by Günter Grass
But when I tried to enter my Ilsebill, she said: “It won’t be long now. It’s starting to tug. It’s going to be a boy. He shall be called Emmanuel. What else do you want? Always the same thing. I don’t need it any more. Beat it! Beat it, I say. Or tell me what the Flounder is up to… .”
The Womenal
That’s what the Flounder called the Women’s Tribunal during the last session of his trial. He stopped saying, “But my dear and esteemed ladies!” No patriarch tried to ingratiate himself with “You are my beloved daughters, after all.” Never again did he try to establish superiority with irony, by speaking of “assembled Ilsebills,” or to ridicule with mock pathos the “High Long-haired Court.” Instead, he reduced the assembly that was trying him to the one word “Womenal.” Let the Womenal judge. Let the verdict be what it may, only the Womenal can decide. Other than the Womenal he recognized no superior authority.
Since, during his long captivity, he had grown transparent and lost all color from head to tail fin, it was in glassy terms that the Flounder formulated his admission of guilt, which, however, was also a program, opening up new horizons: “The punishment you are about to impose will put me under obligation to the Womenal for all time.” To make his meaning clearer and amplify his neologism, he spoke of the “Last Womenal,” and for that (so unsure of themselves were these emancipated women to the very end of their confrontation with the flatfish) he was once again suspected of irony.
And yet, what injustice! What had these bitches done to my Flounder! How pale he was! And could that be his voice? No fatherly advice was poured into his son’s ear. No gripes, threats, commands. Where had his scintillating arrogance run off to? No longer did any Ilsebill, no longer did anyone call forth his cynical comments. Gone the cavernous laughter that had stirred up his sand bed and the bottommost depths of the psyche.
Whereas at the beginning of the trial, when Awa Wigga Mestwina were on the agenda, he had whispered primordial phonemes and taken refuge in mythological chitchat, involving the god Poseidon, among others, whenever the prosecution had become too captious for his liking, now he simply laid himself bare: “Just look at me. I am transparent. See through me. Let nothing remain hidden from you.”
And whereas, while the cases of Dorothea Swarze, Margarete Rusch, and Agnes Kurbiella were being debated, every historical fact—the Council of Constance, the Battle of Wittstock, or whatever—had opened up to him an escape route into further facts, he now abandoned all prevarication and, conscious of his guilt, spoke to the point. No Dominican prior (in the shape of a Flounder) wanted to spout canon law. Never again would he be heard quoting nasally from the charters of the medieval guilds. No more inquisitorial showing of instruments. Not a word from the Malleus maleficarum. No vale-of-tears tone, transposing plague, hunger, the long-drawn-out war and my Baroque time-phase into iambics, was audible when the Flounder now spoke: “I did … I am … Never again … In the future I will … It serves me right.”
Oh, God! How they have crushed you! He didn’t even want to weigh and balance any more, to consider in historical perspective, though apt parallels had brought him considerable advantage while the cases of Amanda Woyke and Sophie Rotzoll (and I in relation to them) were under discussion. Never again did the Flounder introduce an interminable speech with the little words “In short.’” Never again did he display his wide reading. Nevermore did the Church Fathers or the heretics speak from his lips. He had understood that in prosecuting him, the Womenal was also prosecuting Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. Hadn’t all the intellectual giants, from Erasmus to Marxengels and even—while the case of Lena Stubbe was under discussion—good old Bebel, been accused? Weren’t three thousand years of history being condemned with him? Might not the Flounder, in his concluding statement, have let his voice ring out once more, have sung the swan song of his epoch, drawn up a deep-thundering balance sheet, writing off the male cause and with it civilization as a failure, yet at the same time illustrating its tragic grandeur, populating it with rhetorical figures, showing it ascending the grandiose staircase of cultural progress, and celebrating its demise, if not with a hymn then at least with a richly orchestrated symphonic poem, whose basses spoke of enduring achievement (the Strassburg Cathedral, the diesel engine), its high notes of guilty entanglements (the moon rocket, the splitting of the atom), and its middle register of the man in the street and his troubles (a family to support, tax bills)?
