Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Günter Grass

Title Page

From Germany to Germany

Notes

Copyright

About the Book

In 1990, Günter Grass – a reluctant diarist – felt compelled to make a record of the interesting times through which he was living.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of Communism, Germany and Europe were enduring a period of immense upheaval. Grass resolved to immerse himself in these political debates: he travelled widely throughout both Germanys, the former East and the former West, conducting a lively exchange with political enemies, friends and his own children about all the questions posed by reunification.

His account gives the reader an unparalleled insight into a key moment in the life of modern Europe, seen through the eyes of one of its most acclaimed writers. It also provides a startling insight into the creative process as the reader witnesses ideas for novels occurring and then taking shape.

From Germany to Germany is both a personal journal by a great creative artist and a penetrating commentary on recent European history by someone who was simultaneously an acute observer and a highly engaged participant.

About the Book

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.

Also by Günter Grass

The Tin Drum

Cat and Mouse

Dog Years

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

Four Plays

Speak Out!

Local Anaesthetic

Max: A Play

From the Diary of a Snail

Inmarypraise

In the Egg and Other Poems

The Flounder

The Meeting at Telgte

Headbirths

Drawings and Words, 1954–1977

On Writing and Politics, 1967–1983

Etchings and Words, 1972–1982

The Rat

Show Your Tongue

Two States – One Nation?

The Call of the Toad

Novemberland

My Century

Too Far Afield

Crabwalk

Peeling the Onion

The Box

Explanatory notes on the text can be found here.

Vale das Eiras, 1 January 1990

WHILE I WAS planting a sapling this morning on the east side of the house – Leonore Suhl gave it to us on New Year’s Eve, promising that in six or seven years it will have grown into a stately tree with blue blossoms – the new year started off with a bang. And when we went to look for mushrooms in the cork forest above Casais in early afternoon, a full-grown bolete would have fulfilled all my expectations for New Year’s Day, but our favourite spots offered slim pickings: after an unusually long rainy season – we heard it had poured for nine weeks straight in these parts – the few water-logged chanterelles offered a good subject for a drawing, but not much else.

The drawing, however, gives me an excuse for inaugurating this journal with mushrooms rather than with the major political events that were competing for attention during the past few months, concluding with the bloody revolution in Romania and the equally bloody demonstration of military might in Panama, as if the Communist and the capitalist systems were determined to show their true colours one last time.

I am not one of those people who love keeping a journal. Something unusual must be happening to inflict this ritual on me. I felt a similar compulsion in 1969 when a democratic change in government became possible in the German Federal Republic, and I abandoned my writing desk to devote myself to campaigning for the Social Democrats. Their narrow victory soon provided the material for a book. Or our half-year in Calcutta. (Without a journal the city would hardly have been bearable.) This time I will keep trying to vault over the border that separates the two German states, and will also stick my nose into both election campaigns, in May and December. Now that my work on Dead Wood is done, I would have liked to start on a regular manuscript, one that might have turned out to be quite long: the story of two widows, Frau Piątkowska and Frau Reschke, who meet in Gdansk on All Saints’ Day and craft a plan, which is soon implemented because the time for it happens to be ripe: the establishment of a Polish-German cemetery association, ltd. But this journal is more pressing.

This evening, the toad in our inner courtyard. As big as a full-grown guinea pig, it assumes for me the identity of one of those toads that last autumn could be heard calling from far and near as soon as darkness fell: the call of the toad. I grasped it behind its front legs and held it up for Ute to photograph. Its sacklike body dangled. Everything motionless, including its blank green eyes with orange horizontal stripes. The only sign of life a pulsing in its throat. What is this creature doing in my journal, I wondered, except that it is unfamiliar, incomprehensible, and at best suggests a title – for something, I don’t know what: ‘The Call of the Toad’?

Vale das Eiras, 2 January 1990

As if trying to fortify myself by doing something positive, I planted another tree, this time a carob, on the west side of the house, a tree that grows slowly, which brought the following comment from Ute, who objected to the spot I had chosen: ‘Well, I won’t be around to see it get tall.’

It began to rain again. The gas heater lit upstairs, I sat down to work on ‘Writing after Auschwitz’ I think I picked this subject, which is bound to defeat me, to force myself to take a position; a suspicious number of my fellow writers who used to be able to rattle off their newfound anti-fascist credo as fluently as Schiller’s poem ‘The Bell’ are now brimming with nationalist sentiment to the point of idiocy. To me, however, robbed of many prized German possessions over the years – with the exception of the language – Auschwitz seems to offer one last chance to think about Germany. (In the Frankfurt speech I want to try to demonstrate how the alleged right to German unity, in the form of a reunited state, is refuted by Auschwitz.) Write slowly!

