The Life and Work of Gunter Grass: Literature, History, Politics

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The Life and Work of Günter Grass Literature, History, Politics

Julian Preece

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-09

The Life and Work of Günter Grass

10.1057/9780230286603 - The Life and Work of Gunter Grass, Julian Preece

Also by Julian Preece

NINE LIVES: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish–Ukrainian Borderlands (co-author)


BRADFORD SERIES OF COLLOQUIA ON CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE (co-editor)


The Life and Work of Günter Grass Julian Preece Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature University of Kent at Canterbury



Literature, History, Politics

© Julian Preece 2001

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–79303–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preece, Julian. The life and work of Günter Grass : literature, history, politics / Julian Preece. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–333–79303–X

1. Grass, Günter, 1927– 2. Authors, German—20th century—Biography. I. Title. PT2613.R338 Z774 2000 838'.91409—dc21 [B]

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For my father

Alan Preece, 1931±97



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Contents ix

Acknowledgements and Note on Translation Map: The changing shape of Germany, 1937±90

1 Life and Art

x

xii

1

Biographies: real and imagined

1

Multi-talented art student

19

Artistic cross-connections

25

Idealists, absolutists and crypto-social democrats: the plays

30

2 Lives in History

34

A world novel: The Tin Drum

34

Oskar's Danzig requiem

37

Scandal

47

Cat and Mouse: is Pilenz guilty?

50

After Kafka ± after Mann

56

Broken biographies: Dog Years

58

3 The Turn to Politics

68

A famous young man

68

A broken critical tradition

74

Ì advise you to vote ES-PE-DE'

80

Writers and politicians

89

The student revolt

93

Ì meant myself just as much': Bertolt Brecht in the cross®re in

The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising

99

On cooking pigs' heads: Exhaustively Questioned

106

`Burn, warehouse, burn!': Local Anaesthetic

107

Sceptics and melancholics: From the Diary of a Snail

118

vii



List of Plates

4

5

The End of History Man

127

A state of the nation novel: The Flounder

127

`Social-Democratic Rabelais'

134

False Messiah on Father's Day

137

Feminism and The Flounder

141

Writers and the state, 1647±1979: The Meeting in Telgte

145

Orwell's decade

150

A critical intellectual in the post-modern era

153

Exotic encounters

157

Fiction against the bomb: The Rat

161

Wrong Side of the Wende

170

The galloping Weltgeist

170

Grass and the German Question, 1953±89

176

Burying the past or melting-pot utopia: The Call of the Toad

180

Execution of an author

187

Fonty/Fontane: broken biographies in Too Far A®eld

194

Making sense ± ®nding truth

202

Notes

208

Index

217



viii Contents

List of Plates

3. With Ute Grunert. (Copyright Visum/Rudi Meisel.) 4. Tasting soup for The Flounder. (Copyright Visum/Rudi Meisel.) 5. Fonty and Hoftaller from Too Far A®eld. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.) 6. Manuscript page of Too Far A®eld with drawing. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.) 7. The writer at work on his old Olivetti. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.) 8. The artist with pipe and sketchpad. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.)

ix



at the SPD Conference in 1972. (Copyright Visum/Rudi 1 and 2. With Heinrich Boll Meisel.)

Ideas for this book have been germinating since I ®rst started to read German and travel Grass at grammar to Germany up to twenty years ago. I ®rst heard the name Gunter school in Taunton and my thanks go to Michael Robinson for encouraging my interests in all things German. Denys Dyer took me through Grass's novels at university; David Constantine, who found he could not approve of my author's ironic slipperiness, supervised my doctorate: my thanks go to both of them. My greatest intellectual debt is to Dieter Stolz who will disagree with much of what he reads here but without whom my arguments would have been much weaker. Others have helped in other ways: Stuart Taberner, Chloe Paver and Colin Riordan kindly let me see unpublished research; Sean Allan shared his memories of Ralph Manheim; Susan Tebbut alerted me to Otto Pankok; John Wieczorek helped with Johannes Brobowski My colleagues Osman Durrani, Martin Kane and and J.H. Reid with Heinrich Boll. Elisabeth Demleitner have been generous with advice and materials. George Stern demonstrated admirable thoroughness in proof-reading a draft of the manuscript, Grass for which greatly improved the ®nished version. I am also grateful to Gunter allowing me to view his correspondence with Helen Wolff prior to its publication. My research has taken me to a number of libraries in the UK and Germany. In particular I would like to mention the incomparable facilities at the Freie Universita t in Berlin, the ever helpful staff at the Institute of Germanic Studies and the German Historical Institute London and the Literaturarchiv in Sulzbach Rosenberg for helping me gain access to the correspondence between Grass and Walter Hollerer. Some material used in this book has been published elsewhere, albeitly usually in different form. I am grateful to the editors of the following books and journals for permission to plunder the following chapters and articles: Arthur Williams and Grass's Die Rattin', Stuart Parkes for `Literature and the End of the World: Gunter in Literature on the Threshold: the German Novel in the 1980s (1990); the editors of Journal of the Kafka Society of America 17 (1993) for `The Danger of Reaching Thirty for Franz Kafka, Josef K. and Oskar Matzerath: Kafkaesque Motifs in Die Blechtrommel'; to The German Monitor 47 (2000) for `Seven Theses on Der Fall Fonty'; and to the Modern Language Review 90 (1995) for `Sexual-Textual Politics: the Transparency of the Male Grass'. Narrative in Der Butt by Gunter Quotations from primary sources are with the kind permission of the publishers: Grass, copyright Steidl Verlag; Max Frisch, Die Tagebucher the works of Gunter and Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf, copyright Suhrkamp Verlag; Marcel ReichRanicki, Mein Leben, Arnulf Baring, Machtwechsel, copyright Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt; TABU 1 and Die Jahre die ihr kennt, copyright Rowohlt Verlag; Peter Ruhmkorf, Ich habe Lust im weiten Felde . . ., copyright Wallstein Verlag; Peter Peter Ruhmkorf, Schneider, Lenz, copyright Europa ische Verlagsanstalt/Rotbuch Verlag; Hans Werner Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, copyright Hanser Verlag. x



Acknowledgements and Note on Translation

Acknowledgements and Note on Translation

xi

Note on translation Translations from the German are my own.

The volumes are ordered as follows: I Gedichte und Kurzprosa (Poems and Short Prose) II Theaterspiele (Plays) III Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) IV Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse) V Hundejahre (Dog Years) (Local Anaesthetic) VI o rtlich betaubt VII Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail) VIII Der Butt (The Flounder) IX Das Treffen in Telgte (The Meeting in Telgte) X Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out) XI Die Rattin (The Rat) XII Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad) XIII Ein weites Feld (Too Far A®eld) XIV Essays und Reden I. 1955±1969 (Essays and Speeches I. 1955±1969) XV Essays und Reden II. 1970±1979 (Essays and Speeches II. 1970±1979) XVI Essays und Reden III. 1980±1997 (Essays and Speeches III. 1980±1997) Books by Grass not included in the collected edition are:

Mein Jahrhundert (1999): My Century ± MC

Nicht-Leser (1997): Findings for Non-Readers ± FNR Fundsachen fur Vier Jahrzehnte. Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (1991): Four Decades. A Report from the Workshop ± FD Totes Holz (1990): Dead Wood. An Obituary ± DW. Zunge Zeigen. Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen, Prosa und einem Gedicht (1988): Show Your Tongue. A Diary in Drawings, Prose and a Poem ± SYT Note: the books above are published by Steidl, except for Zunge Zeigen, which is published by Luchterhand. Correspondence, interviews, and more recent articles by Grass are indicated separately.