But he pulled no stops. Though his final statement was termed interesting and left what is known as a lasting impression, this was no longer the old Flounder I knew so well, but a new Flounder, a stranger. He, the jester, the concocter of droll anecdotes which had brought smiles even to the refrigerated faces of the ladies here assembled, he, who had found everything, even the death of poor Sibylle Miehlau, laughable, had become dead serious, though I’m sure he was snickering somewhere in the fishy depths of his existence.
Be that as it may, the Flounder tilled word fields in which only morality gave promise of harvest and bread. He, the talker, the master of digression, he, the slyboots versed in every dodge, laid himself bare, as if he had been vulnerable. When the prosecution attacked him for the last time, he didn’t even take refuge in his sand bed. Though as transparent as glass, he nevertheless exposed himself; every word struck home. Fragile, he hovered in his tank. No longer palpable and yet (as photographs have shown) all there. Wholly at the mercy of the Womenal, the many Ilsebills.
They had dressed up for the occasion. Exotic silver jewelry dangled; feathers and flowers were stuck in their hair. Ruth Simoneit sat wrapped in a shawl. Ulla’s hair pinned high to display gold earrings. Even Erika Nöttke wore jewelry, a pearl necklace. Jangling bracelets lent emphasis to each of the prosecutor’s statements. Sieglinde Huntscha called the Flounder “Spirit of violence. Father of war. Instigator of all wars.” She cried out, “We know you. You are the destructive, life-negating, murderous, male, warlike principle!”
To which the Flounder replied: “Yes. That’s how it is. That’s how it has been up to now. I declared war to be father of all things. On orders from me, positions, from Thermopylae to Stalingrad, were held to the last man. Relentlessly I said: Hold out. Time and time again I commanded death for one thing or another—the greatness of the nation, the purity of some idea, the glory of God, undying fame, an abstract principle such as the fatherland—my invention, incidentally—and exalted death as the essence of life. The balance sheet is known. In killing and in counting the dead, men have been thorough. Almost everywhere in Europe, as vacationing motorists can see by their road maps, far-flung military cemeteries, most of them charmingly situated, have become part of the landscape. Mass-produced crosses bear witness to the First and Second World Wars; in village churches one can read, incised on slabs of marble, the names of men who fell in one or the other war. What were they fighting for? Even I, the prime mover, am not sure. Of course I hoped that after the wars—what? That men would come to their senses? Transvalue all their values?
“The peace that broke out in 1945 has admitted only of limited conflicts; this much, thanks to the balance of nuclear terror, the Great Powers could promise one another. But these limited conflicts also brought millions of deaths, even though—since the advent of global politics—the counting has no longer been done with the old European precision. I am referring to the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, the decimation of a people in the so-called Biafra conflict, the war of annihilation against the Kurds, all the wars in the Near East down to the most recent Yom Kippur War, the wars between India and Pakistan, and, a relatively minor example, the never-ending war-in-peace situation in Northern Ireland. And last but not least: in December 1970, the Polish People’s Police fired on the striking shipyard workers. Deaths! Deaths! In two, four, six digits.
“Who is responsible? Who drives people to destroy one another? Can one speak of human reason when an appreciable percentage of the product of workers’ toil is invested in a more and more highly perfected technolog
y of destruction? What secularized Devil furbishes your portraits of the enemy so bright that in the midst of declared peace the nations, groaning under the burden of their armaments, confront one another eye to eye, deluded, dead sure? Can it still be Beelzebub? Or the so-called death wish? Or is it I, the Flounder out of the fairy tale? The warlike and therefore masculine principle?
