Gunter Grass - The Flounder

"The affairs and achievements of today: Calcutta. The Aswan Dam. The pill. Watergate. These are men's ersatz

babies. Some principle has got them with child. They are pregnant with the categorical imperative. At least the military art, which they alone master, enables them to antedate death as birth into the unknown. But what they give birth to — whether creation or monstrosity — will never learn to walk, never be able to say 'Mama.' Unsuckled, it will waste away or reproduce itself only on paper: children born of desk-ridden males. Culture? Yes, if you will. Or should we speak of a morgue? Dusty old books in libraries. Canned music. Crumbling Gothic brickwork. In air-conditioned museums art has forgotten its origins. And the secret archives in which the monstrosities born of men live on in sinister, softly rustling dossiers. Already there are data banks. Already human beings are computerized; terrifyingly, their punch cards can be pulled out at any time. In short, extraordinary things are being done. We speak of epoch-making achievements. We say: Even in failure he was great. We look with emotion upon tragic proofs of existence, but nature plays no part in them; how impoverished they are in comparison with nature, and, because they were achieved by unnatural effort, we are bound to evaluate them negatively. Women, on the other hand, even if they have studied, even if they have emancipated themselves, even if they have been able to perfect the computer, increase profits, modernize the armaments industry, and put their imprint on government, will always — even with the fanciest hairdos — be nature. They menstruate. They give life even when they draw nameless seed from sperm banks. Milk wells promptly from them and them alone. Yes, they are mothers in a fundamental sense, even if they are not, or are not yet, or possibly never will be, even if they remain virginal all their lives like Fraulein Rotzoll.

"Women have no need to worry about immortality, because they embody life; men, on the other hand, can only survive outside themselves, by building a house, planting a tree, doing a deed, falling gloriously in battle, but after first begetting babies. Persons who can't give birth to children are at best presumptive fathers; nature has not done well by them."

When the Flounder had finished saying all this and worse — for he predicted that women, along with increasing equality, would develop an increasing predisposition to male-

type baldness — he left his sand bed (in apparent triumph) and disported himself with his fins, while the associate judges of the Women's Tribunal condemned his differentiation of the sexes as "one-sidedly biological" and "hopelessly conservative."

Griselde Dubertin shouted, "He is and remains a reactionary." And before summing up the case for the prosecution, Sieglinde Huntscha quipped, "Those poor little menfolk. Not even allowed to have babies. My ass bleeds for them." After what seemed like liberating laughter on the part of the female public, she said drily, "In any case the revolutionary Sophie Rotzoll died childless and unmarried."

Except for her, they all bore me children, even Billy. In every case I was at least a possible begetter. But fervently as I've longed for sons ever since patriarchy was put through, much as I longed to see myself, my name, and my possessions perpetuated by sons, they all gave me nothing but daughters.

My friends made fun of me, called me a cracksman, recommended tinctures, pills made from mouse droppings, strenuous pilgrimages, but after every confinement I was shown the characteristic Parker House roll; no watering can ever consented to fill me with paternal pride. Even the Flounder didn't know what to do. When Dorothea gave birth to her fourth daughter and I went to him with my trouble, he spoke darkly of maternal counterforces. The mother goddesses, he whispered, Demeter, Hera, Artemis, the Pelasgian Athene, the three-breasted Awa, had all been defeated, but continued to wield a subliminal power. He, the Flounder, could only attribute the failure of certain individuals to beget sons to the vengeance of the mother goddesses — that was the price we had to pay.

Every time I begot a child from then on, the Flounder's suppositions were confirmed. Nothing but girls ever came of it. I'm not speaking of Awa, Wigga, or Mestwina. To them the concept of fatherhood was long unknown, and after that a mere joke. But when as a master swordmaker and member of the guild, with two journeymen in my employ and good hope of leaving a little something behind me, I got my Dorothea with child nine times, I think I might have been rewarded with at least one son. And even the fact that eight of the nine girls died (five of the plague) can

hardly be regarded as a consolation, for Gertrud, the survivor, also had nothing but girls (four or five), among them Birgitta, who went off with the Hussites and came to a sad end at the siege of Bautzen.

I repeat: daughters, nothing but daughters. Mother Rusch was delivered of daughters — twice. Never any mention of fathers. Hedwig, the first daughter, was married to a Portuguese merchant who set up a trading post on the Malabar Coast, and Katharina got a local butcher for a husband. Hedwig and her Portuguese died (along with three out of their four daughters) of Indian swamp fever; Kath-arina's surviving daughters (three out of six) married local butchers, to whom they bore daughters, nothing but daughters. (And by the way, my Ilsebill has two sisters. Griselde Dubertin comes of a so-called three-girl family. And Witzlaff never speaks of any brothers, either.)

It was and remains a spooky business. Apart from the boy (by painter Moller) who wasted away, we know that Agnes Kurbiella gave birth to a little Ursula soon after the poet Opitz died of the plague. And the best Amanda Woyke could do for me was seven daughters. Stine Trude Lovise starved to death in infancy. The others lived out their lives as Kashubian serfs, all except Anna, the youngest daughter, who was bought free and went with her illegitimate child to live in the city, where she married the journeyman brewer Christian Rotzoll and was widowed when her daughter, Sophie, was nine years old. It only remains to be said that during her first and second marriages Lena Stubbe bore and nurtured four daughters, Billy's daughter grew up with her grandparents, and Maria's twin girls are now four years old.

One of the things I liked about Sophie was that she kept shut and even as an elderly spinster still had a virginal glow. When her case came up before the Women's Tribunal, the fiendish pleasure she took in arousing men and letting them dangle and fret filled the public with enthusiasm. A color poster (closely resembling Associate Judge Dubertin) was made of her as she was presumed to look, or perhaps as she was sketchily described by the Flounder, and marketed as a feminist relic. It showed Sophie dressed as a Danzig market girl standing on a barricade. With her left hand she was

clutching the Flounder by the tail fin and with her right brandishing a kitchen knife. Her narrow, scowling face. Her peat-brown hair, piled high and tied with a tricolor ribbon. Her small mouth, open and rounded, apparently singing something revolutionary. And at the foot of the barricade uprooted mushrooms, clearly suggesting that an unmanning massacre had taken place.

It is safe to assume that Sophie Rotzoll as political poster served, along with similar graphic works (for posters of Dorothea and Amanda were also on sale), to decorate the walls of rooms in old houses and new; and I, too, bought a freshly made print for five marks, because the Sophie I remember is all too split a personality.

It took the poster to simplify the prim spinster whose father I am supposed to have been. I had never seen her so explicitly — a daughter, never a mother. And, addressing the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder maintained that Sophie's virginity could be viewed as an essence, though the circumstance that her childhood friend the revolutionary schoolboy Friedrich Bartholdy spent a good forty years of his life in fortress arrest undoubtedly helped her to remain true to her essence.