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Günter Grass (1927–2015) was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

About the Book

Lifted from their ancient fairytale, the fisherman and his wife are still living today. During the months of Ilsebill’s pregnancy, the fisherman tells her of his adventures through time with the Flounder, constituting a complete reworking of social, political and gastronomic history.

ALSO BY GÜNTER GRASS

The First Month

The third breast

ILSEBILL PUT ON more salt. Before the impregnation there was shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, the season being early October. Still at table, still with her mouth full, she asked, “Should we go to bed right away, or do you first want to tell me how when where our story began?”

I, down through the ages, have been I. And Ilsebill, too, has been from the beginning. I remember our first quarrel, toward the end of the Neolithic, some two thousand years before the incarnation of our Lord, when myths were beginning to distinguish between raw food and cooked food. And just as, today, before sitting down to mutton with string beans and pears, we quarreled more and more cuttingly over her children and mine, so then, in the marshland of the Vistula estuary, we quarreled to the best of our neolithic vocabulary over my claim to at least three of her nine kids. But I lost. For all the ur-phonemes my nimble, hard-working tongue was able to line up, I did not succeed in forming the beautiful word “father”; only “mother” was possible. In those days Ilsebill’s name was Awa. I, too, had a different name. But the idea of having been Awa doesn’t appeal to Ilsebill.

I had studded the shoulder of mutton with halved garlic cloves, sautéed the pears in butter, and bedded them on boiled string beans. Even though Ilsebill, speaking with her mouth still full, said there was no reason why it shouldn’t come off, or “take,” right away, because she had thrown her pills down the John as the doctor advised, what I heard was that our bed should have priority over the neolithic cook.

And so we lay down, arming and legging each other around as we have done since time immemorial. Sometimes I, sometimes she on top. Equal, though Ilsebill contends that the male’s privilege of penetrating is hardly compensated by the female’s paltry prerogative of refusing admittance. But because we mated in love, our feelings were so all-embracing that in an expanded space, transcending time and its tick-tock, freed from the heaviness of our earthbound bed, a collateral, ethereal union was achieved; as though in compensation, her feeling penetrated mine in hard thrusts: we worked doubly and well.

Eaten before the mutton with pears and beans, Ilsebill’s fish soup, distilled from codfish heads that have had the hell boiled out of them, probably embodied the catalytic agent with which, down through the ages, the cooks inside me have invited pregnancy; for by chance, by destiny, and without further ingredients, it came off, it took. No sooner was I out again—as though expelled—than Ilsebill said with perfect assurance, “Well, this time it’s going to be a boy.”

Don’t forget the savory. With boiled potatoes or, historically, with millet. Our mutton—as always advisable—had been served on warmed plates. Nevertheless our kiss, if I may be forgiven one last indiscretion, was coated with tallow. In the fish soup, which Ilsebill had made green with dill and capers, codfish eyes floated white and signified happiness.

After it presumably came off, we lay in bed together, each smoking his (or her) conception of a cigarette. (I, descending the steps of time, ran away.) Ilsebill said, “Incidentally, we need a dishwasher. It’s high time.”

Before she could engage in further speculation about a reversal of roles—“I wish I could see you pregnant some time”—I told her about Awa and her three breasts.

So help me, Ilsebill, she had three. Nature can do anything. Honest to goodness, three of them. And if my memory doesn’t deceive me, all women had that name in the Stone Age: Awa Awa Awa. And we men were all called Edek. We were all alike in every way. And so were the Awas. One two three. At first we couldn’t count any higher. No, not below, not above; in between. The plural begins with three. Three is the beginning of multiplicity, the series, the chain, and of myth. But don’t let it tie you up in complexes. We acquired some later on. In our region, to the east of the river, Potrimpos, who became a god of the Prussians along with Pikollos and Perkunos, was said to have had three testicles. Yes, you’re right: three breasts are more, or at least they look it; they look like more and more; they suggest superabundance, advertise generosity, give eternal assurance of a full belly. Still, when you come right down to it, they are abnormal—though not inconceivable.

Naturally. A projection of male desires! I knew you’d say that. Maybe they are anatomically impossible. But in those days, when myths still cast their shadows, Awa had three. And it’s true that today the third is often wanting. I mean, something is wanting. Well, the third of the three. Don’t be so quick on the trigger. No, of course not. Of course I won’t make a cult of it. Of course two are plenty. You can take my word for it, Ilsebill, basically I’m satisfied with two. I’m not a fool. I don’t go chasing after a number. Now that, thanks to your fish soup and no pill, it must have come off, now that you’re pregnant and your two will soon weigh more than Awa’s three, I’m perfectly, blissfully contented.

