Gunter Grass - The Flounder

"But my esteemed prosecutor and judges, please, please! Mere social sentiment — the desire to help the poor devil-would never have led me to dispense a piece of advice so fraught with consequences. The truth is very different: I wanted to offer the little, but later so lusciously upholstered Margarete the best possible prospect of freedom by sheltering her in a convent. For what would have become of her other-

wise? She'd have had to marry some unguilded boilermaker. Doomed to four walls and child raising, she'd have pined away in the Wicker Bastion. The marriage bed would have given her no sensual pleasure but only a dismal push-push, no sooner begun than over. The usual fate in those days. Yes, women had a rough time of it in the so-called age of the Reformation, whether they had to put their pouches at the disposal of Catholic or of Protestant husbands. The only free women were nuns, and possibly the little whores in Pepper-town, because they had organized as efficiently as the nuns; in fact they elected their own abbess — later known disparagingly as 'the madame.' It wasn't the cantankerous married women, kept as they were in a perpetual state of jealousy, who practiced the solidarity which today is rightly demanded at feminist congresses and in feminist pamphlets; no, it was the nuns and whores. Without wishing to meddle in the affairs of the feminist movement, I must ask the High Court, before which I have the honor of being on trial, to concede that an astonishing degree of emancipation prevailed, if not in the brothels of the Middle Ages, then at least in the convents of the Middle Ages. As the career of the nun Margarete Rusch shows, my advice to an ignorant blacksmith gave the female sex access to areas of freedom from which at the present time — let's face it — it is still — or shall we say once again? — barred.

"Permit me to cite certain facts in evidence.

"Margarete Rusch was never the property of any man, but a dozen men or more were obedient to her whim and pleasure. The allegedly so confining rules of her order— claustration, exercises, rule of silence — gave her leisure and enabled her to concentrate her thoughts, undisturbed by the bustle of everyday life. True, she brought two girls into the world — a painful business at the time — but child care never chained Fat Gret to any four walls. No paterfamilias imposed his law on her. No patriarchal thumb held her down. She was no domestic harridan with a bunch of keys jangling at her waist. She was free to exercise her physical and mental powers by cooking, by ordaining menus conducive to the pleasure of the flesh, by contributing, not many, I admit, but all the same a few democratic bright spots to the male-dominated, oligarchic, power-oriented political life of her day. Permit

me to remind you of the 'Statuta Karnkowiana,' which without Fat Gret's influence would hardly have granted rights to the guilds.

"In short, my advice accomplished all that. For if I hadn't saved the girl by sheltering her in the convent, she would never have grown up to be our Fat Gret. And as for this heavenly bridegroom the nuns were betrothed to, please believe me that the convents of the sixteenth century were free from High Gothic mysticism. Ecstasy was a thing of the past. Very little of the girls' passion went to the Son of God. Flagellation, barefooted asceticism, hysterical Saint Vitus's dancing — all completely out of fashion. No Dorothea of Mon-taus demanding to be immured and die to the flesh. Motivated by earthly considerations, the nuns of Saint Bridget's knew how to increase their wealth and make use of their power. True, there were nuns' quarrels and nunnish infighting. But as long as Abbess Margarete Rusch was at the head of the convent, the nuns formed a women's association that looked upon and practiced sisterly solidarity as the highest virtue. United, they were strong. The Dominicans kept their peace, though the whole town stank with their gossip about Fat Gret and her sinful goings-on."

To this harangue Prosecutor Sieglinde Huntscha replied promptly and with striking figures of speech. The Flounder, she contended, was trying to ingratiate himself with his claim to have promoted solidarity among women, though she admitted it could do with some promoting. He had brought forward a model, and what a pretty picture he had painted of that model. But if the truth be known, Margarete Rusch was nothing but a political opportunist. By advising the girl's father to put her in a convent, he, the Flounder, had been responsible for the cooking nun's misuse of her freedom. To call a spade a spade, she had simply prostituted herself the whole time. Take her dealings with Ferber. How can you call this nun's lecherous escapades a mark of emancipation? On the contrary, Abbess Margaret's alleged freedom was almost identical with the petit-bourgeois liberalism of a middle-class housewife who signs on as a call girl to make a little extra pocket money. In a pinch the sexual behavior of this nun could be characterized as protorevolutionary, although

it was strictly self- and body-related, and therefore not transferable to other women and their narrow, dependent lives. At no expense to himself, he, the Flounder, after serving the male cause exclusively for three and a half millennia, was trying to publicize himself as a friend of womankind. But Mother Rusch wouldn't do as a model. How did nuns' farts contribute to feminine consciousness raising? And the misuse of the vagina as a chalice in the Christian ceremony of the Lord's Supper could only be regarded as an example of male perversion. "In sum, what execrable taste! And this I say as an atheist, not because I'm afraid of offending anyone's religious sensibilities."

In conclusion, the prosecutor suggested that a time limit be imposed on the accused Flounder. "We cannot afford to let our Tribunal, whose proceedings millions of oppressed women are following with hope and expectation, be misused for purposes of patriarchal propaganda."

The court-appointed defense counsel opposed this measure on formal juridical grounds. And a majority of the associate judges were unwilling to anticipate the verdict. The associate judge Ulla Witzlaff, ordinarily rather slow and often behindhand in her reactions, was positively outspoken: "Give him a fair chance. Can it be in our interest to take over the notorious practices of male class justice?"

And so — over the prosecutor's objection — all four of the affidavits that the Flounder through his counsel had commissioned from recognized historians were read.

The first affidavit characterized the activity of the medieval witches as a desperate attempt at female emancipation. A statistical evaluation of the fifteenth-century witch trials showed a surprisingly high percentage of nuns among witches burned at the stake, namely, 32.7 percent, whereas by the sixteenth century the percentage had fallen to 8 percent. The meager data available for the fourteenth century did not lend themselves to statistical treatment.

The second affidavit showed why conventual witchcraft had diminished in the century of the Reformation. An increase in the number of lay witches was symptomatic of the distress prevailing among uncloistered women, especially those of the artisan class. In convents, which on the surface

had preserved their fidelity to the Catholic Church, the Reformation seems to have been a force for emancipation, since it opened the eyes of the nuns to earthly matters and fostered a new type of vigorous, hard-working, shrewd, and enlightened nun. Numerous lay women, on the other hand, could escape only into religious mania or eccentric witchcraft. A list of sources followed.

The third affidavit took up the political influence of the convents in the Middle Ages, under such headings as "The Convent Kitchen as Power Center," "The Convents and Their Kitchens as the Scene of Peace Negotiations," "Conspiracies and Debauches." The convent, it stated, had proved its worth as an institution where at least at times the woman's shortfall could be made good.