Next he added pinches of green and red paprika – ‘but not hot kind’ – and brought everything – the cubes of meat and mounds of seasoning – to the boil again, whereupon he ushered the ceremony to a solemn close by pouring what might have been holy water from a phantom demijohn but was in fact vinegar into the nearly full pot: you needed a lot of vinegar because it lost its punch as the brew cooled. ‘Now, gentlemen, we pour into earthenware bowls, put in cool spot, and wait and wait with patience we have plenty of.’
For an extended pause, during which the ideal of a jellied pig’s head generated a jelly of its own, without factory gelatin, and one-time soldiers crammed Latin words and mathematical formulas in the balmy spring air outside the former veterinary ward, he looked each member of his audience, each victim of his magic, in the eye. Before any scepticism on our part could break the spell, he blinked a few times as if he, too, were awakening from a calorie-rich dream, and said in his nasal, movie-star voice, ‘Is ready now, firm now in bowls. You can cut with knife. Dinner is served, gentlemen.’
After another pause and another round of blinks, he turned to the future: ‘Is good for breakfast also. When things will be better and enough pigs are in market again.’
OF EVERYTHING THAT went astray I miss my notebooks the most: I would be more believable if I could quote from them.
Or was I too taken up by the master’s performance of the rites – the simmering, the deboning, the detaching and cubing of the meat, the piling up of the seasonings – to take it all down?
Was the writing paper from my Marienbad stock, which I used for scribbling poems dealing with another variety of flesh and for sketching the wizened faces of veteran soldiers, too elegant for mundane recipes?
The answer is not long in coming: looking back, I see my pencil flying across lost paper of one variety or other, with or without erasures; I hear myself swallowing saliva, as the other pupils in the course must have done, to stifle the permanent sound of the rodent Hunger. Indeed, the master’s lessons became so much a part of me that later, when, as that fortuneteller of a Bessarabian chef foretold, ‘enough pigs were in market again’, I not only wrote a poem in celebration of jellied pig’s head but also regaled my guests, living and from times past, with pots brimful of natural jelly. And I rarely missed the chance to regale the company – I once invited the publishers of the folk-song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the Brothers Grimm, and the Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge – with the tale of the abstract but hunger-stifling cooking course, in one or another of its variations.
I enjoyed varying the chef’s origins: sometimes he came from the Hungarian Banat region; then I had him born in Austrian Bukovina, in the city of Czernowitz, where he would claim to have met the young poet Paul Celan, who was still Paul Antschel at the time; from Bukovina, his birthplace would move to Russian Bessarabia.
Sometimes I served sautéed potatoes with the brawn, sometimes plain black bread. My various guests – who included dignitaries from afar, the European Social Democratic Big Three (Brandt, Palme, Kreisky), to say nothing of friends from the Baroque, like Andreas Gryphius, who liked to call everything vanity of vanities, and Martin Opitz, before the plague got him, and Grimmelshausen’s Mother Courasche and Grimmelshausen himself, when he was still Gelnhausen – seldom left anything on their plates. Sometimes I served the brawn as a first course, sometimes as the main course, but the recipe never varied.
THE MASTER ALSO had much to say about the nature and virtues of sows, boars, and suckling pigs during those fast-moving two-hour sessions: we learned that where he came from they were all fattened with corn cobs but that there were also oak woods planted specially to supply them with acorns; that acorns made for firm and not overly fatty meat, but that the fat layer was not to be looked down upon, because it could be rendered in a pan into dripping and cracklings; that pig’s liver, pig’s heart, and pig’s lung could be put through a meat grinder and – like the blood during the slaughtering process – turned into sausages (‘But please, gentlemen, add marjoram!’); and that the smoking of ham and bacon was a high art.
When we all, myself included, believed we had attained the requisite degree of piety and verbal satiety, he said by way of conclusion, ‘Now, gentlemen, we are through with pig. So day after tomorrow I talk about something different. My topic for day after tomorrow is poultry. But let me say in advance: No goose without mugwort!’
