in the Eastern bloc or of the premature expectations of the West, with the result that one more long overdue, but nevertheless ill-timed attempt to reform state Communism came to grief because it took the form of a Great Leap Forward, the immediate consequence being the all-too-familiar limping lag …”—after, more to myself in mulling over the congress than with any intention of provoking Ilsebill, I had said these words, she replied: “Go on! You with your snail philosophy. How’s there going to be any progress if we have to crawl all the time. Look at Mao and China. They weren’t afraid to take a Great Leap Forward. They’re ahead of us. They’re over the hump.”
Already my Ilsebill had her eye on that ditch. She took a run; a concept had hurried on ahead and she leaped after it. Despite my shouts of “Don’t!” she, by then close to five months gone, leaped. In defiance of all reason she leaped and, turning her belly to one side, fell on the rain-softened ground. I jumped after her, no distance at all, and said, “Hurt yourself? Why can’t you listen? What a childish thing to do. In your condition.”
For the first time during a persistently contentious pregnancy we were worried about the baby. I palpated. I listened. But there was nothing wrong. She’d only turned her left ankle. In three shakes we were fighting again. (“You and your shitty snails!” “You and your shitty leaps!”) Ilsebill had to lean on me, which she doesn’t like to do. Step by step, I limped her home.
When we got there, I was still worried. I made vinegar compresses, listened again, palpated some more. The child in her womb—“My son!,” as Ilsebill said—made knocking movements. “It could have been worse. What if a stone had been lying there. Or some other hard and pointed object. Besides, you’re wrong when you attribute the achievements of the Chinese to Great Leaps. Look how they’ve bloodied their noses with their endless Cultural Revolution. These things can’t be done in a hurry. Think of Amanda Woyke. It took years and years for potatoes to take the place of millet. And even longer to abolish serfdom. Always relapses. After Robespierre Napoleon, then Metternich …”
After that I told my Ilsebill—as she lay there at my mercy—about the developments at the Tribunal. To cheer her up, I mimicked the Flounder’s arrogantly curled lip when Amanda’s utopia, the world-wide farm kitchen, was being discussed. I ridiculed his trick of affecting benevolent understanding for everything, even the sheerest nonsense. Then I parodied his manner of speaking: “‘But my dear and gracious ladies! Of course I was glad my contention that the Rumford-Woyke world food center points the way to an egalitarian solution of the food problem has found supporters in your midst, but these things can’t be done helter-skelter. It will first be necessary to set up working groups that will—thoroughly and knowledgeably—research the basic foodstuffs of the past and present. A number of questions arise. What role was played in times of famine by the manna grits obtained from wild grasses? Or: what position shall we take on the protein shortage and hence on the soybean problem? Or: is the European millet shortage before the introduction of the potato comparable to the rice shortage in China before the onset of the Mao Tse-tung era? But if you wish to approach the Chinese world food solution on the basis of the Central European experience, then I must beg you to lose no time in advancing from theory to practice, in other words, to revive Amanda Woyke’s West Prussian soup. To the best of my knowledge, Associate Judge Therese Osslieb operates a successful restaurant. Couldn’t an experimental kitchen be installed there? Mightn’t that be a good place in which, slowly, with deliberate procrastination and phase lag, in slow motion as it were, to initiate the Great Leap Forward?’”
“So then what?” asks my incapacitated Ilsebill. “Did the girls fall for that? Are aprons in demand again? Good God! Do they expect to emancipate themselves with cooking spoons?”
When the nunnish freedoms of the cooking abbess Margarete Rusch were under discussion and the Flounder (more or less playfully) suggested the establishment of feminist convents, first a loose, then a more structured group began to form, drawing its first members from the various factions of the Revolutionary Advisory Council, but then enlisting certain of the associate judges. While the case of Agnes Kurbiella was being debated, the group, far from gaining in definition, stagnated, but when Amanda Woyke’s farm kitchen was held out as an example, it crystallized into a faction which was widely decried as revisionist and which, first in the press, then among the public at large, became known as the “Flounder Party.” Restaurant owner and Associate Judge Therese Osslieb passed for its spokesperson. Ulla Witzlaff and Helga Paasch were members. Ruth Simoneit supported it with reservations. Ms. Schönherr, the presiding judge, was said to have expressed herself in private as a sympathizer. And even Bettina von Carnow, the court-appointed defense counsel, tried to ingratiate herself with the Flounder Party.
This development, which split most of the groups, especially the liberals and Spontaneous Revolutionaries, led to constant conflict with the explicitly ideological groups, and all the more so as heresy had raised its head even among the Marxists. Group discipline became more severe. Anyone who had signed up for the working groups of the so-called Flounder Party was expelled or rejected. And yet those feminists who had unjustly been classified as “moderates” gained more and more influence, for the Flounder Party was very hard on the Flounder, and Therese Osslieb gave him a really rough time. Just as Amanda Woyke had berated Inspector August Romeike as a dope or a bully, so Osslieb flung such titles as “flathead” and “super-Hegel” at the Flounder.