The third was always an extra. Essentially a caprice of capricious nature. As useless as the appendix. Altogether I can’t help wondering: Why this breast fixation? This typically male tittomania? This cry for the primal mother, the super wet-nurse? Anyway, Awa became a goddess later on and had her three tits certified in hand-sized clay idols. Other goddesses—the Indian Kali, for instance—had four or more arms. But these may have served some practical purpose. The Greek mother goddesses—Demeter, Hera—on the other hand, were normally outfitted and managed to stay in business for thousands of years even so. I’ve also seen gods represented with a third eye in their forehead. I wouldn’t want one of those if you paid me.

All in all the number three promises more than it can deliver. Awa overdid it with her three boobies as much as the Amazons underdid it with their one breast. That’s why our latter-day feminists always go to extremes. Get that sulky look off your face. I’m all in favor of the libbers. And I assure you, Ilsebill, two are plenty. Any doctor will tell you so. And if our child doesn’t turn out to be a boy, she’ll certainly have enough with two. What do you mean, aha? Men just happen to be crazy, always this yen for bigger and bigger bosoms. The truth of the matter is that all the cooks I have ever sojourned with have had one on the left and one on the right, the same as you: Mestwina two, Amanda Woyke two, and Sophie Rotzoll had two little espresso cupfuls. And Margarete Rusch the cooking abbess smothered the wealthy patrician Eberhard Ferber in bed with her two admittedly enormous tits. So let’s not exaggerate. The whole thing is kind of a dream. No, not a wish dream. Why must you always pick a fight? Can’t a man dream a little? Can’t he?

Absurd, this jealousy about everything and nothing. A pathetic lot we’d be without projections and utopias! I’d even be forbidden to let pencil stray over white paper in three curved lines. Art would have to say “Yes” and “Have it your way” all the time. I beg you, Ilsebill, be just a little reasonable. Think of the whole thing as an idea with an inherent contradiction which, it is hoped, will give the female breast the dimensions it now lacks and produce some sort of superbosom. You must learn to take a dialectical view. Think of the Roman she-wolf, for instance. Think of expressions such as “nature’s bosom.” Or, with regard to the number, the triune God. Or the three wishes in fairy tales. What do you mean, given myself away? You think I’m wishing? Well, well. You really do?

All right. Admitted that when I grab at empty space, I’m always after the third breast. In which I’m certainly not alone. There must be reasons why we men are so hipped on breasts, as if we’d all been weaned too soon. It must be you women’s fault. It could be your fault. Because you attach so much, too much importance to whether or not they sag a little more, each day a little more. Let them sag, to hell with them. No. Not yours. But they will, they’re bound to, in time. Amanda’s sagged. Lena’s sagged from the start. But I loved her and loved her and loved her. It’s not always a bit of bosom more or less that matters. If I wanted to, for instance, I could find your ass with all its little dimples just as beautiful. And I certainly wouldn’t want it in three parts. Or something else that’s smooth and round. Now that your belly will soon start ballooning, a symbol for everything that’s roomy. Maybe we’ve simply forgotten that there’s still more. A third something. In other respects as well, politically for instance, as possibility.

Anyway, Awa had three. My three-breasted Awa. And you, too, had one more back in the Neolithic. Think back, Ilsebill: to how our story began.

Even if it seems convenient to presume that they, the cooks inside me (nine or eleven of them), are nothing more than a full-blown complex, an extreme case of banal mother fixation, ripe for the couch and hardly worthy of suspending time in kitchen tales, I must nevertheless insist on the rights of my subtenants. All nine or eleven of them want to come out and to be called by name from the very start; because they have too long been nameless old settlers, or, collectively, a complex without name or history; because too often in mute passivity and too seldom with ready words (I say: dominant nevertheless; Ilsebill says: exploited and oppressed) they cooked and performed various other services for shopkeepers and Teutonic Knights, abbots and inspectors, for men in armor or cowls, in baggy breeches or gaiters, for men in high boots or men with snapping suspenders; and because they want their revenge, revenge against everyone; want at last to be out of me—or, as Ilsebill says, emancipated.

Let them! Let them reduce us all, including the cook inside them—who would doubtless be me—to sex objects. Perhaps from exhausted daddies they will build a man who, untainted by power and privilege, will be sticky and new; for without him it can’t be done.

“Not yet, unfortunately,” said Ilsebill as we were spooning up our fish soup. And after the shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, she gave me nine months’ time to deliver myself of my cooks. When it comes to deadlines, we have equal rights. Whatever I may have cooked, the cook inside me adds salt.

What I write about

About food and its aftertaste.

Then about guests who came

uninvited or just a century late.

About the mackerel’s longing for lemon juice.

Among fishes I write mostly about the flounder.

I write about superabundance.

About fasting and why gluttons invented it.

About crusts from the tables of the rich and their food value.

About fat and excrement and salt and penury.

In the midst of a mound of millet

I will relate instructively

how the spirit became bitter as gall

and the belly went insane.

I write about breasts.

About Ilsebill’s pregnancy (her craving for sour pickles)

I will write as long as it lasts.

About the last bite shared,

the hour spent with a friend

over bread, cheese, nuts, and wine.

(Munching, we talked about this, that, and the other

and about gluttony, which is only a form of fear.)

