Constructing Authorship in the Work of Gunter Grass (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs)

OXFORD MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee C . H . G R I FFI N K . M . KO H L

A. K A H N

M. L. M C L A U G H L I N

I . W. F. M A C L E A N

R. A. G. P E A R S O N

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Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass R E B E C C A B R AU N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Rebecca Braun 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–954270–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents List of Figures Note on editions used and frequently cited works Acknowledgements Introduction

vi vii ix 1

1. Models of Authorship: Das Treffen in Telgte in Context

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2. Public Constructions of Authorship in Grass’s Political Writings, 1965–2005

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3. ‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .] erzählen’ I: Placing the Author in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus

65

4. ‘Aus der Geschichte gefallen’: Displacing the Author in Der Butt and Die Rättin

96

5. ‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .] erzählen’ II: Reconstructing the Author in Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert

122

6. ‘Er, in dessen Namen ich krebsend vorankam’: Reading the Author in Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang

149

Conclusion

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Select Bibliography Index

181 193

List of Figures 1. ‘Roman-Entwurf (500 Seiten)’, 8 August 1969

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2. ‘Die Gleitspur’, 22 August 1971

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Note on editions used and frequently cited works Unless otherwise stated, I have used the 1997 edition of Grass’s collected works throughout this study: Günter Grass, Werkausgabe, 16 vols, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997). Later works such as Mein Jahrhundert and Im Krebsgang have been added individually to the edition since that date. I reference each volume with an abbreviated form of the title and page numbers after each quotation. The order of the volumes, together with the abbreviated titles I use, is as follows: I II III IV V VI VII

VIII IX X

XI XII

Gedichte und Kurzprosa, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes Theaterspiele, ed. Dieter Stolz Die Blechtrommel, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referenced as BT ) Katz und Maus, ed. Volker Neuhaus Hundejahre, ed. Volker Neuhaus örtlich betäubt, ed. Volker Neuhaus Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referenced as TS; this is also referred to in the main body of the text as the Tagebuch) Der Butt, ed. Claudia Mayer-Iswandy (referenced as B) Das Treffen in Telgte, ed. Claudia Mayer-Iswandy (referenced as TT ) Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referenced as K ; this is also referred to in the main body of the text as Kopfgeburten) Die Rättin, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referenced as R) Unkenrufe, ed. Daniela Hermes (referenced as U )

XV

Ein weites Feld, ed. Daniela Hermes (referenced as WF ) Essays und Reden I: 1955–1969, ed. Daniela Hermes Essays und Reden II: 1970–1979, ed. Daniela Hermes

XVI

Essays und Reden III: 1980–1997, ed. Daniela Hermes

XIII XIV

viii XVII

XVIII

Note on editions used and frequently cited works Mein Jahrhundert [1999], ed. Volker Neuhaus (note that references are to the 409-page picture-book edition, as referenced below and in the bibliography) Im Krebsgang [2002], ed. Daniela Hermes (referenced as IK )

Books by Grass referred to in this study and not included in the collected edition are: Zunge zeigen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988) (referenced as Zz) Mein Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999) [409 pp.] (referenced as MJ ) Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006) (referenced as HZ ) Further works by Grass not included in the collected edition, as well as interviews and more recent articles by the author, are indicated separately and referenced in the bibliography. Archival material cited comes from the Günter-Grass-Archiv in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Robert-Koch-Plaz 10, 10115 Berlin. This is referenced as SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv.

Acknowledgements THIS book is the revised version of my doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Oxford in Trinity Term 2005. Work on my thesis was funded by a Theodor Heuss / Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship held in Berlin from 2001–02, and an Oxford University Scatcherd Scholarship held in Oxford from 2002–05. I am grateful to both funding bodies for their generous support. During the course of my research I had to learn how to navigate my way round several institutions. Special thanks are due to Ms Jill Hughes at the Taylor Library, Oxford, to Frau Elisabeth Unger at the Günter-GrassArchiv in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and to Frau Hilke Ohsoling from the Günter-Grass-Sekretariat, Lübeck for their good-humoured help and advice. I also gratefully acknowledge permission granted by both the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Günter Grass to cite and reproduce archival material. The argument developed in the course of this study has benefitted from generous input from several colleagues. Thanks are due to the examiners of my thesis, Professor Stuart Taberner and Dr Ben Morgan, for supporting its publication. I gratefully acknowledge the critical engagement and constructive advice offered to me by the two anonymous readers and the series editor at Oxford University Press. My biggest single debt of gratitude, however, is to my doctoral supervisor, Dr Karen Leeder, whose ability to pull on the weakest threads of one’s argument is truly frightening. For her honesty, patience, and unfailing support throughout the entire project, my sincere thanks.

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Introduction ‘Günter Grass hat viele Gesichter; der zur Stereotype gewordene Schnauz kann darüber nicht hinwegtäuschen.’ 1

Commenting on the way in which the contemporary writer is portrayed in the media, David Lodge notes, ‘whereas post-structuralism has asserted the impersonality of creative writing in the most extreme theoretical terms— the so-called “death of the author”—literary journalism has never been so obsessed as it is now with the personality and private life of the author’. 2 Lodge is writing with particular reference to contemporary Britain, but the basic paradox he discerns in what amounts to the theory and practice of authorship can be applied to contemporary Western society in general. On the one hand, the impact of French-led post-structuralist thought from the late 1960s onwards has indeed ushered in a style of highly selfaware and textually suspicious literary criticism that has tirelessly chipped away at the idea of any sort of ultimate authority either within or outside of the literary text. At the same time, however, the wider public sphere that can be traced in major broadsheets and news magazines has become increasingly fascinated with the author’s public image, whether in the form of a publisher’s marketing campaign that aims to sell the books produced by the author, biographical sketches that pander to public curiosity about the author, or literary scandals that rage from time to time about the author. 3 In socio-economic terms, the successful literary author would appear to have 1 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein’, in Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Franz Josef Görtz, eds, Günter Grass: Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1971), 143–50, 143. 2 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), 101–2. 3 An overview of the contemporary public sphere with respect to literature in Germany can be found in Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 8–16, and in Martin Hielscher, ‘The Return to Narrative and to History: Some Thoughts on Contemporary German-Language Literature’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece, eds, Literature, Markets and Media in Germany and Austria Today (Oxford: Lang, 2000), 295–309.

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become central to the culture industry at the heart of contemporary Western society. In Germany this has very clearly been the case since the mid-1990s, where a self-conscious concern with image is primarily associated with the relatively new and more global strands of German literature such as the so-called ‘Fräuleinwunder’ and the new pop literature. 4 Debate about authors and the media, however, goes back much further. Older generations, from the 1960s through to the present, have consistently railed against the apparent superficiality of what is often derogatively referred to as the ‘Mediengesellschaft’. 5 Consciously organizing themselves into politically active groupings, authors such as Martin Walser and Hans Werner Richter worked collectively with their peers to try to establish the German author as a serious intellectual figure in the public sphere, countering the dominant media trend towards marginalization throughout the 1950s. This can be seen in their respective edited volumes, Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neue Regierung? (1961) and Plädoyer für eine neue Regierung oder Keine Alternative (1965). Such a move was not without complications. In 1962 Hans Magnus Enzensberger analysed the development of what he called the ‘consciousness industry’, drawing attention to the double-bind faced by those public figures who must of necessity use the media in order to try to communicate their own alternative image: Die rapide Entwicklung der Bewußtseins-Industrie, ihr Aufstieg zu einer Schlüsselinstanz der modernen Gesellschaft, verändert die soziale Rolle des Intellektuellen. Er sieht sich neuen Gefahren und neuen Möglichkeiten ausgesetzt. [. . .] Freiwillig oder unfreiwillig, bewußt oder unbewußt, wird er zum Komplizen einer Industrie, deren Los von ihm abhängt wie er von dem ihren, und deren heutiger Auftrag, die Zementierung der etablierten Herrschaft, mit dem seinen unvereinbar ist. 6

Along with Martin Walser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Heinrich Böll, to name but a few, Günter Grass experienced this paradox first-hand. 4 See Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond, Andrew Plowman, ‘ “Was will ich denn als Westdeutscher erzählen?”: The “Old” West and Globalisation in Recent German Prose’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004), 47–66, and Beth Linklater, ‘Germany as Background: Global Concerns in Recent Women’s Writing in German’, in Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, 67–87. 5 Stuart Parkes, ‘German Authors on the Media’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece, eds, Literature, Markets and Media (Oxford: Lang, 2000), 1–18, goes into some detail on older authors’ long-standing dislike of the media sphere. 6 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Bewußtseins-Industrie’, in Einzelheiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), 7–15, 15.

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From the 1960s onwards, his high-profile political interventions helped not only to force the media to engage with authors outside the purely literary realm, but also to establish an active political image of authorship that was subsequently radicalized by the so-called 1968 generation. In return, however, he quickly found himself reduced to a certain party-political line in the popular press, while the kind of authorial intervention for which he stood landed him the difficult title of ‘praeceptor democratiae germaniae’. 7 These are public constructions of his identity which Grass has repeatedly had to negotiate. Indeed, Grass has been aware of the power of his public image from the early 1960s onwards. Probably no other author in post-war Germany has had his or her literary reputation made overnight in such startling, public fashion. On reading a chapter from his then unpublished novel Die Blechtrommel at a Gruppe 47 meeting in 1958, he was awarded the group’s prestigious prize and immediately surrounded by publishers and journalists who were convinced that he stood for a new kind of German literature. Subsequent reviews of the novel focused particularly on Grass’s person, merging the author and his main character to create an authorial image based on a bold, devil-may-care attitude that shocked conservative literary circles of the time. Franz Josef Görtz describes Grass’s media branding in the following terms: Seit den Tagen der Blechtrommel hat man Grass auf eben solche Qualitäten [e.g. ‘überquellende Phantasie’, ‘robuste Genialität’, ‘ekelerregende Details’] und damit zugleich auf eine Rolle festgelegt, mit der dieser Autor dann auf Jahre hinaus stets identifiziert wurde: auf die Rolle eines literarischen Holzfällers, der ‘in einer Zeit der Dürre, der Sekundär-Literaturen, der schwachbrüstigen, weltlosen PsychologieEtüden’ die deutsche Nachkriegsepik ‘von dem Fluch stilisierenden Epigonentums und modernistischen Kunstgewerbes erlösen’ sollte. 8

Beginning with the 1965 election campaign, Grass has repeatedly engaged with this and subsequent popular public images, allowing them to feed in to his self-presentation within fiction and non-fiction alike. Indeed, one of the most unifying aspects of his literary work since the novel örtlich betäubt (1969) is that the author is repeatedly present as a clearly recognizable self-image in his texts. Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972), Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980), and Zunge zeigen (1988) all employ a clear autobiographical narrator, while Mein Jahrhundert (1999) is 7

Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein’, 148. Franz Josef Görtz, Günter Grass: Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1978), 78. 8

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partly narrated from an autobiographical standpoint. Der Butt (1977), Die Rättin (1986), and Unkenrufe (1992), have fictional first-person narrators unmistakeably endowed with Grass’s biography, and the loose roman à clef basis of Das Treffen in Telgte (1979) sees him writing into the text not only a rather cryptic version of himself, but also all of the major players from his cherished Gruppe 47. Finally, in Ein weites Feld (1995) and Im Krebsgang (2002) the famous author appears in an ironic cameo role and influences proceedings from the sidelines of his text respectively, while his autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), entails revelations about Grass’s youth that challenge the dominant public understanding of his socio-political position. Directly thematizing the problems of writing about himself, this last piece draws attention to issues of authorship that have in fact informed all his writing to date. From the early 1970s onwards, then, Grass’s authorial person conditions both the form and content of his literature. This may in part be seen as a response to his own experience within the public sphere: finding himself turned into a ‘brand name’—fellow author and cultural commentator Horst Krüger called him a ‘Markenartikelzeichen’ in an article in Der Spiegel in 1969—Grass begins to explore the literary possibilities of an overtly constructed authorial self. 9 Such a reaction to the public sphere is only partly reflected in the work of other authors of the period. Individual writers such as Arno Schmidt, Max Frisch, and Christa Wolf share with Grass a broad focus on identity issues, exploring the problematics and possibilities of manipulating the authorial ‘I’ within literature from the late 1950s and 1960s onwards. Their reflections, however, do not generally go beyond the literary, that is to say, their texts deal extensively with the literary and at times even philosophical aspects of authorial identity, but this identity is rarely placed back into the context of the real author’s experience of the media-led public sphere. Rather, the fiction of these authors fits better with the literature of ‘Neue Innerlichkeit’ or ‘Neue Subjektivität’, which attracted extensive consideration in the 1970s and was generally considered to be the opposite of such socio-politically engaged literature as is widely associated with Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Heinrich Böll. Wolf ’s idea of ‘subjective authenticity’, explored (amongst other places) in Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) and Kindheitsmuster (1976) can be linked to the focus on the subject that gains rather radical expression in the work of Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina, 1971), Max Frisch (Mein Name sei 9 Horst Krüger, ‘Das Wappentier der Republik: Augenblicke mit Günter Grass’, Der Spiegel, 25 April 1969, quoted in Görtz, Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds, 51.

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Gantenbein, 1964) and Peter Handke (Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, 1972; Wunschloses Unglück, 1972; Die linkshändige Frau, 1976), as well as to the idea of a self-consciously anti-political stance propagated in such introspective works as Peter Schneider’s Lenz (1973) and Nicholas Born’s Die erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte (1976) and Die Fälschung (1979). Grass’s works, on the other hand, place the relationship between the author and the public sphere very squarely at their centre. The author is not just examined as a largely literary construct, but also as a product of the media-led public sphere. The result is a much fuller consideration of all aspects of the author’s existence. By engaging with the socio-political context of authorship in his writing, Grass both makes space for current affairs and identity issues to coexist within his work and operates a model of self-presentation that can be fruitfully employed in a wide variety of genres. He may not be the only author to deal with such issues in his writing, but he does stand out for both the explicit manner in which he engages with popular constructions of his own public persona and the breadth of genres and techniques that he employs in this process. Given this long-standing interest in ideas of authorship, it comes as no surprise that Grass has increasingly begun to reflect in more theoretical terms on the effect that media branding can have on an author. In 1994, he described how the contemporary author encounters a media industry that actually sets about replacing the author with its own image of him or her: Die permanente Selbstfeier des Sekundären bestimmt nicht nur den Zeitgeist, sie verkörpert ihn. Das Sekundäre erlaubt sich, als Original aufzutreten. Nicht das neuerschienene Buch ist Ereignis, sondern der sekundäre Reflex. [. . .] Wie hieß nur der Autor?—Den hat es sowieso nie gegeben. 10

These comments add a twist to Lodge’s observation. Grass is pointing out that the pervasive ‘secondary’ discussion has come to overshadow the author and his work. The author’s image and the way it is presented in a discussion constructed by others is important for a public that no longer wants to invest time in reading ‘primary’ literature. The author as originator of the literary text dies a second sort of death, killed off this time in the public rather than literary realm and replaced by his or her own image. Grass himself is aware of this process, as he elaborates with reference to the public reception of Thomas Mann’s diaries: 10 Günter Grass, ‘Über das Sekundäre aus primärer Sicht’ (1994), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XVI, 405–11, 406–7.

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Am Ende war Thomas Mann ertappt, in seinem Wesenskern gedeutet und auf den Punkt gebracht. Frech konnte eine sekundäre Findung zur Erkenntnis aufgeblasen und als Sichtblende vor das Werk des Urhebers gestellt werden. So abgeblendet wird er uns vorerst nicht mehr verstören können. Endlich haben wir ihn im Griff. [. . .] Meinte, als Autor hinter dem Werk verschwinden zu dürfen. Aber nun haben wir ihn doch noch heimgeholt nach langer Emigration. Jetzt ist er unser. Wir kennen ihn durch und durch. Wir müssen ihn nicht mehr lesen. 11

Here, Grass is arguing against the kind of positivist biographical approach to authorship that conditions much of the contemporary culture industry’s engagement with literature. In his ironic reference to Mann’s supposed ‘Wesenskern’, he polemicizes against reductive popular images of both the author and his literature, arguing instead for the author’s right ‘to disappear behind his work’ and live on, as it were, as an ambiguous figure. Both in his literary work and in his essays Grass celebrates the writer’s ability to manipulate his authorial position in literature and the world. This ability is the author’s key to successfully negotiating the contemporary media-led sphere: he exploits a culture industry that is itself based on exploiting him. Curiously, however, this aspect of Grass’s writing has been largely overlooked by literary scholarship. Although there have been local considerations of the way Grass manipulates first-person narrators and fictional characters endowed with aspects of his biography in individual texts, these analyses are almost universally subsumed by the greater concern to elucidate the perceived socio-political message in the works in question. 12 This reflects a general positivist biographical weighting in Grass criticism, and it can be seen particularly clearly in those studies that aim to provide overarching analyses of Grass’s work. Thus Keith Miles, Hanspeter Brode, Michael Hollington, Heinrich Vormweg, and Julian Preece all begin with biographical information on Grass, then proceed chronologically through his works. 13 They follow the major phases commonly discerned in the 11

Ibid., 408–9. Siegfried Mews, ‘Grass’s “Kopfgeburten”: The Writer in Orwell’s Decade’, German Studies Review, 6 (1983), 501–17, Elizabeth Dye, ‘ “Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”. Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang’, German Life and Letters, 57 (2004), 472–87, and Michael Minden, ‘Implications of the Narrative Technique in Der Butt’, in Philip Brady, Timothy McFarland, and John J. White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 187–202, are all examples of this. 13 Keith Miles, Günter Grass (London: Vision, 1975); Hanspeter Brode, Günter Grass (Munich: Beck, 1979); Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (London: Boyers, 1980); Heinrich Vormweg, Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996); Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 12

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author’s life and interpret the main thematic strands of each work in accordance with their (biographically conditioned) image of the author at the time. Thus, the ‘Danzig trilogy’ sees Grass working through the Nazi period and his Danzig beginnings, örtlich betäubt and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke are products of the political Grass, Der Butt corresponds to a ‘return to fiction’, Die Rättin documents the author’s concern with a nuclear holocaust, and so on. In all of this, Grass’s literary self-projection is taken to be compatible with his public political persona. There is no allowance made for the idea that he might be playing with his own image, that the image of the author projected into the fictional text is perhaps not to be directly equated with the real author who has ‘disappeared’ behind it. Against this general background, a small number of works point in a different direction. In the first chapter of his 1995 study on Günter Grass’s use of the baroque, Alexander Weber comments that ‘it would be a valuable task to outline the image of the writer’s self in the novels from örtlich betäubt onwards’, linking Grass’s literary self-presentation with Stoicism and positing that ‘the Stoic focus on the inner self is bound up with an indirect, allegorical mode of writing’. 14 However, Weber has space to develop these ideas only with reference to Der Butt, and this is done only in the wider context of his focus on a baroque concept of literature, so that his wish largely remains unfulfilled. Stuart Taberner also perceives the overarching theme of self-presentation in his analysis of some of Grass’s work in the period from 1965 to 1975. 15 In a study that sets out to analyse ‘the public and private faces of the author’ in work by Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass, and Martin Walser, he first raises the issue of the author’s position in the media-led public sphere, and then offers readings of these authors’ works that interpret their fiction as a reaction to this sphere. Ultimately, however, political impact remains the measure for Grass’s fiction, and selfpresentation for its own sake is seen as detrimental to this aim, as the following concluding remarks on Grass show: Grass’s ability to function within the media-dominated public sphere perhaps reflects the fact that he shares with that domain a certain anti-intellectualism. This anti-conceptual approach allows Grass to view his public image as something fluid, and capable of being bent to many purposes, including political ends. [. . .] Yet 14

Alexander Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature (London: Maney, 1995), 36–7. Stuart Taberner, Distorted Reflections: The Public and Private Faces of the Author in the Work of Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass and Martin Walser, 1965–1975 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). 15

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Grass’s exploitation of his biography in order to exert this influence may finally collapse into self-presentation. [. . .] [I]nterest in the writer’s public persona has come to overshadow his message. This has serious consequences for a democratically functioning public sphere. 16

While I agree with much of what Taberner says here about Grass’s particular suitability for the media-dominated public sphere, I am not convinced that Grass necessarily exploits his biography specifically ‘in order to exert’ a political influence. Instead, when Grass’s tendency to manipulate his image is traced across his work from the mid-1960s to the present, the idea that self-presentation might be a consciously developed theme in its own right becomes increasingly plausible. This idea has been presented in strong terms in a recent work by Mathias Mertens, Figurationen von Autorschaft in Öffentlichkeit und Werk von Günter Grass (2005), the genesis of which coincides largely with that of this present study. Stating ‘die Figurationen von Autorschaft, die er geschaffen hat, dienen nicht nur der Reflexion der Autor-Funktion und sind nicht bloßes autobiographisches Material, sondern sie stellen gleichzeitig auch eine Ermöglichungsbedingung für das Schreiben dar’, Mertens argues that self-presentation is nothing less than an existential necessity for Grass’s literary output. 17 Offering radically new interpretations of Grass’s early plays, Mertens builds up an image of Grass as obsessed with the authorial ‘paratext’ even before he became famous. By this, he means the entire public discourse about an author that accompanies his or her actual literary output. The fact that Grass’s later prose works draw on the author’s public appearance may then be understood as a logical conclusion to such behaviour. It is probably for this reason that Mertens goes into comparatively little detail on the prose works, dedicating just a fifth of his study (fifty-three pages) to discussion of Die Blechtrommel, Katz und Maus, Unkenrufe, Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, and Die Rättin. While I agree with much of what Mertens says with regard to the way Grass explores the authorial role within fiction, he does not go anywhere near far enough in explaining the extent to which these considerations have conditioned Grass’s output. He also readily acknowledges that he has not had the space to discuss Grass’s actual appearance in the public sphere, and this naturally limits the extent to which he can consider 16

Ibid., 88. Mathias Mertens, Figurationen von Autorschaft in Öffentlichkeit und Werk von Günter Grass (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005), 10. 17

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Grass’s literary technique as a matter of play and manipulation of reader expectations rather than simply a kind of unreflecting self-obsession. Finally, Timm Pietsch’s study, ‘Wer hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist (2006), which appeared just before this present volume went to press, makes a very significant contribution to the area most overtly neglected by Mertens’s work. 18 Pietsch’s major achievement is to provide in-depth analysis of the evolving rhetorical techniques underpinning Grass’s work in the public sphere. While his emphasis is on examining the political writings as a coherent body of work within Grass’s wider œuvre, his sensitivity to questions of form and style allows him to dispute the usefulness of such genre categories as ‘speech’, ‘essay’, and ‘novel’ and look beyond the long-standing literature / politics divide. Arguing chronologically, he makes the case for development across Grass’s literary and political career as the author repeatedly refines his grasp on dialogic communication structures and alters his rhetorical and stylistic techniques accordingly. Pietsch’s approach goes a long way towards uniting a fundamentally political conception of Grass with a genuine engagement with his aesthetic techniques. This study builds on the work of these critics, aiming to offer the overarching approach to issues of authorial self-presentation found lacking by Weber in Günter Grass scholarship so far. Although it is indebted to some of Taberner’s subtle readings and very much welcomes Pietsch’s analytical rhetorical approach, it shifts emphasis away from a primarily political understanding of Grass’s literature and foregrounds instead his developing manipulation of authorship as a cultural and textual construct. This manipulation is discussed as a masterful rhetorical technique underpinning Grass’s public position and as a complex literary aesthetic that pervades his work and accounts for much of his innovation in terms of style and genre. Although this study was largely completed before I had access to either Mertens’s or Pietsch’s work, it can usefully be read as an extension of both. Where Mertens emphasizes Grass’s early understanding of authorship, concentrating particularly on the early work (the plays and the first two works of the ‘Danzig Trilogy’), my approach is informed by the actual practice of authorship as it affected Grass’s later production. Likewise, while Pietsch and I share a focus on Grass’s practice, our emphases differ. Pietsch is concerned first and foremost with techniques developed in Grass’s 18 Timm Niklas Pietsch, ‘Wer hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist (Essen: Klartext, 2006).

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political writings and then points to structural and stylistic developments in his literature, whereas my approach prioritizes the idea of literary play as a response to public constructions of Grass’s identity and uses this to explain his various appearances across the literary and political realms. It is for these reasons that I have not included extensive discussion of any of Grass’s prose writing before 1965, the date when he may be said to have first actively begun manipulating his authorial image in the media-led public sphere. Much of Grass’s poetry and drama also falls before this date, although my decision to omit detailed discussion of these works resides less in chronological than practical considerations. With regard to the poetry, I felt there was not enough space to do justice to Grass’s manipulation of the lyric ‘I’ throughout his poetic œuvre, although I have included discussion of some of the poetry that forms part of his narrative fiction. As for the drama, Mertens, as already indicated, goes quite some way towards addressing the issue of authorship in this genre. The only major piece he left unaccounted for, Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (1966), and which I, on account of my focus on narrative fiction with a clear Günter Grass self-image, have likewise been unable to integrate, is fortunately addressed in quite some depth in Pietsch’s study. The analysis offered here entirely squares with my own reading of the play and I refer interested readers to it. I have also omitted one well-known prose work from the later period, örtlich betäubt. This is because I did not judge there to be a sufficiently clear Günter Grass authorial figure within the text, although critics have certainly spilled much ink trying to construct one themselves. It seems to me that the questions of authorship it explores—Starusch’s propensity for inventing wild tales with multiple endings—still belong in the ‘Danzig Trilogy’ period of Grass’s œuvre and do not show any clear reaction to his own experience of authorship in the German public sphere. It should also go without saying that in the works I do analyse my focus is very specifically on questions of authorship within them. I take issue with the current dominant political readings of these texts more because they tend to preclude proper engagement with the aesthetic and particularly textual aspects of Grass’s self-presentation than because they are intrinsically misguided. Grass’s texts are surely of sufficient complexity to function on several levels. This study therefore does not aim to be exhaustive either in its interpretative scope or its treatment of source material, but rather to offer a shift of emphasis in reading Günter Grass that questions some of the received wisdom about politically committed West German writing. The first chapter sets out three main models of authorship that Grass investigates in his work: the author as a political figure, the author as a textual figure, and

Introduction

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the author as an ironic construct. Discussion is given a special focus through the analysis of Grass’s Das Treffen in Telgte, the only work to deal directly with authors and authorship and one that is often considered an anomaly in his œuvre. Chapter 2 groups Grass’s political writings from 1965 to 2005, taking as its starting point the issue of how Grass created a public political image for himself in the light of his literary fame with the ‘Danzig Trilogy’, and then following his subtle negotiations of this public image through to the present. It notes an increasingly ironic turn in Grass’s recent self-presentation as he knowingly begins to duplicate patterns followed earlier in his career. Chapter 3 charts Grass’s developing understanding of authorship as a textual phenomenon that allows him, in the late 1960s and 1970s, to gain distance from his public political persona. Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus may be read as works that celebrate the power of the textual model of authorship to construct alternative realms in which the author can exist. In Chapter 4, however, this textual mode of existence comes under threat. Faced with the looming socio-political problems of the late 1970s and 1980s traced in Der Butt and Die Rättin, it is no longer able to counter in a fully satisfactory manner the difficulties encountered by the author in the political sphere. This loss of faith in the textual model paves the way for Grass’s increasingly ironic qualification to authorial construction in both political and textual realms from the late 1980s onwards. Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert, examined in Chapter 5, thematize overblown images of authorship: the author is attempting to expand himself across a number of literary and artistic genres, yet at the same time the interplay between these genres trivializes authorship, turning it into an incidental by-product of the text. In Chapter 6 the ironic attack on monumentalism becomes even clearer. First approached through a shift of attention towards the reader in Unkenrufe, a reader-inspired re-evaluation of the famous author’s cultural significance becomes a key structural and thematic issue in Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang. Rather than seeking to work out his own authorial positioning, as in previous works, Grass in these texts is content to analyse with considerable detachment the textual and social relevance of authorship. In so doing he openly traces an ironic aesthetics of replacement that drives both the literary and the political models with which he has worked.

1 Models of Authorship: Das Treffen in Telgte in Context INTRODUCTION In 1979 Grass published an unusually slim volume, Das Treffen in Telgte, that had as its seemingly arcane subject a meeting of baroque poets held at the end of the Thirty Years War. Although his choice of such a theme was quickly explained—it arose from his desire to honour Hans Werner Richter, initiator of the West German group of authors, the Gruppe 47, with a short prose piece for his seventieth birthday—it has since taken a somewhat uncomfortable position in Grass’s work. Many critics, while admiring Grass’s mastery of the baroque period, have judged it to be little more than a slightly tedious roman à clef : the parallels between the Gruppe 47 and the baroque poets seem either too smug (Michael Hollington and Julian Preece describe the text as being, at least in places, ‘selfcongratulatory’) 1 or self-obsessed (Marcel Reich-Ranicki deems the tale to be ‘ein Stück Literatur über Literatur, geschrieben von einem Literaten vor allem für Literaten’). 2 Clear parallels to Der Butt on both a structural and thematic level also betray its genesis as something of a spin-off piece. The precedent for the bold structural amalgamation of past and present can be traced to the longer novel, where, in an inverse move, Vasco da Gama is brought forward into the future on a visit to twentieth-century India. 3 Likewise, just as Katz und Maus (1961) singled out one thematic strand 1 Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (London: Boyers, 1980), 174; Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 150. 2 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ‘Gruppe 1647’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 March 1979, quoted in Werner Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter: Günter Grass’s Das Treffen in Telgte’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 100 (1981), 274–87, 280. 3 See for example Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’; also Alexander Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 41, Bithell Series of Dissertations, 20 (London: Maney, 1995), 108–11.

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from the epic novel Hundejahre (1963), Das Treffen in Telgte draws together fictionalized past meetings of authors as explored in the Butt chapters ‘Von der Last böser Zeit’ (Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius in 1634) and ‘Die andere Wahrheit’ (Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Clemens and Bettina Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Philipp Otto Runge in 1807) and uses this concept to capture the essence of the very real meetings of the Gruppe 47. Furthermore, the idea of the text as an occasional piece that draws on a significant amount of historical source material has led some commentators to praise the author’s writerly skill in a strikingly derogatory manner. Alexander Weber draws attention to this phenomenon, quoting the reviewer Reinhard Baumgart’s conclusion: ‘auch rein handwerkliche Qualitäten (selbst Wurmlöcher in Stilmöbel setzen) sind eben Qualitäten’. 4 With the exception of Weber’s excellent study, which shows how not only baroque motifs but also a baroque approach to literature as a rhetorical art permeates much of Grass’s work, the result of such a narrow understanding of the text has been a universal reluctance on the part of Grass’s critics to incorporate Das Treffen in Telgte, either thematically or structurally, into his wider work. Where the other derivative pieces have found wider resonance—Katz und Maus is read as an integral part of Grass’s body of Danzig fiction and Kopfgeburten, the other short piece linked to Der Butt, is often interpreted alongside the author’s political activities—Das Treffen in Telgte still stands out on its own. When read in terms of authorship, however, Das Treffen in Telgte is neither an oddity nor a mere spin-off. In fact, it is eminently suited to introducing the issue of authorship that runs throughout Grass’s work. As the only prose text that deals directly with the topic, it reveals much about Grass’s understanding of the authorial role in both its socio-political and textual contexts. This has been noted by Werner Hoffmeister, who understands the text as a direct contribution to the wider 1970s debates about literature and politics and as a counter to the trend of ‘Neue Innerlichkeit’. 5 What he does not and cannot do, given the time his piece was written, however, is link this piece to the rest of Grass’s œuvre. In the overarching interpretation that I am offering, on the other hand, Das Treffen in Telgte is not just interesting with reference to its immediate time of writing. It takes a central place in a body of work that repeatedly circles around questions of authorship but rarely addresses them directly. The text not only emphasizes 4 Reinhard Baumgart, ‘300 Gramm wohlabgehangene Prosa: Die behäbige Literatenkomödie des Günter Grass’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5, 6 October 1979, 132, quoted in Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature, 149–50. 5 Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’, 282.

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how important the Gruppe 47 community of authors was for Grass’s own self-understanding, it also highlights the role played by predecessors in earlier centuries, allowing him to relativize the contemporary experience of authorship and give it historical weight. Furthermore, dealing with questions of authorship on both a thematic and structural level, Das Treffen in Telgte foreshadows later works by pointing at seemingly timeless issues of authorship whilst reflecting on its own contingent status as an authorial construction. As this study will show, where questions of authorship are the implicit sine qua non of the rest of Grass’s writing, Das Treffen in Telgte is unique in making that sine qua non into its explicit theme. It provides three key models of authorship that will inform not only the subject of this chapter but also much of what follows in my subsequent discussion of Grass’s œuvre: the author as a political figure, the author as a textual position, and the author as an ironic construct.

THE AUTHOR AS A POLITICAL FIGURE The first model of authorship developed during the text is also the most obvious one. Where critics discerned a roman à clef, they were responding to the text’s anachronistic representation of a familiar grouping: the baroque poets meeting at Telgte at the invitation of Simon Dach is explicitly linked in the first paragraph of the text to the Gruppe 47 gatherings organized by Hans Werner Richter. This immediately introduces a political dimension. Although both meetings, the real and the imaginary, were in the first instance designed to provide a literary forum for German-language authors, the political circumstances of the time—the end of the Thirty Years War and the immediate post-Second World War period respectively—invariably informed discussion. In the case of the real Gruppe 47, this was not least because those authors who were particularly active at the time of the group’s inception had strong political persuasions and believed that authors and intellectuals should work together to have a direct influence on political events. Such a model of conscious political cohesiveness entailed a break with the deep-rooted apolitical construction of authorship in the German public consciousness. In order to understand the contemporary significance of this new political model of authorship and Grass’s presentation of it in Das Treffen in Telgte, some background information is required. Scholars writing on socio-political conceptions of twentieth-century German authors invariably find themselves compelled to go back to former centuries to try to anchor the debates in a German context that is quite

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distinct from French or Anglo-American parallels. Helmut Müller, for example, begins his study of West German writers and politics with Schiller, while in the recent Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany, William Niven, Stuart Parkes, and Fritz Wefelmeyer each stress the importance of preceding nineteenth-century traditions, with the failed revolutions of 1848 marking a clear caesura. 6 Before this date, a link between literary and political activity seemed perfectly legitimate. The failure of the revolutions, however, not only saw authors beginning to turn their back on politics in favour of a literary sphere that was perceived to be closer to such overarching values as truth and beauty; but, even more importantly, the wider middle classes also rejected political engagement: The post-1848 tendency of intellectuals and the middle classes in general to eschew direct political engagement in favour of culture and education was to have fatal consequences, leading initially to political quietism but then, at the outbreak of war in 1914, to an aestheticized nationalism which lacked any appreciation of the war’s political causes or implications, let alone any sense of its potentially disastrous effects. 7

As well as having clear political consequences, this trend towards divorcing culture from politics had profound implications for the social position of authors. This is nowhere more evident than in the development and usage of the terms ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’, literally ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’, on the one hand, and ‘(political) power’, on the other. By the early twentieth century, these terms had come to signify an entrenched opposition, with authors such as Heinrich Mann quite convinced that it was the task of authors and other cultured individuals to provide an enlightened counterweight to the evil-doings of power-hungry politicians. 8 Not just authors of the time, but also their wide circle of bourgeois readers believed this German spirit to be the repository of everything that was good in the German character, while political developments were either largely ignored, or, as Niven suggests, understood only in aesthetic terms. This division is neatly encapsulated 6 Helmut L. Müller, Die literarische Republik: Westdeutsche Schriftsteller und die Politik (Basel: Beltz 1982); William Niven, ‘Introduction’, in William Niven and James Jordan, eds, Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 1–22; Stuart Parkes, ‘The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?’, in Niven and Jordan, eds, Politics and Culture, 43–62; Fritz Wefelmeyer, ‘From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century’, in Niven and Jordan, eds, Politics and Culture, 23–41. 7 Niven, ‘Introduction’, 4. 8 See Müller, Die literarische Republik, for a brief but thorough history of the terms Geist and Macht.

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in Karl Mannheim’s description in his Ideologie und Utopie (1927) of the German spirit as ‘free-floating’ (‘freischwebend’). 9 The belief that German authors, as representatives of the nation’s cultural spirit, must not only keep themselves unsullied by political developments but also provide a counter to these developments became most pronounced under the National Socialist regime from 1933–45, when much of the German cultural elite was forced into exile in order to survive the machinations of Nazi political ideology. The experience of these authors directly affected post-war understandings of the author’s socio-political role. Helmut Müller discerns two basic readings of Germany’s political collapse that went on to become highly influential in the post-war period. Thomas Mann suggested that the German nation had been brought to its knees because political power, ‘Macht’, had overpowered ‘Geist’ within the German race. 10 The solution was that the representatives of the positive German cultural spirit must reassert themselves in the centre of society, and thus help both the nation and its citizens restore a workable balance. Exiled authors returning to West Germany were cast as the untainted German spirit returning to cure a sick people, a concept that was clearly going to meet with resistance amongst those who had remained in the country. The second reading is one exemplified by Bertolt Brecht, who saw the split more clearly in terms of political allegiances. In line with the founding ideology of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), he believed there was on the one hand a ‘good’ Germany, constituted by those who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, and which after the war could reassert itself in the tabula rasa format of the new socialist state. On the other hand, and directly responsible for the war and all its accompanying ideology, was a fascist Germany, which subsisted underneath the rather fudged beginnings of the Federal Republic. Making no specific claims to moral superiority by virtue purely of being an author, Brecht and likeminded authors who were to choose as their cultural homeland the GDR were able to start out in a new German society after the war that at least initially welcomed input from all left-wing thinkers and cultural practitioners. Indeed, it expressly denied any ongoing schism between political power and intellectual tradition, with the author Johannes Becher elected president of the Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands, a mass state-run umbrella organization that 9 Dietz Bering traces this term to Mannheim, via Alfred Weber: see Dietz Bering, Die Intellektuellen: Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 290–303. 10 See for example Thomas Mann, ‘Deutsche Hörer!: 10. Mai 1945’, in Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, 13 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), XI, 1121–3, esp. final paragraph, 1123.

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sought to guide cultural developments. 11 However different these two understandings of the intellectual’s role in society are, they show the new possibilities that opened up to authors in the post-war period. In particular, for those authors who had remained in Germany throughout the war but wished to distance themselves from the immediate past, 1945 seemed like a real break that would allow writers to take on a more politically influential position. German authorship, so long reduced to the concept of ‘Geist’, could hope to take on a new socio-political relevance. Referring to the position of authors in the immediate post-war period, Erich Kästner summed up a general feeling that authors might at last have an important role to play in the socio-political sphere. The ironic terms in which he did so, however, highlighted the complexities of the ‘Geist und Macht’ tradition that would continue to condition their public reception: ‘Den Deutschen fehlt der große, der überlebensgroße Dichter und Denker, der sich schützend, sammelnd und die Welt beschwörend hinstellt und die Arme ausstreckt wie ein zweiter lieber Gott.’ 12 While the (West German) public was increasingly looking to authors for guidance in a world where politics had failed, the function it was prepared to allow them to take on was markedly lacking in any real socio-political relevance. Consequently, activist left-wing thinkers such as Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch, who initially saw a real possibility of filling the hole left by the discredited Nazi regime with their ideas, quickly found themselves stymied by a society that was not yet prepared to listen to their radical views. Throughout the 1950s, the upcoming generation of writers that gathered around Richter was thus forced back in on itself. These authors sought strength first in their own numbers before they tried to tackle the difficult issue of wider public recognition. Indeed, there was a sense in this period that authors were in training for the role they could see would be needed in the future. As Richter describes the Gruppe 47 meetings in 1962, even in their literary activity authors were aware of the importance of providing an exemplary lead. He lists the ideas on which the group’s activity was based as: a) demokratische Elitenbildung auf dem Gebiet der Literatur und der Publizistik; b) die praktisch angewandte Methode der Demokratie in einem Kreis von Individualisten immer wieder zu demonstrieren mit der 11 For in-depth analysis of the author’s role in the GDR, see David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 12 Erich Kästner, ‘Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen’, in Gesammelte Schriften für Erwachsene, 8 vols (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1969), VIII, 50–4, 53.

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Models of Authorship: Das Treffen in Telgte Hoffnung der Fernwirkung und der vielleicht sehr viel späteren Breiten-und Massenwirkung; c) beide Ziele zu erreichen ohne Programm, ohne Verein, ohne Organisation und ohne irgendeinem kollektiven Denken Vorschub zu leisten. 13

It is not until the beginning of the 1960s, however, that there is any real sense of this training bearing fruit. Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neue Regierung? (1961), the first major bestseller in the long line of collected volumes of political essays published in the 1960s by authors and thinkers largely associated with the Gruppe 47, 14 draws attention to the way writers are now communicating with the wider public: Der Gedanke zu diesem Buch entstand auf einer Zusammenkunft von Schriftstellern im Frühsommer dieses Jahres. Niemand dort war sich einig, niemand hatte etwa ein politisches Programm [. . .]. Gemeinsam ist den hier zu Worte kommenden 20 Schriftstellern das Unbehagen an einer satt gewordenen Demokratie [. . .]. Die Schriftsteller, die hier ihre Stimme erheben—warnend, mahnend und sehr skeptisch—sehen sich in der Tradition Frankreichs, das von Voltaire über Zola bis Jean-Paul Sartre immer seine Männer der Feder auch als Gewissen der Nation wertete. 15

It is worth dwelling for a moment on the use of the term ‘Gewissen der Nation’. Looking to the so-called French tradition, the authors present themselves as determined to be not just ‘men of the quill’ who tend to speak only to their own ranks, but also a much wider and far more socially inclusive ‘national conscience’. Aware that they will be perceived in terms of German ‘Geist’ (and the lack of any sort of unilateral political plan adds to this), they are at pains to convince their readers that this ‘Geist’ can nevertheless also play a very real part in politics. As the nation’s conscience, they can offer the German public the kind of guidance that Kästner had suspected was needed in 1946. Die Alternative thus represents 13 Hans Werner Richter, ‘Fünfzehn Jahre’, in his ed. Almanach der Gruppe 47: 1947–1962 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962), 8–14, 10–11. 14 The most important works are Die Mauer oder Der 13. August, ed. Hans Werner Richter (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961); Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neue Regierung?, ed. Martin Walser (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961); Bestandsaufnahme: Eine deutsche Bilanz 1962, ed. Hans Werner Richter (Munich: Desch, 1962); Was ist heute links?, ed. Horst Krüger (Munich: List, 1963); Plädoyer für eine neue Regierung oder Keine Alternative, ed. Hans Werner Richter (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965). Wolfgang Weyrauch’s edited collection, Ich lebe in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: List, 1961) predates Die Alternative, but it was both less widely circulated and less determined in scope. 15 Die Alternative, ed. Walser, 2.

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post-war authors’ first collective attempt to take on responsibility for the well-being of their nation. Having arrived at a working understanding and appreciation of democracy themselves, they now set about trying to guide the conscience of the reading public. Much of the activist sentiment evident in the preface to Die Alternative is shared by the baroque poets in Das Treffen in Telgte. Indeed, that such selfconscious cohesion in pursuit of public political enlightenment on the part of West Germany’s leading authors was neither completely unparalleled, nor, in the light of the group’s subsequent infighting and demise in the late 1960s, a solitary flash in the pan, is one of the major points brought home by the text. While the actual Telgte meeting itself is a fictional construct, the political motivation behind it is not, as Theodor Verweyen and Gunther Witting point out in their article ‘Polyhistors neues Glück’. They mention in particular the founding manifesto of the baroque authorial grouping, the ‘Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft’ in 1617, which clearly links literary and political agendas in its concern publicly to further ‘die deutsche Hauptsprache’. 16 While neither the baroque poets nor their modern-day equivalents met specifically in order to influence the political course of events, both saw a direct link between their literary work as authors and the wider political situation in which this work was read, and it is this politicized model of authorship as a cohesive public grouping that Grass’s text singles out in the first place for attention. Reading Das Treffen in Telgte as a celebration of Richter’s rediscovery of a model of public intellectual involvement provides one way of interpreting the assertive statement placed in the mouth of Richter’s baroque equivalent, Simon Dach, which is often quoted as the text’s motto: Schließlich war man wer. Wo alles wüst lag, glänzten einzig die Wörter. Und wo sich die Fürsten erniedrigt hatten, fiel den Dichtern Ansehen zu. Ihnen, und nicht den Mächtigen, war Unsterblichkeit sicher. (TT, 24)

Authors are not just a random scattering of humble scribes pursuing their art individually across the country, but rather a self-aware, privileged grouping whose social status is fast eclipsing that of ‘the princes’. The later Gruppe 47’s achievements in re-establishing German literature against the ruins of post-Nazi Germany are implied in such a description, while the authors’ claim to moral, if not political, superiority echoes the post-war sense that the entrenched positions of ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’ were to be reconsidered. 16 Theodor Verweyen and Gunther Witting, ‘Polyhistors neues Glück: Zu Günter Grass’s Erzählung Das Treffen in Telgte und ihrer Kritik’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 30 (1980), 451–65, 452–3.

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Likewise, the structure of the meeting itself—literary readings are followed by criticism to which the author may not reply and punctuated by breaks for refreshment and other more scurrilous activities—is clearly based on Grass’s experience of the Gruppe 47, presenting its literary achievements in a thoroughly positive light. Throughout the three days of readings, the authors successfully engage with one another’s work and pursue debates about the stylistic intricacies of literary production. No matter how disparate their religious and political convictions, the group, as the outsider Heinrich Schütz comments, is held together by a genuine commitment to literature, which, against the bankruptcy of German politics both in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, takes on a political dimension. Where politics has failed to hold the nation together, literature will provide comfort and guidance. Schütz reminds the poets of this when their meeting threatens to lose its way: ‘[Er] beantwortete die Frage nach dem Weshalb [des Treffens]: Der geschriebenen Wörter wegen, welche nach Maßen der Kunst zu setzen einzig die Dichter begnadet seien. Auch um der Ohnmacht—er kenne sie wohl—ein leises “dennoch” abzunötigen’ (TT, 91). The value of the group’s literary inclinations becomes most apparent, however, in the incident with the thistle. A stroke of literary inspiration on Gryphius’s part makes him elevate the potted thistle to the status of an emblem for Germany, ‘das Vaterland’, that has been so ravaged by war. Even when he smashes the pot to smithereens the thistle remains unharmed. Zesen is quick to spot the metaphorical implications of the symbol’s fortuitous escape—nothing can destroy the true core of Germany—and within minutes the authors have agreed on a final draft of their political manifesto. The incident shows how literary techniques can counter a stultifying sense of powerlessness and strengthen public resolve in spite of apparently insurmountable difficulties. Such heroic authorial defiance, brought to a point by Schütz and strikingly enacted by the group, is a stance consciously adopted by Grass himself on numerous occasions when speaking out on political events; I shall return to this shortly. For the moment, just pointing to the similarity between Grass’s well-known public appearances and the kind of behaviour apparently celebrated in Das Treffen in Telgte goes at least some way towards explaining the charge mentioned above that the text is to a greater or lesser extent ‘self-congratulatory’. Before the overall tone and import of the work is judged, however, the full implications of Grass’s paralleling technique must be considered. Several critics have drawn attention to an underlying sense of ambiguity in the text. Theodor Verweyen and Gunther Witting, for example, see in Zesen a rather questionable tendency to aestheticize everything, to the detriment of both decorum (his fascination with the

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dead bodies in the river) and logic (his confused assertion, ‘Nie werde Frieden werden. Weil man die Sprache nicht rein halte’, TT, 56). 17 Referred to as ‘den wirren Zesen’ (TT, 57), and often acting inappropriately, he is largely a figure of ridicule in the text. Given the distance taken in the text from such an extreme prioritization of literary matters, Verweyen and Witting quite rightly question the apparently self-congratulatory assertion quoted above, ‘Wo alles wüst lag, glänzten einzig die Wörter’. Words shining like jewels seem remarkably out of place in a landscape completely devastated by war, and this has repercussions for the meeting as a whole. The poets’ self-conscious gathering is now equated with selfaggrandisement, which rings of misplaced pride and petty opportunism, while the invocation of their own immortality seems a thoroughly unfitting response to the suffering of thousands of ordinary mortals. In fact, cut off from immediate political upheavals as they are on the island, the poets are described at numerous points in the text as being peculiarly immune to the human suffering that surrounds them. The second uninvited guest, the state secretary-cum-commander and undiscovered literary talent, Christoffel Gelnhausen, brings this to a point: ‘ginge die Welt unter, würden sich diese Herren, inmitten Gepolter, um falsche oder richtig gesetzte Versfüße streiten’ (TT, 41). Furthermore, the underlying group dynamics cause the reader constantly to revise his or her understanding of the authors. They might have gathered in the noble pursuit of literary excellence, as Heinrich Schütz says, and they may be genuinely attempting to contribute to a laudable collective resolution of major literary and political issues, but their tendency to get sidetracked by petty argument, their indulgence in food, drink, and sex, and a pattern of distinctly unconsidered herd-like behaviour make it difficult to see in them any serious image of inspirational leadership, political or otherwise. These all-too-human weaknesses are emphasized in the comparison, apparently by Grass himself, of the writers to children: ‘[Dach] unterwarfen die Dichter ihren oft kindlich betonten Eigenwillen’ (TT, 31) comments a markedly distanced narrator, and it is hardly surprising that these wilful children cannot sustain either harmony or moral rectitude for long. Not only do they quickly become enmeshed in religious strife with one another, they treat the dishonest spectacle offered by Gelnhausen when he clears the inn as a ‘Satyrspiel’, a piece of comic entertainment laid on just for 17 Verweyen and Witting, ‘Polyhistors neues Glück’. See also Andreas Graf, ‘ “ein leises ‘dennoch’ ”: Zum ironischen Wechselbezug von Literatur und Wirklichkeit in Günter Grass’ Erzählung Das Treffen in Telgte’, Deutsche Vierteljarhrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 63 (1989), 282–94; Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’.

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them. Later on, their personal vanity causes them to fall for another of Gelnhausen’s illegal schemes, and when they realize how they have been duped, something close to mass hysteria breaks out: ‘Erst nachdem sie genug Zeit lang ihr Elend um den Tisch herum ausgekostet hatten, begannen die Poeten sich und einander anzuklagen’ (TT, 125). Even when they reach what is arguably their finest hour where, drawing on their literary skills, they finally manage to complete their political manifesto, they are quickly distracted by more mundane things: Es war zum Glockenläuten. Doch jenes Handglöckchen, das in der Tür zur Großen Diele angeschlagen wurde, hatte minderen Anlaß. [. . .] Als die versammelten Dichter aus der Großen Diele in die Kleine Wirtsstube drängten, achtete niemand mehr der zwischen Scherben heilgebliebenen Distel. Alle waren nur noch auf Fisch aus. (TT, 166–7)

These local incidents of ambiguity, themselves important sources of humour within the text, are backed up by clear signals of structural ambiguity. Introduced with the sentence ‘Gestern wird sein, was morgen gewesen ist’, the whole import of the parallel underlying the text is relativized. Grass’s play with tenses emphasizes above all the passing of time and the intangibility of the present. While the sentence refers to the way in which the text, from the baroque perspective, maps the future Gruppe 47 onto the past baroque gathering, more importantly it draws the attention of Grass’s contemporaries to the transitory nature of their own socio-political context. The comparison offers both comfort and a careful warning. Authors can take heart in the worthiness of their literary and political efforts, paralleled as they are by some of Germany’s finest poets, thinkers, and social historians from centuries past. With various models of involvement offered by the crafty Weckherlin, the pious Gerhardt, or the realist Gelnhausen, the text draws together a community of politically aware authors across time, offering both inspiration for and justification of commitment to a public role. However, it equally warns authors against overplaying their own importance. Just as the baroque group never had any measurable effect on the politics of their day and have subsequently faded into relative obscurity, so too will today’s exponents find themselves cast ever further back into the past by a succession of new tomorrows. This gains a particular poignancy when the tale’s exact time of writing is taken into consideration. By 1979 the Gruppe 47 had already been defunct for more than ten years. While prominent participants produced numerous short manifestos in the early 1960s that helped establish authors (notably Grass, Heinrich Böll, Martin Walser, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger) individually as political players, by the end of

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that decade increasing tensions within the group made authors incapable of any kind of strong cohesive stance. If all the group’s meetings are telescoped into one, they do not fare much better than their baroque predecessors: nothing of any lasting political import is produced, only the idealist model of public intellectual involvement remains. Similarly, although the text as a whole documents the poets’ meeting as an important event for all concerned, it is dismissive of any tangible results for the wider world: ‘So blieb ungesagt, was doch nicht gehört worden wäre’ (TT, 173), claims the narrator when revealing that the authors’ political manifesto was burned. Those critics who have looked beyond the apparently self-congratulatory projection of Gruppe 47 authors onto past literary giants to unearth an underlying ambiguity have tended to link such ambiguity to Grass’s evaluation of the group’s achievements. Weber, for example, argues that the fact that the manifesto is burned at the end of the novel points less to a general dismissal of the power of literature than to specific criticism of the avoidable demise of the Gruppe 47. The group failed to act cohesively at the final Pulvermühle meeting, and this was in Grass’s eyes directly linked to the end of the group and the public standing its authors had collectively enjoyed. 18 However, Grass’s ambiguity may also be understood in a different light. While he champions Hans Werner Richter’s achievements in bringing to life, even if only for a time, a model of public intellectual involvement, he is also celebrating a rather different model of authorship which, by its very definition, runs counter to the group’s high profile public position and is not at all at odds with the authors’ collective failure to influence political decision-making. This is an understanding of the author as subject to the play of the literary text. As the following section will show, the author can be a dishonest, dissimulating character whose creative drive permits him to overlook moral sticking points and makes him only obliquely suited to political comment.