She took a critical view of the Flounder but opposed a blanket condemnation. The prosecution, she said, would have to acknowledge that his enlightened bourgeois approach had been relatively progressive at the time. The Tribunal, after all, had him—and his protégé Rumford—to thank for il
luminating material concerning the pioneering function of the farm kitchen. The present world food situation—more than half of mankind being undernourished—called for the radical elimination of the family kitchen and reconsideration of historical forms of the large-scale kitchen. This thesis of the Flounder’s, Osslieb went on, defied argument and should definitely be taken into the program of the feminist movement. While justly deploring his male arrogance, the Tribunal should be grateful to him for his fruitful ideas. As associate judge, she, Therese Osslieb, would put the egalitarian, or as the Flounder called it, the Chinese world food solution into practice. This she would do on her own premises. Let the men jabber about the Great Leap Forward if that amused them; the women, at long last, would actually make it.
Now Therese Osslieb’s restaurant in Kreuzberg was rather a fancy sort of place, where eccentrics hung out and the cuisine was explicitly Czech; Therese’s maternal grandmother seems to have been a Viennese of Czech descent. The owner, however, soon managed to drive away most of the geniuses to gain an empathetic understanding of Amanda Woyke’s farm kitchen and to popularize, along with West Prussian potato soup, other simple dishes: manna grits boiled with bits of bacon rind; sorrel cooked like spinach; millet cooked in milk; potatoes in their jackets with curds and car-away seed; oatmeal sausage on mashed potatoes; naturally, potato dumplings, Bavarian as well as Bohemian; and fried potatoes accompanied by one thing and another: herring, fried eggs, meatballs, jellied pork.
Up until then the restaurant had borne an esoteric name; now, as the meeting place of the feminists, it became “Ilsebill’s Barn.” The imperial Austrian décor disappeared; now freshly whitewashed walls were graced with just a few rustic ornaments. Few of the old patrons stayed on. But soon the prices started going up again, for each evening Therese Osslieb’s husband, who was quick to adapt, put on a program for the entertainment as well as the enlightenment of the public: “Sir Walter Raleigh and the Potato.” “The Potato in Shakespeare.” “The Introduction of the Potato as Precondition for the Industrialization and Proletarianization of Central Europe.” And, breathtaking in its timelessness, “Potato Prices Yesterday and Today.”
Associate Judge Helga Paasch of the Women’s Tribunal, owner of a nursery garden at Britz, promised to grow organic potatoes for Ilsebill’s Barn on a half-acre plot which, moreover, would be open to educational visits. The children of committed women were invited to take part in a painting competition, and soon the restaurant was decorated with potato motifs. Songs in praise of the potato were written, set to music, and sung. A back room was set aside for the production of potato prints. Diners who wished to could sit in a circle, chatting and peeling potatoes for themselves and others. The name Amanda was conferred for life on several female babies who had been born while the case of Amanda Woyke was under discussion and whose mothers (and fathers) were among the steady customers of Ilsebill’s Barn.
And yet, despite all the playfulness—a few young women wore necklaces of (sprouting) winter potatoes—the earnestness of the original intention was maintained: working groups discussed the nutritive value of the basic foodstuffs, the protein-rich soybean, millet, rice, the exemplary character of the farm kitchen, the necessity of combating hunger on a global scale, the ultimate goal, the Chinese world food solution, and over and over again the Great Leap, which was said to have already begun. We are already in mid-Leap. Seen dialectically, the Great Leap is not a precipitate action, but a continuous process, unfolding in several phases. A Permanent Leap.
I shouldn’t, when Ilsebill was taking her run, have cried out, “Don’t! Don’t jump! Please! Don’t! Don’t jump!,” because then she had to jump and so prove herself in the light of the, to me, unfathomable law that governs her actions—to prove herself if only for the time of a quick leap, which to me, when I suddenly saw her and her arching belly in a state of weightlessness, seemed to stretch into several leap-phases. I saw my Ilsebill after the takeoff, while my cry of “Don’t jump!” was still quivering in the air, saw how she detached herself miraculously from the heavy, wet soil, saw her rise a scant two feet, then, propelled by her momentum, cover forty inches without loss of altitude, and finally, after a distinct downward bend, drop. She just made it over the ditch.
But before I concern myself with Ilsebill’s fall, I would like for an extended moment to celebrate her at the zenith of her leap. She was beautiful, though her leap accentuated the awkwardness, not to say ungainliness of her condition. Her defiant goat face, as if the whole world had offended her. I’d have liked to engrave her in copper as a leaping Melencolia (freely adapted from Dürer). In Knossos the Minoan maidens (in honor of Hera and to spite Zeus) jumped over a charging bull. And when Awa our mother discovered her shadow and wanted to get rid of it, she jumped over the rivulet Radune—just as Dorothea, on our return home from the pilgrimage, crossed the river Elbe by jumping from ice floe to ice floe. For at the sight of Ilsebill leaping, I carried myself backward, I saw Awa, I saw Dorothea in mid-leap, I fled to the late eighteenth century, where Amanda Woyke, a serf bonded to the state of Prussia, was sitting with her whole sedentary being beside the stove in the farm kitchen, serenely peeling potatoes, and a hundred years later I visited Lena Stubbe’s working-class lodge (at Brabank 5), where I found immemorial poverty entrenched as a social problem. Only then did I attend the congress at Bièvres, on the outskirts of Paris, which tried to do something about the future of democratic socialism.
