The Flounder

by Günter Grass

  Nevertheless, the cook from the nineteenth century had the last word. “Fellow workers!” she shouted at the cooks. “Your cooking lacks historical awareness. Because you refuse to recognize that for centuries the male cook was a product of the monasteries and courts, in other words of the ruling class. We female cooks, on the other hand, have always served the people. In those days we were anonymous. We had no time to work up fancy sauces. In our ranks there are no Prince Pücklers, no Brillat-Savarins, no famous chefs. In times of famine we stretched flour with acorns. It was up to us to find ways of varying the oatmeal porridge. It was a distant relative of mine, the farm cook Amanda Woyke, and not Ole Fritz, as you might think, who introduced the potato into Prussia. While you men—all your ideas have been extravagances: boned partridge Diplomat-style with truffled farce, accompanied by goose-liver dumplings. No, fellow workers! I’m for pigs’ feet with black bread and dill pickles. I’m for cheap pork kidneys with mustard sauce. If you haven’t got the historical taste of millet and manna grits on your tongue, you have no business coming here and shooting off your mouth about grilling and sautéing!”

  The cooks were furious. “Come to the point!” they cried. Then the discussion turned to the next round of wage-price negotiations in North Rhine–Westphalia.

  Meanwhile the chairman of the Social Democratic Party had been looking into Lena Stubbe’s draft project for a proletarian cook book—not very deeply, but enough to form an impression. He praised the undertaking and agreed that young workingwomen, most of whom came from the country and were used to living in self-sufficient farming communities, were at sea in urban surroundings and in need of class-conscious guidance in matters of housekeeping and most especially of cookery. He was well aware of the enormous amount of sugar consumed by working-class families, to the detriment of their health. And he was convinced that the alcoholism so prevalent among the workers was not unrelated to their unreasonable eating habits. Bourgeois temptation, he realized, began at the shopping stage. And he conceded that his book about women ought to have had a chapter on the subject. Perhaps not only he, but also the labor movement in general, should have turned their minds to these matters from the start and developed a class-conscious sense of taste. After all, everything couldn’t be left to reason. There was something dry and theoretical about the demand for justice. It lacked flesh and blood. That was why, shrewdly as socialists could analyze situations, they were short on robust humor. So such a work was long overdue, and he could only congratulate Comrade Stubbe on her commentaries and historical references, for instance, to the meat shortage in 1520 and the resulting development and dissemination of dumplings, both sweetened and unsweetened. He also agreed with her that the introduction of the potato in Prussia had brought about more changes than had the glorious victories of the Seven Years’ War. He could only second her opinion that the triumph of the potato over millet had been revolutionary in its implications. All this was good Marxist thinking, although Marx, probably because of his bourgeois upbringing, had failed to recognize the importance of proletarian eating habits. Socialism, like capitalism, had had a puritanical streak from the very start. Moreover, he admired Comrade Lena’s knowledge and regarded her as a model of the self-educated working-class woman. He, too, as a turner’s apprentice, had learned what he knew by reading, without adequate formal preparation.

  So thoroughly had she convinced him that August Bebel thereupon pressed Lena’s hand for a long moment and cried out, “What an unforgettable day!” But when Lena, arguing that as a woman, and an unknown one at that, she would be unable to find a publisher, asked him to write a foreword to her book, Bebel was assailed by doubts. Were the comrades intellectually mature enough to recognize the political necessity for their party chairman’s writing a foreword to a cook book? Wouldn’t he be making himself ridiculous and so harming the good cause? Not to mention the reaction of the bourgeois public, for in the enemy camp they were only waiting for him to lay himself open. Unfortunately. Yes, unfortunately.

  And Bebel also regretfully rejected Lena’s suggestion that at least essential parts of her cook book—even without mention of her name—be included in small print as an appendix to his successful work. Comrade Stubbe, he could see, was a regular reader of Die Neue Zeit. So she must have followed his controversy with Simon Katzenstein on the woman question. He was being urged to include Katzenstein’s critical article and his answer in the new edition, so—most unfortunately—there would be no room for excerpts from her cook book. Besides, it would be a shame to abridge her excellent work. No, no. He couldn’t do such a thing to Comrade Stubbe.