THE AUTHOR AS A TEXTUAL POSITION If the group represents a collective attempt to provide guidance of both a literary and political nature, albeit undermined by the human failings of its individual members, Schütz and Gelnhausen stand for two different and apparently opposing understandings of the poet’s vocation. Their position as uninvited guests at the meeting flags up their difference from the start. It 18

Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature, 165–6.

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also encourages a comparison between the two with respect to the way they relate to the main authorial grouping and the model of authorship that it represents. Heinrich Schütz’s unexpected arrival with Dach’s friend Heinrich Albert intimidates the poets not least because he has little time for the more popular aspects of their literary craft. Schütz, a ‘Mann von entrückter Autorität und strenger Größe, die niemand [. . .] fassen konnte’, has achieved international regard through refusing to make compromises: ‘Niemals, selbst nicht in Nebenprodukten, hatte er das Mittelmaß protestantischer Alltagserwartungen erfüllt’ (TT, 53–4). Where the poets are gathered in order to ‘serve the word’, the literature through which they do this is always also serving their patron. 19 Schütz, on the other hand, represents a kind of pure art. His music exists solely in order to honour the word and take it to its aesthetic and epistemological limits, and this is ultimately linked to a kind of religious revelation: ‘Die von Albert angesprochene schwierige Vielstimmigkeit tat er mit einem Satz ab: Solche Fertigkeit verlange die Kunst, wenn sie dem reinen Wort Gottes folge’ (TT, 69). The poets are collectively in awe of both the man and his artistic credo, and the text is designed in such a manner as to heighten this effect. Not only does Schütz’s delayed arrival at the meeting single him out from the rest of the group, he is also given a key role at two later points in the proceedings. After the first draft of the manifesto is read out the poets quickly lose sight of their original intentions, both in respect of the manifesto itself and their meeting. At this point, Schütz counters their growing sense of powerlessness by reminding them of the value of valour: they have come together ‘[a]uch um der Ohnmacht—er kenne sie wohl—ein leises “dennoch” abzunötigen’ (TT, 91). This finds an immediate echo amongst the poets and quickly resolves the impending crisis. Significantly, it is also a direct nod to Grass himself. In his well-known provocative poem ‘Zorn, Ärger, Wut’, published in the 1967 collection, Ausgefragt, Grass polemicized against ‘Ohnmacht’, suggesting that following a complicated recipe for brawn might offer a more constructive way of venting one’s anger than falling into despair. By the late 1970s Grass had retained his distaste of soul-searching despair, but dropped the sarcasm. In Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus he played with the image of the writer as Sisyphus, heroic challenger to the gods and champion of the absurd. While the direct political implications of this comparison remain ambiguous in Kopfgeburten—and I will return to this 19 Schütz says of their meeting, ‘Ihre Sache jedoch, die dem Wort diene und dem armen Vaterland nütze, bleibe groß und müsse ihren Fortgang finden’ (TT, 122).

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in Chapter 3—in later political speeches Grass began to present his identification with Sisyphus in terms very close to the defiant ‘dennoch’ uttered by Schütz. In 1983, for example, he describes his response to the challenge of contemporary politics as follows: ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt verlangt von uns, daß wir nicht wehleidig dem Hang zur Katastrophe nachgeben, sondern uns gegen das Abwärtsgefälle stemmen. [. . .] Erst wenn wir aufgeben, den Stein am Fuße des Berges liegen lassen und nicht mehr Sisyphos sein wollten, erst dann wären wir ganz verloren.’ 20 Endowing Schütz with such insight increases this character’s position of authority for those familiar with Grass’s work. Schütz’s status in the text is further enhanced at the second crisis point faced by the poets. Where the group collectively allow vanity to blind their acumen and fall for Gelnhausen’s flattering explanation of the banquet’s provenance, Schütz shows himself to be an unrivalled moral authority, immediately seeing through Gelnhausen’s trickery and forcing him to tell the truth. Even more importantly, his clear understanding of the poets’ worthy ideals subsequently saves the meeting for a second time. If earlier he took on a touch of Grass’s authorial authority, now he seems to be no less than God’s own representative. While the poets stare as broken men into the apocalypse of their own making, Schütz provides absolution: ‘Ihre Mitschuld an dem Greuel sei vor Gott klein. Ihre Sache jedoch, die dem Wort diene und dem armen Vaterland nütze, bleibe groß und müsse ihren Fortgang finden’ (TT, 122). This point, just before his departure, encapsulates everything that Schütz represents in the text: he stands for absolute art and absolute authority, backing a quasi-religious understanding of authorship as answerable only to the word. It is only in doggedly pursuing such a purist notion of their vocation that authors can hope to have any tangible impact on their wider socio-political surroundings: only when they persist in ‘serving the word’ through thick and thin might their efforts also be ‘of use’ to the fatherland. Christoffel Gelnhausen provides a second point of contrast for the group, and he too directly challenges their tendency to be distracted by worldly concerns. His standpoint, however, is almost the exact opposite to that of Schütz. Where Schütz speaks in lofty terms of artistic truth, Gelnhausen brings to the debate his grounding in reality. The poets have for the most part escaped direct experience of the war; Gelnhausen, on the other hand, made his way up the ladder of regional bureaucracy, working as a 20 Günter Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’ (1983), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XVI, 71–9, 78–9.

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state secretary, charged with a commando of troops. His understanding of political power, together with his ability to manipulate it to the poets’ advantage, earns him admiration in the first instance. Harsdörffer recommends him to Dach in the following terms: ‘Der lüge bessere Mär, als sich erdichten lasse. [. . .] Dem seien die Kirchenväter, aber auch alle Götter und deren Gestirn zur Hand. Der kenne des Lebens Unterfutter und wisse sich obendrein überall ortskundig [. . .]. Der könne ihnen womöglich helfen’ (TT, 12). Where Schütz’s fame and moral rigour endow him with absolute authority, here the inverse is the case: it is Gelnhausen’s very ordinariness, his grounding in the political circumstances of the day, that puts him in a position of power over the helpless poets. Furthermore, where the poets’ less successful attempts to follow literary rules are condemned by Schütz as lamentable art (Gryphius’s opera is a case in point), Gelnhausen criticizes similar failings as ignorance of social practice. He makes a mockery of Birken’s rigid rules concerning fitting characterization, and launches a staunch attack on linguistic purism that the poets are unable to rebut: ‘Wer immerfort nur reinlich halte und dem Besen zuspreche, der kehre am Ende das Leben aus’ (TT, 38). Throughout the meeting Gelnhausen is given some of the best quips, which has led critics to speculate that he, the unacknowledged literary talent and political realist, is Grass’s own counterpart in the text. 21 Certainly, his linguistic policy echoes Grass’s calls in the mid-1960s for the preservation of German dialects, and the words in which he expresses his own desire to write just before his dramatic exit from the meeting are reminiscent of both the early enthusiastic reviews of Die Blechtrommel and Grass’s later description of his intentions: ‘[er werde] den großen Sack aufmachen, [. . .] und der Sprache den Freipaß geben, damit sie laufe, wie sie gewachsen sei: grob und leisgestimmt, heil und verletzt, hier angewelscht, dort maulhenckolisch, immer aber dem Leben und seinen Fässern abgezapft’ (TT, 148). 22 Werner Hoffmeister comments on this passage, ‘Diese Worte, denen wir ein Stück Grass’scher Poetik in nuce abhören, sind dem jungen Christoffel Gelnhausen (alias Grimmelshausen) in den Mund gelegt’. 23 However, while Grass might indeed make Gelnhausen his mouthpiece on 21 See in particular Klaus Haberkamm, ‘ “Mit allen Weisheiten Saturns geschlagen”: Glosse zu einem Aspekt der Gelnhausen-Figur in Günter Grass’ Treffen in Telgte’, Simpliciana, 1 (1979), 67–78. 22 See for comparison Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Wilhelm Meister, auf Blech getrommelt’, in Gert Loschütz, ed., Von Buch zu Buch: Günter Grass in der Kritik (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1968), 8–12, and Günter Grass, ‘Rückblick auf die Blechtrommel—oder Der Autor als fragwürdiger Zeuge. Ein Versuch in eigener Sache’ (1973), in Werkausgabe, XV, 323–32. 23 Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’, 278.

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occasion, such authorial affinity with a character is not to be confused with self-dramatization. Rather, the time at which this authorial affinity comes to the fore is significant. As in the case of Schütz, Gelnhausen reaches the height of his authority just before he leaves the group. His parting shot is to extol the virtues of an authorial vocation that finds its grist in the everyday, turning this, rather than poetic rules or staid ideas of bienséance, into literature. Once this message has been forcefully imparted, his presence at the meeting, just like that of Heinrich Schütz, is no longer necessary. 24 His function in the text is not to represent the author, but rather a concept of authorship that only partly corresponds to that of Günter Grass. Constructed as foils to the main group of writers, both visitors can therefore be seen as authorial mouthpieces without actually representing Grass directly. This is important, because if they did echo Grass in a similar manner to Simon Dach and Hans Werner Richter it would be difficult to move the text’s exploration of authorship beyond the specific context of the Gruppe 47. As it is, however, they successfully represent two different understandings of the poet’s vocation. This symbolic role is further enforced by the way they stand out, for they are both in their own way larger than life. Schütz is directly described as being ‘distanced’ and ‘incomprehensible’, while Gelnhausen, as numerous critics have observed, is partly based on the young Grimmelshausen and partly endowed with the biography of this author’s most famous fictional character, Simplicissimus. 25 Perhaps most strikingly, though, however different their understanding of the authorial vocation might be on one level—Schütz propounding total dedication to pure art, Gelnhausen revelling in the underside of life— the two are pointedly brought together at an important caesura in the text. The poets, having inadvertently fallen partisan to Gelnhausen’s illegal plundering, find themselves devoid of all moral rectitude. Their self-belief as a grouping with socio-political weight is severely shaken. Gelnhausen has sunk to his moral nadir. Yet at precisely this point the authoritative Schütz reinstates him, not just as a member of society, but as an author in his own right. Having already taken his leave of the rest of the group, he draws Gelnhausen to one side, refuses to accept the rogue’s piteous request for absolution and instead addresses him as an equal. He alone has recognized Gelnhausen’s innate suitability for the poet’s vocation, advising 24 In a slightly different argument Ruprecht Wimmer has also picked up on this literary significance attributed to Gelnhausen’s character: ‘ “Ich jederzeit”: Zur Gestaltung der Perspektiven in Günter Grass’ Treffen in Telgte’, Simpliciana, 6–7 (1985), 139–50. 25 See Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’ and Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of the Baroque, 135–56, esp. 139–40 for more discussion of this point.

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him, ‘Er dürfe seine Lügengeschichten nie wieder mörderisch ausleben, sondern müsse sie beherzt niederschreiben’ (TT, 122). The logic permitting such mutual sympathy between two such apparently opposing characters is as simple as it is surprising: the position that an author takes on must be justified first and foremost in textual terms. Total dedication to his art makes the author answerable to a different kind of moral authority than conventional constructions of right and wrong. Literature permits a different kind of reality, one that not only tolerates roguishness but also recognizes it as an important source of inspiration. Significantly, just as with Schütz’s ‘dennoch’ and Gelnhausen’s linguistic ideals, Grass has spoken elsewhere about ‘Lügengeschichten’ and the idea of different social and literary realities. In Die Blechtrommel Oskar refers to the act of narrating his life story as a case of ‘etwas vor[lü]gen’ (BT, 9), while in interview in 1971 Grass speaks of art’s challenge to our everyday understanding of reality: ‘Alle Künste [. . .] konfrontieren mit der nur enggefaßten, faßbaren Wirklichkeit eine neue Wirklichkeit, eine literarische, eine bildhafte, eine musikalische, eine theatermäßige, die aber dann auch als eine solche begriffen werden muß’. 26 Schütz’s approval of Gelnhausen’s craft thus carries a triple seal of authorial approval. The role played by both characters, cast as larger than life and endowed with important aspects of Grass’s own public persona, allows them to transcend the group of writers and their contingent concerns. They are brought together by their understanding of authorship, the positioning of which in the text is clearly intended to provide direct competition to the laudable but ailing notion of the writer as self-appointed ‘Gewissen der Nation’. This may be summed up as the second model of authorship evident in Das Treffen in Telgte, and it is exclusively text-centric. Indulging in the liberties of art, the author is by no means necessarily a socially acceptable figure. Rather, at the risk of being distanced and unfathomable like Schütz, or a dissimulating rogue like Gelnhausen, he serves literature first and society second. The two contrasting models of authorship I have outlined above—a publicly accountable, cohesive grouping on the one hand and an array 26 Günter Grass in interview with Getrude Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Ein Gegner der Hegelschen Geschichtsphilosophie’ (1971), in Günter Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, X, ed. Klaus Stallbaum (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987), 106–20, 113. In interview in 1999 Grass referred directly to his ‘Naturell, dem Bedürfnis, Lügengeschichten zu erzählen [. . .]; in etwas hineinzuschlüpfen, mich aufzugeben’, but obviously this link comes quite some time after Das Treffen in Telgte: Günter Grass in interview with Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmnen der Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Günter Grass, Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung & Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999), 43–62, 50.

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of shady literary loners answerable only to the laws of the text on the other—is a productive tension that not only goes through Das Treffen in Telgte, but also Grass’s writing as a whole. Thematically speaking, the two models relativize one another within the text. The charge that the main group of writers, together with their politicized self-understanding, is presented in a self-congratulatory manner is easily rebutted with reference to the serious challenge that Schütz and Gelnhausen pose to their literary credentials. At the same time, the laudable intention underlying their meeting is never really called into doubt. Meanwhile, the literary loners do not offer any practical model for socio-political improvement beyond Schütz’s vague encouragement to the group to continue in their efforts. Their sudden appearance and disappearance underline their one-sidedness, their fundamental unsuitability to uniting the different pulls of literature and politics. The result is that neither model on its own offers a satisfactory all-round paradigm of authorship. Likewise, the text does not have any answers: whether the manifesto would have had any impact can never be known for sure (although the narrator dismisses it), and exactly why the manifesto never made it into the wider world—who was responsible for causing the fire?—remains a mystery. Read with Grass’s exploration of authorship in mind, however, these uncertainties are not necessarily problematic. Bringing the writers together allows Grass to explore various contrasting understandings of the author’s role without running the risk of contradicting himself. Not only does the text not have any answers, it also actively poses questions. In particular, the seemingly unidentifiable first-person narrator has caused considerable speculation amongst Grass scholars. 27 Although most commentators are now agreed that any specific identity is probably untraceable, Alexander Weber has gone to some lengths to identify the first-person narrator as one historical personage. Reading the text extremely closely and applying a baroque approach to possible emblems within it, he makes a strong case for identifying the first-person narrator with the little-known poet Johann Matthias Schneuber. 28 Such an identification is convincing not only with reference to the inner logic of the text, as Weber argues in intriguing detail, but also with respect to the rest of Grass’s writing. Schneuber is characterized in the text as a troublemaker, enjoying 27 Wimmer argues quite convincingly that the text resists any specific author-character identification in Wimmer, ‘Perspektiven in Treffen in Telgte’. 28 Alexander Weber, ‘Johann Matthias Schneuber: Der Ich-Erzähler in Günter Grass’ Das Treffen in Telgte: Entschlüsselungsversuch eines poetisch-emblematischen Rätsels’, Daphnis, 15 (1986), 95–122.

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spreading unkind rumours, jealous of the success of others and keen to mock. This behaviour both marginalizes him from the main group of authors and reflects the first-person narrator’s own marginalization within the text (there are comparatively few direct references to him) together with his penchant for literary intrigue. Most importantly, in the context of the argument in this study, elevating an untrustworthy schemer to the important position of first-person narrator introduces on a structural level the second model of authorship discussed above. The narrator deliberately causes confusion about the course of events and his own relationship to them, calling his identity into doubt and playing petty power games with the reader. ‘Ich wußte sogar, was niemand sonst wußte’ (TT, 112), he boldly claims with reference to unfolding political events, yet when it comes to exactly who said what at the meeting, he cannot even remember whether he or someone else spoke: ‘Jemand (ich?) fragte’ (TT, 29). This sort of narrative vagueness is familiar to Grass readers from the ‘Danzig Trilogy’ onwards. The text of Das Treffen in Telgte thereby functions as a deliberately wicked example of the turn that a text-centric model of authorship can take. Answerable only to the word—and the narrator first introduces himself with the words ‘schreibe ich auf ’—he manages to absolve himself of all responsibility for his text by thoroughly obfuscating his identity within it. The narrator’s blatant disregard for narrative accountability stands in stark contrast to the event he narrates—the authors’ collective attempt to take on a position of responsibility vis-à-vis their literature and their country. Not only within the text (the two different conceptions of authorship), but also across the text (form and content) Grass thus plays different models of authorship against one another. The open-endedness of the text arises because Grass wants to allow space for both conceptions of authorship, not to pitch one against the other. In so doing, he carefully avoids placing a clear self-image into any one of the characters, the narrator included. Instead, aspects of himself and his authorial credo are scattered across the text. It is no accident that there are similarities between Gelnhausen’s trumpeted literary style and that of the author of Die Blechtrommel, that Schütz speaks words of political defiance in the best Grass fashion, or indeed that much of the author’s personal experience of the Gruppe 47 informs the generally positive description of the baroque poets while the first-person narrator is unrepentantly untrustworthy in the best Günter Grass fashion. Grass is both everywhere and nowhere in his text, not least because it feeds off a tension that is fundamental not only to contemporary debates about

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literature and the world, but also to his own self-conception as an author functioning in the public sphere.

THE AUTHOR AS AN IRONIC CONSTRUCT The importance for Grass of the ideas that he explores in Das Treffen in Telgte can be seen in his earlier, well-known 1966 essay ‘Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unter Berücksichtigung nicht vorhandener Höfe’. Referring to his own recent involvement in politics, he states: Das aber heißt: Kompromisse anstreben. Seien wir uns dessen bewußt: Das Gedicht kennt keine Kompromisse; wir aber leben von Kompromissen. Wer diese Spannung tätig aushält, ist ein Narr und ändert die Welt. 29

Although couched in different terms to the models developed above, the basic issue at stake—how authors exist in literature and how they exist in the world—is the same. Grass’s description of the court fool sketches out an ideal model of authorship that unites socio-political efficacy (changing the world) with utter self-absorption (the image of the fool bound up in his own impenetrable logic). The very title of Grass’s speech implies that it is impossible for such literary fools to exist today—the indulgent courts are missing—but this does not stop him concluding his speech in rousing terms. Likewise, his work embraces two apparently irreconcilable models of authorship: the author as a socially responsible figure and the author as a textual position accountable only for the overall aesthetic success of his work. Although Grass develops these ideas without any specific reference to theories of authorship, they do at least in part reflect influential theoretical debate as led by the French thinkers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and it is useful to bring some of the terms they have suggested into my discussion of Grass’s techniques. Foucault’s ideas on authorship form part of his wider reflections on knowledge and society, as developed in The Order of Things. This work set out to describe how certain ways of thinking about the world—epistemes— came to dominate at different historical periods, conditioning scientific output (in its widest sense) at the unconscious level. As he points out in 29 Günter Grass, ‘Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unter Berücksichtigung nicht vorhandener Höfe’ (1966), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 167–72, 172.

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his foreword to the English edition, this concern is intimately linked to an attempt to move beyond the historical subject, who has been traditionally held responsible for developments in knowledge, locating this knowledge instead in underlying, discrete epistemological currents. Arguing that the traditional focus on the individual subject ignores man’s inability to think outside of the system in which he exists and leads to a ‘transcendental consciousness’, he posits that ‘the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice’. 30 Where Foucault’s rejection of the historical human subject as the origin of knowledge led him to reconsider the history of science, Roland Barthes also suggested a radical break with the biographical subject. Barthes’s focus, however, was very specifically the literary text. His dramatically entitled essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) opens by boldly proclaiming the death of the literary subject: As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. 31

The author’s ‘death’, stated here in an entirely unqualified manner, is presented as the prerequisite for the literary text. As the essay moves from this blanket assertion of textual autonomy vis-à-vis the author towards consideration of the role of the reader, however, a shift occurs. The final paragraph builds up to an exhortation to commit the titular murder that now seems to lie ahead of us: ‘we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. 32 Barthes’s essay is rendered perplexing by a distinct confusion as to whether or not the death to which he refers has actually taken place. Is he describing an important literary principle or exhorting his readers to revolutionize the social practice of reading? The implications of the paradox within his argument would seem to be that he is trying simultaneously to follow two different strategies of reading literature, both of which render the author irrelevant. He first prioritizes writing, but then looks to the reader to solve the rapidly ensuing 30 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1991), p. xiv. 31 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–8, 142. 32 Ibid., 148.

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problem of textual unity: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’ 33 While Barthes’s ideas are interesting and important in as much as they put forward an understanding of the authorial subject as a construct rather than a biographical given, he is careless in describing how exactly the subject, whether author or reader, relates to discourse, in this case the literary text. In his essay ‘What is an Author?’ (1968), Foucault picks up on this, responding to and developing Barthes’s assertions in line with his own interest in an autonomous discourse of knowledge. Whilst he subscribes to some of his fellow theoretician’s radical statements pertaining to the nature of writing and death, he is not prepared to discount the non-literary sphere, that is to say the socio-political context in which author, text, and the literary discourse itself exist. Instead, he sets out how ‘the author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture’, that is to say not only represents much more than simply a biographical person, but also reflects contemporary social practice. 34 Consequently, he replaces the term ‘author’ with the concept ‘author function’, defined as ‘the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call “author” ’. 35 Foucault’s concern is to show how the author is a label that has come to stand for the way we relate to literature in general: These aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations we force texts to undergo, the connections we make, the traits we establish as pertinent, the continuities we recognize, or the exclusions we practice. 36

The term ‘author’ is invoked by the critic or reader to confer on his or her work a certain thematic and stylistic unity as well as an overall signification. Foucault then describes how an author, now understood not merely as a name but as an author function, is conventionally located within his or her textual corpus. First, the author is used as a historical reference point: events within a text are understood in line with the author’s biography and life and times. Secondly, he or she stands for unity of writing: any stylistic 33

Ibid., 148. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rainbow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 3 vols (London: Penguin, 2000–2002), II, ed. James D. Faubion, 205–22, 211. 35 Ibid., 211, 213. 36 Ibid., 213–4. 34

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deviation is to be understood as evolution, maturation, or outside influence. Thirdly, the author confers conceptual or theoretical coherence: the contradictions within a series of texts are neutralized by reference to the apparently organic whole of the author’s worldview. Finally, the author is understood as a particular source of expression, manifested equally in various literary forms. Across a series of works the author, and what is known about the author, condition how each individual text is read historically, stylistically, conceptually, and generically. Having laid out what the author has come to stand for, Foucault subsequently sets about creating a bridge between the longstanding constructions of authorship and more recent radical claims about the author’s textual irrelevance. Carrying out multiple functions within the text, he assesses, necessarily entails a certain instability of location, and this explains why it might be justifiable to think of the author in terms of absence: Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator’s account, neither the firstperson pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance. [. . .] [A]ll discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self. 37

While readers and critics conventionally construct the author in line with a certain unified stance in and towards the text, the author is at the same time fragmented into multiple functions that render his or her position visà-vis the text impossible to locate. In Foucault’s argument such positional problems lead not so much to the death of the author within the text as to his or her fragmentation across it. This ‘plurality of self ’ is in turn kept in check by society’s reconstruction of the biographical, pre-existing author in order to police textual meaning: ‘The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.’ 38 This allows Foucault to come to a paradoxical conclusion. While on the one hand the author is presented as a position constructed by the text and its readers (and exactly who or what constructs this position when is not entirely clear), he or she at the same time operates in society as a figure of authority, which Foucault construes 37

Ibid., 215.

38

Ibid., 221.

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in terms of ideology: the author is an ‘ideological figure’ briefed to act as ‘regulator of the fictive’. 39 The above description of the basic tenets of Foucault’s argument should make clear that his understanding of authorship embraces both textual and social aspects. An author is a kind of social role, conditioned by social discourse in line with dominant ideology, and a textual role, conditioned at times by the text itself and at times by those readers and critics who use the author as an interpretative paradigm for this text. Foucault’s argument is invaluable for pointing out the different ways authorship can be constructed and the different agents that can be involved in this process. It is not without its difficulties, however. The very range of his argument is arguably its biggest stumbling point, as Adrian Wilson points out in his masterful critical exegesis on the essay. 40 Foucault criticizes Barthes for essentially replacing the author with écriture, yet in his own attempt to explore authorship in its various legal, epistemological, and social contexts he can be charged with doing the same thing with the terms ‘text’ and ‘discourse’. As Wilson points out, these are used not only interchangeably but also take on quite contradictory meanings as the argument develops. Furthermore, and I am again reiterating Wilson’s criticisms, Foucault’s argument, that apparently sets out to investigate how the authorial subject functions within the world and the text, ends by erasing the author’s individuality entirely: the author becomes a series of textual positions, ‘a plurality of egos’ that the author function is variously claimed to comprise of and to cause. Such a dismissal of the subject is not only inconsistent with its own terms (Wilson deems the term ‘author function’ to descend into incoherence), it also goes no way towards accounting for the fact that, however authors are constructed, they are always constructed as a personal being. This latter point is of signal importance in my discussion of Grass’s investigation of authorship. While playing with models of social and textual construction on a number of levels, Grass never loses sight of the power of the individual to shape the public image of authorship. Not only does Treffen in Telgte reveal his own indebtedness to the mentor figure of Hans Werner Richter, much of its value as an inspirational piece for contemporary authors lies in the very specific biographical portraits it draws of past authorial figureheads. Likewise, even those characters who might be described as representatives of a particularly textual notion of 39

Ibid., 222. Adrian Wilson, ‘Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis’, Modern Language Review, 99 (2004), 339–63. 40

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authorship, Schütz and Gelnhausen, mediate their message through powerful public personae who possess the ability to impress, shock, and provoke. If the text undermines the model of publicly accountable authorship with its own covert textual construction of authorship, it is at the same time fundamentally indebted to a construction of the author as a discrete individual. Indeed, against the depersonalizing understanding of authorship as a disembodied textual construct Grass sets not just the rather naive image of authors collectively acting as important moral sentinels, but also what one might call the overly personalized cult of the author’s image, his construction in the media-led public sphere. Engaging with the phenomenon of literary fame, Das Treffen in Telgte plays on the popular image of wellknown German authors. Part of the text’s appeal lies in the opportunity it provides the reader to ‘star spot’ as links are implied between famous contemporary writers and their baroque predecessors. In the awe-inspiring figure of Schütz it also overtly thematizes the power that an author can enjoy when his reputation precedes him. Given Grass’s own media-star status, such a presentation can hardly be read naively. In fact, the elaborate lengths Grass goes to not to insert any one clear self-representation into his text indicates that he is well aware of the power of his own authorial image, and he constructs his text as a response to this. Deliberately taking distance from his own public image, he creates from a position of comparative detachment representatives of the various different aspects of authorship with which he has been popularly associated and plays each one off against the others. His refusal to replicate directly popular media constructions of his own person and his decision instead to scatter various contrasting aspects of his authorial persona throughout the text may consequently be read as an ironic debunking of the Günter Grass myth. Even as the text appears to praise the committed image of authorship with which Grass was popularly associated in the 1960s and 1970s it undermines such a stance with another familiar Grass image, namely that of the anarchic artist from his Blechtrommel days. This, however, is in turn presented as outlandish and morally unsatisfactory. The wider consideration of authorship to which the text gives rise is deliberately inconclusive, adding a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour to Barthes’s apocalyptic textual model and Foucault’s ultimately rather sinister social model of contemporary authorship. Because Grass is not trying to produce an explanatory pamphlet on authorship, but rather is engaging with authors’ experience of inhabiting the world, contemporary literature and their own texts, he is free to investigate all the paradoxes

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evident in Foucault’s piece and actively enjoy the slippage between them from a position of ironic detachment. In Das Treffen in Telgte the firstperson narrator exploits this to the full. Slipping between the positions of the author’s representative in the opening and closing paragraphs, an anonymous delegate at the meeting, a privileged and temporally undefined commentator, and arguably the hidden textual reincarnation of Schneuber, he certainly exhibits Foucault’s authorial ‘plurality of self ’ scattered across textual discourse. At the same time, the ‘ich’ that variously points to all these possible identities retains a clear sense of personal integrity. ‘Ich weiß, wer ich damals gewesen bin’ (TT, 174) states an ‘I’ very close to Günter Grass in the closing lines, and the statement is as provocative as it is self-assured. It is not the author who suffers from fragmentation across the text, but rather the reader who is desperate to pin the text’s first-person narrator to one clear authorial position that reflects his or her own understanding of the author’s public image.

CONCLUSION By teasing the reader in such fashion, Grass brings the realities of the German public sphere to theoretical questions of authorship, but less with a view to socio-political edification than literary play. The ‘scission’ to which Foucault refers can be equated with the productive tension between the competing models of authorship outlined in this chapter. Caught between socio-political considerations and textual and readerly demands, the author finds himself constructed within a number of competing discourses. Building on Foucault’s ideas to allow for Grass’s sensitivity to the author’s personality, we can conclude that what is fragmented across the text are aspects of the author as a textual and social construct. The author is a public figure with real public responsibilities, yet he is also a literary figure frequently undermined by his own text and given to hiding within it. Constructed at every level, the best way to strive towards the ideal model of authorship— the powerful court fool—is knowingly to play these positions against one another, enjoying the manifold contradictions that they raise along the way. The following chapters will show how Grass has done just this throughout his work, starting with his self-presentation as an author in the political arena and working through his negotiation in literature of the strong public image that such high-profile socio-political activity has created.

2 Public Constructions of Authorship in Grass’s Political Writings, 1965–2005 INTRODUCTION In 1964 Horst Krüger described Grass’s frequent public appearances in the German media in the following terms: Das Ganze ist eine etwas fatale Selbstinszenierung mit schlechter Regie. Hier produziert sich ein Prominenter unter seinem Niveau. So offenbar stellt sich der deutsche Kleinbürger einen freien Schriftsteller vor. Grass spielt genau die Rolle, von der er erwartet, daß die Kleinbürger sie von ihm erwarten. Ein sublimer Fall von Konformismus. 1

The terms in which Krüger discusses Grass’s prominence are designed to ridicule the author, yet they also unwittingly explain the situation in which Grass found himself immediately after the overwhelming literary success of his so-called ‘Danzig Trilogy’. Trumpeted as a ‘Wunderkind der deutschen Literatur’ and a ‘Genie der Fabulierkunst’ after his prose literary debut, Die Blechtrommel, in 1959, he was assigned the status of a ‘Klassiker’ of postwar writing on the publication of Katz und Maus (1961) and elevated to the ‘Gipfel des deutschen Parnaß’ when Hundejahre appeared in 1963. 2 This literary reputation of superlatives was further communicated to the general public by the controversies that surrounded the conservative reception of his first two prose works. In 1959 the Bremen senate overturned the jury’s decision to award him the city’s literary prize for Die Blechtrommel largely on account of ill-informed claims of gratuitous obscenities in the work, while 1 Horst Krüger, ‘Literatur und Prominenz’, Der Literat, 12 September 1964, 97, also quoted in Merle Curtis Krueger, Authors and the Opposition: West German Writers and the Social Democratic Party from 1945 to 1969 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1982), 320. 2 Anon, Herrenjournal, December 1959; Karl August Horst, ‘Ferne Trommelschläge’, Merkur, December 1961; Hans F. Nöhbauer, ‘Die große Danziger Hunde-Sage’, Abendzeitung, 10/11 August 1963, all quoted in Franz Josef Görtz, Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1978), 53, 55.

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Kurt Ziesel, judging Katz und Maus to contain illicit pornographic scenes, began court proceedings against the author in 1962. By 1964 at the very latest, Grass possessed a strong public image that could count on attracting attention, whether he liked it or not. It was clear that he was going to have to learn to live with these public constructions of his authorial identity. Alongside this very specific construction of Grass’s public image came a more general reconfiguration of authorship in line with the turn to political involvement on the part of Germany’s leading intellectuals. Commenting on this move, Helmut Müller describes Grass as ‘der wichtigste Exponent dieser neuen Orientierung der westdeutschen Autoren’. 3 Although it is debatable who exactly was responsible for giving authors the initial impetus to reorientate themselves in the public sphere—Hans Werner Richter would surely challenge Grass for this position, along with Martin Walser— it is probably true that in terms of media reception and general public recognition of a media brand-name, Grass stood head and shoulders above the rest of his colleagues. As a result, he found himself fulfilling at least two public roles at once: the daring bad boy of post-war writing and a mediafriendly figurehead for intellectuals’ collaborative challenge to the reigning political system in West Germany. It is hardly surprising if acting out such contrasting roles led, in the first instance, to bad theatre. That Grass was prepared not only to play his part in this public theatre, but increasingly steer both public debates and perceptions of his own position within them is the starting point of this chapter. Over the course of his career Grass has had to negotiate various public constructions of his identity, and the way in which he has set about doing this reveals much about his understanding of the social, political, and historical contexts of authorship in the German public sphere. This opens up the dominant simplified media image of Grass today as a straightforward self-elected ‘national conscience’ to the literary play of self-presentation, allowing a much more subtle understanding of Grass’s public image to emerge. It is also of direct relevance for Grass’s literary work. Many critics have acknowledged the importance of Grass’s political actions when evaluating his literature, but, with the possible exception of Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, to date only one scholar has analysed Grass’s political writings in depth. 4 Timm Pietsch’s book ‘Wer 3 Helmut L. Müller, Die literarische Republik: Westdeutsche Schriftsteller und die Politik (Basel: Beltz, 1982), 67. 4 My approach has some sympathy with that of Cepl-Kaufmann as developed with respect to the early stages of Grass’s career in Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Günter Grass: Eine Analyse des Gesamtwerkes unter dem Aspekt von Literatur und Politik (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1975), and again in her analysis of Grass’s 1990 publication, Deutscher Lastenausgleich, which contains a

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hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist, published just before the present study went to press, makes a significant attempt to fill the void, arguing that the rhetorical techniques Grass develops within the political sphere lie at the very heart of his œuvre. This chapter has much sympathy with Pietsch’s approach, as both our studies aim to move away from the dominant trend of mining Grass’s political writings for straightforward facts which are then used to explain the socio-political ‘message’ believed to determine his fiction. 5 It differs, however, in placing a special emphasis on Grass’s self-presentation as an author throughout. By looking more specifically at how Grass has developed his public image within his political writings from the early 1960s to the present, it engages with the way Grass has subtly manipulated public understanding of his authorial role in such a manner as to turn to his advantage the pull between the political and textual models of authorship outlined in the previous chapter. Understanding this goes a long way towards explaining Grass’s continued dominance in the German public sphere for almost half a century.

TAKING TO THE POLITICAL STAGE: 1961–5 Grass first began to make public political statements at the same time as numerous volumes of collected essays by contemporary authors on various political issues were beginning to appear in bookshops. The idea that authors might speak out publicly on important issues gained particular urgency when the Berlin wall was erected in August 1961, which inspired one of Grass’s earliest political interventions. Asking ‘Was können die Schriftsteller tun?’ in an open letter to Anna Seghers, president of the East German writers’ association, he explicitly drew on a past model of authorial collection of his political speeches from the 1960s to unification: Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Leiden an Deutschland: Günter Grass und die Deutschen’, in Gerd Labroisse and Dick van Stekelenberg, eds, Günter Grass: Ein europäischer Autor?, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, 35 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 267–89. In both cases, however, CeplKaufmann is more concerned to elucidate the overall political content in Grass’s writings than the techniques of self-presentation that underlie his stance and are the focus of my attention. 5 The analysis found in Hanspeter Rode, Günter Grass (Munich: Beck, 1979), Müller, Die literarische Republik, Stuart Parkes, Writers and Politics in West Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1986), Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), and Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), all conform to this trend. Pietsch’s study, on the other hand, yields some very interesting literary interpretations, particularly of the post-1990 works, where he shows how a dialogic communicative structure is invoked to undercut Grass’s public political persona in an increasingly ironic manner.

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activism. Just as in 1933 Klaus Mann had written in exile to Gottfried Benn imploring him to speak out against National Socialist policies, now Grass was writing to Seghers to ask her to take a clear stance against her government’s aggressive isolationism. Although Grass’s attempt was as unsuccessful as Klaus Mann’s before him, it was an important first step in his self-conception as a politically active author. The idea of acting out roles that had either been played by previous authors or showed clear engagement with them informed many of his subsequent public appearances. Right from the beginning, a certain understanding of authorship conditioned his political self-presentation. This was particularly the case in the 1965 general election campaign. The campaign tour took place in two stages: the speeches ‘Es steht zur Wahl’, ‘Loblied auf Willy’, and ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ formed Grass’s material on the first tour (July 1965), while ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’ and ‘Ich klage an’ were the backbone of the second (August 1965). All five speeches have a distinctly dramatic tone. Grass is keen to emphasize the novelty of his undertaking, both on a historical level (‘diese Wahlreise bricht bewußt mit der Tradition’) and a personal one (‘Ich habe noch nie Wahlreden gehalten und verspüre seit Wochen etwas mir Neues: Lampenfieber’). 6 Furthermore, the enthusiasm with which Grass appears to have taken on the challenge of speaking to the mass public is easily equated with rather theatrical passions. The flamboyant gesture of pulling the ‘beautiful’ Basic Law from his pocket and his tendency at times to get carried away by his own rhetoric certainly led to some rather sardonic newspaper reports. 7 Indeed, the general tenor of most press reports was that Grass’s speeches failed politically, and that it was much more the ‘event’ or ‘happening’ quality of his performance that drew in the crowds. This is the conclusion reached by Hans Suttner: Nach der ersten Viertelstunde Vorlesung frage ich mich, wie viele Menschen wären in diesen Saal gekommen, wie viele wären begeistert, wenn dieselben Worte von einem besseren Sprecher verlesen würden. Grass zieht. Nicht das, was er zu sagen hat, und nicht die Art, wie er es vorträgt. (Zwischenrufe zum Beispiel greift er kaum 6 Günter Grass, ‘Es steht zur Wahl’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XIV, 87–98, 87, 88–9. 7 See Dieter Vogel, ‘Grass empfiehlt die SPD als Hotelfrühstücksreformer: Über die Wahlreise des Blechtrommel-Autors durch die Hörsäle der Universitäten’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 July 1965, and Hans Bertram Bock, ‘Günter Grass auf “Es-Pe-DeWahltournee” in Würzburg und Nürnburg trommelte für Willy’, Abendzeitung, 15 July 1965, both reprinted in Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Franz Josef Görtz, eds, Günter Grass: Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1971), 30–2 and 32–5 respectively.

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auf, auch bei einfältigen fällt ihm nicht rasch genug eine passende Antwort ein, politisch-ernsthaften ist er sachlich nicht gewachsen.) Also: Grass zieht. 8

Other detractors were a little more generous, conceding Grass his showmanship but declaring him politically harmless: ‘Eine eindrucksvolle Wahlrede wurde hier sicher nicht gehalten. Immerhin aber eine glitzernde Vorlesung mit dem Resultat, daß man sich in Zukunft in Bonn über die politischen Ambitionen enragierter [sic] Schriftsteller weiterhin wenig Sorgen machen wird.’ 9 However, Grass never aimed to be a political heavyweight. What even the most negative of reports grudgingly concedes—that Grass can count on a large audience purely on account of his literary fame and perceived ability to entertain—was in fact always Grass’s main political card. Throughout the 1965 speeches he makes it quite clear that political argument is not and cannot be his aim. Rather, as he states quite explicitly in ‘Es steht zur Wahl’, he sets out to make people think: ‘Wenn es mir nur gelänge, jeden von Ihnen nachdenklich zu stimmen, wäre meine Aufgabe erfüllt.’ 10 In order to do this, he casts himself, as well-known literary author, as the exemplary protagonist who is providing a clear and positive lead. Consequently, in his speech he repeatedly reflects on the business of speaking, posing the rhetorical question ‘wer spricht hier und zu wem?’ on numerous occasions. Conventional wisdom declares the ‘Geschichtenerzähler’ to be out of place. 11 He has gone beyond the literary remit of his authorial role (producer of literature) and must now face up to the criticism that he himself introduces: ‘sollte er nicht bei seinen Geschichten bleiben und den Politikern die Politik wie den Hühnern das Eierlegen und den Bürgern das Steuerzahlen überlassen?’ 12 Presenting himself as a sort of rogue element in the conventional social order—an image that squares well with his own controversial literary beginnings—Grass makes his authorial persona into that of a rebel who is clearly leading the way for others to follow. In so doing, he turns to his advantage earlier media constructions of his public image. The full implications of this self-dramatization are perhaps best seen in ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’. Here, the political speaker first introduces himself in the third person as someone whose actions are markedly reminiscent 8 Hans Suttner, ‘Blechtrommler auf Tournee: Der leider mißlungene Versuch, Günter Grass politisch zu verstehen’, Echo der Zeit, 25 July 1965, reprinted in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 36–40, 37. 9 Anon, ‘Der Dichter und die Politik’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 7 July 1965, reprinted in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 27–8, 28. 10 Grass, ‘Es steht zur Wahl’, 90. 11 Ibid., 92. 12 Ibid., 93.

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of those of the great self-stylist Oskar Matzerath in the ‘Tribüne’ chapter of Die Blechtrommel. 13 The speaker’s political motivation is ‘Grund genug [. . .] seinen Koffer zu packen und den Chor der Wahlredner mit einigen Zwischentönen aus dem allzu selbstsicheren Konzept zu bringen. Also ein Störenfried auf Missionsreise? Nein’. 14 Not only is the idea of upsetting a political rally through musical corruption taken directly from Die Blechtrommel, the subsequent denial that he is acting in line with any particular ideology is paralleled in Oskar’s refusal to be linked to any one political party: ‘Nichts liegt ferner, als in mir, wegen der sechs oder sieben zum Platzen gebrachten Kundgebungen, drei oder vier aus dem Schritt getrommelten Aufmärsche und Vorbeimärsche, nun einen Widerstandskämpfer zu sehen’, Oskar claims. 15 Instead, both, in their own ways, claim to be speaking simple common sense by demystifying the self-aggrandizement of the country’s main political players. Where Oskar does this throughout his narrative by taking a satirical look at society from below, Grass, as political speaker, creates for himself in his parable of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ a position of innate moral goodness that, as Cepl-Kaufmann points out, would appear to be mysteriously immune to society’s ills: 16 Hier, bei uns, heute und angesichts einer bankrotten Wiedervereinigungspolitik gilt es, demokratischen Mut zu beweisen und mit unbestechlichem Zeigefinger den derzeitigen Bundeskanzler und seine Minister zu entzaubern: Seht, sie kleiden sich mit Luft! Seht, sie tragen eine Schleppe, die gar nicht da ist! Seht, Ihr Bürger, sie sind nackt! 17

By standing up and performing first the fairy tale and then his own contemporary version of it, Grass is not simply making a clear political point. He also draws attention to the specific role he is playing, which is itself reminiscent of his most famous literary creation. In these closing lines, being as bold as the little boy is a clearly constructed position which both plays off a certain media-led public understanding of the author and forcefully communicates to this public the political necessity for speaking out and taking a stand. This sort of meta-discursive approach characterizes all Grass’s 1965 political speeches. 13 It should be added that throughout the 1965 campaign, the press constantly drew analogies between Grass and his famous protagonist (see the collection of newspaper reports collected in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung). It is likely that the reference here is a direct response to this. 14 Günter Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, XIV , 21–36, 21. 15 Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (1959), in Werkausgabe, III , 157. 16 Cepl-Kaufmann, Literatur und Politik, 123. 17 Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’, 136.

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At the same time, however, Grass is careful not to present himself solely as a self-conscious innovator. Engaging in role-play as a rather selfindulgent political happening runs the risk of trivializing the message being communicated to a wide public base, as the rather more radical 1968 student events demonstrated only three years later. 18 To this end, Grass is careful to temper the novelty of his particular type of political involvement with clear pointers to a long-standing authorial tradition evoked in his references to ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘reason’. Well-respected, politically committed predecessors are scattered throughout all his speeches, from Lessing, Klopstock, Herder, and Büchner through to Zola, Whitman, Thomas Mann, and Orwell. Thus while Grass’s major political message is communicated by manipulating popular conceptions of his public image in the name of the politically aware citizen, he simultaneously stresses the intellectual pedigree to which he, as an acknowledged author, can now lay claim. Cepl-Kaufmann deems the dual existence as a writer and a citizen that he thereby takes on to represent a contradiction in Grass’s political positioning. 19 However, I would argue that he tactically employs two parallel stances. 20 Whilst on the one hand he wants to show that everybody is qualified to have a political opinion, on the other he acknowledges the necessity of justifying his own high-profile intervention as a member of the intellectual elite. Grass’s needs here are twofold. It should be stressed that in the mid-1960s authors were still by no means widely accepted as authoritative political commentators. In particular, conservative politicians, notably the Christian Democrat (CDU: Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, had publicly cast off writers as ‘little pipsqueaks’. 21 Authors needed to fight to establish their credibility in the public sphere. Grass does this explicitly in ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’. With statements such as ‘bevor es überhaupt eine deutsche Nation gab, gab es, seit Klopstock und Lessing, eine deutsche Literatur’, he clearly demonstrates his political 18 Grass’s own criticism of the student uprising in, for example, ‘Die angelesene Revolution’ (1968), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 332–46, shows how easy it was to attack such a position. 19 ‘Charakteristisch für diese Zeit ist die Ambivalenz aus demokratischem Selbstverständnis, von dem her er sich als “Bürger” geriert [sic] und der besonderen moralisch begründeten Befähigung, als Schriftsteller eine hervorragende Stelle im Bereich der geistigen Elite einzunehmen’, Cepl-Kaufmann, Literatur und Politik, 187–8. 20 See also Timm Pietsch, ‘Wer hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist (Essen: Klartext, 2006), 92–100. 21 Grass makes direct reference to this in the opening to ‘Ich klage an’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 137–46: ‘[der Schriftsteller] also, der Querulant, Intellektuelle und Pinscher—so reich ist unsere Sprache an Schimpfworten!—er kommt daher, klagt einerseits an und rät andererseits, die SPD zu wählen’, 137.

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credentials as author. Defining the Enlightenment tradition as a specifically literary one, Grass declares the CDU government unfit on the basis of its intellectual shortcomings: ‘Kleine Geister tragen zu große Verantwortung. Wollte ihnen jemand mit der Sprache Lessings heimleuchten, sie verstünden ihn nicht.’ 22 This sort of wrangling for public political influence, however, places Grass’s comments within another discourse, namely that of ‘Geist und Macht’, which in turn introduces a second front on which Grass must fight. The vigour with which the speaker seeks to question politicians’ credentials places him firmly in the camp of ‘Geist’. Such a straightforward division, however, would not suit Grass’s overall political message. Wanting to engage a wide public base in political decision-making, he cannot afford to imply too strongly that authors have a special political insight that distinguishes them not only from politicians but also from the general public. Consequently, Grass takes on not just the current representatives of political ‘Macht’, the CDU politicians, but also those of the disinterested intellectual elite. In a long paragraph that stands out for the impassioned violence of its metaphors, Grass speaks neither to his general audience nor to the political opposition, but to an anonymous, absent ‘Geist’: Denn der Ort des Schriftstellers ist inmitten der Gesellschaft und nicht über oder abseits der Gesellschaft. Darum fort mit allem geistigen Hochmut und dünkelhaften Elitegeist! Ihr Utopisten und Sektierer in Eurem schönen, windstillen Gehäuse: Tretet vor die Tür! Stoßt Euch Knie und Stirn wund an unserer Realität! Genie wohnt nicht mehr im holden Wahnsinn, sondern in unserer nüchternen Konsumgesellschaft. Die Heiligen sind Pragmatiker geworden. Kein Anlaß besteht, den antiquierten Gegensatz zwischen Geist und Macht neu zu konstruieren. 23

The way in which Grass draws credibility and a sense of social standing from his literary predecessors and at the same time strikes out at conventional conceptions of Germany’s cultural tradition shows the complexity of his public self-presentation. Having acknowledged the basic parameters that will condition his reception, Grass tries to knit them into his overall political aim: making the public realize (in both senses) its role as ‘der Souverän unserer parlamentarischen Demokratie’. 24 Drawing on two different models of authorship—his own roguish reputation and the rather more respectable political legacy of his literary predecessors—he develops contrasting roles for himself in the same speech. By referring back to the Enlightenment model and merging it with his own rebellious public image, he introduces to the contemporary understanding of authorship 22

Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’, 126.

23

Ibid., 124.

24

Ibid., 124–5.

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a practice-focused political dimension, and shows how today’s author can make an exemplary move towards the common melting-pot of democratic citizenship. This is a move that can be repeated by any German citizen, regardless of their starting point, as long as they are prepared to show a similarly open mind to their socio-political positioning. If Grass can expand the remit of his authorial role to fill both the positions of ‘Schriftsteller und Bürger’, then they too can combine the roles of worker and citizen, albeit in a less flamboyant way (filling out a ballot-paper would suffice). Self-consciously acting out the role of the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is Grass’s first attempt at creating a position that combines the author’s recognized literary talents with a new-found political function.

BELONGING TO THE ESTABLISHMENT AS ‘A MAT TER OF COURSE’: 1966–76 Following Grass’s self-presentation throughout the 1965 election campaign, it would appear that heeding the calls of his specific socio-political circumstances and yet retaining artistic integrity and autonomy is the line a politically conscious writer must tread if he wishes to maintain authority in both literary and political spheres. After his careful dual positioning in the 1965 election campaign, however, subsequent developments in the political sphere seemed to point towards such a breakdown in democracy that Grass felt it necessary to stress his political standpoint in no uncertain terms. His decision to continue supporting the Social Democratic Party (SPD: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) after the Grand Coalition of 1966, coupled with the defensive stance he adopted towards increasing student radicalism and the rise of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO: Außerparlamentarische Opposition), saw him adopting a more sober, representative role, with literary playfulness pushed into the wings. 25 If he polemicized, it was now generally for rather than against the state, and by the end of the turbulent year of 1968 the self-styled ‘Störenfried’ of 1965 was already prepared to describe himself as a member of the old guard, albeit in a qualified way: Wollte ich jetzt persönlich Bilanz ziehen, also mich darauf abklopfen, inwieweit der Studentenprotest und die Reaktion der Öffentlichkeit auf ihn mich verändert hat, ließe sich sagen, daß die vereinfachende Fragestellung—wer gehört zum Establishment, wer nicht?—mich dem Establishment zugerechnet hat, eine Einstufung, 25

Brode, Günter Grass, 105–33, charts this neatly.

