6 - Der Butt: The Struggle for Communicative Dominance

Summary

DER BUTT (1977) presents an episodic survey of human civilization in terms of cooking, sexuality, and politics, while interpreting history as fundamentally shaped by the struggle for communicative dominance. Proceeds from the novel enabled Grass to establish the Alfred Döblin Prize for manuscripts in progress, indicating a new form of public engagement. Der Butt's male protagonist, Grass's alter ego, is called Edek in the Stone Age and returns in various incarnations throughout history. His counterpart, the tribal leader Aua, is the first in a line of eleven female cooks that extends from the Bronze Age matriarch Wigga, Mestwina in the Middle Ages, and fourteenth-century Dorothea von Montau to the Reformation-era nun Margarete Rusch, the maid Agnes Kurbiella (17th c.), the cooks Amanda Woyke (18th c.), Sophie Rotzoll (19th c.), and Lena Stubbe, who witnesses the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, and dies in the Stutthof concentration camp in 1942. Billy Miehlau is brutally murdered in 1963 in West Berlin, while the Polish cafeteria cook Maria Kuczorra remains embittered by her fiancé's death in the December 1970 Lenin Shipyard uprising.

Grass modernizes the Grimms’ tale “Von dem Fischer un syner Fru” (The Fisherman and His Wife) to explore the history of poverty and gender struggle. The Grimm tale exposes the wife Ilsebill's greed since her escalating wishes—which, significantly, are granted indirectly through her husband's conversation with the magic fish—provoke the forces of nature (i.e., the flounder or, possibly, God) and cause the couple to lose all they had gained. Der Butt in turn criticizes the suppression of alternate versions of the tale that fault men, not women, for their greed. The oral tradition, after all, reflects an entire community's perspective, whereas printed renderings embody a particular author's viewpoint. Although Der Butt construes the limitless yearning of both men and women as the root of materialism and warfare, the novel retains precisely the communicative (and thus power) imbalance between the genders.

Revisiting History without Finding “Her” Story

In Der Butt, conflict is born of ambition instigated by the flounder's persuasive rhetoric. An example of the novel's focus on competition between genders is reflected in the 1970s frame narrative of the protagonist and his spouse Ilsebill, whose relationship represents a “zentrales Mitteilungsverhältnis” (communicative focal point).