Gunter Grass - The Flounder

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 I 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 technology 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?