With your Latin rigor you remained a stranger to us students, a freak who — let Stalingrad fall or Tobruk be lost— didn't really care about anything but grammar. Only when you indulged in a bit of naive Catholicism, only when you spoke (with discernible affection) of the blessed Dorothea and her impending canonization, were you able to win my heart
and stir my imagination; at the age of thirteen, in any case, I had a crush on a little girl who must have resembled Dorothea — I remember blue veins in white temples. Of course I had no tangible success. She had black hair. But you and I are certain that Dorothea of Montau's hair was the color of wheat. Maybe we also agree that her beauty had no use value. And I join you in the belief that she was unfit for marriage, though you insist in your writings that Dorothea tried to be a good housekeeper and wife to swordmaker Al-brecht Slichting. (You point out, for example, that she often washed the dishes when unable to sleep at night.)
In your last letter you write, "If I have come out strongly for our home saint, the patron saint of Prussia, and am still working in her behalf, it is because, as I am sure you recognize, Dorothea was an extraordinary creature. I regard her as intellectually, morally, and spiritually the most outstanding woman of Prussia during the period of the Teutonic Knights." Here I cannot follow you, for while I agree that Dorothea was extraordinary, I can find no trace of saintliness in her makeup.
In your letter you refer to testimonies presented to the canonization commission of the time. You cite Jungingen and other such ruffians from among the Teutonic Knights, build your case in part on Dorothea's biographer, Johannes Marienwerder, and recommend the study of his great trilogy, Vita venerabilis dominae Dorotheae. But it is not only my scant knowledge of Latin that turns me away from the onetime Prague professor of theology and later dean of Marienwerder Cathedral. Johannes was too deeply involved, too intent on producing a saint for the Teutonic Order. I prefer to rely — since I, like you, my dear Herr Stachnik, am at home in imaginary worlds — on my personal memories, on my own painful experience with Dorothea, for before, during, and after the Black Death, I was the swordmaker Albrecht, eight out of nine of whose children died, whose bit of hard-earned prosperity was dissipated by Dorothea's openhandedness at church doors, who was the laughingstock of the gold- and coppersmiths, of whom, in short, she (the pious bitch) made a fool. Oh, if I had only consented to a separation in Ein-siedeln, when she wanted to throw me and her last child overboard like ballast.
Perhaps you will argue: what do my domestic troubles and years of sexual privation (because she stopped doing it, she wouldn't let me in) amount to, measured against Dorothea's ecstasies and illuminations; how insignificant was my squandered fortune weighed against what Dorothea gained each day by pleasing God with her (bloody) flagellation; what did the loss of eight children (at a time of high infant mortality) signify if through the Lord Jesus (with whom she communed daily) she became a true child of God; and how could I think of demanding retribution for earthly trouble now that after almost five hundred years' patience the heavenly reward was at last on the point of being paid out — any day nowl
If you look at it that way, you are right — my High Gothic family-man troubles shrink to nothingness in the light of your joyful expectation. Triumphantly you write, "As the relator general of the canonization commission recently informed me, the 'Confirmatio cultus Dorotheae Montoviesis, Beatae vel Sanctae nuncupatae' will probably be announced before the year is out in an apostolic brief, so bringing the canonization proceedings to a successful conclusion."
That I am quite prepared to believe, for I am still Catholic enough to tremble at the power of the True Church to suspend time. I know that faith, however darkly it may err, outshines the pathetic lamp of reason. And yet I take the liberty of putting a different, more earthly interpretation on the impending canonization not only of your, but also of my Dorothea: Dorothea was the first woman (in our region) to rebel against the patriarchal tyranny of medieval marriage. Soon after her father's death, her eldest brother, without consulting her (she was then sixteen), married her to an elderly man (me). What did I do? I made the frail child one brat after the other, dragged my expensively dressed Dorothea to boring guild dinners, showed her what a coward I was through my half-hearted participation in a ridiculous artisans' uprising (what did I care about the interests of the brewers or coopers?), and beat her with my hard swordmaker's hand or — as on the return journey from Einsiedeln — threw stones at her because I hated her and her witching ideas of freedom.
Because that was all she wanted — to be set free. Free
from the prison of marriage. Free from sexual duty. Free from domestic trivia. Free for what?
You, my dear Herr Stachnik, will say: Free for God! Free for the love of God! But when the case of Dorothea of Mon-tau was debated before the Women's Tribunal in Berlin — you must have read about it in the papers — the presiding judge said: "Dorothea Swarze wanted freedom for herself. Religion and Jesus were only a means, the one permissible agency through which to press her demand for emancipation and escape the all-engulfing power of men. Since she had no other choice than to be burned as a witch or immured as a saint, she decided — for the sake of her freedom — to serve a halfway credible legend up to the dean of Marienwerder Cathedral. A case typical of the Middle Ages, but not without relevance to the present day. We women of today have every reason to look upon Dorothea Swarze as a precursor. Her attempt at self-liberation — bound as it was to end tragically — obliges us to take a sisterly view of her affliction, to evaluate her Godforsaken! — yes, Godforsaken! — failure as a call addressed to us, and to hold her name in honor."
I feel sure, my dear Monsignor Stachnik, that if all this feminist gush calls forth any reaction in you, it will be the stoical smile of the Latinist. And yet I beg you to consider my compromise proposal, halfway between the Catholic and the feminist positions.
I will never again — though I could furnish proof — call Dorothea a witch; you for your part will stop harping— though she had the makings of a saint — on her impending canonization. We both agree that Dorothea Swarze was an unfortunate woman who suffered under the servitudes of her times — more foolish than clever, tormented by insomnia and migraine, a slovenly housekeeper, yet remarkably efficient when it came to organizing processions of flagellants, a woman of gaunt beauty and ruthlessly strong will, despite her hours of convulsive ecstasy unable to think up appealing miracles, endowed with a slight lyrical gift, sluggish in bed but energetic with the scourge, a good walker, hence adept at pilgrimages, cheerful only in the company of wandering penitents and other nuts, rich in extravagant desires, but practical and innovative in devising her ego-related Lenten
cookery: it was really good! Ah, her manna grits with sorrel! Ah, her Scania herring! Ah, her dried peas! Ah, her codfish roe on buckwheat cakes! Ah, her Glumse with herbs!
You have no doubt noticed, my dear Herr Stachnik, that like you (though without heavenly reward) I, too, loved Dorothea. But she kissed the Flounder, a matter on which her biographer, Johannes Manenwerder, wasted not so much as a word. To be sure, after that kiss (and her fornication with the fish, to be sure) her mouth slipped out of shape, but even crooked of mouth and slanting of eye she was still beautiful. The mass of her hair. Her scourged and bleeding flesh. I even liked her rhymes, her "herte" and "smerte." * And her habit of stirring ashes into all her soups. And she could really hover two feet above the ground — I saw her do it several times (and not only out of doors in the fog).