Peeling the Onion by Günter Gras

Author:Günter Gras [Gras, Günter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, History, Literary Figures, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780151014774
Google: W5fFAvSXGNMC
Amazon: 0151014779
Publisher: Harcourt, Incorporated
Published: 2007-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

THE THIRD HUNGER

FROM AN EARLY age it was impossible to deal with, whether by practising ascetic moderation and limiting myself to black-and-white or by yielding to the addiction and staining every piece of paper in sight. Not even stuffing myself with books to the point of verbal nausea could stave it off. There was never enough. I was always greedy for more.

The ordinary hunger everyone knows could be alleviated for hours by turnip soup with a few sparse globules of fat or even by frost-damaged potatoes, and the desire for carnal love, that panting, unbidden, unyielding onslaught of ever self-renewing lust, could be deadened by a chance encounter or a few flicks of the wrist. My hunger for art, however, the need to make an image for myself of everything standing still or in motion and thus of every object that throws a shadow and even of the invisible, the Holy Ghost and Its Intimate Enemy, that ever evanescent capital – if only by adorning the papal financial headquarters, the Banco di Santo Spirito, as a temple of the obscene with portal figures – this desire to conquer all with images was insatiable, accompanying my conscious self by day and my dreams by night, even as I fed it with promises when I decided to study art – or what I in my limited view considered art. But for a time, the circumstances of the winter of ’46–’47 stood in the way of my wishes.

Having made the trek to Stommeln Station through knee-deep snow, freezing and sweating at the same time, having bought a one-way ticket and believing thereby that I had run away from my newly found family, I had to accept the fact that at the end of the endless slow-train journey no one was waiting for me in Düsseldorf with open arms.

And having asked my way through the city, which had been bombed, though not so badly as Cologne, Hanover, or Hildesheim, to the massive building of the Academy of Art – there were no trams whether because of the snow or a power outage – I found the dark box on the edge of the Old Town open but no one in the porter’s lodge to call out a friendly ‘Welcome!’ or ‘We’ve been expecting you!’

First I knocked on doors, pressed door handles, wandered past locked studios along corridors upstairs and down.

I can still hear my steps, see my breath disappear into the multi-storeyed ice cellar the building had become. To keep from losing strength and heart, I probably carried on a dialogue with myself: Don’t give up! Hold out! Think of what your friend Joseph once said: ‘Grace doesn’t just fall into your lap …’ And all at once, when I was about to leave, I met Art in the person of an old man who looked like nothing so much as a silent-film cliché of an artist. I could see his breath too.

Not until two years later did I learn more about him. The

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