The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Violently as they argued, Fräulein Bettina managed, strangely enough, in her childlike yet precocious way, to agree with all of them. She favored unfalsified folk poetry, the art fairy tale, the search for the sources of language, and the humble transcription of fireside stories. And when painter Runge spoke haltingly and obscurely of primordial forces, of unformed matter, of the breath of chance, of gossamer and transience, all of which he held to be the very texture of life, and proceeded from image to image, Bettina agreed with him, too; in her eyes the friends were all splendid. Each one was right. There was room enough for all their ideas. That’s the way nature was in its beautiful disorder: spacious. All these thoughts could be set before the reader in their wild luxuriance; little order was needed. The reader would know what to do with them. “And then,” she cried, “you can go on with your research!”

  Thereupon painter Runge said: “I’m glad to say that The Journal for Hermits has accepted one of the tales I’ve taken down in dialect, ‘The Juniper Tree,’ but the other, which was also told me years ago by an old woman on the island of Rügen and which I took down in two versions, because the old woman, who was strangely obstinate, kept shifting from one to the other and back, this tale of ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’ is still unpublished, though Zimmer the book dealer recommended it a good two years ago to Messrs. Arnim and Brentano for inclusion in their Boy’s Magic Horn. Our meeting here gives me an opportunity to bring the story up again, and I’m going to submit both versions. That’s why I’ve come all this way at the Messrs. Grimm’s request. Because I ought to be at work on my painting. It’s called Morning, and it simply refuses to get finished.”

  Thereupon painter Runge laid the two versions of his dialect tale on the long, paper-littered table. The one is the tale as it has come down to us; of the other, there is more to say.

  Because, you see, the old woman, who lived on Oehe, a small island between the thin, elongated island of Hiddensee and the large island of Rügen, but who, when the wind was right, came rowing over to the main island on market days to sell her sheep’s-milk cheese in Schaprode, told painter Philipp Otto Runge two different truths to take down in his sketchbook. The one made Ilsebill the quarrelsome wife credible, how she wants to have more and more and more, to be king emperor pope, but finally, when she wants the all-powerful Flounder to make her “like God,” is sent back to the old thatched hut, called “pisspot” in the story. The other truth dictated to painter Runge by the old woman showed a modest Ilsebill and a fisherman with immoderate wishes: He wants to be unconquerable in war. He wants to build, traverse, inhabit bridges across the widest river, houses and towers reaching to the clouds, fast carriages drawn neither by oxen nor horses, ships that swim under water. He wants to attain goals, to rule the world, to subjugate nature, to rise above the earth. “But now,” he says in the second tale, “now I want to fly, too… .” And when at the end the fisherman, though his wife, Ilsebill, keeps advising him to be content (“Now suppose we stop wishing and let well enough alone”), wants to rise up to the stars (“I must and will fly up to heaven”), all the splendor, the towers, the bridges, the flying machines collapse, the dikes burst, drought parches, sand-storms devastate, the mountains spew fire, the old earth quakes, and in quaking shakes off the man’s rule. And cold blasts usher in the next all-covering ice age. “And there, under the ice, they’ve been sitting to this day.” So ended the tale of the Flounder who granted every wish of the man who kept wanting more and more, every wish except the last—to fly beyond the stars to heaven.

  When painter Runge asked the old woman which of the two tales was right, she said, “The one and the other.” Then she went back to the market to sell her sheep’s-milk cheese, for she wanted to be on her island before nightfall, “with some sweet stuff and a bottle.”

  As for painter Runge, he returned to Wolgast, where he lived in his father’s house. There he copied both tales, the one and the other truth, out of his sketchbook in his best calligraphy, without changing a single word.