WAS IT REALLY only two days later that his adage became the epitome of a delectable stuffed goose for us all? It was more likely that days and days passed before I was back in the tiled room of the former veterinary ward that still reverberates in my memory, days good for nothing but the endless story of the ruminant Hunger, apart from rumours that sped through the camp dropping their young.
The rumour that all prisoners from the eastern part of Germany would be handed over to the Soviet occupation forces struck fear in the hearts of many. Then there was the one about how entire Cossack regiments that had fought on our side had been turned over to the Russians by the English and were committing group suicide – anything to escape Soviet revenge. There were also rumours of a mass release of prisoners, occasionally combined with talk of shipping the youngest inmates off for re-education: to America! They’ll knock the Hitler Youth out of you, the older soldiers jeered.
But the rumour with the longest run on the ‘latrine-vine’ was the one about a long since planned, now approved, and soon to be enacted rearming of all unarmed prisoners of war. And with American equipment: ‘Sherman tanks, and so on …’
‘Makes sense,’ I heard a sergeant reason. ‘From now on we’re in it with the Amis’ – we had begun calling Americans the ‘Amis’ by then – ‘against the Ivans. They need us too. They won’t get anywhere without us …’
Lots of men agreed with him. Things would start up again with the Russians – it was as clear as day. They should have worked it out before the Ivans marched into Poland, but it took them until now, when Adolf’s out of the picture and also the other bigwigs, Goebbels and Himmler and so on, or under lock and key like Göring.
‘Right. Our experience at the front as bulwark against the Red Tide. We know what it is to fight the Ivans, especially in winter. The Amis have no idea …’
‘Count me out. I’d make myself scarce. Two years at Leningrad, the Pripyet marshes, the Oder front. I’ve had it!’
Even this prophetic view – prophetic in that a very few years later, once Adenauer here and Ulbricht there had bought into the victors’ systems, the Germans were rearmed and had two armies instead of one – faded in time, though without ever fully disappearing; even as this longest-lived latrine-vine legend circulated and had its believers – some officers started polishing their medals – it could not contend against the camp-wide need for education, both general and specialized, for biblical edification, for culture. Neither I nor any of my fellow pupils wished to save the West – or anything for that matter – in American uniform. We peaceably succumbed to the culinary anaesthetic for our gnawing hunger.
WHICH IS PROBABLY why I recall that the two-hour goose session, immediately or shortly after the session devoted to making the most out of the pig, was especially beneficial to my later culinary development. Looking back, I see myself on the one hand as a boy out to gratify his diffuse desires and on the other as a seasoned cynic experienced in mangled corpses swinging from trees. Having burnt my fingers, I had no tolerance for any faith, be it in Führer or God. The only authority I was willing to recognize besides the lance corporal who had responded to my ‘Hans left home’ was that emaciated, greying man whose eyebrows called out for a comb: he had the power to stave off my hunger, if only for two hours, with his words and gestures.
That is why our chef – who must have turned other ingredients into sausage, brought other animals under the knife, and shown us how to make various fishes and crablike creatures into delicacies – has remained so evocative a presence in my life that even now when I lard a leg of lamb with gar
lic and sage or skin a calf’s rough tongue, he is there, peering at my fingers.
That is why his masterly supervision meant so much to me, for instance, in the late sixties, when the revolution was making itself felt – at least on paper, with exclamation marks – and when, preparing a Martinmas goose for the philosopher Ernst Bloch in my Niedstrasse flat in the district of Friedenau in Berlin, I was faced with a choice between apple or chestnut stuffing. The pupil, inoculated as he was with the admonition ‘No goose without mugwort!’, went with the chestnuts, the master’s recommendation. Bloch got half of the breast, a wing, plus the wishbone on his plate, the latter prompting him immediately to a lengthy disquisition. He praised the chestnut stuffing and told Anna, me, and the four astonished children a seemingly never-ending tale about ‘unfulfilled men’, from Thomas Müntzer to Karl Marx and from the latter’s messianic message to Old Shatterhand, the hero of Karl May, German Western writer extraordinaire, now thundering like Moses from Mount Sinai, now humming a Wagner motif, now evoking the oral origins of literature, now clearing the straight and narrow of some stumbling blocks in a whisper, and finally, after picking apart a fairy tale – was it Hansel and Gretel? – raised the chewed wishbone into the air, ordered a light to shine on his prophetic countenance, invoked his oft-cited principle, and launched into a paean to tall tales in general and in particular.
