Gunter Grass - The Flounder

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."

started on Friday at the main Danzig station, after the news of August 15–14 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 symbolic 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 Schneide-miihl 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 Zii-richsee 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.