Gunter Grass - The Flounder

In his testimony before the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder justified his bad advice with neo-Scholastic eloquence. "It was quite in the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic, dear ladies. I, too, regret deeply that in those days women were denied the right to produce martyrs. I said to myself: From a subjective point of view a certain Mestwina may have bashed the bishop's head in with cast iron, but objectively, before the judgment seat of history, it had to be men, the heathen Prussians. And so, quite logically and only in apparent defiance of the facts, all the historical sources give the Prussians credit for making church history on this occasion."

It was supposed to have been done near Tolkmit. With a wooden oar, which later became a relic. Don't make me laugh.

What next, friend Flounder? It's all down in black and white: the rutting roar of false and authentic elk bulls, what the character with the boar's-tusk helmet did to me behind the gorse bush, how I sang to Christian knights. So am I exculpated? Is my guilt any lighter? And the rest of my shame? Intricately tied packages that want to be unknotted. Because after we were forcibly baptized as Christians, our sin only increased. And to Ilsebill I said, "With that Dorothea, who suffered from migraine in the High Gothic period as you do at present, I often knelt penitently on peas."

There she comes with blood on her dress. Which I don't want to remember. But I must.

At the time when Mestwina, drunk but with unerring aim, struck down Bishop Adalbert, the region of the Vistula estuary was inhabited, apart from us old established Pomor-shians on the left bank and the Prussians who had settled on the right bank of the river, only by vestiges of peoples that had passed through: Gepidic Goths, who had been pretty well stirred together with us Pomorshians, and Saxons who had fled from the missionary zeal of the Franks. Slavic Poles trickled in from the south. And the Norse Varangians raided us whenever they felt like it. They built forts to ward off Prussian incursions but were unable to keep the Prussians from settling to the west of the river valley. The name of the Prussian chieftain was Jagel, a precursor form of the Lithuanian Jagello. And that is why, later on, when the city was founded, the hill came to be known as the Hagelsberg. As early as Mestwina's day the Varangians had disguised themselves as Pomorshian fishermen and murdered Jagel in

his robber baron's castle. But not until the Polish duke Boleslaw Chrobry threw the Prussians back to the right bank of the Vistula was Varangian replaced by Polish rule. For we became subjects soon after Mestwina slew Adalbert, whom the Polish duke had enlisted as a propagandist, and subjects we remained.

Boleslaw had the wonder-working corpse taken to Gniez-no, where it is held in honor to this day. Our territory was elevated to the status of province and named Pomerania— Pomarzanie in Old Polish — after us, because we lived by the sea. With friendly condescension, the pious Boleslaw called us Pomorshians "Kashubs." We were allowed to appoint our own governors, who, though they all harked back to Mest-wina's womb, soon learned masculine forms of authority by observing others. Their daughters and daughters' daughters continued to hand down mother right, but only in secret.

The first of our princes to become known by name was Sambor, who founded the Oliva Monastery and endowed it with privileges — exemptions from custom duties, the right to collect tithes. His son, Subislaw, was sickly and died young, whereupon his uncle, Mestwin I, became prince of Kashubian Pomerania. He barely had time to make his daughter, Dam-roka, an abbess, and with her at its head found the Convent of Zuckau, where just six hundred years later Amanda Woyke directed the farm hands' kitchen of the Royal Prussian State Farm, before the Danes invaded Pomerania and took possession of it for ten years, at the end of which Mestwin's son, Swantopolk, sent them home and appointed himself duke of Pomerania, which displeased the Polish duke Lesko. In truly masculine style the two dukes fought a battle to the death near Gniezno, which was won by Swantopolk and cost Lesko his life. But in the course of his unsuccessful warfare against the still-heathen Prussians, who would not yet recognize the Vistula as a borderline, the now independent Kashubian duke made the same mistake as the Poles: he, too, called the Teutonic Knights, who found themselves unemployed at the end of the Crusades, from Palestine to Kashubia. They came and made a clean sweep of everything Prussian. In the end they defeated Swantopolk several times and took his firstborn son, Mestwin II, prisoner. Set free, Mestwin allied himself with the dukes of Brandenburg against his brother and

cosovereign. Thereupon the Brandenburgers dug in, and Polish help was needed to drive them from the city of Danzig, or Civitas Danczik, founded in 1236 near the Pomeranian fortress and endowed with Liibeck law.

My Giotheschants, Gidanie, Gdancyk, Danczik, Dantzig, Danzig, Gdansk: you were a bone of contention from the very first. We Pomorshian fishermen and basket plaiters stayed in the old Wicker Bastion under the protection of the fort and went on eating grits as we had always done, whereas the new settlers, mostly from Lower Saxony, bearing such names as Jordan Hovele, Johann Slichting, lived as merchants and artisans behind the city walls and ate pork sausages with white beans.

The last Pomeranian dukes — Mestwin was childless — and the Polish duke Przemyslaw battled the margrave of Brandenburg and the Teutonic Knights, for so history ordained. In addition, the Polish governor Bogussa battled the Kashu-bian Swenzas until, on November 14, 1308, the grasping Teutonic Knights seized the city and occupied the fortress, from which vantage point they were able to control the city. Though the Polish Wladislaw bewailed the loss of his Pomeranian possessions and appealed to the faraway emperor and pope, he was obliged by the terms of the Peace of Kalisch (1343) to cede Pomerania.

My Dorothea to be was then three years old, and I, her Albrecht to be, though already of marriageable age, still clung to the apron strings of my Pomorshian mother, Dam-roka, who had married a city man. My father, the sword-maker Kunrad Slichting, raised me to be a swordmaker, too — a trade with a future. The city was growing quickly and wanted to be defended with handy two-handers.

The smooth synchronization of a German command to hold on at all costs, of the Soviet army under Marshal Rokos-sovski, and of English pattern-bombing was needed before the hardy product of bughers' toil, handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, amassed here behind grandiose facades, there in humbler dwellings and workshops, could fall a victim to a generalized conflagration that smoldered for a whole week, and before all Danzig, its angular Old, Charter, Lower, New, and Outer Cities, down

to the brick walls of its big and little churches, could be leveled as though for all time. In the pictures preserved in the archives, the destruction looks total. In aerial photographs, the phases of the city's expansion in the early Middle Ages are discernible. Only at Leege Gate, near the Church of Saint John, between the fish market and Roaring Brook Street, around Saint Catherine's, and in a few other places, a fragment or two of something or other had been left standing by chance. But in the very next pictures to be taken, those shown in the memorial exhibition at the Charter City Rathaus, bricks are being cleaned, rubble shoveled off the perrons of Frauengasse, vestiges of facades on Brotbanken-gasse are being propped up, and the stump of the Rathaus tower is being encased in scaffolding.

And thirty years after the fire a young man, speaking into a clip-on mike for the Third Television Program of North German Radio and Television, related how the Inner City had been eighty-percent destroyed. Pan Chomicz, the municipal conservator, is responsible for rebuilding the historical Danzig, which has now become the Polish Gdansk.