I write about hunger, how it is described

and disseminated by the written word.

About spices (when Vasco da Gama and I

made pepper cheaper)

I will write on my way to Calcutta.

Meat, raw and cooked,

goes limp, shreds, shrinks, and falls apart.

The daily porridge

and other warmed-over fare: dated history,

the slaughter at Tannenberg Wittstock Kolin.

I make a note of what’s left:

bones, husks, innards, and sausage.

About nausea brought on by a heaped plate,

about good taste,

about milk (how it curdles),

about turnips, cabbage, the triumph of the potato

I will write tomorrow

or after yesterday’s leftovers

have become today’s petrifaction.

What I write about: about the egg.

About overeating through sorrow, consuming love, the nail and the rope,

about quarrels over the hair and the word too many in the soup.

Deep freezers and what became of them

when the current gave out.

I will write about us all at a table eaten bare,

and about you and me and the fishbones in our throats.

Nine and more cooks

The first cook inside me—for I can speak only of cooks who are inside me and want to come out—was named Awa, and she had three breasts. That was in the Stone Age. We men had little say, because Awa had filched fire for us from the Sky Wolf, three glowing little pieces of charcoal, and hidden them somewhere, possibly under her tongue. Next Awa, as though in passing, invented the roasting spit and taught us to distinguish raw food from cooked food. Awa’s rule was mild: after suckling their babies, the women of the Stone Age suckled their men until they sweated out their obsessions, stopped fidgeting, and became sleepily still, available for just about anything.

And so we were all of us sated. Never again, never in the future that dawned later on, were we so sated. We were suckled and suckled. Always superabundance was flowing into us. Never any question of enough is enough or let’s not overdo it. Never were we given a pacifier and told to be reasonable. It was always suckling time.

Because Awa prescribed a mash of ground acorns, sturgeon roe, and the mammary glands of the elk cow for all mothers, milk gushed into Stone Age mothers even when there were no infants to suckle. That made us all peaceful and created time intervals. So punctually fed, even our toothless old men preserved their vigor, and the consequence was rather a surplus of males; the women wore out more quickly and died younger. We had little to do between feeding times: hunting, fishing, the manufacture of stone axes; and when in accordance with a strict rule our turn came, we were allowed to mount the women, who ruled by tender loving care.

It might interest you to know that Stone Age mothers already said “la la” to their babies and that the men, when called to take a look at them, said “na na.” There were no fathers. Matriarchy held sway.

It was a pleasantly historyless age. A pity that someone, a man of course, suddenly decided to smelt metal out of ore and pour it into sand molds. God knows that wasn’t what Awa had stolen fire for. But threaten as she would to withhold the breast, the Bronze Age and the masculine cruelties that came after it could not be prevented, but only delayed a little.

The second cook inside me who wants to emerge with a name was called Wigga and no longer had three breasts. That was in the Iron Age, but Wigga, who forbade us to leave the swamps with their plentiful fish and join in the history making of the Germanic hordes who were then passing through, still kept us in a state of immaturity. The one thing she allowed us to copy from the Germans was their coiling pottery. And Wigga made us gather the iron pots they threw away in their haste, because Wigga ruled by cookery, and she needed flameproof pots.

For all the men, who were all fishermen—because elk and water buffalo were becoming rare—she boiled codfish and sturgeon, pike-perch and salmon, roasted roaches, lampreys, finger-length sprats, and those small, tasty Baltic herrings on the iron grill that we had learned to fashion from Germanic scrap. Making a thick, strong broth by boiling the hell out of shifty-eyed codfish heads, Wigga invented a fish soup into which, because millet was still unknown to us, she stirred the crushed seeds of swamp grasses. Possibly in memory of Awa, whose image had come down to us as a three-breasted goddess, Wigga, always nursing an infant or two, added milk from her own breasts to her fish soups.

We unsuckled men were jumpy, as though infected with Germanic unrest. Wanderlust raised its head. We climbed tall trees, stood on high dunes, narrowed our eyes to sight slits, and searched the horizon to see if something was coming, if something new was coming. Because of this wanderlust—and because I refused to be Wigga’s charcoal burner and peat cutter forever—I went off with the Germanic Goitches, as we called the Goths. But I didn’t get very far. Trouble with my feet. Or maybe I turned back in time because I missed Wigga’s mammary fish soup.

Wigga forgave me. She knew that history is forgotten between hunger and hunger. “The Germanic peoples,” she said, “won’t listen to their women; that’s why they will always get themselves wiped out.”

For Wigga, incidentally, I filed a comb from fishbone, because a talking flounder had shrewdly advised me to. Back in Awa’s days, I had fished this flatfish out of the shallow water and let him go again. The talking flounder is a story by himself. Since he has been advising me, the male cause has progressed.