  When the Grimm brothers, the writers Arnim and Brentano, and Brentano’s sister Bettina had read the one and the other manuscript, asking what certain words meant because they didn’t know much Low German, they all praised the tales for their moral substance and originality, but each in a different way. Arnim wanted to put both of them right into his Boy’s Magic Horn; Brentano wanted to cleanse them of dialect, transpose them into verse, and fashion them into a great epic; Jakob Grimm delighted in their free and easy grammar; and Wilhelm Grimm resolved to publish these tales and others in the future. Only Bettina took a dark view of the one version in which, so she said, Ilsebill was painted too black. If the tale were published in that form, it would be easy for men to say: That’s how you women are, greedy and quarrelsome, all alike. “When actually,” she cried, “women have such a hard time of it!”

  “I, on the other hand,” said her brother Clemens, “cannot approve of the other tale, which so cruelly demolishes man’s strivings and dreams of greatness. None of the things we hold sacred, our rich and complex history, the glorious empire of the Hohenstaufens, the towering Gothic cathedrals, would exist if men had dully contented themselves with what they had. To publish the tale in this form, so suggesting that all men’s striving leads to chaos, would soon make a laughingstock of male authority. And besides, women are undoubtedly more immoderate in their wishes. Everyone knows that.”

  After that, brother and sister argued across the long table, and soon the other friends also began to quarrel. Even the scientific-minded Jakob Grimm thought the greedy Ilsebill more plausible than the overweening fisherman. He knew other tales (from Hessen, from Silesia), about women (always women) who wanted more and more. The sensitive Wilhelm took the contrary view. It was common knowledge, he contended, that male lust for power was a source of tyranny and oppression. Consider Napoleon—or Caesar. Hadn’t the Corsican wanted more and more? As general under the Directory, to be consul; as one of three consuls, to be first consul; as first consul, to be emperor; and hadn’t he gone on as emperor to subjugate all Europe? And wasn’t he planning, at this very moment, to invade India; didn’t he hope to break the world dominion of Britain and perhaps even, like Charles XII of Sweden, to penetrate deep into Russia?

  The friends, who were all stricken by the misfortune of their fatherland, agreed. Only Bettina would hear no slur on the greatness of her undersized hero. Hadn’t she heard Goethe in person, himself a great man, praise Napoleon in no uncertain terms? Whereupon Arnim poured abuse on Goethe and waxed loudly patriotic. (Later on, during the War of Liberation, he was to show bravery as captain in a Landsturm battalion.)

  To all this Runge said nothing, though he had his own grounds for bitterness against the great man of Weimar, who, when viewing Runge’s Achilles’s Combat with the River Gods at a competitive exhibition, had thought it “not classical enough.” Once, to be sure, though no one heard him, Runge informed his friends that the old woman had said both tales were true.

  When Brentano now declared the quarrelsome, greedy Ilsebill from the one tale to represent the very essence of womanhood, in support of which judgment he cited some revolting anecdotes drawn from his recent but already foundered marriage to a certain Auguste Busmann, Bettina (who after the Revolution of 1830 was to become a militant champion of women’s rights) was furious with her outspoken brother: “Haven’t we women been humiliated enough?” Then, with a glance at the silent Kashubian woman at the stove (and her frightened children), she put an end to the angry quarrel: “Friends, let’s stop and think this over quietly. Our dear Lovise tells me the woods are full of mushrooms. Let’s entrust ourselves to nature and gather into our baskets what it has to offer us. It’s still early afternoon. The autumn sun will give us a golden light. Where, if not in the forest cathedral, will our quarrel give way to appeasement? And besides, our dear Lovise has announced her cousin’s visit for this evening. She is the local governor’s cook and moreover an expert on mushrooms.”

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p; So they went into the forest, which they saw in different ways. Each carried a basket. For fear of getting lost, they arranged to remain within calling distance of one another. Oliva Forest, consisting mostly of beeches, merged with Goldkrug Forest and the hilly woods of Kashubia farther inland. Brentano was soon overpowered (as though rehearsing his subsequent conversion to Catholicism) by a feeling of profound yet exalted, all-embracing yet concentrated piety. Sobbing with Weltschmerz as, holding his empty basket, he leaned against a smooth beech trunk, he was found by the sensitive Wilhelm, whose consolations were so ineffectual that he, too, burst into tears; whereupon they threw their arms around each other, and so they remained until their sobs died down and, moving like blind men, they finally gathered a few mushrooms: for the most part inedible members of the agaric family, more sulfur cups than honey tufts.