It would work better to have the widow Piątkowska meet a widower by the name of Alexander Reschke in Gdansk while both are buying flowers in the Dominican Market hall on All Saints’ Day. In the year the Wall came down, of course. Or is it All Souls’ Day? At any rate, in November. Flowers for cemeteries. But her mother is buried in Wilna, where the daughter was born, and his mother in the Rhineland, although she, like him, was born in Danzig. That’s what they talk about: where they would like to be buried. This conversation and others, in the course of which a relationship develops, give rise to the idea of a German-Polish cemetery association. He says, ‘It must be possible, now that so much else has become possible, to choose one’s final resting place.’ She wants to be laid to rest in Wilna, which she had to leave as a sixteen-year-old, while he wants to be buried in Danzig/Gdansk, which he left as a seventeen-year-old soldier. Others want the same. Thousands of them. One need only make it possible. Hence a legally incorporated association.

Vale das Eiras, 3 January 1990

The first fish of the year in the oven, with vegetables – tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, onions, and sweet potatoes. Went shopping in Lagos. No German papers except Bild-Zeitung, with a screaming New Year’s headline, ‘Madness!’ A word that since the opening of the German-German border has become increasingly inflated. Or does it now foretell and invoke actual madness? – ‘The Call of the Toad’.

Working on the Frankfurt speech forces me to recall my time as a Hitler Youth. Granted, I was not totally fanatical, but I was hardly plagued by doubts either. A completely different person now? Definitely, as far as the evolution of my political thinking and actions is concerned; yet my youthful obsession with ambitious projects, almost epic in scope, such as creating tables of historical and cultural developments (anticipating Stein’s Timetables of History), strikes me as familiar. This aspect of my personality may have undergone correction, polishing, professional development in the meantime, but fundamentally it has not changed.

Last night a conversation with Ute, till long after midnight, about my plan for the new year: from February to September I intend to be in the GDR every month, for longer or shorter periods, criss-crossing the country from Rügen to the Vogtland, to keep my eye on the changes taking place after this enormous political and revolutionary transformation. The plan also calls for a stay in the soft-coal mining region around Spremberg. That is where I was wounded in the spring of ’45, on 20 April. I want to capture the devastated landscape in drawings. Ute will join me only occasionally. That means buying a sleeping bag just for myself.

It may be too early at this point to form an image of Professor Alexander Reschke. At any rate, he teaches something, not yet specified, at the University of Essen. Probably history. An old leftist intellectual in whom the recent developments in Germany have awakened a kind of sentimental nationalism, but tempered with irony. She, the widow Halina Piątkowska, is a pediatrician. Between the end of November ’89 and May ’90 a lively correspondence develops between the widower and the widow, increasingly focused on their shared project, which gradually takes shape, resulting in a first purchase of land: a rolling three-and-a-half-hectare plot south of Brentau that includes a patch of forest and could eventually be extended in the direction of Ramkau. There is also a sum of money in dollars, deposited in a savings account, large enough to make possible a similar land purchase on the outskirts of Wilna (Vilnius). Neither of them, the widow nor the widower, would have credited themselves with so much business acumen.

I have started another drawing for Dead Wood after all. To escalate the positive to the point of madness, a third tree found its way into a hole on the south slope: what the Portuguese call a nespereira, a loquat, which promises juicy, somewhat sour fruit. We continue to have downpours; I hope the ground is not too soggy.

Vale das Eiras, 4 January 1990

From year’s end until the day before yesterday I was reading Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, a book that invites contradiction and is constantly undercutting itself, belabouring Jewishness and anti-Semitism to come up with an answer to a fairly banal question: Is it permissible for a writer to exploit himself and his family as material? The answer Roth clearly had in mind all along is yes. Perhaps I find the book off-putting because I don’t really care for writers who constantly make themselves the subjects of their books. Even when the author invests his fictitious narrator with dazzlingly telling arguments, it seems hardly worth the effort; no wonder ‘Judea’, the chapter on Israel, is colourless compared to Amos Oz’s collected interviews, In the Land of Israel. I wonder why Jurek Becker recommended this book to me the evening before the SPD party convention in Berlin. I’ll have to ask him.

The sky is still overcast, with more rain likely. Today all I managed to plant were five rosemaries and three lavenders.