The third cook inside me was called Mestwina, and she, too, ruled in the region where Awa and Wigga had kept us in a state of infancy with their ever-loving care: in the swamps of the Vistula estuary, in the beech forests of the Baltic Ridge, amid sand dunes wandering and stationary. Po Morze—country by the sea—for which reason Mestwina’s tribe of fishermen, who had begun to grow root plants, were known among the neighboring Prussians as “Pomorshians” or Pomeranians.

They lived in a Wicker Bastion, so called because of the fence they had plaited from willow withes as a defense against Prussian raiders. Because she was a cook, Mestwina was also a priestess. She raised the cult of Awa to perfection. And when it came time for us all to be baptized, she brewed up paganism and Christianity into a Catholic mixture.

For Mestwina I was at once a shepherd, supplying her with loins of mutton, and a bishop, for whom she cooked. It was I who picked up pieces of amber on the beach, pierced them with red-hot wire, and threaded them, while muttering appropriate spells, to fashion the necklace that came apart as she bent over her fish broth; and as Bishop Adalbert I spooned up that same codfish-head soup, into which, because a necklace had come apart, seven pieces of amber had melted, whereupon I became as horny as a goat from Ashmodai’s stable.

Later on they canonized Bishop Adalbert of Prague, who was me at the time. But here I’m speaking of Mestwina, who, in striking me dead without a qualm, was merely doing a job that is ordinarily done by men. And when I told the Flounder about this incident of April 997, he scolded as follows: “That was supererogation! Look, you’ve more or less turned yourselves into warriors, haven’t you? That killing should have been done by a man. Indisputably. Don’t let them wrest the absolute solutions out of your hands. No relapse into the Stone Age, if you please. Women should devote themselves to a more inward religion. The kitchen is dominion enough for them.”

The fourth cook inside me inspires fear, so I’m glad to get rid of her. No longer a Pomorshian fisherwoman ruling mildly in the Wicker Bastion, this one, now that the city has been founded, is an artisan’s wife, known as Dorothea of Montau, because she was born in Montau, a village on the Vistula.

I don’t want to slander her, but the talking Flounder’s advice that after so much historyless, matriarchal ever-loving care I should devote myself with masculine high pressure to men’s business and leave not the Church but religion to women as a second prerogative after rule over the kitchen, made a big hit with my High Gothic Dorothea. To say that though revered as a saint by the populace she was more like a witch and Satan’s bedfellow is a mild enough observation in connection with a period when the plague was carrying people away right and left, and when witches as often as not doubled as saints.

Typical as Dorothea may have been of the fourteenth century, her contribution to the cuisine of an epoch noted for its revolting gluttony was quite one-sided, for Dorothea ruled by extending Lenten fare to the whole year, not excluding Saint Martin’s Day, Saint John’s Day, Candlemas, and the high holidays. The barley in her pot never saw fat. She boiled her millet in water, never in milk. When she cooked lentils or dried peas, no bone was ever allowed to contribute its bit of marrow. The closest thing to meat that she tolerated was fish, which she simmered with turnips, leeks, sorrel, and lettuce. We shall have something to say of her spices later on. How she had visions and baked the Sacred Heart in bread dough. What penance she found sweet and how she softened peas with her penitent knees. What she hungered for and how she enhanced her beauty. What advice the Flounder gave me. But no advice could help me; she was a witch, and she destroyed me.

The fifth cook inside me is Margarete Rusch, also known as Fat Gret. Nobody ever laughed like her: so totally. While holding a freshly killed goose, still warm and dripping, between her round knees, plucking it so strenuously that she was soon sitting in a cloud of feathers, she drowned the pope and Luther in her laughter. She laughed at the Holy Roman Empire and at the German nation as well, at Poland’s crown and the embattled guilds, at the Hanseatic lords and the abbot of Oliva, at peasant louts and lousy knights—in short, at all those who in baggy breeches, in doublets, cowls, or armor, fought for what they held to be the true faith. She laughed at her century.

As she belly-laughed and plucked eleven successive geese, I, her kitchen boy and the target of her angry spoon, kept the down in the air with my blowing; I’ve always had a knack for blowing feathers and keeping them hovering in mid-air.

The goose-plucking cook was the abbess of Saint Bridget’s, a free and easy nun who helped herself to every man she could fit into her box bed. She had abducted me, a little Franciscan monk, from Trinity Church during vespers. Fat Gret was so spacious a woman that many a noble lord got lost inside her. To her the young sons of patrician families were an appetizer: tender asparagus tips. She fattened the abbot of Oliva to death. She was said to have bitten off Preacher Hegge’s left testicle. After that we went to work for Ferber the patrician, who wanted to stay Catholic and not to forgo Margret’s peppery lamb tongues with broad beans. Then we went back to the Protestants and cooked for one guild or another on holidays. When King Stephen Batory besieged the city, we decided we would be safer outside the walls, cooking for the Poles. In her bed I found warmth. In her bed I found peace. She kept me under lock and key. She sheltered me with her fat.

