Gunter Grass - The Flounder

That morning I had flown in from Berlin-Schonefeld airport on an Interflight propeller plane and landed in the new airfield, where only three years before my great aunt's Kashubian potato fields had still been moderately productive. What I had in my luggage: gaps in my manuscript, still-undocumented assertions about my earlier life in the days of the High Gothic Lenten cook Dorothea of Montau, and advertisements requesting information about the curly-headed kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella and mentioning Baroque allegories in which she figures. Objections on the part of the Flounder. My Ilsebill's wishes. And I also had with me a catalogue of questions, for I was planning to sneak away from the TV cameras and meet Maria, who is still canteen cook at the Lenin Shipyard. "Tell me, Maria. How was it in December 1970? Was your Jan there when thirty thousand workers sang the Internationale as a protest against the party? And where exactly was your Jan when the police fired on the workers? And where was he hit?"

When they started shooting the picture, it all became two-dimensionally present. Historical quotations—1813, the

fire on Warehouse Island — became slips of paper to be thrown away. We had set up our three lamps, the sound equipment, and the camera in the restored treasure room of the Charter City Rathaus. For all his assurance about the facts, the municipal conservator stood somewhat embarrassed amid the paneled walls and the Dutch sink-of-inquity paintings. Behind him hung town painter Anton Moller's Tribute Money, its top forming a half circle; Jesus and his New Testament bunch are standing in manneristic agitation where in actual fact the wide Renaissance Green Gate (Gothic: Koggen Gate) should be separating the Long Market from the bank of the Mottlau. In the direction of the Rathaus, the Long Market narrows into the slightly crooked Long Street, leading to the High Gate. Moller painted this allegory against an urban backdrop immediately after his Last Judgment; this was in 1602, which like the year preceding was a plague year. (But no winding sheets are hanging from the windows. No overloaded carts enliven the background. No doctor is making his rounds with mask and rattle. Nowhere is straw being burned. Warning yellow is nowhere predominant.)

The conservator, obviously used to such tasks, looked straight into the camera. Neither one nor the other hand took refuge in a pocket. With economy of gestures he called Moller's painting a document, important for the reconstruction of the center of the devastated city and comparable to Canaletto's paintings, which had been helpful to the re-builders of the old city of Warsaw. "Astonishing" was his word for the proof provided by this painting that as late as the early seventeenth century nearly all the patrician houses on the Long Market were still graced by Gothic masonry and gables, exceptions being the Artushof and the broad Renaissance-style burgher's dwelling across from the Rathaus.

The conservator was explaining with a smile why, in rebuilding, not the Early Gothic, less cost-intensive form but (shunning no expense) the elaborate Baroque facade had been chosen — when in mid-sentence our three lamps went out. A fuse had blown in the Charter City Rathaus (reconstructed in accordance with Moller's picture). The house electrician was called but did not come. Instead, unannounced and walking ahead of his party, Prince Philip of England entered the historic hall. Some regatta or horse

race seems to have been the occasion for his semiofficial stay at the Grand Hotel in Zoppot. Visibly exhausted by his tourist program, Prince Philip winced at the sight of the camera. Although the prince could scarcely have been mistaken for anyone else, our sound technician, whose name was Klaus—"Hey, Klaus! Go get it, Klaus!" — wanted to put him to work as the long-awaited electrician. Before this mistake could be converted into an anecdote and make history, the prince and his escort were gone.

Later on at the Monopol cafe, I noted: what if Copernicus or the hoary-headed Schopenhauer had turned up and been mistaken for someone else? Ah, those great historic moments! If you've seen one, you've seen them all. Come to think of it, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler had been in the same place. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English nobleman Henry Derby, long before becoming a character in Shakespeare, arrived here with his retinue to join in hunting down the heathen Lithuanians, a popular Christian winter sport at the time. From Dorothea's husband, the swordmaker Albrecht Slichting, he bought a gold-plated crossbow, and never paid for it. A story fraught with consequences. Unpaid bills wherever you go.

While waiting for the right electrician — and because television filming involves so many timeless interruptions — I toddled off down the stairs of history (all the while talking coexistence with our Polish Interpress attache) until, in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, I saw town painter Moller's kitchenmaid, then pregnant, coming toward me across the Long Market.

Agnes Kurbiella has bought a soup chicken unplucked. It persists in being winter, although we were shooting the TV documentary in fine late-August weather, at the height of the tourist season. In January 1636 Agnes is in an advanced state of pregnancy; King Wladimir VI has taken up residence in the Green Gate, thus lending a date to the town's history. There he is chatting with the Silesian diplomat and poet Martin Opitz von Boberfeld. The king is planning to engage Opitz as secretary and court historian. The admiral of the Polish navy, a Scotsman by the name of Seton, is also present, as are several local patricians with

well-fed faces over stiff ruffs. Now that the armistice with Sweden has been extended, the king wants Opitz to negotiate a new schedule of harbor fees. Just a little while ago the poet had submitted some fresh-baked iambics praising the sovereign as a prince of peace, and it is plain that they have won the king's favor. The patricians assure the poet — recently driven out of Silesia — that here he will be able to live in peace. During a pause in the official deliberations, Admiral Seton, a Catholic well versed in letters, tells the Protestant Opitz, half in amusement, half in real concern, how his sons' tutor, a young man of the Lutheran persuasion and like Opitz a fugitive from Silesia, is sick in bed because the festivities of the hard-drinking burghers — who couldn't very well help drinking to the successfully concluded treaty with Oxenstierna's commissioners, could they? — have been too much for the young man, who is hardly more than a boy; so "at the moment he's writing bilious sonnets, proclaiming that all is vanity. His verses might interest you, all the more so since young Gryphius doesn't write in Latin but in plain German."

But, worn down by the long war, Opitz is too distraught to ask for copies of the sonnets. Through the tall windows of the Green Gate, he looks out (in the perspective of town painter Moller when he painted his Tribute Money picture) on the wintry Long Market, across which the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella in an advanced state of pregnancy is still plodding through the wet snow with an unplucked soup chicken. Now she is passing the Rathaus, where three centuries later we are waiting for the house electrician. Now she is turning onto Beutlergasse. She is planning poached chicken breast in chervil sauce with oaten porridge. Soon Agnes will be cooking light, easily digested dishes for Opitz. That summer, shortly before the departure of the recovered Andreas Gryphius, the diplomat takes up lodgings in the house of the preacher Canassius. By then he has entered the service of Sweden as well as Poland: a double agent.

When the electrician finally arrived and our three lamps, plugged into an auxiliary line, were again shedding light on the municipal conservator and on Anton Moller's Tribute Money scene on the Long Market, I had just left the seven-