  When August Bebel took out the gold pocket watch that Willy Brandt, the chairman of the SPD, carries today on festive occasions, Lena removed her spectacles, cast a watery look at the plundered table, and said, “It don’t matter.” He said: “I own that I was depressed when I came; but I leave you in good spirits. For now unfortunately I must. The comrades are waiting for me at Adler’s Beer Hall. That is the name of the place on Tischlergasse? Revisionism is on the program again. This eternal bickering. I’d much rather stay and hear a little more about your great-grandmother, the farm cook Amanda Woyke. Yes indeed. If it weren’t for the potato …”

  When, surrounded by the Stubbe family, August Bebel left the workers’ house at Brabank 5, a large crowd was waiting outside; they cheered him and wished him well, for they believed in the good cause. Workers’ songs were sung. He had to shake many hands. Men and women had tears in their eyes. The May evening donated a sunset. A police lieutenant who with his men was keeping an eye on the crowd said, “They’re more excited than if it were the kaiser in person!” And a workingwoman, Frau Lewandowski from next door, answered the lieutenant: “He is our kaiser.”

  The trip to Zurich

  started on Friday at the main Danzig station, after the news of August 13–14 had appeared in Thursday’s Volkszeitung. True, the local leadership had immediately decided to hold an appropriate memorial service, which was well attended when it did indeed take place at the headquarters of the Citizens’ Shooting Club on Saturday, but the comrades also wished to send a delegate and were all the more pleased to do so when Comrade Lena Stubbe, who years before had had an animated talk with the party chairman, decided then and there to take the long trip at her own expense. The local party district donated a laurel wreath with a white ribbon on which were inscribed in red letters the words “Farewell!” and “Solidarity!” Otherwise her luggage, apart from strictest necessities in a straw suitcase, consisted of a loaf of bread, a jar of potted pork, and a string bag full of apples. A special passport was made out for her, and she received it just in time.

  Otto Friedrich Stubbe took Lena to the station. He saw her off with manly self-possession but deep emotion, though the day before he had advised against the expensive trip, which would use up all Lena’s savings, saying, “There’ll be enough of a crowd.”

  Though I can indicate the approximate time when the express left for Berlin (shortly after 11 A.M.), and though that August 1913 is clear in my mind in other respects as well, the present time eludes me almost entirely. Only a few days ago the present chairman of the SPG resigned as chancellor merely because the Communists had put a spy in his office. It’s beyond me. “Those swine!” I fume. I call equally bewildered friends on the phone, I sit down, because running around doesn’t help, and over and over again I lament, “It can’t be! It can’t be!” And to revive the past I write about August Bebel: What would he have done in a similar situation? What would he have said about the spy problem? And for and against whom would Bebel have decided when on April 22, 1946, the CPG and the SPG of the Soviet-occupied zone met at a unification congress and voted to fuse into the Socialist Unity Party? On that solemn occasion the Social Democrat Grotewohl applauded when an aged comrade handed the Communist Pieck a wooden staff, which Bebel himself had turned, and with which he had pounded the table for order at the turbulent Erfurt party congress of 1891.

  But the sym
bolic import of that staff was not sufficient to save several Social Democrats from Bautzen Prison (soon after the unification congress); nor could anything stop the ruling Communists in the German Democratic Republic from spying on one another and everybody else, including Bebel’s successor.

  Naturally the master turner hadn’t thought of that when—still for love of his trade—he turned a handy staff with which to give emphasis to his authority when the comrades started arguing too violently about the true road to socialism. (Or had Willy resigned because he was disgusted with power?)

  At 7:30 P.M., when Lena Stubbe arrived at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse Station, she had to change to the Stadtbahn, because the 10:13 express to Zurich via Halle, Erfurt, Bebra, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, and Basel left from Anhalt Station. So flat was the Pomeranian countryside that from Schneidemühl on she had slept imperturbably in her corner seat. On the platform, which was lined with wreath-bearing comrades from other local sections and districts, she ate an apple. Later, after luckily finding a window seat in her compartment, she cut two slices from her loaf of black bread and spread them with potted pork out of her jar. This she washed down with one of the bottles of Aktien beer that Otto Friedrich had thoughtfully put into her carryall.