Fat Gret, the Flounder said to me, was a woman after his wide-mouthed taste: she let the men get on with their deadly serious trade in wheat, toll collecting, guild fees, and indulgences, let them find more and more elaborate ways of slicing or pulverizing one another, or interpreting the Scriptures, and improved her health laughing at the murderous entertainment they offered. “If she had wanted to,” said the Flounder, “she could have won back Awa’s power at any time.”

The sixth cook inside me—they’re pushing to get out, and there are nine or more of them, each with a name—also plucked geese, but she didn’t laugh. An oat-fattened goose when the Swedes, with fire behind them, withdrew. When the Swedes came back (punctually on Saint Martin’s Day), nothing was left of all her geese but a bowlful of stirred blood, to which she added roots and sliced pears to make a sour black sauce for the boiled giblets—neck, heart, gizzard, and wings.

Directly behind the barn, under the apple tree, from which later dangled heads with upturned beaks, Agnes plucked the geese and sang little songs: weary wind-blown words that put the wretched Swedish occupation into rhyme and hovered in mid-air with the goose down for the length of a November day. O vale of tears!

That was when Agnes was still childlike and Kashubian. Later, when she became a city dweller and cooked for Möller the town painter, the Swedes with their Gustavus Adolphus were already somewhere else. Instead, four years after the Battle of Lützen, the poet and diplomat Martin Opitz, embittered by the long-lasting war, came to Danzig.

“Agnes,” said the talking Flounder—though I’m not sure whether it was as painter Möller or as poet Opitz that I questioned the wise old fish—“your Agnes,” he said, “is one of those women who can only love comprehensively. The man she cooks for she loves; and since she cooks tenderly for both of you, one for his swollen liver, the other for his embittered gall, you are obliged to sit down to table with what you take to be her divided—and what I call her doubled—love, and listen as the bed creaks.”

To painter Möller she bore a little girl; and as for me, when the plague baked me and sweated me, she stuffed the pillow of my deathbed full to bursting with goose down. That’s how kindhearted she was. But I never managed to turn out a poem to her kindness. Only courtly flattery and lamentations of various kinds. No mouth-filling Agnes-rhyme to chicken broth, calf’s sweetbreads, manna grits, and suchlike delicacies. I hope to make up for it later on.

The seventh cook inside me bore the name of Amanda Woyke, and when I let the whole lot of them and their daughters babble together, comparing the prices at different epochs, she’s the one who stands out most clearly in my mind. I’d never be able to say straight out, “This, just this is what Agnes looked like,” because Agnes always looked melancholy but in different ways, and always seemed torn between Möller and Opitz; for Amanda’s looks, on the other hand, I easily find an image: she had a potato face. Or, to be more specific, in her face the full beauty of the potato could be admired every day of the week. It wasn’t just the bulbousness; no, her whole skin had that earthy sheen, that glow of palpable happiness, that can be seen on stored potatoes. And since the potato is first of all grand, sweeping form, her eyes were small and lay, unaccented by heavy brows, embedded in roundness. Her lips, not fleshy red but the color of the sandy soil of Kashubia, were one of nature’s happy caprices: two bulges always prepared to utter such words as Bulwe, Wruke, Runkel.¹ To be kissed by Amanda was to receive from the earth, or, rather, from that dry potato soil that has made Kashubia famous, a smack that was not ephemeral but filled you up, just as potatoes boiled in their jackets fill you up.

When Mestwina smiled, you beheld the sheen of willow branches in March; Dorothea of Montau’s smile froze the snot in children’s noses to icicles; my Agnes’s smile, tinged with a yearning for death, made death tasty to my palate; but when Amanda smiled at me, the story of the triumph of the potato over millet could be spun on and on, a story as sinuous as Amanda’s potato peelings—for when her storytelling took hold of her, she peeled away from the thumb. As cook at the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau, she had to prepare food each day for seventy, for farm hands and house servants, for day laborers, cottagers, and retired old folks.

“She deserves a monument,” said the Flounder, “because without Amanda Woyke the introduction of the potato into Prussia after the second partition of Poland, when famine was raging far and wide and acorns brought a good price, would not have been possible. Though only a woman, she made history. Isn’t it amazing? Yes, amazing!”

The eighth cook inside me absolutely wanted to be a man and, in keeping with her revolutionary times, mount the barricades with militant breast; yet all her life Sophie Rotzoll, close as many men (including me) came to her, remained a virgin under seven seals. The only man she ever loved was Friedrich Bartholdy, the stammering schoolboy who was condemned to death for Jacobin conspiracy. He was seventeen and Sophie fourteen; in view of his youth, Queen Luise of Prussia commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. It was not until forty years later, when her Fritz was released from the fortress of Graudenz in failing health, that Sophie, by then an old woman, or, rather, an aging spinster, saw him again. Calf’s head in herb vinegar, hog belly with chanterelles, hare stewed in red wine; regardless of what she cooked for him, of all her attempts to fire his spirit, of all the lofty goals she held up to him and mankind, Bartholdy had had enough; all he wanted was to puff away at his pipe.

