Gunter Grass - The Flounder

The fourth affidavit dealt with the broadening of the nunnish horizon since the discovery of the New World by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and others. In particular, it confirmed the Flounder's contention that Abbess Margarete Rusch had in 1549 married her elder daughter, Hedwig, for trophopolitical reasons to a Portuguese merchant, who later established a trading post on the Malabar Coast of India. This merchant had solemnly undertaken to supply his mother-in-law twice annually with shipments of spices — pepper, cloves, ginger, cardamom. The author of the affidavit had no doubt that Fat Gret was in correspondence with the New World and that Portuguese merchantmen frequented the port of Danzig from the mid-sixteenth century on.

Then the Flounder spoke again. Modestly, barely exploiting the success of the affidavits, he spoke of his small part in emancipating and raising the consciousness of the young novice, then kitchen nun, and later abbess Margarete Rusch. He brushed in a picture of Fat Gret, exaggerating the comic aspect. Frivolous anecdotes alternated with grotesque episodes: how when Preacher Hegge incited the populace to smash images, she forced him to eat every crumb of a Saint Nicholas she had made of puff pastry stuffed with sausages; how when patrician Ferber's pecker hung its head, she made it stand up straight by piling silver guldens and Brabant talers into paradigmatically vertical towers; how after burning down the Oliva Monastery she fried pancakes for the

poor over the monastic embers; how Fat Gret plucked geese while riding into the camp of King Stephen Batory on the back of a sow. And more tales, which made the public laugh, for after a short interruption — caused by the Advisory Council, which wanted to dissolve itself — the public had been readmitted.

Thus encouraged, the Flounder went on: "You see, dear ladies, who have managed to smile after all: that's the sort of woman the cooking nun Margret was, heart-warmingly cheerful, because it was in nobody's power to oppress her. We might think of her as a sister of the parish priest of Meudon, Francois Rabelais, not only because they were the same age, but more because she shared his enlightened way of life. Ah, if only he had known her! I'm sure he would have conceived a female companion piece (and a worthy one) to Gargantua in the form of Fat Gret, and that she, too, would have grown into a stout volume. For literature is short on comic female protagonists. Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, Falstaff and Oskar Matzerath — it's always a man who makes comic capital of our despair, while the ladies perish in unrelieved tragedy. Mary Stuart or Electra, Agnes Bernauer or Nora, all are in love with their tragedy. Or they pine and sigh over their sentimentalities. Or madness drives them to the moors. Or sin gnaws at them. Or a masculine power-hunger is their undoing — take Lady Macbeth. Utterly devoid of humor, they are handmaidens of suffering: saint, whore, witch, or all three at once. Or trouble turns them to stone, they are hardened and embittered, a wordless plaint. Sometimes their author allows them to go off their rockers like Ophelia and babble incoherent verses. Only the 'grotesque old crone,' far removed from all pleasures of the flesh, and the flighty chambermaid might be cited as examples of the female humor that is supposed to be 'imperishable.' But whether old and grotesque or young and flighty, only minor roles fall to woman's wit. And yet we need this comic female protagonist, we need her desperately! And the same goes for the movies. Why should it always be the men, the Charlie Chaplins or the Laurels and Hardys, who are privileged to supply the comic aspect of tragedy. I call upon you, dear ladies, to stage at long last the great feminine comedy. Let the woman comic triumph. Give the knight of the mournful countenance a woman's skirt and

let her battle the windmills of male prejudice. I offer you the cooking nun Margarete Rusch, Fat Gret. Her laughter gave women scope, it gave them freedom in which humor— and now women's as well as men's — could explode its firecrackers and unleash its obscenities!"

Possibly the Flounder expected friendly applause or at least half-amused agreement. But his speech was followed by silence, then by throat clearing. Finally the prosecutor, more or less as an aside, as though preferring to minimize an unfortunate incident, said: "Doesn't it strike you as poor taste, defendant Flounder, to come here and crack literary jokes at the expense of the world's oppressed women? Yes, yes, we know the so-called lords of creation find our fight for equal rights amusing. We're used to that. But to us it is serious, not deadly so but objectively. We cannot sit idle while Elec-tra or Nora is disparaged as just another tragic figure. There has been no shortage of quixotic women. Just stop offering us roles. Pretty soon you'll be wanting to sell us a female Dr. Faustus, or a Mephista in sparkling evening dress. But let's get back to the point! Considered in the light of her times, your cooking nun is important to us; we can't let you make her ridiculous with your distortions. Look. Margarete Rusch deliberately killed two men in execution of a long-matured plan. It was largely the fault of those two men that her father, the blacksmith Peter Rusch, had been sentenced to death on April 29, 1526, and beheaded. Three years later, in the course of coitus, she smothered Eberhard Ferber, the former mayor of Danzig, who had retired after the judicial murder. Margarete Rusch was then thirty, the same age as the prelate Kaspar Jeschke, abbot of Oliva Monastery, whom she fattened to death fifty-three years later. That, Mr. Flounder, is your oh-so-comical Fat Gret, your witty nun, your laughter-loving mountain of fat. No, she was a woman of serious and unflagging purpose. A woman who knew how to hate her enemies. And what, I ask, was your part in these two politically necessary acts? Did you prod Margarete Rusch's heroic memory with your voluble advice? We demand the truth. And nothing but the truth. No escaping into comedy."

Here the Flounder admitted that he had advised patrician Ferber and Abbot Jeschke as well. True — the Flounder assured the court — Ferber hadn't taken his advice. In his lecherous old age he had put himself in Fat Gret's power. Nor had the Flounder's advice prevailed on Abbot Jeschke. But it wasn't lust that had chained the old man to the aged Mar-garete; no, it was the gluttony and love of pepper so widespread at the time.

"Still," said the Flounder, "I did manage in '77 to persuade the old fool to escape, after telling him they had set fire to his monastery. But his gluttony — and he knew the nun had resolved to fatten him to death — was beyond the best-intentioned advice. I tried to prevent both murders, because I had no wish to see Margarete Rusch's impressive contribution to democratic progress darkened by this long-drawn-out vengeance. She worked hard and well — though in vain — for the powerless guilds. By guile and cookery she obtained a liberal peace from King Stephen Batory. And not least: for the cloistered nuns of the sixteenth century she won freedoms that even today seem worth striving for. On the other hand, she accomplished nothing by encompassing the deaths of two old men. The only worthwhile action is one that emancipates! And if, as I hope, the High Court wishes with this trial to help oppressed womanhood, I urge you to take note — even if you do not follow it — of my experienced advice. For aren't we all interested in seeing the shortfall of womankind at long last made good?"

The Flounder's plea was granted. And so one can read in the minutes of the debate on the case of Margarete Rusch how the accused Flounder advised the international women's movement to establish throughout the world feminist convents with exclusively earthly aims, so creating an economically powerful counterweight to the Mannerbiinde that are now everywhere dominant. Thus and thus alone, he declared, in a state of economic and sexual independence, would women be able to revive their forgotten solidarity and through it to usher in equality between the sexes. That and that alone would clarify the ambivalent structures of the feminine consciousness. The shortfall specific to the female sex would be overcome. And the consequences would be very funny.