I have used the 1997 Steidl edition of Grass's works, edited by Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, and individual volumes, edited by Dieter Stolz and Claudia MayerIswandy. I give volume and page numbers after each quotation.

SWEDEN

BALTIC SEA Polish Corridor (1919-39)

Mon Hiddensee

Wewelsfleth

Rugen Koningsberg (Kaliningrad)

Usedom Hamburg

Lubeck

Pom

Behlendorf

era

nia

Danzig (Gdansk)

EAST PRUSSIA

Bremen

Berlin

Hildesheim Dusseldorf

GDR (1949-1990)

BELGIUM Cologne

tenla de Su

LUX. Wurzburg

P O L A N D Silesia

Breslau (Wroclaw) (Wroctaw) n

FRANCE

R. Elbe

Warsaw

Oder - Ne

Telgte

iße Line

Neuruppin

HOLLAND

d

Marienbad

Prague Territory of the former GDR Territory lost by Germany in 1945 Annexed by Germany in 1938

Dachau

GDR border

Munich

Pre-1939 German border

Map: The changing shape of Germany, 1937±90


R. Vistula


xii

DENMARK

1

Biographies: real and imagined Anyone born, like me, in the third decade of this century, cannot deny his share of guilt for the great crime, even if he was very young at the time. Anyone who survived the end of the war by chance, as I did, knows from experience of Germany that, however entertaining the present may be, it can never distract attention from the past. For these reasons I ®nd that the threads of my tales are woven together for me in advance, that I am not free in my choice of material: there are too many dead looking over my shoulder while I write. XVI:446±7 It is enough for a German born before 1945 to give his year of birth in order for his listeners to place him in a likely historical context, even to purport to know his fundamental experiences. While most men born ®ve years either side of 1920 had not much better than an evens chance of reaching 30, those who did so were inevitably deeply marked by the war and Nazism. They had passed crucial phases of their adult careers under Adolf Hitler, whether or not they signed up to his creed and Grass, belongs to the so-called party. But anyone born in the mid-1920s, like Gunter weiûe Jahrgange (the `white years'), old enough to have played some role in what happened, but young enough not to be seriously implicated in the Nazi extermination machine. Ì too, born halfway too late, count as unincriminated' (VII:17), Grass explained in From the Diary of a Snail (1972). He never needed, unlike so many other Germans just a few years older, to hide, explain away, or falsify what he did as a young man. Gunter Grass was born on 16 October 1927 to mixed German-Slavic parentage in where Poland's the recently created city state of Danzig, today Polish Gdansk, mighty river, the Vistula, disgorges into the Baltic. This made him ®ve years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany, eleven at the outbreak of World War Two, and 17 at the end of it. After four years making his way in the devastated western zones of occupation, he was 21 when the Federal Republic of Germany (the FRG) came into being in May 1949, 40 at the time of the student revolt, and in his 1



Life and Art

Gunter Grass: His Life and Work

early sixties in the year of German reuni®cation. Up to the point of the SPD accession to power in 1969, he stood ®rmly between the generations; in 1989 he belonged to the youngest age group who could remember a previously united Germany. The biographical experience indicated by these markers informs all his writing, ®ction and non-®ction, and all his public utterances. The young Grass had been ®rst a member of the Jungvolk (Hitler Cubs) and the Hitlerjugend, then completed compulsory stints as a Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force Auxiliary) before joining the Arbeitsdienst (work service), the classic career pattern for German males of his age. He was expelled from school twice for bad behaviour, a fact he attributes to the wartime breakdown in discipline but which attests also to a rebellious personality. He did not have the opportunity to complete his school leaving exam, the Abitur. The years of paramilitary exercises and camp-®re songs which interrupted his schooling led to a military call-up just as the war entered its ®nal, desperate phase in the winter of 1944±45 as the Red Army, which ®nally took Danzig in March, pressed towards Berlin. He has recalled this period many times: The military training lasted until about the end of February 1945. I ended up in a tank and I went up to the front at the beginning of March. A little later my tank was blown up by a mine and I was transferred to the infantry and took part in combat during the retreat. My ®rst experience of terror was when my company, with some other units, fell under ®re from so-called Stalin-Organs [multiplerocket launchers] in a wood. Within two hours, no, under two hours, a third of our company, boys of sixteen or seventeen like me, had been killed or seriously wounded. And that continued up to 20 April, right up to Hitler's last birthday. On that day, thank God, I was wounded, not far from Berlin. That is how I left the Eastern Front.1 It is hardly surprising that ®gures from his early ®ction follow similar routes through childhood and adolescence; their fundamental experiences are ®rmly behind them before they reach 20. What is possibly worse than guilt for his actions and beliefs in his teenage years is his awareness that he could so easily have committed far more signi®cant acts. This fear was driven home `by anxiety dreams, which became more and more frequent the more time passed, in which I ®gured as the guilty party or my behaviour was found wanting' (XV:513). Two of the three narrators in his second novel, Dog Years (1963), Eddi Amsel and Walter Matern, are ten years his senior, thus old enough to have been responsible adults during the Nazi period. A host of other ®ctional ®gures, Oskar Matzerath, Pilenz and Mahlke, Harry Liebenau and Eberhard Starusch, are, on the other hand, contemporary with him. They all have highly ambiguous attitudes towards their youth; none integrates successfully into postwar society, none marries or settles down to start a family. Klaus Rainer Rohl, the future leftwing journalist and husband to Ulrike Meinhof, was Grass's near contemporary in the Conradinum, the Danzig grammar school also attended by several characters from Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years. Rohl