I knew her well. As a boy I went gathering mushrooms with Sophie in every acre of woods around Zuckau. She knew them all by name: the honey tuft, the poisonous sulfur tuft, the anise agaric, which liked to grow in a magic circle on beds of pine needles. The cep stood solitary. The word “stinkhorn” took on meaning for me. Hopelessly as Sophie had ruined her eyes reading revolutionary books, she could identify any mushroom at a glance.

Later, when she cooked for Pastor Blech, the chief pastor at Saint Mary’s, and still later, when she cooked, first enthusiastically, then conspiratorially, for General Rapp, Napoleon’s governor, I was successively Blech, the pastor she ran away from, and Rapp, the governor she tried to depose with a dish of special mushrooms.

Sophie could fire with enthusiasm. In the cellar, on every flight of stairs, and in the kitchen she sang “Trois jeunes tambours.” Her voice was always in the vanguard: saberthrust, whipcrack freedomthirst deathkiss. As though Dorothea of Montau were trying to discharge her heavenly high pressure on earth. “Ever since Sophie,” said the talking Flounder, “the kitchen has been in a turmoil. Always revolution.” (And my Ilsebill also has this demanding look.)

The ninth cook inside me was born in the fall of ’49, when Sophie Rotzoll, the eighth, died. One might almost suppose she had wanted to pass the banner of revolution on to Lena Stubbe; and it seems equally possible that Lena, who as a young widow ran a public soup kitchen (her husband, an anchor maker, whom she had married when very young, was killed before Paris in the Franco-Prussian War), dished out her soup in silence but harbored secret socialist hopes. But Lena’s voice didn’t carry. As an agitator she was a failure. She was never really carried away by enthusiasm. For all her intensive reading of Bebel, her spirit never rose above the gray commonplace.

When Lena Stubbe remarried she was already a mature woman; I, like her first husband an anchor maker, was no spring chicken myself, though ten years younger than she, and was, admittedly, a drinker.

She took charge of the strike fund and tried to guard it against my depredations. She endured my blows, and she comforted me when I was bowed with remorse because I had beaten her again. Lena survived me, for in 1914, when I was sent to East Prussia with the Landsturm, she was widowed a second time.

After that she did nothing but dish out soup: barley, cabbage, pea, and potato soups. In soup kitchens, in settlement houses, in field kitchens during the Spanish-flu winter of 1917, then at the Workers’ Aid. When the Nazis came in with their Winter Aid and one-dish Sundays, she was as old as the hills and still active with the soup ladle.

As a boy—back again and still driven by curiosity—I saw Lena. Her white hair, parted in the middle. Her special way of dishing out soup. A grave woman who seemed to practice compassion as a trade. The Flounder thinks Lena Stubbe was basically apolitical, except for her “Proletarian Cook Book,” which circulated in manuscript after the abrogation of Bismarck’s Socialist Laws but never found a publisher.

“You see,” said the Flounder, “that might have brought about a change of consciousness and created something new. True, there were any number of ‘bourgeois’² cook books at the time, but not a single proletarian one. That’s why the working class, impoverished or not, went in for bourgeois cookery. Before you ‘invent’ a tenth, let alone an eleventh cook, why don’t you quote from the posthumous papers of Lena Stubbe? You’re a Social Democrat, aren’t you?”

The tenth and eleventh cooks inside me are still fuzzy of outline, because I came to know them both too well. Only their names are present on an otherwise blank sheet of paper: I lost Billy (whose real name was Sibylle) in the sixties, on an Ascension Day, which is celebrated with great hullabaloo in Berlin and elsewhere as Father’s Day; Maria, who works at the canteen of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk (formerly the Schichau Shipyard in Danzig), is a relative of mine.

I admit it: Billy and Maria are pressing to get out. But since the Flounder advises me to observe chronological order and since I have so many cooks inside me, I shall take the liberty—especially as my present Ilsebill is kind of urging me—of making Awa’s three breasts more palpable before taking up the Father’s Day celebration—exclusively a men’s affair—that was held in June 1963 in Grunewald, in Tegel Forest, in Spandau, in Britz, and on the shores of the Wannsee. A man clogged with so much past who finally sees a chance of relieving his constipation can’t help being in a hurry to speak of Mestwina’s amber necklace, even if the uprising of the shipyard workers in the Polish seaports, as recorded by the world press in December 1970, ought to be closer to him.

Old yarns. The story of millet. What did the peasant serf have left to eat? According to what menu did Fat Gret fatten conventual abbots for the slaughter? What happened when the price of pepper fell? Rumford soup for the poor. How the deadly amanita gave promise of becoming political. When the invention of pea sausage gave the Prussian army new strength. Why the proletariat was drawn to bourgeois cookery. What it means to go hungry. “But perhaps,” said the Flounder didactically out of his crooked mouth, “history can teach us what role women played in historical events, in the triumph of the potato, for instance.”