An increasing source of pleasure: the absence of television and telephone. An outline from last year that now could be titled ‘The Call of the Toad’ has the working title ‘Crabwalk’. Whatever title I settle on, no matter how badly this German-Polish escapade ends, the story should turn out to be fiendishly funny: widow and widower are the ideal subjects, with their fatuously humane attitudes. The subplots, such as the piecemeal acquisition of the Lenin Shipyard, need to be worked in sparingly. Both protagonists are in splendid health, even if Reschke is a hypochondriac.

Last night, after waking up several times, I dreamed I was looking for a place to stay in Leipzig (with my sleeping bag), a dream that also pitted several members of my extended family against each other. At the end, if the dream had an end, Nele’s mother pulled Ute’s car out of the ditch with her own car, after I was gone, on my way.

Vale das Eiras, 6 January 1990

Yesterday I cooked a four-pound tilapia for Mieke and Jules Heindels and Leonore and Jacob Suhl. Before I stuffed it with sage and shoved it in the oven, I drew this sketch:

A happy evening: Jacob – Jankele – a Trotskyite passionately preoccupied with stock trading. Jules, who has quit smoking and no longer drinks, will soon convert entirely to vegetarianism, like Mieke.

Yesterday morning I planted a palm on the east side of the house, refusing to halt my defiant tree-planting. Today it was cactus shoots from Leonore that I planted in little colonies. Then I sat down to work on the Frankfurt speech again.

In their letters, widow and widower try to trump each other with the number of newly registered members of their German-Polish Cemetery Association. Reschke gives lectures on Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’, calling the graveyard ‘the last opportunity for international reconciliation’. Frau Piątkowska has set up a friends’ organization to which several Catholic priests and a prelate from Oliva belong. Polish emigrants to America, born in Wilna, express an interest in financing free plots for those of modest means. In one of his letters, Reschke says he hopes he can get the fairly steep membership fees ruled tax-deductible. His suggestion that the cemetery be nonsectarian marks his first run-in with the board of directors and encounters opposition from the Catholics. After the two German states move closer together – adopting the concept of Vertragsgemeinschaft, or union by treaty – old Danzigers from Pomerania and Mecklenburg raise their voices: at first there is a currency problem, which Reschke tries to ease with West German funds – burden-sharing.

Perhaps Reschke wrote his dissertation on patricians’ tombs in Danzig’s churches. He is also an expert on the Hanseatic League and a firm opponent of nationalism, of both the German and the Polish variety.

The idea of building a retirement home on the grounds of the wooded cemetery came to Halina Piątkowska when more and more elderly people started arriving from the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic to have a look for themselves, and displayed great enthusiasm for the beautiful, well-tended setting.

The waxing moon promises clear weather for the next few days. We may be able to go mushroom-picking after all.

Vale das Eiras, 7 January 1990

The cactuses and agaves I planted a year ago in front of the old house have been thriving without any special attention, putting out new branches and now looking as though they have always been there. Standing among them, I begin to have doubts: maybe she should not be called Piątkowska, maybe Reschke is not the right name for him. Does she have to be a pediatrician, he a history professor? Maybe all we need to know about their place in society is that they are a widow and widower. I can also picture how things will end for them: they will die in an automobile accident while travelling together, and when no relatives turn up, they will be buried in a village cemetery (in Italy). The ‘idea’ they share should be commented on as it becomes a reality, let us say in letters, telegrams, newspaper articles, and the like. Letters, for instance, from a Hong Kong Chinese man whose family graves near Beijing are off limits to him; from an Israeli, born in Danzig, who asks for a Jewish section – ‘very small’ – in the German cemetery in Gdansk; from a Polish writer from Wilna who lives in New York and who, despite being thoroughly Americanized, wants to be laid to rest ‘at home’.

Professor Reschke – I am going to continue calling him that – speaks in a voice soft but emphatic, as if muted by sorrow. He dresses with old-fashioned elegance, berates himself for his political errors, still views himself as a leftist despite his conservative leanings, and has a tendency to spout sentimental platitudes, which consistently give way to cynical remarks.

Yesterday Ute helped me transplant the nine-branched cactus we rescued (stole) as an amputated skeleton a year ago from the neglected garden at our old house. She wanted it moved from the bed in the inner courtyard to the south side of the house. We had to place a board under it to make sure none of the branches broke off, though you can stick any broken branch into the ground, with the broken-off end in the soil, and let it take root. In the process, I found myself thinking of the German-Polish Cemetery Association, which will eventually engage in similar transplantations to Gdansk, to Wilna. No wonder transplanting the cactus seemed so meaningful.

Reading Der Spiegel, I could see Rudolf Augstein, for decades a confirmed cynic, unravelling into a nationalist.