Some Czechoslovak refugees had invited me. A French Communist, risking expulsion from the party, met me at the Orly airport. I had hardly checked into the hotel when I bought a postcard to send to my Ilsebill, scribbled full of sentences such as: “Take care of yourself! Please don’t overdo it. Your condition permits of no leaps. The congress promises to be interesting. About a hundred revisionists …”
They sit at a long table and have that refugee look. Sparse beards matted with vestiges of the last and next-to-last revolutions, which have become part of them in the meantime. In among the veterans sit young, inexperienced beards, in which the future nests, giving hope of hope.
This congress at Bièvres (it seems there used to be beavers here) has been well prepared, with reports that go on and on and leave no historical aspect untouched. Mimeographed copies of the speeches in French translation are made available. Each orator addresses the toiling masses as though speaking to a large crowd, as once he did on public squares, in factory halls, at the now celebrated party congress. Words listen to words with approval. Stalinism condemned in absentia. Determination to remain a socialist, come what may. Appeals to reason. The lament of the enlightened.
Those not speaking draw box constructions or hairy twats. In the translators’ booths emancipated women confidently translate the speeches of errant men into English, German, Czech, and Italian. Outside the windows that can’t be opened, February claims to be March. They’ve come from everywhere. (Only the comrades from Chile haven’t come.) An old Trotzkyist marked by four party splits takes the minutes (in Spanish): his posthumous papers.
Cover your eyes and forehead with your palm and your joined fingers until emptiness sets in: a new promise. Now that reason and the potato have triumphed over superstition, it must be possible to … Now that we know so much, at least the most glaring hunger must be … If we, the whole lot of us, are not to perish, then at last the Great Leap must …
All of a sudden I want to be sitting outside in my overcoat on a bench for old folks and sparrows, eating cheese off my knife and drinking red wine out of a liter bottle, until I’m too demoralized to withstand the claims of time and absolutely without hope, or until I meet some of the other veterans I sat with in Amanda Woyke’s farm kitchen, discussing every battle from Kolin to Burkersdorf back and forth over potatoes with caraway seed and Glumse.
The next man has the floor. Off to one side a resolution is born. On a motion by the Italians. About the Prague Spring: it doesn’t want to be over.
(No no no! I mean it. That was foolish. Even
if we were lucky.) By twisting her belly to one side as she fell and landing on her elbow, she got off lightly—once again. Dutifully I leaped after her. But for quite some time, while I was saying my little sentences—“You were lucky, damn it. But what an irresponsible thing to do!”—the veterans’ meal in Amanda’s farm kitchen dragged on (and the congress of European revisionists stuck to the agenda point for point). For right after the Peace of Hubertusburg I was made inspector of crown lands on the strength of my services. My comrades of the regiment found some sort of livelihood, mainly in the school system. And Amanda had no objection if once a year, after the farm hands had been fed, we sat around the much-too-long table and drank potato schnapps until we were drowning in blissful battle memories: “Ah, comrade, when I think of Torgau … Remember the time we found all that tobacco and chocolate in the Saxon baggage train… .” (And during the intervals between conferences in Bièvres, a few political jokes that were new to me were told: Brezhnev and Nixon meet Hitler in hell… .) And after her fall I said to my Ilsebill, “It could have turned out worse, my dear. When Amanda was pregnant with her youngest daughter, Annchen, the one Romeike made her after the Battle of Burkersdorf just before the end of the war, she jumped across a brook while gathering mushrooms in the woods and fell on some mica rocks, which brought on labor pains prematurely.”
Annchen got born all the same. And her daughter Sophie got to be cook later on for Napoleon’s Governor Rapp. And when we former corporals celebrated our reunions, little Sophie served potatoes in their jackets with Glumse and caraway seed (with linseed oil), which are today coming into fashion again.
Recently, when last the spirit carried me off to Berlin—Ilsebill’s sprained ankle had mended in the meantime—Ruth Simoneit took me along. We managed to talk Sieglinde Huntscha, who just on principle says the Barn is “shitty,” into coming with us. We sat at a table with Ulla Witzlaff. After the manner of restaurant owners, Osslieb sat down with us now and then for a brief chat. Considering I was the only man in the place, I wasn’t treated too badly. Ulla Witzlaff was knitting (knit one, purl one) a man’s sweater. (The girls are better natured than they put on.) When I talked about my hopeless socialist congress, they actually listened. Only Ruth Simoneit, who had ordered a double potato schnapps the moment she arrived, bristled: “Licking your wounds, eh? That’s the one thing you men are good at. When you’re not brutes, you’re crybabies.”