  Meanwhile Arnim and Bettina (who were to marry some years later and have eight children) had met as though by chance at the edge of a clearing by the side of a dark pond. They showed each other what they had gathered in their baskets: Arnim was proud of a few specimens of butter fungus and numerous chestnut mushrooms; the playful Bettina called attention to a few moss heads and begged indulgence for the fly agaric she had gathered. They were as beautiful as fairy tales, she said. They emanated enchantment. She knew that fly agaric, even if one ate only a little, induced dreams, suspended time, freed the self, and reconciled the most glaring contradictions. Thereupon she peeled the skin from the cap, broke off a morsel, took some for herself, ate a piece, and gave some to Arnim. Then they stood silent, waiting for the effect. It soon made itself felt. His fingers and hers wanted to play together. Standing eye to eye, they looked deep into each other’s souls. They spoke words clad in purple that found their mirror image in every pool of water. Bettina compared the nearby pond to the sorrowful eye of an enchanted prince.

  When the effect of the fly agaric wore off a little—the sky had already begun to darken—Arnim reached into his trouser pocket and found a peasant knife, which he had bought for next to nothing while on a trip to the Rhineland with his friend Brentano. With it he cut into a beech trunk, as smooth as the one Clemens and Wilhelm had wept by, the word “forever,” and under it the letters “A” and “B.” (Thus they made the clearing and the dark pond significant. Much later a stone was placed there, which remembered them with a hewn inscription.)

  Meanwhile Jakob Grimm and Philipp Otto Runge had managed to carry on a serious conversation, though they had passed any number of honey tufts and a few ceps. Runge was not only a painter but also a theoretician; he wrote about colors, for which reason a work entitled “The Color Globe” was found among his posthumous papers; whereas Jakob Grimm studied the laws of phonetic change, the mythological background of all reality, and vast realms of words, for which reason we still refer to the dictionary that bears his name.

  At length they got around to the two versions of the fairy tale about the Flounder. Jakob Grimm said he would be glad, at his next opportunity, to publish the first version, in which the greedy Ilsebill is sent back to her pisspot. (And indeed, a year after Runge’s death, the tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife” was included in the Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen. The other version, however—as Runge himself finally agreed—would have to be withheld, because of its apocalyptic tone. “It would seem,” said the painter with some bitterness, “that we humans can tolerate the one truth and never the other.”

  The elder Grimm brother wondered if it might not be possible to rewrite the tale, stressing the ethical aspect, to convert it into a political attack on Napoleon, and so make it serve the unhappy fatherland. (And in 1814, to be sure, such an attack on the tyrant was published in High German; but by then Napoleon had already been defeated.)

  And now, as dusk descended on Oliva Forest, the friends called out till they found one another, but they didn’t know the way back. They were just beginning to be afraid—even Runge and the elder Grimm brother were troubled—when the forester appeared from the depths of the woods. He must have heard their cries. Without a word, as though there were nothing to say, he led them all home.

  At the forester’s lodge, beside the pond and the already dark deer meadow, the woodsman’s Kashubian wife’s cousin had by then arrived with fresh-baked bread from the governor’s kitchen. Lovise called her cousin Sophie. And when the pretty but noisy young lady began to sort the mushrooms that had been gathered, saying, for instance, “This is a sulfur tuft, it’s poisonous,” Brentano remembered sorrowfully that Sophie had been the name of his wife who had died a year before.

  And Sophie Rotzoll—as the French governor’s cook continued to be called—cleaned the good mushrooms and fried them in a big pan with bacon and onions till they gave off juice, which she peppered and at the end seasoned with parsley. The friends ate of the dish at the long table, and there was enough for Lovise and Sophie as well. The old forester and the Kashubian woodsman, whose name was Kutschorra, sat on the stove bench, dipping chunks of the bread Sophie had brought into bowls of beer soup left over from the day before. And the friends also broke off chunks of bread. In the bedroom beside the kitchen, Lovise’s children were no doubt dreaming of spice cookies with anise baked into them.

