Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Lord, what qualities I saw in that slender child, who seemed to have been cut from silver leaf. Yet her graceful little questions — Had the Lord Jesus sent me? Had I brought her a message from sweet Jesus? — should have aroused my suspicions. And when the child (grown to the age of ten by that time) wheedled me into giving her a seven-chained scourge with a silver handle (inlaid with mother-of-pearl and amber tears) to play with (it had been ordered by the abbot of Marienwerder), my only feeling was one of affectionate

amusement; for how was I to guess that Dorothea drew blood night after night by flaying herself through her hair shirt. And her first verses—"Jesu, guide my litel chaine, for my flesh hath chosen paine" — struck me as nothing more than fashionable babble. Only when at sixteen she was married to me yet did not become my wife, did I, in temporary possession of her utterly indifferent flesh, feel the scars on her back and the festering, still-open wounds.

In those days flagellation was pretty much what pot smoking is today. Especially the High Gothic youth, among whom I could no longer number myself, sought out the warming stench of the bands of flagellants, the percussion rhythms that went with their litany, their terrifying descents into hell, group ecstasies, and collective illuminations.

When in the year '63 Dorothea became my wife and went to live in town, the enormous building site that was to become the Charter City was often clogged with flagellants. Quivering female penitents who had come from Gnesen (Gniezno) lay exhausted amid the rising brick walls of Saint Mary's and Saint John's, and outside the Holy Ghost and Corpus Christi hospitals. For some years after the Teutonic Knights had built their Big Mill on the recently dug Ra-daune Canal, which circled the Charter City, fights were frequent between the millworkers and the obstreperous flagellants, more and more of whom took to camping between Saint Catherine's and the Big Mill. When I was looking for my Dorothea, I could always find her with the lepers in Corpus Christi Hospital or with the flagellants outside Saint Catherine's. Tramps and spongers, that's what they were! Who do you thing brought us the plague!

The mill is standing there again, the interior broken up into offices while pigeons nest in its skylight. Today the Radaune Canal is no more than a stinking gutter; too many of the Kashubian water holes have been dammed up and made into reservoirs.

Max had set up the camera across from the Big Mill, behind the hoarding of the Saint Catherine building site. There stood four pinnacles ready to be mounted, and the central bulb-shaped steeple. All expensively covered with copper, which, as no precautions were taken against air pol-

lution, had already put on an attractive verdigris color, because fumes from the sulfur wharves not only corrode the reconstructed sandstone facades, but also blacken the copper roofing of the church towers.

The director sat me down (in a "natural" pose) beside a pile of scaffolding. At a signal from him, the concrete mixer some twenty steps away was set in motion. Pan from the spireless stump of the Old City Church tower to the boarded-up towers and verdigris-green central steeple. Then I came into the picture, pronouncing the concluding words of the documentary. As soon as the big crane arrived, I said, the day's work would begin. With the Big Mill of the Teutonic Knights and behind it the churches of Saint Catherine and Saint Bridget, an architectural unit dating from the fourteenth century had been reconstructed in the Old City, adjacent to the self-contained Charter City complex. This, I declared, was a noteworthy achievement. Poland had not disavowed its history. But now an appeal to the Hanseatic spirit of the people of Liibeck was in order, for the famous chimes of Saint Catherine's were hanging in Liibeck's Church of Saint Mary but belonged here in Danzig. The cause of German-Polish reconciliation would be well served by generosity on the part of the people of Liibeck. And so forth and so on.

What I did not communicate to the tube: that when I looked over the hoarding into the sixteenth century, over there in the spot where today only the barest fragments of the convent remain standing beside the Church of Saint Bridget, the abbess Margarete Rusch had survived the hairsplitting of the Reformation with her free-ranging Brigittine nuns and was putting more pepper into her cookery than ever; that right next door, though a century later, the poet and court historian Martin Opitz von Boberfeld was living in the so-called preachers' houses, until the plague carried him away; that here, outside the Charter City wall, the millers of the Big Mill joined forces with the rebellious brewers, coopers, and other guildsmen against the patrician order, though only the brewers of Jopengasse and Dog Street had serious reason to rebel, in so far as they were injured by the importation of beer from Wismar.

In any event, seven ringleaders of the artisans' uprising were executed in May 1378, among them an Old City miller; whereas the strike and uprising of the shipyard workers in December 1970 resulted not in the arrest of the strike committee of the Lenin Shipyard, but in the dismissal of Go-mulka and several minor officials and in the annulment of the projected increase in the prices of staple foods. The shipyard workers' threat to send several large ships down the ways unfinished, if not to blow up the shipyard, was heard as far away as Warsaw: state power recognized worker power. The state gave in, made some changes in personnel, and announced one more "new policy." But if we consider the workers shot in Gdansk and Gdynia in a political light, along with the executed ringleaders of the medieval artisans' uprising, then as now little was achieved: true, the Danzig patricians dropped their plan of importing beer from Wismar, but they granted the guilds no voice in the city council or court of aldermen; and the demand of the shipyard workers for worker management went equally unheard. All the same, one thing has changed in Danzig or Gdansk since 1378; today the patricians have a different name.

We panned a couple of times in the direction of the New City and the shipyards: high-rise buildings, low-cost housing under construction, the air pollution that goes with progress the world over. While Max and Klaus were packing their tin suitcases and unwieldy equipment, I looked for traces of my High Gothic wife, Dorothea, near one of the side doors of Saint Catherine's. All I could see to remind me of her Lenten fare was nettles and dandelions. When she betrayed the projected uprising of the guilds to the Dominicans, I struck her narrow face with my swordmaker's hand, though I, too, had my misgivings about the uprising and took no part in it.

Actually Dorothea's betrayal had no effect, for the Dominicans were at odds with the patricians because the town councilors, with the help of their Culm charter, had confiscated all the grasping monks' landed property and turned the Dominicans into mendicants.

When we rose up, even the Teutonic Knights kept their peace. Feeling threatened by the power of the patrician mer-

chants and by the Charter City's ties with the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Order, on the advice of the aged grand master Kniprode, founded — to the north of the Charter City and the Old City — a New City, "juvenile oppidum," with its own charter and, much to the irritation of the Charter City, its own port and maritime laws. Dorothea knew nothing of that. There was no politics in her piety. After the death of my mother, Damroka, I would have liked to establish myself in the Charter City, but instead, thanks to the Knights, who paid me well, built a new home in the jagged triangle formed by Brabank, Bucket Makers' Court, and the Lime Quarry, where the canalized Radaune follows Carp Pond, roughly between the Wicker Bastion and the castle of the Teutonic Knights, within convenient distance of the New City warehouses, to take the place of our old timber-frame house. We made liberal use of brick, which even in the Charter City only the patrician merchants and a few coopers and drapers could afford. Until the city ordinance of 1451 prohibited wooden buildings, even the main streets of the competing townships of Danzig were lined with thatched frame houses, and frequent fires encouraged new construction. The quarters adjoining the Mottlau long remained swampy and almost impassable; the main pillars of Saint John's (near Hawkers' Gate), which was built on marshy, unstable ground, are still sinking.