Gunter Grass - The Flounder

teenth century with its varied religions and was back in the early fourteenth century — May 17, 1308, to be precise — watching the execution of the sixteen Pomeranian knights, all members of the widely ramified Swenzas family. One reason for my interest was that it is still uncertain whether the Teutonic Knights, as their first contribution to the history of the city of Danzig, beheaded only the sixteen Swenzases, or whether they butchered over ten thousand urban Pomor-shians, all of whom lived between Saint Catherine's and the old Pomeranian castle, which soon became the castle of the Teutonic Knights. The Pomorshian part of the Old City was still known as the Wicker Bastion. For when the sixteen nobles or ten thousand Pomorshians were executed, there was still no Charter City, although the Teutonic Knights had already decided to found a new city governed by Culm law to the south of the Pomorshian settlement.

In any event, more than sixteen Pomorshian-Kashubian counts and less than ten thousand Kashubian-Pomorshian inhabitants of the Wicker Bastion were executed or otherwise slaughtered. History, to be sure, tells us with chronological precision that on February 6, 1296, the Polish king Przemy-slaw was murdered in Rogasen, but the figures for the mass slaughter remain crude guesswork; just as in recent times I was unable to find out by random questioning of resident Poles (which I kept up as long as we were shooting the television film) how many workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk and how many shipyard workers and longshoremen in nearby Gdynia were shot in mid-December, when the police and army of the People's Republic of Poland were ordered to fire on the striking workers. For fire they did, and not without effect. Maria lost her Jan, who, when hit, was quoting the Communist Manifesto through a megaphone. What ideological contradictions provide whom with dialectical (in the Marxengelsian sense) entertainment when in a Communist country the state power gives orders to fire on workers, thirty thousand of them, who have just been singing the Internationale outside the party building in proletarian protest?

In Gdansk five or seven seem to have been killed outside the shipyard entrance on Jakobswall, where the shipyard

already had its entrance in the old days; in Gdynia the exact number — between thirty and forty killed — has been kept secret. Details were not discussed. The whole thing was subsumed and deplored under the head of "December Events." And the Teutonic Knights were also quick to proceed to the order of the day. The facts and Realpolitik argued in their favor: Pomorshian Danzig was allied with the Swenzases and Brandenburgers against Lokietek, king of Poland. On the advice of the Dominicans, who were loyal to the king, his bur-grave Bogussa had called on Plotzke, the provincial master of the Teutonic Knights, for help. The Knights had sent a battalion, which fought its way into the besieged fortress, forced the Brandenburgers to withdraw, drove Bogussa and his Poles out of the fortress, and seized the Pomorshian Swenzases. After the Swenzases were beheaded, and after a massacre whose victims cannot be numbered, the Knights made the inhabitants remove the city's walls, bulwarks, and other fortifications, and finally demolish their many defenseless mud huts and few frame houses. What was left of the population dispersed and a few years later was again decimated, by the famine that raged throughout Europe. And when, beginning in 1320, the first streets of the new Charter City were laid out at right angles to the Mottlau — Brewer Street (later renamed Dog Street), Long Street, Brotbankengasse, Holy Ghost Street — only sparse remnants of the Old City population, but large numbers of Lower Saxons, driven eastward by hunger, came to settle there. And at the same time the Wicker Bastion section, outside the new Charter City, rose up anew on the ruins of the old Pomorshian settlement.

By then no one spoke aloud of the sixteen Swenzases and ten thousand massacred Pomorshians, for one thing because a papal commission of inquiry had set its seal on the report of the Teutonic Knights' procurator. Don't forget that all the people involved were Catholics. Just as the strike and uprising of the longshoremen and shipyard workers of Gdansk, Gdynia, Elblag, and Szczecin and the order to fire given the police and the People's Army were all of the Communist persuasion. In any case, the municipal conservator kept thoroughly silent about the events of December 1970, all the more so because no striking shipyard workers

interfered with the reconstruction of the Charter City (in accordance with the plans of the Teutonic Knights).

When our lamps were functioning again, the conservator spoke into his clip-on microphone, informing the public that in the Old City only the churches had thus far been rebuilt, most recently Saint Bridget's, but that the Charter City, with all its principal streets, had been reconstructed as a self-contained unit inside the city wall built in 1343: it was bounded by the Old City Ditch on the north and the Outer City Ditch on the south, on the east by the stretch of the Mottlau extending from Cows' Gate to Hawkers' Gate, and by the reconstructed city wall to the left and right of Long Street Gate on the west.

The director of the television crew made an announcement in TV jargon: "Cut statement in front of Moller painting. Tomorrow nine o'clock sharp Saint Catherine's spires, statement. Followed by Saint John's, Hawkers' Street, artists from Vilna, and so on. ."

I went to look at some more shooting sites and couldn't remember for sure whether the brick house of the sword-maker Albrecht Slichting, built in 1353, was on Smith Street in the Old City or on Ankersmith Street in the Charter City. When construction on the Late Gothic house was begun (most probably in the Old City, come to think of it), Dorothea of Montau, the daughter of Wilhelm Swarze, a peasant recently arrived from Lower Saxony, was just six years old. (You see, Ilsebill, I have a better memory for flights of stairs, kitchen smells, winding sheets hung out of windows, and personal defeats than for places.) Be that as it may, after bubonic plague had paid its first visit to all our streets, thus lowering the price of city lots at a time when the price of everything else was going up, I, then a swordmaker, started building my house. We stayed in the Old City, and the amiable conservator, who is rebuilding only the Charter City on the most orthodox lines, was unable to help me locate my Old City building site.

I often went to Montau on my way to the Marienburg through the country between the Nogat and the Vistula, which had been freshly diked in (after the famine years). My

father, the swordmaker Kunrad Slichting, who refused to die and kept me, his eldest, on short rations, not only supplied the Danzig headquarters of the Teutonic Order in the by then rebuilt Pomeranian castle; the grand master's chancellery, whose red-brick buildings were spreading out farther and farther along the east bank of the Nogat, also preferred to give its orders to Old City smiths and sword-makers, and the orders were ample, thanks to the losses incurred during the annual winter forays into the Samland Peninsula and across the frozen swamps of Lithuania.

Bearing richly ornamented hilts for the notorious two-handers, enchased scabbards, and silver-plated sword belts, I made the journey by way of Montau, the new village on the Island. There I saw how boiling-hot water was spilled on little Dorothea, seventh of the peasant Swarze's nine children, on Candlemas of the year '53 and how she nevertheless (as though by a miracle!) retained her fine skin and blue-veined transparency, while the careless kitchenmaid got perfectly normal burns on both feet.

I fell in love with the child Dorothea then and there. Thirty years of age and not yet a full-fledged master craftsman. I should have set up a household of my own in the Charter City long before. But not only were we closely watched by the Teutonic Knights; we were also under the thumb of my grandmother, who put pressure on her daughter Damroka to stay near the Wicker Bastion, the original settlement, which kept rising from its ashes. My father, you see, had married into a Pomorshian clan. Women have always kept me on a short lead. I've always tied myself to some Ilsebill's apron strings. And when I fell madly in love with Dorothea, whom the boiling water had left unscathed, it was no different.