  Since his only daughter had married a Zurich man and was living there, the chairman, whose activity as a writer of books had proved profitable, had built a house on the Zürichsee for his old age. When August Bebel died, at the age of seventy-three, Lena was sixty-four. The woman comrade across from her must have been in her early forties. In addition there were three men in the compartment, only one of whom, however, was going to Zurich for socialist reasons. Though pure chance had brought this Herr Michels, who lived in Turin, where he was an instructor of economics at the university, to Lena’s compartment, he was on familiar terms with the other woman. Soon after the train pulled out, he spoke to her on so radical a note that though it wasn’t far to Halle, where they were getting out, the other two gentlemen changed compartments, in the course of which move one of them, much to the amusement of the two women, spoke of “Communist riffraff.”

  They were doing Robert Michels an injustice in more than one sense, for the young man came of a Rhenish merchant family. True, after a brief interlude as a Prussian officer he had taken up with revolutionary socialists, but, repelled by German Social Democracy and its law-abiding ways, he had made friends with French and Italian Syndicalists. Influenced by Sorel, he detested the petit-bourgeois reformism of the socialists, and yet, though disappointed in Bebel, Michels, because of his longing for true authority, was also fascinated by that son of a career sergeant. Which explains why he was on his way to the funeral of the chairman of a party that he, in his headlong development, had long left behind him. He regarded himself as far to the left of Frau Rosa, who belonged to the left wing of her party. In Lena Stubbe, who offered him and everyone else in the compartment apples, he saw nothing; and how, indeed, could he have understood this white-haired woman who crossed herself as the train pulled out and re-enacted this sin against the spirit of enlightenment at every station?

  The two younger passengers discussed the general strike as a revolutionary weapon, and their dialogue became more and more impassioned. Michels, too, favored the great strike, but criticized Rosa for having feared to overstep the limits of legality, for submitting to Bebel, the “notorious majority-politician,” and for not daring to take her left-wing faction out of the party. “You with your democratic talk. The masses are a blind power. They need a guiding will to drag them forward. All the people ever want is a few pfennigs more on payday and free beer. Your Social Democracy stinks of bourgeois decadence. All you can think of is statutes. No feeling for the anarchic power that sweeps away the dust of the centuries with an iron broom and at last makes room for true freedom.”

  She, too, wanted true freedom, said Rosa. But freedom couldn’t be commanded from the top down. It had to grow up from the base—though organization could help. “Of course the compromise solutions they’re now suggesting are out. The Bernsteins and Kautskys have to go. Now that the Old Man is dead, younger leaders will rise up. We’ve got to find our way back to spontaneity. Against the party, if need be.”

  They talked like this as far as Bebra. As darkness fell outside, Lena spoke: To tell the truth, she wanted to sleep a while. But there was something that needed to be said. What Comrade Luxemburg was saying—she’d read pretty much the same thing in the party press. And on paper it was true. Freedom from the bottom up—she was all for it. And as for Comrade Michels, whose writings she was sorry to say she hadn’t read, he talked mighty big, sounded almost like her Otto Friedrich shooting his mouth off in Adler’s Beer Hall when he was carried away on his radical Sundays. But people live on Mondays, and every day of the week. Comrade Bebel had said that time and time again. Too bad he wasn’t chairman any more. What would happen now if no one could put just enough left-wing and right-wing truth into sensible sentences? Because too much truth was dangerous. Pretty soon you’d talk the party’s unity away. Comrade Luxemburg should think about that. And as for Comrade Michels, who was so learned and such a glib talker, he should take care that his talk didn’t carry him too far to the left, because then he’d come out on the right. She knew people, take Karlchen Klawitter, for instance, who’d changed beyond recognition in only a few years. The only thing that didn’t change was the real world, its poverty, for instance.

  Then, after again offering her apples, Lena Stubbe pulled her coat over her face and slept, while the express sped through the bright morning, making every effort to get there on time, for the enginer and fireman, as well as the relays of conductors, were all comrades. They knew exactly whom they were taking where, and knew that their regularly scheduled train was becoming more historical from mile to mile.

  Lena’s words—at one point she had called Rosa “child” and “my lass”—had made Rosa Luxemburg and Robert Michels rather thoughtful. And yet, because socialism is like that and habit is habit, they had to argue the principle of the thing for another hour, though in a considerate undertone, until they, too, were tired.