“As the Womenal has rightly recognized and aptly stated, all this, this living toward death while parroting peaceful intentions, is pursued with resolute seriousness, with pragmatic know-how and moral pretensions, by men and men alone. With the blessings of the priests of this and that religion, all this has been planned and efficiently executed—in spite of a breakdown now and then—budgeted and endowed with meaning by men and men alone. I know whereof I speak. Peace and war have been my doing. My program was as follows: Men will make history. Men will resolve conflicts. Men will stand and fall—to the last man. Men will fear the day of wrath—and dream of it. Men will be trained to the hilt for premature death. Men will be buddies with death. And the rifle, to cite an old saw, will be ‘the soldier’s bride.’
“And this is how it will be as long as I keep at it, squandering my advice. As long as historiography sets dates. Grandiose in their exaltation, men, heroes out of stupidity, masking their fear of death with contempt, will continue to press forward—forward over graves. Permit me to remind you of Lena Stubbe’s husbands: they got theirs at Mars-la-Tour and Tannenberg. Two run-of-the-mill heroes.
“But wars aren’t the whole story. Every revolutionary process known to us has served up orgiastic rites of death, massacres drawing their justification from some masculine purity-principle or other. The guillotine was celebrated as humanistic progress; the Stalinist show trials met with the blessing of the knowing and the unknowing; in the Nazi concentration camps re-education for death ceased to be anything more than a bureaucratic, administrative measure—in every case it was men, males, who with cold passion sprung from faith, with devotion to a just cause, with eyes fixed on the ultimate goal, with the chilling single-mindedness of archangels, have antedated the deaths of fellow humans—pious, self-assured males, far from their wives and families, but in love with the instruments of death, as though killing were the continuation of sexuality by other means. You have only to look in at the dances of marksmens’ associations, watch young ruffians punishing one another, go to a soccer game, or mingle with the crowd when Ascension-Father’s Day is loudly celebrated here in Berlin: that damned-up aggression looking for an outlet. That fierce, destructive lust.
“Of course there have always been apostles of peace and men who have risked a bold and quotable word against war. Permit me to remind the High Womenal of the poet Opitz, who during the Thirty Years’ War—how vainly, we know—attempted to foment peace. Or Old Man Bebel’s antiwar speech. That was in the spring of 1913, and the Socialist International cheered him. We know that in religious songs and philosophical treatises peace has been sung, longed for, spun into allegory, and meditated upon ad nauseam. But since no one ever tried seriously to resolve the conflicts of human society while forswearing the categories of masculine thinking, nothing was ever accomplished beyond protestations of peaceful intent and sophistical distinctions between just and unjust wars. Crusaders have always managed to massacre people in the name of brotherly love. Wars of liberation are still very much in vogue, and the principle of the free market has meant undernourishment for millions of people: hunger, too, is war.
“And because history presents itself as an inevitable alternation of war and peace, peace and war, as though this were a law of nature, as though nothing else were possible, as though a supernatural force—take me as a captive example—had imposed all this as fate, as though there were no other way of discharging aggression, as though peace could never be more than a brief interval during which men prepared for the next day of wrath, this vicious circle must forever remain unbroken—unless it is broken by those who have hitherto made no history, who have not been privileged to resolve notorious historical conflicts, whom I have subjected to male history, to whom history has never brought anything but suffering, who have been condemned to feed the war machine and replenish the human material it consumes—I am referring to women in their role as mothers.
“But can this be? How uncomplainingly—as was recently brought to the Womenal’s attention—the farm cook Amanda Woyke let herself be got with child after child between the battles of the Seven Years’ War, without ever asking: What for? And the mothers, wives, sisters of the men engaged in murdering one another—haven’t they always kept silent, turned to statues, stone embodiments of female suffering, or even allowed themselves to be honored as the mothers of heroes?
“It is my hope that the Womenal, upon whose mercy I cast myself, which has manifested my guilt, and to which I offer my desire to make atonement, will not only judge me, but will also bear in mind that power will henceforth fall to women. No longer will women be compelled to stand silent and look on. The world is at a turning point. Today history demands a female imprint. Already the male is hanging his head, neglecting to play his role. Already he is unwilling to will. Already he is beginning to relish his guilt feelings. He’s finished, and he knows it. The world awaits a sign from the Womenal, a sign that will put the future back in business.