Am getting around only now to reading Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. A fabulous novel, in the true sense of the word. The writing is clever, naïve, masterly. Despite its apparent impudence, a book remarkably pious; by contrast Rushdie’s enemies appear godless. It will be a source of continuing gratification that I resigned from the Academy for this writer’s sake.

Vale das Eiras, 8 January 1990

Yesterday I collected almost three quarters of a litre of sepia natural from four medium-sized chocos, or squid, and with it drew today a ‘Dance of the Praying Mantises’, using a specimen from last autumn, nicely preserved in alcohol. When this ink is fresh, its blackness is unreliable, but with time it sometimes becomes a consistent blackish brown. The process of harvesting the ink – today we had the chocos cooked with vegetables – is a pleasure. (I first used this ink in the late sixties in Brittany, then resumed using it in the mid-eighties, especially after my return from Calcutta, at the beginning of February ’87.) Now that I am close to the source in Portugal, I use it as an alternative to the charcoal of the Dead Wood series.

Back to Augstein. His editorials in Der Spiegel are dangerous because, like a gifted adolescent, he bases them not on reasoned arguments but on a prevailing mood, partly already present, partly whipped up by him. There is an unfortunate constellation consisting of Schönhuber, Waigel, and Augstein, though for the present only Schönhuber has the guts to cite his brothers in the Germanic spirit. I plan to develop this point into a whole paragraph for Tutzing, citing as a counter-example Brandt’s address to the SPD convention.

In my speech for Frankfurt I’ve got as far (on page 18) as Dog Years; the last third will have to be more compressed, and at the end German unity (unification) must be held up to the distorting mirror of Auschwitz.

A fine study upstairs, tucked away.

Down by the shore today. Waves. Shells. On the path to the water, which leads through uncultivated stretches and modest plots of farmland, with pseudo-Moorish villas, I scooped up creepers, agaves, shoots of spoon plants, which I transplanted in the afternoon. An easy life here, from hand to mouth, as it were. The world exists only in old newspapers. Full moon tomorrow.

After promising, then increasingly rigid, and finally inescapable plot lines, ‘Crabwalk’ or ‘The Call of the Toad’ must leave room for contrasting reflections, counterplots, even a happy ending, with the Bengalis and other Asians arriving; yet I still hope it can remain a longish story. Before corpses are transplanted, the cemetery should be half full, at which point a shortage of new occupants should set in, making the reburials important for keeping business brisk. The retirement home will attract visitors: the children of refugees, grandchildren, for whom a hotel will be built on land purchased in Kashubia.

I want to remember my praying mantises through drawings: beautiful from all angles with their grasping arms.

Vale das Eiras, 11 January 1990

Tomorrow this ‘lightness of being’, a pleasant interlude, will be half over. The playful transition from breakfast outdoors (now that the weather has turned springlike) to pottering about with the hoe or going into Lagos to buy fish. In the afternoon I go back to working on the Frankfurt speech, unless a drawing has to be completed before I start to write: ‘What was left of the tilapia’. Or today, above the bay, when I again sketched wintry fig trees, leafless: the exotic tangle of branches, each tree displaying a different form of ecstasy.

Actually I wanted to anchor this lightness of my everyday existence with the chaotic phenomenon known as the extended family, the source of my occasional happiness but also of many medium-sized annoyances, which heighten the sparse feelings of happiness. Yet I have a hard time being intimate. What is it that compels me to keep the most private things under wraps? Maybe the fear that naming them would disrupt this tolerable and (if I play my cards right) liveable precarious equilibrium. In essence, this extended family of mine consists of eight children (six of them biological) and four mothers, to whom I am devoted and whom I greatly enjoy gathering around me in patriarchal fashion: the children can all fit under one umbrella, but not the mothers. ‘The Mothers’: that could be the title of a book, which I shall not write, unless in my seventies I achieve the kind of serenity that has no need to keep score.

My dream last night: I was looking for a place to be buried in Berlin with lots of room, so that anyone who wants to lie there next to me can do so.

My German-Polish Cemetery Association takes a different approach. It adopts regulations consistent with German guidelines: no black Swedish granite, polished to a high sheen, may be used for grave markers.

By the way, the grandchildren in the cemetery’s hotel and the older folks in the retirement home ( Johannistal Forest Lodge, also known as the ‘Death Home’) soon meet and develop a fondness for one another. The first weddings take place in Gdansk. The idea of building a maternity clinic is broached, and then, four years after the cemetery became operational and two years after the foundation was laid for the retirement home, a granddaughter married to a grandson experiences a premature birth, at which time the decision to move ahead is made immediately, because Polish hospital conditions cannot measure up to West German standards. Frau Doktor Piątkowska is excited about the symbiosis between the retirement home and the maternity clinic. Before long one can see young German mothers taking walks with their infants on the cemetery paths in lovely weather. In the novel all this would have to be reported by an elderly man from Danzig, of Kashubian ancestry, who has never left Danzig and now finds a job as a cemetery watchman. He can tell the story from a Kashubian perspective, at an equal distance from the Poles and Germans.

