This development, which split most of the groups, espe-
daily the liberals and Spontaneous Revolutionaries, led to constant conflict with the explicitly ideological groups, and all the more so as heresy had raised its head even among the Marxists. Group discipline became more severe. Anyone who had signed up for the working groups of the so-called Flounder Party was expelled or rejected. And yet those feminists who had unjustly been classified as "moderates" gained more and more influence, for the Flounder Party was very hard on the Flounder, and Therese Osslieb gave him a really rough time. Just as Amanda Woyke had berated Inspector August Romeike as a dope or a bully, so Osslieb flung such titles as "flathead" and "super-Hegel" at the Flounder.
She took a critical view of the Flounder but opposed a blanket condemnation. The prosecution, she said, would have to acknowledge that his enlightened bourgeois approach had been relatively progressive at the time. The Tribunal, after all, had him-and his protege Rumford-to thank for illuminating material concerning the pioneering function of the farm kitchen. The present world food situation-more than half of mankind being undernourished-called for the radical elimination of the family kitchen and 1 reconsideration of historical forms of the large-scale kitchen. This thesis of the Flounder's, Osslieb went on, defied argument and should definitely be taken into the program of the feminist movement. While justly deploring his male arrogance, the Tribunal should be grateful to him for his fruitful ideas. As associate judge, she, Therese Osslieb, would put the egalitarian, or as the Flounder called it, the Chinese world food solution into practice. This she would do on her own premises. Let the men jabber about the Great Leap Forward if that amused them; the women, at long last, would actually make it.
Now Therese Osslieb's restaurant in Kreuzberg was rather a fancy sort of place, where eccentrics hung out and the cuisine was explicitly Czech; Therese's maternal grandmother seems to have been a Viennese of Czech descent. The owner, however, soon managed to drive away most of the geniuses to gain an empathetic understanding of Amanda Woyke's farm kitchen and to popularize, along with West Prussian potato soup, other simple dishes: manna grits boiled
with bits of bacon rind; sorrel cooked like spinach; millet cooked in milk; potatoes in their jackets with curds and caraway seed; oatmeal sausage on mashed potatoes; naturally, potato dumplings, Bavarian as well as Bohemian; and fried potatoes accompanied by one thing and another: herring, fried eggs, meatballs, jellied pork.
Up until then the restaurant had borne an esoteric name; now, as the meeting place of the feminists, it became "Ilsebill's Barn." The imperial Austrian decor disappeared; now freshly whitewashed walls were graced with just a few rustic ornaments. Few of the old patrons stayed on. But soon the prices started going up again, for each evening Therese Osslieb's husband, who was quick to adapt, put on a program for the entertainment as well as the enlightenment of the public: "Sir Walter Raleigh and the Potato." "The Potato in Shakespeare." "The Introduction of the Potato as Precondition for the Industrialization and Proletarianization of Central Europe." And, breathtaking in its timelessness, "Potato Prices Yesterday and Today."
Associate Judge Helga Paasch of the Women's Tribunal, owner of a nursery garden at Britz, promised to grow organic potatoes for Ilsebill's Barn on a half-acre plot which, moreover, would be open to educational visits. The children of committed women were invited to take part in a painting competition, and soon the restaurant was decorated with potato motifs. Songs in praise of the potato were written, set to music, and sung. A back room was set aside for the production of potato prints. Diners who wished to could sit in a circle, chatting and peeling potatoes for themselves and others. The name Amanda was conferred for life on several female babies who had been born while the case of Amanda Woyke was under discussion and whose mothers (and fathers) were among the steady customers of Ilsebill's Barn.
And yet, despite all the playfulness — a few young women wore necklaces of (sprouting) winter potatoes — the earnestness of the original intention was maintained: working groups discussed the nutritive value of the basic foodstuffs, the protein-rich soybean, millet, rice, the exemplary character of the farm kitchen, the necessity of combating hunger on a global scale, the ultimate goal, the Chinese world food solution, and over and over again the Great Leap, which was
said to have already begun. We are already in mid-Leap. Seen dialectically, the Great Leap is not a precipitate action, but a continuous process, unfolding in several phases. A Permanent Leap.
I shouldn't, when Ilsebill was taking her run, have cried out, "Don't! Don't jump! Please! Don't! Don't jump!" because then she had to jump and so prove herself in the light of the, to me, unfathomable law that governs her actions— to prove herself if only for the time of a quick leap, which to me, when I suddenly saw her and her arching belly in a state of weightlessness, seemed to stretch into several leap-phases. I saw my Ilsebill after the takeoff, while my cry of "Don't jump!" was still quivering in the air, saw how she detached herself miraculously from the heavy, wet soil, saw her rise a scant two feet, then, propelled by her momentum, cover forty inches without loss of altitude, and finally, after a distinct downward bend, drop. She just made it over the ditch.
But before I concern myself with Ilsebill's fall, I would like for an extended moment to celebrate her at the zenith of her leap. She was beautiful, though her leap accentuated the awkwardness, not to say ungainliness of her condition. Her defiant goat face, as if the whole world had offended her. I'd have liked to engrave her in copper as a leaping Melencolia (freely adapted from Durer). In Knossos the Minoan maidens (in honor of Hera and to spite Zeus) jumped over a charging bull. And when Awa our mother discovered her shadow and wanted to get rid of it, she jumped over the rivulet Radune — just as Dorothea, on our return home from the pilgrimage, crossed the river Elbe by jumping from ice floe to ice floe. For at the sight of Ilsebill leaping, I carried myself backward, I saw Awa, I saw Dorothea in mid-leap, I fled to the late eighteenth century, where Amanda Woyke, a serf bonded to the state of Prussia, was sitting with her whole sedentary being beside the stove in the farm kitchen, serenely peeling potatoes, and a hundred years later I visited Lena Stubbe's working-class lodge (at Brabank 5), where I found immemorial poverty entrenched as a social problem. Only then did I attend the congress at Bievres, on the outskirts of Paris, which tried to do something about the future of democratic socialism.
Some Czechoslovak refugees had invited me. A French Communist, risking expulsion from the party, met me at the Orly airport. I had hardly checked into the hotel when I bought a postcard to send to my Ilsebill, scribbled full of sentences such as: "Take care of yourself! Please don't overdo it. Your condition permits of no leaps. The congress promises to be interesting. About a hundred revisionists. ."