Awa

And if I were faced with three breasts

and were not divided between the one and the other tit

and if I were not double because of the usual split

and did not have to choose between

and were never again confronted by an either/or

and bore the twin no grudge,

and harbored no other wish …

But I have only another choice

and am attached to another set of tits.

I envy the twin.

My other wish is as usual split.

Even whole, I am only half and half.

My choice always falls in between.

Only in pottery (vaguely dated) does Awa

(supposedly) exist: the goddess

with the triune font,

one of which (always the third) knows

what the first promises and the second withholds.

Who expunged you, making us poor?

Who said: Two are enough?

Diet and rationing ever since.

How the Flounder was caught

No, no, Ilsebill. Of course I’m not going to tell you that phony fairy tale all over again. Of course I’m going to write the other truth that Philipp Otto Runge took down, even if I have to pick it word for word out of the ashes. For the old woman’s additional babblings into the painter’s ear in the summer of 1805 were burned under the full moon between woodland pond and deer meadow. It was done in defense of the patriarchal order. Which explains why the Grimm brothers only threw one Runge transcript—“The Fisherman and His Wife”—on the fairy-tale market. The fisherman’s wife Ilsebill has been proverbial ever since: a quarrelsome bitch who keeps wanting to have, to possess, to command more and more. And the Flounder the fisherman catches and sets free has to keep on delivering: the larger cottage, the stone house, the palace royal, the might of empire, the Holy See. In the end Ilsebill wants God’s power to make the sun rise and set, whereupon the greedy woman and her good-natured husband are punished and sent back to their wretched hovel, their “pisspot,” to live. Really, an insatiable virago. Can’t ever get enough. Always wants something more. That’s the Ilsebill of the story.

My Ilsebill is the living refutation, which I hereby make known. And even the Flounder thought it was high time to publish the original version of his legend, to rehabilitate all Ilsebills, and to confute the misogynistic propaganda tale that he himself had so treacherously disseminated. That’s right. Pulling no punches. Nothing but the truth. Believe me, dearest, there’s no point in starting a fight. You’re right, right as usual. Before we even start fighting, you win.

It was toward the end of the Stone Age. A day unnumbered. We hadn’t begun yet to make lines and notches. When we saw the moon lose weight or put on fat, our only thought was fear. No prefigured event happened on time. No dates. Never did anyone or anything come too late.

On a timeless, partly cloudy day, I caught the Flounder. In the place where the river Vistulla mingles in a constantly shifting bed with the open sea, I had set out my basket traps in hope of eels. We had no nets. And baited hooks hadn’t come in yet. As far back as I can think—the last ice age sets a limit to my memory—we hunted fish in the arms of the river, first with sharpened branches, later with bow and arrow: bass, pike, perch, eels, lampreys, and, on their way down the river, salmon. There where the Baltic Sea laved wandering dunes, we speared the flatfish that like to lie bedded in the sand at the bottom of the warm, shallow water: turbot, sole, flounder.

It was only after Awa taught us to plait baskets from willow withes that chance helped us to discover that baskets could also serve as fish traps. An idea seldom came to us men. It was Awa—always Awa—who sank a basket full of gnawed elk bones in the rushes by the bank of a tributary that was later called the Radune and much later still the Radaune, so that the water might soak away the last fibers and bits of sinew; for Awa used elk and reindeer bones as kitchen utensils and for ritual purposes.

When after sufficient time we hauled the basket out of the river, several eels barely escaped, but along with some small fry, five arm-long customers remained in the wickerwork, lashing and thrashing amid the smooth bones. The operation was repeated. Improvements were made. Awa invented the fish trap, just as exactly two centuries later she developed the first fishhooks from the wishbones of swamp birds. According to her instructions, and under her supervision, which seemed to have been imposed on us by fate, we plaited those baskets tapered on the open end, to which later, on our own incentive—for we were not to require Awa’s tutelage forever—we fitted a second and then a third basket, so as to make it harder for the eels to escape. Long, supple willow withes forced into a complicated mesh: an early craft. Something that could be done without Awa.

Good catches ever after. More than we needed. First attempt at smoking in hollow willow trees. The words “eel” and “trap” became a hallowed pair, which I, with my obsessive drive to leave my marks wherever. I went, converted into an image. Before leaving the beach after setting the traps, for instance, I would draw in the wet sand, with the sharp edge of a shell, a picture of wriggling eels behind intricate wickerwork. If instead of being flat and swampy, our region had been mountainous and honeycombed with caves, I would undoubtedly have bequeathed a cave painting of a trapped eel to posterity. In his mid-twentieth-century time-phase the Flounder would pontificate, “Neolithic graffiti originating in northeastern European fish culture, related to the southern Scandinavian Maglemose drawings on bones and amber.” The Flounder has always been hooked on culture.