Shortly before Christmas I managed to gather part of the family in Berlin-Friedenau for a meal; I served ratatouille with a smoked pork roast. Franz, who had come from his farm with Gianna for the occasion, got up to offer a toast in Swiss German. Ingrid Krüger and Veronika Schröter sat across the table from each other, seething a bit, as did Helene and Nele for a while. Even Malte judged the party a success. Maria, whom I had made a point of inviting, since for better or worse she belongs to the family, snapped pictures and no doubt had thoughts she kept to herself. Veronika had brought dessert. Her daughters (born before Helene), Jette and Katharina, were adorable, and Stefano, Tinka’s young husband, also offered a toast, in Italian, to please the patriarch.

Caught a large grasshopper today in the old house and preserved it in schnapps.

Vale das Eiras, 12 January 1990

This is the grasshopper preserved in alcohol. Once it dries out, I plan to draw it in graphite, in the foreground of landscapes or towering over them. Now, with the manuscript almost completed, this Frankfurt speech is wearing me down. Twenty years, even ten years ago, I could not have taken on the topic of ‘Writing after Auschwitz’. Why now?

I fear my planned trip to the GDR is going to take place during the let-down after the first successful revolutionary rush. But the old power structures are proving durable, as might have been expected. The mass exodus continues. The opposition is weighed down with organizational problems. Maybe in June and August I’ll be sitting on Rügen or in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains writing about the progress of the German-Polish Cemetery Association: in Wilna final approval has been granted for the construction of a mortuary chapel, while in Gdansk the German cemetery is supposed to be expanded or have a seaside cemetery added to it, at the mouth of the Vistula near Nickelswalde.

Vale das Eiras, 15 January 1990

In the afternoon I wrote the last page of the Frankfurt speech. Almost too neat a conclusion. A sense of dissatisfaction remains, as predicted. Maybe I can work in some irritants.

After a good two weeks of consistently fine weather, our stay here is starting to have something preternatural about it. The two-month rainy period is already nothing but a legend, and only when I hack into the ground to plant more and more cactuses does the damp layer of loam and clay offer a reminder of the floods of yesteryear.

Herr Gysi’s rapid transformations are reminiscent of a character from the French Revolution: from now on, he has only two choices – he can either fail spectacularly or turn into a telegenic stage villain.

Of the four mothers with whom I have lived and live – all of whom have next to nothing in common with my own mother – three come from the GDR and all four come from three-daughter families: Anna and Veronika were middle daughters, Ute the eldest, Ingrid the youngest. This phenomenon yields no theory, however, let alone any complex.

At what point will the organization of the German-Polish Cemetery Association expand to Breslau, Stettin, Glogau, Bunzlau, Hirschberg, Landsberg, Küstrin, Posen? After the recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line, might a positive parliamentary resolution in Warsaw become possible? Also voices (calls of the toad) warning against this first ‘land seizure’? And at what point does Reschke realize that his and Piątkowska’s idea is being misused?

I plan to be in Leipzig when the Social Democrats in the GDR hold their party convention at the end of February. Tomorrow I want to get back to picking captions for the Dead Wood images, then write my short speech for Tutzing.

Vale das Eiras, 17 January 1990

A day of cooking: prepared tripe in advance for tomorrow. For supper we had crayfish sautéed in oil with garlic and two large codfish that I dredged in flour and fried in the skillet. I sliced up the rest of the cod and set it to marinate in vinegar with fresh coriander and onion rings. I cooked the tripe Neapolitan style, with large tomatoes, garlic, potatoes, and marjoram. Even cooking is a delight here. And Ute made a stock with the crayfish shells that will serve as the base for a fish stew. Today the covered market in Lagos was again overflowing with possibilities.

Because Ute had mistakenly parked right in front of the market hall, we had a run-in with a Portuguese policeman. His sense of his own power was in no way inferior to that of a GDR policeman. That rocking on the toes. Talking without pausing to listen. Apparently not much has changed in police circles here, in spite of the revolution. Not until we had paid our 2,000 escudos at the police station did he display some semblance of courtesy. What would it be like to have a fellow like that, ready to strike at the slightest provocation, as a father, a husband? Or is he easygoing at home, jovial?

