Gunter Grass - The Flounder

Then they remembered their work. The next volume of The Boy's Magic Horn must be even more splendid than the first. For the moment they disagreed only on the guiding-principle. While Arnim wanted to preserve German folk poetry by presenting it in its original form, unfalsified, as it welled from the mouths of the people-"For when treasures have endured this long, we have no business taking a file and trying to polish them"-Brentano wanted to improve on the old songs, tales, and fables, and teach the voice of the people to speak more artistically: "The artist's hand is needed to ennoble the crude stone, magnificent as we find it uncut." Jakob Grimm was more scientific in his enthusiasm; he wished to proceed with method and put order into the superabundant material: "We are dealing with a linguistic river; like other rivers it has its source, which we will search for and question with regard to origins." Only the sensitive Wilhelm thought they should listen in all humility but with meticulous ear to everything said or sung around the hearth or spinning wheel, and preserve it by taking it down without embellishment. "That alone would be enough for me," he said. (And later on, to be sure, he patiently collected folk tales and gave them to the world as a household treasure.)

Violently as they argued, Fraulein Bettina managed, strangely enough, in her childlike yet precocious way, to agree

with all of them. She favored unfalsified folk poetry, the art fairy tale, the search for the sources of language, and the humble transcription of fireside stories. And when painter Runge spoke haltingly and obscurely of primordial forces, of unformed matter, of the breath of chance, of gossamer and transience, all of which he held to be the very texture of life, and proceeded from image to image, Bettina agreed with him, too; in her eyes the friends were all splendid. Each one was right. There was room enough for all their ideas. That's the way nature was in its beautiful disorder: spacious. All these thoughts could be set before the reader in their wild luxuriance; little order was needed. The reader would know what to do with them. "And then," she cried, "you can go on with your research!"

Thereupon painter Runge said: "I'm glad to say that The journal for Hermits has accepted one of the tales I've taken down in dialect, 'The Juniper Tree,' but the other, which was also told me years ago by an old woman on the island of Riigen and which I took down in two versions, because the old woman, who was strangely obstinate, kept shifting from one to — the other and back, this tale of 'The Fisherman and His Wife' is still unpublished, though Zim-mer the book dealer recommended it a good two years ago to Messrs. Arnim and Brentano for inclusion in their Boy's Magic Horn. Our meeting here gives me an opportunity to bring the story up again, and I'm going to submit both versions. That's why I've come all this way at the Messrs. Grimm's request. Because I ought to be at work on my painting. It's called Morning, and it simply refuses to get finished."

Thereupon painter Runge laid the two versions of his dialect tale on the long, paper-littered table. The one is the tale as it has come down to us; of the other, there is more to say.

Because, you see, the old woman, who lived on Oehe, a small island between the thin, elongated island of Hiddensee and the large island of Riigen, but who, when the wind was right, came rowing over to the main island on market days to sell her sheep's-milk cheese in Schaprode, told painter Philipp Otto Runge two different truths to take down in his

sketchbook. The one made Ilsebill the quarrelsome wife credible, how she wants to have more and more and more, to be king emperor pope, but finally, when she wants the all-powerful Flounder to make her "like God," is sent back to the old thatched hut, called "pisspot" in the story. The other truth dictated to painter Runge by the old woman showed a modest Ilsebill and a fisherman with immoderate wishes: He wants to be unconquerable in war. He wants to build, traverse, inhabit bridges across the widest river, houses and towers reaching to the clouds, fast carriages drawn neither by oxen nor horses, ships that swim under water. He wants to attain goals, to rule the world, to subjugate nature, to rise above the earth. "But now," he says in the second tale, "now I want to fly, too. . " And when at the end the fisherman, though his wife, Ilsebill, keeps advising him to be content ("Now suppose we stop wishing and let well enough alone"), wants to rise up to the stars ("I must and will fly up to heaven"), all the splendor, the towers, the bridges, the flying machines collapse, the dikes burst, drought parches, sandstorms devastate, the mountains spew fire, the old earth quakes, and in quaking shakes off the man's rule. And cold blasts usher in the next all-covering ice age. "And there, under the ice, they've been sitting to this day." So ended the tale of the Flounder who granted every wish of the man who kept wanting mOre and more, every wish except the last — to fly beyond the stars to heaven.

When painter Runge asked the old woman which of the two tales was right, she said, "The one and the other." Then she went back to the market to sell her sheep's-milk cheese, for she wanted to be on her island before nightfall, "with some sweet stuff and a bottle."

As for painter Runge, he returned to Wolgast, where he lived in his father's house. There he copied both tales, the one and the other truth, out of his sketchbook in his best calligraphy, without changing a single word.

When the Grimm brothers, the writers Arnim and Bren-tano, and Brentano's sister Bettina had read the one and the other manuscript, asking what certain words meant because they didn't know much Low German, they all praised the tales for their moral substance and originality, but each

in a different way. Arnim wanted to put both of them right into his Boy's Magic Horn; Brentano wanted to cleanse them of dialect, transpose them into verse, and fashion them into a great epic; Jakob Grimm delighted in their free and easy grammar; and Wilhelm Grimm resolved to publish these tales and others in the future. Only Bettina took a dark view of the one version in which, so she said, Ilsebill was painted too black. If the tale were published in that form, it would be easy for men to say: That's how you women are, greedy and quarrelsome, all alike. "When actually," she cried, "women have such a hard time of it!"

"I, on the other hand," said her brother Clemens, "cannot approve of the other tale, which so cruelly demolishes man's strivings and dreams of greatness. None of the things we hold sacred, our rich and complex history, the glorious empire of the Hohenstaufens, the towering Gothic cathedrals, would exist if men had dully contented themselves with what they had. To publish the tale in this form, so suggesting that all men's striving leads to chaos, would soon make a laughingstock of male authority. And besides, women are undoubtedly more immoderate in their wishes. Everyone knows that."

After that, brother and sister argued across the long table, and soon the other friends also began to quarrel. Even the scientific-minded Jakob Grimm thought the greedy Ilsebill more plausible than the overweening fisherman. He knew other tales (from Hessen, from Silesia), about women (always women) who wanted more and more. The sensitive Wilhelm took the contrary view. It was common knowledge, he contended, that male lust for power was a source of tyranny and oppression. Consider Napoleon — or Caesar. Hadn't the Corsican wanted more and more? As general under the Directory, to be consul; as one of three consuls, to be first consul; as first consul, to be emperor; and hadn't he gone on as emperor to subjugate all Europe? And wasn't he planning, at this very moment, to invade India; didn't he hope to break the world dominion of Britain and perhaps even, like Charles XII of Sweden, to penetrate deep into Russia?