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mit der ich mich abgefunden habe. Oder genauer gesagt: Diese und ähnlich grobschlächtige Pauschalurteile haben mir deutlich gemacht, wie sehr ich dem Wohl und Wehe der Bundesrepublik und damit dem immer noch nicht abgeschlossenen Versuch, hierzulande die Demokratie zu etablieren, verbunden bin. 26

The identification with the state that Grass’s critics and commentators saw in this kind of pronouncement quickly pushed him into the fixed role of state representative. This contrasts with the behaviour of other high-profile writers, many of whom were alienated by the Grand Coalition. Both Martin Walser and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, joined ranks with left-wing student radicals. Grass’s decision to support government policy at a time when many of his natural intellectual allies felt let down by that policy meant that he, on the other hand, was inevitably placed into a far more overtly party-political context. In the eyes of many contemporary commentators, Grass lost his public authorial role altogether in the late 1960s and effectively became a political figurehead. It is for this reason that in early 1969 the young student activist Rudi Dutschke deemed what he termed ‘the struggle against Grass’ to be more important than anything else on his political agenda. 27 For the young generation of left-wing radicals ‘Grass’ was already a fixed political monument that needed to be pulled down. Other very different commentators painted a similar picture. In a controversial article that was initially not published on the grounds that Grass should not be attacked to such an extent in the left-wing / liberal press (interestingly, Grass himself finally authorized the article), Heinz Ludwig Arnold criticized Grass’s growing ranks of biographers because he felt that they ‘völlig unkritisch an einem Piedestal für den übergroß scheinenden Autor Grass basteln, das ihm entweder selbst ungelegen kommt oder von dem man ihn, zu seinem Nutzen, herunterholen muß’. 28 This was something which he then went on to do: mich [verstört] der im nachhinein praktizierte Hochmut [. . .], der Mief sein will und doch beim Mief der Spießer die Nase rümpft, der moralisch auftritt und anderen die mangelnde politische Wirksamkeit ihrer Moralität ankreidet, der schließlich, großzügig die Lage zu beurteilen vermeint und sich doch keine lauten Gedanken darüber macht, wie sehr er selbst in sie verstrickt ist. 29 26

Günter Grass, ‘Was unterm Strich steht’ (1968), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 384–8, 388. ‘Die politische Bekämpfung von Günter Grass ist wichtiger als alle andere’, quoted in Brode, Günter Grass, 115. 28 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein: Fragen zur politischen Wirkung des Günter Grass’, in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 144. 29 Ibid., 148. 27

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Indeed, an increasing consensus amongst Grass’s numerous critics and commentators, from student radicals to critical fellow left-wing Publizisten and authors, that Grass had grown into something of a caricature of himself was clearly formulated by Horst Krüger, in Der Spiegel: Grass—das ist die perfekte Identität von Individualität und Image. Ein Reklamebild, das immer stimmt. Er sieht tatsächlich so aus, wie ihn die Massenmedien reproduzieren. Sehr individuell, etwas fremdartig, und in beiden ungemein einprägsam, wie ein Wappentier. Fast hat er etwas von der Ausgereiftheit eines hervorragenden Markenartikelzeichens. Nationale Repräsentanz schwingt da mit, etwa wie bei dem Mercedesstern. Den kennt man auch überall in der Welt und weiß, was man daran hat. 30

Where in 1964 this same commentator had described Grass’s public appearances as ‘eine etwas fatale Selbstinszenierung mit schlechter Regie’, by 1969 he had come to echo what was now a widespread belief. 31 Grass was no longer simply engaging his authorial person in exemplary public role-play; his constant political profiling had caused his public image to be redefined in purely political terms. The newspaper headline from the 1965 election campaign that suggested a move from the theatrical ‘Bürgerschreck’ to a sober ‘Staatsbürger’ is thus in actual fact more applicable to the change that took place between 1965 and 1969. 32 It was during this later period that critics and commentators really began to feel they had the measure of Grass. The author, in the terms of his own polemicizing speech ‘Rede über das Selbstverständliche’, had become a political player as a ‘matter of course’ and, like him or not, people at least now knew what to expect. 33 These changes account for the different approach Grass took to campaigning in the 1969 general election. Not only was he now supported by the Social Democratic Voters’ Initiative, a pro-SPD grouping that he founded largely on his own initiative; he also enjoyed a well-defined and readily recognized socio-political position from which to speak. In 1965, one of Grass’s main slogans, ‘Wahlen sind Appelle an die Vernunft!’, had betrayed his sense that he needed to cry out to attract attention to his political cause. 34 In 1969 the emphasis in his election 30 Horst Krüger, ‘Das Wappentier der Republik: Augenblicke mit Günter Grass’, Der Spiegel, 25 April 1969, quoted in Görtz, Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds, 51. 31 Krüger, ‘Literatur und Prominenz’, 97. 32 Kai Hermann, ‘Wahlhelfer Grass: Der Bürgerschreck als Staatsbürger’, Die Zeit, 8 July 1965 in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 28–9, 28. 33 Günter Grass, ‘Rede über das Selbstverständliche’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, XIV , 147–63. 34 See for example, Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’, 123.

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speeches had subtly shifted, as the introduction to ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ demonstrates: 1965 sagte ich: Wahlen sind Appelle an die Vernunft. Dieses Wort bleibt bestehen. Ich will nicht Stimmungen fördern, viel eher möchte ich versuchen, ernüchternd zu wirken. Denn während der letzten Jahre ließen sich überall Einbrüche des Irrationalismus in die deutsche Politik verzeichnen. (my emphasis) 35

Reacting to radical left- and right-wing attacks on the government in the intervening years, Grass now perceived his role as neither to heckle nor to incite, but rather to propound the virtues of quiet, sober argument: ‘Zwischen einer Unmenge vollaufgedrehter Lautsprecher lohnt es sich, halblaut zu sprechen und notfalls auch leise, damit man verstanden wird.’ 36 The ensuing speeches, ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ (May 1969), ‘Rede über die Parteien’ (June 1969), ‘VW-Bus-Rede’, ‘Die runde Zahl zwanzig’, ‘Rede von den begrenzten Möglichkeiten’ (August 1969), and ‘Rede über den unbekannten Wähler’ (September 1969) are all characterized by a distinct lack of showmanship in comparison to their 1965 predecessors. Brode puts it thus: Die Wahlkampfreden von Grass hatten jetzt ihren rhetorischen Schwung, ihre frühere Freude am Zitat, an der Parabel, am “Es-war-einmal”-Einschub, am lässigen Rückgriff auf die Literatenrolle, verloren: Pragmatisch (um nicht zu sagen knochentrocken) ging es um die politische Alltagsrealität in ihrer ganzen Dürftigkeit. 37

References to the literary aspect of Grass’s authorial role are entirely lacking, and although he still stresses the value of the Enlightenment tradition, this has lost all its literary overtones, being largely reduced to the reference to ‘reason’. Furthermore, when Grass invokes his private person, he describes himself as somewhat decrepit. Aged just forty-one, he refers to himself— in his son’s term—as an ‘altes Eisen’, although he qualifies this to become a ‘mittelalterliches, halbwegs rostfreies altes Eisen’. 38 In fact, it quite suits Grass to cast himself as a little weathered. Having omitted all those claims to a superior, enlightened authorial position that characterized his 1965 speeches, he now seeks to convey a level of practical political experience that accords him authority within the political sphere: ‘Nur wer die Verlockung der Resignation kennt, nur wer mit Skepsis gerüstet der Realität und ihren 35 Günter Grass, ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ (1969), in Werkausgabe, XIV , 436–47, 436. This introduction is also repeated almost word for word in Günter Grass, ‘Die runde Zahl zwanzig’ (1969), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 483–98, 483. 36 Ibid., 437, and also word for word in Grass, ‘Die runde Zahl Zwanzig’, 483. 37 Brode, Günter Grass, 117. 38 Grass, ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’, 437.

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Widersprüchen begegnet, kann den fordernden, zerrenden Ansprüchen der Politik genügen.’ 39 This new, sober image of Grass the political campaigner demonstrates a large degree of independence from the more playful, literary aspects of his famous authorial self. Having made his political name and set out his political beliefs, Grass is no longer reliant on either literary methods or the literary tradition to boost his cause. It is probably for this reason that his public image became, as Krüger’s comment shows, ever more one-dimensional. The drama of Grass’s self-conscious role-play disappeared behind the steadiness of measured social comment, as exemplified by his own political column that ran in the Berlin newspaper Abend and the Süddeutsche Zeitung from 1970–2, and then in the speeches aimed at SPD politicians in 1974 and 1976. 40 Outwardly supporting the government whilst inwardly trying to strengthen it with politically focused criticism, the kind of authorship Grass represented had become synonymous with a fixed political position. The emphasis was no longer on using his authorial standing in an exemplary manner to encourage political participation, but rather on actively developing a specific political agenda.

OLD DEBATES FOR NEW TIMES: 1977–89 Grass’s comparative lack of large-scale public political activity in the mid1970s corresponds to the respite taken by his generation from high-profile public intervention in the nation’s affairs, often discussed under the term ‘Neue Subjektivität’. When Der Butt was published in 1977, it seemed to confirm a general feeling that established writers were returning to a literary sphere that was particularly suited to subjective self-reflection. 41 Just as Grass’s narrator tries to hide within the epic folds of his narrative from the challenge of feminist emancipation, so too did the author appear to have withdrawn to what was unquestionably his terrain: the literary text. As has been amply pointed out with reference to West German writing in general, however, focusing on the self in literature does not necessarily correspond to absolute silence on the political front. 42 Rather, as the scope of politics 39

Günter Grass, ‘VW-Bus-Rede’ (1969), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 475–82, 478. See Günter Grass, ‘Rede vor der Fraktion der SPD’ (1974), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 344–8, and ‘Einige Denkzettel nach der Wahl’ (1976), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 434–42. 41 For a discussion of the so-called phenomenon of ‘Neue Subjektivität’, see Moray McGowan, ‘Neue Subjektivität’, in Keith Bullivant, ed., After the ‘Death’ of Literature, 53–68. 42 See McGowan, ‘Neue Subjektivität’, and Keith Bullivant, Realism Today: Aspects of the Contemporary West German Novel (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), esp. ch. 8. 40

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changed, Grass, as ‘jemand, der sich immer wieder und nahezu zwanghaft neu definieren muß’, made a corresponding change to the way he presented his public person within it. 43 Speaking at a one-day colloquium, ‘Was ist heute links?’, run by L’76, the magazine that he, Heinrich Böll, and Carola Stern had founded as an intellectual forum for left-wing / liberal ideas, Grass outlined the new political agenda: Ich möchte dazu auffordern, hier nicht die ideologischen Gefechte der zurückliegenden Jahre zu führen, sondern zu begreifen, daß wir in einer Welt des schnellen, des beinah überstürzten Wandels leben. Zu begreifen, was in den nächsten fünfzehn, zwanzig Jahren auf uns zukommt: bei nicht gelöstem West-Ost-Konflikt der immer stärker dominierende Nord-Süd-Konflikt; die schon stattfindende Bevölkerungsexplosion; die permanente Tatsache, die genauso permanent ignoriert wird, daß in dieser Welt voller Reserven, hochentwickelter Transportmittel, eines funktionierenden Nachrichtensystems dennoch die Hälfte der Weltbevölkerung permanent unterernährt ist. 44

Although by the late 1960s Grass had established an acknowledged role for himself as commentator on German affairs (Arnold referred to him as ‘Praeceptor democratiae germaniae’, a rather extreme formulation that underlines just how fixed his political positioning had by then become), a similar degree of authority on international matters was not necessarily so self-evident. 45 Grass’s solution, it would appear, was to reassert himself specifically as an author operating with specifically authorial talents in the political sphere. Where only a little over a decade previously he had explicitly polemicized against the ‘Geist’ / ‘Macht’ opposition that was historically so dominant in German cultural discourse, by the late 1970s he subtly started reintroducing a revised version of this polarity. In a 1979 speech on the position of literature in the two Germanys, ‘Die deutschen Literaturen’, Grass emphasizes the fundamental split between literature and politics. Politics is seen as restrictive, ‘smothering’ literature’s life-blood: ‘Der politische Wirklichkeitsbegriff faßt zu eng. Sein Pragmatismus erstickt die Phantasie.’ 46 Furthermore, such behaviour is presented as thoroughly unjustified, as Grass asserts ‘Hingegen sind die Schriftsteller, von Logau und Lessing über Herder und Heine bis zu Böll und Biermann stets die 43 Günter Grass, ‘Der Schriftsteller als Bürger: eine Siebenjahresbilanz’ (1973), in Werkausgabe, XV, 265–82, 265. 44 Günter Grass, ‘Ein neuer Begriff von Arbeit’ (1977), in Werkausgabe, XV , 449–54, 454. 45 Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein’, 148. 46 Günter Grass, ‘Die deutschen Literaturen’ (1979), in Werkausgabe, XV , 518–27, 519.

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besseren Patrioten gewesen’. 47 Drawing once again on previous models of authorship, this sort of oppositional polemics leads Grass to redefine literature (and with it, authors) as above politics. Although he is speaking in the first instance about East and West Germany, the terms he uses along with the context in which he is speaking (a tour through South-East Asia, during which Grass engages with, for example, the status of writers in China) lend his argument a universal application: Diese [Ost-West literarischen] Treffen machten uns deutlich, daß sich die Literatur dem Zugriff der Ideologien entziehen muß, daß sich Literatur an kein Staatsverständnis binden läßt, daß Literatur grenzüberschreitend ist. Nicht nur wir saßen dort und redeten uns die Köpfe heiß, unsere Zunft war gegenwärtig. Büchner und Kleist wurden zitiert; von Lessing und Heine war die Rede. Unsere literarischen Ziehväter ließen sich nicht nach Himmelsrichtungen einteilen. Ost und West mit ihrem jeweils ideologischen Anspruch gaben keinen ästhetischen Maßstab her. Unversehens wurde uns Deutschland zum literarischen Begriff. 48

This sort of argument is striking in the contrast it provides with Grass’s earlier, vigorous dismissal of what he considered the ‘floating’ intellect, ‘über oder abseits der Gesellschaft’. Now, Grass’s own ‘guild’ of authors is itself defined by its very lack of specific political allegiance. Instead, these authors are presented as the representatives of a transnational literature that is united by its common roots in the imagination (‘die Phantasie’) and the aesthetic (‘ästhetischer Maßstab’), not divided by contemporary political splits. Moreover, their methods are not just better than those of politicians, they take place within an entirely different space which must be kept clear of all ideological political influence. Accordingly, literature becomes a kind of antidote to everyday politics, ‘ihre Macht bedrückt nicht, sondern vermittelt Erkenntnisse und setzt Phantasie frei’. 49 Grass is arguing that literature’s greater insight into the human condition makes it a better tool than the politics of reason for helping us deal with the world in which we live. This corresponds to more general trends discerned by critics in literature of this period. Moray McGowan, for example, refers to ‘the neo-Romantic return in the 1980s of attempts to transcend reality by aestheticising it, seen in the influence of Novalis on Strauß and Handke, and the return of the author (or the text) as a visionary force with the power to create counter-worlds’. 50 Similarly, Stephen Brockmann presents East and West German literature of the 1980s as converging in the idea of Germany as a primarily cultural 47 50

48 Ibid., 527. Ibid., 520. McGowan, ‘Neue Subjektivität’, 67.

49

Ibid., 527.

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entity (‘Kulturnation’). 51 If Grass’s terms are taken at face value, then, authors would seem to be very close to the ‘Hohenpriester’ against whom he had polemicized in the strongest of terms fourteen years previously. In looking at authors in the bigger picture, Grass, in step with other authors of the time, develops a markedly different understanding of the author’s public role from that of his establishment phase: the author is now a specially talented ‘seer’ who communicates his mythical visions in order to bring help and guidance to ordinary mortals in the socio-political sphere. The idea that authors are visionaries is clearly developed from the speeches in the late 1970s onwards. In particular, much of Grass’s political activity at the beginning of the 1980s came increasingly under the influence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not only does the concept of ‘Orwell’s decade’ sum up the sense of angst felt by all the characters in Grass’s 1979 fictional piece, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, it also becomes a leading slogan in his 1980 and 1983 election campaigns. The 1980 election speech begins with a direct reference, in semi-Foucaultian terms, to the socio-political aspect of authorship: ‘Wie Markenzeichen geistern der Name des Autors und der Titel seines Buches durch unser schreckenbereites Bewußtsein.’ 52 Orwell has gained meaning within the contemporary public sphere on account of his vision of the world, so that his name has come to stand not just for a style of writing, but for a whole way of living that seems increasingly plausible. Consequently, Orwell is now relevant not as a ‘literarische Wiederentdeckung’, rather ‘es ist die düstere Hellsichtigkeit des Autors, die uns immer noch oder mehr als vor drei Jahrzehnten betrifft’. 53 These introductory remarks to Grass’s speech set up the context in which Grass himself is speaking. Literature has thrown down the gauntlet to politics and Grass can warn his audience to ignore his authorial advice at their peril. Accordingly, having endorsed the SPD as politics’ strongest response to Orwell, Grass carries on to formulate ‘in eigener Sache [. . .] und als Schriftsteller’ his own ideas concerning German cultural unification and the foundation of a so-called ‘Kulturnation’, which is not otherwise on any party political agenda for the 1980 election campaign. 54 While diversion from official party policy is certainly not new to Grass’s speeches (he embarrassed the party on a number of occasions in the first half of the 1960s), it does highlight the extent to which he has returned to the traditional division of authors and politics. The success of his speech depends 51 Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Unification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. ch.1. 52 Günter Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt I’ (1980), in Werkausgabe, XVI , 5–18, 5. 53 Ibid., 5. 54 Ibid., 6.

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entirely on convincing the voting public that the endorsement of a party by a representative of the literary tradition is enough to make them vote SPD. This is the sort of condescending intellectual stance that Grass, in contradistinction to some of his colleagues in Walser’s Die Alternative, so carefully avoided in the early 1960s. 55 Literature’s continued superiority to politics is further developed in the 1981 speech, ‘Literatur und Mythos’. Where Enlightenment reason, in its own drive towards technological progress, is categorically presented as having succumbed to the mythologizing tendencies it initially set out to counter, this same contradiction is described as the very stuff of literature: Könnten nicht sie, die Literaten, ihr, der Vernunft, die immerhin vernünftige Einsicht beibringen, daß Märchen, Mythen und Sagen nicht außerhalb unserer Wirklichkeit entstanden sind, [. . .] sondern Teil unserer Realität und kräftig genug geblieben sind, um uns klarer, wenn auch mit gesteigertem Ausdruck in unserer existentiellen Not und Wirrnis darzustellen, als es die überdies wortarm gewordene, nur noch im Fachjargon nuschelnde Vernunft vermag? 56

In this rhetorical questioning, it becomes the author’s mission to open up reality through the power of his or her imagination. By embracing a different kind of reality, literature throws new light on the world as it is seen through rational eyes. Grass then illustrates this with reference to his own adaptation of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus: Heute, gebeutelt von Erfahrungen und auch gezeichnet von der produktiven Vergeblichkeit des politischen Steinewälzens, ist mir Camus wieder nah, ist die Mär vom rastlosen Stein, der, Mal um Mal bergauf gewälzt, nicht liegenbleiben will, ist mir die heroische Absurdität des die Götter spottenden und den Stein bejahenden Sisyphos gegenwärtig. Sie beweist sich alltäglich. Dieses den Mythos in wenige Sätze fassende Bild vom heiteren Steinewälzer weist die menschliche Existenz komplexer und obendrein sinnlicher nach, als es der Informationswust unserer Tage oder gar die soziologische Überproduktion vermag. 57

Literature here is described as re-enacting reality in its fullest scope (‘weist [. . .] nach’). The absurd is not just part of the everyday, but the very essence of human existence, and literature, in Grass’s eyes, has become the last bastion of the myth that best represents it: ‘Die Literatur lebt vom Mythos. 55 Compare Grass’s meta-discursive piece, ‘Wer wird dieses Bändchen kaufen?’ with the other essays by Axel Eggebrecht, Gerhard Szczesny, Hans Josef Mundt, Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Heinz von Cramer, Hans Werner Richter, Gerhard Schoenberner and Erich Kuby, all in Walser, ed., Die Alternative. 56 Günter Grass, ‘Literatur und Mythos’ (1981), in Werkausgabe, XVI , 19–23, 21. 57 Ibid., 21–2.

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[. . .] Ihr Gedächtnis speichert, was wir erinnern sollten’. 58 Consequently, in the 1983 election speech, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’, literature, now explicitly used to explain political reality, is described as taking politics to another, more profound level: Literarisch begründet, ließe sich sagen: Es geht in diesem Wahlkampf nicht nur um Bafög, Mieterschutz und Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramme, sondern auch—und so wichtig die genannten Probleme sind—um die Frage, ob George Orwells Schreckenvision, der Roman “1984”, von der Wirklichkeit eingeholt oder sogar überboten wird. Zuallererst deshalb mische ich mich in diesen Wahlkampf. Denn noch—so hoffe ich—haben wir es in der Hand, Orwells Vision zu widerlegen. 59

Grass then sets out his own qualifications to engage in this effort as purely literary in nature: they are based on a long-standing familiarity with the work of Orwell, Camus, and Miłosz. 60 Just as the earlier novel, Kopfgeburten, makes Camus respond to Orwell, so Grass uses here Camus’s Sisyphus to face the challenges posed by Orwell’s decade. In so doing, the author merges with the literary position he is propounding: the author as political speaker actually becomes Sisyphus: Wie sagte Sisyphos, als er den Stein bergauf gewälzt hatte, doch der Stein sogleich wieder bergab rollte? Er rief: Keine Angst, Stein! Bald bin auch ich wieder unten. Du gehörst zu mir. Gleich geht es wieder bergauf! Jede politische Anstrengung, die das Unrecht schmälern, den Frieden sicherer machen, die Freiheit erhalten oder gar erweitern und die Natur vor der zerstörenden Anmaßung der Menschen schützen will, ich sage, jede dieser Anstrengungen ist immer auch ein Stück Sisyphosarbeit. 61

However, this identification also entails a distinct reinterpretation of Grass’s own understanding of the Sisyphus myth. In the earlier speech from 1981, ‘Literatur und Mythos’, Sisyphus’ actions are explicitly presented as ‘heroically absurd’, that is to say fully embracing their lack of ultimate purpose. In the later speech, however, Sisyphus has become a sort of paternal political 58

Ibid., 23. Günter Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’ (1983), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 71–9, 72. 60 The relevance of Miłosz is described as the inverse of Camus—where Camus provides a mythical example of how man overcomes adverse circumstances, Miłosz’s work shows historically how intellectuals failed under the dual pressures of fascism and Stalinism. It seems significant that in both the contemporary literary work, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, and this political speech, Camus and the force of myth are favoured over Miłosz and the grim realities of history. See my own article, Rebecca Beard, ‘The Art of Self-Construction: Günter Grass’s Use of Camus and Orwell in “Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out” ’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1 (2004), 323–36, for a fuller investigation of how Grass employs Orwell and Camus in his literary consideration of the threats posed by the 1980s. 61 Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’, 78–9. 59

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figure, shown comforting his stone with direct reference to continued social relevance. The continuous uphill / downhill cycle is now loaded with emotional significance: ‘bergauf gehen’ has become positive and reassuring while ‘bergab rollen’ encapsulates fear and hopelessness. Furthermore, this emotional roller coaster is explicitly linked to political purpose: the stone is rolled up the hill in order to further one of the worthy causes mentioned by the speaker. This sort of socially determined, meaningful behaviour goes against the version of the Sisyphus myth formulated not only by Camus but also by Grass himself, first in Kopfgeburten (this will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3) and then in ‘Literatur und Mythos’. Grass thus again endows his authorial role with a degree of intellectual condescension that he so carefully avoided in the 1960s: he has become literature’s messenger, bringing comfort to the masses from on high. In the process, the myths that Grass described as constituting our literary heritage are recast by the self-elected authorial visionary in such a manner as to change their overall significance. Consequently, while literature and literary methods set the tone for Grass’s political self-presentation in the 1980s, they by no means escaped unscathed from the prolonged comparison. Indeed, the popularity of Grass’s literary output reached an all-time low in the latter half of the 1980s, when Die Rättin (1986) and Zunge zeigen (1988) both met with widespread rejection in the press. It seems likely that at least some of the hostility Grass provoked was a reaction to the kind of authorship he had come to represent as someone who believed himself specially mandated to speak on matters of both national and international import, as Rolf Michaelis implies in the late 1980s: ‘Stärker als bei jedem andern Autor seiner Generation schiebt sich der in der Öffentlichkeit wirkende Grass vor den in der Stille der Schreibstube erzählenden Fabulierer.’ 62 This can certainly be seen in the reviewer Helmut Ziegler’s response to Die Rättin: ‘[Die Rättin] ist die Bibel für die letzten Jahre liberaler Dummheit, moraltriefend und von pastoraler Bescheuertheit [. . .]. Gebt dem Mann den Literaturnobelpreis, damit er endlich den Mund hält!’ 63 That Grass was widely perceived to have overplayed to political ends the specifically literary aspect of his authorial 62 Rolf Michaelis, ‘ “Brauchen täten wir ihn schon, aber wollen tun wir ihn nicht”: Günter Grass und die Aufnahme seiner Werke vor allem bei Kritikern der Bundesrepublik’, in Günter Grass, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 6th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1988), 120–7, 121. 63 Helmut Ziegler, ‘Wort zum Sonntag’, Tempo, March 1986, 102, quoted in Manfred Durzak, ‘Grass Parodied: Notes on the Reception of “Die Rättin” ’, in The Challenge of German Culture: Essays Presented to Wilfried van der Will, ed. Michael Butler and Robert Evans (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 122–33, 123.

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role can be seen in the success of the bestselling Eichborn spoof, Der Grass, which was written by an anonymous author or authorial collection, ‘Günter Ratte’. 64 Only very loosely engaging with the real novel, it focuses instead on how an oversized Grass storms through the Berlin underworld showering all and sundry with his half-baked political ideas. Not only had Grass’s insistence on the specifically authorial credentials of his public image angered those in the political sphere; by the end of the 1980s they also seemed to have become his biggest obstacle in the literary realm.

PL AYING WITH POLITICAL LEGACIES: 1990–2005 When the wall came down in October 1989, not only the political agenda but also Grass’s public position changed once more. Where in the early 1960s he had tapped into the general move towards political campaigning, allied himself with the government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s operated in line with new concerns that were shared by left-wing thinkers on an international scale, in the early 1990s he found himself alone. Numerous critical studies have examined the so-called failure of German intellectuals to provide a united left-wing position on the issue of unification. 65 Whatever the historical reasons for this, the consequences for those few authors who did try to take a stance were clear: they did so alone. Furthermore, unlike Martin Walser, Grass did not even enjoy the support of any influential political commentators or newspapers. 66 At the same time, he clearly felt that he, of all authors and intellectuals, was particularly qualified to guide public opinion. The publication in January 1990 of Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot, a collection of Grass’s writings and statements on the two Germanys from 1960 to the present, underlined his political consistency and asserted his authority as a long-standing commentator on German affairs. 67 Indeed, Grass even drew attention to his own qualifications quite 64 Günter Ratte, Der Grass (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1986). Manfred Durzak writes that the book sold 20,000 copies, Durzak, ‘Grass Parodied’, 123. 65 See Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000), and Karoline von Oppen, The Role of the Writer and the Press in the Unification of Germany, 1989–1990 (New York: Lang, 2000). 66 The PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) and the Greens (Die Grünen) are the notable exceptions. However, these parties did not enjoy the support of any of the major newspapers, which were so important in influencing general public opinion. 67 Günter Grass, Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990). Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Leiden an Deutschland’, discusses how Grass’s

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explicitly, when in a speech in February of the same year he set out his thoughts concerning a German confederation: ‘In Reden und Aufsätzen habe ich mich seit Mitte der sechziger Jahre gegen die Wiedervereinigung und für eine Koföderation ausgesprochen. Hier gebe ich abermals Antwort auf die deutsche Frage.’ 68 The self-confidence with which Grass began to develop his own, unpopular position sees him drawing much more strongly on his own biographical circumstances than in preceding decades. In the 1960s he drew on authors’ general qualifications to leave behind their literary work and take on a political standpoint; in the 1970s he made comparatively little reference to his literary background; and in the 1980s he developed a universal concept of literature’s superiority to politics that saw his own work and person swallowed up in a far greater, international grouping of authors. Now, however, he pushed his own public image and literary writings back into the centre of debate. In the high-profile Frankfurt literature lecture series, which he was invited to give in February 1990, for example, he painstakingly set out how his own literary work had always responded to what he believed was the key determining factor for post-war German identity: the Holocaust. Delivered under the title ‘Schreiben nach Auschwitz’, he presented his contemporary authorial role as the product of a long line of increasingly self-conscious and morally aware literary works that gradually attempted to atone for the immediate post-war failings of the young writer and his contemporaries. Contrary to Cepl-Kaufmann, who deems this 1990 speech to be Grass’s ‘Abgesang auf seine Vorstellung von der Vorherrschaft der Intellektuellen in Deutschland’, I read it as a positive avowal of his political credibility that shows little intention of acknowledging any sense of socio-political irrelevance. 69 In fact, Grass is effectively claiming for himself a position of national importance. Certainly, this sort of self-understanding conditions his political writings and speeches from early 1990 onwards. In his ‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’ he equates attacks on his own person with the earlier National Socialist attacks on exile writers. Relaying how he was recently branded a ‘Vaterlandsverräter’ by a passer-by, he describes it as understanding of German identity, national and cultural, is developed in this collection. Her reading of the pieces that stretch from the early 1960s through to unification traces a similar development to the one I have outlined in some detail here, seeing Grass’s stance in 1990 as the culmination of an increasingly polemical prioritization of literature over politics. 68 Günter Grass, ‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’ (1990), in Werkausgabe, XVI , 230–4, 232. 69 Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Leiden an Deutschland’, 279.

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‘ein Wort, das gepaart mit den “vaterlandslosen Gesellen” zum Sprachschatz deutscher Geschichte gehört’, before claiming this latter term for himself: ‘Man zähle mich gegebenenfalls zu den vaterlandslosen Gesellen’. 70 In subsequent speeches a personal slant on the exile debates of the late 1940s and early 1950s provides an increasingly audible sub-discourse to contemporary events. In ‘Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ (October 1990), for example, Grass develops the themes of intolerance and hatred, first as a personal issue (‘[ich wurde] zum Schwarzseher, Miesmacher ernannt und unter dem Rubrik “vaterlandslosen Gesellen” abgebucht’) 71 and then as a contemporary political one with strong historical roots: Wem wird noch immer nicht bange, wenn täglich deutsche Rückfälligkeiten demonstriert werden, wenn mühsam erlernte demokratische Tugenden über Nacht ihren Kurswert verlieren, wenn Vereinigung auch im Staatssicherheitsbereich vollzogen wird, wenn sich—schon wieder einmal—die größte Oppositionspartei wegduckt, weil sie befürchten muß, nach leisestem Widerspruch ‘vaterlandslos’ gescholten zu werden? 72

He closes with a strong implication that he is taking his leave of this newly resurfaced ‘monster’ (‘Ein Monstrum will Großmacht sein. Dem sei mein Nein vor die Schwelle gelegt’). 73 In so doing, Grass presents his situation in terms that echo National Socialist indifference to the exodus of respected public intellectual figures in the 1930s: ‘In seiner Machtfülle wird der neue Staat einen solchen Patrioten kaum vermissen.’ 74 It is in the 1992 speech, ‘Rede vom Verlust: Über den Niedergang der politischen Kultur im geeinten Deutschland’, however, that Grass’s selfstylization as state-enforced exile most clearly coincides with his political message. Here, he explicitly presents himself as trying, in vain, to shelter himself on Møn island from political developments in his ‘schwierige[s] Vaterland’. 75 Commenting on the series of attacks on homes for asylum seekers that shocked both Germany and the rest of the world in 1992, it is easy for Grass to sketch out the links between the kind of intolerance that saw him outlawed as ‘der “notorische Feind der deutschen Einheit” ’ and the activity now undertaken by Neo-Nazi groups. 76 This kind of identification with the exile period, however, goes beyond mere parallel. With polemical references to politicians as ‘Saubermänner[. . .]’ and current 70 71

Grass, ‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’, 230, 234. Günter Grass, ‘Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ (1990), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 286–98,

288. 72 75 76

73 Ibid., 298. 74 Ibid., 298. Ibid., 295. Günter Grass, ‘Rede vom Verlust’ (1992), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 360–72, 360. Ibid., 364.

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political practice as a ‘Säuberungsprozeß’ that has reduced the democratic left to the pathetic form of ‘einige zum Fossil degradierte Einzelgänger’, Grass develops his own position clearly. 77 Declaring ‘eines dieser restlichen Exemplare spricht heute zu Ihnen’, he merges his contemporary public persona with that of left-wing thinkers in the 1930s. 78 This is reminiscent of his first incursion into political debate, when, writing to Anna Seghers in 1961, he characterized himself as Klaus Mann writing to Gottfried Benn in 1933. This time, however, he is much more an immediate victim than a warning voice writing from a position of relative safety. Claiming a strong position of moral rectitude, Grass presents the way in which he was subsequently sidelined from post-1989 political debate as resulting from a patriotism deemed ‘undesirable’ by a public majority that was overtaken by feelings of nationalist fervour: Zwar war ich es gewohnt, mit meinem geschriebenen und gesprochenen Wort umstritten zu sein, doch habe ich während der letzten drei Jahre, daß heißt, solange ich mich zum von Anbeginn mißglückten Prozeß der deutschen Einheit kritisch geäußert und Warnungen vor diesem gedankenlosen Ruckzuck-Verfahren zur Litanei geknüpft habe, schließlich erkennen müssen, daß ich ins Leere sprach und schrieb. Mein Patriotismus, dem nicht der Staat, vielmehr der Verfassung wichtig ist, war unerwünscht. 79

Where in early 1990 Grass failed to take on the leading political position he felt was rightfully his, by 1992 he has thus turned this personal failure into a matter of national scandal by directly equating widespread political hostility to his ideas with a concerted programme of expulsion as suffered by hundreds of writers during the Third Reich. Such an inflated rhetoric (incidentally, at a time when emotions were running high right across the German public sphere this was by no means restricted to Grass) may appear problematic. What it did achieve, however, was to help Grass, now entirely lacking any wider backing, to remain in the spotlight when the immediate unification period had passed. By overtly embracing what he presented as a concerted political attempt to silence him and making this the theme of numerous political speeches and writings, he merged his own biography with recent national history. First asserting his own political consistency across the decades and then drawing attention to the way in which the new state was silencing its older, established writers by portraying himself as ‘zum Fossil degradiert’, Grass set about creating his own legacy not only as a morally credible voice, but as the only credible 77

Ibid., 371.

78

Ibid., 371.

79

Ibid., 374.

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voice given the recent misdemeanours of the state. By the end of the 1990s, he thus began presenting himself as one of the few remaining members of the Gruppe 47 generation of writers who had stayed true to his roots. He alone had kept intact the socio-political ideology underpinning the group’s collective political recasting of authorship. The result was that he began to position himself back in the socio-political sphere, but now speaking with all the authority of a sole survivor of exile. The increased confidence that this new position gave him allowed Grass to emphasize again his public relevance and consciously play to an audience. This is particularly evident in the 1997 address ‘Rede über den Standort’. Although Grass begins by pointing out similarities with the position he had taken in the speech ‘Rede vom Verlust’ of five years before, the way he presents himself now is quite different. Where the earlier speech, revolving around the theme of exile, was itself written from what appeared to be a semi-enforced state of exile on the Danish island, ‘Rede über den Standort’ begins with a positive decision to gain some self-imposed distance from Germany by travelling to Hong Kong. Furthermore, while it was the negatively connoted term of loss that Grass presented as the crucial experience on which his authorial role was predicated in 1992, by 1997 this same author opens his speech with a distinct sense of chutzpah: ‘Ein Schriftsteller, also jemand ohne Mandat, maßt sich an, über etwas zu sprechen, das droht, ihm abhanden zu kommen.’ 80 Where just five years earlier political failure and exile determined the author’s self-conception, now it is a different matter: ‘Vor Beginn der Niederschrift dieser Rede sagte ich mir: [. . .] Beweise dich professionell! Als Schriftsteller, der die Wirklichkeit im Plural erlebt, verstehst du es allemal, dich in Fiktionen zu retten’. 81 This sort of emphasis on the author’s flexibility and autonomy with regard to sociopolitical positioning, something invoked by the very title of the speech, was last acted out on a political stage at the very beginning of Grass’s public interventions in the 1960s. In many ways, the self-righteous returning exile and the novice author-turned-political campaigner have much in common. The 1997 speech shows a renewed meta-discursive tendency that is implied, at least in part, by its own title and reinforced by Grass’s inclusion of dialogues with himself, anticipated hostile reactions from his critics and a repeated third-person take on ‘der Schriftsteller ohne Mandat’. It also for the first time since 1965, employs the theatrical mode. Having drawn ample attention to his own maverick position, the speaker then turns his attention 80 81

Günter Grass, ‘Rede über den Standort’ (1997), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 464–82, 464. Ibid., 464.

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to the standing of a lone capitalist, now suffering the loss of his communist brother, and a tax evader easily recognizable as Steffi Graf ’s father. Both positions, taken as exemplary for the state of contemporary Germany, are developed into one-act plays for the theatre, which the speaker describes at some length to his audience. Using his powers as a writer of fiction, Grass then goes one step further, and details the impact his theatre might have on an ideal audience. The existential stagnation that his one-act plays convey inspires counter-action: Und schon beginnt das Wunschdenken und mit ihm die wunschgerechte Spekulation. [. . .] Wie anderswo auf der Welt, erwacht bei uns Bürgersinn. Weckrufe werden laut, vernehmlich sogar jenen Parteien, die wie alteingesessen auf der Oppositionsbank dahindämmern und ihr Ego nuckeln. [. . .] Sogar die junge Generation, die sich bis dahin cool gegeben hatte, stünde hitzig in vorderster Reihe. Den mittlerweile betagten Achtundsechzigern fiele ein, sich aus ihren Befindlichkeiten zu lösen, und auch alte Knacker wie ich wären dabei. Nicht mit der MaoFibel in hochgereckter Hand, nur mit dem Grundgesetz bestückt, einer, zugegeben, lädierten Waffe, käme es darauf an, den alles nivellierenden Begriff ‘Standort’ zu löschen und wiederum die Bundesrepublik ins Recht zu setzen. 82

Against this stirring projected vision, Grass places a much more prosaic version of political reality: ‘Die Jugend versteckt sich hinter ihren Ängsten. Keine Universität will Ort geistiger Höhenflüge sein. Die Achtundsechziger hecheln dem Zeitgeist hinterdrein. Und die alten Knacker schimpfen am Stammtisch.’ 83 In fact, the different positions acted out by German citizens have become so fixed that the real political life that inspired his theatre is described, quite simply, as ‘Standorttheater’. 84 Just as in 1965, then, Grass encourages his audience to think about their positions within society by satirizing the current political stagnation. Using the power of his own artistic imagination, he deploys his obvious pleasure in the creative process to show the public how they could set about redefining their own positions in the world. The position from which he does so, however, is now considerably better established. As a guest speaker in the series entitled ‘Zur Sache: Deutschland’, his public image has taken on the power of a political legacy: the Günter Grass school of political thought.

CONCLUSION The striking similarities between the self-conscious political performances of 1965 and 1997 encourage further consideration of certain patterns 82

Ibid., 477–8.

83

Ibid., 478.

84

Ibid., 482.

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underlying Grass’s self-presentation in the public political sphere. Grass has reconfigured his public image at least four times over the course of his career to date. In the mid-1960s he set about qualifying his bad-boy public image by straddling the divide between literature and politics in an exemplary fashion. Over the course of subsequent years, he was increasingly associated with a quasi-establishment public image. During the 1970s, however, he began to distance himself from the political sphere, re-emerging in the 1980s as an intellectual driven by the power of specifically literary insight. When this insight was classed as unwelcome in the early 1990s, he embraced a further reconfiguration of his public image. First casting himself as marginalized in a manner similar to writers in the Third Reich and then fast-forwarding through the 1940s and 1950s, he returned in the mid1990s to a public role of bold literary agitator that can be understood as a repeat of his initial incursions into the public sphere in the early 1960s. This point is particularly borne out by the appearance in 1994 of a collection of his political writings from 1961 to 1993, entitled Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen and accompanied by a foreword that ends by directly quoting the concluding sentences of his famous 1966 piece, ‘Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unter Berücksichtigung nicht vorhandener Höfe’. 85 Such repetition has continued to the present day. Rewarded in 1999 with the Nobel prize for literature and in 2002 with widespread media praise for his political acuity on the point of German suffering, Grass would now appear to be enjoying his second establishment phase, firmly positioned as an author of unshakeable and inimitable national standing. Indeed, as he settles into his second cycle of positions in the public sphere, the very familiarity to him of his own variously connoted public image seems to have conditioned both absolute identification with and humorous distance from his public political self. Although he is Germany’s foremost representative of a politicized kind of authorship, at least some of his speeches reveal a degree of ironic distance taken from this public persona. Furthermore, whilst he has certainly not been shy in exploiting his newfound respectability, as his trenchant essay on the current state of democracy in Germany published in the Guardian in May 2005 testifies, this weighty, at times even dogmatic, political self does not give the whole picture. 86 This became particularly clear in late 2006, when Grass revealed in his autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, that he had served for a short period in the Waffen-SS and 85 Günter Grass, Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1994). The foreword is reprinted under the title ‘Der Versuch öffentlicher Dreinrede’, in Werkausgabe, XVI, 393–4. 86 Günter Grass, ‘The high price of freedom’, Guardian, 7 May 2005, Review section, 4–5.

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had categorically failed throughout his career to admit to this dark spot in his past. The revelation led to heated debate not just in the German media but across the world, with calls for both Grass’s political standing and his literary achievements to be radically re-evaluated. 87 Even if Grass were not prepared to take a little distance from the political model of authorship with which he has become associated, his own biography has necessitated some kind of qualification to the dominant political understanding of his authorial role to date. For those who are prepared to read carefully, this qualification was in fact always forthcoming. A close reading of his various contrasting styles of self-presentation over the past forty years reveals that, throughout his public political career, Grass has combined various strong, biographically determined standpoints with a certain authorial slipperiness. Setting out by defining himself in line with some of his illustrious literary predecessors, he has worked with various models of authorship, both past and present, discreetly manipulating public understanding of his own authorial role as he does so. This engagement with public constructions of authorship has proven his strongest single political weapon, as it is in repeatedly reinventing himself whilst giving the appearance of staying the same that Grass has managed to remain so dominant in a media landscape that has made several concerted efforts to dislodge him. His ability to manipulate the authorial role has, however, played an equally important role in conditioning his authorial self-understanding in literature. It is to this second conception of the publicly accountable author that I will now turn.

87 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung first printed news of the forthcoming autobiographical revelations and an interview with Grass on 12 August 2006. The story was followed in sensationalist style both at home and abroad for weeks after this. The Spiegel’s extensive cover story, ‘Der Blechtrommler: Spätes Bekenntnis eines Moral-Apostels’, 21 August 2006, 46–68, gives a sense of the hostile arguments brought against Grass, while John Irving provided a passionate defence in the UK Guardian (amongst other places): ‘Günter Grass is my hero, as a writer and a moral compass’, 19 August 2006, 28.

3 ‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .] erzählen’ I: Placing the Author in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus INTRODUCTION In 1981, in an interview with Siegfried Lenz, Grass pointed to the similarity between the two situations in which he found himself when he wrote Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980), two works which draw on a great deal of autobiographical material. He suggested that there is a certain overall pattern in his writing life, involving a recurrent need (termed a ‘Notwendigkeit’) for self-examination, one that can be directly linked to the genesis of these pieces: Da gibt es bei mir so eine Art Kontertanz, eine Annäherung und dann wieder eine Entfernung von der gegenwärtigen Wirklichkeit. Das ist eine Notwendigkeit, nach so viel Wegtauchen in Vergangenheit, mich plötzlich der Realität zu stellen, z.B. einem Bundestagswahlkampf, einer vor der Tür lärmenden Realität. Dabei zu sein, Zeitgenosse zu sein, mitzusprechen, mich einzumischen und mich dabei zu beobachten, mich dabei zu sehen und gleichzeitig mich mit meinem Wirklichkeitsbegriff, diesem reduzierten Wirklichkeitsbegriff zu konfrontieren. Ich habe das zum ersten Mal in Tagebuch einer Schnecke gemacht. Das war zu Beginn der siebziger Jahre, und dieses Jahrzehnt hörte auf mit einem abermaligen Aufnehmen des Themas und dieser Möglichkeiten in Kopfgeburten. 1 1 Günter Grass in interview with Siegfried Lenz, ‘Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit’ (1981), in Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, ed. Volker Neuhaus, 10 vols (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987), X , ed. Klaus Stallbaum, 255–81, 268.

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The way in which Grass develops his thoughts here is revealing. He begins by presenting past and present realities as clear opposites. While the literary author spends his time ‘hiding away’ in the ‘reduced’ reality represented by his grip on the past, the politically active citizen finds himself brutally confronted with present-day events. In the third sentence, however, this opposition begins to break down. Participating in present-day politics becomes a self-reflexive process, as ‘mich einzumischen’ turns into ‘mich dabei zu beobachten’. Finding oneself confronted with the strains of contemporary reality thereby becomes instead, and much more pressingly, a matter of selfconfrontation: ‘mich mit meinem Wirklichkeitsbegriff, diesem reduzierten Wirklichkeitsbegriff zu konfrontieren’. The literary man’s understanding is challenged and extended by that of the politician, and it is only in bringing the contrasting spheres of literature and politics together that Grass’s own self-understanding becomes complete. Tellingly, however, this final synthesis takes place not during the process of political action, but rather by engaging in the genre of autobiographical writing, as the final two sentences make clear. In this description of the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten Grass makes his autobiographical fiction into a journey of selfdiscovery. Although these comments, echoing the general tenor of ‘Neue Innerlichkeit’, are very much of their time, they are surprising in as much as Grass is not generally associated with writing of a solipsist nature. Such an interpretation of these two works has been further encouraged by Grass’s own statement concerning the narrative structure of the Tagebuch, the first work in which he employs an autobiographical narrator: ‘Im “Tagebuch einer Schnecke” ist das Autor-Ich und das Erzähler-Ich weitgehend identisch’, he states. 2 This claimed identification between the author and the narrator invokes Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’, and heavily implies that the book is to be read in the genre of autobiography proper. Outlining his idea of a special autobiographical pact between author and reader, Lejeune argued in 1975 that if the names of the narrator and protagonist refer to the same person as the name of the author on the title page, then a text will be read by the reader as autobiographical. This makes clear the importance of the author (through his or her name) in conditioning not just how the text is constructed, but also how the reader reacts to it: The problematic of autobiography [. . .] is [. . .] grounded on [. . .] analysis, on the global level of publication, of the implicit or explicit contract proposed by the 2 Günter Grass in interview with Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Heute lüge ich lieber gedruckt’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, ZEIT-Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 7–18, 10.

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author to the reader, a contract which determines the mode of reading of the text and engenders the effects which, attributed to the text, seem to us to define it as autobiography. 3

Although Lejeune carries on to describe autobiography as more a mode of reading than of writing, it is nevertheless evident that the author initiates a contract which effectively obliges the reader to direct his or her energies into projecting the author into existence through the act of reading. This has certainly been the way most Grass critics so far have behaved. Hanspeter Brode, for example, extrapolates from Grass’s statement quoted above, ‘zum ersten Mal bietet Grass autobiographischen Stoff fast unverhüllt dar’, while Cepl-Kaufmann sees the author-narrator identification as breaking down the barriers between literature and politics. 4 In commenting, ‘mit der Identität von Autor und Erzähler kommen sich literarisches und politisches Werk sehr nahe’, she is proposing that the Tagebuch shares with Grass’s political speeches a discrete autobiographical subject who can be clearly located at the heart of his text. 5 This sort of reading of Grass’s presence in his own literature is representative of the majority of literary critical approaches to the Tagebuch. These judge the work to be a sort of refined authorial statement that simply exploits the metaphor of the snail and the tale of Dr Zweifel in order to make Grass’s overall standpoint all the more readily comprehensible. 6 Volker Neuhaus sums it up: ‘der Schriftsteller Grass erzählt mit den Mitteln seines Handwerks vom Politiker Grass’. 7 The central focus of such readings is on how the public subject of traditional autobiography is elucidated in the literary form. In a similar vein, much of the literary critical discussion of Kopfgeburten has been concerned to explain Grass’s supposed political standpoint with regard to the threat of an ‘Orwellian decade’. 8 Underlying these readings is an 3 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 29. 4 Hanspeter Brode, Günter Grass (Munich: Beck, 1979), 165. 5 Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Günter Grass: Eine Analyse des Gesamtwerkes unter dem Aspekt von Literatur und Politik (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1975), 164. The way she goes on to read the Tagebuch as a straightforward kind of source material illustrating Grass’s understanding of literary and political activity makes this clear. 6 A representative sample of predominantly autobiographical readings can be found in: Brode, Günter Grass; Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (London: Boyers, 1980); Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 7 Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 122. 8 Mark Cory, ‘Sisyphus and the Snail: Metaphors for the Political Process in Günter Grass’ Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus’, German Studies Review, 6 (1983), 519–33; Heinz D. Osterle, ‘An Orwellian Decade? Günter Grass

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assumption that the autobiographical narrator within the text is the same kind of apparently straightforward authorial voice as has been widely (and, as I argued in the previous chapter, erroneously) located in Grass’s political speeches. The complex form of both works, however, makes such directly autobiographical readings problematic. Grass certainly did not believe that with either piece he had actually written an autobiography. Asked in 2003 whether he might write one, he replied entirely in the subjunctive: ‘Wenn ich eine Möglichkeit sähe, mich gewissermaßen in Variationen zu erzählen—das wäre vielleicht reizvoll. Aber eigentlich mag ich Autobiografisches in der verschlüsselten Form der Fiktion, des Romans, lieber.’ 9 Throughout his career Grass has clearly favoured mixing autobiographical material with a fictional framework. The challenge that his work poses to the autobiographical mode thereby echoes that of the French sub-genre of autofiction, designed as it was both to question and further Lejeune’s ideas on autobiographical writing. Rejecting conventional autobiography as a genre only available to important public personages writing towards the end of their lives, Serge Doubrovsky described autofiction as an approach to writing that mixes a fictional framework with autobiographical content in an attempt to capture the reader’s interest and yet allow the author to retain ultimate control of the text. Himself an author, he described in the following terms his reasons for employing this mode in his novel Fils (1977): So fiction here would be a narrative ruse; not being an eligible party for autobiography on his own merit, the ‘Mr so-and-so’ that I am must, in order to win over the stubborn reader, pass off his real life in the more prestigious forms of an imaginary existence. 10

Doubrovsky’s comment is important not only for its interesting consideration of the respective prestige of the fictional and autobiographical modes, but also for the way in which it shows how the author of autofiction not between Despair and Hope’, German Studies Review, 8 (1985), 481–507; Mark Martin Gruettner, Intertextualität und Zeitkritik in Günter Grass’ ‘Kopfgeburten’ und ‘Die Rättin’ (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997). For a considerably more differentiated approach that nevertheless remains true to an autobiographical political reading of the text, see Stuart Taberner, ‘ “Sowas läuft nur im Dritten Programm”: Winning Over the Audience for Political Engagement in Günter Grass’s Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus’, Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, 91 (1999), 84–100. 9

Grass, ‘Siegen macht dumm’, Der Spiegel, 25 August 2003, 140. Serge Doubrovsky, Autobiographiques: de Corneille à Sartre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988), 69, my translation. 10

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only writes towards the reader but also sets about manipulating him or her in order to subvert readerly expectations. A similar kind of duplicity is exactly what appealed to Grass in his later reference to the ‘verschlüsselte Form der Fiktion’ and the scope it offers for ‘lying’. In both cases, this acknowledgement of the author’s calculation with the reader adds a playful, performance quality to Lejeune’s legalistic-sounding ‘pact’. Wolfgang Iser’s considerations about the reading process are instructive here, as they highlight the possibilities open to the author keen to influence his or her own reception by the reader. Where Lejeune merely gestures towards the reader’s role, Iser proposes that ‘in reading the reader becomes the subject that does the thinking’. Building on this, he defines identification between the reader and what he or she reads as a matter of taking on an attitude to the experience the text conveys, and this is an attitude which the author will hope to influence as much as possible: ‘The author’s aim [. . .] is to convey the experience and, above all, an attitude towards that experience. Consequently “identification” is not an end in itself, but a stratagem by means of which an author stimulates attitudes in the reader.’ 11 The subtle negotiations that exist between author and reader are described by Iser in terms of a carefully staged performance inherent in the text: Literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meanings themselves. Their aesthetic quality lies in this ‘performing’ structure, which clearly cannot be identical to the final product, because without the participation of the individual reader there can be no performance. 12

These considerations give a very different twist to the idea of selfrevelation in Grass’s autobiographically informed writing, situating it now precisely in the scission between the political and textual models of authorship. While Grass, by the early 1970s, has had plenty of experience of negotiating his public–political authorial image, he is only beginning to explore a textual understanding of authorship as it applies to his own positioning within the text and his readers’ reception of it. The particularly self-conscious form of autofiction not only allows Grass to experiment with both this textual position and his readers, but also renders problematic readings that seek to explain the texts solely through their wider sociopolitical circumstances. As I will argue below, a far subtler textual politics must also be accounted for. 11 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, New Literary History, 3 (1972), 279–99, 296. 12 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge; Henley: Kegan Paul, 1976), 27.