On the way back we stopped in to see a couple from Hannover who spend several months of every year in Portugal, yet cannot put down roots here. She has severely impaired vision, and says, ‘Of course I see everything wrong, distorted, including on television, but since I used to see properly, I know what trees and people and everything else look like, so in my head I can correct what I’m seeing.’ That, too, would make an interesting narrative perspective.

I planted more trees, this time three pomegranates, on the east side. By now, hacking holes in this clayey, rocky soil has become an obsession.

Gradually the title ‘The Call of the Toad’ is growing on me. Through writing, prefigure disaster. Knowing, with calm confidence, that it will end badly. The mournful nocturnal calls from one Kashubian lake to another. Reschke and Madame Piątkowska could take an excursion to Karthaus/Kartuzy because some land has been offered to the association, and towards evening they might hear toads calling.

Started on the speech for Tutzing. Possible title: ‘On Rootless Cosmopolitans’.

Vale das Eiras, 20 January 1990

Yesterday, while I was hacking holes for planting, I put down my glasses, which I usually take off only when I go to bed, on a pile of rocks, which created this image. How matter-of-fact, how representative of me, that fragile object looked amid round and pointed rocks.

In the meantime, the pile of topsoil is visibly shrinking. Our days here are coming to an end. Yesterday the short speech of a rootless cosmopolitan was also finished. I wonder whether in the last four days I will be able to concentrate on Dead Wood, the afterword to the book?

The Satanic Verses is giving me more and more trouble, even though the basic idea is still valid.

All the news from the GDR confirms how harsh daily life is, now that the great surge that came with the revolution has subsided. I fear the only thing that will carry the day is the hard West German mark.

Bad, tormenting dreams last night, their frenetic quality in sharp contrast to the monotony of our days here.

Doubts as to whether I can still motivate myself to undertake a book like ‘The Call of the Toad’. (The texts of the two speeches are not conducive to further writing.)

Vale das Eiras, 21 January 1990

Today in blazing sun: the rabbit and I. Nothing is more lifeless, more naked than a skinned rabbit. The more I draw it, the more naked it becomes: muscles, sinews, streaks of fat are exposed and form a touchingly beautiful composition of an animal cadaver on its side, despite the hacked-off fore and hind paws – perhaps because the skinned rabbit, with its rounded back and foreshortened front and hind legs close together, resembles a human embryo.

I drew it with a landscape in the background, and then, with soft graphite, in vertical format, a cod that I later stuffed with sage and steamed in butter for supper, with the flame in the oven on low.

Later in the day I managed to get started on the afterword to Dead Wood. I want to keep it short, with the link to the picture captions unmistakable.

No newspapers in Portimão: the airline pilots are on strike. No chance to stay informed on events in the GDR.

‘The Call of the Toad’ thus far has been proceeding in a straight line, too logically. My protagonists, the widow and the widower, are not sufficiently lifelike. She should have something tough and persistent about her, because she promised her husband, who did not want to be laid to rest in foreign soil, that she would bury him in Wilna, whatever it took; he, on the other hand, is motivated more by an idea than by personal inclination.

In the neighbourhood, a quarter of an hour’s walk away, live a couple from England with two small children. Until three years ago he was in Hong Kong: a businessman. One of the many drop-outs here, like Volker Huber, Jules Heindels, Jacob Suhl. We visited them yesterday afternoon for drinks in their unfinished refuge. He’s planting vegetables, but the constant rain in November and December rotted the seeds. She teaches at the international school. The pretext he presents for leaving: in the past few years the Chinese in Hong Kong have become unbearably arrogant. This from an Englishman, who also considers his fellow countrymen arrogant, by the way.

Halfway to the neighbour’s we dug up young mimosas and planted them on our property. The unusual, gratifying feature of this place is that every evening I find myself looking forward to the next day; this anticipatory pleasure is something with which Ute does not identify. Only on Møn does she feel anything similar.

Vale das Eiras, 25 January 1990

Ute is packing. I have carted the garden tools to the garage, tidied my study upstairs, and finished writing my ‘Obituary’ for Dead Wood. The first draft is all of a piece – that’s how it reads, anyway.

It was exciting to work on three different texts in quick succession, because their subjects – Auschwitz, the German question, and the dying forests – have a good deal in common. I did nine drawings to keep in reserve. It is so relaxing to turn to Portuguese motifs after the Calcutta images and the drawings for Dead Wood — for example, fish before and after the evening meal.

No matter how much I look forward to seeing the children, especially Nele and Helene this time, I would not have minded one or two more weeks here.