2

Life and Art 3

From my fourteenth year my whole life took place within the con®nes of barracks in various camps. Military preparation camp. Shovel camp digging anti-tank ditches. Harvest camp bringing in potatoes or turnips, Flak camp, Work-Service camp. The time I spent at home in the last two years of the war, 44 and 45, took on the character of brief holidays. Younger people nowadays might ®nd our incredible physical and mental hardness hard to imagine. We all had hard pre-military training from the age of ten. Route marches for hours and hours with full kit in the hot sun [. . .] until one or two collapsed because their hearts gave out, cross-country marches, dirt, mud, night marches, tests of courage, all at jogging pace. From the age of fourteen we did nothing but weapons training.2 and Grass meant that the younger boy The two-year age difference between Rohl escaped getting a call-up himself. But in the games the boys played in the schoolyard, they already mimicked the military heroics they saw on the newsreels. The siege of the Alcazar, which marked the ®nest hour of Franco's Falangists in the Spanish Civil War, was a favourite. Nobody wanted to play the Reds, of course. The ~ courage of the Falangist leader, who told his son to cry `Viva Espana!' if his captors and his carried out their threat to shoot him, was self-evident to young Gunter schoolmates. Curiously, however, he recalls more than 60 years later in My Century (1999), they did not act out the bombing of Guernica when planes from the German Condor Legion dropped their bombs in broad daylight on the defenceless Basque town: `you could not get anything heroic out of that' (MC:136). This is an insight, however, which came much later. As the war neared its end, the victors of 1939±41 began to learn the taste of defeat and with defeat came suffering. Like Oskar in The Tin Drum (1959), Grass saw the corpses of executed deserters hanging from lampposts and telegraph masts: òlder soldiers from the Front and young chaps of my age [. . .] each with a cardboard sign hanging around his neck with the words `Ì am a coward''':3 wherever you went ± this is for me, along with two or three other formative experiences, an image which will not go away; wherever you went, in every little place [. . .] mainly fairly old men [. . .] or my age, 16, 17 years old, 18 perhaps.4 Like Lina Greff in The Tin Drum and Sibylle Miehlau in The Flounder (1977), the women left behind in Danzig, including his own mother, were raped by Soviet soldiers. Other civilians Grass knew lost their lives on the overland trek or maritime evacuation to the west, an event also re¯ected in his ®ction: Starusch's mother in Local Anaesthetic (1969), the clockmaker Laubschad and Herr and Frau Schef¯er from Oskar's tenement in the Labesweg, and Matern's family from Dog Years are all drowned when their evacuation ships are sunk by Soviet U-boats.



remembers the teenage Grass running wild with the rest of the boys and the adolescent world he depicts is familiar to Grass's readers:


Grass's own immediate family, his mother and father and younger sister, survived, but he did not catch up with them again until December 1946. After military hospital in American-occupied Marienbad, soon to be incorporated into the Soviet bloc as part of a reconstituted Czechoslovakia, he found himself in the summer of 1945 in an American POW-camp in Bavaria. Here he was forced, like millions of other Germans, to confront for the ®rst time the reality of what had been National Socialism. The Americans took him to the concentration camp at Dachau. Grass recalls in From the Diary of a Snail: `we did not want to understand; we saw the showers and the ovens and did not believe' (VII:154). Like the majority of the rest, he at ®rst refused to accept that what he was shown was true and assumed it was just Allied propaganda. Gradually, once the Nuremberg Trials got under way in the autumn of 1945, he came to realise the monumentality of his error, a mental turnabout which would begin to power his creative work more than a decade later. This is a key event in his intellectual and emotional biography. Its importance cannot be overestimated in any assessment of his work or in¯uence on German public life. It was above all an emotional event and emotions are never far below the surface in many of his public interventions. Seventeen is also the key age for many of his ®ctional ®gures. Two events in fact occurred between Grass's own seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays, both of which drove his creative energies once he began to write. The ®rst was the realisation that everything he had accepted as true and just in fact underpinned the most evil regime the world had ever seen. The second was the loss of his beloved Baltic homeland, the medieval towers and granaries of Hanseatic Danzig, the expanses of the Vistula Delta and the sandy wastes of the Prussian coastline which stretched as far as Konigsberg (now Russian Kaliningrad), Lithuania and Latvia in the east. This is the terrain he reinvented in his ®ction and made known to generations in the west who could not see it easily for themselves during the years of the Cold War. According to his friend and fellow migrant, Salman Rushdie, Grass suffered a triple dislocation as a result of the wrench to the west. The ®rst was the loss of `roots', `the sense of home as a ``good'' safe place'. The second, the loss of language, as even though he continued to be surrounded by German speakers, the German language had to be `rebuilt, pebble by pebble, from the wreckage: because a language in which evil ®nds so expressive a voice is a dangerous tongue'.5 Third, according to Rushdie, his loss of ideological orientation was a form of migration into a new unknown land. The 17-year-old Grass had enlisted as a convinced believer in the Nazi cause, con®dent he was needed by Volk, Fuhrer and Vaterland, and that the Germans stood on the side of right. These thoughts and feelings were all the stronger for being unexplored yet allpervasive and largely unquestioned in the environment in which he had grown up. When Joseph Goebbels shrieked `Do you want total war?' in the wake of the defeat at Stalingrad, the 15-year-old schoolboy had felt instinctively ready to make the ultimate sacri®ce, as he recalled in the mid-1960s in a speech directed at young voters `tempted' to vote for the neo-Nazi German National Party, the NDP. His father had joined the NSDAP in 1936, before it became something that was expected, like Oskar Matzerath's father, because, as he explained to his grown-up son after the war, his `business competitors joined [. . .] and he had the feeling that he was living in



4

historic times and you simply had to be part of it'.6 How could it have occurred to the young schoolboy to question what his father did when nearly all the other adults he knew behaved in the same way? In his novels, Grass fails to draw a clear dividing line between guilt and innocence, hero and villain. His ®gures either know, like him, what it is like to have believed in the cause and feel a great emptiness at the heart of their existence once that cause has been taken away, or they have made compromises, run with the tide, and acted opportunistically. If they committed acts of opposition, they did so for the wrong reason. After 1990, Grass was better equipped than most other West Germans to empathise with ex-GDR citizens accused of collaboration with the East German regime and the dreaded Stasi. He recognised how easy it would have been for him to have changed the `Hitlerjugend brown shirt' for `the blue shirt of the Communist youth movement', the FDJ (XVI:436). In Too Far A®eld (1995) he reconstructs lived experience in the ex-GDR, articulating the nuances of ordinary people's feeling in the face of the juggernaut of Western conformism. Thirty-®ve years after the war in Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out? (1980), he wondered what would have happened to him had he been a little older. First he divulged that he too has one or two teenage skeletons in his cupboard: A questionable stroke of luck, my year of birth, 1927, forbids me from condemning others. I was too young to be tested. And yet I could still be blamed for one thing: as a 13-year-old I took part in a story competition organised by the Hitlerjugend magazine, Hilf-Mit! I started writing early and was dying to get noticed. But because I obviously had misjudged my audience and written some melodramatic fragment about the Cassubians, my luck held and I had no chance of getting a Hitlerjugend or a Hilf-Mit! prize. X:24 Like other family memorabilia, this story, written in his neatest Gothic hand he grew to hate so viscerally, was lost during the evacuation. writing, the Sutterlinschrift He remembers it was set in the thirteenth century during a war-torn ìnterregnum' in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. But the problem was that the 13-year-old would-be historical novelist crammed so much action into the ®rst 20 pages that soon none of his characters was left alive. This taught him one invaluable lesson: ìf you're going to have deaths, then have them towards the end.' (XVI:426). But what is rather more remarkable than that lesson in narrative technique is how closely he stuck to his adolescent theme. All his ®ction up to the age of 50 is centred on his homeland and its past: The Flounder reconstructs Danzig's history from the stone age to the bloodily Lenin Shipyards in 1970. repressed strike in Gdansk's Having revealed these precocious ambitions, Grass then imagines what he might have done had he entered the world in 1917 instead of 1927: In 1933 I would have been sixteen and not six years old, at the beginning of the war, twenty-two and not twelve. As I would have been old enough to be called up straight away, it is unlikely that I would have survived the war, like most born in