The children at the table – Franz, Raoul, Laura, and little Bruno – listened open-mouthed to our unusual guest, with the same faith in his words as I’d had in those of my master, the Bessarabian chef, when he recommended an exotic spice like mugwort for any and all goose stuffings.
SUDDENLY HE WAS gone. No more chef. No one to appease our hunger with his ‘But please, gentlemen’ gesture. Word had it he’d been transferred by order of the top authorities and had last been seen sitting between two military policemen in shiny white helmets.
This was immediately followed by the rumour that General Patton, who headed the Third American Army and whose speeches brimming with Russophobia had fanned the latrine-vine speculation that we would be rearmed and sent to a new eastern front, yes, this oh-so-farsighted general had commandeered our internationally renowned chef as his own personal chef so as to feed himself and his high-ranking guests in the style to which they were accustomed.
And when General Patton reportedly lost his life in an accident, a new spate of rumours started circulating: he had been murdered, poisoned most likely. And since his personal chef and our master of imaginary cuisine had been involved in the plot, he, the chef, had been put under lock and key together with a slew of other agents and shady characters. The trial against the conspirators as well as all relevant documents, had been declared top secret on the advice of a German expert. Throw it all together, and you have the makings of a novel or a film.
What the disappearance of the master and putative chef of General Patton meant for me at the time was an immediate increase in hunger pangs, but now after all these years I have a yen to do a script for that thriller. The south-east European cuisine puts General Patton into a cocky, warmongering mood, which in turn puts my master teacher in danger because the loudmouth general’s war lust is of concern to more than the NKVD: Western intelligence agencies, too, feel the need for remedial action. Patton is talking too loudly, too much, too soon. Patton has outlived his usefulness. Patton must go. Why not then by means of a goose whose stuffing is seasoned with a spice quite different from mugwort …
Such more or less are the terms in which my script would test the rules of the Cold War game and give a minute account of the birth of Organization Gehlen, the hotbed of the already active German intelligence. It would also benefit the German film industry.
NOT UNTIL THE POW camp on the territory of the former Grafenwöhr military training ground had been partially closed – it was late May – and we had been transferred in trucks to the open-air camp of Bad Aibling in Upper Bavaria, where we were housed in holes in the ground under tents for several weeks, then split up and sent to work camps – not until then did my hunger abate. It was then that I managed to beef up my calorie-poor Morgenthau ration by trading with the shiny silver Siegfried Line pins.
I traded them for American cigarettes, which was quite lucrative because I was not yet tempted by tobacco and could trade the cigarettes for bread and peanut butter. A large tin of corned beef has lodged itself in the tow-rope of my memory. Some hefty chocolate bars as well. And I think I was given an impressive supply of Gillette razor blades, though surely not for my own use.
Once, while still at the Bad Aibling camp, I got a bag of caraway seeds in exchange for three Camels and chewed them in memory of the caraway sauerkraut recipe of my missing master, though I saved some for the friend I’d made during those endless rains under the tarp, when we told each other’s fortunes with the three dice. I can still see him – Joseph – and hear his unfailingly soft, even gentle voice. I can’t get him out of my mind.
I wanted to be this, he that.
I said, There are many truths.
He said, There is only one.
I said, I don’t believe in anything any more.
He saddled one dogma onto the next.
Joseph, I cried, you sound like a grand inquisitor. Or are you aiming higher?