“And yet we wonder: Why only now? Why have hundreds of millions of mothers, sisters, and daughters looked on unprotestingly while men made their wars? To this day, women who have suffered irretrievable loss cling to the consolation that their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers—all those heroes who have died in the Volkhov marshes, in the Libyan desert, on the North Atlantic, or in air battles God knows where—have died for something and not in vain; that the deaths of sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands have had meaning and purpose. Given the male view of morality and power—for the one follows from the other—men have always been able to supply logical proof that their cause is just, that the enemy attacked first, that they themselves misjudged the situation but acted in good faith, that they want nothing so much as peace, but that conspicuous weakness, pacifism, and suchlike childishness only provoke aggression, that, suffering and sorrow notwithstanding, it is pleasant and noble to die for the fatherland or for an idea, sprung in all likelihood from a male mind, and finally that we can’t expect to live forever. And another thing: since the surviving males have been taught to be chivalrous, they never neglect, after won or lost wars, to bow respectfully to the mothers and widows. After victory parades, heroes dead or alive are honored. Days of national mourning are always a big hit. No danger that the dead will protest. And what do the mothers say?
“On the sideboard stand, over the sofa hang, the photographs of young men in dress uniform, some with an innocent smile, others with a look of earnest concentration, whose earnestness or smile never got beyond the stage of promise. In drawers and portfolios lie school diplomas, letters from the front, their last written words—‘I am well and happy here’—and black-bordered newspaper clippings, which after the terse announcement once again list all medals and decorations. A millionfold inheritance without political consequences. Did the women voters say a massive ‘no’ when—the ruins were still there for all to see—rearmament was decreed? Not at all; they resigned themselves to the perpetuation of this male-ordained madness. And even when women have gained political influence or power, they have always—from Madame Pompadour to Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi—conducted their politics in the Procrustean bed of the male historical consciousness, and that, as I have shown, means war. Can this be changed? Ever, soon, at all?
“The Womenal will have consequences. Our time-phase bears the imprint of the women’s liberation movement. Women have been politicized. They have organized; they are fighting, refusing to be silenced. Already they have registered partial successes. But—I ask myself with misgiving—will women’s striving for social equality end by shattering the male ethic? Or will equality between the sexes merely intensify the male striving
for power?
“I am almost inclined to fear that womankind lacks counsel, sustained, reliable, or, to put it plainly, supernatural counsel. But as an embodiment of the guilty male and—as has been demonstrated—warlike principle, am I fit to advise the female cause, and henceforth the female cause alone?
“I want to. I could. I already know how. Let the Womenal judge.”
Just as my Ilsebill always wants both at once, to freelance and to hold a regular job, to live in the country and to enjoy the scenario of city life, just as on the one hand she strives for the simple life (baking her own bread), but on the other hand requires certain conveniences (most recently an automatic clothes dryer), for which reason her wishes, violently as they conflict, are constrained by force of will to run along in pairs—so, after the Flounder’s peroration, when a verdict was at last to be pronounced, was the Women’s Tribunal (or Womenal) torn. Strictly speaking, death would have been fitting punishment, if his advice (as expiation) had not been needed.
Taken as a whole, the Tribunal wanted both; its parts wanted this or that. While the Flounder Party raised objections to the liquidation of the accused, opposed the death penalty on principle, and contemplated at the most a symbolic punishment, after which the Flounder would be taken on as a repentant adviser and restored to his element, the radical minority were determined to forgo his advice and expunge the Flounder.
Prosecutor Sieglinde Huntscha demanded death by electrocution. Griselde Dubertin wanted to add daily-increased doses of mercury to his drinking water. Ruth Simoneit was for cooking him alive. And as for the court-appointed defense counsel, while on the one hand she demanded acquittal, on the other she pleaded for humane punishment, that is, confinement and psychiatric treatment.