  How merrily the friends talked. How cleverly Sophie the cook answered their questions. When the conversation suddenly went back to the Flounder and his truths, Sophie and Lovise said that they, too, had heard such tales. But only the one truth was right. It was the men and no one else who wanted more and more and more. “They’re to blame for all the trouble!” cried Sophie, slamming her fist down on the bread.

  That would have provoked more quarreling at the long table if the sensitive Wilhelm hadn’t suddenly said, “The moon! Look at the moon!” They all looked through the little windows and saw how the full moon shed its light on the pond where the swans were sleeping and the deer meadow where the deer were grazing.

  So they went out in front of the forester’s lodge. Only the forester stayed on the stove bench. But while they were all looking at the moon and thinking up pretty names to call it by, painter Runge returned to the house, came back with a brand he had taken out of the stove, and set fire to a sheet of paper with writing on both sides.

  “All right, Mr. Flounder,” said Runge when the manuscript was consumed. “There goes your other truth.’”

  “Good Lord!” cried the younger Grimm. “I only hope you’ve done the right thing.”

  Then they all went back into the house. And now I must write and write.

  Beyond the mountains

  What would I be without Ilsebill!

  the fisherman cried

  contentedly.

  My wishes clothe themselves in hers.

  Those that come true don’t count.

  Except for us everything’s made up.

  Only the fairy tale is real.

  Always, when I call, the Flounder comes.

  I want, I want, I want to be like Ilsebill.

  Higher, deeper, more golden, twice as much.

  More beautiful than imagined.

  Mirrored ad infinitum.

  And because the concepts of life and death no longer.

  And have a chance to invent the wheel once more.

  Not long ago I dreamed riches:

  everything I could have wished for,

  bread, cheese, nuts, and wine,

  only I wasn’t there to enjoy them.

  So then my wishes went off again

  and searched beyond the mountains for

  their double meaning: Ilsebill or me.

  Gathering mushrooms

  It was easier to tell us apart by our shoes, which were found later—those are Max’s, those Gottlieb’s, those Fritzchen’s—than by our faces before; the three of us with our round heads could be confused as readily as the mushrooms in the woods around Zuckau and Kokoschken, where we went with Sophie, who, after we had once again managed to get lost, called all the mushrooms and us, too, by name.

 
That must have been in the fall of ’89, because seven years later, when after a good many things had happened we found our way out of the woods, Fritz Bartholdy wanted to proclaim the republic right away; and Sophie, who brought home baskets full of chestnut mushrooms and lordly ceps, agreed with her Fritz.

  That’s how big the forests were in those days: if you got lost in them as a child, you were older by the time you got back. Almost grown up, and with his mouth full of determination, the gymnasium student Friedrich Bartholdy declared, when we met in the attic of his father’s town house at Beutlergasse 7, “Freedom must be won by violence!” Sometimes he quoted Danton, who was dead, and sometimes Marat or Robespierre, who were also dead. But because we’d been gathering mushrooms repeatedly and for so long, the idea had stuck with us. It was as beautiful as a solitary cep. And when Sophie read aloud what the latest gazette had to say about General Bonaparte, Fritz said, “Maybe this Napoleon is the idea for our time.”

  Since then I’ve gathered mushrooms time and time again with Sophie, Ilsebill, and whoever. Names I’ve shouted in the woods. My terror when no answer came. And sometimes I, too, have found, I, too, have been called, and I’ve answered too late.

  Last fall, before we made the baby after mutton with beans and pears as though it were an idea, Ilsebill, while gathering mushrooms in Geest Forest near Itzehoe, found a solitary cep, which was so big that we long looked in vain for something to compare it with, until Sophie, in the adjoining forest but just two centuries earlier, found an even bigger one that was beyond compare. Like all mushroom forests, those I’ve gone into with Ilsebill, Sophie, and whoever are twined and matted with ferns and seamlessly upholstered with moss; I never knew who actually found the biggest cep—which in Sophie’s day was known as the imperial mushroom—when or where.