He always beat me at dice, quoting Saint Augustine when he threw them, as if he had the Confessions in Latin at his side.
And so we shot the breeze and rolled the dice for days on end, until he was sent home – because he lived in Bavaria, nearby – but I, with no address to return to and thus homeless, was first deloused and then sent to a work camp.
TALK THERE TURNED on two events, which affected us POWs in different ways. One was the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities I’d never heard of. We accepted this double strike because the other event had a much more immediate and tangible effect on us: in late summer Morgenthau’s slimming cure was called off. We now received more than a thousand calories. We could even count on two or three ounces of sausage a day.
This meant we were arguably better fed than those outside the barbed wire, who brought their hunger to the black market. We heard that the citizens of Augsburg and Munich had been mobilized to clear the rubble and that civilians had to stand in military-like ranks to get what little the bakers and butchers had to offer. They were rationing out peace in smaller and smaller portions; we captives of the camp were doing better and better: we had grown used to our situation, felt safe behind our fence.
Many prisoners of war, especially those who had lived in what were now Russian-and Polish-occupied territories, even feared being released. I may well have been one of them. For want of news – had Mother and Father managed to flee Danzig with my sister or had they drowned on the Gustloff? – I pictured myself as parentless, homeless, uprooted. I wallowed in self-pity and tried on various roles, the little orphan boy, for instance. Especially at night on my straw mattress.
Fortunately I had friends my age in similar circumstances. But what we missed more than Mama and Papa was something dreams of female contours could not provide. It was enough to make one queer. And sometimes – no, often – we reached for one another, touched, fumbled.
THEN THE SITUATION improved again. Practising my school English on every possible occasion to make it more American, I got myself assigned to a work detail responsible for washing dishes in the US Air Force company kitchen attached to the barracks of the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield. We were in charge of potato-and carrot-peeling too. And we were delivered every morning by truck to our land of milk and honey.
A group of DPs, as the displaced persons of various nationalities were called, had also found work there, washing and ironing. The group was made up of a half-dozen young Jews who had been smiled upon by fate and escaped death in one or another concentration camp. They wanted to go to Palestine, but had not received permission.
Like us, they were astounded at the quantity of leftovers – mountains of mashed potatoes, bacon fat, meat left on
chicken carcasses after only breasts and legs had been served – that ended up in the trash day after day. Since we observed the waste without a word, our common feelings could only be surmised. Can it be that the mirror in which until then I had seen only a spruced-up image of our victors had suddenly developed a crack?
The one thing we had in common with the Jews our age was that we all ate the leftovers. But that’s where the similarity ended. Supervision was relaxed, and we engaged in verbal battles with them whenever we had a break, though they spoke Yiddish or Polish to one another and their German was mostly limited to Raus! Schnellschnell! Stillgestanden! Fresse halten! Ab ins Gas! – linguistic souvenirs of an experience we did not want to acknowledge. Our vocabulary was pieced together out of ‘barracks German’: You bow-legged dogs! You bed wetters! I’ll make you toe the line, the lot of you!
At first the Amis laughed at our war of words. They were white GIs and called the men in the neighbouring company niggers. We and the young Jews passed this over in silence because we had other fish to fry.
Then the Amis took a pedagogical tack, but the American ‘education officer’, with his spectacles and soft voice and freshly ironed shirts, did not get very far with us; we, myself included, refused to believe the evidence he put before us, the black-and-white pictures of Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück … I saw the piles of corpses, the ovens; I saw the starving and the starved, the skeletal bodies of the survivors from another world. I couldn’t believe it.
‘You mean Germans did that?’ we kept asking.
‘Germans could never have done that.’
‘Germans don’t do that.’
And among ourselves we said, ‘Propaganda. Pure propaganda.’
A mason who went with us on a brief re-education tour of Dachau – we were classified as young Nazis – said after we had been led through the camp from one station of the cross to the next, ‘Remember the shower rooms? And the shower heads? For gas supposedly. Well, they were freshly plastered, the Amis installed them afterwards …’