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Framing the self: the author at work The way in which Grass sets about creating his first piece of autofiction is a logical place to begin when reconsidering his authorial role within the finished text. The archive material for Grass’s written work at present includes everything from the earliest beginnings in the 1950s through to 1989, along with some pieces from 1990 to the present. 13 Material relevant to Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke is mostly gathered in fifteen folders and two Arbeitstagebücher—real writing diaries that Grass kept from 1959 to 1967 and from 1969 to 1973. Unfortunately, access to the Arbeitstagebücher is currently denied. 14 The earliest accessible plan for the Tagebuch (Plurien, am 8.8.69) consists of two pages (see Figure 1). 15 The first page, entitled ‘Roman-Entwurf (500 Seiten)’, is predominantly visual: the novel is represented in pie-chart form, with a smaller sketch of a snail and imaginary quotations from the snail underneath. On the second page, many of the snail quotations from the previous page are worked into an early version of the poem, here entitled ‘Schneckenhaus’, that is published on pages 48–9 of the finished work. The first part of the Plurien plan—the pie chart— presents primarily factual plot lines: ‘Die Söhne, Kirchentag + Wahlkampf ’ are allotted 100 pages, 50 pages each go to ‘Danzig-Gdansk’ and ‘Mond’ (presumably the 1969 moon landing, to which reference is made in the published text, pages 165–74), and then 250 pages collectively to the individual chunks, ‘SS-Mann’ (based on the real Wolfgang Scheub, who becomes Augst in the published version), ‘Ranicki-G[eschichte]’ (Dr Zweifel’s tale is based on the life of the Polish-German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, during the war years), ‘Mauritius’ (the story of the Danzig Jews), ‘Kiesinger’ and ‘Die Belag[er]ung’ (in some early plans Grass intended to include the Napoleonic siege of Danzig). In the middle of the pie-chart, however, is 13 I refer to the collection at the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, RobertKoch-Platz 10, 10115 Berlin. A selection of material has been published in Günter Grass, Fundsachen für Grass-Leser, ed. Karin Kiwus and Wolfgang Trautwein (Berlin: Günter-GrassArchiv, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste; Göttingen: Steidl, 2002). There are further collections in Bremen (sound archive), Lübeck (graphic works), Sulzbach-Rosenberg (correspondence with Walter Höllerer and typed draft chapters of Die Blechtrommel), and Marbach (newspaper articles). 14 I asked Grass for permission to access this material, but was told that the diaries contained far too much personal material for anyone to use them at present. This response is of course in itself interesting when considered in the frame of my argument. 15 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.169.

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an intriguing and easily overlooked addition: ‘Ich’ is pencilled in right at the centre of the chart, a tiny circle from which the novel’s various strands radiate. The pie-chart is thus not only a simple breakdown of the major (factual) strands that will make up the work’s subject matter; it also actively illustrates the relationship between the author and/or first-person narrator (it is impossible at this point to differentiate) and these historical plot lines. At this point, the bottom half of the page becomes interesting. Positioned almost directly underneath the pie-chart, the snail’s shell can easily have the pie-chart visually mapped onto it. The ‘ich’ of the pie-chart corresponds to the clear dot at the centre of the shell, while the segment lines have been swapped for whorls. Meanwhile, the imagined comments dotted around the drawing assert an ‘ich’ that has become synonymous with the snail, as is then developed in lyrical form on the second page. The fact that Grass writes the potential title for his ‘Roman-Entwurf ’, ‘(Im) Schneckenhaus’, between these two visual representations seems to make even clearer his own position with regard to the subject matter: his ‘I’ is buried deep within the shell of the snail, at the centre of all the various different plot lines that will first and foremost make up the subject matter (‘shell’) of his text. In writing his ‘I’ both visually and literally into the snail, Grass would seem to be envisaging his own authorial voice as synonymous with the core structure of his work. This concept of the self as the centre of the novel suggests a clear narrative position for his authorial persona: he is the position from which all plot lines are narrated, the author who stands at the very core of his work as an autobiographical first-person narrator. The second accessible plan, written in Dubrovnik on the 22 October 1969, shows Grass even more consciously considering his authorial position. 16 Taking the working title ‘Im Schneckenhaus’, he apparently describes to himself, as author sitting down to try to write, just what it is he is trying to achieve: Am Tag nach der Wahl Willy Brandts zum Bundeskanzler, also nach dem ‘Sieg’ und im Zustand unausrottbarer Resignation, versuche ich ein Ich-Buch zu entwerfen, für das während des Wahlkampfes erste Stichworte zu Papier kamen.

The statement shows Grass capturing a moment in time where he observes himself writing (or trying to) about himself, and becomes doubly selfreflexive: he writes about himself writing about himself. Not only is the authorial ‘I’ thereby the subject of the sentence, it is also its object, with 16

SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170.

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Figure 1. ‘Roman-Entwurf (500 Seiten)’, 8 August 1969, SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.169.

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the neologism ‘Ich-Buch’ drawing particular attention to the author’s own self-objectification and the reference to his own state of mind increasing this sense of introspection. Perhaps the most obvious reading of this private meditation is that Grass, in weaving the various strands of the Plurien plan into a coherent work, believes he is simultaneously weaving his own story: his ‘ich’ will emerge as the sum of his text’s parts. In the early plans, however, there is little further indication that Grass is trying to do this. Instead, as is made visually clear in the Plurien plan, his ‘ich’ is conceived as the tiny speck from which these greater considerations grow. He is a vehicle to pedagogical discoveries (learning about Germany’s recent history), anchoring the various historical strands to a clear narrative position that will help make them comprehensible for the next generation. Consequently, his ‘ich’ seems to be first and foremost a narrative means, part of the structure, rather than an ultimate narrative object. It is far less a book about the authorial ‘I’ than a book that is simply written from the authorial first-person perspective with the clear aim of communicating important historical lessons. This notion of perspective, however, encourages a second reading of Grass’s private meditation quoted above. Instead of simply remarking on his own emotions (‘im Zustand unausrottbarer Resignation’), Grass is outlining the kind of tone that must permeate his work. As author, he decides that his autobiographical narrator will narrate at a certain time, and in a certain tone, and the way in which this narrator goes about his project thereby becomes part of the book’s subject matter. Grass is not so much being self-reflexive as creating for himself a separate narrator who will provide a constant point of reference within the text, even as the author moves and changes throughout the period of textual production. His narrator is defined by the immediate post-election period and its accompanying sense of ‘ineradicable resignation’ that will cause him repeatedly to question himself. The author’s feelings, on the other hand, are sure to vacillate enormously over the course of his writing project. It is surely in this vein—of fixing the textual conditions for his autobiographical narrator—that Grass carries on in the Dubrovnik plan of 22 October 1969. He envisages a textual framework of long and short letters, and develops twelve separate ‘durchlaufende Handlungen’, all based on real-life people or events, and twenty ‘thematische Briefe’ that cover all the main topics Grass wishes to explain to his children. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this detailed plan as far as narrative perspective is concerned is the way in which the various plot lines are to be integrated into a basic framework of pedagogical letters. Grass writes, ‘Diese zwölf

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durchlaufenden Geschichten sollen in jedem Brief entweder hauptsächlich oder am Rande entwickelt werden.’ This kind of construction would very clearly mark out the narrator within the work as the medium for all historical information. As letter writer, he has a definite structural function, namely to convey the material that makes up the Tagebuch. His ‘ich’ is therefore, as he writes on 24 October 1969, an ‘Erzählhaltung’, albeit a flexible one that is given to plurality, spontaneity, and humour: ‘diese Erzählhaltungen müssen nicht streng durchgehalten werden. Sie können eingeschoben, nachgestellt, ironisiert werden’ he comments of a list of various different narrative scenarios. 17 Whether this narrator communicates through moral lecture or entertaining diversion, however, his role throughout is clear. He is to give one consistent and unifying line for his children, with the result that they consider their father’s particular mind-frame only in as much as it points to a greater historical context. The whole text is, in these early plans, constructed by the author to lead away from his autobiographical narrator and into the wider world. The work’s projected content in all these early plans thus renders marginal any scheme for autobiographical self-presentation. Apart from the cursory reference to ‘die Geschichte des Günter Grass’ in the Dubrovnik plan quoted above, Grass is markedly absent as subject. On the plan from 28 November 1969, the six major parts of the work are listed as ‘Der Weg nach Mauritius (80 pages)’, ‘Dr Zweifel’ (150 pages), ‘Der Selbstmörder’ (60 pages), ‘Sieben Essays’ (100 pages), ‘Der Wahlkampf ’ (90 pages), and ‘Die Schnecke’ (50 pages). A roughly similar overview is presented on the 8 March 1970, as Grass toys with the size of his overall project: ‘Dr Zweifel’, ‘Mauritius’, ‘Scheub’, ‘Kinder und Wahlkampf ’, and ‘Schnecke und Melancholie’ are the five major categories to be considered. 18 It therefore comes as something of a surprise when, for work scheduled for the period ‘ab.16.7.1970’, Grass suddenly pencils himself in as an entire separate section: ‘Zweifel’, ‘Der Auszug’, ‘Ich’, ‘Melancolia’, ‘Scheub’, ‘Schneckensprache’, and ‘Wahlkampf ’ are the seven sub-sections he is now working with. 19 Other plans from this point onwards confirm this new conception. ‘Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke: Stand am 1. August 1970’ works with the sub-headings ‘Zweifel’, ‘Scheub’, ‘Wahlkampf ’, ‘Kinder’, ‘Melancholie’, ‘Schnecken’, and ‘Über mich’, where ‘Über mich’ represents the fifth longest of the seven sections (longer than ‘Melancholie’ and ‘Schnecken’). 20 ‘Die 17 18 19 20

SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170. SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.172. SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.173. SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.2081.

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Gleitspur’, written just over a year later (22 August 1971), divides the novel up into chapters (1 to 26), with a box drawn around the major theme of each one (see Figure 2). 21 ‘Ich’ fills this role in chapter 6, occurring again as major theme in the form of ‘Zweifel + Ich’ in chapter 17. Furthermore, in chapters 3, 4, 8, and 14, ‘Ich’ appears as a sub-section in the form of ‘Geschichte + Ich’, ‘Kollegen + Ich’, ‘Sozialdemokratie + Ich’, ‘Gott + Ich’ respectively. The trend implied by the archival material seems clear. Where Grass initially conceived of the project as an ‘Ich-Buch’ in which his ‘ich’ was first and foremost a narrative position, increasingly his own person becomes a plotline in its own right. His narrating subject becomes an ever more clearly constructed narrative object. The result is that the narrator can no longer be seen as an unproblematic reflection of the author; rather, the relationship between the two becomes one of the major focuses of the work.

‘I’ve been framed’: manipulating the narrator Although perhaps not Grass’s initial intention, his statement ‘ich versuche ein Ich-Buch zu entwerfen’ takes on a new light. Now that the author is creating a definite reconstruction of himself amidst fictional and factual plotlines, the genre in which he is writing is clearly close to Doubrovsky’s autofiction. Explaining the genesis of the term, Doubrovsky classifies the fictional element of autofiction as a ‘ruse’ employed by the author in order to captivate the reader’s interest. This is accompanied by a value judgement: the imaginary life of fiction is deemed ‘more prestigious’ than its real-life counterpart in the eyes of the reader. Such considerations seem to have been shared by the narrator in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke when he sets about narrating the story of Hermann Ott, alias Zweifel. A factual approach to his children’s questions about the fate of the Jews is rejected early on: ‘es war falsch, euch das Ergebnis, die vielstellige Zahl zu nennen’ (TS, 15). Instead, the narrator opts for a more personal approach—history is conveyed through his story: ‘Jetzt erzähle ich euch [. . .], wie es bei mir zu Hause langsam und umständlich am hellen Tag dazu kam’ (TS, 16, my emphasis). If the reader accepts this, then he or she easily accepts the logic for the final move into the fictional: Zweifel, in himself a fictional creation, is deemed by the narrator to be the best way of communicating the facts of the past, as he comments, ‘auch wenn ich ihn erfinden muß, es hat ihn gegeben’ (TS, 22). This emphasis on the personal narrative, whether 21

SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.2081.

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Figure 2. ‘Die Gleitspur’, 22 August 1971, SAdK, Berlin, Günter-GrassArchiv, no.2081.

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this narrative is real or only seemingly real, is subsequently portrayed as successful with the children, who constantly interject with requests for more details on either the narrator’s life (chapter 8) or Zweifel’s fate. Indeed, they even request personal stories that draw explicitly on the model of Anne Frank, as Franz says in chapter 13: ‘Erzähl mal was, wo sich einer versteckt hat, richtig, weil er gemußt hat, versteckt hat, wie bei Anne Frank: das war spannend und komisch und traurig und stimmte auch und war langweilig überhaupt nich . . . ’ (TS, 121). This links with similar considerations in Grass’s 1970 speech, ‘Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen Kindern Auschwitz zu erklären’, where he recognizes the need to make historical facts more readily accessible and exciting through reference to the tales of individuals. 22 By contrast, the factual aspect of the election campaign and the history of the SPD elicit little more than yawns (‘Wissen wir schon. Wissen wir schon’, TS, 77). The message is clear: weaving the self into a clearly constructed story is a necessary ruse to communicate important pedagogical facts. However, if the author were himself trying to draw the full benefits from his ruse, it is unlikely that he would draw the reader’s attention to such trickery. The narrator is overt about the way in which he merges fact and fiction, not only in the way he structures his narrative—the real election campaign in which Grass took part, the fictional story of Zweifel, and the various everyday household scenes constantly interrupt and undercut one another—but also in the way he programmatically draws attention to this right at the beginning of the text: Ich will auf Umwegen (Abwegen) zu euch sprechen: manchmal außer mir und verletzt, oft zurückgenommen und nicht zu belangen, zwischendurch reich an Lügen, bis alles wahrscheinlich wird. Manches möchte ich umständlich verschweigen. Einen Teil vom Teil nehme ich vorweg, während ein anderer Teil erst später und auch nur teilweise vorkommen wird. (TS, 13)

The narrator draws attention to the particular way in which he creates a link between himself and recent history that is not necessarily factually correct, but that will win an audience for the basic subject matter he wishes to communicate. His children take the pedagogical bait, as their ongoing interest throughout the narrative documents. However, the very fact that the narrator comments on his own literary activity also turns him into the object of his own narrative: he is constructing his own story in 22 Günter Grass, ‘Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen Kindern Auschwitz zu erklären’ (1970), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XV, 49–51.

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semi-fictional terms, with the result that he is both inside and outside his text at the same time, both at work as an author and being worked by the author. This tension is most clear in the scenes that relay short exchanges between the father and his children. The very fact that these scenes are played out within the Tagebuch points to an extra-textual author at work deliberately setting up a teacher–pupil scenario in which both parties represent certain positions. Indeed, the sense that these scenes have been inserted by the author precisely for this purpose is supported by the archival material. While in earlier drafts for the novel Grass toyed with including a number of scenes in the narrator’s autofictional text that established an overt relationship of pedagogue and pupil between Zweifel and Stomma, in the final version this is played out by the father and children (any sort of plan for which is notably absent in the earlier drafts). 23 Although this relationship between pedagogue and pupil is in itself a well-known device, familiar from Plato’s Socratic dialogues onwards but more recently used to great effect by Bertolt Brecht, the twist on it here is the way in which Grass visibly places it within his own text and in a manner that frequently shows up the constructed nature of the position occupied by his narrator. The overtly pedagogical dialogues are played out by the narrator and children who themselves function as author and readers of a text (the narrator’s autofictional narrative is the subject of their discussion). This has an important result on the overall effect made by the Tagebuch on its extra-textual reader. Seeing the narrator construct his autofictional narrative with the express intention of captivating his children’s interest to a pedagogical end makes the reader focus not so much on the didactic message as on the way in which it is conveyed: how the narrator sets about turning history into his story. Effectively, it renders visible the issue of narration and textual construction, and thereby makes these otherwise rather academic textual features into a conscious theme of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The very transparency of the narrator undermines his position, pointing beyond him to the elusive and manipulating author. 23 There are two early drafts for a stylite (‘Säulenheilige’) text in which Zweifel teaches Stomma about the multiplicity of viewpoints—a sort of lesson in tolerance: SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, nos.168 and 172 (no.168 is clearly misfiled). In both cases, the conversation between the two takes the form of a question and answer process, where Zweifel is clearly in control. Grass also toys with the idea of giving Lisbeth a fourteen-year-old son whom Zweifel could teach, ‘Zur Figur Dr. Zweifel’, SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170. For early plans of the novel which do not include any sort of encounters between the narrator and his children (rather, the whole text is conceived of as a series of letters from the father to the children) see ‘Dubrovnik, am 22.10.69’, SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170.

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Not only playing with his own image to stimulate the children’s interest but also actively commenting on this play, the narrator is thus turned into a symbol by the author. He represents the textual revelation that manipulating one’s autobiography into a mode of autofiction that is inherently ‘reich an Lügen’ can lead to greater enlightenment than a straightforward presentation of the historical facts. This is the second pedagogical message of the work, and it is aimed not at the children constructed within it, but at the (adult) reader who comes to it from outside with his or her autobiographyconditioned expectations. While the narrator reproduces his own person in autofictional form to nudge his children into learning the lessons of history, Grass the author highlights this process of self-presentation in order to convey to his readership the equally valid lessons of literature.

‘Ich schreibe [. . .] auf ein Förderband: Ich, Ich, Ich’: reading the first-person singular The framework devised by the author has so far taken two forms. When planning the work, Grass first of all plotted a textual frame in which he would occupy the first-person narrator position, explaining recent historical events to his children. As the work developed, however, this textual framework gave rise to a second ‘shell’. The cumulative effect of scenes that document the narrator at work is to form a sort of meta-textual commentary to the initial autofictional text. These reflections on the writing process undermine the apparently straightforward position of the text’s author persona. Instead, the narrator is seen as at least in part the product, and not the source, of the creative process. Furthermore, in constantly meditating upon his own activity, he becomes engaged in a conversation with himself, which to a certain extent overshadows his original intention of ‘speaking out’ to the children. As a result, the reader is led into a quasiphilosophical meditation on the narrator’s identity as author of his own autofictional text. This can be seen in particular in the way in which the notion of ‘Mief ’, initially coined as a way of describing the author’s (any author’s) motivation, comes to dominate the narrator’s thoughts. Chapters 23 and 25 make extensive use of the concept, and in chapter 23 it is directly linked to an author’s very existence: Die Leiche im eigenen Keller suchen, benennen. Ein Schriftsteller, Kinder, ist jemand, der den Mief liebt, um ihn benennen zu können, der von Mief lebt, indem er ihn benennt; eine Existenzbedingung, die der Nase Schwielen einträgt. (TS, 236)

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While this statement links up with the usual interpretation of ‘schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit’, that is, writing as stalling the passage of time and—here—exposing the ‘stench’ of history, it also points to the way in which the writing subject relates to discourses of fact and fiction. 24 The use of ‘Mief ’ throughout the text to signify not just history but also presentday politics (the ‘Mief ’ of local politics TS, 253 and 255, as well as the narrator’s own ‘miefgesättigte Hemde’ when he returns from the rigors of electioneering, TS, 32), makes the writer’s response to, indeed reliance upon ‘Mief ’ (‘Existenzbedingung’) at least in part a response to the factual discourse of the present. Writing becomes the activity undertaken as a response to the constant confrontation with this ‘everyday stench’, as the narrator states: Ich schreibe, während ich irgendein Schnitzel zerkaue, über Kies laufe, schwitzend eingekeilt bin, gegen Sprechchöre anschweige, Saubohnen mit geräuchertem Schweinekamm koche, mich woanders erfinde . . . (TS, 240)

The movement within this quotation is away from the everyday into the imaginary (‘sich woanders erfinden’), and indicates the merging of fiction with fact in the writing subject’s reaction to this ‘Mief ’ of present existence. Just several paragraphs further on, the idea of the ‘Mief ’ as an author’s ‘existential condition’ has been replaced by writing itself, as the narrator states: ‘oft schreibe ich nur, um mir zu beweisen, daß ich bin’ (TS, 240). Several lines later again, this assurance of the self ’s existence through writing has mutated once more, this time into the very production of its existence, as the act of writing is equated with factory-line production of the ‘I’: ‘Ich schreibe auf regennasse Schieferdächer, in Bierpfützen, auf ein Förderband: Ich, Ich, Ich’ (TS, 241). These are strong statements concerning the creative power of writing. Descartes’s ‘I think therefore I am’ has become ‘I write therefore I am’, and this existence is presented in terms of an endless self-reproduction that seems as much a sort of obsessive mania as existential reassurance. What the narrator appears to be stressing here is how writing—and thereby the text he is producing—is an existential necessity for the authorial subject: through this activity the (non-fictional) writer can reproduce (fictional) images of himself that constantly remind him of his own existence. Fiction thereby becomes nothing less than the guarantor of the author’s existence, 24 See Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 118, for an example of the usual interpretations of the metaphors, writing ‘gegen die verstreichende Zeit’ and ‘gegen den Sog’.

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and autofiction, as the mode in which this process can be self-consciously re-enacted, is the most suitable form for the author actively seeking textual affirmation of his authorial position. This is the kind of ‘need’ referred to in the introduction to this chapter. The reader initially lured into the text by the apparent promise of a privileged insight into Grass’s private thoughts and feelings has by now certainly got rather more than he or she bargained for. The author presented within the text is the product, not the source, of his various literary and political activities. There is no private, inner self to be revealed, only multiple images of authorship to construct, and this as a sort of writerly existential necessity. This sort of reflection on the writing process, however, does not merely give rise to an abstract, quasi-philosophical consideration of authorship. It also accounts for a distinct sense of irony as the author engages with and ultimately distances himself from the various well-known public images of his person. This is particularly clear in the case of the ‘Begrüßgustav’, where the narrator himself actively satirizes Grass’s famous public image: Nur weil er so faul und meinen Schreibtisch belagernd unnütz ist, habe ich ihn in die Politik mitgenommen und als Begrüßgustav beschäftigt: das kann er. Überall wird er ernst genommen, auch von meinen Gegnern und Feinden. Dick ist er geworden. Schon beginnt er sich selbst zu zitieren. (TS, 82)

This sort of self-deprecation is not only wry humour aimed at the public political author who may appear at times to take himself too seriously; it also gently teases the reader who has come to associate with Grass the sort of monumental stance that was being debated in the press in the late 1960s. In a similar, but somewhat subtler manner, the way in which the author undermines the first-person position throughout the text also results in an overall levity of tone when dealing with the authorial role. The very technique of presenting himself in variations—like variations on a musical theme—instils in the work a mood of playfulness that, at least in part, counters the potential pathos inherent to losing all concept of a stable or rooted identity. Thus while such a line as ‘Hilfe, Kinder!—Nicht mehr ich rede; es redet aus mir: “überzeugt . . . nämlich . . . immerhin . . . ” ’ (TS, 202) is on the one hand a moment of apparently genuine desperation on the part of the narrator, at the same time it demonstrates considerable irony on the part of the author, as he shows his first-person position being taken over by the mania of the characters he describes and losing all sense of perspective. Any sort of over-identification is derided in a

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text that delights in constantly flitting from one authorial variation to another. The idea that textual identity is inherently unstable is further developed in the narrator’s comparison between his behaviour and that of his textual characters with reference to collecting things. He states: Das Sammeln ist eine Antwort auf den Zustand der Zerstreuung, gleich ob [. . .] meine Muscheln, Augsts Mitgliedschaften oder Zweifels Schnecken gesammelt werden. Fast jeder sammelt irgendwas und nennt andere Sammler tickhaft. Gleichzeitig zerstreut das Sammeln die in Sekunden versammelte Zeit: als Zweifel seiner Lisbeth und seinem Gastgeber Stomma durch erfundene Geschichten die kompakt lastende Zeit zerstreute; wenn ich Geschichten, wo sie zerstreut liegen, auflese und euch erzähle. (TS, 226)

This passage takes up the motif of ‘Zerstreuung’, linking it to the activity of collecting things. Collecting both counters a sort of mental distraction (‘der Zustand der Zerstreuung’) by imposing order, and offers a way of passing time (‘zerstreut die in Sekunden versammelte Zeit’). It is then linked to collecting fiction: the narrator picks up ‘scattered’ stories and re-tells them, while Zweifel passes time with his. The wording of the final phrase itself strongly echoes an earlier passage in the text, where the narrator refers not to picking up stories but, rather, picking up himself: ‘Ihr seht mich oft zerstreut: immer bin ich zerstreut, so sehr ich mich seitenlang auflese, sortiere und als Summe, samt Außenständen, aufrechne’ (TS, 78). The textual resonances of ‘seitenlang auflesen’ when applied to the subject of a text that is written in some kind of autobiographical mode must surely be more than an inadvertent pun. The implication seems to be that existing in a ‘scattered’ form throughout his own text, and at the same time constantly trying to counter this, are the defining literary characteristics of authorship. Indeed, it is tempting to compare this description of authorship to post-structuralist definitions of the author. Certainly, the analogy bears traces of Foucault’s essay ‘What is an author?’, where, as set out in chapter 1, the author is ascribed amongst other things a classificatory function—the ability to order texts in the sense both of defining a body of work, and, in the later addition to the essay, limiting its possible meanings. The idea of collecting is thereby strongly linked to playful textual considerations, both with respect to the function of the author and the construction of various characters, who may or may not be extensions of the author. In a final twist and following Walter Benjamin, the ‘need’ to

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collect is associated with melancholia, linking up with one of the most obvious themes of the work and returning us to Grass’s own reference to his ‘Zustand unausrottbarer Resignation’. 25 In the paragraph following the narrator’s musings on the universal nature of collecting, he states: ‘Da sich den Schwermütigen die Welt zu etwas verengt hat, das nur geordnet (als Ganzes) ertragen werden kann, ist das Sammeln tätiger Ausdruck der Melancholie’ (TS, 226). Collecting represents a need to make sense of the world, a world that has ‘narrowed’ or become limited. However, collecting has also been directly linked to writing, and indeed autobiographical writing, as laid out in the introduction to this chapter, was described by Grass as the place where one’s own limitations can be confronted and countered. 26 Writing, just like collecting, is a response to the limitations of contemporary reality. Engaging in it in order to pass the time or escape the stagnancy of the everyday represents a turn to fiction in the effort to re-present reality. The result is that reality becomes a fluid concept, and the writing subject reproducing it finds his or her own identity beginning to dissolve during the process. Instead of fusing narrator and author to allow unmediated access to the private man behind the creative process, Grass thus drives a wedge between the two to show up each one as a product of the other. Even as the narrator is constructed by the author to communicate important moral lessons, an abstract concept of the author (authorship) is increasingly formulated by the narrator as he meditates on his own writerly activity. Meanwhile, the overall structure of the book encourages ironic distance from both. This is the true success of the Tagebuch’s invocation of the hybrid autofictional form: while the narrator renders his pedagogical message for the children more attractive by mixing the real with the seemingly real, the author Günter Grass introduces both humour and subtlety into his text by teasing and undermining the genre-conditioned expectations extant in his wider readership. 25 Walter Benjamin, ‘Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus: eine Rede über das Sammeln’, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), IV, ed. Tillman Rexroth, 388–96; and Walter Benjamin, ‘Edward Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker’, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 465–505. For further discussion of Benjamin on collecting and melancholy, see Beata Frydryczak, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Idea of Collecting as a Postmodern Way of Participation in Culture’, Información Filosófica, 2 (2003), 180–7. 26 Elsewhere the author figure refers to his authorial self as a ‘Sammelstelle für Zerstreutes’ (TS, 82).

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Reproducing the narrator in textual time: ‘die Vergegenkunft’ Amongst the various definitions of the authorial role put forward by the narrator in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke is the statement, ‘ein Schriftsteller, Kinder, ist jemand, der gegen die verstreichende Zeit schreibt’ (TS, 148). While the definition itself is formulated within a clear sociohistorical framework (the narrator is commenting on political developments in Czechoslovakia), there are, as should be clear by now, also good grounds for applying it to Grass’s aesthetics both within the Tagebuch and in his work as a whole. Indeed, just several pages earlier a very similar phrase is invoked with reference to diary-writing: ‘Das wastebook englischer Kaufleute hieß bei Lichtenberg Sudelbuch; Zweifel empfahl mir diese Methode, mit leichter Hand gegen die Zeit zu schreiben’ (TS, 135). The idea that suspending the passage of time might be a quality of writing itself and quite divorced from any specific socio-political reality was also expressed by Grass in the remarks quoted earlier concerning the genesis of the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten. Here, writing fiction was directly equated with hiding away in the past, while autofiction was quickly turned into an introspective mode specifically designed to allow the author to take a step back from contemporary socio-political events. A need to engage with contemporary society went hand in hand with a need to take stock and gain distance from the authorial self. In this sense, for all their socio-political relevance, both the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten involve Grass effectively placing his autobiographical narrator out of time (the author’s life and times), and repositioning him instead within the very separate chronology of his text. 27 Grass first formulates his idiosyncratic idea of textual time in Kopfgeburten. Whilst this short piece, like the Tagebuch, draws on recent autobiographical experiences (Grass’s visit to South-East Asia) and employs a narrator-cum-protagonist who implies on the surface at least Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, the experiences now are self-consciously adapted to fictional characters located not in the past (like Zweifel) but in the near future of the 1980 general election campaign. The narrator’s own experiences from the recent past, his present time of writing (late 1979), 27 See Rebecca Beard, ‘The Art of Self-Construction: Günter Grass’s Use of Camus and Orwell in “Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out” ’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1 (2004).

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and the future experiences of his fictional characters are thus all intertwined. This locates the narrator within a strange textual ‘tense’ as he writes, one for which he coins the neologism of ‘die Vergegenkunft’: Wir haben das so in der Schule gelernt: nach der Vergangenheit kommt die Gegenwart, der die Zukunft folgt. Mir aber ist eine vierte Zeit, die Vergegenkunft geläufig. Deshalb halte ich auch die Form nicht mehr reinlich. Auf meinem Papier ist mehr möglich. Hier stiftet einzig das Chaos Ordnung. Sogar Löcher sind Inhalt hier. Und nicht verzurrte Fäden sind Fäden, die gründlich nicht verzurrt werden. Hier muß nicht alles auf den Punkt gebracht werden. (K , 127)

The special tense ‘familiar’ to the narrator is directly linked (‘deshalb’) to the particular form of his text, as Siegfried Mews comments: ‘No mere pun, “Vergegenkunft” denotes the fusion of (present) autobiography and (future) fiction in the author’s consciousness.’ 28 The advantage of this particular form is, as in earlier comments pertaining to the diary, that it avoids the limitations of conventional writing—the closed fictional world of Katz und Maus, for example, in which all details contribute to the overall significance of the work. Kopfgeburten, with its consciously open form, is constructed in a fundamentally different manner: ‘Hier stiftet einzig das Chaos Ordnung’, claims the autobiographical narrator. It is therefore not surprising that the work, with its autobiographical, fictional, and political elements, has proven difficult to classify. Like the Tagebuch, Kopfgeburten’s form acts like a bridge between the autobiographical and the fictional: the bridge of autofiction. Narrative threads are left dangling loose in an effort to mirror the complexity and incompleteness of real life, and the autobiographical narrator, who simultaneously reproduces real events and gives birth to fictional characters who in turn (partly) project his recent experiences and political views into the future, is located precisely at this crossover point between life and art. By stressing his production of these fictional selves and never actually eliding his own continuous present time of writing with the projected present in which these characters live, Grass’s narrator thus once again draws attention to the creative process, his construction of a text.

Reproducing the narrator in person: fictional counterparts Form and tense are thus both crucial to the interpretation of the text, for they work together to foreground the textual activity of the narrator— where he is situated in relation to his text. Effectively, he is foregrounded 28 Siegfried Mews, ‘Grass’s Kopfgeburten: The Writer in Orwell’s Decade’, German Studies Review, 6 (1983), 501–17, 505.

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as an author at work, and the text becomes a sort of hall of mirrors as the narrator sees a past image of himself (talking on German politics and literature in China) refracted through his future ‘headbirth’ reproductions, Harm and Dörte: Ist meine Behauptung, die ich in Peking und Shanghai, danach anderenorts wie ein närrischer Wanderprediger vortrug [. . .] nur eine Trotzgebärde? Mit Beweisen von Logau und Lessing bis zu Biermann und Böll zur Hand, setzte ich einfältig (womöglich rührend in meiner Einfalt) Kenntnis der deutschen Kultur und ihrer Entwicklung voraus. (Selbst meine beiden Lehrer, die nun Harm und Dörte Peters heißen, winken ab und sind überfordert. ‘Mann’, sagt Harm, ‘sowas läuft nur im Dritten Programm.’) (K , 20)

Just as Zweifel worked as the narrator’s self-extension in the Tagebuch, Harm and Dörte, who are explicitly presented as the narrator’s cerebral offspring, are both extensions of the narrator and offer (critical) reflections on him. Here they directly reject the narrator’s attempt at preaching politics through literature. Given that they are at all times presented as clearly constructed by the narrator, this sort of rejection of their author may be understood as a concrete example of self-confrontation within the autobiographical work. In other instances, they demonstrate a certain mode of behaviour generally associated with the famous public author that seems deliberately exaggerated to the point of provocative cliché, thereby making it all the more easy to single out for criticism. The wording of Harm’s reported reaction to his time in India, for example, shows up to comical effect the kind of naivety often associated with amateur political commitment, a naivety with which Grass himself has frequently been charged: Harm hingegen machte sich mit der Absicht auf die Reise, ‘den bundesdeutschen Polit-Streß’ zu Hause zu lassen. Doch ob bei seinen Strandgängen oder beim Einkauf der letzten Reiseandenken [. . .], es pfuscht ihm immer die Politik dazwischen: ‘Mir ist hier ne Menge aufgegangen. Schon in Bombay fing das an. Wenn wir zurück sind, bring ich das alles auf paar Thesen. Anmerkungen zum NordSüdgefälle. Das muß man klar aussprechen. Und zwar im Wahlkampf.’ (K , 103–4)

The use of the verb ‘pfuschen’ is a derogatory way of expressing the link between political engagement and real-life experience, while Harm’s description of politics in the first instance as ‘bundesdeutscher Polit-Streß’ and then as ideas that can be expressed in a ‘paar Thesen’ clearly reveals an overly simplistic logic, which comes across here as humorous. In fact, this send-up of the amateur politician whom Harm comes to represent

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gains in momentum throughout the text. In chapter 5 the narrator’s idle fantasies about being a dictator and completely overhauling the political scene are projected onto Harm, who, taking on some of these suggestions and rejecting others, then goes on to radicalize even further by planning the self-sacrificial death of the German race to save the environment and preempt the complete failure of German democracy. While this passage is first and foremost humorous, it also serves an important textual purpose: Harm, deliberately described as ‘der Musterdemokrat’ (K , 89) just beforehand, turns from purely fictional figure into a sort of exaggerated political self for the narrator. Parody thereby becomes a deliberate sort of self-parody, introducing a clear sense of distance between the narrator and the various self-images that he confronts. This becomes particularly evident in the introduction and development of one of the text’s main metaphors, namely that of the mythical Sisyphus figure. The parallel between this figure’s actions and political commitment is first introduced by Harm, acting as the narrator’s exaggerated amateur political self, when he directly equates himself with Sisyphus, the (as he describes him) tireless political campaigner: So seh ich mich, Dörte. Genau so. Raufgewucht den Stein, plumps liegt er wieder unten. Wieder rauf, nochmal runter. Immerzu. Lebenslang. Ich meine, kaum hat man irgendeine Reform über die Runden gebracht und denkt, Donnerwetter, ist doch ne Sache, da ist schon das nächste Reförmchen fällig. Das hört nicht auf. Nie, sag ich dir, nie wird das aufhören. Immer wartet unten der Stein. (K , 99)

The situation of this comparison within the text, however, should be clear. Not only does Harm’s language here again reveal the comical simplicity of the amateur enthusiast (‘raufgewucht’, ‘plumps’, ‘Donnerwetter ist doch ne Sache’), the narrator also clarifies his own position with respect to such a claim by immediately satirizing it. He turns Harm’s metaphor into a projected film clip: Womöglich ließe sich Harm sogar als Sisyphos ins bewegte Bild bringen, indem er seinen existentialistischen Reformismus mit einem ziemlich großen Broken auf jenem bergigen Lavafeld bergauf demonstriert, das ihn zuvor als Diktator erlebt hat. (‘Hier, Dörte’, stöhnt der schuftende Harm, ‘das ist die Rentenreform im siebten Anlauf ’.) (K , 99)

This, together with the ensuing paragraph where Harm chases the ‘Entsorgungsproblem’ up and down the hill under encouragement from Dörte (‘Los schon! Nicht nachlassen. Zupacken! Ja sagen zum Stein’, K , 99), underlines just how ridiculous the metaphor of the amateur

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politician as Sisyphus looks. This fictional naively political self is thereby ridiculed even as the narrator loudly and conspicuously sings his praises: ‘Und Harm hört auf Dörte und auf Camus. Ihn kann Orwell nicht schrecken. Harm ist der absurde Held wider das Absurde, er ist der Held der Geschichte’ (K , 100). Admiration and identification are feigned by the narrator in such ironic terms as to underline immediately his own distance to such a position. The initial similarities established between the two, however, mean that the presentation of Harm amounts to exaggerated selfparody, or, put another way, parody of a self with whom the narrator no longer identifies.

Reproducing authorship Stuart Taberner has suggested that the general motif of self-detraction evident in the work is Grass’s attempt to ‘win back his (political) audience’, an audience embodied in the liberal German teacher couple. 29 Such passages as the one quoted above, however, make it difficult to read such a clear programmatic intention into the work, where the emphasis is at least as much on the play of self-representation as on any overall political message. Rather, the distance taken from the various political selves, whether it is the past self speaking in China or the fictional projection of self playing Sisyphus in the Far East, implies that Grass is here standing back from political involvement to such an extent that it is in fact gently mocked as hopelessly idealistic. Instead, the narrator, who is self-consciously involved in the construction of his fictional work, sets himself up against all the political self-images, past and future, embodied within the text. His main concern within the text is not with political but literary activity: the positive self-image that he brings to the fore—as opposed to the pilloried political persona—is one engaged in the present-continuous of the creative process. Taberner picks up on this, diagnosing the failure of Kopfgeburten to stem from an overly determined image of Grass the author: Grass’s appeal [as he presents himself in the novel] certainly entails both dramatic exaggeration and a compelling spectacularity: he condenses, embodies, and manifests the public in a theatrical instance of courtly ‘representativeness’ rather than conveying its democratic will: the writer’s aura, then, implies authority rather than accessibility. As such, it might be argued that Grass dampens rather than encourages democratic participation. 30 29

Taberner, ‘Winning Over the Audience’.

30

Ibid., 97.

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Where Taberner judges Grass’s fictional image to have undermined his own text’s attempt to extol democratic principles, however, I argue that masterfully controlling multiple variations on the authorial self is in fact entirely in keeping with Grass’s wider project of self-confrontation within his newly fashioned autofictional form. In order to elucidate this, I would like to sidestep briefly into a consideration of Kopfgeburten’s major intertext, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), explicitly mentioned within the text on a number of occasions. Camus’s essay deals with man’s ‘absurd sensitivity’, his ability suddenly to perceive the world as a place lacking in any tangible meaning or order. 31 This is linked to Camus’s ideas about religion—man, as mortal, cannot ultimately know whether or not there is a god, and this lack of knowledge defines man’s mortal condition. His experience of being alive is to live in a world lacking any divine authority or meaning. Because man is inherently curious for knowledge—to understand the meaning of his existence—this situation strikes him as absurd and triggers a sense of despair or crisis. Camus’s argument, however, is that this very realization about one’s mortal condition is in fact a liberation, for once man realizes that he cannot know his world and accepts the ensuing rejection of hope for the future, he is freed from both the search for meaning and the sort of enslavement to the future that tends to dictate everyday activity. The result is that man becomes his own god for the time he remains alive, and the only curb to this freedom is death. Living the absurd amounts to defying death, and taking on this challenge entails developing a passion for life itself, the present. In his essay, Camus goes on in the second and third sections to show how this lifestyle is enacted by various different figures, grouped together under the title ‘the absurd man’, and then by the creative process itself, ‘absurd creation’, before he actually reinterprets the myth of Sisyphus. The third section of his essay, ‘absurd creation’, is of particular interest and relevance to the discussion of the narrator’s relationship, as author, to his text. According to Camus, the creative process shapes the artist: ‘For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work.’ 32 However, the absurd artist—the artist who has come to know and accept the absurd—must also remain divorced from his work; it cannot become something that gives him meaning: The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resignation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and 31 32

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 2005), 1. Ibid., 94.

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covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would not exist. 33

Art, Camus argues, describes rather than explains the world, and thus the creative artist can ‘create without appeal’. 34 However, this is not to deny the fact that the creative act is inherently opposed to a worldview that champions the absurd. The absurd artist in fact engages in two diametrically opposed activities: ‘Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator.’ 35 This tension, Camus argues, is what forms the grandeur of the creative process. He then goes on to suggest that the very test that the creative process places on the artist defines art’s value: But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity with which it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality. 36

Art is a vehicle of self-discovery for the artist; through the creative process he is confronted with himself. This is not to say that man can find himself in the creative process, he only comes ‘a little closer’ to himself. In fact, the ‘naked reality’ is that there is no integral, meaningful self, for this would run counter to the whole idea of the absurd. It is the act of creation (in which the artist is continuously engaged), rather than the created product, which becomes the artist’s calling: ‘To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them.’ 37 Returning to Kopfgeburten, the idea of the text as a hall of mirrors in which the narrator sees himself refracted into multiple selves corresponds to Camus’s argument. Grass’s historical self outside the text (fifty-two years old at the time of composition) is suspended within the special tense of the literary work, ‘die Vergegenkunft’. Compared to conventional narrative tense, the concept of ‘die Vergegenkunft’ is summing up the continuouspresent process of reading and writing, where past words and future words are turned into continuous-present text as the text moves through time. This tense of writing therefore merges all images together, past, present, and future as well as fictional and non-fictional. Similarly, for a narrator casting him or herself as author in the text, past selves and future selves are turned into the continuous-present authorial persona who is caught within the 33 36

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 112.

34 37

Ibid., 98. Ibid., 114.

35

Ibid., 111.

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text always in the process of creating. The result is an image of authorship composed of fragments of all of these textual selves: the author is the sum of the narrator’s parts. Where previous critics have seen in Kopfgeburten’s intertexts with The Myth of Sisyphus a strong political statement on the part of Grass, I therefore bring to the link a slightly different perspective. 38 Grass sets up the link precisely to draw attention to the way the narrator’s creative construction of authorship takes place beyond any wider socio-political timeframe. This is entirely in keeping with his statements throughout the 1970s and early 1980s concerning different kinds of realities. Like Sisyphus, his narrator is given to the task of continuous self-reproduction in a textual world that is utterly delimited by these creative actions. Literature consequently functions as a kind of time-out from its socio-political context. This last point is made explicit when the narrator, having presented as parody the overly enthusiastic political interpretation of Sisyphus propounded by Harm, considers in what way he might himself identify with the mythical figure. In Camus’s essay, all the figures of the absurd preceding Sisyphus himself are portrayed as concerned with the act of self-creation, whether it is the actor blurring the boundary between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’ (‘être’ and ‘paraître’) or Don Juan living out a life of procreation. 39 His Sisyphus, too, shuns worldly concerns. The final figure in Camus’s consideration, he represents the ultimate metaphor for the self-absorbed individual, defined through the trials and tribulations of the activity in which he is engaged. In Kopfgeburten the narrator finds a parallel in this notion of the self as a discreet and closed individual. Sisyphus’ identity is defined through his relationship to his stone, the continuous spur to selfabsorption that defines his existence and which has no wider significance for the world around him. This leads the narrator to question ‘was aber ist mein Stein?’ (K , 100). Both literary and political pursuits are suggested as suitable stones, but ultimately it is not what the stone actually represents but rather the relationship to this stone that captures the narrator’s attention: 38 As well as the dominant socio-political readings referenced earlier (n. 8), see Frank Brunssen, Das Absurde in Günter Grass’ Literatur der achtziger Jahre (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1997) for a detailed consideration of the Camus intertext. In his understanding of Camus, Brunssen weights the political context in which the text was first written, and so sees in the Grass–Sisyphus link a determination to rebel against the absurd. On the wider issue of Grass and Camus, see Dieter Stolz’s study, ‘Der frühe Grass und die Literatur des Absurden (1954–1959)’, Germanica Wratislaviensia, 82 (1988), 229–378. 39 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 114.

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Das alles macht meinen Stein rund und eckig. Ich sehe ihn auf der Kippe, bin seinem Abstieg in Gedanken voraus. Er enttäuscht mich nie. Er will von mir nicht, ich will von ihm nicht erlöst werden. Menschlich ist er, mir angemessen und auch mein Gott, der ohne mich nichts ist. Kein himmlisch Jerusalem kann sein Tauschwert sein, kein irdisches Paradies ihn unnütz machen. Deshalb verlache ich jede Idee, die mir die letzte Ankunft, die endliche Ruhe des Steins auf dem Gipfel verspricht. Aber auch den Stein, der mich zum Helden des Aberundabermals machen will, lache ich aus. ‘Schau, Stein’, sage ich, ‘so leicht nehme ich dich. Du bist so absurd und mir so gewohnt, daß du zum Markenzeichen taugst. Mit Sisyphos läßt sich werben. Mit dir läßt sich reisen.’ (K , 100–01)

Unlike his fictional self-parody, Harm, the narrator has no interest in becoming a hero through his perceived dedication to his stone (‘Aber auch den Stein [. . .] lache ich aus’). He does not seek meaning in his stone: for all the possible activities that the stone may represent, whilst on the one hand claimed as an integral part of the narrator, are at the same time dismissed as ‘brand names’ or advertising slogans. The stone, in effect, can conjure up a variety of selves and is thus the ideal ‘travelling companion’: it is the constructed authorial role, modified as needs be to the necessary discourse. This is, in fact, a reformulation of the ‘Begrüßgustav’, humorously described in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The narrator’s relationship to this apparent core of authorial selfhood is therefore one of humorous distance. Like Sisyphus, he has abandoned the search for meaning or future release from his condition, and is content to see himself as sovereign of his destiny, constantly engaged in rolling his stone, whatever it represents. Indeed, in a 1981 interview with Siegfried Lenz, Grass goes beyond Camus’s presentation of Sisyphus’ sovereignty at the moment when the stone begins to roll downhill, conceiving of him instead as sovereign throughout the whole process: Ich erkenne mich am Fuß des Berges, der Stein ist da, ich wälze ihn, ich nehme die Strafe der Götter nicht nur an, ich höhne weiter den Göttern. Ich sage: bitte schön, der Stein gehört zu mir—im Camusschen Sinn. Ich weiß, daß er oben nicht liegenbleibt. Und deshalb akzeptiere ich in der Tat die Formulierung von Camus: ‘Wir dürfen uns Sisyphus als einen glücklichen Menschen vorstellen.’ Ich habe den Stein angenommen. 40

Lenz points out that Sisyphus, according to Camus, is free only at the moment when the stone begins to roll downhill, to which Grass interjects: 40

Lenz, in Grass interview, ‘Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit’, 279 (see n. 1 above).

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‘Aber die Gewißheit, daß der Stein da ist . . . ’ 41 After further argument from Lenz, Grass still insists: ‘Sicher richtig. Aber, diese wenigen Momente der Distanz zum Stein, wenn der Stein ihm vorausgeeilt ist, zeigen ja doch auch an, daß er genau weiß: der Stein wartet auf ihn, auf den kann er sich verlassen, der wird wieder da sein. Er ist zum Stein verdonnert. Der Stein wird oben nicht liegenbleiben.’ 42 Similarly, in Kopfgeburten the autobiographical narrator who exists only within the continuous present of the text shows a degree of self-absorption that quite transcends the particular political situation. He is ‘zum Text verdonnert’. By very conspicuously placing himself between past and future, fiction and non-fiction, the narrator highlights the production of self inherent to the creative process, and is thus absurd hero only in as much as he is strictly taking on the role of Camus’s creative artist. It is his very refusal to try to counter the absurd (through social action or political commitment) and his insistence on living it, ‘covering with images that which has no meaning’, that characterize his authorial position within the text. 43 The extent to which the narrator is so caught up in the creative process of his text as to be divorced from his socio-political surroundings is made clear at the end of the novel. While Harm and Dörte are overpowered by the image of the immigrant children—a clear symbol of their fear and failure on both a personal and a socio-political level—the narrator remains to the end blissfully unconcerned by any threat to his future well-being. He is described immediately before this closing scene happily celebrating the New Year with a dish of flounder, the eponymous protagonist of Günter Grass’s previous novel. The scene is one of optimism and contented self-absorption as he sits down with his wife to carve up the literary fish—a mood that could not be further from the speechless fear expressed with reference to Harm and Dörte in the closing line of the work. The message is clear: political considerations are far away from the narrator, who has projected all such worries on to his fictional scapegoat selves. Instead, as author, he is bound up in a textual chronology that will never have to face up to the next decade but can populate both the future and the past with as many literary creations as he chooses.

41

42 Ibid., 279. Ibid., 279. On this, see also Mertens, Figurationen von Autorschaft in Öffentlichkeit und Werk von Günter Grass (Weimar: Verlag und Daten bank für Geistwisenschaften, 2005): ‘Der Inhalt seiner Arbeit ist er selbst in seinem Verhältnis zu seiner Arbeit. Der endlose Kreislauf [. . .] wird ihm zur Grundbedingung seiner Existenz’, 235. 43

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CONCLUSION The narrator of Kopfgeburten is absolved of all need to engage with politics: it is always just after he has returned from his tour of South-East Asia and just before he gets involved in the 1980 general election. While all readers know that the author Grass will be back in political mode just a few weeks after the book is finished, his narrator is frozen in that short period of stocktaking between the author’s rounds of political campaigning. The position between these past and future political selves is a profoundly apolitical one, in line with Camus’s absurd artist who is caught up in the continuous-present of the creative act. The result is that in manipulating an autobiographical narrator suspended outside real political action and transfixed by his own literary creations, Grass manages to fashion a situation in which a textual understanding of authorship imposes its own time and space on contemporary socio-political discourse. The literary text is made to play host to an extended performance of authorship, partly for the author’s own entertainment, but partly also as a challenge to the reader to experience the full range of Grass’s creative persona. This is one of the main attributes of both the autofictional texts discussed here and surely constitutes the attraction for Grass of this form of autobiographical writing. He is able to move from negotiating constructions of his authorial identity in the public sphere to negotiating them in the literary text, and this necessitates a different kind of performance aimed at, and finally realized by, a different kind of reader audience. Exploiting the particularly self-conscious form of the autofictional mode, he introduces into both works a space for self-invention in which the author’s biographical self is suspended, as the special textual reality of the creative process, with its own logic, time, and tense, takes over. Indeed, the narrator of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke had foregrounded his apparently impossible wish of exchanging present political reality for a private, ‘encapsulated’ dimension (‘ “Und was möchten Sie, wenn Sie könnten?”, “Mich verkapseln . . .” ’, TS, 284) and achieved it textually. Kopfgeburten, on the other hand, openly presents its narrator as encapsulated within his own particular ‘Vergegenkunft’ tense. Both autofictional texts allow the author as biographically specific individual to escape into fiction even as he appears to be offering to a curious readership genuine autobiographical material, with the result that an often humorous distance is taken from any one particular self-image and

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the reader is warned accordingly. A number of variations on the authorial role are woven through the different factual and fictional strands as part of an overall examination of how the author moves through time and through his own autofictional text. In this respect both works not only echo structural issues of Der Butt; they also clearly point forwards to the space-shuttle self of Die Rättin.