Life and Art 5


that year. Yet despite this probability there is no reason to think (except wishful thinking) that I would not have willingly turned into a convinced National Socialist. Suppressing my half-Cassubian background, from a petty-bourgeois family, educated to see Germany as my ideal, and sworn to the principle of purity, I would have let myself be carried away by the extensive war aims and have been happy to accept (in the name of the community of the Volk) that what was subjectively wrong was objectively right. (The Danzig SS-Home Defence could have relied on me in the late summer of 39, even though my uncle Franz worked for the Polish Post Of®ce.) X:25 His early literary career would have been sponsored by the Nazis. He would have encountered no dif®culties in ®nding a publisher for either his patriotic odes to the Fatherland or his introspective nature poems. Not until the Reich began to suffer defeats and an Allied victory began to seem possible, would he have expressed second thoughts: Probably after Stalingrad ± now twenty-six years old and a ®rst lieutenant or a lance corporal ± I would have begun to see the light. Involved in the shootings of partisans, reprisal raids, and clean-up operations, as a witness of Jewish deportations which no-one could not notice, I would have added some new tones to my late-Expressionist versifying [. . .] ± sadness unconnected to any speci®ed locality, expressions of despair, dark and ambiguous thoughts. Probably (in comparison to my creative period during the time of the great victories) I would have produced some so-called èternally lasting verse' on the retreat. And using this style, which in `44 would have been acceptable to my publisher and the censor (providing that I had survived), I would have effortlessly bridged the unconditional surrender, the so-called Year Zero, possibly one or two years in a POW-camp and then been able to adopt the new, bare, low-calorie themes from a paci®st or anti-Fascist perspective: as happened in a hundred or more cases. X:26±7 Grass's ®ctional reconstruction of his childhood landscapes would run the risk of nostalgia were it not for the knowledge, which permeates its every narrative pore, that he is evoking a landscape where evil ¯ourished. The places and place names of his childhood, the streets of suburban Danzig and the villages along the coast and the banks of the Vistula, were robbed of all the innocence that childhood would otherwise have bestowed on them in the ®ve and a half years which began on spent this day collecting bits of 1 September 1939. The 11-year-old Gunter shrapnel to swap with schoolfriends. Until that day, Stutthof, for instance, was the name of a small village on a coastal spit to the east of Danzig, separated from the city by the mouth of the Vistula, on either side of which perched the villages of Schwienenhorst and Nickelswalde, where the blood brothers Matern and Amsel grow up in Dog Years. On the second day of the war work started on the Danzig side of Stutthof to build a concentration camp, the plans for which had evidently been laid carefully in advance. It was an ideal location, concealed by woodland and



6

surrounded on all sides by water, making escape especially dif®cult. Along with Grass's own ùncle Franz' (actually his mother's cousin) 40 000 Poles were shot in Danzig±Westprussia in the ®rst four months of the war, some of them in these woods. The camp itself was integrated in numerous ways into the local community: prisoners were sent out to the ®elds and to nearby factories to work; locals, Polish or German, who fell foul of the authorities, by trading in ration coupons, for instance, were sent there for `re-education'. This is what happens to Oswald Brunies in Dog Years. Like all the Nazi camps, Stutthof was supplied by local businesses. Grass's paternal grandfather, who ran a small timber yard and carpentry workshop, like Harry Liebenau's father, was no exception, as Grass recalls in a poignant verse: My grandfather's circular saws could cut up a long bright morning into roof slats. Parts of barracks for transit camps. I:139±40 Stutthof was intended initially for Poles, who were `collected' at the Viktoriaschule in Neufahrwasser, another favourite haunt for characters from Grass's ®ction. By January 1940 it was large enough to contain 4500 inmates. Heinrich Himmler visited in November 1941 by which time it took prisoners from all over Germanoccupied Europe. A crematorium, which could dispose of ten corpses per hour, was built in September 1942, a gas chamber was added at the beginning of 1944, and the camp was still being extended at the time of the Soviet liberation. Liebenau says that he does not know how many died there. The ®gures are estimates and vary from 65 000 to 85 000, including up to 18 000 who perished on the evacuation march which started on 25 January 1945.7 In Dog Years the bones pile up into the sky, visible to all who want to see them. Another of Grass's great teenage traumas, which feeds directly into Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, is his failure to do anything or ask any questions when a teacher from school, Professor Oswald, a model for Dog Years' Oswald Brunies and Hermann Ott in From the Diary of a Snail, disappeared. Pilenz in Cat and Mouse can only comment in respect of Brunies that Ì hope not to have given evidence against him' (IV:48±9), but he is not sure. Tulla Pokriefke certainly did, however. Fifty years after the war, during a public correspondence with a Japanese contemporary, the Nobel Laureate ^ Grass contrasts his own behaviour with that of a contemporary, Ã Oe, Kenzaburo presumably a Jehovah's Witness, he encountered in the Arbeitsdienst who refused steadfastly to use or even to touch a ri¯e: I remember a young, gentle man whose friendliness bordered on the ridiculous who accepted even the harshest punishments without complaint, who was not capable of explaining his actions, and demonstrated his strength simply in refusal, and who in the end was sent away, I fear, to a concentration camp because his attitude evidently disconcerted us, recruits of the same age.8



Life and Art 7


Even though these lines were written half a lifetime after The Tin Drum, Grass's feelings are as raw as ever. Theo Wuttke, alias Fonty, the septuagenarian hero of Too Far A®eld, is haunted by even more ghosts from his past, which spans both authoritarian German regimes in the twentieth century. Grass's adolescence was not just shaped by war and Nazism, however. He was brought up a Catholic, which set him apart from the majority of German-speaking Danzigers. In a famous line, he later wrote that he `grew up between the Holy Ghost and Hitler's picture' (I:198). The Bible, the theology of sin and redemption, leave their mark on everything he has written. Even his all-pervading scepticism has clear theological overtones, as the Catholic cleric Matull in Too Far A®eld explains to the guests at Martha Wuttke's wedding. The Catholic Church's failure to stand up to Hitler must have contributed to his loss of faith after the war. But there is no sign that his religious upbringing damaged him in any way. On the contrary, he has never ceased to be fascinated by Catholics' love of ritual, performance and liturgy. Catholicism is an ideology, a system of belief with adherents and renegades, absolute values and dogmatic certainty. For Grass it is an alternative to either Nazism or Communism, both of which ful®l the same basic human need for explanations, purpose and the sense of allegiance. The free-market economy, the foundations of which he began to question seriously in the 1980s, emerges as just another ideology Grass it is imperative in the wake of German reuni®cation. For the sceptic Gunter never again to fall into the embrace of any belief system. In his chronicles of German ideological history, individual ®gures' ¯irtation with religious or, more usually, secular creeds is a primary theme. He speaks not with the zeal of a convert, that would risk sounding doctrinaire, but with the anxiety of a `burnt child'. Danzig, which had been a predominantly German city for more than six centuries, lay on the fault-line between the Germanic and Slavic worlds. This ®ssure ran right through the Grass family which: like many families in Danzig contained quite a colourful mixture: on my father's side we were, as they say, German stock and my mother's family was of Cassubian origin and the Cassubians were an old Slavic tribe.9 They were peasants who supplemented the living they made from the land by working in local industry. Both his grandfathers were skilled artisans, however ± his mother's father a plumber in an arms factory, his father's father a master carpenter. When his mother's family moved from the country to the city they started to speak German, which indicates nicely the relative status of the two languages and the communities who spoke them. Allegiance to the Nazis within the wider Grass clan had not been universal, which meant that once the Nazis had been defeated, Grass could re¯ect on courses of action different to those he and his immediate family had taken. Like Jan Bronski, Oskar's uncle and `putative father' in The Tin Drum, ùncle Franz' had been executed by the Germans for his role in defending the Polish Post Of®ce in September 1939. When in the spring of 1958 to research details for his ®rst novel, Grass returned to Gdansk he checked the facts concerning the ®ghting over the Post Of®ce, which had been a



8

Polish enclave within the independent but predominantly German-speaking city. He was amazed to discover that, contrary to the of®cial versions published by both sides, there had been three survivors. He records their escape, which he `could not have invented' (XV:331), after talking to two of the men, who had since found work in the Lenin Shipyards. This is his ®rst poetic correction to recorded historical truth, a procedure of `gap-®lling' he will come to regard as one of literature's primary functions. Oskar feels acute responsibility for Jan's death because Jan would not have gone to work that day had his little nephew not needed his drum mended. Yet Oskar's sense of guilt is out of all proportion to his actual role in the events. He feels cultural rather than personal shame. For the Grass family, once ùncle Franz' had been shot, `contact with the Cassubian relations was only in fact maintained by my mother, and something which was previously normal became suddenly something suspect.'10 Grass told Heinrich Vormweg in 1985 that the Slavic element in his own family àlways fascinated me, embarrassed and fascinated me at the same time'. The lack of contact with the relations on this side of the family was one of many `things which made me think, they disturbed me, but I didn't draw any real conclusions.'11 Once the war was ®nished, his mixed background enabled him to look at his fellow Germans from the outside as well as from within: he both belonged and did not belong. In this he resembles both Thomas Mann, who had a half-Brazilian mother, and Theodor Fontane, the inspiration for Too Far A®eld, who was descended from seventeenth-century Huguenot refugees. Grass's empathy with other immigrants, be they new arrivals to Danzig in past centuries or Turks in contemporary Germany, is founded on a genuine sense of af®nity. At the height of his political campaigning for the Social Democrats in 1969, he expressed the fear to Helen Wolff that he was in danger of becoming too serious, which means `too German'. He promised her, as he had promised his wife Anna, that once the election was over `there will be more laughing ± and we will live more like Cassubians than Germans'.12 His legendary zest for life, his love of good food and wine, of dancing and partying, of joking and telling stories, align him with this supposedly non-Germanic tradition. A negative ethnic dynamic is replicated in the web of Oskar's extended family relations in The Tin Drum. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, had been a terrorist in the cause of Polish nationalism; his grandmother loses no time declaring for the Poles once the Polish state is resurrected in 1918. Jan Bronksi does the same, though he is warned repeatedly not to throw his lot in with Poland by his rival for Agnes's affection, Alfred Matzerath: as a German speaker Jan could claim either German or Danzig status. Agnes, Oskar's mother, is warned off Jan by the converted Jew, Sigismund Markus, who wants to elope with her to London to escape the gathering storm in the mid-1930s. After her death in May 1937 relations between Alfred and Jan are forced underground. Neither Greff nor Schef¯er, neighbours from the Labesweg, the cramped, terraced street where Oskar grows up, are at ease in his presence. Once Jan's widow, however, the Cassubian Hedwig, who had adopted Polish nationality on marrying Jan, marries the Baltic German Ehlers, another smalltime Nazi, she becomes a Volksdeutsche, that is she assumes a German identity. Other members of this branch of the family also take this step. The ®rst Matzerath/Bronksi



Life and Art 9

family reunion is placed under a double strain as Polish ghosts haunt Kurt's christening in August 1941. Oskar's grandmother defuses the tension in her down-toearth manner. Presenting Alfred with a fat goose, she pats it with the palm of her hand and wants to know what it is worth: `that isn't no Cassubian goose, that isn't, that's an ethnic German goose now and tastes just the same as it did before the war!' (III:394). The German city of Danzig had an above average number of Nazi voters, resentful that they had been separated from the rest of Germany by the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. The NSDAP ran the city from as early as 1932. Its hinterland and the stretch of Pomerania known as the Polish Corridor to its south, which divided Germany from East Prussia in order to give the newly recreated Polish state access to the sea, contained a rich and potentially explosive mixture of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities. In Pomerania, the Germans outnumbered the Poles by nearly two to one and the Cassubians by approaching ten to one. In Danzig itself under 5 per cent of the population was not German: `The situation was further complicated by religion. Most Poles were Catholic, but not all Germans were Protestant and there were also German Jews and an increasing number of Polish Jews.'13 The mixture of Catholic and Protestant, German and Slav in the Grass family thus re¯ected the historic hybridity of the people in the region. This explains why both Oskar and Starusch are half-German, half-Cassubian, Mahlke and his family have Polish sympathies, Eddi Amsel is half-Jewish, and Hermann Ott in From the Diary of a Snail is descended from Dutch Mennonite immigrants. Ethnic identity is sometimes in the eye of the beholder: Ott's Cassubian protector, Anton Stomma, who like all Cassubians in Grass's ®ction changes his allegiance from Germany to Poland and back again repeatedly depending on which is in the ascendancy, treats him as a Jew because he has helped the Danzig Jews. Volker Schlondorff, who worked closely with Grass to make his ®lm of The Tin Drum, was astounded to ®nd how close to his material the author still felt 20 years whose polemical tract, The Lost Honour of after the novel was published. Boll, had recently ®nished, was much cooler in comparison: Katharina Blum, Schlondorff for or against something, then it is much easier If you have the same views as Boll, to take over his personnel and put them on to the screen ± it is rarely directly autobiographical: with Grass, despite all the exaggerations, everything always is. The ¯at in Labesweg, the petrol stain on the wall, the people, everything is quite concrete, undoubtedly the four or ®ve skirts of the Cassubian grandmother, whose mouth (`healthy, strong teeth with wide gaps between them') he describes as if it were his own.14 Grass's best ®ction has come from his heart. Its autobiographical basis remains even after he has worked through his childhood experiences. In From the Diary of a Snail he develops a semi-authorial narrative persona, which he adapts for The Flounder, Headbirths and The Rat (1986). He can even at times be recognised in Theo Wuttke from Too Far A®eld despite the difference in their backgrounds. In My Century, which contains one hundred brief chapters dedicated to each year from 1900 to 1999, ®ctional memoirs sit side by side with autobiographical recollections.



10 Gunter Grass: His Life and Work

Grass's parents were shopkeepers, like Oskar's, which made them Kleinburger or petty-bourgeois, a label Grass has always proudly claimed for himself. As a class they became enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. It was his mother who had opened the shop and then ran it after his father, who suffered from poor health, had lost his job as a salesman for a paper company, a position held brie¯y by Oskar's father too. grew up with Conditions were cramped in their small ¯at where the young Gunter his younger sister. As he tries to explain to his twin sons who had bene®ted from their father's wealth in the prosperous FRG of the postwar Economic Miracle: I did not have my own room but instead the space underneath the righthand window ledge. You have got one each now that we have divided the quarrelling because you have turned into such different twins. And my sister, whom you call Gotte in your Swiss-German (and who as a midwife has meanwhile helped about seven thousand children into the world) occupied the space underneath the lefthand sitting-room window ledge. Now Franz is hammering against the dividing wall because Raoul with a metal ®le. Apart from that we only had the bedroom, in which we and our parents. `Right', I said, èach of you will get his own room'. And my father said on Sunday: `You shall have something better as soon as the war is over. We will get a three-roomed ¯at in Schidlitz'. You see, when I was twelve and my sister Waltraut nine, I heard, because I lay awake in the dark, everything: the continuing quarrel, the noises of love-making in the bed, and the sound of the parents sleeping. You two have got what I did not have: a square room in which you can think your thoughts and imagine things to yourselves. (But I too thought my thoughts and imagined things to myself underneath my window ledge.) VII:265±6 This lack of privacy is one explanation for Oskar seeing and hearing his parents at their most intimate moments. There was no room for secrets. It also taught Grass how to concentrate, by escaping into his own world by blocking off outside noises sees another remarkable parallel between Grass and while reading. Schlondorff Oskar, the eternal three-year-old who stops growing in order to keep the world at realises that the author's reticence on bay. Once the ®lm was ®nished, Schlondorff set was due to shyness rather than disapproval, as he and the actors had feared: `We misunderstood this attitude at the time. He keeps people at a distance, puts distance between himself and others, like Oskar Matzerath, a self-portrait in this respect too.'15 Grass ®nally got his own room at the age of 24 ± and then it was nothing ¯at. more than a converted bathroom in an overcrowded postwar Dusseldorf Helene Grass (1898±1954) left by far the greater mark on her son. The chapter in My Century for 1927, his own year of birth, is dedicated mostly to her and her love of music and dance. In the last chapter he even brings her back to life so that she can meet his children and grandchildren and see what her talented son has made of his life. There is something very moving in the way that this world famous author still, in his seventies, wants to share his world with his mother who died too soon, above all to show her what he has done and thereby gain her approval. He told Nicole Casanova in 1977 that he remembered her ìn her mid-thirties [. . .] plump,



Life and Art 11

sentimental, with a great sense of humour and a fertile imagination, with a good head for business, a petty-bourgeois woman of peasant origins'.16 He recalls that she shopped with Jewish tradesmen right up to the beginning of the war. As she liked operettas, took her son to the theatre, `liked to give her passions free rein' (MC:100), and was a Catholic Cassubian, it is easy to recognise Oskar's `poor mama' in her, especially in view of her suffering in the last ten years of her life. The games of Skat, which assume such importance in the relationship between Agnes and Oskar's `two putative fathers', Jan and Alfred, were played between Grass's own parents and the ill-fated ùncle Franz'. Fiction is of course not identical with autobiography, but ®rst novels are very often a reckoning with the experiences of youth ± The Tin Drum is constructed as a ®ctional memoir. Grass displaces his own childhood feelings for his parents in his portrayal of the parental triangle in the novel. All Oskar's sympathy is with his mother, whose death when he is 13 he mourns for the rest of his life. His favourite father is undoubtedly the Polish Jan who also dies before his time. The German Nazi father, who survives longest, is delivered by his son into the hands of the avenging Red Army and is shot as he chokes on his Party badge which Oskar has maliciously jabbed into his open hand. Grass has combined his personal feelings with political and national considerations which in turn were shaped by what had happened to him. When he was re-united with his mother after the war he found her prematurely aged, physically and mentally broken: A woman who had learnt fear, who had lost the basis of her existence, her native country, her home, and who had been assigned to live, with her husband and my sister, with a Rhineland farmer who put them in a barn. She tried nonetheless to make the best of it with what remained of her natural character. She experienced ± which I did not ± the occupation of Danzig by the Soviet Army, she was raped by Russian soldiers ± in part a matter of endurance, in part of her giving herself to them on a regular basis in order to protect my sister who was thirteen at the time.17 Michael Minden remarks of The Flounder that `three rapes mark out the architectonic shape of the book'.18 The awful action in the notorious `Father's Day' chapter, an allegorical intensi®cation of all past brutality in the German past, is a simulated rape. Oskar's apparently nonchalant depiction of Lina Greff's gang rape by Soviet soldiers, who spare the younger Maria because she is holding a small child on her lap, must be a displaced representation of an event which he rarely mentions. In countless other cases similarly dreadful experiences generated life-long resentment, which makes it one of the more remarkable features of Grass's life and career that his sense of justice triumphed over this grief. Albert Camus famously explained his allegiance during the Algerian War of Independence by saying that if he had to choose between justice and his mother, he would choose his mother, a poor pied noir washerwoman. Confronted with a similar choice in comparable circumstances this fellow Nobel Laureate chose justice. Helene did not live long enough to share her son's success, a fact he has expressed




great regrets about, especially since he feels he owes his love of books and the arts to her: Ì had always wanted to prove something to her; but it was not until her death that the impulse was set free' (XV:324). Conjured back to life in My Century Helene Grass reveals that her late teenage years were marked by tragedy. She lost her father at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914. Two of her three brothers, both of whom had artistic ambitions, were killed in France: Òne of them painted and the other even had poems published in the newspaper' (MC:375). Her third brother died of venereal disease during the war and her mother of a broken heart before it was over, leaving Helene and her sister, barely 20 years old, to cope by themselves. She says of her son that he could `tell the most convincing lies and make wonderful promises' (MC:374), assuring her he would take her anywhere in the world when he was grown up and rich, even as far as Naples. She never got that far, not even to Berlin to see the Tiller-Girls, but once, towards the end of the 1930s, she left her husband in charge of the shop to take part in a Strength-through-Joy trip to the Salzkammergut. Grass borrowed the name of his mother's poetically inclined brother when he published a collection of short prose pieces in 1968, indicating that his uncle's lost talent had been somehow channelled through him. His mother had been a member of a reading circle and possessed a small library kept in two small bookcases, where, behind glass doors veiled by curtains, he found: à Dostoevsky, a Tolstoy, but also a Rasputin and the Women, Ef® Briest, Go sta Berling, and The Battle for Rome by Felix Dahn'.19 In The Tin Drum this library belongs to the baker's wife, Gretchen Schef¯er. She and Agnes drool over Rasputin and the Women, which like The Battle for Rome, enjoyed immense popularity in the interwar years. Both books are favourites of Oskar's. As a boy Grass had to read whatever he could lay his hands on. This sometimes amused his mother: I will never again be able to read like I used to read as a fourteen-year-old: so absolutely. (To prove to an aunt that her son was elsewhere in his mind, my mother passed me a bar of soap instead of the piece of bread with plum spread. They both enjoyed the joke.) VII:81 Even under the Nazis a young bookworm could ®nd exciting reading matter: èven bad books are books and therefore holy' (III:111), remarks Oskar, painfully aware of the narrow frame of his own cultural reference. Grass mentions two very different literary accounts of World War One: Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, banned by the Nazis and lent him surreptitiously by an uncle, and Ernst Junger's Storms of Steel, prescribed reading at school. The contrast between glori®cation impressed Remarque's paci®st condemnation of war and Junger's him: 60 years later he confronts the two authors with one another in an imaginary meeting in My Century. At school, a young art mistress showed him prewar catalogues of banned artists such as Picasso, Barlach, and the Blauer Reiter Expressionists. He recalls that she only paid attention to the two or three boys in the class interested in art, letting the others play cards in her lessons. These disturbing Modernist images, like the fate of his



Life and Art 13


mother's Cassubian relations, pricked a sense in him that other worlds existed beyond the con®nes of his Nazi-saturated environment:

From an even earlier age cinema had been another means of escape. His weekly pocket money suf®ced for two trips to the picture house, as long as he walked each way rather than catch the tram. An uncle Walther, who worked as an usher, decided that his little nephew could see the ®lms intended for much older viewers, which must have cultivated his life-long thrill of breaking taboos (XVI:420±2). Young Gunter was, by his own admission, an erratic pupil who pursued the subjects which interested him (German, history, geography, drawing) and responded to individual teachers, who tended to be older men not needed at the Front. The regime of a wartime Gymnasium, while not as strict as one might imagine, did not bring out the best in him ± one reason he became, as an adult, a champion of comprehensive education. Socially, however, he is what the British would call a typical `grammar-school boy'. His parents had made sacri®ces to enable both their children to have a better chance in life and their son was well aware he was learning subjects they knew little about. Not only could they not help him with his homework, they could not afford to pay for extra private lessons, as common then in German middle-class homes as they are now. It is perhaps surprising that class does not constitute much of a theme in Grass's writing ± as it would have done had he been born British. The German national experience and the allegiance to his own generation loom far larger. But like many ambitious young men from modest backgrounds, he married above himself. Anna Schwarz's Swiss parents were very de®nitely bourgeois, in contrast to his own. Proving to them that their artistically inclined daughter, who had dreams of becoming a dancer until she got pregnant, had not thrown herself away on a bohemian good-for-nothing whose parents had lived above their shop, was a motivating factor when writing The Tin Drum. In Max Frisch's recollections of a family visit, there is a sense that the unknown novelist-to-be was compensating for his insecurity through ostentatious display. Persuading his own parents of the merits of his ambition would have been one thing; persuading his in-laws quite another: they invited a leading Swiss German writer to dinner in order to check him out. Frisch himself does not seem to have appreciated this Grass's angle to the evening (see p. 24). But, in general, if there is a chip on Gunter shoulder, it can be put down to education and his perceived lack of it rather than to his lowly origins. Not having studied for a university degree, not even having completed an Abitur, made him stand out in the circles in which he soon began to move. As postwar West Germany was socially ¯uid, its class system smashed after the upheaval of two world wars, where you came from did not count for much. Being a refugee, being 17 in 1945, remembering supporting the Nazis as a schoolboy, all counted for far more. School was a different world in other respects. Two of his teachers tussled with the Nazis, one fatally. Dr. Stachnik, who taught Latin, survived long enough to respond



It didn't convince me but it didn't let go of me either. It was a real breakthrough into a realm which interested me far more than the Jungvolk or the Hitlerjugend or the Catholic Church ± the realm of art.20

Life and Art 15

a dry conservative schoolmaster who [. . .] drummed history into us by walking up and down as he lectured. He made the chaos of the Thirty Years' War even more confusing with phrases such as `We have every reason to doubt that . . .' or Ònce more there are grounds for scepticism'. Then suddenly, shortly before or after Stalingrad, he would make a leap into the present and rouse us from our semi-slumber by saying: `The German people is like a ¯ock of sheep right up to the high command of the Wehrmacht.'21 Here was a brave, questioning individual who refused to accept that the world was as the Nazis said. Whereas Grass claims he has a very healthy `mother complex', his adolescent feelings towards `her husband' were the same, he believes, as all male children to their progenitors: When I was ®fteen I wanted to murder my father in thoughts, words, and deeds with a Hitler Youth dagger. (From generation to generation the intention remains the same, only the objects of the act change.) VII:81 Wilhelm Grass (1899±1979), who survived his wife by 25 years, opposed his son's ambition to become an artist and then compounded this failing by claiming to have believed in his talents all along once he had become famous ± though it appears he ®nancially supported his son (with a modest monthly allowance) until the age of 30 when he could live from his writing. It is remarkable how many of Grass's ®ctional ®gures have either no father or a very distant relationships with them. Only Matern, for instance, sees his father after the war. Those born the same year as Grass belong to the `fatherless' or `parentless generation', wrenched from home at an early age. Apart from Fonty's immediate rapport with his rediscovered French granddaughter, there is no example in Grass's ®ction of a ful®lled relationship across the generations. In his later ®ction he shifts his focus to the parents whose children are more or less estranged from them. In The Call of the Toad (1992) the 20- and 30somethings show no interest in their parents' great project to reconcile Germans to Poles and Poles to Lithuanians in the wake of the joyful events of 1989. They are shallow and sel®sh to the point of being self-obsessed. Fonty's surviving sons in Too Far A®eld are equally uncomprehending of their father's glorious eccentricities. This generational antipathy has no basis in Grass's own life, however. His letters to Helen Wolff teem with detailed and loving comments on his children and grandchildren.



to what his former pupil wrote about him in The Flounder 30 years later. As a Catholic liberal, he had been chairman of the Danzig Centre Party and he saw the inside of Stutthof more than once. The other teacher never returned from the camp and Grass's memory of him fed into his portrayal of both Oswald Brunies in Dog Years and Hermann Ott alias Doctor Doubt in From the Diary of a Snail. His lessons nourished Grass's nascent interest in the past as well as giving him food for thought on more immediate matters:

