Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Around Ilsebill scurry the stick men who have planned, developed, sanitized, welfared everything to death. Above her, jet-propelled in oblique flight, local NATO maneuvers, which never stop rehearsing the real thing. So she lies, fallen from all time. Where the Vistula and the Elbe flow, or try to flow, into the sea. Her wandering shadow: history that has never been written but is enduringly there. Roads that are supposed to pass around her. Screens to shelter her from sight. Warning signs that deny her existence. A double-meshed fence to protect her. Leaping males all about. Measured brevity. Achievement trying to catch Ilsebill's eye. To strike her dumb with wonder. But when the mood takes her, she rolls her flesh to the other side. We call that exercise. With her dimensions she confutes male-administered power. Already Ilsebill has become landscape, closed to all interpretation. Let me in! I want to crawl into you. To disappear completely and recover my reason. I'm sick of running away; it's warmth I want. .

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. . "

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 "Wom-enal." 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, Mar-garete Rusch, and Agnes Kurbiella were being debated, every historical fact — the Council of Constance, the Battle of Witt-stock, 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 malefica-rum. 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 Nottke wore jewelry, a pearl necklace. Jangling bracelets lent emphasis to each of the prosecutor's statements. Sieglinde Hunt-scha 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