4 ‘Aus der Geschichte gefallen’: Displacing the Author in Der Butt and Die Rättin INTRODUCTION The issue of how the author relates to the first-person narrator in largely autobiographical works has been discussed in Chapter 3. In this chapter, the exact workings of such a relationship continue to be an important feature. Although it would be going too far to term Der Butt (1977) and Die Rättin (1986) works of autofiction, their structures do thematize issues of narrative standpoint in a manner similar to Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus. Indeed, in the case of Der Butt and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass himself makes the link explicit: Daß mit dem ‘Tagebuch einer Schnecke’, und nun mit dem ‘Butt’ konsequent vorangetrieben, ich zum ersten Mal das Autoren-Ich als Erzähler-Ich einführe und das sonst, wie bei der ‘Blechtrommel’ oder bei den ‘Hundejahren’, von vornherein gesetzte fiktive Erzähler-Ich ablöse, und daß ich dann beim ‘Butt’ dieses Autoren-Ich nach einer gewissen Zeit in ein fiktives Ich verwandle, aber immer in Korrespondenz zum Autoren-Ich—das ist meiner Meinung nach für mich ein neuer Vorgang, der natürlich auch andere Prosa-Formen und andere Lyrik-Formen gebiert. 1

In the case of both Der Butt and Die Rättin the first-person narrator is endowed with much of Grass’s private and professional biography, and in both cases the narrator, just as in the two previous works, is also very actively involved in constructing the story that forms his narrative. He is thus not only at times identical with the famous author, he is also often explicitly acting out the authorial role within his own narrative. At the same time, however, the fictional situations in which this narrator finds himself—reporting on the trial of a magical fish and orbiting around a post-nuclear world—mean that both works are first and foremost works 1 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘Gespräche mit Günter Grass’, in Günter Grass, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 5th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1978), 1–39, 28.

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of fiction, and the narrator within them can only ever be understood as a decidedly fictional self-projection on the part of Günter Grass. This generic tension between a highly fictional plot and a markedly autobiographical narrator is described by Grass as a creative tension that opens up the forms of prose and poetry to new possibilities. In this sense, it is an extension of what he had already begun with the autofictional form of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The new-found structural freedom, however, also entails a heightened degree of complexity, for the very way in which two very similar but fundamentally different narrative positions, those of author and narrator, overlap and then move apart only to overlap again has now become a central concern within these works. In the following, I aim to trace these movements in order the better to understand just what impact Grass’s increasing interest in narrative position has had not only on the two specific works in question but also on his overall understanding of the textual and political models of authorship against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world.

DER BUT T

‘Ich, das bin ich jederzeit’: locating author and narrator The claim made in the second paragraph of the novel Der Butt, ‘ich, das bin ich jederzeit’ (B, 9), introduces the issue of both time and narrative standpoint right from the first page. As even the briefest perusal of the literary critics will reveal, this riddle is conventionally understood within its literary context as a narrative device, a ruse used to endow the narrator with the necessary degree of omniscience for the vast chronology in hand. 2 The narrator and his own particular subjectivity are extended into the fictional as a means of giving historical depth to the narration of the age-old story of sexual relations. This, certainly, is how Michael Minden, writing in 1990, sums up literary critical reaction to the narrator’s bold claim, adding to it his own emphasis: 2 See the following for a representative sample of discussion on narrative perspective: Gertrud Bauer Pickar, ‘The Prismatic Narrator: Postulate and Practice’, in “The Fisherman and His Wife” : Günter Grass’s “The Flounder” in Critical Perspective, ed. Siegfried Mews (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 55–74; Osman Durrani, ‘ “Here Comes Everybody”: An Appraisal of Narrative Technique in Günter Grass’s Der Butt’, Modern Language Review, 75 (1980), 810–22; Ruprecht Wimmer, ‘ “I, Down Through the Ages”: Reflections on the Poetics of Günter Grass’, in Mews, ed., “The Fisherman and His Wife”, 25–38.

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If I have a quarrel with all these analyses, it is that they seem intent upon keeping the ‘real’ Günter Grass out of his own fiction, and that they thus reconstruct the omniscient narrative intelligence, ‘spiritus rector’, which was, I believe, precisely what Grass intended to avoid in developing this technique. 3

Minden disposes of the idea of multiple selves as a way of achieving effective omniscience, stressing instead the authorial intention behind endowing each of the created narrative standpoints with subjectivity; he then links this back not to the narrator who is acting as an author framed within the text, but rather the real author Günter Grass. His argument, in short, is that Grass structures his novel through a sequence of obviously constructed subjective positions in order to highlight his own fallibility in the face of the material he is presenting. The narrative technique of what Bauer Pickar terms a ‘prismatic narrator’ arises, according to Minden, as much out of moral concerns as aesthetic ones: ‘Grass writes to deconstruct the literary realism which was predicated upon the authority of the author; an authority which merely masked profound spiritual uncertainty.’ 4 Following this line of argument, the narrator’s claim of eternal presence becomes, rather surprisingly, a concealed metaphor for the author’s awareness of his own limitations. Minden is correct to draw attention to the way in which the author Günter Grass relates to his work, and his sense that the authorial role per se is undermined during this process provides a more accurate evaluation of narrative standpoint than is offered by most other critics. However, the chapter within which he presents his ideas is short and does not sufficiently explain the full implications of these various contrasting narrative standpoints. Above all, the issue of self-presentation that is central to the narrative is here flattened into a simple question of authorial intention. The moral message of authorial fallibility is invoked as a reductive interpretative model that overrides the elaborate posing and evident pleasure inherent to the narrator’s attention-seeking claims. It is my contention, by contrast, that in Der Butt Grass has in fact created a case study of how a male narrator, who carries only echoes of his famous author creator, turns to rewriting history along with his own story precisely in order to shirk his responsibilities towards the opposite sex and in so doing to throw the implied female reader off his scent. This is certainly not an exemplary moral tale on the part of 3 Michael Minden, ‘Implications of the Narrative Technique in Der Butt’, in Philip Brady, Timothy McFarland, and John J. White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 187–202, 188. 4 Ibid., 201.

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either Grass or his fictional persona, and the authorial figure who acts as the ultimate frame of reference when interpreting this text is not Günter Grass but his fictional first-person self—the narrator—who pointedly shows himself spinning his own tale within it. This complex narrative structure is central to understanding the authorial motivation that the narrator represents. The statement ‘ich, das bin ich jederzeit’ amounts to a challenge to the reader on the part of this narrator. His tangled chronology and multiple contemporaneous, first-person narrator identities make further demands which must, at least initially, frustrate the reader. In a similar vein, even before the female jury has been assembled and his partner has begun to listen, he ostentatiously claims a representative moral burden for himself, which in the first instance disarms the unsuspecting reader. In fact, he starts in medias res from an entirely unexplained position of guilt, and this, tellingly (and characteristically for Grass), is linked to his desire to tell a story. Immediately after the child has been conceived, the narrator tries to sneak away in parenthesis—‘(ich lief, die Zeit treppab, davon)’ (B, 10). His intention is to forestall Ilsebill’s grumbling with the father-to-be through the introduction of his fantastical narrative: ‘bevor sie über umgekehrte Rollenverteilung weitere Spekulationen anstellen konnte [. . .], erzählte ich ihr von Aua und ihren drei Brüsten’ (B, 10). Right from the start, the narrator seems rather shifty, a character with something to hide, responsible for the complex way in which the detail of his narrative (the story of both the fish and his own former existences) is relayed. For the reader struggling to follow the twists and turns of the narrative, the emphasis thus falls on how the narrator manipulates his own story, how he presents himself within it. Whether or not he has the support of Günter Grass, the extra-textual author is in the first instance entirely irrelevant, for he represents what amounts to an uncommented case study in authorial motivation: his narrative is complex, and he, for some reason, is deliberately making it so. This narrator’s overt insistence on his guilt (which is as yet still undefined) should arouse the suspicions of the reader acquainted with Grass’s literary fiction, for it is highly reminiscent of the original overly guilty narrators, Oskar and Pilenz. In both cases, the display of guilt is ostentatious and ultimately serves to divert a suspicious reader’s attention away from the actual claim being made and onto the pathology of the claimant. 5 In 5 This is why critics stress the importance of recognizing an unreliable narrator as a particular narrative technique. As Beyersdorf, summing up his list of ways in which Oskar deviates from a conventional, reliable author-narrator figure, says, ‘it is only when all of these factors are taken into account that a truly reliable interpretation of the novel can even

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Der Butt, too, the presentation of how exactly the narrator comes to be narrating his guilty tale to Ilsebill should send out warning signals. In the opening lines of the work she purportedly asks him when he wants to start narrating, implying he has asked her to listen. When he does actually start, however, it is in order to escape her demands—something rather different to any implied desire to enlighten. Later on again, the narrator claims that it is because the fish was caught by women that he is compelled both to tell his tale to Ilsebill and to write it down: weil aber der Butt [von den Frauen] nicht freigesetzt [. . .] wurde, kam alles raus, [. . .] wurde ich beispielhaft, muß ich mich häuten, beichte ich Ilsebill, schreibe ich auf, steht hier geschrieben. (B, 52)

This presents the decision to narrate as having been taken out of the narrator’s hands altogether, putting quite a different light on the importance of the domestic set-up and the specific circumstances that lead him to construct his narrative. The reader is now no longer confronted with the transcript of an oral tale designed for personal entertainment and edification, but with a written testimony occasioned by much wider social conditions and which is distinctly reminiscent of the court room. Consequently, the reader is directed away from the specific domestic situation relayed in the narrative and out towards the extra-textual 1970s feminist movement with all its social ramifications. The narrator has accordingly become a passive and unwillingly representative narrating subject (‘wurde ich beispielhaft’), forced by circumstances beyond his control to ‘shed his skin’ and deliver up a confession in writing that will count for the entire male gender. A grave moral sense of responsibility certainly informs the way he presents his narrative project to Sieglinde Huntscha, the feminist prosecutor, a little later on in the work: Auf Sieglindes Frage [. . .] gab ich vorsichtig Auskunft: Das Tribunal an sich, das ganze Thema überhaupt interessiere mich. Ich sei nicht nur als Autor, sondern auch als Mann betroffen. Und zwar irgendwie schuldhaft. (B, 186–7)

The association that is drawn early on between the narrator’s awareness of his own specific flaws and the tale of general male guilt which he, in his begin’: H. E. Beyersdorf, ‘The Narrator as Artful Deceiver: Aspects of Narrative Perspective in Die Blechtrommel’, Germanic Review, 55 (1980), 129–38, 138. McElroy expands on this, explaining how Oskar’s pathology becomes representative for a whole generation’s ‘way of seeing’: Bernard McElroy, ‘Lunatic, Child, Artist, Hero: Grass’s Oskar as a Way of Seeing’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 22 (1986), 308–22. Reddick shows how similar concerns permeate Katz und Maus, John Reddick, The ‘Danzig Trilogy’ of Günter Grass: A Study of ‘The Tin Drum’, ‘Cat and Mouse’, and ‘Dog Years’ (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975).

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authorial role, constructs is strengthened by the ostentatious sense of moral compulsion that pervades the remaining narrative. Time and again the reader is told that each individual narrator figure must relate all the details, even those which are particularly painful to him, in the name of some unknown greater good: ‘die Schande danach will ich mir nicht zurückrufen; aber ich muß, weil ich schreibe und schreiben muß’ (the shame of being raped by another man, B, 123); ‘Woran ich mich nicht erinnern will. Aber ich muß’ (the story of Dorothea von Montau, B, 135); ‘Darauf gingen alle ins Haus zurück. Und ich muß nun schreiben und schreiben’ (after the manuscript containing the second version of the old woman’s tale is burned, B, 452). All this lends the narrative a distinct aura of moral gravitas and painful authenticity. However, it must be stressed that within the greater context of Grass’s writing, the notion of writing as moral compulsion is eminently dubious. Characters who make a show out of religious ceremony (‘beichte ich Ilsebill’) very rarely do so for straightforward repentance, as Pilenz, Mahlke and the ‘Stäubergruppe’ demonstrate, while a narrator who sets about ‘shedding his skin’ (‘mich häuten’) is very unlikely to reveal anything at all, as can be seen in chapter 8 of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. 6 The constant focus on male guilt and on how this particular male is trying to atone for it through his narrative thus indicates a man who in fact may well be ‘protesting too much’. Indeed, his behaviour would appear to be orchestrated by the author in order to encourage the reader to examine the text more closely for a rather different, considerably more self-indulgent, motivation.

‘Was mir (ihm) trotz bester Absicht alles danebengegangen sei’: narrating under the shadow of the author A sense that what the narrator claims to be doing and what he is actually doing may diverge is not just triggered by shifty behaviour from the culprit himself. His female ‘readers’, both Ilsebill and the female jury assembled to try the flounder, the Feminal, give quite a different account of his appearance within the narrative. For the feminists, he is far from central to events in the courtroom. In their eyes it is the fish who represents male megalomania, while the male narrator is simply an uninteresting example of the degenerate state to which modern man has sunk. Consequently, his 6 The relevant passage can be found in TS, 78. See Taberner’s discussion of this, Stuart Taberner, Distorted Reflections: The Public and Private Faces of the Author in the Work of Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass and Martin Walser, 1965–1975 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 85–6.

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claims to be a key witness, if not actual defendant, are openly laughed at by the female jury. Instead, they fix his identity firmly to that of the famous contemporary West German author and political activist Günter Grass: Mein mit schriftlichen Angaben gestützter Einspruch, ich sei es gewesen, der vom Neolithikum bis in die Gegenwart jeweils im Verhältnis zu Aua, Wigga, Mestwina [. . .] und so weiter gelebt habe, wurde [. . .] von den Beisitzerinnen des Tribunals verlacht: Da könne ja jeder kommen. Der Herr Schriftsteller suche wohl Stoff, wolle sich anbiedern, mal wieder schmarotzen, seine Komplexe in Literatur ummünzen, uns womöglich die Hausfrauenrente aufschwatzen und ähnliche Beschwichtigungen. (B, 94)

Such direct comment on the narrator’s role as author functions as a reference within the text to the idea that his appropriation of past male identities might indeed be understood, as earlier literary critics have implied, simply as narrative technique. It is part of Grass the famous author’s supposed general obsession with looking for material, trying to find an outlet for his personal complexes and sneaking political messages into his fiction. It is crucial, however, to consider the way in which this image of conniving self-presentation is itself presented within the narrative. The fact that it is relayed in reported speech highlights the specific words chosen by the speakers and raises the issue of standpoint. The use of such sneering terms as ‘sich anbiedern’, ‘mal wieder schmarotzen’, and ‘ummünzen’ to describe the way the narrator, as author, transforms life into art shows the extent to which such activities are viewed by the feminist jury—and, by extension, a wider audience hostile to the narrator’s public image as author—as dissembling or somehow dishonest. This sort of specific and largely dismissive image of what the narrator, as author, represents is repeated throughout the work in both throw-away remarks and lengthier scenes, all of which lend weight to such hostile opinion, helping to build it up as a counter standpoint within the text. The hallucinatory scene in the section ‘wir aßen zu dritt’, triggered when Griselde Dubertin, one of the feminist jury, comes to dinner with the narrator and his partner, is a good case in point. This section places the narrator in an uncomfortable position between Ilsebill and Griselde. They join critical forces against him, dissecting his character as if he were not even present. He narrates this experience of being partly, if not wholly, treated as an absent object by referring to himself with both first- and third-person pronouns: Dann wurde meine politische Arbeit verhandelt: Was mir (ihm) trotz bester Absicht alles danebengegangen sei. Und zwar folgerichtig, weil ich (er) mich (sich) nicht eindeutig entscheiden könne: immer einerseits andererseits. Meine (seine) absurde Ideologiefeindlichkeit sei ja bereits schon wieder meine (seine) Ideologie. (B, 492)

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This dual use of pronouns to refer to the narrator (rather humorously just at the point when his inability to make decisions is being criticized) indicates the way in which he relates to his authorial role within the text. It may be interpreted as the narrator exploiting the potential for distancing himself from his narrative that the conscious foregrounding of self-construction affords (as indeed Oskar in Die Blechtrommel most famously demonstrates). Using a first-person narrator, his narrative makes famous public author and narrator one and the same; when this narrator refers to himself in the third person, however, he can quickly disappear behind the opinions of other characters, leaving them to discuss a famous author figure with whom the narrator need not in any way be linked. The way in which both this passage of reported speech and that of the feminist jury quoted above highlight the narrator’s dual narrative standpoint as both manipulating author and manipulated narrator has wider consequences for the work as a whole, for the reader is encouraged to question the narrator’s own selfpresentation as overly contrite. Where he initially presented his narrative as an attempt to pre-empt the present charge of guilty, making sure that he could hold centre stage as a key narrative witness and inventing a multitude of past first-person selves in order to do so, the existence of other opinions within his own narrative undermines these multiple standpoints. The women insist on seeing in the narrator’s ‘I’ nothing more than the well-known image of that West German public intellectual commonly known as Günter Grass. This counter standpoint, built into the narrator’s narrative, limits his importance both textually and socio-politically. He is ‘just’ a male author who is bound to have a hidden political agenda up his sleeve. This is a serious blow to the narrator’s attempt to expand into all corners of the narrative. In fact, none of his claimed former identities provokes any reaction from those listening to his tale; instead, the women—rather like many of the novel’s subsequent critics—continuously reduce him to one narrative standpoint alone, fixing him undeniably in the present and in the shoes of Günter Grass, the famous public author and intellectual. Thus in the section ‘wir aßen zu dritt’, his musings about the return to Aua are interrupted by the women as they refer to the famous author’s supposedly infamous oedipal complex (something which his counterpart in Kopfgeburten offloads onto his scapegoat, Harm), while his attempts to narrate Sophie’s unerring love for Fritz are robbed of their romantic implications and reduced by his female (non-)listeners to his own particular psychosis: ‘Daß er sich dauernd was vormache, daß er konfliktscheu auf seinen Konflikten sitzenbleibe, daß deshalb sein Magenblubbern wieder zunehme’ (B, 495). Only under the influence of magic mushrooms do

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the women show any reaction to his claimed former existences but, as the narrator himself openly acknowledges, they still see in him only one individual and not the central, representative role he is trying to acquire: ‘ “Dieser Lump!” Schlimm sei einzig nur ich. “Hassenswert! Nichtswürdig! Lausig! Überflüssig!” ’ (B, 499, my emphasis). Where Minden ultimately attributes all various subjective standpoints to Grass and his greater moral message of authorial fallibility, the women within the narrative document a similar reduction without our ever needing to look beyond the boundaries of the text. The male narrator is an entirely sufficient authorial frame of reference, for as even the other characters show, everything can be pinned on him as author and his own morally dubious motivation. This is precisely the uncomfortable self-image that the narrator, by reproducing himself across his narrative, is trying to counter.

‘Nur rückbezüglich noch da’: the narrative fate of authorship The narrative may thus be understood as built upon an underlying tension, a tension between what the narrator is claiming about himself and his writerly motivation, and what he is actually doing, as betrayed by his own text and sharply observed by his female ‘readers’ (Ilsebill and the Feminal). These opposing positions are summed up in the contradictory roles of unspecified narrator(s) and specific famous author which he simultaneously fills. While supposedly forced to justify himself as both specific man and general male representative who is easily linked to Grass’s own public image, he in fact delights in abandoning his rather unglamorous present identity for the greater, and as he presents it eminently more enjoyable, issue of narrating relations between the sexes down through the ages. However, if the narrator manages to shift the emphasis from his failure as one man in the 1970s whose glory-days have passed to his pleasure as omnipresent narrator in the frame of his narrative, this underhand celebration of his authorial abilities is threatened as the Feminal trial draws to a close and he finds himself running out of material: his textual existence as eternal narrator is now also facing its own demise. His reaction to this is to make his own death as narrator into the thematic centre of his narrative by giving even greater weight to the sense of self-sacrifice present within it from the start (one man becomes the scapegoat for all mankind). The result, to be detailed below, is that selflessness is thereby turned from laudable moral action into a selfish mode of survival as the final pretence of high-minded

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intentions is shed. Indeed, it becomes synonymous with this narrator’s own understanding of authorship. As set out above, the narrative itself is first introduced by the narrator as a means of diverting his partner’s attention away from both his present failings and his underlying narrative motivation. His real compulsion to write and be central to his narrative is covered over by a feigned compulsion to tell the truth. Thus he introduces into his narrative a tone of self-sacrifice which he hopes will render Ilsebill sympathetic to him and blind to his narrative manipulations. This role, with the premeditation and manipulation it implies, naturally entails a great deal of demonstrative self-flagellation. Consequently, the narrative is peppered with outbursts of misery and ostentatious guilt as the narrator bewails the end of the line for the male gender, with himself included as the last isolated specimen: miserable sinner, callous judge, and honourable repentant all in one. He suffers increased isolation, as he is excluded first from the social institution of the feminist court (‘Mir wurden runde viertausend Jahre Vergangenheit abgesprochen. [. . .] Nicht mal als Publikum sollte ich geduldet werden’, B, 94), then from the private family idyll (Ilsebill rejects his wish to create domestic harmony as ‘der alte Männertrick’, B, 120), and finally from history in general as the flounder himself turns his back on his former ally. His isolation is therefore presented as harsh but ultimately justified, a moral burden which the selfless scapegoat agrees to shoulder. The poems scattered throughout the narrative add a further twist to this. They appear at poignant moments, when the narrator seems to be calling for recognition and acceptance from his partner, and frequently bring to a head a specific emotion or uncomfortable situation that he has experienced. It is surely no accident that, as Fritz J. Raddatz has noted, when taken on their own they seem to tell a particularly heart-wrenching tale of relationship breakdown. 7 This sense of suffering increases as the novel draws to an end. Superficially this might be interpreted as a reaction to the judgement spoken by 7 Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘ “Wirklicher bin ich in meinen Geschichten”: Der Butt des Günter Grass—erste Annäherung’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, Günter Grass: Unerbittliche Freunde: Ein Kritiker, ein Autor (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 43–63, 59. He describes the work as built around ‘ “Rippen”, die von puristischer Haltbarkeit sind—Gedichte. [. . .] Es sind Ruhepunkte der Fabel, weil Besinnungsmomente des Erzählers. Es sind auch die unverhohlensten Selbstaussagen’, 58. However, it is also entirely possible to see the same structure as evidence of just how calculating the narrator is being in the way he structures his narrative. For further discussion of the poems as literary compositions in their own right, see also Philip Brady, ‘ “Aus einer Kürbishütte gesehen”: The Poems’, in Brady, McFarland, and White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’, 203–25.

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the women on the fish’s patronage of male-driven history. At the end of the seventh month, the fish disowns twentieth-century history, declaring ‘der Mann ist am Ende’ (B, 574). Consequently, he advises the narrator to exit gracefully, ‘Feierabend, mein Sohn. Es gilt abzudanken. Mach es mit Anstand’ (B, 574). For the narrator, relinquishing his place in history, however, amounts to relinquishing his place in his story, as recreating the past four thousand years within his narrative was what allowed him to retain authority and centrality as author within the textual realm. His authorial role is at stake. Now faced with the imminent end of his narrative, he is left to comment on his own end in textual terms, linking the general fate of man to the specific fate of this male author-narrator: ‘Ich saß weit weg und abgeschrieben. Nur rückbezüglich noch da. Ein Mann mit seiner gelebten Geschichte: Es war einmal . . . ’ (B, 575). His departure is twofold: the ‘ein Mann mit seiner gelebten Geschichte’ is prepared to be ‘written off ’ both as one specific man and as a generally representative male. Both are possible now only when exiled either to the past or a system of textual relations. Just as, in line with 1970s gender politics, men are beginning to see their historical hold on the socio-political sphere slipping away, here the narrator sees his textual realm fast disappearing as his story draws to a close. His authorial role, both within the text and within the socio-political realm, is being denied. Consequently, the term ‘nur rückbezüglich noch da’ invokes both the ‘zurück’ movement back through time and, more specifically, the author-reader-text triangle: the narrator exists only in as much as he relates back to the real author, forwards to the reader, and across the text to the characters he narrates; outside this system he has no identity. By the ninth month, the narrator’s symbolic position as self-sacrificial onlooker, sidelined both from history and his own story, is clear. Where at the beginning of the text he constantly stresses his guilt and complicity, now the emphasis falls on his exclusion, condemned as an innocent bystander to play the role of scapegoat and thereby remove himself from the world. In a scene full of overt symbolism as the fish is carried back to the sea, the narrator paints himself as Jesus carrying the cross: ‘So trug ich ihn, als müßte ich mit seiner Last mich und meine geschichtliche Zeitweil, die Männersache zu Grabe tragen’ (B, 677). With ‘seine Last’ implying that the crime is not his, he presents himself as a paragon of selfless virtue, as he recognizes that the burden he carries is the making of the gender he has come to represent within his narrative. Certainly the narrator’s sense of abandonment by the fish in his hour of need echoes Jesus’ unanswered pleas to His Father, encouraging the reader to interpret the representatively guilty

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narrator’s isolation along similar lines as the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. He dies for man; but because his existence was only ever textual, his death is to be a narrative one, as it is subsequently duly reported: ‘Ich saß neben dem leeren Henkelmann. Aus der Geschichte gefallen’ (B, 697). At this point it becomes clear that the narrator’s self-presentation as a commanding textual author in fact sought to cover up the exact inverse state of affairs. The initial claim of ‘ich, das bin ich jederzeit’ has ended not in universal presence but rather absence, with even the pronoun ‘ich’ missing from the clause describing its fate (‘aus der Geschichte gefallen’). Is the narrative then to be read as a sort of enactment of Barthes’s pronouncement on the death of the writing subject (‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’)? 8 I suggested earlier that dissolving his own guilty present identity in the greater sins of the past was the narrator’s motivation for his narrative, that he was purposefully trying to ‘slip away’ into a narrative role in order to avoid being confronted with his diminishing importance in the socio-political sphere of 1970s Germany. The high-profile position which the narrative ‘ich’ at all times enjoys within his narrative, however, makes it difficult to speak of a true disappearance; rather, it is a case of shifting identities and of constantly drawing attention to this process of constructed slippage. This is humorously captured in the description of the narrative ‘I’ as an insect caught in amber that triggers a whole host of images of the self as somehow outside the narrator, preserved in order to plague him and upset his own chronology: Mir hat [Maria] nur einen Bernstein geschenkt. Mit einem Insekt als Einschluß. Ich bin der Einschluß. Im Zweifelsfall ich: spätversessen und aufgehoben. Neben mir: ich. Außer mir: ich. Mir (als Bär) aufgebunden: das folgsam brummende Ich. Immer entlaufen, zeitflüchtig, hinterrücks. [. . .] Mich hat die große, alles verrührende Köchin gegen die Zeit gerührt. Wie sie mich (immer noch) mit der Schaumkelle klärt. Wie sie mich austeilt gerecht. [. . .] Abgeschmeckt ich. Jan, das bin ich, Maria, nach deinem Rezept. (B, 643–4)

Such a description of the self as a tedious joke that plagues the narrator, something that will not go away (it is caught in amber for all time) and which sticks to him just like the mud slung by Strauß with his defamation of authors as ‘Ratten und Schmeißfliegen’ (surely intentionally invoked here) points to the way in which the narrator’s high-profile textual position is a 8 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 142.

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burden to him. 9 Lacking the courage to stand up to his wife, he apparently desires anonymity by losing himself in fictitious former existences. At the same time, however, the very space he gives within his narrative to foregrounding his own construction of these escapist bit-parts keeps his self firmly in the reader’s and Ilsebill’s mind. The final ironic twist to this discussion of self-presentation in the novel is that while the narrative so overtly undermines the idea of a universal historic presence with an unavoidable, socio-politically and textually conditioned ‘death’ of the authorial narrative self, at the same time the narrator quietly reasserts his textual authorial role as an eternal narrative principle. He is socio-politically on the way out, yes, but clearly still at the centre of his story all the time it is being read. In the battle of the sexes, he is still the author’s most powerful artistic counterpart to his partner’s biological re-creative faculty. This final twist can be elucidated by brief reference to the final poem included in the narrative, ‘Mannomann’. This poem employs a hostile female voice, which echoes the general gender tension that has structured the entire narrative. The speaker takes a quasi-sadistic delight in presenting man with his final reckoning, culminating in the final strophe. The ambiguity of lines 29–30 should by now be clear: ‘Du bist nach deinen Gesetzen verbraucht, / entlassen aus deiner Geschichte’ refers both to man’s socio-political standing and his place within the narrative. The closing question, however, provides both the poem and the novel with a final twist: ‘Was, Mannomann, wird deine Frau dazu sagen?’ asks the sarcastic speaker. Man as narrator has been declared ‘fertig’ by the unnamed speaker in this poem, and the reference to a power reversal in gender relations as the woman is now called upon to speak the verdict is a calculated blow to this former omnipresent and omnipotent male. At the same time, however, it is in fact clear that this poem, like everything else of which the text comprises, including the Feminal and all nine / eleven female cooks, comes from the first-person male narrator. The woman’s judgement may be asked for, it may even hang over the narrator, but it will never actually eject him from his central position within the text. Even as the narrative ‘I’ describes himself as pushed out of his-story, he finds his way back into the narrative by appropriating the castigatory female voice for himself. It is from this new-found standpoint that he transforms his ‘ich’ into a ‘du’ and declares his own socio-political and narrative demise. Having 9 See Ronald Speirs, ‘The Dualistic Unity of Der Butt’, in Brady, McFarland, and White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’, 11–32, 18, and Joyce Crick, ‘Future Imperfect: Time and the Flounder’, in Brady, McFarland, and White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’, 33–49, 44–5, for examples of how critics have overlooked the clear humour in this passage.

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the confidence to speak one’s own death is surely a final display of complete confidence in the power of the male authorial role within the confines of his text. The stance that the attentive reader can infer from such self-presentation on the part of the narrator is an entirely self-centred one, for the whole narrative stems from, and is conditioned by, his present existence as it is framed within the text. Invoking the idea of self-sacrifice is a cunning trick that in actual fact shores up the position of the authorial self within his own narrative: he cannot exist without his narrative, but then neither can his narrative exist without him. Slipping from one specific present identity into multiple imagined past identities, he makes himself literally selfless in order to keep himself central as author to textual proceedings. Within the text, he thus lives on as Foucault’s historical, stylistic, conceptual, and generic reference point by virtue of his specifically fractured identity. Consequently, the whole text may be understood as the narrator’s response to his fear of losing centrality within the public realm. Assuring himself of an ongoing textual authorial role is his solution: he manifestly takes on the role of author and locates himself in the temporal and spatial paradox of ‘ich, das bin ich jederzeit’ precisely because he fears banishment from his own sociopolitical time. In the case study that Der Butt represents, Grass shows a narrator playing at authorial temporal relocation in the folds of his text in order to defer impending dislocation in contemporary society. His-story is the last bastion of unrepentant male centrality, as a textual model of authorship tries to counter the crumbling political one.

DIE RÄT TIN

‘Schluß! sagt sie. Euch gab es mal’: narrator and author under threat Where Der Butt investigates how the (male) narrator, as author, relates temporally and spatially to the entire span of human history up to the writing present, Die Rättin moves in the other direction, looking back on the present from a standpoint in the future. In fact, the novel’s major innovation is to break with the flow of time, linear or circular, in order to investigate instead the possibility of being literally ‘out of time’; human history is brought to an end and the narrator is thrown out into orbit. As in Der Butt, however, this narrator not only carries echoes of the famous author Günter Grass, but is also framed within the text busily constructing

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his own various narrative strands. The plight suffered by this narrator figure is therefore also directly endured by an author figure. Furthermore, although the post-apocalypse scenario officially applies both to the narrator and mankind in general, because the narrator is the sole human survivor of the nuclear explosion, it is in effect experienced by him alone. This has repercussions for the role his first-person position comes to adopt: he is both the specific Günter Grass, famous author, responsible for the fictional strands of his text, and the general representative of humankind responsible for the nuclear fallout and its own demise. If, as critics so far have tended to imply, Die Rättin is to be understood as a satirical warning to contemporary readers, then an examination of just how this collective and yet highly specific narrator-cum-author positions himself with respect to the text and its readers should be central to understanding how this warning is conveyed. 10 Right from the very beginning of the novel, the narrator is located in two different places and at two different times; on the one hand, he relays how he came to acquire his ‘Weihnachtsratte’ just in time for 1984, the Chinese year of the rat. The rat is described as a muse, sitting next to him and provoking him into planning and telling stories: ‘sie mir daneben gesetzt. [. . .] Sie spielt mit meinen Ängsten, die ihr handlich sind. Also rede ich gegenan’ (R, 9). Indeed, in this role she is clearly instrumental to the entire construction of the novel. Not only does her post-apocalypse speech trigger the narrator’s counter pre-apocalypse narratives (see below), the final sentence of the novel, ‘Ein schöner Traum, sagte die Rättin, bevor sie verging’ (R, 487), is reminiscent of Grass’s 1956 essay ‘Die Ballerina’, where the poet rubs his eyes and sits down seriously to write just after 10 Grass himself certainly encourages a reading of the text as a warning; Volker Neuhaus quotes his comment in Vier Jahrzehnte, ‘Es sollte ein Buch werden, das alte Geschichten aufnahm, um sie den allerneuesten Katastrophen auszuliefern’: Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 162, quoting from Günter Grass, Vier Jahrzehnte: ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Steidl, 1991), 269. For further consideration of Die Rättin as a satirical warning, see Julian Preece, ‘Literature and the End of the World: Günter Grass’s “Die Rättin” ’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Roland Smith, Literature on the Threshold: The German Novel in the 1980s (Oxford: Berg, 1990); and Klaus-Jürgen Roehm, Polyphonie und Improvisation: zur offenen Form in Günter Grass’s ‘Die Rättin’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). Roehm’s detailed study may be read as a kind of response to Preece’s piece, as he outlines how Grass combines a playful, ironic form with a serious overall message. Frank Brunssen also engages with the idea of the text as both an aesthetic and a thematic response to sociopolitical developments, grouped together in his analysis under the term of ‘the absurd’: Frank Brunssen, Das Absurde in Günter Grass’ Literatur der achtziger Jahre (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1997). Although both Roehm and Brunssen show some sensitivity to the idea of authorial positioning and develop interesting arguments, neither goes so far as to examine it explicitly as a major thematic and structural aspect of the novel, nor do they clearly differentiate between author and narrator.

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the ballerina vanishes out the window. 11 This ‘Weihnachtsratte’, however, does more than simply inspire the narrator. By quickly mutating into an active counter-narrator, she threatens his position within the text. The passive construction ‘neuerdings träumt sie mir’ (R, 9), with its grammatical emphasis on how the rat brings about the dream rather than the dream bringing about the rat, reflects the position of control that she asserts over him. Furthermore, the rat is then given implicitly human qualities in the neologism of ‘Rättin’ (R, 10), introduced into the text when she first makes use of authoritative direct speech. Just as the narrator in Kopfgeburten asserts himself through the godlike act of self-reproduction within his text, the rat is similarly described as wise to the powers contained in the position of narrating subject: ‘schon vermehrt sich die Rättin erzählend, indem sie von unserem Ausgang berichtet’ (R, 10). At this early stage it is already clear that her narrative carries at least as much authority as that of the author-narrator, for she has in part usurped his position, raising serious questions about his own location within the narrative. Her story interrupts his comfortable autobiographical description of the 1983 Christmas period, catapulting him simultaneously into and out of post-apocalypse times: ‘Schluß! sagt sie. Euch gab es mal’ (R, 10). This dislodging of the first-person narrator from prime subject position to incidental object of narration is underscored by the way in which the rat’s narrative is relayed to him: in a dream-form that escapes his rational control and is addressed to a helpless vision of himself, locked in the future, first strapped into a wheelchair and then, from the second chapter onwards, orbiting the earth after the nuclear fallout. 12 Ostensibly, as in the ‘Ballerina’ essay, the rat’s narrative takes the form of a vision or daydream, with the implication that the narrator remains behind in the festive period of 1983/84, able at the end of the work to wake up, sit down, and write. The fact that the various narrative strands all simultaneously draw upon the same time and space of the text, however, means that for the reader the narrator is impossibly placed in two mutually exclusive locations: on the one hand, as dreamer, he is sitting in the eighties dreaming up the various narrative strands; yet on the other, as the dreamed, he is catapulted into the future and off the face of a burnt-out world where human existence 11 Günter Grass, ‘Die Ballerina’ (1956), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XIV, 7–15. 12 There are clear Orwellian parallels here which have already been commented upon. See Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 164–5 and Stolz, Vom privaten Motivkomplex zum poetischen Weltentwurf: Konstanten und Entwicklungen im literarischen Werk von Günter Grass (1956– 1986) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 92.

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is impossible and only rats have lived to tell the tale. Furthermore, the narrative deliberately introduces doubt as to where the dreaming actually stops, as summed up in poetic form ‘Könnte es sein, daß beide, / die Ratte und ich, / geträumt werden und Traum / dritter Gattung sind?’ (R, 408). This dual existence, as the dreamer and the dreamed, is not simply a passing point of uncertainty; it is central to the logic of the novel. 13 By examining each location individually, I wish to draw attention to the importance of this paradox in conditioning not only the structure of the work, but also Grass’s most radical presentation of how the author relates to the time and space of his text.

‘Erde! rief ich. Antworten Erde! Aber es kam nur Piepen’: the death of the narrator in post-apocalypse times In his post-apocalypse location, a narrative strand that acts as a catalyst for all other narrative strands, the narrator has suffered a double displacement: the rat has taken over the role of chief narrator, challenging his previous existence within and through literature—his authorial role. Mankind in general, of whom the narrator is the last survivor, has, in the words of Günter Grass’s 1982 speech ‘Die Vernichtung der Menschheit hat begonnen’, ‘fallen out of nature’. 14 Both displacements are represented within the text spatially by the narrator’s sudden and unwilled relocation to the space capsule, but they are also overtly thematized by the way in which for much of the novel he is determined to rail against them. The recurrent ‘nein, Rättin, nein!’ cried by the dreamer obtrusively displays his refusal to believe the rat’s tale of how mankind, together with all he holds dear, was obliterated from the earth. With such counterclaims as ‘immer noch sind wir zahlreich’ (R, 10), he underscores his role as representative of the human race in general, asserting it against the collective of rats and the ‘now’ against a dystopian future. In a more discreet manner, however, he also repeatedly highlights his own personal discomfort with his secondary narrative position. Although he sometimes depicts his reliance on the rat in terms reminiscent of the intimate creative relationship between the author and his muse (as implied by the possessive tone of ‘meine Weihnachtsratte weiß, 13 Only two critics so far have made the idea of dream into the centre of their approach; Thomas Kniesche uses it to develop a psychoanalytical reading, which I find difficult to square with the text (Die Genealogie der Post-Apokalypse. Günter Grass’ ‘Die Rättin’ [Vienna: Passagen, 1991]); Brunssen, Das Absurde in Günter Grass’ Literatur der achtziger Jahre, takes a more convincing line, linking dreams to his overarching theme of the absurd in Grass’s writing. 14 Günter Grass, ‘Die Vernichtung der Menschheit hat begonnen’ (1982), in Werkausgabe, XVI , 57–60, 60.

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daß ich ihr zuhören muß, sobald sie mir träumt’, R, 260), at times of greater wakefulness he makes obvious efforts to stifle the voice of the competing rat narrator: ‘weil ich nicht will, daß jetzt wieder die Rättin spricht, bleibt der Käfig meiner Weihnachtsratte verhängt’ (R, 212). On other occasions, the dreaming narrator makes his dislike of an enforced secondary position quite overt (‘als Space-Observer in eine Raumkapsel gezwängt’, R, 136, my emphasis), comparing it for example to compulsory attendance at school (‘Schulzwang beherrschte den Traum’, R, 180, my emphasis), where the rat’s message is conveyed to him in the dreaded ‘Sütterlinschrift’—‘mit Spitzen und Schleifen die Pein meiner Jugend, die mir vorgeschrieben blieb’ (R, 180; another telling use of the indirect personal pronoun). Resentment is thus amply in evidence, and the narrator, both as author denied control of his narrative and as human being pushed spatially and temporally out of world history, feels the loss of control over both history and his story to be a double denigration. The self-deprecatory description of ‘ich, eine Fehlbesetzung’ (R, 136) gives voice to this frustrated sense of passivity and offers a means of uniting the narrator’s specifically textual feelings of inadequacy (his narrative is constantly overridden by the rat’s, as made clear by the plea ‘[w]ie soll ich von meiner Damroka berichten, wenn mir die Rättin dazwischenspricht?’, R, 155) with the wider sense of mankind’s general failure to manage his own technical inventions. The idea that the narrator becomes a sort of signifier for two quite different issues (narrative control of the text, human control of the world and world history) is taken up again in the rat’s explanation of the collective sense of self which is common to all rats. She compares this to the human fixation on individuality which, as we have seen in the case of Der Butt and the representative male ‘Versager’, allows one person to become the scapegoat or, as it is put here, ‘Fehlerquelle’. In this case, the rat proposes that the narrator in his space capsule inadvertently caused the nuclear fallout. This prompts a poetic response from the latter that plays on the issue of individual versus collective responsibility: [. . .] Jetzt suchen wir die Fehlerquelle. Wir suchen sie außer uns wie verrückt, bis plötzlich jemand wir sagt, wir alle könnten, mal angenommen zum Spaß, die Fehlerquelle oder du oder du könntest sie sein. Wir meinen das nicht persönlich. [. . .] (R, 222)

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The poem clearly employs a humorous tone as it paints a picture of the human collective heading blindly and yet knowingly to its own mass grave, yet it obviously also points directly to matters of serious concern for the narrator. His helpless pleas scattered throughout the text of ‘Erde! Antworten Erde!’ show a belief in an earthly collective that can fix a technological problem and thereby save him. Yet even as he shouts he is aware that he has become the sole survivor of this earth and is therefore himself the remains of this collective to whom these entreaties are addressed. He, as a human being, necessarily carries the fatal flaw within him, in spite of himself, or, as the poem states ‘[w]ir meinen das nicht persönlich’. The individual is the collective, no matter how he may endeavour, as author, to separate himself off from an uninformed general audience and speak warningly to them. This point is driven home immediately after the humorous poem in a series of paratactical clauses that emphasize the question of the narrator’s relationship to his general audience down below: Ich bin die Fehlerquelle! [. . .] Nein! schrie ich. Das kommt nicht auf meine Kappe. [. . .] Ich als Orbit-Observer! Ich als Space-Turner. Ich, ohne Ahnung, was Chips und Klips sind. Ich, der das Kosmonautengequatsche nur aus Filmen kennt. Ich, der vorhin verzweifelt versuchte, aufzuhalten, was sich vollzieht, indem ich nach unten Aufhören! Falscher Alarm! rief. Vergeblich natürlich. Ich kann das ja nicht. Bin zu dumm dafür. Erde! rief ich. Antworten Erde! Aber es kam nur Piepen. Stille danach. Eigengeräusch. (R, 223–4)

Any previous attempts to assert an individual self in possession of greater environmental knowledge than the general human collective (or indeed any general scientific knowledge at all) are shown up as misplaced, as the narrator reasons ‘ich kann das ja nicht’. It is not the lack of any human civilization still in existence down below that has rendered his attempts useless, but rather a basic failing located within the narrator: a mixture of authorial and fundamentally human inadequacies (‘bin zu dumm dafür’). The passage is overtaken by the fear that, because he has been abandoned, willingly or not, by his fellow humans, he has nothing to distract him from the fact of his fundamental insufficiency—‘Eigengeräusch’, the sound of his own hopeless movements in the space capsule, is all he has left. This fear is presented even more concretely later on in the text when he contrasts the fate of his individual isolated self with that of the rat collective: ‘Und ich! schrie ich. Zu wem soll ich flehentlich? Wie soll ich in meiner Raumkapsel ausharren, wenn nur noch das Wrack treibt und es keine Damroka mehr gibt . . . ’ (R, 324). In fact, one may generally surmise that the main reason the narrator dislikes his post-apocalypse location is that the dislocation of

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self it entails renders his relationship both to his text (characters and readers) and his fellow human beings non-existent, facing him with the prospect of being left entirely by himself. The closing image of the narrator in Der Butt as ‘aus der Geschichte gefallen’ (B, 697) is here from the start quite literally applicable: he is condemned to the eternal prospect of what is in effect a surplus of self in a sort of atextual temporal and spatial vacuum. There is nothing left for the narrator to narrate, except his own existential misery. Furthermore, with nobody left to hear it, the narrator has entered into a kind of living death: even the ‘Rückbezug’ of Der Butt has been denied him. He represents a kind of authorship in a world that no longer has either books or readers left to give such a position meaning.

‘Was ich erzählen will, / weil ich durch Wörter das Ende aufschieben möchte’: reasserting the author in pre-apocalypse times Where the post-apocalypse location of the narrator is built on the supposition that his grip on both world history and his own story has come to an end, in the pre-apocalypse sections of the text he is still for the most part in control of his narrative, with the different narrative strands told in straightforward linear fashion (Oskar and his grandmother, the fairytale characters and Bonn politicians, the five women on the ‘Neue Ilsebill’, the children of Hamlin, Malskat the bogus art restorer). Although it may be argued that these tales are located within the narrator’s own mind, in which any sense of an external timescale has been suspended (and the narrative suggestion that perhaps this figure, too, is dreamed up supports such a sense of temporal destabilization), the (dreamed) dreamer narrating his dream has not yet actually ‘fallen out’ of time and nature. Instead, he occupies a position quite similar to that of the narrator in Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, who within the confines of his ‘Vergegenkunft’ text pulls together the various narrative strands as they present themselves to him. Just as this figure in Kopfgeburten expressly refers to his location in the closing months of 1979 and the ‘Buch oder Film’ on which he is working, here the reader is referred to the Christmas / New Year period of 1983 to 1984 and informed of the narrator’s literary project of a poem ‘das von der Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts handelt’ (R, 7). In both cases, the narrator’s claim to an authorial role is overt. The narrator’s location in the pre-apocalypse strands of the narrative might thus, as in the case of Kopfgeburten, be considered in terms of actually asserting an existence as

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specifically textual author who facilitates or gives birth to his text within the suspended time of his narrative. Certainly the occasional dialogues that occur between the narrator and his fictional creations in Die Rättin are reminiscent of those between the Peters and their author, although here, as in the following conversation with Oskar, the narrator is often markedly more dictatorial: Ich deute auf den Produktionsvertrag: ‘Hier, genau hier fehlt Ihre Unterschrift, bitte.’ Er bedauert, daß für Videokassetten der Markt zur Zeit verstopft ist. Ich will aber keine Kassette: ‘Einen Stummfilm als Kinofilm will ich, mit Untertiteln.’ Er sagt: ‘Sobald ich aus Polen gesund zurück bin vielleicht . . . ’ Ich sage: ‘Es könnte mir im Nebensatz einfallen, Ihr Visum einfach verfallen zu lassen.’ ‘Erpressung!’ nennt er das, ‘Autorenhochmut!’ (R, 121)

Such banter between the pre-apocalypse characters and their author not only provides moments of humour; more importantly, it establishes the narrator as clearly in control of his text and provides a striking contrast to the post-apocalypse sections of the work. At repeated intervals throughout the text the narrator conspicuously controls his characters: Oskar travels to Poland on a Friday ‘weil ich so will’ (R, 141), while of the five seafaring women the narrator comments, ‘nur meine Willkür hat sie auf Deck [. . .] versammelt’ (R, 213). Even at the moment of the nuclear explosion, arguably part of the rat’s narrative, the narrator claims complete control over his own characters: ‘ausgespart durch meinen Willen, den ich gegen die Rättin und ihr Diktat setze, bleiben die beiden [Oskar and Anna Koljaiczek] übrig’ (R, 317). Indeed, at this moment of high tension when the narrator himself is about to be propelled off the earth, it would seem that he compensates for his imminent death by lording it over his most famous textual creation, Oskar Matzerath: ‘weg ist er, und ich bin ihn los. Nie wieder soll er. Keine Einsprüche seinerseits mehr’ (R, 319). The assertiveness that shines through at such instances is significant when evaluating the narrator’s relationship to the text in which he is located. 15 His exchanges with the rat counter-narrator highlight his own 15 See also Roehm, Polyphonie und Improvisation, for further consideration of the relationship between the first-person narrator and competing narrator-characters, esp. ch. 3. Roehm works out the narrative logic at play behind the relationships differently from me, placing the idea of a self-conscious text at the heart of his argument rather than the position of the author-narrator. This is an interesting complement to the reading I offer.

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mental and emotional well-being, with him frequently railing in strong emotional terms against her version of his fate. Set in such a context, the pre-apocalypse narrative strands appear psychologically motivated, as the narrator presents them as his counter-narrative that specifically reasserts existing time and place. When in the first poem of the work the narrator, now a poetic voice, speaks of ‘was ich erzählen will, / weil ich durch Wörter das Ende aufschieben möchte’ (R, 16), then this would seem to be a clear indication of how the pre-apocalypse narrative strands that follow are to be understood. Der Butt shows a narrator as author slowly working his way through four thousand years of history in an attempt to avert or avoid the reality of his writing present, while in Kopfgeburten the narrator keeps the airplane circling so as to allow himself time to reach a decision about the projected future of his characters. 16 Here, too, the reader is presented with an author-narrator holding up present narrative time, this time in order to avoid the onset of the future and the beginning of the rat’s horrible sci-fi tale that entails his own demise. This psychological motivation could be termed ‘schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit’, with quite a different and much more personal implication than the original political understanding of the phrase in the late 1960s. Certainly, the rat herself reacts to his various narratives as if they are to be understood as the expression of a particular psychosis: ‘Ist ja gut. Mach nur weiter. Träume, Freundchen, was dir noch einfällt, Frauen, so viele dir guttun, Malskatsche Gotik, deines Herrn Matzerath Golddukaten. Wir mögen deine Ausflüchte. Unser Wissen muß dich nicht kümmern’ (R, 157). The clearly patronizing tone underscores the narrator’s vulnerability and ultimate inability to face up to the personal challenge of the rat’s future narrative as instead he spinelessly holes himself up as author in his own. If the narrator, reacting to the rat’s shocking mutation into narrator of an unpleasant future, is therefore always under the sway of her terrifying narrative, then it is hardly surprising to note that the pre-apocalypse narrative strands, however different they may superficially appear, all in fact revolve around one major idea: the demise of the self. The various retellings of the tale of the children of Hamlin, for example, all build up to the moment when the children realize that they are trapped inside the cave never to escape, while the fairytale characters spend the entire time trying to avert the decay of the forests, which signals the end of their own existence. Similarly, both the ‘Neue Ilsebill’ and Oskar’s visit to his grandmother are steered towards the ‘großer Knall’ which will make all characters involved 16

See K , 43.

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confront their own inevitable demise. This is particularly emphasized in the case of Anna Koljaiczek’s birthday party, as Oskar’s video replays the final moments of their lives just before the nuclear explosion. These characters, like the narrator himself, have their dying hours stretched by narrative time: they are sucked into a video time-loop which suspends the passage of time (they are literally prevented from progressing to other activities as they sit down to watch it) and, through tortuous reconstruction of the apparently insignificant activities engaged in during the day, replays the hours in which, as it turns out, death approaches. All the above examples emphasize how the characters are forced to confront their own end. The narrative strands in which they exist may consequently be understood as shot through with the narrator’s own particular psychosis, triggered by the rat. However, the final narrative strand, that of Malskat and ‘die falschen Fuffziger’, differs in a number of ways. It is narrated at Oskar’s request. Indeed, initially the narrator resorts to introducing it in order to get him to partake in the text in the first place, and Oskar continues to show an especial interest in the historical account right through to the end of the work, where he is reported to have abandoned the film on the Brothers Grimm in favour of Malskat’s story. This story, unlike the others, is firmly rooted in the recent historical past as experienced by both the narrator and Oskar. Furthermore, where all other narrative strands inevitably end with the characters helplessly and unexpectedly facing their own death, in this instance Malskat survives as a figure living in lonely but apparently untouchable isolation on one of the Baltic islands. The anomalous nature of this continued existence is highlighted by Oskar’s visit to the island shortly before his defiant sixtieth birthday, a date which, according to the rat’s narrative, he should never live to see. For Oskar, Malskat’s tale not only survives into the apocalypse-denying narrative present, it is also of direct significance for the future which he asserts is still worth fighting for; he is ‘überzeugt, daß man den Schlüssel für unsere Zukunft unter den Ablagerungen der fünfziger Jahre suchen müsse’ (R, 476). This is at least in part due to the position the artist represents in relation to the demise of the self. Not only does he covertly remove the final traces of the biblical characters in the frescoes in order to forge a pseudo-past, echoing the general dishonesty of a decade that is in Grass’s fiction generally presented as obsessed with keeping up appearances, he also then turns himself in to the authorities, boldly facing up to his ‘inauthentic’ artistic identity in a manner that is entirely at odds with the decade he apparently represents. The way in which Malskat simultaneously exploits and condemns the superficiality of his decade takes on an exemplary role. This surely appeals to the Oskar

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from Die Blechtrommel who presented his own character as someone who subverts the social system only to turn himself in and thereby physically and mentally remove himself to the lunatic asylum of his present-day narrative. Where the characters in all the other narrative strands of Die Rättin are either unaware of their end until they are faced with its imminent approach or resist its onset vigorously, Malskat represents a position of knowing self-demise. He is an artist who removes first existential authenticity from others and then his own identity from the rest of the world; it is clear that this is of direct relevance to both Oskar and the narrator as they contemplate how their own artistic roles are conditioned by the time and space represented within the text. Both are struggling, sometimes against each other, sometimes against the rat, for a similar degree of sovereignty. I have described the position occupied by the narrator in both the postand pre-apocalypse parts of the work in some detail because it is the fundamental impossibility of these two mutually exclusive locations within the one present-tense text that determines not only the work’s complexity but also the radical development in Grass’s conception and presentation of the author figure. Locating oneself as both a dreamer still ‘in der Natur’ and the dreamed just fallen ‘aus der Natur’ entails some serious division of self into roles that can be equated with those of author, text, and reader. As pre-apocalypse dreamer, the narrator clearly retains the role of author within his text; once the rat’s narrative takes over, however, he becomes both the subject of narration (the text, as his story is related) and the reader who is forced to listen to the rat counter-narrator. While these multiple narrative positions may appear overly complex, they in fact merely represent an inversion of a genre known only too well to readers of both general literature and Günter Grass’s works in particular: that of autobiography. The strictest form of autobiography, the diary, entails an author narrating his past self (which becomes the text) to his present self (thereby also the reader). Here, we are faced with an author being confronted with a future vision of himself, one that entails not re-creation on the part of the present narrator as in autobiography, but rather destruction as he envisages his removal from his own story. Because it is impossible consciously to experience one’s own end, it is the unconscious, dictated to by the rat, that takes over, dispenses with authorial control and thereby pushes the narrator into the position of textual object and reader of his own fate. Death of the autobiographical subject is equated with death of the author figure. The paradox of simultaneously locating the self both inside and outside the text and time thus underscores the impossibility of writing your own

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end, something which is inevitable if, instead of writing your autobiography retrospectively, you attempt, like Oskar’s ‘Post-Futurum’ video productions, to project it forwards into the future. The result of this is that the general thematic fear that Die Rättin could be said to be investigating—impending ecological disaster—is rendered acute through the personal plight of the narrator as he battles for existence within the text. In this latest twist on selfpresentation, facing up to the inevitable temporal and spatial limitations of the authorial self is paradoxically equated with writing the self (itself inherently creative) as an act of enforced self-destruction: the author’s future death overrides his present control of the text. It is this existential plight that drives the narrative forward and ultimately endows the work with a sense of philosophical depth and urgency.

CONCLUSION In both works, the relationship between author and narrator is deliberately complex. This is not least because Grass on both occasions uses the works to explore the limits of the author figure and takes the narrator as his prime experimental object. Placing a largely non-fictional self-projection into a highly fictional scenario, he is able to experiment with the textual limits of authorship in a way that would not be possible in any predominantly autobiographical mode. This is the kind of freedom to which he was referring when linking the oscillating overlap and divergence of author and narrator in Der Butt and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. While the way in which the Tagebuch and its later Kopfgeburten counterpart deal with the author-narrator relationship may be read as a precursor to the innovations of Der Butt and Die Rättin, the greater fictional content of these latter works sees Grass’s exploration of a particularly textual kind of authorship taken to another level. Here, the narrator represents authorship against the odds, struggling to retain his position within the text and at the same time implicitly defining the authorial role as the only way in which he might be able to ensure his survival. Given that this struggle is triggered by two issues that were highly topical in the 1970s and 1980s—the rise of feminism and the threat of a nuclear holocaust—the male narrator’s attempts to hide as author within his text (Der Butt) or narrative strands (Die Rättin) also take on a political significance. Unlike the predominantly self-reflexive mode of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten, which allows the author to take a break from politics and reflect on the literary process and his role within it, here

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his far more problematic exploration of authorship may be understood as a direct response to the times in which he lives. Narrative control is invoked in an effort to compensate a loss of influence in the socio-political sphere, and the texts are consequently instrumentalized to try to salvage the author’s sense of self. Politics impinges in an increasingly threatening manner on the sphere of literature. Der Butt explicitly shows an author on the run within his own narrative, desperately trying to maintain his status in the literary realm precisely because his socio-political position has lost authority. By Die Rättin, political erosion of the literary sphere is complete: the author’s position in the text implodes along with his position in the world—and indeed the whole world itself. The image of authorship that arises from Der Butt and Die Rättin is consequently hardly heroic. In fact, it highlights the egotism that underlies the act of asserting authorship, and this in itself can be understood as authorial comment (although not necessarily apology or condemnation) on the part of Grass. While the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten both showed a certain unquestioned belief in the author’s centrality to his text as firstperson narrator, from Die Rättin onwards this belief can no longer be upheld. Instead, as will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, the author’s desire to be the central creative power in his text is constantly destroyed by the text itself. From the late 1980s onwards, a dominant narrative position as firstperson narrator is, in Grass’s own eyes, no longer tenable without some kind of qualification, and it is with this new decree in mind that the author must work.

5 ‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .] erzählen’ II: Reconstructing the Author in Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert INTRODUCTION For almost as long as Grass has been in the public eye, he has insisted that there is more to his creative abilities than simply literary talent. Displays of sculptures, drawings, watercolours, and etchings frequently accompany each new literary work, and he has always stressed the importance of these alternative artistic disciplines for helping him conceptualize and develop his literary ideas. 1 Furthermore, he has often described the role that painting and sculpting can play upon completion of a particular literary project, claiming that he turns to non-literary art forms as a kind of private retreat to help take stock of the past years’ work and to avoid falling into the infamous hole suffered by many writers when a project has come to an end: ‘Etwas ist weg, ein Loch entsteht; und ich bin in der glücklichen Lage, dieses Loch mit einer anderen Disziplin ausfüllen zu können’, he explained to Jürgen Wertheimer in interview in 1999. 2 In addition, however, one increasingly suspects that exulting in further creative talents has been at least as important in helping the author to shrug off what are often very personalized media attacks: by temporarily redefining himself as a painter or sculptor, Grass has found a way of distancing himself from his difficult public authorial image. He describes in Fünf Jahrzehnte (2001), for example, how in the wake of the Ein weites Feld controversy he rediscovered his watercolours and set off to escape the literary scene: ‘Ich 1 See for example Günter Grass, Fünf Jahrzehnte: Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Welttag, 2001). 2 Interview with Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmen der Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Günter Grass, Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung & Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999), 45.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 123 aquarellierte glattstämmige Buchen, ohne nach den Ansprüchen gegenwärtiger Kunsterwartung zu fragen, und erlebte mich, den jeweils individuell auftretenden Bäumen gegenüber, annähernd glücklich, weil allen auf Literatur abonnierten Kopfgeldjägern zumindest zeitweilig entkommen.’ 3 Two works immediately followed this period of retreat, Fundsachen für Nichtleser in 1997, and Mein Jahrhundert in 1999, and both overtly mixed artistic disciplines. There are predecessors for these pieces, both of which likewise followed periods of high public exposure: Mariazuehren (1973) followed the intensive political campaigning of the late 1960s and early 1970s, while Zunge zeigen (1988) was the first piece published after Die Rättin’s negative reception in the mid-1980s. Mariazuehren, a little-known collaborative work, first took illustrated poetry to another level with its insertion of lines from the title poem into photographs of Grass shot by Maria Rama and fullpage spreads of his artistic work arranged by P. J. Wilhelm. Zunge zeigen (1988) very overtly brings prose, pictures, and poetry into dialogue with one another. 4 Given that these works draw on different artistic disciplines in the same manner as a work of art may avail itself of numerous different materials, the term ‘mixed-media’ seems a fitting label for this new genre. This chapter looks at how this mixing of disciplines has accompanied a further change in Grass’s understanding of authorship, with particular reference to Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert. Given that both works in their full-scale picture-book versions are physically very imposing, on a superficial level at least Grass’s recent tendency to present his creative abilities not just in black type but also colour brushstrokes has seen him rather self-consciously expanding the remit of the authorial role. Now the author exists in image as well as word, and in large format as well as small (the picture-book and text-only versions of Mein Jahrhundert, for example). This brings to the idea of ‘variations on the self ’ a new dimension, as the dual artistic disciplines introduce a new kind of dialogue to the author’s text that goes beyond the construction of an introspective, ‘encapsulated’ narrative self of his earlier autofictional pieces. This certainly is how Grass himself characterizes the relationship when, referring to Zunge zeigen, he implies that the way in which the work provides an insight into recent events of his life is heightened by the interplay between the two different media: 3

Grass, Fünf Jahrzehnte, 114. One could argue that Totes Holz (1990) also experiments with a mixed-media form. However, I do not consider it to be a proper work of literature. Rather, it is a glorified piece of ecological campaigning. Documentation of the publishing controversy surrounding Ein weites Feld can be found in Oskar Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty: ‘Ein weites Feld’ von Günter Grass im Spiegel der Kritik (Göttingen: Steidl, 1996). 4

124 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert Die Wörter—verfügbare und nicht vorhandene—gehörten dem Tagebuch als Möglichkeit an, sich selbst in extrem veränderter Lebenssituation zu begreifen, das eigene Unverständnis aufzuschreiben und notfalls Distanz, Ausflucht zu suchen. Oft genug spielten sich Skizzen- und Tagebuch als vom Autor unabhängige Dialogpartner auf, die einander ins zu vage Wort fielen, dem Bild, weil es vorschnell Bild wurde, widersprachen. 5

As indicated in Chapter 3, the written medium provides a means not just of exploring the challenge of contemporary reality, but also of actively fleeing it (‘Distanz, Ausflucht zu suchen’), with the result that the author avoids having to pin himself to one authorial self-image that might constitute the ‘real’ Günter Grass. Here, however, word and image are described as policing such evasive tactics. They are referred to as autonomous forces (‘vom Autor unabhängig’) that will not succumb to his usual manipulation. Instead, they themselves take on a degree of authorship, guarding the style and conceptual integrity of the work. The implications in this for the author’s own role in his text are, potentially, profound. The specific dynamics between author, narrator, and text combine to question fundamentally the author’s textual centrality even as they would appear to confirm it. In the following, I will examine exactly how such a paradox informs the structure of Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert and consider its implications for Grass’s own understanding of authorship, both within the text and the wider world.

ZUNGE ZEIGEN

Authorial abandon in the Far East In the introduction to Chapter 3, I discussed how Grass linked the ideas of self-confrontation and self-discovery with the autofictional mode. Discussing Zunge zeigen, Grass has similarly linked compositional elements to his own need for a diary form: Ich führte—was mir zuletzt im Schneckenjahr ’69 notwendig gewesen war— Tagebuch, diesmal von Zeichnungen durchsetzt, die vom bengalischen Alltag erzählen. Und im fortwährend geführten Tagebuch entstand, mit Löchern 5 Günter Grass, foreword to the Skizzenbuch (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989), [n.p.]. The Skizzenbuch, published shortly after Zunge zeigen, consists of a brief three-page description of Grass’s time in Calcutta and the ensuing development of his artistic project Zunge zeigen, followed by simple sketches completed on site in India. Unlike the pictures published in Zunge zeigen, there is no written element (apart from the artist’s signature) in these sketches.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 125 dazwischen, in erster Fassung das zwölfteilige Stadtgedicht ‘Zunge zeigen’, das einem Buch den Titel gegeben hat, in dem sich, zwischen einem knapp gehaltenen Prosablock und der Schlußfassung des in Calcutta konzipierten Gedichtes, doppelseitige, von Schrift durchsetzte Zeichnungen reihen, die aus den Skizzen entwickelt wurden. 6

The way in which Grass renders the genesis of his text accords the work a strong level of textual autonomy. All the verbs pertaining to the text’s genesis are either attributed directly to the various elements of the text or indirectly through the use of the passive. The effect of this is twofold: it sidelines the impact of the author on his text, and it draws attention to how the various elements of the text work together to create some sort of meaningful whole. The idea, expressed particularly well in the metaphor of the ‘Dialogpartner’ quoted earlier, is eminently reminiscent of Hegel’s dialectic: an argument that moves forward, through objection and recasting in an eternal dialectic. The way in which this process is described, however, would appear to have the text taking over the authorial role. The idea that Grass ‘needs’ to write such a text suggests aligning autobiographical writing with a conscious move away from the authorial self and its conventional textual responsibilities. The self-confrontation that Grass described in relation to the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten has here given way to the evasive play of textual substitution. Following on from Die Rättin, it would appear that Grass’s ruminations on authorship within fiction now see him re-conceiving the autobiographical mode too as a means with which to investigate the author’s loss of textual centrality and, with this, political significance. The way in which the creative process is overtly thematized in the prose section supports this interpretation. The work opens with the idea of abandoning the famous authorial self. Grass’s autobiographical narrator, who is first a straightforward first-person prose narrator, then an artist, and finally a poetic voice, initially describes his journey to India as an attempt to abandon German society and his own part in this society: Wovon ich wegfliege: [. . .] weg vom Gequatsche, von den Verlautbarungen weg, raus aus der Ausgewogenheit, den Befindlichkeiten, den ellenbogenspitzen Selbstverwirklichungsspielen, Tausende Kilometer weit weg vom subtilen Flachsinn einst linker, jetzt nur noch smarter Feuilletonisten, und weg, weg von mir als Teil oder Gegenstand dieser Öffentlichkeit. (Zz, 17)

It is interesting to note that in the original Calcutta diary in the Berlin Grass archive, Grass expresses a very similar idea, using the same phrase, ‘weg 6 Quoted here from Grass, Fünf Jahrzehnte, 90–1, but originally published in Günter Grass, Vier Jahrzehnte, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Steidl, 1991).

126 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert von mir als Teil oder Gegenstand dieser Öffentlichkeit’, but follows it with a rather cynical comment: ‘Natürlich weiß ich, daß mich in Indien nichts anderes erwartet (Der Film [on the plane], zeigt sich, ist eine indische Spielart von “Schwarzwaldklinik”). Also verschiedene Spielarten des gleichen Irrsinns bei extrem anderem Klima.’ 7 In the later published version the rather more naive narrator does not keep his feet so firmly on the ground. Abandoning his Western public persona is instead clearly linked to the notion of finding or rediscovering a creative one in the East, just as, before him, Harm and Dörte undertook a similar journey in the hope of unearthing their true stance on the issue of procreation. As the text progresses, the emergence of a creative self is chronicled with evident satisfaction. The time spent drawing and writing poetry is noted, and its implication is directly stated where the narrator’s positive reaction to his surroundings is contrasted, through a distancing use of the third-person, with the rather more negative one of his wife: ‘Er zeichnet, schreibt auf; sie zählt die Tage lautlos. [. . .] Er lebt ein; sie hält durch’ (Zz, 60). As the end of the prose section approaches, the narrator clearly feels entirely at home in his Eastern surroundings. This is symbolically presented in his sudden desire to disappear in the crowds of the Bara-Bazar area after his status as (Western) writer has caused him unexpectedly to be refused entry to Burma: ‘ich [hatte plötzlich Lust], in jenem blasenwerfenden menschlichen Brei, der gegen Mittag immer dickflüssiger einkocht, unterzutauchen, verrührt zu werden, verlorenzugehen’ (Zz, 90). The movement throughout the prose section is thus towards assimilation of the new environment, as the narrator’s experiences of the new milieu lead to artistic inspiration and creative output, and this in turn leads to loss of the original distance to the Indian surroundings. 8 In contradistinction to Harm and Dörte, the narrator actively begins to seek out the experience of being overwhelmed by a foreign culture as something positive. Where the Peters are left undecided and dumbstruck at the end of Kopfgeburten by the foreign children’s indirect questioning of their ability to procreate, here the challenge of appropriating the foreign into the narrator’s own creative output leads to a rediscovery of his innate creative self, as expressed in his desire to stay on in India: 7

SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.394, 2. For a description of the gradual loss of distance to the new surroundings see Sigrid Mayer, ‘Günter Grass in Calcutta: Der intertextuelle Diskurs in Zunge zeigen’, in Gerd Labroisse and Dick van Stekelenburg, Günter Grass: Ein europäischer Autor?, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, 35 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 245–66. 8

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 127 Jetzt hierbleiben. Geborstenes Pflaster porträtieren. Dicht herangehen an Slumhütten, Materialien notieren. Wie Fremdes vertraut wird und fremd bleibt. Das Kunstgeschwätz vergessen. Mit breitem Pinsel, mit dünn auszeichnender Feder, mit bröckelnder Kohle Verfall verdichten. Unsere verrückte schwarze Mutter, wie sie gibt und nimmt. Ein Pulk Hocker—ein Pulk Krähen. Geköpfte, aufgehackte, gehäufte Kokusnüsse. Noch einmal von vorn beginnen: den Müll umschichten. (Zz, 103)

This passage is situated close to the end of the prose section, and the two sections that follow carry out this wish to recommence the creative process even as the narrator packs his bags and flies home. The drawings portray the objects listed above in stark charcoal and ink sketches, and the poem begins with a very striking metaphor for how the poet gains artistic inspiration from the new culture. As he sweats on the busy commuter train, his inspiration ‘fließt, / tropft aufs Blatt, / macht sich mit Tinte gemein’ (Zz, 209). Introducing alternative media does more than simply enable creative output to continue after the narrator has flown home, however. As Grass’s own comments imply, the pictures and poem are not merely extensions of the prose text (like appendices to document the autobiographical narrator’s creative output), but rather they work independently of the author actually to create the text itself. They themselves take on an authorial role, which ultimately competes with that of the author as set out, via his autobiographical narrator, in the opening prose section. This point is best illustrated by the corpus of pictures and the way in which they force the reader to re-evaluate the relationship between the author, narrator, and the work.

Artistic construction: the role of the pictures The main block of pictures within the work occupies the same amount of space as the prose section (108 pages of pictures compared to 109 pages of prose). Many of the motifs taken up in the pictures have already been mentioned in the prose text as passing sights and impressions that caught the narrator’s attention: crows, heaps of skulls around the goddess Kali, hands sticking out of the bus, the feet of the pavement dwellers lined up in rows, and so forth. The pictures do not therefore continue the narrative or even particularly embellish it with extra incidents or impressions. Indeed, to a certain extent they simply repeat it. There is, however, one fundamental difference: the apparent lack of any artist figure within the pictorial representation. Given Grass’s penchant for self-portraiture, this

128 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert seems noteworthy. 9 Instead of focusing directly on himself as artist, the apparently self-effacing author employs one of two basic tactics: either the pictures are arranged so that the viewer’s gaze is channelled into a particular point in the picture (e.g. Zz, 119, 127, 161, 177, etc.), or there is a figure within the picture that reflects the viewer’s gaze back out onto him or herself (e.g. Kali in Zz, 111, 117, the man in Zz, 133, the cows in Zz, 151, etc.). This use of perspective is striking, because, in as much as the first viewer of the picture is the artist himself, alternating between the two constructions allows Grass to combine the two opposing positions (the artist sees himself seeing), without ever actually including an image of this figure in the picture. Either the perspective takes the gaze away from the artist onto the images he has recorded as they meet at a point to which his eyes are drawn, or it rebounds upon the artist and makes him into a sort of absent presence within the picture. In both cases he is the perceiving consciousness behind the picture, and thus the picture points out from itself to him. The artist’s standpoint forms a sort of unidentifiable gap within the pictures. While issues of perspective may be applied to any art criticism, these particular drawings include one element that is rare in conventional art and which strengthens my argument here: the interface between word and image. The way in which the two disciplines are brought into contact with one another in Zunge zeigen contrasts in both style and effect with both of the other places where Grass’s Calcutta sketches can be seen. In the Skizzenbuch, a collection of Grass’s sketches from India are reproduced with no written element beyond the artist’s signature, with the result that they appear much less crafted and complete. In the original diary that Grass took with him to Calcutta, on the other hand, the pictures are given their own space on the page, but in such a manner that the images and the text flow into one another very naturally—unlike the rigid genre divisions of the published version, where the main body of text is entirely blocked off from the pictorial representations. 10 Within the pictorial section of the published text, however, all the drawings are accompanied by fragments of handwritten text, to the point where this writing is frequently a key compositional element within the picture. The visual effect of the writing 9 Grass’s self-portraits can be found in several of his collections of graphic works, notably Günter Grass, In Kupfer, auf Stein (Göttingen: Steidl, 1986), Günter Grass, Ohne die Feder zu wechseln: Zeichnungen, Druckgraphiken, Aquarelle, Skulpturen, (Göttingen, Steidl, 1997), and Günter Grass, Ausstellung anläßlich des 60. Geburtstages von Günter Grass, Hundert Zeichnungen: 1955 bis 1987: Katalog der Kunsthalle zu Kiel der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, ed. Jens Christian Jensen (Kiel, Kunsthalle zu Kiel und Schleswig-Holsteiner Kunstverein, 1987). 10 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.394.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 129 on Zz, 121, for example, is to sketch in the sense of scattered rubbish and filth strewn across the pavement and almost literally ‘bracket off ’ the space around the body. Frequently the writing forms part of the sky, creating the effect of clouds (or smog) hanging over the scene below (e.g. Zz, 117, 127, 131, 177), or is ‘strewn’ along the ground, like litter or clutter (Zz, 145, 149, 155, 159, 167, 177, 199). Some pictures almost seem to be entirely written over by text (e.g. Zz, 141, 151, 179, 205), while in others the images appear to emerge from the flow of text around them (e.g. Zz, 119, 137). The effect of this interface is to break down any clear-cut distinction between pictorial and written representation. The immediate impression is one of black ink on a white page, with the cumulative effect of stark contrasts and seemingly chaotic lines conveying a certain impression of India. It is largely immaterial whether the lines are forming words or pictures, and sometimes the writing is in any case largely illegible. One’s natural impulse to read the words from left to right across the page is frustrated, and frequently it is easier for the viewer to rest his or her eyes on the scenes of poverty rather than the words that describe them, allowing these words simply to form part of the overall effect. In some cases it is not even clear whether we are looking at bits of rubbish or bits of words (e.g. Zz, 153, 197). In this sense, the dense, ‘scribbled style’ of the pictures contrasts starkly with the neat block of prose text that precedes it. Moving into the pictorial section of the work is rather like unpicking the careful type of the ‘diary’: the pictures highlight how the preceding section is carefully constructed and cleaned of all unwanted litter or clutter. This certainly undermines any notion of the prose text consisting of thoughts scribbled down in real time. Interestingly, the short ‘epilogue’ of pictures after the poem (also a neat block of careful type) begins with four straw brooms sweeping away scraps of words and letters (Zz, 233), something that might refer directly back to Grass’s comments on the advantages of combining the two disciplines: the pictures are sweeping away the ‘vague’ words that do not properly belong in the finished work. The disciplines within the work are thus shown actively taking on an authorial role with regard to stylistic unity. Furthermore, the specific way word and image are combined leads to an understanding of the author himself as a product of his work. Even as the words of his diary prose are broken down and replaced or succeeded by pictures, the visual object produced builds up the notion of a reflecting, reasoning human consciousness at work. This acts in the first instance like a kind of imprint left by the author on the forms which have gone on to become his legacy. The clear-cut Western literary standpoint established in the prose section has been removed, along with all representations of,

130 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert or direct references to, the autobiographical narrator. Replacing it is an unidentified human consciousness made tangible by the play between word and image on the page (although one may argue that it is clearly a welleducated one whose pen can turn itself to either drawing or writing and is fluent in the German language). 11 In effect, the picture section ‘reads’ like someone’s remembering mind, with scraps of commentary and phrases accompanying particular lingering imagery, like a diary or photo-album. The viewer of this section thus has the impression of entering into the author’s mind either before the process of rationalization and order—which is then evident in the neatly typed-up and chronologically ordered prose section—or into a rather different kind of authorial mind. The insistence with which the words are penned into the pictures, however, makes it difficult simply to cast this persona as an artistic as opposed to literary self, for the words constantly echo the position taken up by the narrator in the preceding section. This makes of the apparent realist diary a much more ordered, artistic product than one may originally suspect (a visual effect, incidentally, which is also achieved by the initial move from the brief ‘prologue’ of pictures into the main body of the prose section). Furthermore, reading the prose diary section not as a limpid chronicle of the time spent in India but rather as a consciously constructed text necessarily weakens the sense of authenticity generally associated with the autobiographical diary form. Effectively, the pictures, and later again the poem, emphasize the artificiality of the prose section in which the narrator is of necessity constructed in order to communicate the verbal side of the author. Chronicling the emergence of a creative self thereby becomes a rather artificial sort of self-discovery, with the text constructed by the author in such a manner as to produce this apparently Ur-creative self in his wake. The result of the interplay between the two disciplines, writing and drawing, is not so much to multiply the author’s positions within the work and thereby strengthen his hold over his text as to achieve the exact opposite: the creative persona behind the work is sidelined as the play of the text takes over his authorial role. Not only do the different disciplines hold one another in check, as Grass described earlier; they also directly condition the way in which the author exists within his work. What this means is that within Zunge zeigen there is a double sense of distancing from the authorial self: the famous public author is apparently abandoned early on 11 See Thomas W. Kniesche, ‘ “Calcutta” oder Die Dialektik der Kolonialisierung’, in Schriftsteller und ‘Dritte Welt’: Studien zum postkolonialen Blick, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998), 263–90, for an interesting discussion of Grass’s standpoint in terms of postcolonial theory.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 131 in the work in order to allow the innate creative artist to gain expression in a new and challenging cultural environment. But this creative artist himself is revealed by the various different media through which he is expressed to be a construct of each specific creative discipline, and in this sense is as much their product as producer. This happens despite the fact that each particular discipline—the prose, pictures, or poem—is constructed by an author or artist who predates their existence, and it corresponds to the truth of the autofictional text as suggested in my reading of the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten: representing the authorial self in literature amounts to suspending it within textual considerations; authorship is re-presented by the text. However, if the author’s existential dependence on his own literature is already implicit in Grass’s earlier works, the twist on this underlying truth of literary self-presentation here is the way in which Grass carries on to make it thematically explicit throughout the work. The paradox of a creator who is both created and destroyed within his own work is personified directly in Zunge zeigen through the Hindu goddess Kali. Kali is the goddess of destruction in Hindu culture, yet, like many Hindu gods and goddesses, she is also linked to the binary opposite of this—creation—through her relation to the supreme goddess, Sakti. This understanding of the gods and goddesses is itself linked to the Hindu doctrine of the atman-brahman, a sort of life force which is the self of all things and is eternally present through a cycle of creation, preservation, transformation, and reabsorption, or, put another way, a cycle of life, death, and rebirth in which creation and destruction are inextricably linked. That the discovery of a creative self is here automatically linked to the dual symbolism of Kali is evident from the prose section onwards, where, as already quoted, the narrator refers to ‘unsere verrückte schwarze Mutter, wie sie gibt und nimmt’ (Zz, 103). However, while Kali is certainly referred to throughout both the prose text and the pictures, it is not really until the poem that the importance of her paradoxical position becomes evident.

Creation and destruction as both structure and theme Positioned after the prose text and the pictures, the poem carries on the movement away from the Western enlightened self supposedly left behind by the narrator in Germany. Notions of disappearance and being overwhelmed, which I have already mentioned in relation to the first two parts of the work, gain expression in the first section of the poem when the crush on the commuter train is described: ‘Einander / abhanden gekommen,

132 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert greifen wir über uns / und ins Leere’ (Zz, 210). Where the prose and the pictures first and foremost record the details of everyday experience with some reference to the emotions it stirs up, the poem makes the idea of being (willingly) overwhelmed by a foreign culture into its main theme. The early sections emphasize the poet’s impotence when faced with scenes of poverty. In the following example, the poetic voice even splits into two so that the poet can distance himself from his evidently misguided Western rational self: Was suchst du? Dich hier—woanders verloren—zu finden, hieße dich aufzurufen, als Bündel dazwischengelegt: dir hat es die Sprache verschlagen. Und brabbelst dennoch: Vom Nutzen der Landreform, wenn sie nur käme. Läßt dir (wie Sündennachlaß) mehr Wasserhähne und Rikschalizenzen, Wörter aufschwatzen wie Slumsanierung und Trockenmilch. (Zz, 212–13)

Linguistic impotence, symbolized here through the lyric subject’s initial speechlessness (‘dir hat es die Sprache verschlagen’), followed by ‘brabbeln’ and then ‘Wörter aufschwatzen’, becomes a recurrent theme in the later sections. In section 10, language is accused of having tricked the poet into incorrect representation of a young boy, as his attempts to recreate the child resulted in destruction of his proper character: ‘später beim Tee trieb die Sprache / Verrat, mißriet mir der Knabe zum schrecklichen Engel’ (Zz, 227), while in the ensuing section language is presented as particularly out of place in the context of the Indian cycle of life and death—funeral platitudes are ‘nicht im Handel’, for they count for nothing against the fact of death: ‘die Toten hier / sind besonders tot’ (Zz, 228). Kali, on the other hand, represents not only death and destruction, but also an answer to its supposed finality. In section 9, the real floods that partly submerged the city during the poet’s visit (also described in the prose section) are conflated with a description of India’s history of violence and famine still blocking the drains of the city today. Of all resurgent historical figures, the mythological Kali is placed at the head of history: ‘Kali endlich, die unsere Zeit mißt: / Jetztzeit Letztzeit . . . ’ (Zz, 225). This use of the possessive ‘unsere’ is, as in the prose section (‘unsere verrückte schwarze Mutter’), significant, as it indicates the extent to which the poet is associating with Eastern culture.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 133 The description of her in charge of time indicates an almost religious submission to her authority, and it is in this respect that she is associated not only with a cyclical type of violent (mortal) history (‘Jetztzeit’)—a feature of many of Grass’s works—but with a general immortal ability to overwhelm (‘Letztzeit’). 12 In this sense, she creates the past and ensures its perpetuation throughout the mortal human generations, as well as standing for the utter destruction of civilization. Her role as immortal goddess is to perpetuate the mortal universe by tactically destroying it. Certainly this would seem to be the poet’s motivation for invoking her in the final section of his poem. As the closing lines of section 11 indicate, he demands to be overwhelmed by a new social order: ‘käme doch Zorn auf / und hielte an’ (Zz, 229), a demand that seems to be his response to the poverty and hardship that the narrator has been recording throughout the work as a whole. The introduction of Kali in the third strophe of section 12 deliberately echoes this reference to anger: ‘Geduld am Ende, außer sich Wut’ (Zz, 230), and the poet speaks in almost mystical terms of the notion of being finally overwhelmed when he states, ‘Ich sah / Calcutta über uns kommen’ (Zz, 231). It is now that Kali emerges, in one swift strophe, and to all intents and purposes terminates the poem: In Mundhöhlen ungezählt sah ich der schwarzen Kali lackierte Zunge rot flattern. Hörte sie schmatzen: Ich, ungezählt ich, aus allen Gullys und abgesoffenen Kellern, über die Gleise: freigesetzt, sichelscharf ich. Zunge zeigen: ich bin. Ich trete über die Ufer. Ich hebe die Grenze auf. Ich mache ein Ende. (Zz, 231)

The construction of this particular strophe, however, intriguingly manages to conflate the poet with the goddess of destruction even as he is in the process of being destroyed (subsequently recorded as, ‘da vergingen wir (du und ich)’, Zz, 231). The pronoun ‘ich’ slips from the poet onto Kali as the sound of her voice takes over. It is then repeated almost compulsively throughout the strophe, as Kali becomes the ‘I’ of the poem. The result 12 See also Kniesche ‘ “Calcutta” oder die Dialektik der Kolonialisierung’, 276 for a discussion of the significance of the terms ‘Jetztzeit’ and ‘Letztzeit’.

134 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert of this for the reader or listener is that the poet becomes Kali even as he is overwhelmed by her. It was his idea to create the destruction of Calcutta within his poem, and thus he takes on the voice of Kali in order to do so. Moving into her persona, he imbues himself with immortality and is consequently able to report on his own death as authorial subject. This is an intriguing end to a work that deals with the search for creative inspiration through abandonment of the public Western self. While the different elements of the work all individually testify to a unifying, all-round author, they also work collectively to destroy any sense of integrity or preexistence to which this authorial self may try to lay claim. Rather, like the Hindu doctrine of the atman-brahman, the self of the work is continuously reborn within each of its different sections, and a necessary and inherent part of this self ’s rebirth is its own destruction. Where in the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten the author was clearly in control of his various narrative egos, here the text has displaced him. It is as if Grass has drawn his lessons from Die Rättin: the author must of necessity hand over the authorial role to his text if he is to continue to exist in any sort of recognizable form within his own literature.

MEIN JAHRHUNDERT

‘[Sich] aufspalten können in die verschiedensten Perspektiven’: the relationship between author and narrator The idea that creation and destruction represent two fundamental aspects of the creative process is also born out in Grass’s later work Mein Jahrhundert (1999). The image of the century that Grass presents in this text is one of repeated war and destruction, as is emphasized in both the opening and closing years of the narrative. In order to convey this picture, however, Grass creates the voices of purportedly ordinary people, the vast majority of whom are born into the narrative for the single year that they narrate. As the tale of destruction unfolds a multitude of voices is brought to life by the text, and the overall work is as much a celebration of these individual voices as it is a solemn monument to the ravages of war. This dual sense of creation and destruction is also borne out in the work’s representation of authorship. Speaking on his decision to employ multiple narrators in Mein Jahrhundert, Grass explains that he had originally attempted to construct the book with an old woman as its sole narrator, but rejected this strategy for the following reason: ‘Die alte Frau

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 135 hätte ich nicht ganz und gar aufspalten können in die verschiedensten Perspektiven. Mit mir konnte ich das schon machen.’ 13 The major distinction upheld here is one between author and narrator: while a constructed narrator does not tolerate being ‘split’ into further contrasting narrative positions, the author, as Grass demonstrated amply in Der Butt and Die Rättin, can. He believed that in order for this project to work, the ‘mein’ of ‘Mein Jahrhundert’ must be understood to relate to Grass, the famous public author, and the strong implication is that this is because only a truly creative force (the author) can endure necessary destruction (the different voices within the text usurp his authorial position) and still maintain a recognizable textual position. This two-pronged approach to authorship entails further paradoxical simultaneities. As the titular promise of autobiography is combined with the narrative tricks of fiction, a chronicle of the author’s life and times emerges that is as literary as it is historical and as universal as it is specific. In her overview of reviewers’ reaction to the work, Monika Shafi observes that it was this very way in which Grass sat on the fence between conventional genre categories that saw the text rejected as ‘neither (literary) fish nor (historic) fowl’. 14 She sees the main interest in the work residing in such a defiance of genre: ‘Grass turns his attention from the bios of the self to the bios of the collective, requiring him to perform multiple balancing acts between fact and fiction, literature and history, autobiography and biography.’ 15 In her view, however, the apparently polyvalent text is ultimately in thrall only to its author, as she observes ‘it is precisely the need to perform so many metamorphoses, to change identity and speech so many times, that underscores the author’s command over the text’. 16 This then leads into a negative aspect of the text, since an overabundance of Grass’s own perspective, albeit fictionalized through his various narrators, leads to a clear under-representation of women and foreign migrants. In a considerably shorter space, Amir Eshel comes to a similar conclusion. For him, the structure of Mein Jahrhundert is metonymic, with each year neatly encapsulated by one short symbolic event; the whole that keeps all these parts together and gives them moral direction is Grass himself: ‘All secondary referents, all the events that took place during each and every year, are set in relation to the rest through the book’s focal centre, 13 Günter Grass in interview with Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Ich bin ein lebenslustiger Pessimist’, Die Zeit, 1 July 1999, reprinted in Raddatz, Günter Grass: Unerbittliche Freunde, 86–98, 90. 14 Monika Shafi, ‘ “Gezz will ich ma erzählen”: Narrative and History in Günter Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 1 (2002), 39–62, 40. 15 Ibid., 45. 16 Ibid., 47.

136 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert the narrating “I”.’ 17 Beyond this assertion, Eshel does not explain how this central narrative ‘I’ relates either to the individual narratives or the author. However, the structural conclusion shared by Shafi and Eshel— that the commanding author-narrator lies at the centre of his text—is itself instructive. It implies that the multiple narrative positions are at all times clearly subordinate to the author of the text. Fritz Raddatz, however, offers a slightly different angle when in his review he considers the exact nature of the relationship between work and author. He describes Grass’s project in the following terms: [Grass ist] bitter verliebt in seine Rolle der recht habenden, rechthaberischen Kassandra; die jedoch ist persona im Sinne von Maske, nicht Persönlichkeit. Setzt er die Maske auf, wird sein Strich fahl. Läßt er die Masken tanzen, dräuend lugen und lügen, bekommt seine Sprache Rhythmus und Eleganz. 18

By emphasizing the theatrical posture in Grass’s fictional writing, Raddatz makes a clear distinction between Grass’s public image (here equated with a Cassandra role) and his authorial role within the text, which is hidden behind many masks. The well-known warning position is just one mask that the author can wear, and he is defined not through this, or indeed any other single mask, but rather through his ability to manage the whole lot. Although this argument is not dissimilar to that of Shafi’s, it is different in one important respect: whereas Shafi deems the various narrative poses ultimately to point back to a fixed and commanding author, for Raddatz these ‘masks’ bring the text as linguistic construct to life. In this respect, they actually point away from the author as a clear ‘personality’ who infuses the multiple roles with his own ideas and opinions. Instead, they work together to help manifest an authorial role on their own terms within the text: it is only through the play of the masks that the author’s linguistic and stylistic competence becomes evident. Indeed, the elusiveness of the author’s position within Mein Jahrhundert is expressed very early on in the work itself. After the self-importance of the title and the physical format of the book that is, in Raddatz’s words, ‘in seiner aufgeblasenen Aufmachung wohl eher etwas zu bedeutsam daherkommend’, Grass immediately sets about downsizing his author within the text. 19 The opening sentences of the first year make this clear: ‘Ich, 17 Amir Eshel, ‘The Past Recaptured? Günter Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert and Alexander Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 1 (2002), 63–86, 69. 18 Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Über das Buch Mein Jahrhundert’, in Günter Grass: Unerbittliche Freunde: Ein Kritiker, Ein Autor (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 82–5, 83–4. 19 Ibid., 83.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 137 ausgetauscht gegen mich, bin Jahr für Jahr dabeigewesen. Nicht immer in vorderster Linie, denn da alleweil Krieg war, zog sich unsereins gerne in die Etappe zurück’ (MJ, 6). While the claim to universal presence, reminiscent of the opening to Der Butt, is in itself far from modest, the emphasis on the supplementarity of the authorial ‘I’, existing now as narrator, not only counters this but in fact undermines it. The grand ‘I’ implied by the work’s title has been substituted by a string of easily replaceable, timorous and largely forgotten ‘I’s, which take over the narrative. Instead of shaping the events of history, a claim implied for the author in the work’s title, they are merely witness to them (‘dabeigewesen’). Their lives follow the timeline of history, and the significance of events is determined not by reference to the persons narrating them, but rather by history’s own unrelenting march through the years. The author consequently disappears amongst a string of largely anonymous and undeveloped narrators. The predominantly negative criticism of the work judges these individual narratives simply to represent Grass’s views—Ulrich Baron writing in Die Welt, for example, deems Grass to have ‘zunehmend vom Epiker zum Kommentator mutiert, dessen Gestalten nur noch Sprachrohre sind’. 20 This in itself, however, can be interpreted as a reaction to the lack of an obvious unifying author figure in a text that purports to come from one clear authorial standpoint (‘Mein Jahrhundert’). As Foucault argues, when readers are faced with textual contradictions the author function is generally invoked to neutralize them and make an overall significance clear: ‘The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be—at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious—a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction.’ 21 The multiple narratives of Mein Jahrhundert themselves constitute this series of texts. What I am suggesting, then, is that all the readings of Mein Jahrhundert to date, from those of newspaper reviewers through to Shafi and Eshel’s academic articles, have reacted to Grass’s performance of multiple narrative positions by inflicting their own image of the author back onto a text which otherwise and in spite of its own promising title threatens to yield no overall unity.

20 Ulrich Baron, Die Welt, 1 September 1999, quoted in Fachdienst Germanistik, 9 (1999), 16. 21 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rainbow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 3 vols (London: Penguin, 2000–2002), II, ed. James D. Faubion, 215.

138 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert In fact, as the following will show, Grass repeatedly undermines authorship throughout the work.

‘Is bitzeli fossil’: undermining authorship as theme Throughout the course of the work, authors are the subject of a considerable number of the individual narratives. The most memorable of these concern Else Lasker-Schüler (1901), Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque (1914 to 1918), the fictitious meeting between Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brecht in the year of their death (1956), and the East–West Berlin meetings of the mid-1970s (1975 to 1977). Only the 1970s meetings actually have a famous author as their narrator, Grass himself. In the other narratives, the authors’ voices are filtered through anonymous and largely undeveloped first-person narrators. The result of this kind of explicit narrative framework, however, is that the kinds of authorship these famous authors represent are turned into a clear subject of the text. Furthermore, the thematic examination of authorship is accompanied towards the end of the work by an increased sense of introspection, as Grass overtly introduces his own authorial personage, as both narrating subject and object, into the work. Such a personal turn on the part of the work’s author encourages a detailed examination of how exactly the author is thematized within his text with a view to the consequences for Grass’s own stance on the issue of authorship at the end of the twentieth century. Consideration of the authorial role begins in the second narrative, in which an anonymous admirer of Lasker-Schüler’s work reports how he or she found and bought three postcards at a flea market on which the author had given full vent to her imaginative powers. Her text is repeated in the narrative, and the way in which Lasker-Schüler fictionalizes in her overblown signature style an account of riding on the first monorail in 1901 in order to send signs of life to Gottfried Benn in 1945 seems calculated to show both her ingenuity and lasting appeal. In her own literary world, she is a past master at creating exotic images of herself and casting further roles so that all her friends and acquaintances can join her. 22 Although the author, as the narrator points out, does not actually manage to outlive the difficult political times in which she is writing, her authorial image thus does live on as footloose and fancy-free: this is what the narrator, smitten with the cards, is prepared to pay a ‘Liebhaberpreis’ (MJ, 11) for. The author’s very 22

See in particular Else Lasker-Schüler, Mein Herz (1912).

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 139 delight in representing herself in fictional roles thus leads directly to her own textual objectification by subsequent readers. In the case of Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque, the meeting between the two is presented as painstakingly arranged by a young Swiss researcher in the 1960s. This immediately casts the two authors in a certain light, as they are seen not just as an oppositional pairing, but are also retrospectively held by a subsequent generation of scholars to be representative of the entirety of the First World War period. Indeed, both authors are presented not only as representing political positions (one right-wing, one left-wing), but also as little more than extensions of their books (Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern and Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues respectively). Just as on her postcard Lasker-Schüler executes private, non-fictional correspondence in the same voice as her literary writing, in this conversation Remarque and Jünger also speak like their own works. Remarque refers to himself as a ‘lebendigen Toten’ (MJ, 62), describes the young soldiers as facing the front ‘in den zu großen Stiefeln und mit den zugeschütteten Herzen’ (MJ, 70) and finally signs the narrator’s copy of his book ‘unter dem recht eindeutigen Bekenntnis: “Wie aus Soldaten Mörder wurden” ’ (MJ, 79). Speaking in the 1960s in the same tone as their 1920s literary works, both authors have in fact become monumental relics from the past, as the Swiss narrator remarks upon on several occasions with reference to their rather outdated manners. However, any blame for the fossilization (‘is bitzeli fossil’, MJ, 60) which seems to have taken place can be pinned as much on the narrator and the institution she represents as on the authors themselves. Although she appears to be relatively self-effacing throughout the talk, she is the one who is in fact stage-managing their face-to-face appearance, and she is the one who on two separate occasions produces the books through which their opposing authorial positions are brought most sharply into focus. Just as in the case of Lasker-Schüler, the way in which authors are appropriated by their readers and turned into textual objects is directly thematized within the narrative: the image of authorship that they represent is shown to be almost exclusively conditioned by the expectations of the reader. This last point is made all the more explicit in the 1956 meeting between Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn. Like the meeting between Jünger and Remarque, this is also structured around an oppositional pairing who represent certain fixed positions. Significantly, however, the account of their conversation is given by an anonymous student of German literature who happens to overhear it. His account delights in pointing out the scurrilous way in which both authors, for the duration of their conversation at

140 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert least, entirely overturn conventional literary and political understanding of their respective authorial standpoints: ‘Es gefiel wohl meinen Idolen, ihren Rollen auf ein Stündchen zu entkommen’ (MJ, 227), he remarks. The utter irreverence that both show for what one might call the official canon of German literary studies—from the terminology employed by literary criticism through to the way in which the merits of literary works and authors’ perceived political standpoints are conventionally discussed—emphasizes to just what extent authors are forced into representative positions by their readers, whether literary or political in nature, with which they may not necessarily fully identify. Their illicit meeting is thus presented as a selfconscious attempt to undermine the roles that have become so engrained as to dictate even how they stand: ‘Mal standen sie dicht beieinander, wie auf gemeinsamem Sockel, dann wieder auf jene ihnen vorgeschriebene Lücke bedacht’ (MJ, 227). Certainly, the way in which they question the dominant socio-political face of authorship leads the eavesdropping narrator to question what he expects from literature, with the result that he ultimately decides to burn his own attempts at poetry and sign up for an engineering course instead. The way these authors question the received understanding of their authorial role thus acts as a sort of epiphany for the student narrator. Realizing the potential gulf of understanding that can open up between authors and their readers, he sees the whole literary discipline so undermined as to want to have nothing more to do with it. By the mid-1970s, this gulf has widened further, with authors abandoned by their wayward readers and now apparently writing only for themselves. After the burning socio-political issues of the early 1970s—Willy Brandt’s visit to the Warsaw ghetto in 1970, abortion in 1971, RAF terrorists in 1972, the oil crisis in 1973, and the first football match between the two Germanys in 1974—the text’s turn back to authors and their literary activities is announced almost apologetically by the author-narrator: ‘War kein besonderes Jahr’ (MJ, 304). This sets the tone for contemporary authorial self-understanding in the latter half of the twentieth century. On a personal level, the narrator, here Grass himself, presents his own authorial activities as cowardly escapism (in contrast to Lasker-Schüler’s earlier courageous selfinvention). His own inability to face up to present-day reality is, however, echoed on a wider scale by the group of authors who meet in East Berlin, to whom the author-narrator collectively refers as ‘uns versammelte Schreibfederhalter’ (MJ, 306). The self-consciousness of such a metaphor underlines to what extent these writers are out of touch with contemporary socio-political issues. Indeed, in 1976 it is revealed that they completely overestimated their public importance, expecting the rooms in which their

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 141 ‘konspirative [. . .] Treffen’ (MJ, 310) took place to be bugged and members of their own group to be informers. Years later, however, the narrator discovers that the authorities made no attempt to tap their meetings, making all the more laughable the way in which they studiously overacted for the supposed hidden spies. Their fruitless attempts to subvert the state contrast sharply with the practised public performer Wolf Biermann, who rehearses his bad-boy political image to perfection, provoking the state authorities to expel him in 1976. The respected literary authors fall far short of such notoriety, and as their self-consciously illicit meetings fizzle out as a result of falling numbers rather than direct state intervention, their literature continues to appear at reliable intervals, apparently entirely independently of any external socio-political factors—and also of any obvious public response. Where Benn and Brecht had to go to a considerable effort to escape their publicly assigned roles, their successors find that socio-political relevance is something that contemporary German authors can only wish for within their private circles in terms of a postmodern joke. Each in their own way, these four presentations of authorship emphasize how an image comes to fix an author in the public imagination. Where in the first part of the century authors found themselves forced into a predetermined role by their readers, in the second they have been abandoned by their readers, with the result that their function within the world loses all meaning. Authorship goes from being an artificially constructed position to a socially irrelevant one. If these four narrative strands collectively detail the falling significance of the author and his or her works for society over the course of the twentieth century, then a fifth and final strand, Grass’s own self-presentation via first-person narrators in the final decade, can be read as the logical culmination to such a downward spiral. From 1987 onwards, Grass’s presence as both narrator and authorial subject in Mein Jahrhundert increases dramatically: 1987, 1988, 1990, 1996, and 1998 are all narrated by him in the autobiographical mode, while 1994, 1997, and 1999 use different narrators who make clear reference to Grass as author. It is this latter facet of the text, narrators who make Grass as author into the subject of their narrative, which is of particular relevance to the argument I have developed so far. In all three cases, the narrators demonstrate a considerable distance from the author, with their tone ranging from hostility (Birgit Breuel, the infamous Treuhand replacement, 1994), through smug superiority (Hubertus Vonderbrügge, an eminent specialist in cloning, 1997) to good-natured, albeit somewhat sceptical, submission (Helene Grass, the author’s mother, 1999). Birgit Breuel’s piece is written defiantly against the author who is both writing her own narrative now in 1994—‘der mich hier niederschreibt

142 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert und meint, mir ein Zeugnis ausstellen zu dürfen’ (MJ, 385)—and who will go on to write up an (unfavourable) account of her in Ein weites Feld. With the narrative conflict this clearly entails—Breuel is cast as both selfdetermining narrating subject and author-determined narrative object— her piece involves paradoxically distancing herself from the author’s view of her (‘beinhart sei ich’, MJ, 385) and at the same time trying to assert these self-same characteristics as the basis of her own self-assured counterattack (‘weil ich jedes Ding beinhart durchstehe’, MJ, 386). The result is an extravagantly vituperative narrative, in which Grass is countered by Grass and Grass is cleared by Grass at one and the same time: while the moral character of Breuel is, as critics have pointed out, presented as negative to the point of grotesque, she is nevertheless given ample space in which to criticize the domineering author and his literary project. 23 In 1997 the author comes under fire for a second time, this time not from hard market forces, but, rather, the scientific community. Having voiced his fears about the future of the male gender following the breakthrough in cloning sheep, he now finds himself confronted with the patronizing response of a man of science whose aim is ‘Ihre gewiß nicht haltlosen, jedoch ins Fabelhafte übersteigerten Befürchtungen zu entkräften’ (MJ, 396). However, with his very next sentence, this narrator’s transmission begins to suffer from authorial interference. The way in which he stresses the value of sobriety in his exhortation, ‘Sie neigen dazu, Ihrer Phantasie auf unterhaltsame Weise ungehemmt freien Lauf zu lassen, dabei sollte, zum Wohle aller, Nüchternheit angezeigt sein’ (MJ, 396), indicates a kind of rhetoric that could be plucked straight from one of Grass’s own public political speeches from almost any decade. Thus even as the narrator outwardly continues establishing his authority in a condescending tone, the author is undermining him from within. The culmination of this can be seen in his description of ‘ “de[n] emanzipierte[n] Mann” ’ who is ‘sozusagen ein Luxusgeschöpf, das sich die kommende Gesellschaft gönnen wird’ and is presented as particularly attractive for such an author as Grass who will surely benefit from ‘diese demnächst offenen Freiräume [. . .], damit sich in ihnen [. . .] auch Ihre Kopfgeburten auf schier unbegrenzter Weide Auflauf finden’ (MJ, 399). The joke is that such a ridiculous suggestion properly belongs in one of Grass’s novels, either Kopfgeburten or Die Rättin, and is clearly the ironic fabrication of this self-same author. Even as the narrator ridicules Grass, the author uses his own work to ridicule the narrator, who is hardly a convincing man of science by the end of his piece. 23

See Fachdienst Germanistik, 9 (1999) 15–17, 16.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 143 The relationship between author and narrator in the final year, 1999, is considerably less strained than these two previous examples. Here, Helene Grass starts out by stating straightforwardly how she has come to act as narrator in her son’s work: ‘Gezwungen hat er mich nicht, aber überredet, der Bengel’ (MJ, 405). Coaxed back from the dead, she accepts both his request for one final overview of the twentieth century and the life he imagines for her beyond her biological death in 1953. The tone in which she does so is one of amused parental capitulation, and her memories are peppered with the kind of vaguely embarrassing revelations parents are apt to make about their grown-up offspring’s early years. Referring to the latest literary project of her ‘Bengel’, her verdict is as frank as it is proud: ‘So ist er nun mal. Denkt sich die unmöglichsten Sachen aus. Muß immer übertreiben. Mag man gar nicht glauben, wenn man das liest . . . ’ (MJ, 409). However, although this sort of praise may sound distinctly like Grass patting himself on the back at the end of a long project, it is not entirely free from the sort of irony evident in the two earlier pieces. Even as Grass invokes his mother to praise him, she is also subtly undermining him: the author is merely a boy, and his grand literary-historical project is referred to in terms of childhood tricks that, by their very nature, lack a certain finesse. This image of the author hardly squares with the grand self-image that the title’s claim to ‘Mein Jahrhundert’ implies. Instead, running through all three narratives is an image of the author as devious little scamp, tripping up his own narrators even as they try to trip up him. Thematically, then, the author as concept is very much present throughout the text of Mein Jahrhundert. Not only are numerous authors named and invoked throughout the narratives, a certain progression throughout the text as a whole encourages a reconsideration of authorship as it has evolved across the twentieth century. While Lasker-Schüler, Jünger, and Remarque not only represent certain fixed positions but actually seem to advocate this kind of self-stylization in reaction to socio-political events, Benn and Brecht begin a process of questioning the popular reception of authors that is echoed on a wider scale by Grass’s 1970s contemporaries. This in turn leads to Grass’s own ironic self-dismissal via his fictionalized narrators in the final decade. The author has mutated from fine representative of the power of imagination to a self-conscious liar whose grasp of reality is questionable. Collectively, the individual narratives undermine overblown notions of authorship, with Grass himself humorously presented as its most degenerate specimen at the end of the twentieth century.

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Drawing out narrative strands: the author as artist Although the text of Mein Jahrhundert not only reveals no authoritative author figure but actually undermines the very concept, this does not mean that the work in its entirety lacks an inherent author. My comments so far have been based on a reading only of the written form, as this has been the sole focus of critical and academic debate to date. However, while there is a text-only version of the work, the picture-book edition is generally acknowledged to correspond to Grass’s original concept. Indeed, Monika Shafi not only points this out in her article, but adds that ‘Grass has repeatedly insisted on the importance of the pictorial in his works’. It therefore seems quite astounding that she then simply asserts, ‘Yet, in the case of Mein Jahrhundert the drawings are a major, but not a crucial part of the text. Texts and images complement, but do not depend on each other.’ 24 Quite to the contrary, I will argue here that unlike the text-only version, the so-called ‘Prachtausgabe’ very visibly asserts an overall author who literally draws the deliberately fragmented narrative strands together. Whereas the textual narratives are characterized by contrasting styles, events, and genres, the artwork throughout Mein Jahrhundert is unchanging: each piece is executed in Grass’s signature watercolour style. Writing on Grass’s artwork in general, Peter Joch establishes that a focus on objects and a studied avoidance of any self-conscious artistic mannerisms defines much of his work: Der Bildraum, der ‘realistisch’ bleibt oder gänzlich ausgespart ist, nicht als Bedeutungsträger fungiert und nicht als Artefakt entlarvt wird, zeigt einfach ein ‘Ding’ als seinen Gegenstand. Dieses ‘Ding’ muß für sich Bestand haben, ohne Weltfiguren, ohne Formeln für die Makrozusammenhänge in der Natur. 25

In the case of Mein Jahrhundert, these objects are brought all the more to the fore by the sheer size of the picture-book edition, which confers on the large-scale, colour pictures a visually arresting quality. Furthermore, while Grass’s pure artwork (artwork without any accompanying text) may well resist all wider connections or transcendental significations, the fact that in Mein Jahrhundert the pictures are positioned before or alongside each narrative piece means that they are automatically interpreted as textually significant. The object or, less frequently, the scene that the pictures convey seems to sum up the crux of each story, and Grass himself has commented 24

Shafi, ‘Narrative and History in Günter Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert’, 59. Peter Joch, ‘Ohne die Feder zu wechseln: Deutungen zum bildnerischen Werk von Günter Grass’, in Grass, Ohne die Feder zu wechseln, 15–42. 25

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 145 on how the pictorial side of the work often helped him decide which stories should be chosen from the wealth of historical material available: ‘oft war das Malen, das Aquarellieren [. . .] behilflich. Also, die Geschichte, die ich vom Stoff her für mich reizvoll, die sich auch auf eine Bildmetapher, eine gemalte Bildmetapher bringen ließ, die bekam dann den Vorrang’. 26 Indeed, the organizational role of the pictures is precisely what makes them so significant for the overall work. Most obviously, the pictures convey the timeline underlying the project: the numerals for each relevant year are incorporated into the accompanying picture, while the work itself is periodically punctuated by double-page spreads of ‘date heaps’ at the historically significant moments of 1918 to 1919, 1932 to 1933, 1945 to 1946, 1961 to 1962, 1968 to 1969, 1977 to 1978, 1990 to 1991, and 1999 to 2000. 27 The apparently autonomous march of time is thereby given a distinctly subjective twist, indicating an ordering, interpreting force behind the way in which it is invoked here. In addition to this, the artwork provides a visual representation of some of the thematic links that underlie the apparently disparate narrative pieces. This is well illustrated by a particular visual emphasis on headgear in the early part of the work. While in the period up to 1918, only 1902, 1915, and, briefly, 1905 thematize headgear in the narrative text, hats and helmets are a major if not the main visual feature of the artwork in 1902, 1905, 1911, 1914, 1915, and 1917. This visual emphasis seems particularly gratuitous in 1911, where the page is dominated by a Prussian Pickelhaube in deep blue and yellow while the narrative text makes no reference to headgear of any sort. The narrator of this year is Wilhelm II, writing to his trusted Prince Eulenburg, and expounding at some length on his pet project of naval expansion. Although this narrative is in itself comprehensible enough as part of the build-up to the First World War, the artistic focus on the Pickelhaube, symbol of Prussian militarism, helps bind this voice into the series of events preceding and succeeding this particular story. Thus the overwhelmingly bright yellow of the straw boaters set against a blue sky in 1902 and the arresting blue and yellow Pickelhaube perched over the suggestion of a blue-coated general in front of yellow city spires in 1905 evoke the glory of Germany’s new-found 26

Interview with Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch, 51. The significance of 1977 to 1978 is debatable, but given that it follows a series of autobiographical pieces from 1975 to 1977, each accompanied by a pictorial variation on the flounder, it is probably meant as the caesura felt in the author’s own life on the publication of Der Butt. Politically, it corresponds to increased state vigilance in both Germanys, linked in the 1977 narrative to the triple RAF suicides (Baader, Raspe, Ensslin) and the difficult situation in which East German writers found themselves following Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976. 27

146 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert wealth and colonial status in the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1911, however, its proud and colourful form is floating precariously over grey smoking ships of war, and by 1914 the colours have darkened dramatically. Now, grey spiked helmets march out against a blood-red sunset, leading into the upturned khaki-brown steel helmet complete with bullet-hole in 1915, and the row of grey-green helmets and gas masks in 1917. Indeed, while the individual narratives between 1900 and 1914 flit between a variety of seemingly unlinked topics and voices, the artwork throughout marks a very coherent and consistent darkening of colour. With the exception of 1904, all years in the first decade are painted in rich colours. In 1910, however, the grey-brown double-page spread of a lone woman against an industrial landscape conveys a striking change. From this point on, the artist’s palette is increasingly washed through with blacks, browns, and greys. By the time the narrative settles into its first sequence of consistent narrative voice (1914 to 1918 are all narrated retrospectively by the same Swiss girl interviewing Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque in the late 1960s), the artwork has already long prepared the reader for the sludge and muck of trench warfare that is now described verbally. Thus, when, in 1915, Jünger alights on the ‘Stichwort [. . .], von dem nicht mehr recht loszukommen war: “Diese elende Pickelhaube [. . .] wurde [. . .] vom Stahlhelm abeglöst” ’ (MJ, 66), the text is able to trigger off within the reader’s consciousness a string of associations that have hitherto remained at the level of the subconscious. While only two of the individual narratives between 1900 and 1918 make hats into their overriding theme, the artwork has not only focused repeatedly on headgear but even allowed its colours to condition the palette applied to the first nineteen years of the century. Thus even though the individual narratives collectively seemed to fall short of any kind of conventional unifying author on all four of Foucault’s counts, the artwork shows very clearly how they fit into an overall project that displays historical, stylistic, conceptual, and generic unity. The frame I have discerned in the artwork is of course entirely absent from the text-only version of Mein Jahrhundert, an absence that has clear repercussions. This can be seen in the case of 1957. Here, a GDR citizen who has just been decorated by the state for developing the GDR people’s army helmet, writes to his design collaborator from the Second World War, now resident in West Germany. In so doing, he reminds both of them of their debt to the inventor of the steel helmet in the First World War. With the wealth of associations that this narrative triggers, readers of the picturebook edition can read 1957 as an agreeable reminder that the project is

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 147 safely progressing in the hands of its author, whose picture for this year pointedly collects together all the different models of helmet from the Pickelhaube onwards. Their text-only peers, on the other hand, are much more likely to understand this seemingly odd choice of topic (for without the artwork the whole theme of hats and their significance is far less evident) as a prime example of just how bewilderingly fragmented a text that lacks all clear signs of authorship can be. The specific combination of word and image in Mein Jahrhundert thus achieves the opposite to that of Zunge zeigen. In the case of this latter work, the pictorial section was pitched against the written sections, manifesting its own implicit authorial role that clashed with and undermined the image conveyed by the text. In Mein Jahrhundert, however, word and image are placed side by side within any one narrative, with the written section providing the verbal detail that is then interpreted by the author in the pictorial section. The two different disciplines correspond to the two different positions inherent to any work, those of author and narrator, with the unusual twist simply being that Grass chooses to locate his work’s author figure within the visual rather than the verbal. The advantage of this is that it allows him thematically to undermine the very concept of authorship, a development that he places within the historical context of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, he manages to endow the overall work with its own very clear author figure by relocating himself to the pictorial realm. The result is a work in which the author is free to play out both his own death and that of his authorial contemporaries, without, as in the case of Die Rättin, placing the existence of his own text in danger.

CONCLUSION The way both Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert expand textual standpoints by mixing artistic disciplines encourages further reconsideration of the issue of authorship. The author exists on two levels within the works. While the different media and narrators may undermine him both thematically and structurally within the text, they themselves cannot avoid signifying a higher creative power who is masterfully pulling all the strings. Furthermore, creating a narrator who speaks as an enemy, deliberately slandering the author or making light of him, could be construed as the ultimate act of self-confidence, as indeed is orchestrating one’s own demise in the case of Zunge zeigen. Thus even when both works are apparently celebrating a certain kind of authorial death, they are also at the same time

148 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert praising their creator. Both constructed as monuments to the author and actively asserting their own narrative independence, they yield an image of authorship that is both monumental (the all-round artistic genius) and utterly inconsequential (belittled and derided by his own text). Interestingly, this dual self-conception on the part of the author corresponds to a period in Grass’s public political life in which he also found himself acting on two opposing levels. On the one hand, by the end of the 1980s he was popularly accused of having grown far too big for his boots, as the aforementioned spoof on Die Rättin, Der Grass by one Günter Ratte, made abundantly clear. On the other hand, this perceived monumentality made it increasingly difficult for the author to be heard, as Grass was to find out during the unification period when he did not have the influence he might have liked. Throughout the 1990s, his political interventions saw him actively engaging with both popular reactions to his public image. In fact, openly stylizing himself as monumentally out of date was, as argued in Chapter 2, an important key in helping Grass stay in the public limelight throughout this decade. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the attack on authorship written into both Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert with a confidently controlling authorial flourish is continued in Grass’s post-unification works, Unkenrufe (1992), Ein weites Feld (1995), and Im Krebsgang (2002), the subject of the final chapter in this study.

6 ‘Er, in dessen Namen ich krebsend vorankam’: Reading the Author in Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang INTRODUCTION In all Grass’s fiction discussed so far the author figure presented within the text has narrated his own story, motivated for better or for worse by his own personal circumstances. With the advent of Unkenrufe in 1992 this changes. For the first time in Grass’s literary œuvre his authorial persona is coerced into narrating somebody else’s story to which he has only the vaguest of links (Reschke claims to be an old school friend, but Grass’s alter ego within the text appears to have considerable difficulty remembering him). The packet of primary materials that arrives unexpectedly on his desk demands Grass’s authorship on the grounds that the story it tells has a distinctly Grassian touch to it: ‘Im Grunde könnte das alles von Dir erfunden sein, aber gelebt, erlebt haben wir [. . .]’ (U , 14), claims Reschke in his covering letter. Although Reschke is himself of course constructed by Grass, within the fiction he represents a new approach to authorship in Grass’s work. Chasing down the author and instructing him to narrate his story, he represents a first attempt to make a space for the reader in Grass’s self-presentation on something approaching equal terms. This change is instructive, as it allows Grass to move beyond his usual strategies of authorial self-presentation and engage directly with popular public constructions of his authorial persona. Although some earlier works without doubt illustrated an awareness of Grass’s impact on his readers, such reaction was in the main restricted to political evaluations and never threatened the narrative centrality of Grass’s authorial position. 1 From the early 1 See Taberner’s reading of Kopfgeburten on this point, ‘ “Sowas läuft nur im Dritten Programm”: Winning over the Audience for Political Engagement in Günter Grass’s Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus’, Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, 91

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1990s onwards, however, Grass’s literary legacy as evaluated by his readers begins to loom ever larger in his texts, threatening to marginalize the author entirely as he is replaced by his own public image. ‘Du wirst bestimmt irgendwas damit anfangen können, gerade weil alles ans Unglaubliche grenzt’ (U , 14) Reschke explains to his famous peer, adding a healthy dose of flattery: ‘Nur Du kannst das. Dir hat es schon immer Spaß bereitet, tatsächlicher als alle Tatsachen zu sein . . . ’ (U , 241). Reschke’s enthusiastic claim that his own life story imitates Grass’s literary fiction could be read as the ultimate accolade for Grass, apparently confirming the author’s fine understanding of both the human condition and contemporary political circumstances. However, Grass’s alter ego is markedly uncomfortable with such adulation. Unconvinced of his ability to collate information either to historical or political ends, he grumbles about the task forced upon him ‘all das wäre besser bei einem Archivar abzulagern gewesen als bei mir. Er hätte wissen müssen, wie leicht ich ins Erzählen gerate. Wenn kein Archiv, warum hat er nicht einen eilfertigen Journalisten beliefert?’ (U , 13). While the successful completion of Unkenrufe keeps such claimed reticence within bounds, the limits Grass places on his authorial abilities here are significant when considered in the light of his future literary output—a long pseudo-historical text entirely narrated by archivists (Ein weites Feld, 1995), and a story with a markedly political point researched and written by a journalist (Im Krebsgang, 2002). Grass’s familiar authorial persona now appears only on the margins, as a kind of textual memory. Furthermore, these texts turn into a key thematic and structural element the readerinspired evaluation of authorship that exists only in Unkenrufe as false modesty on the part of an author given to paying himself backhanded compliments. In terms of authorship, Unkenrufe may thus be seen as a transitional text: although Grass retains his authorial importance, the terms of the narrative are changing. Bowing to the reader, he begins to take his leave of the kind of overt authorial centrality that dominated his earlier works. He no longer has any claim to control the narrative, and is forced instead to observe from afar (he describes himself at one point in Unkenrufe as ‘ungeladen und ein halbes Dutzend Barhocker entfernt’, U , 42) and to keep his thoughts largely to himself: ‘Nach meiner Meinung, die—ich weiß—nicht zählt’ (U , 150), he ruefully concedes. In subsequent works, the author is largely deposed from his text, appearing only as a brief and unwelcome cameo in Ein weites Feld and continuously cast off in Im (1999), 84–100. Even Taberner’s title, however, indicates that the author remains firmly in control in this text.

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Krebsgang as an irritating old man whose writing days are over. At the same time, however, all three works display a public celebration of authorship: Reschke celebrates his old school friend as the only person who could do his story justice, the archivists spend their entire time documenting the activities of both Fontane and his contemporary extension, Fonty; while Im Krebsgang can be read as the gradual accession to authorship of its reluctant journalist narrator, Paul Pokriefke. This chapter investigates the full implications of introducing readerly reactions to the question of authorship in Grass’s texts, with particular reference to Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang. It would certainly be wrong to assume that allowing other voices into the narrative necessarily amounts to dismissing the models of authorship Grass has come to represent. As the following will argue, by removing his own public persona from the front line of the narrative, Grass is in fact able to develop further his idiosyncratic consideration of authorship. Making space for third-person narrators who make no claims to authorship allows him to stand back from the process of authorial construction and deal instead with its effect on the text, the reader and the author’s own legacy. Furthermore, in grasping the bigger picture of authorship Grass provides an ironic qualification to his consideration of the author’s significance in textual, social, and political terms that ultimately gives a much more complete sense of the challenges facing an author such as Grass in contemporary German society.

EIN WEITES F EL D

Intertextuality and authorship Ever since the controversial debates surrounding its publication, Ein weites Feld has widely been read as Grass’s literary response to German unification. These kinds of readings were provided first by contemporaneous newspaper reviews, and then, in a more differentiated manner, by subsequent literary critical analysis. 2 In particular, as I will discuss in relation to Christine Ivanovi´c and Morwenna Symons below, some of the most convincing literary analyses have detailed how the novel’s aesthetic qualities support the author’s overall moral message concerning unification, focusing particularly on the effect of the work’s intertextual structure. This is certainly one way 2 For the journalistic reception of Ein weites Feld, see the collection of newspaper reviews in Oskar Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty: ‘Ein weites feld’ im Spiegel der Kritik (Gottingen: Steidl, 1996).

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of looking at the basic pattern of linkage that permeates the narrative. The anonymous archivist narrators desperately try to note down all the words and actions of Theo Wuttke / Fonty as he walks around Berlin and its environs over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991. This period of recent history is then in turn stretched back to 1871, as Fonty narrates and reinterprets his own existence through the words and deeds of Theodor Fontane. Thus Christine Ivanovi´c, for example, analyses in detail Fonty’s and the writer Uwe Johnson’s respective readings of Fontane’s works at the Neuruppin monument, and uses this to argue that the focus on reapplying past works of literature to the present becomes part of the work’s overall message concerning the nature and value of literature. 3 Morwenna Symons elaborates on these ideas, expressly invoking the term intertextuality, and argues that the self-conscious appropriation of earlier literary works forms part of a process within the text whereby fiction and reality are merged in order to engage the reader’s critical faculties vis-à-vis history. By seeing in Fonty’s actions how a standpoint can be so overtly constructed, the reader becomes suspicious of any narrative, factual or fictional, that does not question the standpoint from which it is written. 4 These critics therefore see in the intertextual narrative structure the major pedagogical achievement of the work. While this approach convincingly covers both the issue of how fact and fiction merge within the novel and this latter’s status as politically subversive literature, in focusing on the importance of underlying textual structures it does not take sufficient note of individual personalities within the work. 5 I contend, on the other hand, that the personality cult on which Ein weites Feld is predicated raises the importance of individual authors and with that the idea of authorship in general, a facet of the text that has been acknowledged by Frauke Meyer-Gosau. 6 The most fundamental 3 She describes the whole narrative as a ‘Plädoyer für das Erzählen als Prozeß einer relativen Wahrheitsfindung’: Christine Ivanovi´c, ‘Fonty trifft Johnson: Zur Fiktionalisierung Uwe Johnsons als Paradigma der Erzählstrategie in Günter Grass’ Ein weites Feld ’, Johnson-Jahrbuch, 3 (1996), 173–99, 195. 4 Morwenna Symons, Room for Manoeuvre: The Role of Intertext in Elfriede Jelinek’s ‘Die Klavierspielerin’, Günter Grass’s ‘Ein weites Feld ’ and Herta Müller’s ‘Niederungen’ and ‘Reisende auf einem Bein’, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 64; Bithell Series of Dissertations, 28 (London: Maney, 2005). 5 Symons, for example, comes to the conclusion that Fonty is ‘not so much a character as a “term” in the text’, Symons, Room for Manoeuvre, 77. 6 Frauke Meyer-Gosau, ‘Ende der Geschichte: Günter Grass’ Roman “Ein weites Feld”— drei Lehrstücke’, in Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ed., Günter Grass, 7th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1997), 3–18. Arguing that in the Fonty–Hoftaller pairing Grass is pitching the author’s abilities against those of the state, Meyer-Gosau posits that Grass in all earnestness continues to present the author as a privileged socio-political commentator. I find this reading

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thematic and structural precondition for the text is that Fonty is obsessed with the author Fontane, to the point of re-living his life and interpreting his present-day surroundings through this figure. Indeed, he is presented by the archivists as Fontane’s ‘bedeutendes Nachleben’ (WF, 9). This obsession consequently turns him into an author figure, as he not only identifies both with Fontane’s presentation of the writer’s plight and his keen socio-political observational skills, but increasingly takes up the pen himself. 7 At critical moments in the text, other authors intrude on the archivist’s narrative: first Grass himself, and then Uwe Johnson. The result is that the focus of the intertextual narrative is as much on these authors as on the texts they represent, and the narrators, hitherto so prominent in Grass’s fiction, retreat into the background. 8 If Ein weites Feld offers strikingly dominant multiple authorial positions, it also displays at least two clear narrative standpoints. Most obviously, there is the anonymous collective from the archive, who, as in Hundejahre, Grass’s only other novel containing an anonymous narrative collective, immediately draw attention to themselves as the main narrating instance: ‘wir, die im Archiv übriggebliebenen Fußnotensklaven, ermahnen uns, nicht vorschnell den Siebzigsten abzufeiern, sondern von jenem Spaziergang Bericht zu geben’ (WF, 12). Expressly conceiving of their narrative as a factual ‘report’, rather than, say, literary biography, they are determined to deflect all attention onto their narrative subject. Their constant attempt, therefore, to keep up with Fonty provides much of the overall structure of the text, and is certainly responsible for its length. A second narrator, however, can also be discerned in Fonty himself. Even as he is narrated, he is at the same time narrating: he ceaselessly repeats and reworks Fontane’s life and works for all who care to listen. Both narrator positions—the archival scribes vis-à-vis Fonty and Wuttke vis-à-vis Fontane—thus make the man behind the story they are relaying into the focal point of their narratives. He becomes an ultimate authority figure, and their own raison d’être is purely to relay to a wider audience his unique words and actions. The position of the narrators in this textual pattern is therefore characterized by a lack of autonomy. Theo Wuttke, reinterpreting Fontane’s life unconvincing, as it does not at any level account for the irony of both Grass’s self-presentation and his presentation of authorship in general throughout the work. 7 On Fonty’s accession to authorship, see Jutta Heinz, ‘Günter Grass: Ein weites Feld und Oral History’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 1 (2002), 21–38, 25–6 for a brief discussion. 8 The same can be said of Mein Jahrhundert, which, although employing multiple narrators, keeps them all largely anonymous. Authors and authorship, as discussed in Chapter 5, on the other hand, are a clear theme in the work.

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and works, significantly surrenders his proper name. Widely known only by the diminutive ‘Fonty’, his whole ‘Nachleben’ existence is conceived and presented as dependent upon the great man. Similarly, the archivist narrators manage to remain anonymous throughout the text (something which their Hundejahre equivalents could only maintain for a paragraph). Their position is defined solely by the service they are rendering their great author figure, Fonty, which is clearly set out in the quotation above. The idea in ‘Bericht geben’ of bearing witness to something and faithfully reporting upon it is constantly invoked throughout the narrative and makes the hierarchy within this narrative clear. While the archivists are constantly trying to pin down and catalogue Fonty’s movements and activities, he apparently moves through the text untroubled by such narrative concerns. What he says and does functions for them like the word of God, and their narrative religiously tries to record it, just as, for Fonty, Fontane has become the oracle of all knowledge. The result is that the whole text becomes a sort of scriptural record of Fonty’s life amongst the archivists, which itself draws on the monumental image of a creative genius. Fonty and Fontane might not be the actual authors of Ein weites Feld, but they are certainly the two major points of authority on which the entire text rests. Although the archivist-narrators, beholden as they are to their authorsubject, believe everything Fonty says ‘aufs Wort’ (WF, 10) just as Fonty does in Fontane’s case, the authority of both figures is not entirely unquestioned in the text. Hoftaller, an archivist of a rather different sort, is coupled to Wuttke / Fonty rather like a hostile critic to an author, as Fonty (speaking for authors in general) himself exclaims in an unusual outburst: ‘ “Jadoch!” rief er. “Was wären wir ohne Zensur, ohne Aufsicht? Sie, mein auffällig unauffälliger Herr, sind schlechterdings unser gutes Gewissen!” ’ (WF, 596). Just like his literary predecessor, Hans Joachim Schädlich’s Tallhover, Hoftaller embodies the eternal principle of loyalty to the regime, shadowing Wuttke / Fonty as his ‘Tagundnachtschatten’. 9 His priority at every stage is to read Fonty for information, to second guess his actions and motivations, and to intercept any politically subversive behaviour in such a 9 Hans Joachim Schädlich, Tallhover (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986) tells the tale of a state agent, impossibly active through various German regimes, from 1842 to 1955, and provides a clear basis for Hoftaller. The links between the two novels have been well documented. See Dieter Stolz, ‘Nomen est omen: Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 7 (1997), 321–35, 324; Rolf Geißler, ‘Ein Ende des “weiten Feldes”?’, Weimarer Beiträge, 45 (1999), 65–81, 65; Jörg Magenau, ‘Geheimdienstdossier oder Doktorarbeit?’, Freitag, 25 August 1995, reprinted in Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty, 115–21, 119.

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manner that the authority of the state will always prevail. 10 This is certainly the role he plays with Fonty, and it is particularly clear in the scene from which the above quotation is taken: Hoftaller orders Fonty to take his place next to Fontane at the Neuruppin monument. The difference between Fonty’s relationship to Hoftaller and his relationship to the archivists is made clear early on in the scene. As the pair stand looking up at the monument, Fonty no longer enjoys the position conferred upon him by the archivists as authoritative focus of their narrative; rather, as Hoftaller’s ‘object’, he speaks only when this shadowing figure is silent: ‘Weil sein Tagundnachtschatten nichts sagte, sprach das Objekt’ (WF, 583). This new position is stressed again by the archivists as they ponder Hoftaller’s motivation for ordering the physical comparison between Fonty and the statue: ‘Könnte es sein, daß Hoftaller sein Objekt aus verehrender Zuneigung so prominent erhöht sehen wollte?’ (WF, 589). Furthermore, the question itself shows the difference between the archivists and Hoftaller as they implicitly project their own feelings onto Fonty’s shadow. The speculation is clearly inappropriate. While their concern throughout is to put Fonty on show, Hoftaller’s concerns are to block Wuttke / Fonty’s actions and undermine his authority whenever his behaviour betrays any degree of autonomy that might not immediately serve state interests. 11 Fonty’s attempts to leave the country are the most obvious examples of this. However, the way in which Hoftaller repeatedly threatens him with archival material on both his and his predecessor’s illegitimate and legitimate children in order to make him cooperate with his designs shows a general paradigm in which Hoftaller has his ‘object’ firmly under his thumb. It is thus entirely in character that, in the scene at the Neuruppin monument, Hoftaller blackmails Fonty (as Theo Wuttke) into taking his place next to the statue, and continues to dominate throughout, ordering exactly how to sit and where to look. Once Fonty has followed these instructions, the outcome undeniably detracts from the proud image of Fonty ‘in seiner 10 Rolf Geißler, ‘Ein Ende des “weiten Feldes”?’ makes reference to this idea of Hoftaller as a reader, who misses the point in his attempts to read Fonty’s intertextual behaviour as a way of explaining how the world works. Instead, Geißler argues, Fonty offers to the more careful or sensitive reader a template for how to escape this objective and objectifying world of restrictive social norms by fleeing into the subjective realm of poetry. Fonty’s narrative is one that fractures the conventional social field (presumably with reference here to Bourdieu’s theories), leading up to the moment in which Fonty finally manages to break out of it altogether. 11 Critics have rightly pointed out the humane side to Hoftaller, see e.g. Magenau, ‘Geheimdienstdossier oder Doktorarbeit?’: ‘die Unzertrennlichkeit Fontys und Hoftallers [changiert] zwischen Zuneigung und Überdruß, Gängelung und Gewohnheit, Erpressung und Freundschaft’, 120. The humane side, however, only comes to the fore when Fonty is clearly subservient to Hoftaller as Theo Wuttke (e.g. when he is ill in bed).

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greisenhaften Schönheit’ (WF, 586) which the archivists had so pointedly inserted only several pages earlier. Now the picture is quite a different one: ‘Neben [Fonty] dominierte das Original. Zwar mangelte es nicht an Ähnlichkeit, doch wirkte die verkleinerte Ausgabe wie ein geschrumpftes Modell’ (WF, 590). By literally making Fonty try to measure up to the great author, Hoftaller thus undermines both Fonty’s and the archivists’ claims. Fonty provides a pitiful physical comparison to the real ‘Urheber’ (WF, 9), appearing instead as a small-scale fraudster with big pretensions. Far from elevating the grey GDR citizen to the glorious ranks of the immortal Fontane ‘aus verehrender Zuneigung’, as the archivists had initially hoped, Hoftaller is in fact intentionally demoting him back to his existence as Theo Wuttke, an old man dependent on the clemency of his important ‘friend’. Calmly smoking a Cuban cigar and ordering his ‘object’ into the most ridiculous of poses, Hoftaller robs Fonty of all claims to authorship. Furthermore, as an archivist quietly working away behind the scenes, he acts as an unfavourable foil to the narrators. Where they deflect all attention onto Fonty in such a manner as to turn him into the central author figure of their narrative, Hoftaller makes Fonty reveal the ridiculous pretensions that underlie his intertextual behaviour. Even as the narrator archivists transfer all authority from themselves onto their autonomous narrative subject, Hoftaller, acting as Fonty’s careful reader, turns him back into an object who cannot even control his own actions, never mind somebody else’s narrative. By pointing out the process by which one individual can play with the gap between the real and the ideal and consequently attain a fraudulent position of authority, he undermines in one fell swoop the intertextual narrative technique on which Fonty’s authorial position within the archivists’ text is based.

‘Die Lücke lud dazu ein’: gaps and authorship On the one hand, then, the appropriation of Fontane’s life and works that conditions Fonty’s authorial role within the text is paraded by the archivists as the work of a quasi-genius. His bold personality becomes the focus of their text, and, because their narrative is entirely conditioned by his words and actions he takes on an ultimate position of authority. He becomes an author not merely because he emulates Fontane, but, more importantly, because he is the figure who delimits their narrative. Rather like the narrator’s autofictional explanation of himself to his children in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, reading and recording what Fonty says, does, and means is the whole point of the archivists’ careful documentation; when

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Fonty disappears, the narrative also comes to an end. If the text represents a sort of intertextual field, then Fonty is always present as a Foucaultian author figure, marking out its boundaries. Hoftaller, on the other hand, challenges Fonty’s stature, both literally and metaphorically. Shadowing Fonty, he throws his intertextual authorial behaviour into sharp relief by constantly reminding him of his civilian existence and limitations. As Fonty himself exclaims, he takes on the role of his conscience, always keeping his flights of fancy in check. In this way, Hoftaller comes to represent Fonty’s limitations, the Wuttke-pull on Fonty that makes him into just an old man serving a crumbling state. Fonty therefore exists in two forms in the narrative: the idealized image of the strident author that emerges from the archivists’ report, and the rather more realist figure of the plodding old man subject to Hoftaller’s eternal supervision. The tension between fiction and reality is not merely another facet of intertextuality, as it has so far been discussed by critics. It is also, very concretely, characteristic of the relationship between the two protagonists whose respective standpoints are inextricably bound up with questions of authorship. While Hoftaller constantly reminds Fonty of his position in the real world as Theo Wuttke, Fonty represents the textual pull on Wuttke to rewrite his world in line with literature. The result is that Wuttke / Fonty is split down the middle. He is partly real within the fiction (Wuttke), partly fictional (Fonty); partly located in the present, partly in the past; partly a frail and doddering old man (Wuttke / Fonty as textual object), partly a figure of idealized authority (Fonty as authorial subject). Both strands of interpretation are simultaneously present in the narrative. What is missing is the link between the two. The archivists’ daily activity, however, consists in supplying links to fill gaps, and this is one of the main reasons that their narrative report on Fonty is spun out at such length. The fact that there is a short circuit in Fonty’s own symbolism is eminently well suited to such an aesthetic. Fonty represents a logical gap, and not only do the archivists constantly (and hopelessly) seek to fill this gap, it is also manipulated by the text’s real author, Grass, to investigate further the place of authorship within both literature and society. This should become clear with further reference to the scene at the Neuruppin monument. Hoftaller’s order to Fonty to climb the monument is described by the archivists as initially inspired by the spatial gap next to the bronze figure: ‘die Lücke lud dazu ein’ (WF, 586). Once Fonty has managed the climb, Hoftaller makes it clear that he must also fill the gap, ordering ‘genau in die Lücke dazwischen setzen!’ (WF, 589). Although on the surface of it the ensuing comparison is merely one of physical proportions, it is hard

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not to see in it a further symbolic element. While Fonty and Hoftaller both stood under the monument, the archivists stressed Fonty’s substitutive nature as a living version of the great author: ‘Fonty, der uns in solchen Momenten näher als der sitzende Unsterbliche stand, weil er samt Hut und Shawl, im Mantel und mit Stock nach Neuruppin angereist war, um sich in Vergleich zu bringen’ (WF, 583, my emphasis). He brings Fontane into the present world, giving the immortal author an additional, contemporary face. Because these comments have already drawn attention to how Fonty bridges the gap between the past and the present, physically filling the gap next to the bronze figure takes on a further symbolic meaning: this is the physical manifestation of Fonty’s substitutive behaviour. Certainly, this would seem to be the case when the whole narrative itself is subjected to a gap, or ‘Intermezzo’ (WF, 591), as the easily recognizable (although never actually named) figures of Günter and Ute Grass intrude on the ‘gestellte Szene’ (WF, 591). These ‘tourist’ (WF, 593) figures look straight at the Fontane monument on which Fonty sits, and yet do not perceive him: he has become the gap he sought to fill, or, in filling the gap, he has been subsumed by the greater entity which the monument now represents. Only when the Grass couple return and Fonty has meanwhile vacated his position is there a sense of something lacking, as Grass cries out ‘ “Irgendwas fehlt!” ’ (WF, 600), while his wife contradicts him: ‘ “Seh ich nicht. Du bildest dir wieder was ein” ’ (WF, 600). The fact that Grass, himself an author figure, perceives a gap next to the statue highlights a certain process of replacement implicit to the Fontane statue: authors are naturally drawn to the image of authorship represented in the statue, and find themselves trying to fill the gap it implies almost in spite of themselves. The immortal image needs an accompanying mortal face to carry it through to the present day. In the wider context of chapters 28 to 30, this is exactly what a succession of contemporary authors, Fonty, Günter Grass, and Uwe Johnson, each individually try to provide, as one after another they traipse past the larger-than-life monument, like apostles gathering around a great master in the hope that one day they might step into his shoes. The scene thus functions as a point in the text where authors’ understanding of their own authorial role within the wider socio-political context is examined. Not only Fonty, then, acts out the process of replacement: the structure of the narrative sees one author after the next placed into direct physical comparison with Fontane. This is done through a rather unconvincing series of references to chance. The appearances of the Grass couple are introduced with ‘wenn nicht [. . .] der Zufall mitgespielt hätte’ (WF, 591), and ‘dann wollte es der Zufall oder die Laune höherer Regie’ (WF, 600), while the

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exact course taken by Johnson’s visit is also conditioned by supposed chance events: ‘der Zufall—so es ihn gibt—wollte es’ (WF, 607). The unsatisfactory nature of these vague references in an otherwise thoroughly footnoted report makes one suspect that the ‘höhere Regie’ is a direct invocation of the text’s real author, Günter Grass. The fact that an explicit Grass figure then intrudes on the narrative adds weight to this, so that there are surely strong grounds for reading Fonty’s replacement role as representative of a wider message on authorship that is now being deliberately and unmistakeably profiled by the text’s real author with reference to two further cases, Grass himself and Uwe Johnson. In all three cases, ‘das Überlebensgroße’ (WF, 590) of the monument is stressed, and, as the initial description makes clear, this larger-than-life authorial image is itself based on a gap or short-circuit between the real and the ideal: ‘Wenngleich überlebensgroß abgebildet, stellte sich dennoch die Frage: Ist er das wirklich?’ (WF, 583). Even Fontane himself might not measure up to his own monument, and is thus implicitly brought into this authorial chain of replacement where the idealized image of the author towers over its real-life counterparts. Fonty, as described above, is rendered ridiculous, while Grass shuffles around at the feet of the monument looking ‘ein wenig vorgestrig’ (WF, 591), and Uwe Johnson ‘vornüber gebeugt und heftig schwitzend’ (WF, 604) meets up with Fonty to sit on a nearby bench and discuss the great author’s work and influence. Physically, all three real-life authors unquestionably lose out in comparison with the ‘toller Guß!’ (WF, 591). The difference between the idealized immortal bronze statue and the all-too-real, ageing mortal flesh could not be made more evident. Such a cleft between the real and ideal state of authorship is also made evident in the subsequent actions of the mortal authors, as all three selfconsciously act out their role in line with a certain image of authorship. Forced into a direct position of replacement by Hoftaller, Fonty actually begins to merge with his literary forefather: ‘Mehrmals dazu aufgefordert, nun endlich vom Denkmal zu lassen und treppab zu steigen, klebte er dennoch an der Bronze. [. . .] Fonty ließ sich nicht kommandieren, war seßhaft. Und dann sprach er vom Denkmal herab’ (WF, 593). All of a sudden the comparison between mortal author and his immortal ideal is turned to Fonty’s advantage, as he makes use of his lofty position and physical proximity to the great author in order to appropriate for himself Fontane’s voice and authority. To a spectator down below, it must appear as if the great Fontane himself is speaking. Significantly, however, Fonty uses his position first to attack this very figure, questioning the authenticity of the statue to which he has just been unfavourably compared: ‘der ganze Kerl

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stecke im Leihkostüm’ (WF, 594). By merging his own biography with that of Fontane, he sets against the immutable statue an understanding of the ordinary mortal author that stresses and celebrates the writer’s inauspicious beginnings as a mere ‘Tintensklave’ (WF, 595). However, even as Fonty is reasserting the achievements of the mortal man against his immortal literary image, he is also unwittingly reaffirming the predominance of this idealized authorial image. His reworking of Fontane’s essay on ‘die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller’ (WF, 596–9) draws on a traditional image of authorship—that of the poverty-stricken poet toiling away in his attic in spite of cruel social circumstances. 12 Furthermore, Fontane’s essay itself, albeit ironically, argues that the author’s role is a fundamentally replaceable position in society: man [läßt] die Schriftstellerei als Kunst nicht gelten [. . .] und [geht] davon aus[. . .], all das am Ende ebensogut oder auch noch ein bißchen besser machen zu können. Schreiben kann jeder. Und außerdem ist das Schriftstellern so nutzlos, es ist das einzige Metier, das ganz überflüssig dasteht und mit einem ernsten Bedürfnis der Menschen nicht recht zusammenhängt. 13

Even as Fonty tries to assert the real author over his or her overbearing public image, he finds himself thrown back to other, equally dominant clichés of authorship that have come to constitute the very experience of being an ‘authentic’ writer. Fonty thus shows how the modern-day author is at every point touched by a pre-existing image of authorship. As if to underline to what extent Fonty is himself dependent on this image, he collapses once he has finished his speech, leaving his ‘footnote slaves’ to fill in the exact nature of his references and exiting the scene very much back in Hoftaller’s hands. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the speech is spoken through Fonty, who is merely a medium for the lessons of the idealized Fontane monument. Once the various images of authorship that this monument represents have been imparted, the mortal man is accordingly thrown to one side. Furthermore, the fact that the whole speech is framed by the two appearances of the Grass couple seems a very explicit way of signalling its importance in setting up a wider textual consideration of the relationship between an author and his or her image. Where the implicit author of the ‘höhere[. . .] Regie’ is a figure of control, however, his human equivalent within the text is much less so. 12 See Theodor Fontane, ‘Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller’, in Kurt Schreinert, ed., Aufsätze zur Literatur (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1963), 491–5. 13 Ibid., 492.

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Largely subservient to his wife, Grass’s appearance is ironically constructed out of physical Grass stereotypes, complete with ‘leicht schiefsitzende Brille’ (WF, 591) and ‘hängenden Schnauz’ (WF, 591). Indeed, should the reader not recognize the clichés him or herself, the narrative deliberately draws attention to them as such: ‘So betont er mit Baskenmütze und in gebeugter Haltung den Pfeife rauchenden Künstler auf Motivsuche abgab, war sie es doch, die den Photoapparat in Anschlag brachte’ (WF, 591). Once again, then, the author (both Grass and Fontane) has become subservient to his public image, for while Grass is observed straining (‘betont’) to act out his own artistic existence in line with public expectation, Fontane has, in the eyes of subsequent generations (represented here by Ute’s camera), been replaced by the larger-than-life monument. There is again a gap, here rather humorously presented, between the real author and his clichéd public representation. This appearance of Grass the author only has any authority in as much as the ‘postmodern wink’, as Symons puts it, of his entrance points back to the ‘höhere[. . .] Regie’ controlling the text. 14 In many respects the appearance of Uwe Johnson echoes (and thereby confirms) the pattern set up by Fonty and Grass. He too wants to try out measuring up to the Fontane ideal, and he too comes out of the physical comparison poorly: not only does he approach both Fonty and the Fontane monument ‘mit hochgerötetem Schädel und in erbärmlichem Zustand’ (WF, 604), he also has all the signs of a serious alcoholic. Like Fonty, he quickly takes to the authorial moral high ground, but this time—and this in distinction to Fonty—arguing against Fontane. This is presumably at least in part caused by the failure of his own marriage, referred to as an afterthought by Fonty (WF, 608). Convinced that his wife was spying on him, he cannot tolerate the happy ending Fontane writes for the adulterous Melanie in L’Adultera, which he rates as an ‘aus seiner Sicht unverdiente Idylle’ (WF, 606). Disappointed by life, Johnson has reacted by fixating on the ideal, which he now demands to see realized in both life and literature. Consequently, he forces his own real character into an idealized mode of behaviour, whatever the cost to his mental and physical well-being. Fonty picks up on this: Ach, meine Mete, wie ausgestoßen er dasaß, wie sehr um Haltung bemüht. Schwitzend der massige Schädel, dem kein Haar mehr erlaubt war. Ach hätte ich doch einen Lorbeer zur Hand gehabt! [. . .] wie er, in seiner Strenge gefangen, neben mir saß, war er nur zu bedauern. (WF, 608) 14

Symons, Room for Manoeuvre, 69.

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For Johnson, his existence, both literary and private, is to be defined by ‘Haltung’ of the moral kind, and yet the direct result is that his physical ‘Haltung’ is sagging under the strain. His moral rigour transforms into a head on which no more hair is ‘allowed’; only a laurel wreath would prove acceptable. The real physical image of the man has been sacrificed to the lofty ideals he propounds, so that the author himself has become ‘caught’ in his own authorial role, described by Christine Ivanovi´c with reference to his literature as ‘die richtige ästhetische Position, die richtige moralische Haltung’. 15 The result is grotesque: an oversensitive and overly punctilious man whose own body cannot live up to his authorial ideals of complete aesthetic and moral clarity. Johnson’s inability to perceive the gap in his own behaviour is mirrored by his readership’s reaction to his work, as described by Fonty: the literary critical establishment ‘[hat ihn] abgestempelt und in ein Kästchen namens “Dichter der deutschen Teilung” gezwängt’ (WF, 608), while Hoftaller notes that the East German censors showed a knee-jerk response that amounted to ‘behördliches Fehlverhalten aus ideologischem Übereifer’ (WF, 609). Where the fate of Fontane shows how a great author can be turned by his readers into a larger-than-life figure, Johnson actually sets up this process himself, acting in extremes that elevate the author to a position that ultimately distances him from both his readership and, indeed, his own body. What all three authors, Fontane, Grass, and Johnson, thus demonstrate, is how the authorial role can become so overburdened as to splinter away entirely from the real-life man or woman behind the public image. Fonty’s role is to make this explicit. Himself humiliated into action by Hoftaller in chapter 28 and then given an important slot in the narrative by the ‘Laune höherer Regie’ in chapter 29, he pointedly discourses on the social positioning of authors past and present before giving a memorable concrete example from the recent past (Uwe Johnson) in his letter to Martha Grundmann in chapter 30. This latter episode is the culmination of his argument, for it is precisely the problem of social standing that wreaks such devastation on Johnson’s life. His case is the most extreme formulation of a pattern shared by all three: the author becomes so aware of his representative social position that he cannot live up to it. An unbridgeable gap opens up between the real man and his literary ideal. Just as I argued in the case of Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert, authorship carries the impossible burden of being both monumental (in image) and inconsequential (in reality).

15

Ivanovi´c, ‘Fonty trifft Johnson’, 194.

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If Fonty himself symbolizes this gap and thematizes it with respect to other authors, he also shows how the author can respond to it. In his own tendency to blur fact and fiction, he shows how the gap can be, if not overcome, at least ignored. Authorial invention becomes a way of turning a blind eye to one’s own insufficiencies. The archivists (themselves representing self-effacement) pick up on this facet of Fonty’s character. When, at the height of his authorial performance, he is ignored by the intruding image of Grass, they comment: ‘Fonty, der beispielhaft stillgehalten hatte, wird sich seinen Teil gedacht haben; auch er neigte dazu, was ihm nicht paßte, zu übersehen und tatsächliche Lücken mit den Kindern seiner Laune aufzufüllen’ (WF, 592). Indeed, throughout the text Fonty has been the champion of the imaginary and the greater freedom it allows. His own tendency to slip into the gap between fact and fiction is in fact highly reminiscent of many of Grass’s own comments on the value of the ‘Lügengeschichte’. 16 In many ways, then, Fonty’s ignominious disappearance at the end of the text may be read in line with Grass’s own developing aesthetic of authorship. Consciously thematizing the way in which Fonty sets about disappearing from the archivists’ narrative, Grass, himself already overtly displaced from his text, experiments further with the concept and consequences of displacing the text’s author figure.

‘Nur, indem wir Blatt auf Blatt füllten [. . .] war er [. . .] nah gerückt’: the author as absentee There has been some literary-critical discussion of how Fonty accedes to authorship throughout the text, gradually emancipating himself from Fontane to the point where the great author is relegated to the status of character within Fonty’s own counter-narrative. 17 It is certainly true that the archivists’ narrative builds up to Fonty’s speech in the Kulturbrauerei, which itself shows Fonty perfectly controlling and manipulating both his audience and Fontane’s life and works. It is questionable, however, to what extent this really represents a significant change in Fonty’s character. It is made clear right from the start that Fonty’s public reputation was built on his skill in recasting Fontane and his characters in contemporary society, and there are certainly earlier points in the text when Fonty writes independently of his literary mentor, whether in his private correspondence or 16 Interview with Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmen der Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Günter Grass, Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung & Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999), 50. 17 See Heinz, ‘Ein weites Feld und Oral History’, 33–4 on this point.

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in the commissioned historical narrative of the Haus der Ministerien. His illness, furthermore, is cured by constructing a type of Fonty biography that exists in parallel to Fontane’s childhood memoirs, and this is effective long before its actual public performance. Fonty’s strategy in each case is to objectify the original Fontane texts, incorporating their basic structures and ideas into his own, adapted narrative. His own text expands on the original material, so that each authorial act—and not merely the final Kulturbrauerei performance—shows him both taking on Fontane and emancipating himself from him. Fontane is ever-present in the works of Fonty, but he is also always continuously being replaced. In many respects, the relationship can be summed up right from the start as ‘Fontane is dead. Long live Fonty!’ Fonty is thus always acting out the role of replacement in the archivists’ narrative. Stepping into Fontane’s shoes, he fulfils their need, as self-defined ‘Fußnotensklaven’, for an author who carries responsibility for their narrative. The role of replacement author, however, is, as should be evident by now, a high-profile one, and it is not necessarily one that Fonty wants to play on a long-term basis. Where an author such as Uwe Johnson takes it upon himself to create an idealized image to which he will try to conform at all costs, Fonty, always also the simple Theo Wuttke, feels the strain of constant public exposure. As Symons points out, he is himself a somewhat disreputable figure who is in no rush either to face up to his own moral failings or to expose the collective guilt of the regimes he has served. 18 Perhaps not least because of this, he makes several attempts to escape the intertextual field that his archivist narrators have him ceaselessly pacing. Two attempts are foiled by his conscience, or shadow, Hoftaller, who sees it as Fonty’s duty to stay within the regime, continuing to supplement (add to, support) both family life and state activities. The third and final attempt, however, succeeds, as Fonty manages to make his way out of the archivists’ and Hoftaller’s field of vision and ‘escape’ with Madeleine to France. The way in which this is described is highly symbolic, for leaving both Germany and the narrative amounts to leaving his mortal, everyday existence behind. This is well documented by the intermediary stages of his journey. In the scene at the funfair, Fonty slips into several different positions (a place on the roller-coaster, a place on the Ferris wheel), each of which maintain the circular metaphors of the text so far (the pater-noster lift, rowing round the lake, the circular diving and resurfacing of the great 18 Symons discusses this in quite some detail, commenting acerbically, ‘His own way of coming to terms with his own and his country’s past is to disappear with his granddaughter to France, which as a personal redemption leaves much to be resolved’, Symons, Room for Manoeuvre, 92.

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crested grebe). 19 We see his body once more filling in a space on a circular template of replacement. This time, however, the grandiose moral element has been replaced by unadulterated pleasure, and Fonty’s body is, in contradistinction to the scene at the Neuruppin monument, admirably up to the task (Hoftaller specifically notes how he and Madeleine ‘seien aber nicht torkelig ausgestiegen’, WF, 774). The next report from Fonty finds him physically removed to the same kind of fixed point as that from which the Fontane monument surveyed the surrounding countryside. It has been updated, however, to the television tower in Berlin, a modern-day East German cultural monument that reaches out to a far greater audience. Fonty has not just an ageing spy and a couple of authors at his feet, but the whole of Germany. With the third postcard, he sends a picture of Henri IV’s death mask, along with what the archivists’ themselves describe as a ‘vieldeutige[n] Satz’: ‘Zweifelsohne werde ich mir selbst nun zum jüngsten Kind meiner Laune’ (WF, 779). Not only does the reference to whimsy indicate both release from former socio-political constraints and a move into dotage (death of the mortal man), it may also be read on a meta-textual level, for it strongly echoes the earlier prominent statement ‘auch [Fonty] neigte dazu, was ihm nicht paßte, zu übersehen und tatsächliche Lücken mit den Kindern seiner Laune aufzufüllen’ (WF, 592). Read in this context, the statement becomes highly self-reflexive, as Fonty, increasingly removed from the socio-political contingencies of his existence, begins to make himself, the quirky emulator of authors with aspirations to immortality, into his own favourite narrative subject. Effectively, his long-distance textual vision shrinks back in on himself as he, like the Fontane monument, becomes more and more distanced from the world in which the real-life author lived. In his final communication, his location is almost impossible to make out. The green hills merge into the kind of eternal blue landscape with which Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig ends, while the postage mark is unreadable (although the stamp gives it away). Fonty sends his words from a ‘kolossal menschenleere Gegend’ (WF, 781) where the favoured Günter-Grass mushrooms and his Sophie-like granddaughter are his only company, bringing to the narrative a final promise of closure: ‘ich jedenfalls sehe dem Feld ein Ende ab . . . ’ (WF, 781). ‘Weitsicht’ is now nothing more than a matter of meteorological visibility (‘bei stabilem Wetter ist Weitsicht möglich’, WF, 781), for the infinity offered by intertextual vision has, with 19 Literary critical discussion of these and similar images is both summarized and developed in Gerd Labroisse, ‘Zur Sprach-Bildlichkeit in Günter Grass’ Ein weites Feld ’, in Das SprachBild als textuelle Interaktion, ed. Gerd Labroisse and Dick van Stekelenberg, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik, 45 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 347–79.

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this final sentence, been firmly countered. Now that he has finally removed himself from the process of substitution, he can stop his eternal pacing through the narrative. Instead, he can rest in peace as an authorial absent presence, a gap which is not a gap and which others will exhaust themselves impossibly trying to fill. This, indeed, is what the archivists, faced with their loss, begin to do. The end of the narrative, the closure of the field, becomes its beginning: Wir [waren] sicher, ins Bodenlose gefallen zu sein, weil uns mit Fonty der Unsterbliche verlassen hatte. Alle Papiere wie tot. [. . .] Nur Fußnoten noch und Ödnis unbelebt. Leere, wohin man griff, allenfalls sekundäres Geräusch. Es war, als sei uns jeglicher Sinn abhanden gekommen. Fonty, der gute Geist, fehlte. Und nur, indem wir Blatt auf Blatt füllten, ihn allein oder samt Schatten beschworen, bis er wiederum zu Umrissen kam, wurde er kenntlich, besuchte er uns mit Blumen und Zitaten, war er, ganz gestrig, der von Liebermanns Hand gezeichnete Greis, nah gerückt, doch mit Fernblick schon, um uns abermals zu entschwinden. (WF, 780)

The metaphorical ‘death’ of the visible figure of textual authority is the crisis that, as in Die Rättin, propels the narrative. The narrators, just like Die Rättin’s autobiographical narrator who finds himself abandoned to the sound of his ‘Eigengeräusch’, feel that they too are losing their minds as they are doomed to the empty echoes of their ‘sekundäres Geräusch’. Both respond by writing to evoke the past, by teasing out the gaps in their textual archive and trying to counter the disengaged ‘Fernblick’ of the absent author, whose concerns no longer seem to be with their earthly existence. Indeed, a shift on the part of the author from a kind of textual ‘Weitsicht’, as witnessed in both Fontane and Fonty’s writings, to a disengaged ‘Fernblick’—the gaze of the bronze statue and, now, of the archivists’ monumentalized image of Fonty—is the slippage in perspective that actually justifies the anonymous narrators in the first place. Their attempt at writing is a last-ditch attempt to save the absent author from oblivion. The lack of a controlling author figure within their unchecked text is both the structural trauma and overriding theme that conditions their narrative. Writing is thus presented here as a process of replacement, an attempt to cover up the loss of authorship by continuously gesturing towards the author, and it is for this reason that the archivists’ narrative technique consists solely in reworking, doubling-up, and reporting. All genuine creative power has been lost. Such a textual aesthetics as described above may be construed in terms of a kind of textual ‘death of the author’, but it also has a clear sociopolitical relevance. Ein weites Feld was written at a time when the role

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of authors such as Grass in the public sphere had, from Grass’s point of view, been dramatically thrown into question. 20 However much critics may have subsequently taken their distance from the so-called ‘Literaturstreit’ that sought to discredit what was felt to be a particularly Cold War model of political activism on the part of well-known German writers, left-wing authors like Grass and Wolf were, for a time at least, made to feel unwelcome in the public sphere. Perhaps more than anything else, then, Grass, the ‘höhere[. . .] Regie’ behind the text, is pointing out the impossible situation in which contemporary authors find themselves, hailed on the one hand as ultimate figures of authority, and undermined on the other as fraudulent figures trying to rise beyond their station. This certainly corresponds to the difficult situation in which he found himself on the public political stage in the 1990s. The only hope, it would seem, is that recognition will come after death, and that somebody else will write the author, as a well signposted and sorely missed gap, back into the intertextual field of literature. The following, final section of this chapter will show how Grass has gone about organizing just this in his most recent work of prose fiction to date, Im Krebsgang.

IM KREBSGANG In the 1956 meeting between Benn and Brecht depicted in Mein Jahrhundert, both authors come to discuss their own deaths. Brecht describes how he has written into his will the manner in which he wishes his funeral to be conducted, causing Benn to comment ‘Vorsorge ist gut. Wer aber schützt uns vor unseren Epigonen?’ (MJ, 229). I have already discussed in relation to Die Rättin and to a certain extent Zunge zeigen how Grass has on previous occasions attempted to take control of his own textual death and consider an absolute loss of textual authority. The additional concern about not just life after the author, but other authors after the author is a later one that gains expression in the Novelle Im Krebsgang. The relationship between the 20 Particularly illustrative of this point is Grass’s decision in 1994 to publish a volume of his collected political speeches ranging from 1961 to 1993, Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1994). While the speeches themselves point to his unfailing commitment to political activism, his foreword comments glumly on the present situation: ‘Schweigend wird Politik hingenommen; die Bürger suchen Distanz. Und viele Schriftsteller haben sich einen feuilletongerechten Maulkorb verpassen lassen’, 8 (reprinted as ‘Der Versuch öffentlicher Dreinrede’ (1994), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XVI, 393–4, 394).

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clear Grass author figure 21 and his narrator, Paul Pokriefke, within this text is something that has hitherto received almost no serious literary critical attention, with the overwhelming focus being instead on the socio-political significance of the novel and its reception. 22 Elizabeth Dye is so far the only critic to my knowledge who has paused at all over the relationship, considering the particular importance that Grass attached to it in interview when he stated: Reizvoll war für mich der im Buch mitschwingende Streit zwischen dem fiktiven Erzähler und dem Autor, meiner Person. Ich halte das Ganze für eine Novelle, er besteht darauf, einen Bericht zu schreiben. 23

Dye follows the immediate context of Grass’s statement, where he is discussing the tension between the factual and the fictitious strands of the narrative, and suggests that the relationship between narrator and author becomes strained not least because Grass gives conflicting messages as to 21 Some critics have been more careful in linking the narrator’s ‘Arbeitgeber’ directly to Grass. However, rather as in Der Butt or Die Rättin, the figure is given so many clear Grass attributes (including authorship of some of his most famous novels) that I see no point in splitting hairs: the figure is supposed to be interpreted as an image of Grass. My approach would seem to be backed up by the progression in Stuart Taberner’s article, ‘ “Normalization” and the New Consensus on the Nazi Past: Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang and the Problem of Wartime Suffering’, Oxford German Studies, 31 (2002), 161–86. Taberner starts off keeping Grass and the ‘Arbeitgeber’ separate (e.g. 171), but soon enough elides the two, calling the ‘Arbeitgeber’ ‘the fictional Günter Grass’, 176. 22 Taberner, for example, places the novel into the context of the debates about German normalization: Taberner, ‘ “Normalization” and the New Consensus’. Stephan Braese, ‘ “Tote zahlen keine Steuern”: Flucht und Vertreibung in Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang und HansUlrich Treichels’ Der Verlorene’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 2 (2003), 171–96, and Nicholas Martin, ‘Rocking the Boat—Victims, Perpetrators and Günter Grass’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 41 (2005), 187–99, also seek to evaluate the political significance of the work, while Aleida Assmann considers the import of its subject matter in terms of cultural memory: Aleida Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past’, in David Midgley and Christian J. Emden, eds, Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500 (Oxford: Lang, 2004), 19–37. More recently, some critics have attempted to distance themselves from the novel’s political significance, expressly examining it instead as an aesthetic construct: Jill E. Twark, ‘Landscape, Seascape, Cyberspace: Narrative Strategies to Dredge up the Past in Günter Grass’s Novella Im Krebsgang’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 3 (2004), 143–68; Dye, ‘ “Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”: Gunter Grass’s Im Krebsgang’, German Life and Letters, 57 (2004), 472–87. In both cases, however, these critics offer their literary analysis still very much under the influence of the socio-political debates that have so far dominated the work’s reception: Dye’s considerations are woven into an overall argument that returns us to the ‘perpetrator / victim’ dialectic, while Twark tries to make all her various literary observations fit with a curiously over-determined political understanding of ‘Vergegenkunft’ that to my mind misunderstands both the term and the text. 23 Grass in interview with Steidl-Verlag, ‘In meiner Geschichte findet der immerwährende Untergang der “Gustloff ” im Internet statt’ (2002), www.steidl.de/grass/a2_3_gespraech.html, last accessed 22 June 2005.

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the exact style in which Paul should present his material. 24 This, however, only touches the surface of the complex relations between author and narrator as presented within the text. When placed in the greater context of Grass’s work, the way in which Grass manipulates this relationship provides a fascinating conclusion to the investigation of authorship that I have discerned in his work so far. Here, in contrast to Die Rättin, the Grass figure willingly declares himself dead to literature (he is described as someone who has ‘sich leergeschrieben’, IK, 30 and ‘sich müdegeschrieben’, IK, 99). Overtly displacing himself from the text, he actively seeks out a substitute autobiographical narrator to take his place, as Paul Pokriefke reports: ‘Nun sei es zu spät für ihn. Ersatzweise habe er mich zwar nicht erfunden, aber nach langer Sucherei auf den Listen der Überlebenden wie eine Fundsache entdeckt’ (IK, 77–8). 25 Where the autobiographical narrator in Die Rättin was constantly trying to assert his life and works against the rat counternarrator, in Im Krebsgang he not only willingly reaches out to a younger successor, but actually needs Paul to help him fill in the gap in his own literary legacy: Das nagt an dem Alten: Eigentlich, sagt er, wäre es Aufgabe seiner Generation gewesen, dem Elend der ostpreußischen Flüchtlinge Ausdruck zu geben [. . .] Doch nun glaubt der alte Mann, der sich müdegeschrieben hat, in mir jemanden gefunden zu haben, der an seiner Stelle—‘stellvertretend’, sagt er—gefordert sei, über den Einfall der sowjetischen Armeen ins Reich, über Nemmersdorf und die Folgen zu berichten. (IK, 99)

Throughout the text of Im Krebsgang, then, the relationship between the ‘old master’ author—he is referred to as, amongst others, ‘der Alte’ (IK, 31, 55, 56, 99), ‘mein einstiger Dozent’ (IK, 30), ‘mein Arbeitgeber’ (IK, 55, 139), ‘der Boß’ (IK, 176) and ‘jemand, der in Mutters Alter ist’ (IK, 151)—and his textual successor is presented as a kind of legacy. Apparently in his twilight years, Grass has laid his own literary career to rest and is instead attempting to take care of the very issue that worried Benn

24

Dye, ‘Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört’. The idea that the narrator was not ‘erfunden’ but ‘gefunden’ links back to Pilenz’s statement in Katz und Maus, ‘Ich [. . .] muß nun schreiben. Selbst wären wir beide erfunden, ich müßte dennoch. Der uns erfand, von berufswegen, zwingt mich’: Günter Grass, Katz und Maus, in Werkausgabe, IV, 6. This comparison highlights well the difference in the authorial and narrative positions staked out by the two texts. While in Katz und Maus the author is explicitly described as engaged in his career (‘von berufswegen’) and therefore creating characters at whim to populate his text, in Im Krebsgang this career is over and ownership of the text left open. 25

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and Brecht in Mein Jahrhundert: in an effort to pre-empt history, he creates his own literary epigone. The successor on whom he settles, Paul Pokriefke, certainly provides malleable material. He, in line with the overwhelming majority of Grass’s first-person narrators, willingly describes himself as a failure, and his lack of desire to write is directly linked to his negative self-image. Against this, Grass the author sets about encouraging him. He posits that Paul’s background is precisely what qualifies him to take on an authorial role: ‘das Herkommen meiner verkorksten Existenz sei ein einmaliges Ereignis, exemplarisch und deshalb erzählenswert’ (IK, 30). Placing a moral burden on his shoulders, the author hopes to inspire Paul to use his personal circumstances, à la Günter Grass, as a kind of springboard to help his own and subsequent generations engage properly with recent history. 26 Paul’s mother, Tulla, had in fact been trying a similar approach throughout Paul’s life, but to no avail. For years he feared that telling the harsh circumstances of his birth aboard the sinking Wilhelm Gustloff as his mother fled from the Soviet Army in 1945 would see him branded a right-wing sympathizer. In 1996, however, the time is finally ripe. Now in his fifties, Paul comes across the Neo-Nazi propaganda website, www.blutzeuge.de, and, more bemused than shocked by its extreme right-wing account of the Gustloff tragedy, he feels the first stirrings of responsibility for the material. When he subsequently discovers that the mind behind ‘diese[. . .] kackbraun aufgehende[. . .] Saat’ (IK, 32) is in fact that of his own son, his personal implication in historical events becomes undeniable. Not only has he failed to deal with his own difficult beginnings, he has also failed to pass on a proper account of them to his son. Although he certainly does not relish delving into his past, he can finally see the relevance of it. Fortuitously enough, it is at this very same point in time that Grass the author begins to cast around for a suitable, morally responsible successor. Paul, a typical failed 1968er, thus begins to rethink his own position as figure of authority both within a text and within his own life. In order to become the author of his own life, he must first acknowledge his failings: ‘Wenn ich jetzt beginnen muß, mich selber abzuwickeln, wird alles, was mir schiefgegangen ist, dem Untergang eines Schiffes eingeschrieben sein’ (IK, 7). Not only did his failure to take on the apparently male responsibility of narrating Tulla’s story cause relations with his mother to be strained, 26 See Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory’, for a very convincing account of how the different generations in Im Krebsgang are engaged in communicating different responses to the historical material which equate to different kinds of memory.

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his subsequent negative self-image as a ‘Versager’ (IK, 43) meant that the relationship to his wife and son soon became practically non-existent. Not just the author, but also the man has so far been lacking all practical authority to take up what would appear to be his rightful place vis-à-vis the historical material that forms both his text and his life. With the beginning of his narrative, however, he comes to represent the Günter Grass view that it is the responsibility of those who were involved in the war to continue to communicate its lessons to subsequent generations. As the text proceeds, working its way in an interlocking, crablike motion through the national and personal strands of his story, Paul is shown gradually acceding to a type of responsible authorship particularly associated with Grass, the political model developed in my analysis of Das Treffen in Telgte and further explored with reference to Grass’s public speeches throughout his career. The way in which he sets about making good his previous failures, as both father and author, is thereby elevated into one of the central strands of the text. Indeed, Paul’s authorial apprenticeship carries a number of defining characteristics which are made all the more clear by his two foils in the text, the Grass author and his son Konny. At the outset, he is keen to divert attention away from his ‘bißchen Ich’ (IK, 7) at any opportunity, equating autobiographical narration with a destructive kind of self-revelation (‘mich selber abwickeln’ is reminiscent of Fonty’s search in Ein weites Feld for a word with less negative connotations than ‘abwickeln’ to describe the work carried out by the Treuhand organization). Putting his journalistic skills to good use, he focuses for as long as possible on the historical facts and figures of the Wilhelm Gustloff, so that eventually Grass has to intervene and force him to proceed to his own implication in events: ‘ich darf keine weiteren Stories erzählen. Jetzt wird mir geraten, mich kurz zu fassen. [. . .] ich [solle] mich bescheiden, zur Sache kommen. Er meint, zu meiner Geburt.’ (IK, 139). However reluctant he may be, though, Paul offers a full and balanced account of the recent history that is directly relevant to his story. This contrasts with his son Konny’s presentation of the same material, which amounts to the kind of irresponsible authorship that one might more generally associate, as Dye suggests, with tabloid journalism, and which was the direct inspiration for his father’s counter-narrative. 27 In Konny’s Internet pages, facts are manipulated into propaganda and posted in an untraceable manner, claiming to be from a large collective. 28 Where 27 ‘Whereas Paul, and also Grass through strict use of the pared-down novella form, attempt to adhere to the detailing of concrete facts, Konny favours tabloid-style sensationalism’: Dye, ‘Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört’, 481. 28 Twark goes into some detail on this point: ‘Landscape, Seascape, Cyberscape’, 158–60.

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the father fills in the entire picture, his son cuts and pastes what suits him, and where the father, albeit grudgingly, draws attention to his own flawed place in history, his son dissembles his own identity behind collective NeoNazi ideals and heroes. Konny might be an enthusiastic author, but Paul is a far more responsible one, prepared at all times to be kept on the straight and narrow by his Grassian conscience. Indeed, Paul’s absolute subservience to his nagging authorial ‘old man’ (‘Alter’) provides a surprising contrast to his repeated wish to have been born either without parents or with a father, Heinz Schön, who would have done all the narrating for him. He not only allows the author to ‘nail’ him to a position of authority that he has hitherto put much effort into avoiding (‘Jemand, der keine Ausreden mag, nagelt mich auf meinen Beruf fest’, IK, 7), he also unquestioningly accepts all the author’s literary advice, periodically repeating it to his readers in quite some detail. Indeed, although relations between the two are hardly warm, Paul, unlike Harm and Dörte Peters in Kopfgeburten or Oskar in Die Rättin, never complains about or rebels against the rather dictatorial interventions on the part of his ‘Arbeitgeber’. Instead, he complies with all the stern pedagogue’s wishes, to the point of becoming a ‘Ghostwriter’ (IK, 30). In the context of Paul’s very personal narrative, such a term may initially seem a little odd, given that Paul’s own character, both as narrative subject and object, is very much on display within the text. As author, however, it is in fact quite fitting. Unlike Grass, Paul sees his literary activity as simple paid employment rather than an all-consuming existential calling. He consequently has no desire to write in his own style and take on a fully developed authorial role within the text, a position which would be sealed by placing his name on the book’s cover. In fact, Paul is so in thrall to his authorial ‘employer’ throughout that in many ways his own text is nothing but a derivative form of his master’s previous works. The fact that Paul’s very story draws directly on Grass’s former characters (Tulla Pokriefke, and also, fleetingly, Harry Liebenau from Katz und Maus and Hundejahre) thereby turns the whole narrative of Im Krebsgang into something of a Grass pastiche. Tellingly, the only other text where former protagonists are written back into the narrative with major roles is Die Rättin, a text that experimented with the death of Grass’s autobiographical narrator, just one step short of the experimentation here with the author’s public persona. The idea that Paul’s authorial role is itself derivative, however, is made particularly clear at the end of the Novelle. Overwhelmed by the showdown with his son in prison, Paul is directed by ‘jemand—er, in dessen Namen ich krebsend vorankam’ (IK, 216) to look online for the ending to

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his story. When he comes across a new Neo-Nazi website that now idolizes not Wilhelm Gustloff but Konrad Pokriefke, the apprentice epigone is quick to draw his Grass-style conclusion: ‘Das hört nicht auf. Nie hört das auf ’ (IK, 216). In the context of my argument, this line, given such prominence as to be placed at the very end of the Novelle, is strongly reminiscent of the moment of high kitsch in Kopfgeburten, when Harm, another derivative figure, cries out, ‘Das hört nicht auf. Nie, sag ich dir, nie wird das aufhören’ (K , 99). Harm’s reference is to the fate of Sisyphus, a fate with which he, as a self-styled political reformer, is at that moment identifying. This is immediately ridiculed by the autobiographical narrator as a matter of naive self-aggrandisement. Such self-aggrandisement is, however, equally something that Grass himself has been charged with, particularly on the political stage of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a Günter Grass epigone Paul is thereby enacting Grass’s public image, the supposed essence to which Grass has been popularly shrunk: a strong moral stance on the past and a rather unappealing tendency to play Cassandra in the present. By the end of the text he has certainly earned the Grass name in which his narrative was constructed. This last point concerning authorship and individuality leads towards the more general consideration of authorship that underlies Grass’s own self-presentation in Im Krebsgang. The final reference to the Grass author, who started out on the first page of the Novelle as ‘jemand, der nicht ich bin’ (IK, 7) only to end on its last as ‘jemand—er, in dessen Namen ich krebsend vorankam’, stresses the reduction of the author to his most famous attribute—his name. The kind of public display of the author’s all-round creative abilities as embodied by Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert has here been swapped for a drastically reduced image of the author in line with Foucault’s discussion of the author function as a construct designed for classificatory purposes. If the epigone can get his simulation right, he will be able to pass himself off as the famous author. Of course, in the case of Im Krebsgang it is ultimately Grass who has achieved this literary pastiche of himself, and so his name quite rightly sells the book. In so doing, however, he has highlighted the innate reproducibility of his own authorial image, and thereby consciously set out the blueprint for others to follow. In developing the position of somebody trying, albeit in a rather workaday manner, to write like him, he not only pushes his own literary authorial role into the margins of the text, but also consciously thematizes the way in which this image of authorship is perceived in its wider socio-political context. Constructing a text in the manner of Grass is presented nowhere more clearly than in Im Krebsgang as a conscious political act. It would thus

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appear to be for his political model of authorship that Grass most expects to be remembered and emulated.

CONCLUSION In both the texts that formed the main subject of this chapter, Grass has set about mediating his public image through the observations and interpretations of others. In Ein weites Feld, the description of his appearance at the monument was in itself only a very brief intermezzo in the narrative proper. It fitted into a much greater overall consideration of how authors relate to grand authorial images, however, and is given a key position within the chain of replacement developed within the archivists’ report. In this, Grass may be seen to be abstracting from his own personal situation to that of famous authors in general. Indeed, this corresponds to the underlying paradox I have discerned in a number of Grass’s more recent works. While the works themselves have demonstrated an increasing tendency to undermine the authorial role within them, when considered in their entirety, physical as well as textual, they appear to signify a rather monumental conception of the author as proud master of not only all disciplines but also much of recent German history. On one level, then, Grass is writing himself into the authorial hall of fame, allying himself with such authors as Fontane. On another, however, he is acutely aware of the various contrasting readings and appropriations to which authors are subjected both within and after their lifetime. These readings can ultimately turn the author into little more than a textual object. In the later works there is an increased sensitivity to the role of both contemporaneous and successive generations in shaping not just the author’s image, but the author himself. In contrast to the earlier works, the reader is no longer a mute aspect of literary production with which the author calculates when trying to condition his text’s performance of meaning, but also a co-author of sorts who may or may not do as the author desires. This point is brought out by Im Krebsgang, where Grass effectively tries to create the first epigone who writes in what he perceives to be the Günter Grass mould. For Paul, his image of the author comes first, and this conditions his own authorial role within the text. Displacing the authorial position within the text, whether it is his own author figure or a thematized authorial role in general, allows Grass to introduce new voices that reinterpret the author’s literary and sociopolitical achievements. This introduces to Grass’s writing a real sense of the reader and the role he or she can play in constructing authorship. The

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unflattering way in which these new critical voices present the old master— the archivists note his physical decrepitude while Paul repeatedly portrays him as a nagging old man—introduces a considerable deal of humour into the texts. This is itself, of course, manipulated by the author to his advantage. Creating his apprentice epigone, Paul, and endowing him with a rather ambiguous attitude towards the famous old man is a rhetorical trick by means of which Grass manages to convey his own socio-political standpoint. By mixing his strong political views with apparent self-detraction, he hopes to appease his long-standing critics. However, Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang also provide a further twist in Grass’s consideration of authorship within literature. By focusing on how others, readers and budding authors alike, construct the author in line with their image of him, he places at the heart of authorship an ironic aesthetics of replacement. Authors are effectively reduced to their great name, and this name, which symbolizes in a highly reduced form the essence of their written output and public reception, ultimately comes to represent simply a position that others can subsequently fill. The great author is thus a style and a stance that can be emulated, and if he or she is an author of any consequence, then they will be emulated. This is what being an author means: taking on a role, on both the micro-level of the text and the macro-level of society. Right from the beginning then, authorship is predicated on its own image. The real challenge of being an author is not simply slotting in with this image, which would produce only epigones, but rather learning to negotiate it in order to produce texts of genuine literary merit and fire debates of real socio-political import.

Conclusion This study has shown in detail how Grass has repeatedly addressed issues of authorship throughout his career. Propelled into the media limelight by his initial literary success, he quickly gained practical experience not only of how his own authorial identity was constructed in the media-led public sphere, but also of the way he could manipulate this public image to his advantage. Profiling himself in the political sphere, he drew on popular conceptions of his person and mixed them with past models of authorial engagement which have lived on in public memory. The glamour of his own person coupled with the intellectual weight of these predecessors allowed Grass to develop a political model of authorship that was unprecedented in recent German history both in terms of flamboyancy and long-term commitment. Over the course of the past forty years, he has repeatedly reconfigured this model, manipulating his public image in order to respond to the changing demands of the public sphere and the role that authors are expected to play within it. This practical experience of negotiating public constructions of his identity has fed directly into Grass’s writing. Starting with the ‘Danzig Trilogy’, Grass has always cultivated a particularly self-aware style of prose writing, with narrators apt to draw attention to their fictional constructions and own constructed nature within the text. From Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke onwards, however, he begins to place himself in the position of first-person narrator, merging issues of identity construction with regard to his own person with those pertaining to the literary text. The self-reflexive form of his writing enables Grass to re-enact in literature the process of identity construction that he experienced first hand in the public sphere. This re-enactment encourages reflection on underlying existential questions of authorship—who or what ultimately controls authorial production / production of the author, where are the limits of the biographical subject?— which Grass explores in the textual aesthetics of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, Der Butt, and Die

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Rättin. Negotiating his public authorial image in literature thereby offers Grass the space to reflect on the aesthetic strategies underpinning his negotiation of the wider public sphere. This textual model of authorship enters into dialogue with the political model, providing Grass with two opposing ideals that mutually hold each other in check. As Grass’s literary career has developed, however, he has increasingly begun to distance himself from over-identification with either model. In the later works Zunge zeigen, Mein Jahrhundert, Ein weites Feld, and Im Krebsgang he relinquishes absolute control of the authorial position, showing instead, in Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert, how the text can both create and destroy the author and, in Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang, investigating the role of the reader in conditioning the author’s public image. In these last three works Grass removes himself from the first-person narrator position, opening up the texts to a thematic analysis of authors in their wider socio-cultural context. Such a move allows ironic distance to be taken from the existential issues discerned in the earlier texts. Analysing the actual impact of his textual and political models on both authors’ sociocultural standing in the world and their position within the text brings to Grass’s understanding of authorship an increasing sense of the author as an ironic construct. Recognizing the author’s lack of absolute integrity, both in the sense of discrete individuality (the author is constructed in all discourses) and moral infallibility (the very constructed nature of the author means that he will echo the blind spots of the discourses in which he is constructed), accounts for the humour that pervades much of Grass’s exploration of authorship and eases his own negotiation of the public sphere. This ease has grown with age and experience, although Grass’s masterful presentation of authorship in Das Treffen in Telgte shows that the key ideas displayed in his œuvre were familiar to the author from a comparatively early date. Likewise, although his humour may now be more deliberately self-deprecatory, a general levity has always informed his public self-presentation, both in his political interventions and his literary work. When analysing Grass’s response to questions of authorship throughout his career it is therefore perhaps better to speak less of a clear development across his œuvre than of different priorities at different times. His particularly personal take on authorship—however his ideas are formulated, they are almost always mediated through the experiences of his own person—means that the wider aesthetic considerations to which his texts give rise are always also located in the socio-political context in which he operates. This is nowhere better

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demonstrated than in his recent autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006). 1 Although the work does not actually take as its subject Grass’s adult writing life, his lengthy attempt to reconstruct the actions and mentality of his young self between the ages of twelve and thirty-two is indebted to his politically conditioned self-understanding as one of Germany’s leading authors. His motivation in writing the autobiography would appear to reside in trying to locate, understand, and atone for the moral failings of his younger self by making them public. This is to be done through a painstakingly careful process of remembering, acted out in the literary text and summed up in the metaphor of peeling an onion: ‘Die Zwiebel hat viele Häute. Es gibt sie in Mehrzahl. Kaum gehäutet, erneuert sie sich. Gehackt treibt sie Tränen. Erst beim Häuten spricht sie wahr’ (HZ, 10). This rather grand notion of reconstructing the self in such a manner as to lead to a public display of remorse and uncover personal (and possibly even wider, public) truths is undermined, however, by the author’s younger self. He immediately protests against both the crude literary methods and underlying self-satisfaction of an author who is trying to lord it over his helpless character. According to the writer, the young boy ‘verweigert Auskünfte, will sich nicht als mein frühes Selbstbild ausbeuten lassen. Er spricht mir das Recht ab, ihn, wie er sagt, “fertigzumachen”, und zwar “von oben herab”’ (HZ, 37). If the contemporary author embodies a politically informed image of authorship, the troublesome young boy may be understood as a figure of textual play in the work. Not only does he refuse to cooperate with the older author figure and resist all moral judgement (‘[e]r weicht mir aus, will nicht beurteilt, verurteilt werden’, HZ, 37), he also comes to stand for everything that is unknowable and elusive about the authorial self as it is reproduced in literature. In this, he functions less like a younger self than as a foil for the literary author. The writing subject draws picture after picture of his younger counterpart, yet he fails to root his contemporary self in any one clear image. Instead, towards the end of his account, he is forced to acknowledge the limitations of his public project: ‘Die Zwiebel verweigert sich. [ . . . ] Und auch mich selbst sehe ich nur als eine von vielen Skizzen, entfernt ähnlich dem Original’ (HZ, 340). His younger self is ‘nicht einzuholen’ (HZ, 37), and although this does not prevent the autobiographical subject from cataloguing what he can remember of his youth and lamenting the young boy’s failure to take a stance that would

1

Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006).

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be much more befitting of him now, the degree of understanding reached between the two remains distinctly unsatisfactory. Such a sense of dissatisfaction is in fact inherent to Grass’s autobiographical project. Trying to do the correct political thing and square his former behaviour with the expectations placed on a national figurehead amounts to bringing Grass’s public political model of authorship to a thoroughly textual understanding of the author. Autobiography studies have taught us that all reconstructions of the self are fictional, while the reading of Grass offered in this study has made clear that the fictional realm, at least as far as Grass is concerned, is dominated by the ‘Lügengeschichte’ where reality, just like the skin of an onion, exists in the plural and refuses to yield any one definitive self-image of the author. Consequently, while the onion in Grass’s autobiography started as a metaphor for the composition of memory and the process of remembering, it quickly shifts into a metaphor for the author himself. Often called ‘Peer Gynt’ by his mother, Grass transposes his unsuccessful experience of trying to get to the bottom of his character onto the famous scene of the onion in Peer Gynt, referring to this character’s ‘Lebenszwiebel[, die] am Ende, nachdem Haut auf Haut geschält war, keinen sinnstiftenden Kern barg’ (HZ, 433). Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Der Butt both dealt in ironic terms with this idea of the skin being shed, presenting it as a misleading masquerade on the part of the author who was, in fact, nothing but skin, a self-styled construction within the text. His different self-images corresponded to skins that he manipulated accordingly, just as here the different and not necessarily interconnected periods of his life correspond to layers of onion peel. The comparison emphasizes above all the coincidental nature of Grass’s person, formed entirely from sub-strata upon sub-strata of lived experience that can only be re-imagined within the plurality of fiction and never exhaustively verified in fact. Furthermore, peeling back the layers may reveal much about the author’s life and times, but this only confirms the suspicion that the author, like any other individual, is nothing but the untraceable product of chance circumstances. For Grass, trying to get to the core of his identity, even within clear political parameters, is first and foremost an aesthetic process of self-construction that feeds directly into both literary constructions of authorship and the media-led construction of the author’s public image. Not even he can circumvent the dictates of textual play here. Grass’s autobiography thus brings home in its own metaphorical terms the main point made throughout this study: while Grass is perhaps best known for a political understanding of authorship, his real accomplishment

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lies in the way he has negotiated the political demands of his day whilst remaining true to his literary principles. The deciding factor in this has been his ability to tease out the complexities of authorship in both spheres, with experience in one guiding his activities in the other. This has kept his texts rich, his politics engaging, and Günter Grass firmly at the centre of German public debate as no other author in the last fifty years.

Select Bibliography This bibliography lists only those works which have been cited or which were particularly important in forming my opinions. Comprehensive bibliographies on Günter Grass can be found in Volker Neuhaus, ed., Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993) and Heiner Schmidt, ed., Quellenlexikon zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte: Personal- und Einzelwerkbibliographien der internationalen Sekundärliteratur 1945–1990 zur deutschen Literatur von den Anf ängen bis zur Gegenwart (1945–1990), 36 vols, IX, 226–66.

Works by Günter Grass Mariazuehren (Munich: Bruckmann, 1973). In Kupfer, auf Stein (Göttingen: Steidl, 1986). Ausstellung anläßlich des 60. Geburtstages von Günter Grass, Hundert Zeichnungen: 1955 bis 1987: Katalog der Kunsthalle zu Kiel der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, ed. Jens Christian Jensen (Kiel, Kunsthalle zu Kiel und Schleswig-Holsteiner Kunstverein, 1987). Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, ed. Volker Neuhas, 10 vols (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987). Zunge zeigen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988). Skizzenbuch (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989). Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990). Totes Holz: Ein Nachruf (Göttingen: Steidl, 1990). Gegen die verstreichende Zeit: Reden, Aufsätze und Gespräche 1989–1991 (Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1991). Vier Jahrzehnte: Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Steidl, 1991). Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1994). Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002). Fundsachen f ür Nichtleser (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997). Ohne die Feder zu wechseln: Zeichnungen, Druckgraphiken, Aquarelle, Skulpturen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997). Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung and Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999). Mein Jahrhundert [409 pp.] (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999). Fünf Jahrzehnte: Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Welttag, 2001).

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Fundsachen für Grass-Leser, ed. Karin Kiwus and Wolfgang Trautwein (Berlin: Günter-Grass-Archiv, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste; Göttingen: Steidl, 2002). ‘The high price of freedom’, Guardian, 7 May 2005, Review section, 4–5. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006).

Interviews with Günter Grass A RNOLD , H EINZ L UDWIG, ‘Gespräche mit Günter Grass’, in Günter Grass, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 5th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1978), 1–39. C EPL -K AUFMANN , G ETRUDE, ‘Ein Gegner der Hegelschen Geschichtsphilosophie’, in Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden (1987), X, ed. Klaus Stallbaum, 106–20. L ENZ , S IEGFRIED, ‘Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit’, in Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden (1987), X, 255–81. R ADDATZ , F RITZ J., ‘Heute lüge ich lieber gedruckt’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, ZEITGespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 7–18. , ‘Ich bin ein lebenslustiger Pessimist’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, Günter Grass: Unerbittliche Freunde: Ein Kritiker, Ein Autor (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 86–98. S PIEGEL , DER , ‘S IEGEN MACHT DUMM ’, Der Spiegel, 25 August 2003, 140. ,‘I N MEINER G ESCHICHTE findet der immerwährende Untergang der “Gustloff ” im Internet statt’, www.steidl.de/grass/a2_3_gespraech.html, last accessed 22 June 2005. W ERTHEIMER , J ÜRGEN, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmen der Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Grass, Wort und Bild (1999), 43–62.

Archive material Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste [SAdK], Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.168 SAdK, Berlin, no.169 SAdK, Berlin, no.170 SAdK, Berlin, no.171 SAdK, Berlin, no.172 SAdK, Berlin, no.173 SAdK, Berlin, no.174 SAdK, Berlin, no.375 SAdK, Berlin, no.394 SAdK, Berlin, no.407 SAdK, Berlin, no.1758 [access currently denied] SAdK, Berlin, no.2081 SAdK, Berlin, no.3613 SAdK, Berlin, no.4280

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Index Abend 50 absurd 24, 54–6, 89–94 passim, 94, 110, 112 aesthetics 24, 31, 52, 84, 98, 151, 177, 179 Albert, Heinrich 24 Andersch, Alfred 17 Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen 63 angst 53, 110 APO 46 Arnim, Achim von 13 Arnold, Heinz Ludwig 47 art, artwork 115, 122–48 passim, 144–7 passim Asia 52, 84, 88, 94 audience 41–2, 45, 61–2, 94, 114, 153, 163 Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke 3, 7, 8, 65–7, 70–83 passim, 84, 94–5, 96, 97, 101, 120, 121, 125, 131, 134, 156, 176, 179 Ausgefragt 24 Auschwitz 58, 77; see also Holocaust authority 25–7, 34, 49, 51, 88, 106, 111, 121, 153–7, 167, 170–1, 172 autobiography: autobiographical material 65, 67, 74, 84 autobiographical narrator 66, 71–4, 84, 93, 94, 125, 130, 169, 171 literary genre 3–4, 66–8, 83, 119–20, 125, 130, 135, 178–9 way of reading 68, 79 see also diary autofiction 68–70, 75, 79, 81, 83, 94, 96–7, 131 Bachmann, Ingeborg 4 ‘Die Ballerina’ 110, 111 Baltic 118; see also Møn baroque 12, 13, 19, 29 Baron, Ulrich 137 Barthes, Roland 31–3, 36, 107 Bauer Pickar, Gertrud 98 Baumgart, Reinhard 13 Becher, Johannes 16 Beim Häuten der Zwiebel 4, 63, 178

Bengal 124 Benjamin, Walter 82 Benn, Gottfried 41, 60, 138, 139, 141, 143, 167, 169 Berlin 40, 50, 57, 140, 152, 165 Biermann, Wolf 51, 86, 141 biography: analytical approach 1, 6, 32, 33–4 individual’s life 4, 6, 8, 58, 60, 64, 94, 96, 164, 176 literary genre 1, 35, 47, 135, 153, 164 Birken, Sigmund von 26 Die Blechtrommel 3, 8, 28, 30, 36, 38, 43, 96, 103, 119 Böll, Heinrich 2, 4, 22, 51, 86 Bombay 86 Bonn 42 Born, Nicholas 5 branding, brand-name 3, 4, 5, 39, 48, 92 Brandt, Willy 71, 140 Brecht, Bertolt 16, 78, 138, 139, 141, 143, 167, 170 Bremen 38 Brentano, Clemens and Bettina 13 Breuel, Birgit 141, 142 Britain 1 Brode, Hanspeter 6, 67 Brockmann, Stephen 52 Büchner, Georg 44, 52 Burma 126 Der Butt 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 93, 95, 96–109 passim, 113, 115, 117, 120–1, 135, 137, 176, 179 Calcutta 125, 128, 133, 134 campaigning: actual activity 3, 41–64 passim, 123, 173, 176–7 literary theme 73, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87, 94 Camus, Albert 55, 56, 89–91, 92, 93, 94 capitalism 62 Cassandra 136, 173 Cepl-Kaufmann, Gertrude 39, 43, 44, 58, 67 China 52, 86, 88

194

Index

CDU 44, 45 cliché 86, 161; see also parody coincidence, chance 158–9, 179 communism 62 correspondence, see letters creative process 79, 85, 89–91, 93, 112, 125, 126–7, 131, 154 Cuba 156 Czechoslovakia 84 Dach, Simon 14, 19, 21, 24, 26, 27 Danzig 7, 70 ‘Danzig Trilogy’ 7, 9, 10, 30, 38, 176 death, see mortality democracy 8, 17–18, 19, 45–6, 87, 88–9 ‘Die deutschen Literaturen’ 51 Deutscher Lastenausgleich 57 diary (genre) 70, 84, 85, 119, 124, 128, 129, 130 Doubrovsky, Serge 68, 75 drama (genre) 10, 61; see also performance; role-play dreams 110–13, 115, 119 Dubrovnik 71, 73, 74 Dutschke, Rudi 47 Dye, Elizabeth 168, 171 East Germany, see Germany Enlightenment 44, 45, 49, 54, 100 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 2, 22, 47 Erhard, Ludwig 44 ‘Es steht zur Wahl’ 41, 42 Eshel, Amir 135, 136, 137 Eulenburg, Philip, Prince of 145 exile 59–60, 61 existence: existentialism 54, 89, 114–15 and writing 8, 54, 79, 80–1, 89, 119, 131, 176, 177 fairy tales 43, 54, 115; see also myth fame: as legacy 62, 151, 169 as public standing 36, 42, 125, 152, 174, 176 see also monumentalism feminism 50, 100, 101, 102, 120; see also gender fiction: as escape 7, 61, 68, 83, 84, 94, 99, 108, 117, 124, 140 as genre 75, 80, 82, 85, 96–7, 179 as lying 69, 77, 79, 102, 143, 163, 179

and reality 25, 28, 32, 54, 62, 65–6, 83, 124, 143, 152, 157, 163, 179 as report 150, 153, 168 see also imagination film 87, 114, 115, 116, 118, 126 Fontane, Theodor 152–67 passim food and drink 21, 22, 24, 93 Foucault, Michel 31–7, 53, 82, 109, 137, 146, 157, 173 France 18, 164 Frank, Anne 77 Frankfurt 58 Frisch, Max 4 Fundsachen für Nichtleser 123 Fünf Jahrzehnte 122 Gama, Vasco da 12 Gdañsk, see Danzig ‘Geist und Macht’ 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 45, 51 gender 97–109 passim, 135, 142 generation 62, 73, 133, 139, 169, 170, 174 genre 9, 75, 85, 97, 122–3, 128–30, 135 Gerhardt, Paul 22 Germany 2, 14–20, 46–7, 51–2, 57–62, 125, 145–6, 164, 165 East (GDR) 16, 40, 146, 156, 162, 165 ‘Gewissen der Nation’ 28, 39 gods 17, 24, 25, 54, 89, 92, 106, 127, 131–4, 154 Görtz, Franz Josef 3 Graf, Steffi 62 Grand Coalition 46–7 Grass, Helene 141, 143 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm 13, 118 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von 26, 27 Gruppe 47: 3, 4, 12–30 passim, 61; see also intellectuals Gryphius, Andreas 13, 20, 26 Guardian 63 guilt 99–101, 103, 105, 106–7, 164 Handke, Peter 5, 52 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 125 Heine, Heinrich 51, 52 Herder, Johann Gottfried 44, 51 history: as direct theme 60, 105–6, 113, 132–3, 137, 152, 170

Index as intellectual approach 31–2, 41, 109, 146 as material in text 13, 70–4, 77–8, 171 Hoffmeister, Werner 13, 26 Hollington, Michael 6, 12 Holocaust 58 Hong Kong 61 humour: as narrative strategy 74, 81 self-detraction 36, 63, 92, 94, 107–8, 143, 161, 177 within text 22, 83, 86–7, 114, 116, 175 see also irony; parody; satire Hundejahre 13, 38, 96, 153, 154, 172 ‘Ich klage an’ 41 identity: innate personal attribute 30, 81, 91, 106, 107, 119, 172, 179 multiple 37, 99, 102 national 58 public constructions of 3, 39, 94, 176 subject to textual play 4–5, 79, 82–3, 90, 94, 109, 176 ideology 35, 43, 51, 52, 102, 162, 165 Im Krebsgang 4, 148, 150–1, 167–75 passim, 177 image: as ideal model 23, 31, 37, 157, 158–62, 177 within literary text 7–8, 80, 81, 88–9, 124, 138 within public sphere 1–5, 35–7, 44–5, 50, 63, 141, 160–2 see also branding; identity imagination 52, 54, 68, 75, 80, 138, 143, 163 India 12, 86, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132 Intellectuals 2, 15, 17, 39, 45, 57, 58, 59, 103; see also Gruppe 47; Geist und Macht intellectualism 7, 44, 54 internationalism 51, 52, 56, 57, 64 intertextuality 42–4, 55, 89–93, 151–3, 164, 167; see also repetition introspection 31, 50, 65–6, 73, 84, 93, 123, 138; see also Neue Innerlichkeit irony: narrative attitude 36–7, 63, 74, 81, 88, 142, 160, 161 situtational 108, 143, 175

195

Iser, Wolfgang 69 Ivanovi´c, Christine 151, 152, 162 Joch, Peter 144 Johnson, Uwe 7, 152, 153, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164 journalism 125, 150, 171; see also media Jünger, Ernst 138, 139, 143, 146 ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’ 41, 42–3, 44–5 Kästner, Erich 17, 18 Katz und Maus 8, 12, 13, 38, 39, 85, Katz und Maus 169 n.25, 172 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 70 Kleist, Heinrich von 52 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 44 Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus 3, 8, 13, 24, 53, 55, 56, 65–7, 84–95 passim, 96, 103, 111, 115, 117, 120, 121, 125, 126, 131, 134, 142, 172, 173, 176 Krüger, Horst 4, 38, 48, 50 Kulturnation 52–3 ‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’ 58 Lasker-Schüler, Else 138, 139, 143 Lejeune, Philippe 66–7, 68, 69, 84 Lenz, Siegfried 65, 92, 93 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 44, 45, 51, 52, 86 letters 73–4, 163, 164 ‘Literatur und Mythos’ 54, 55, 56 ‘Loblied auf Willy’ 41 Lodge, David 1, 5 Logau, Friedrich, Freiherr von 51, 86 McGowan, Moray 52 Mann, Heinrich 15 Mann, Klaus 41, 60 Mann, Thomas 5–6, 16, 44, 165 Mannheim, Karl 16 Mariazuehren 123 Mauritius 70, 74 media, 1–9 passim, 38, 63–4, 122–3; see also public sphere Mein Jahrhundert 3, 123–4, 134–48 passim, 162, 170, 173, 177 melancholia 73, 74, 83; see also introspection memory 55, 150, 176, 178, 179

196

Index

Mertens, Mathias 8, 9, 10 metaphor and symbol: individual words 45, 125, 127, 140 wider paralleling technique 20, 27, 67, 79, 87, 91, 98, 106, 145, 157, 164, 178–9 Mews, Siegfried 85 Meyer-Gosau, Frauke 152 Michaelis, Rolf 56 ‘Mief ’ 47, 79, 80 Miles, Keith 6 Miłosz, Czesłow 55 Minden, Michael 97, 98, 104 Møn island 59 Montau, Dorothea von 101 monumentalism 81, 139, 144, 148, 155–62 passim, 165, 166, 174 morality: informing literary composition 151 informing personal behaviour 21, 25–6, 27, 36, 43, 47, 99–101, 104–5, 162, 170, 177, 178 moral debates 23 subject in literature 28, 58, 83, 98, 135, 178 see also ‘Gewissen der Nation’ mortality: ageing 49, 60, 157, 159, 165, 177 death 32, 89, 104–9, 112–20, 132, 143, 147, 166, 167, 169 immortality 21, 133, 158–60 mortal condition 89 Müller, Helmut 15, 16, 39 music 24, 43, 81 myth 53–6, 87–93 passim, 132 narrator: first-person 29–30, 78–9, 81, 83, 84–7, 96–121 passim, 134–7, 141–4, 153–4, 166, 168–9 third-person 151 see also autobiography National Socialism, (Neo-) 7, 16, 41, 58–60, 63, 170, 172, 173 Neue Innerlichkeit 4, 13, 50, 66 ‘Ein neuer Begriff von Arbeit’ 51 Neuhaus, Volker 67 Neuruppin 152, 155, 157–8, 165 1968: 3, 44, 46, 62, 170 Niven, William 15 Nobel prize for literature 56, 63 Novalis (Georg Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 52

Opitz, Martin 13 Orwell, George 25, 44, 53, 55, 67, 88 ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt I’ 53 ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’ 55 örtlich betäubt 3, 7, 10 Parkes, Stuart 15 parody 87, 91, 172, 173 pastiche, see parody paternity 74, 77–8, 86–8, 91, 99, 116, 155, 171, 172 pedagogy 73, 77, 78, 79, 83, 86, 88, 172 performance 41–2, 62, 69, 91, 94, 98–9, 141; see also role-play Peking 86 Pietsch, Timm 9, 39 Plato 78 Plebejer proben den Aufstand 10 Plurien 70, 73 poetry 10, 24, 71, 97, 105, 108, 112, 113–14, 123, 125–34 passim Poland 116 politics, see campaigning pornography 38, 39 postmodernism 141 post-structuralism 1, 82 Preece, Julian 6, 12 Prussia 145 public sphere 1–9 passim, 36, 37, 39, 44, 60, 63, 176, 177 Raddatz, Fritz J 105, 136 radicalism 44, 46–7, 49, 87, 119 Rama, Maria 123 Ratte, Günter 57, 148 Die Rättin 4, 7, 8, 56, 95, 96–7, 109–21 passim, 123, 125, 134, 135, 142, 147, 166, 169, 172, 177 reader: fictional 75–9, 98, 104 relation to text 32–5, 66–9, 75–9, 81, 99, 101, 108, 110, 115, 119, 139–41, 149–51, 174–5 see also audience; viewer ‘Rede über das Selbstverständliche’ 48 ‘Rede über den Standort’ 61–2 ‘Rede über den unbekannten Wähler’ 49 ‘Rede über die Parteien’ 49 ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ 49 ‘Rede vom Verlust’ 59, 61 ‘Rede von den begrenzten Möglichkeiten’ 49 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel 12, 70

Index religion 21, 89, 101; see also gods Remarque, Erich Maria 138, 139, 143, 146 repetition: emulation (epigone) 170, 173, 174, 175 enacted in literature 80, 91, 153, 164–5 pertaining to politics, history 54–6, 87, 131, 132–3, 134 rhetoric 9, 13, 40, 41, 42, 142 Richter, Hans Werner 2, 12, 14, 17, 19, 23, 26, 35, 39 role-play 38, 41, 42–6, 92, 138–40, 159–62, 175 ‘Die runde Zahl Zwanzig’ 49 Runge, Philipp Otto 13 sarcasm 24 satire 21, 43, 81, 87, 110, 174, 176 Schädlich, Hans Joachim 154 Scheub, Wolfgang 70, 74 ‘Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ 59 science 114, 140, 142 Schiller, Friedrich 15 Schmidt, Arno 4 Schneider, Peter 5 Schneuber, Johann Matthias 29, 37 Schütz, Heinrich 20–30 passim, 36 ‘Schreiben nach Auschwitz’ 58 ‘Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen Kindern Auschwitz zu erklären’ 77 Seghers, Anna 40–1, 60 self-absorption, see introspection Shafi, Monika 135, 136, 137, 144 Shanghai 86 Sisyphus 24, 25, 54–6, 87–93 passim, 173 Skizzenbuch 124 n.5, 128 socialism 16 SPD 46, 48, 50, 53, 54, 77 Spiegel 4, 48 Stern, Carola 51 Strauß, Botho 52 Strauß, Franz Josef 107 subconscious, see unconscious Süddeutsche Zeitung 50 Suttner, Hans 41 Switzerland 139 Symons, Morwenna 151, 152, 161, 164 Taberner, Stuart 7–8, 9, 88, 89 teachers, see pedagogy Telgte 14, 19 theatre, see drama; performance

197

time: passage of 22, 80, 82, 84, 117, 133, 137 tenses 22, 85, 90 tetxual chronology 12, 84–5, 93–4, 97, 99, 109, 111, 115, 117, 145 Totes Holz 123 n.4 Das Treffen in Telgte 4, 12–37 passim, 171, 177 Treuhand 141, 171 truth 25, 105, 130, 178 unconscious 103, 119, 146 unification 57–61, 151 Unkenrufe 4, 8, 148, 149 ‘Die Vernichtung der Menschheit hat begonnen’ 112 Verweyen, Theodor 19, 20 viewer 128, 130 ‘Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren’ 31, 63 Vormweg, Heinrich 6 ‘VW-Bus-Rede’ 49–50 Waffen-SS 63, 70 Walser, Martin 2, 4, 7, 22, 39, 47, 54, 57 war: general 21, 134 Thirty Years 12, 14, 21, 25 First World 15, 139, 145–6 Second World 14, 146, 171 Cold 167 ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ 41 Weber, Alexander 7, 9, 13, 23, 29 Weckherlin, Georg Rodolf 22 Wefelmeyer, Fritz 15 Ein weites Feld 4, 122, 142, 148, 149–67 passim, 171, 174–5, 177 Whitman, Walt 44 Wilhelm, P. J. 123 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 145 Wilson, Adrian 35 Witting, Gunther, see Verweyen, Theodor Wolf, Christa 4, 167 Zesen, Philipp von 20, 21 Ziegler, Helmut 56 Ziesel, Kurt 39 Zola, Émile 44 Zunge zeigen 3, 56, 123–34 passim, 147–8, 162, 167, 173, 177