One thing Awa couldn’t do was set signs, draw a likeness. She admired the pictures I scratched in the sand and found them useful for ritual purposes; she liked my palpable representations of herself and her three breasts; but when, just for the fun of it, I drew on the sandy beach a trap consisting of five tapered baskets, she instantly forbade both the drawing and the fivefold trap itself. The basic value, three, as established by Awa and her breasts, could not be exceeded. And again I was sharply called to order when I drew a picture of the Flounder, who had been caught in an eel trap. Awa exploded in mother-goddessly wrath: she had never seen such a thing, and because she had never seen such a thing, it couldn’t exist. It was mere invention and therefore untrue.

Threatening punishment, Awa and the whole council of women forbade me ever again to draw pictures of a flounder caught in an eel trap. Nevertheless, I kept doing so in secret. For, much as I had learned to dread the withholding of the breast that suckled me thrice daily, the Flounder was stronger, especially since he spoke to me whenever I wished: I had only to cry out “Flounder, Flounder.” “All she wants,” he said, “is constant self-affirmation. Everything outside of her is ruled out. But art, my son, refuses to be ruled out.”

Toward the end of the third millennium before the incarnation of our Lord (or, as a computer has computed, on May 3, 2211 B.C., a Friday, so it seems), on a neolithic day—east wind, loosely knit cloud formation—an event occurred which later, for reasons of patriarchal self-justification, was falsified, twisted into a fairy tale that still sends my Ilsebill up the wall.

I was young but already bearded. Late in the afternoon I pulled in my thrice-tapered eel trap, which I had set out early in the morning before the day’s first suckling. (My favorite eel-catching spot was on or near the site of Heubude, the popular beach resort that long centuries later could conveniently be reached by streetcar number 9.) Because of my talent for drawing, Awa, in her ever-loving care, had favored me with an extra, out-of-turn suckling. Consequently, when I saw the Flounder in the eel trap, my first thought was: I’ll bring him to Awa. She’ll wrap him in moist lettuce leaves as usual and bake him in hot ashes.

I’m not sure that I was any more amazed at his crooked-mouthed speech than at the mere fact of having caught a broad-beamed flounder in an eel trap. In any event, I did not respond to the words “Good afternoon, my son!” with a question about his astonishing gift of speech. What I did ask was why he, a flatfish, had chosen to force his way, through all three narrowings, into a trap.

The Flounder replied. From the very start his know-it-all superiority made him garrulous despite his categorical finalities, now nasally professorial, now infuriatingly paternal. His purpose, he said, had been to join conversation with me. He had been motivated not by foolish (or did he already say “feminine”?) curiosity, but by the well-matured decision of a masculine will. There existed, so he said, certain information pointing, beyond the neolithic horizon, and he, the sapient Flounder, wished to communicate this information to me, the dull-witted fisher, kept in a state of infantilism by total female care. To prepare himself, he had learned the dialect of the Baltic coast, a language of few words, a wretched stammering that named only the strictly necessary. In a relatively short time he had mastered the speech defect that broadened all our sounds. Language, he assured me, would be no obstacle in our dialogue. But in the long run he would feel cramped in this wicker basket.

I had scarcely freed him from the tripartite trap and set him down on the sand when he said first, “Thank you, my son!” and then: “Of course I am aware of the dangers to which my decision exposes me. I know I taste good. I’ve heard about all the different ways your women, who rule through ever-loving care, have of grilling roaches on a willow spit, of baking eel, pike, perch, and hand-sized sole on well-heated stones, or of wrapping larger fish like myself in leaves and bedding us in hot ashes until we are cooked through, but still succulent. Bon appétit. It’s flattering to be considered tasty. All the same, I’m sure my offer to serve forever as an adviser to you, that is, to the male cause, outweighs my culinary value. In short, my son: set me free and I will come whenever you call me. Your magnanimity puts me under obligation to supply you with information gathered in every corner of the world. We flounders, you see—and related species—are at home in every ocean and on every coast. I know what kind of advice you need. Deprived as you are of every right, you Baltic men will need my encouragement. You, an artist, able in your affliction to set down signs and symbols, a man in quest of enduring, meaning-charged form, must realize that my timeless promise is worth more than a few mouthfuls of baked fish. And in case you doubt my trustworthiness, allow me, my son, to divulge my motto and first principle: ‘A man’s word is his bond!’”

Fact: I fell for him. His talking to me like that gave me a sense of importance. Of significance. Of inner growth. Self-awareness was born. I began to take myself seriously. And yet—believe me, Ilsebill!—my doubts were far from dispelled. I’d have to put this talking Flounder, who had promised me so much, to the test. No sooner had I tossed him into the smooth water than I called after him: “Flounder! Come back! There’s something I’ve got to ask you.”

In the exact place where I had dropped him, he jumped out of the Baltic Sea and landed on my two palms. “What is it, my son? Always at your service. Even, I might add, in surf and storm.”

About the Author

About the Book

ALSO BY GÜNTER GRASS

The First Month

The third breast

What I write about

Nine and more cooks

Awa

How the Flounder was caught