In ‘The Call of the Toad’, once the cemeteries are established, and the retirement home, the hotel, the maternity clinic, and the church (also for weddings) are built, and the first vacation houses on the Kashubian lakes for which West Germans received building permits are occupied, all this resulting in more and more Germans coming to Gdansk, a formal request could be submitted for new, bilingual road signs. A ‘mixed’ panel discussion takes place in the city hall. Professor Reschke, despite being in favour of the signs, eventually opposes them, out of consideration for the feelings of the Poles. The request is authorized, but limited to the names of streets in the rebuilt Old Town. Frau Piątkowska comes back from Wilna railing against the nationalistic Lithuanians, to whom the Russians are giving too much freedom. After an argument about nations, Reschke declares his love to Piątkowska.

Despite the skilful plotting, unfortunately The Satanic Verses runs out of suspense: after the fantastic beginning, with its wickedly witty, ironic evocation of the time of Mohammed, we get all too obvious criticism of contemporary English society. Towards the end, the book gives in to sensationalism.

Our English neighbour, who still maintains business relationships with Hong Kong and Taiwan, talks about plunging prices on the New York Stock Exchange. Reports of such developments are coming ever more frequently.

Even today, I helped Ute with some final planting. Yesterday, when Rémy Bongard and his girlfriend came by – we had the rest of the rabbit, stewed in red wine – he brought us a piripiri pepper, which has now been planted between the rosemary and the marjoram.

Dresden’s mayor, Berghofer, has resigned from the Socialist Unity Party and is said to be planning to join the Social Democrats, which could mean not only a gain – a prominent, seasoned politician – but also a burden for that young party.

Tomorrow morning Germano, our neighbour, is driving us in our Jeep to the airport very early: six-thirty!

On the plane from Faro to Hamburg, 26 January 1990

Goodbye to my cactuses! The newspapers (bought in the Faro airport) trigger the familiar German-German stomach cramps. Die Zeit has a conversation with Brandt under the heading ‘Confederation Is Also a Form of Unity’. So why all the vague allusions to a German federation? It is certainly phenomenal the way the Old Man – which is his role now, since Wehner’s death – invokes the history of the Social Democratic Party as the basis of his commitment to the GDR’s Social Democrats.

‘The Call of the Toad’ is traveling with us. At the very beginning of the story, a Bengali busybody in Gdansk, actually a Marwari from Calcutta, will make an appearance. Before long he has set up a bicycle rickshaw service: inexpensive, environmentally friendly, with Polish rickshaw drivers. He is also the one who recognizes the symptoms of worldwide climate change and predicts that someday rice will be grown in the Vistula Delta. He mocks the German-Polish Cemetery Association’s ‘wasteful use of space’. He then serves as the intermediary for wealthy Marwaris to buy into the former Lenin Shipyard, previously the Schichau Shipyard, soon after which Bengalis begin to emigrate from Calcutta and Bangladesh. But this ever-increasing by-product ought to be kept in the background, saved for the end of the story. My Bengali (Marwari) could be a mixture of Daud Haider (our guide in Calcutta) and Salman Rushdie: at once crazed and concrete, intellectual and naïve, enlightened and superstitious. According to his faith, which draws on all major world religions, toads’ croaking does not mean bad luck but rather announces welcome changes in the offing.

The bicycle rickshaws operated by Polish coolies are a great favourite of German tourists and senior citizens from the ‘Death Home’ for sightseeing tours of the city.

My Bengali (Marwari) might deliver lectures filled with speculation about sacred matters, the subjects ranging from the goddess Kali to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.

Important to maintain the momentum, stay active during the few days in Behlendorf before I have to leave for Tutzing.

My cactus plantation, I now realize, is laid out like a novel: covering a lot of ground, with all sorts of gaps that will be filled in as the plants grow. I probably cannot stop myself. A few days ago, when I told Ute how many plants I had put in front of the old house – eighty-seven! – she laughed at me and said that in the GDR in the fifties I would have been a true Hennecke.

Behlendorf, 26 January 1990

Hänschen is there to meet us at Hamburg airport. Standing on the other side of the glass partition between the waiting area and the baggage pickup, he holds a copy of the Morgenpost with the headline ‘Hurricane!’. (Later the evening news provides more detail: more than ninety deaths in England, France, and Belgium.) I wonder whether the increasing violence of these storms, predicted by scientists, is already a sign of climate change.

Back in Behlendorf, and the house is fine. In my studio I immediately spread out the manuscripts. On my drawing board are the last drawings from before we left for Portugal: the pike Herr Lübcke gave us, a metre and three centimetres in length. Drawn in pencil. A sketch in brush and reed pen, using ink I made from walnut shells, which blackened in the autumn; the ink produces a sienna shade that apparently holds its colour.