  Of course Rosa didn’t want to split off from the party (as she did later on, with dire consequences). Of course the radical son of the bourgeoisie didn’t want to end up in the camp of reaction after an eccentric career (and yet soon after the First World War—then imminent—he became a Fascist in Italy, where he was a professor, and remained an enthusiastic and radical Fascist to the end). All in all, a good deal of future was traveling in that train to Zurich: Ebert and Scheidemann were riding in a first-class carriage, and Plekhanov, whom Lenin was even then excoriating as a revisionist, was also on his way to speak beside Bebel’s grave in the name of the Russian comrades.

  Unfortunately, there are some things that no one can foresee. For all his jokes about sons of the bourgeoisie, Bebel had held the brilliant young man in high esteem: his (liberal) scientific attitude, his (colorful) style. While with Brandt, Guillaume’s reliability and even disposition had become a soothing habit. Traitors have their special charm. It was rather flattering, in fact, for even in their betrayal Michels and Guillaume always managed to speak respectfully, the one of Bebel, the other of Brandt. No one reading Michels’s obituary of Bebel, even the critical passages, can fail to see how dearly he must have loved the old man. And if Guillaume should some day present us with the “Memoirs of a Traitor,” I am sure he will draw a neat distinction between his political employers’ cause and his own private feeling. After all, one can only betray what one loves; though Lena Stubbe, who all her life obeyed only necessity, remained single-minded even in her love.

  Punctually at 3:39 P.M. the express pulled into the Zurich Central Station. The Workers’ Association had prepared lodgings for the new arrivals. As usual, the arrangements went off without a hitch. Lena—who had taken leave of Rosa with a motherly “Take care of yourself, lass; and try and write something sensible about us poor womenfolk,” and of Michels with a good-nature
d slap on the back—went to spend the night with the Loss family, to whom she had been assigned. For supper there was café au lait with a Swiss variant of home-fried potatoes known as Röschti.

  Old Man Loss, who had worn out shoe leather as a postman until he himself was worn out, told her how the comrades among the Swiss and German post-office employees had worked together at the time of the Socialist Laws, to smuggle The Social Democrat, which was printed in Switzerland and forbidden in Germany, across the border.

  Lena Stubbe told her hosts about the strike at the Klawitter Shipyard, and how Bebel had come to their place on Brabank for a visit. Though mentioned only in passing, her cook book, for which she had found no publisher, aroused the interest of Mother Loss, who was about Lena’s age.

  Then they all went to bed. The bells of Zurich woke them. A fine summer day gave the impression that the whole world was sparkling bright. Money was going to church. God was keeping his finances secret. Bebel’s death had thus far gone unnoticed.

  It was May when Willy resigned. On the sixth I had spent the whole day drawing pictures of myself with gulls’ quills: aged and worn, but still blowing feathers as I’d done as a boy (when airships were in vogue) and even before that, as far back as I can remember myself (B.C., Stone Age), three, four at once, the down, the wishes, the happiness, lying, running, blown them and held them in suspension. (Willy, too. His amazing second wind. Where he got it from. The Lübeck recreation yard.) My feathers—some were his—are getting limp. It so happens that they fell in the usual pattern. Outside, I know, state power is puffing up its cheeks; but no feather, no dream will dance for it.

  The funeral ceremonies were scheduled for two o’clock Sunday afternoon. As Comrade Loss belonged to the organization committee, Lena was favored with an admission ticket to the municipal cemetery at Sihlfeld, which she picked up at the Workers’ Association on Stauffacherstrasse. Until Saturday the body had lain in state in the auditorium of the Volkshaus. From there the dead Bebel was transferred to the house of his widowed daughter on Schönbergstrasse. That was where the funeral procession formed. In the lead the Konkordia band. Then more than five hundred wreath bearers, among them Lena Stubbe, who had not wanted to delegate her wreath. Then came the hearse, followed by several carriage loads of flowers, the carriage bearing the bereaved family, and two more occupied by persons too frail to walk. The bearers of the traditional banners were followed by delegations from Germany (including the Reichstag fraction), France, England, Austria, Switzerland, and other groups. Then came the Harmony band, followed en masse by the political organizations of Zurich and environs. The trade unions brought up the rear. Even the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, always ready to sneer at the labor movement, was amazed at the size of the crowd and wondered why.