Gunter Grass - The Flounder

The rest is known. Thompson requisitioned a run-down Pauline monastery in the suburbs and transformed it into a military workhouse with shops for turners, smiths, dyers, saddlers, and so on, as well as dormitories, a refectory, and a community kitchen with a masonry cooking stove that Amanda later had copied (from Thompson's blueprints) for her farm kitchen: horseshoe shaped with numerous openings and fire grates. He then established welfare committees in Munich's sixteen districts, put up a sign in gold letters over the gateway of the workhouse saying, "No alms accepted here!" and finally, on January 1, 1790, arrested twenty-six hundred beggars in a sweeping roundup, had them registered on previously prepared blanks, and sent them to the workhouse the following day.

In a letter to Amanda, Thompson wrote, "We are making footstools, horse blankets, and uniforms for the whole Bavarian army. We wind yarn and spin wool. Fourteen hundred permanent inmates are industrious and happy. Even

the little children help. It is to be hoped that my success will encourage others to follow my example."

What was discussed before the Women's Tribunal, however, was not the successful police action but the accused Flounder's contention that by advising Thompson to give the beggars and other paupers work, wages, and food, a farm cook, who was not only a Kashubian but a serf as well, had prevented the French Revolution from spreading to Bavaria.

Protected by his bulletproof glass, the Flounder said: "If such advice had been given to an able Frenchman, if the French mob had been provided with well-heated workhouses and ample community kitchens, if they had been guaranteed full soup kettles with smiling eyes of fat floating on top, there would have been no revolution, the guillotine would not have had to function many thousands of times, no Robespierre, no Napoleon would have become known to us; instead, enlightened princes would perforce have resolved to promote the public welfare. As it was, Amanda Woyke's advice benefited only the Bavarian people. While elsewhere the Furies raged, the beggars of Munich were made over into useful citizens."

You're right again, Ilsebill: carrot and stick. It would be easy to imagine Ms. Huntscha, the prosecutor, taking a strictly materialistic approach and demolishing the Flounder's speculations—"If the dog hadn't shat, he would have caught the hare," and so on. But she adopted an entirely different tone. "Excellent reasoning," she said. Then she dissociated herself from "male revolutionary rites," expressed her horror of Robespierre and Napoleon, exposing the one as a hypocrite, the other as a little man who wanted to be big. After that, she wound up for a haymaker:

"But what, defendant Flounder, became of your enlightened princes' alleged achievements? A few years later Thompson's workhouse, with its rudiments of self-government, had become a common jail where the prisoners were bullied and beaten. And on the state farm at Zuckau serfdom was maintained until well into the nineteenth century. Nay, more: your great genius, your friend of the people Thompson, was chucked out by the Bavarian estates. And Amanda

was obliged to look on as an ambitious inspector drove the serfs of the state farm from their individual potato plots. That's right, with whips. Her little talks with the sweet Lord didn't help one bit. And as for Thompson, who'd been made a Holy Roman count in the meantime, the best this Count Rumford could do, even in his late years in London and Paris, was to rush into more and more new ideas which, as the defendant has succeeded in proving, were kindled in a Kashubian farm kitchen and exploded in Rumford's brain. "We concede that by their division of labor the Woyke-Thompson correspondence tandem were productive — we owe them the slow-combustion stove, the steamer, and the soup kitchen — but what part did the Flounder play in this often pioneering collaboration? He claims to have been the Welt-geist. He claims to have coupled the ambition of a delinquent upstart with the public spirit of a farm cook rooted in her native soil. He tried to play God for Amanda Woyke and to embody social progress in the interest of Count Rumford. A scheming matchmaker, that's what he was. It's beginning to look as if he'd sold the Tribunal a bill of goods, as though we feminists had fallen for his flimflam about equality, as though his belated monument to the farm cook had turned us into a lot of gaping fools, as though he, in his Floundery way, were contributing to our emancipation. But let's not be deceived by appearances. His version simply doesn't make sense. The intention is too obvious. Here's what the Flounder is really saying: in the hands of a man, the naive invention that this dear little woman managed to arrive at over her homely cooking stove — West Prussian potato soup, for instance — becomes social and political achievement, namely, Rumford soup for the poor, which was spooned up for a whole century in Munich, London, Geneva, and Paris. In other words, the defendant wants us to praise, glorify, and perpetuate the inventive little woman's humility, the admirable inner freedom of a lifelong serf, subservience misrepresented as equality. There's Flounder morality for you! What a stinking, fishy trick! I move that we rule out all further quotations from letters!"

The motion was overruled. (The Flounder faction in the Revolutionary Advisory Council had already become a

powerful enough minority to force majority decisions.) Then the Women's Tribunal adjourned, because the Flounder claimed to be, or really was, feeling faint; in any case he left his sand bed, showed how his steering mechanism had failed and cast him helplessly adrift, reeled, threatened to capsize and float belly up, and just under the surface of the water whispered over the intercom system: "What deplorable, what painful suggestions! So much injustice almost strikes me dumb. When what I really wanted — ah, me! — if I hadn't been so gallingly insulted, was to elucidate Count Rumford's ideology by the example of the Chinese Tower in Munich's English Gardens. But — ah, me! — all I get is vilification, and I'm too weak to insist on my right of rebuttal and on further quotations from the letters. Ah, me! Ah, me! Has it ever occurred to this feminine and therefore stern court that I, too, the Flounder, the detested male principle, might be mortal?"

Don't worry, Ilsebill. Naturally the flatfish recovered. And the trial took its course. Further quotations from letters were admitted in evidence. The recipe for Rumford soup for the poor was read: "Dried peas, barley, and potatoes are boiled for two and a half hours until they form a mash; then soured beer is stirred in; then diced stale bread is fried crisp in beef fat and added; then the whole is seasoned with salt." Amanda's violent reaction to this mushy perversion of her potato soup was quoted: "I wouldn't feed such pap to the Devil himself."

After Rumford's embittered departure from Munich, his activities in London, his move to Paris and marriage had been discussed rather briefly, and the father's conflict with Sally, his daughter beyond the seas, had been allowed to flare up in quotations from letters, Rumford's political creed, his belief in Chinese beneficence from above, complemented by Amanda's concern for her Kashubian farm hands, became the storm center of the court proceedings.

A single sentence of the Flounder's — or, rather, his rhetorical question "Is it not clear that with their Utopian descriptions of cultural mass movements and of community kitchens feeding entire populations, Count Rumford and Amanda Woyke foreshadowed Maoism?" — unleashed a tu-

mult and would have broken up the Tribunal if Ms. Schon-herr, the presiding judge, had not found words of appeasement. "Defendant!" she shouted into the rising storm. "I assume that by your conjectures you have merely meant to say that the ideas of the great Mao Tse-tung have long lain dormant in the minds of the peoples, but have often, as in Rumford's case, been absurdly misunderstood and, as in Woyke's case, been too narrowly confined to the agrarian sector to move the masses to revolution, and that consequently they did not find relevant expression until the present period."