On the telephone, Ute is telling her sister in Freiburg about the grotesque dreams she had in Portugal. In the first dream she wants to get married – it is not clear to whom – but she puts everything on hold because her mother is missing, but later she finds her, dead drunk. In the second dream her mother, seventy-eight and shaky though she is, is pregnant – unclear or irrelevant by whom – but Ute comforts herself with the thought that her mother might give up alcohol because she has to nurse the baby; also, in the ‘home for the aged’ the situation is viewed not as tragic but rather as something that will liven up the place. There is no need to analyse dreams like that, I think.

The three-quarter-litre bottle of squid ink made it home safely in our hand luggage.

Tomorrow I want to see how our old orchard fared in the hurricane.

While we were on our way from the airport to Hamburg’s main station, Ute’s mother was arriving by train from Freiburg, somewhat late but cheerful and relaxed – and not the least bit pregnant.

Behlendorf, 28 January 1990

Today the line-up for the Bundestag election will probably be decided in the Saarland. Will Lafontaine be able to hang on to an absolute majority of parliamentary seats? And will he or will he not be the SPD’s candidate for chancellor? It is not looking good for him, because according to the radio the turnout is down from four years ago (the weather is stormy), which will give the small parties a better chance to get over the 5 per cent hurdle, and that includes the Republicans.

Here, too, a gusty northwester is sweeping across the countryside. The nearby forest is groaning. I have retreated to the cocoon of my studio. Rewrote the short speech for Tutzing again. Brandt was on television last night, attending the convention in Gotha for the founding of the Thuringian SPD. It makes me uneasy to see him promoting unification. His reservations expressed too casually and vaguely: unification from below, no unified state but a federal state based on the individual provinces’ sovereignty. But also increasingly frequent pre-emptive rejection of foreign criticism of the ‘German people’s desire for unity’. Could it be his young wife who has made him so nationalistic? Or is he trying to put the finishing touches on a lifetime of political involvement? Or might he feel he has to wash away the stain of the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’? Or is it just his political instinct telling him to lay claim to the topic? Or all those things together?

In my studio I started working on a new and final image for Dead Wood, maybe for the jacket. Ute has gone to her sister’s to fetch the dog. Am cooking pork in Schwarzsauer sauce, and put some Portuguese figs in the stock.

Talked on the phone with Franz. How pragmatically he assesses the political situation, our onetime cloud-pusher. He is building a bigger cow barn.

I am no good at predicting election results. Oskar won a surprisingly big majority. As a candidate for chancellor, he will be played off against Brandt’s national vision for the sake of German unity – unless the two of them modify their positions.

While I was glued to the election coverage, the sauce cooked down too much. Kohl’s priceless comment: ‘The results are related to the campaign.’

Behlendorf, 30 January 1990

Back from Portugal only a few days, and I am stuffed to the gills with information, overwhelmed with details, all trying to convince me that reunification is the only game in town, that the train has long since left the station. With this baggage (and with diarrhoea that set in during yet another sleepless night), it is off to Tutzing. Will it be possible to challenge the alleged will of the people? The politicians, at least, if they have any integrity, must realize that although a hasty reunification can be pushed through, the price to pay would be distrust and lasting internal discord.

Behlendorf, 2 February 1990

Back from Tutzing: the conference Antje Vollmer and I conceived and organized apparently took place at the right moment, and could have a lasting effect. My brief speech, not delivered until the final day, focused the discussion again, the more so because on the previous day the politicians had been unable to come up with any ‘new answers to the German question’. It was not easy for me to take a position fundamentally counter to Willy Brandt’s; but if anything caused him to reconsider, it was probably the rather softly spoken but firm points made by the young conference participants from the GDR, people like Konrad Weiss.

It was amusing to see how angry the German president became because he could not express his reservations about the unification process with journalists present. Antje Vollmer, who despite being in a chronic state of excitement and prone to emotional break-downs and outbursts, always kept to the subject. Ibrahim Böhme, as chairman of the SPD-East, has too heavy a burden to carry, and that with too little sleep and too much expected of him. I signed up for the party convention in Leipzig on 22 February and for several political events.

Tutzing Castle is located directly on Lake Starnberg. Large, old trees on the grounds. In clear weather you can see the Alps. A landscape that is almost too beautiful, as in the regional films popular in the fifties. The director of the Protestant Academy is incapable of uttering a single sentence without having to suppress a smile. Even Heinrich Albertz made a point of being there; he arrived on the night train. It is pathetic to see the Greens constantly chafing against the Social Democrats, even when there is no perceptible difference of opinion between them and Norbert Gansel (the case in Tutzing).