Gunter Grass - The Flounder

And when I was General Rapp, Napoleon's governor of the Republic of Danzig, it was the cook Sophie Rotzoll who, because I had disparaged her mushroom dishes as indigestible, spread my shit on a silver platter and served it up to me. I had a soldier's sense of humor; I put up with her impudence. And she was right: not a shred of mushroom skin, not a single mushroom worm to be seen. My palate grew keener and keener, and soon I was calling morels, milk caps, and egg mushrooms delicate. My taste developed to the point where I wouldn't even forgo the tasty though sandy Polish green agaric, although the sand would have shown up in my gubernatorial stools.

But what my last Napoleonic shit would have looked like if I had partaken of the special mushrooms Sophie added to her stuffed calf's head — which dispatched six of my guests, officers all, including three Polish officers and one officer from the Rhenish Confederation, into the other world — I hardly dare imagine, though the shattering effect of the poisonous sulfur tuft is well known.

All my cooks, I say, have inspected feces, read the future in feces, and in prehistoric times even carried on a pagan dialogue with fecal matter. Wigga, for instance, examining the still-steaming shitpile of a Gothic captain who had been so ill-mannered as to relieve himself in the immediate vicinity of our Wicker Bastion settlement, read the inexorable destiny of the Goths, who were soon to embark on their migration. In our Old Pomorshian tongue (the precursor of present-day Kashubian), she oracled their division into Ostrogoths and Visigoths, into luminous Goths and sublime Goths: Ermanaric and the Huns, Alaric in Rome. How Beli-sarius would take King Vitiges prisoner. The Battle of Chalons. And so on and so on. .

In the Neolithic, on the other hand, when my primordial cook ruled, the inspection of feces was a feature of the cult. We neolithic folk had entirely different customs, and not just in regard to eating. Each of us ate singly, with his back to the horde, not shamed but silent and introverted, immersed in mastication, eyeless. But we shat together, squatting in a circle and exchanging shouts of encouragement.

After the horde shit-together we felt collectively relieved and chatted happily, showing one another our finished products, drawing pithy comparisons with past performances, or teasing our constipated comrades, who were still squatting in vain.

Needless to say, the farting incidental to the rite was also a social affair. What today is said to stink and is crudely amalgamated with latrines and slit trenches—"It stinks like an army camp around here!" — was natural to us, because we identified with our feces. In smelling our turds, we smelled ourselves. These were no foreign bodies. If we needed food and enjoyed the taste, how could we fail to take pleasure in evacuating what remained of it? We looked upon each

departing turd with gratitude, and with a certain sadness as well. Consequently, the horde shit-together, for which we assembled, nay, were obliged to assemble twice daily, was followed by a paean, a formula of thanksgiving, a hosanna or last tribute.

Because she was the horde cook, our priestess, Awa, inspected our feces, which had cooled in the meantime. Though she never established a fixed order of sequence, she strode around the circle, finding an exegetic word for each of us, even the meagerest shitter, for which reason this most human of institutions must be recognized as primordially democratic. All squatted in equality, none exalted above his fellows, for we were all her children. Anyone who had squatted unsuccessfully was reprimanded, and if he remained constipated over a period of days, he was punished — as is still customary — by being made to shit alone. And if even then he failed to squeeze out so much as a hard and undersized sausage, toads' eggs were tunneled into him. Awa wielded the neolithic spoon, the ladlelike shoulder blade of an elk cow. That helped!

In our humanistic modern age political criminals, or "enemies of the people," are sometimes punished or tortured by being made to eat their own fascist, Communist, anarchist, or even liberal shit. We would not have felt humiliated by such treatment, because our attitude toward fecal matter was not only religious but practical as well: in times of famine we ate it, without pleasure but also without disgust. Today only babies have this natural attitude toward the end products of their digestion and toward the pleasurable process of metabolism, for which adults have devised such coy euphemisms: Number two. Big business. To go where even the kaiser must go on foot. To disappear for a moment.

"You barbarians!" cried the Flounder when, more or less in passing, I told him about our maternally approved shit-togethers. "Pigs!" he screamed. "When in King Minos's palace they've already got flush toilets." He tried to talk me into a sense of shame. And soon, only two thousand years later, I developed one and shat alone like everyone else. The Flounder lectured me on culture and civilization. I listened, though I really never understood whether the in-

dividualization of the bowel movement was a cultural development or an advance in civilization. In the Neolithic, in any case, when we knew only the horde shit-together and our Awa twice daily struck up her vowel-rich paean, we were no strangers to hygiene: coltsfoot leaves. Never been beat.

(Ah, if only we had a collective toilet, a two-seater at least, if not the big family-size.) Tell me the truth, Ilsebill, even if you didn't want to fish your gold tooth out of your excrement, and (like most people) you use the word "shit" exclusively and quite unjustifiably as an expletive. Admit it, Ilsebill, don't use your pregnancy as an excuse, admit that you, too, look behind you, though diffidently and much too genteelly. You like to smell yourself as much as I do myself. And I would gladly smell you, and gladly be smelled by you. Love? That's it.

And so the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, who cooked diet fare for painter Moller and poet Opitz, inspected her lovers' feces each day and honored them in verses. Salutary words always came to her. And when the Black Death struck Opitz, Agnes recognized by the shit in his breeches that he was doomed to die, and lamented softly:

"The Lord hath meant to give me the alarm: where shytte is black, beset with many a worm, the shytter soon must come to grievous harm."

Pants down, hands joined as though in prayer,

my eyes right on target:

third tile from the top, sixth from the right.

Diarrhea.

I hear myself.

Two thousand five hundred years of history,

early insight and last thoughts

lick and cancel each other out.

It's the usual infection.

Brought on by red wine or by quarrels on the stairs with Ilsebill. Fear because time — the clock, I mean-has chronic trots.

What afterdrips: breakfast problems. No compact turd takes form, love, too, flows thin and loose.

So much emptiness

is in itself a pleasure: in the crapper

with my own specific ass.

God state society family party. .

Out, the whole lot of you.

What smells is me!

If only I could weep.

In the sixteenth year of the war, when the Saxons were negotiating with the imperial forces and Silesia was about to fall for the second time, the eighteen-year-old Andreas Gryphius, whose native Glogau had been razed, went to Danzig, where he planned to defray the costs of his studies in history, theology, astronomy, and medicine by instructing the burghers' children, who lived behind newly remodeled facades that, with their flutings, ledges, and inscriptions, expressed the exuberance of life and gilded it with deep meaning.

Until recently the young man had written only heroic epics in Latin, but now, since becoming acquainted with a little book on the rules of poetics, he had taken to writing German verses, which in their first elan pushed the door so violently as to attract the notice of the author of the poetic rule book, who had settled in Danzig, where he was employed as Royal Polish court historian, by their voluptuous preoccupation with sorrow, their rage over the vanity of all things, their gushing sadness. For in a copy submitted to him by a friend, Martin Opitz von Boberfeld read: