When the poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, the merchant Nordermann, the kitchenmaid Agnes Kurbiella, and her somewhat crackbrained daughter, Ursula, were burned under the open sky in Moscow on October 4, 1689, the men as con-
spirators, the women as witches, Agnes, still in pursuit of a fish recipe (her pyre had already been kindled), was said to have quoted from the poems of Martin Opitz: "His dearest love am I for all eternity. For fish and pleasure he depends on none but me. Come, dearest, come, let us at table stay. In sumptuous repose and pass the time away."
And when Amanda Woyke expired peacefully in the arms of her enlightened pen pal, Count Rumford, she is believed to have beheld a vision of giant atomic-powered kitchens the world over and to have proclaimed the end of human hunger.
And Sophie Rotzoll, who lived so dangerously and kept death in the form of mushroom recipes in readiness for her enemies, died quite normally of old age in the fall of 1849. (Later on there was some argument as to whether her last words had been "Long live the Republic!" or "Venison in aspic!")
And Lena? Lena Stubbe went on living for several years, though she would have preferred to die immediately after her chairman, August Bebel, or at any rate right after his funeral in Zurich.
And then came the war, then there was hunger, and then there were strikes. Then the Revolution was proclaimed. Then everything turned out entirely differently. Then there was more hunger. Then came the League of Nations. Then the Free City was proclaimed. Then the hunger let up a little. Then the money lost its value. Then new money was printed. Then Lena became a great-grandmother. And still she dished out soup. Her always fair measure. Almost a century. Already a monument in her lifetime: the woman with the soup ladle.
For just as Lena Stubbe had dished out soup in soup kitchens during the four war years, and just as during the inflation she had cooked and dished out cabbage and barley soup for the Workers' Aid in the Red waterfront suburb of Neufahrwasser, in Ohra, and in Troyl, so she continued to ladle soup when, in compliance with the Winter Aid program, the SA, the League of National Socialist Women, the National Socialist Welfare Organization, and the Hitler Youth distributed pea soup with bacon at field kitchens on so-called one-dish Sundays. At these ceremonies, which be-
came more and more popular after 1934, the Free City police band, conducted by Kapellmeister Ernst Stieberitz, played march music and merry tunes so blaringly loud that just as a certain three-year-old boy, pounding furiously on his tin drum, could not make himself heard above the noise, no one could hear the almost ninety-year-old woman who cursed into the air between ladleful and ladleful, yet dished out fairly and without so much as a glance at anyone's coat collar.
It wasn't noticed or reported until considerably later that, just to be helpful, Lena Stubbe was cooking kosher soups at the emergency kitchen of the Jewish community on Schichaugasse for poor East European Jews, who since April 1939 had been waiting in vain for visas to America and various other places. And when, after the start of the Russian campaign, Lena made flour and bread soups, the ingredients for which she had begged or saved out of her own rations, for the Ukrainian slave laborers, when as though in defiance the old woman, like the hungry workers from the East, wore a big cloth patch with the letters EAST painted on it, when at the age of ninety-three Lena Stubbe grew childish and started speaking her mind openly, she was arrested at her home on Brabank and sent without a trial to the nearby Stutthof concentration camp. For reasons of public welfare, as her granddaughter Erna Miehlau was told in answer to her inquiries. (Lena's great-granddaughter Sibylle was then twelve years old and still playing with dolls).
In Stutthof, Lena Stubbe continued to dish out soup. For exactly a year she ladled blue-green barley soups into tin messkits. All the prisoners, and not just the politicals, trusted her. The ladle was never out of her hands. She couldn't help being fair. Her half-liter measure. Born in '49. A century of watery hope. Her way of ladling. How her memory remained serviceable to the end. How she always and only had good things to say of her husbands, killed in two wars. How she told tales about earlier soups. How, in dishing out soup, she quoted from the writings of the man who, as though no time had elapsed, was still her chairman. Died on December 4, 1942, of old age. According to a different version, a kitchen Kapo, who as a common-law
prisoner belonged to the privileged class of inmates, beat Lena Stubbe to death when she tried to stop the Kapos from pilfering the already meager kitchen rations of margarine and beef fat. With a beech log. Two political prisoners, who knew Lena from her Workers' Aid days, found her battered body behind the latrines. They had to shoo the rats away. Her string-mended specs lay beside her, in pieces. When the Second Soviet Army occupied Danzig and the tarpaper-roofed workers' houses on Brabank burned down, Lena's "Proletarian Cook Book," which had failed to find a publisher, burned with them.
Apart from Amanda and Sophie, so much violent death: the poisoned blood, the starved body, the burnt flesh, the stifled laugh, the headless trunk, the slain tender loving care. Ugly realities that can't very well be glossed over. Totted-up losses. The violence account.
My Ilsebill, who's not out of the fairy tale but comes from Swabia, likes to settle accounts with men. "The one thing you're good at is starting fights. Your eternal Waterloo. Your heroic defeat."
And now the Flounder has made out my account: "Let's have a look at your balance sheet, son. It's not a pretty sight. I'm afraid you're in the red."
Those words were spoken after the Tribunal had wound up the case of Lena Stubbe. Sieglinde Huntscha had (secretly, at night) let me in to see him again. (She stayed in the box office: "Don't mind me. Just talk talk talk!") He rose from his sand bed and seemed to be in high spirits from top to tail fins, though he's sure to be convicted soon and his health has suffered visibly from long confinement: his pebbly epidermis has paled, and his bone structure stands out as though he were trying to prove his credibility by becoming transparent.
When I tried to read him my next chapter, the story of my poor Sibylle, he interrupted me: "There's been enough dying!" Then he started bandying cliches like "ultimate audit" and "hour of truth." Once again he reviewed his mission, from the neolithic Awa to the early-socialist Lena. He listed his achievements — patriarchy, the state, culture,
civilization, dated historv. and technological progress — and went on to deplore the sudden turn from grandiose to monstrous action. "I gave vou knowledge and power, but all you wanted was war and misery. Nature was entrusted to and what did you do. you despoiled, polluted, disfigured, and destroyed it. With all the abundance I made available to you, you haven't even succeeded in feeding the world properlv. Hunger is on the increase. Your era is ending on a sour note. In short: you men are finished. How can there be order with so much waste motion? In capitalism and Communism alike, everywhere I find madness impersonating reason. That's not what I wanted. It's no use advising you men anv more. The male cause is bankrupt. Time to knock off. my son. To abdicate. Do it with dignit y."
Then he suggested that I end the book named after him with the case of Lena Stubbe. and after the Women's Tribunal handed down its verdict, let him say the last word: "You can blame me for Alexander and Caesar, the Hohen-staufens and Teutonic Knights, even for Napoleon and Wilhelm II. but not for Hitler and Stalin. There I disclaim bility. Their crimes were none of my doing. The present is not mine. Mv book is closed: my history- is done."
At that I cried. "No, friend Flounder. No! The book goes on, and so does history."
Ah, Hsebill! I dreamed the Flounder was talking to you. I heard the two of you laughing. Smooth was the sea. And there vou were, working out the future. I was sitting far away: I'd been written off. Present only in retrospect. A man and his story: Once upon a time. .