On the northern edge of the city, not far from the port and shipyard area, where the Old City merged with the New City and poverty put its stamp on children, there was a row of workers' houses, one-storied structures of unfaced brick with tarpaper roofs. They belonged to the Schichau (formerly the Klawitter) Shipyard, and each house had always been occupied by two shipyard workers' families. The Stubbes had long lived next door to the Skrovers, until Ludwig Skrover and his family had been served with expulsion notices and emigrated to America. Ship's carpenter
Heinz Lewandowski and his wife and four children then moved into the Skrovers' dwelling, the door of which, side by side with the Stubbes' door in the center of the elongated house, was painted in the same green. The hallway led to the kitchen-living room with its window and French door, which opened onto the adjoining yard, outhouse, and garden. The parlor with its two front-facing windows branched off from the passageway on the right (on the left at the Lewandowskis'). Likewise to the right and left, but smaller than the parlors, the bedrooms adjoined the kitchen-living rooms of the Stubbes and Lewandowskis. There was no room for closets under the flat tarpaper roof. In the backyard there were rabbit hutches leaning against the house. The tile stoves had to be stoked in the parlors, but through the partition walls they also heated the bedrooms of both families.
The kitchen was the warmest place. The water pump in the yard was intended for the use of both tenants. It would never have occurred to either the Lewandowskis or the Stubbes to convert the little-used parlor into a bedroom for the children. So the three small children from Lena's second marriage slept in two cots alongside the big marriage bed, at the foot of which was placed a narrow bed where Lisbeth, Lena's daughter by her first marriage, slept until she was eighteen, when, thoroughly instructed in the ways of matrimony, she married a worker in the railroad-car factory, became pregnant, and moved to Troyl, whereupon the narrow bed was taken over by twelve-year-old Luise. Lisbeth, Luise, Ernestine, and Martha experienced Otto and Lena Stubbe night after night: their snoring, creaking, groaning, farting, weeping, their sudden silence, their talking in their sleep. The children learned in the darkness and forgot nothing.
The parlor remained a place of mystery, virtually unused except on the high holidays, until 1886, when, shortly after the strike at the Klawitter Shipyard and her husband's attempted suicide, Lena began setting a Saturday table in the kitchen-living room for possible suicides and, since a few of her guests belonged to the upper classes, took in considerable extra money, a good part of which she spent on books and subscriptions to magazines. The parlor then became Lena's study. If she hadn't mislaid her spectacles in the kitchen, they were sure to be under a sheaf of papers in
the parlor. There Lena read Die Neue Zeit (The New Age) and Das Neue Frauenleben (The Modern Woman); there she lined up recipe after recipe for her "Proletarian Cook Book," and there in her Sunday handwriting she wrote the party chairman two letters full of questions about his book Woman and Socialism. An answer came in which he soft-pedaled his Utopian ideas on free choice of profession, unsaid a little of his "state as educator" program, and, taking an interest in Lena's class-conscious cookery, announced his visit.
In Kiel with shop stewards: "Look, fellow worker. Why do you write such complicated stuff? It's no good for us workers because only the privileged bourgeoisie can understand it." A turner (today we call them lathe operators) speaking. "It's too highfalutin for us. When we get home from work, we're all in, no good for anything but the tube. If you want to talk to us, it's got to be simple and exciting-like a crime thriller."
As if sleep-work-goggle-at-the-tube were a smooth-running process. As if the lathe were ever switched off and you didn't have quiz flicks running through your sleep. As if the rationalized work process weren't interspersed with reels of film, films run in reverse, protests from the back benches, and cost-efficiency figures, so that the lathe shavings get inextricably mixed with private refuse and suchlike nonsense. As if the workshop didn't have veto power while the quiz master varies his jokes. As if there were no other film uncoiling, running on, breaking off, starting up again, repeating itself, flowing right on from your dream through the early work shift, through your shop contacts, even while your wife, that permanent stranger, is taking up so much room— a film running on without intermission or time clock, as if there were no such thing as a wage scale, only hit music in the ear, warmed-up red cabbage, and the whole thing, even the black-and-white parts, in color.
"But fellow workers, that's just what I do. I write compressed time, I write what is, while something else, overlapped by something else, is or seems to be next to something else, while, unnoticed, something that didn't seem to be there any more, but was hidden and for that reason ridic-
ulously long-lasting, is now exclusively present: fear, for instance."
"That's it, fellow worker. That's the way it is. We can't turn it off. And usually there's something else running at cross-purposes. And the kids who won't ever keep quiet. And always something else besides. Not exactly fear. Just a kind of feeling. But your long sentences, fellow worker, are no help. By the time you're through, you've lost me. Can't you make it simple?"
"I can, fellow worker. I can."
One Monday in 1885, when the workers of the Klawitter Shipyard were on strike and Lena Stubbe, one of the many cooks who are inside me and want to come out, was running the soup kitchen that fed the whole lot of them and their families and taking charge of the strike fund, she noticed that seven hundred and forty-five marks were missing from the fund, but she said nothing to her Otto, who always started clobbering the moment he was caught at anything, and kept her peace when Otto beat first the girls, who all wore pigtails, and then her, his Lena, with the heavy hand of a father, husband, socialist, and anchor maker, until he was exhausted and reduced to tears, because Otto didn't want to be as I've described him in another overlong sentence, and would rather have been a class-conscious model of working-class solidarity. For only recently Otto Stubbe, addressing the comrades at Adler's Beer Hall, had inveighed against the beating of proletarian children and early-worn-out wives: "As Bebel says, we don't want to bring up no subjects, but independent-minded Germans."
And the comrades of those days all nodded and said "Right!" — just as you, too, fellow workers of the Kiel local group, nod and say "Right!" when I try to explain why complicated sentences are short and simple ones are long. Now here, for instance, is a short sentence: The spy in the chancellor's office is said to have been an eminently reliable Social Democrat in the daytime. But you refuse to read my short and long sentences, because a few leftist sons of rightist families have written you off as underprivileged illiterates, stigmatized you as stupid vulgarians, wife-beating Ottos. But the cook Lena Stubbe in her day knew several books that helped to shape the history of her times. After cooking pigs'
feet until tender for the comrades, who were often at loggerheads, to gnaw at, she read sentences and paragraphs from the already classical work Woman and Socialism aloud, while the men munched.
And when the chairman of the Social Democratic Party came to Danzig in '96 to reconcile the warring factions among the comrades — even then the point at issue was revisionism-she discussed the proletarian cook book, which was still both lacking and needed, at length with her party chairman. They were sitting in the parlor. At first Otto Stubbe was there, too. The children in the adjoining room could be heard trying to be quiet. The Lewandowski children in the apartment next door were noisier. Outside it was May, lilacs were blooming between the houses. Otto had suggested killing a rabbit in Bebel's honor. But Lena Stubbe cooked pork kidneys in mustard sauce. They, my dear fellow workers, tasted good.