At the age of eighteen Grass was suddenly pitched into the middle of what he called `the uncharted preserve for beasts of prey which goes by the name of freedom' (VII:81). He had no food, no money and no job, and made a living by trading in jam to his compatriots and Nazi trinkets to American soldiers on the black market. He worked in a potash mine in the winter of 1946±47 and lived all the while in makeshift accommodation like most of the German population, especially the refugees from the eastern provinces. Like all Germans of his age he knows poverty and hunger, but was determined to realise his long cherished ambition of becoming an artist, one wish which had survived all the upheavals. His gift for drawing had helped him gain a few meagre privileges both as an infantryman in the Wehrmacht and as a POW. In both cases he was able to draw pin-ups or portraits of ®ance es for of®cers ± whether German or American. This was his ®rst experience of a change of regime and he survived it, like the characters in his ®ction, by carrying on pretty much as before. Grass considers his own life to have been shaped by a number of accidents, the accident of his year of birth and the accident of his survival, then the accident of his prodigious fame, which he has both endured and exploited and which has brought material bene®ts and personal anguish, sometimes in equal measure. If 1945 is the year of his most profound experience, then 1959, when he became the ®rst and greatest literary star in the Federal Republic, is the year of his second great turning point. His success and the fame that accompanied it came as a surprise: My initial career intentions lay in the direction of art. I wanted to be either a sculptor or a graphic artist. I may have written, and my writing was important, but I never actually thought that it could possibly be my main job for such a long time. And then when I published my ®rst volume of verse in 1956, there was no possibility as far I was concerned that I would ever make a so-called name for myself as a prose author. The third point is that, like all my generation, which had gone through the period of National Socialism and was shaped, positively and negatively, by it, I had a pronounced interest in politics. But I never thought that I would get this famous name [. . .] as a novelist, a writer and that I would have the opportunity of using it to support a political party in politically dif®cult times.22 Few famous people know they are going to become famous and few in the history of literature have achieved such fame so suddenly and lived and worked for so long in the spotlight of media attention. Grass has been ®nancially independent since this date, rich enough to support not only a large family but to employ a full-time secretary since 1963 and to fund numerous good causes. Unlike most of his contemporary fellow writers, he has never had to earn his living by writing reviews or screenplays or teaching in universities. Grass always states precisely which year his characters were born and proceeds to insert the successive stages of their lives into the bloody tapestry of recent German history. In order of age his principal ®ctional ®gures are: Hermann Ott (From the Diary of a Snail) 1905; Eddi Amsel and Walter Matern (Dog Years) 1917; Wuttke alias Fonty and his eternal shadow, Hoftaller/Tallhover (Too Far A®eld) 1919; Oskar 1924;




Mahlke (Cat and Mouse) 1926; Pilenz (Cat and Mouse), Liebenau, Tulla, Jenny Brunies (Dog Years), Starusch and Irmgard Seifert (Local Anaesthetic), Alexander Reschke (The Ë Call of the Toad) all 1927; Sibylle Miehlau (The Flounder) 1929, Alexandra Piatkowska (The Call of the Toad) 1930, and Damroka (The Rat) 1933. The lives of characters born after the war are embedded in postwar history to a similar degree. Their year of birth is again the starting point for a shared generational experience. Philip Scherbaum and Veronika Lewand, the would-be revolutionary sixth-formers in Local Anaesthetic, and Maria Kuczorra, the last of 11 women in The Flounder, are born in the same year as the two postwar German states were created, 1949. We can date the birth of Peters from Headbirths to be approximately 1945. Fonty's four Harm and Dorte children are also born between 1945±51. Grass's youngest main character, Madeleine Aubron in Too Far A®eld, entered the world in another year of upheaval and generational con¯ict: 1968. My Century shows once more how the lives of ordinary folk intersected with the great events of the last 100 years. The great majority are biographical stories. Biography, meaning primarily in this context what an individual did between 1933±45 and ± no less tellingly ± how he or she regarded that period afterwards, was a measure of judgement in postwar FRG politics. This is why Grass weighs his friends and foes in the balance of their personal histories and their understanding of these experiences. He discusses Willy Brandt's biography (1913±92) constantly in the 1965 election campaign. In 1969 he contrasts Brandt's de®ance of the Nazis with the career of his opponent for the Chancellorship, Dr Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1904±88). Kiesinger had been a member of the NSDAP from 1933 and had worked under Goebbels in radio propaganda. This meant that `while he was covering up for Nazi crimes with his propaganda work, the last Danzig Jews were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, to Auschwitz, to Theresienstadt' (VII:215), as Grass comments in his account of the election. When Konrad Adenauer attacked Brandt in his infamous `Brandt alias Frahm' speech in August 1961 by emphasising his illegitimate birth and resistance to the Nazis, Grass decided to lend his energies to Brandt's election campaign. Thus began one of the more remarkable friendships in German political history. It was anger at the outrageousness of Adenauer's remarks which initially propelled him into the public realm. Kiesinger had à good war' and was promoted quickly. Adenauer subsequently sponsored his postwar career, like those of many other ex-Nazis, partly because of his abilities, partly because, with a `brown past', he was in no position to pose a threat to his political patron, and partly because Adenauer simply thought it did not matter. One individual in particular came to symbolise all that was wrong with the way that the postwar CDU-Government ignored the relevance of the recent past when it came to its own personnel. His name was Dr Hans Maria Globke and he had drafted the Nazis' Nuremberg Race Laws and then helped put them into practice. After 1945 he was held in custody for less than a year before becoming an advisor to Adenauer on appointments to the Civil Service. According to Tom Bower, `Globke's recommendations, which Adenauer accepted, re¯ected his own past.'23 Grass mentions Globke at every opportunity in his election speeches of the 1960s. In Dog Years, Matern goes so far as to say that Globke had been the secret Chancellor



Life and Art 17

throughout the Adenauer years: so much of German public and business life was run by former Nazis. This second republic in German history, which concentrated on economic restoration, refused to recognise its new eastern borders or the loss of territory to Poland and the Soviet Union. It also insisted on the sole right `to represent' in legal terms the former regime, demanding, at least on paper, the restitution of the 1937 borders. The republic's founding act, which cemented the division between what became the two German states, had in fact already taken place by May 1949: with the currency reform of June 1948 the new Deutsche Mark replaced the worthless Reichsmark in the three western zones. Economics took priority over politics, a sequence, so Grass argued, repeated in 1990 when currency union preceded political uni®cation, this time by four months. After the currency reform goods appeared for sale in shop windows as if by magic: the Economic Miracle had begun. Grass's memory of the event is perhaps a little too emblematic to be completely true. He recalls patching up the bomb-damaged facade of the Dresdener Bank in Dusseldorf and managing to peer through a crack in the walls to see the piles of new currency being carefully counted, put into bundles, and piled high ready for distribution.24 In 1955 the FRG established its own army, drawing on the expertise of Wehrmacht veterans, joined NATO, and began to rearm. For a while it even looked as if it would join the exclusive club of nuclear powers a mere 15 years after Hitler's defeat. The intellectual class, who congregated around Hans Werner Richter in the Gruppe 47, felt increasingly disillusioned by the lack of `new beginning', a failure not recti®ed for 20 years until Brandt's 1969 election victory. What Grass had learnt personally after 1945, his nation, or the remaining FRG rump of it, had to learn too. In the 1960s he preached the lessons of failed democracy in the Weimar Republic, whose institutions had been too weak and too poorly supported to resist Hitler. Most of all there was a democratic de®cit which had to be made up. One lesson was to avoid all extremes and all expressions of absolute faith. For Grass the ¯ip side of fanatical idealism is melancholic resignation, a nonproductive, volatile form of fatalism which can have equally explosive consequences. If, however, politics can be modest in its aims, hopes scaled down, then disillusionment and melancholy can be averted. These were Grass's central tenets in his campaign speeches for Brandt and during the student crisis of the late 1960s. There are many in Germany who found his biography and what grew from it admirable in the 20 years which separated The Tin Drum (1959) from The Meeting in Telgte (1979), through the period as Brandt's vociferous supporter and public nuisance to the renewed literary success in the wake of The Flounder (1977). Up to Brandt's resignation in May 1974, Grass's public wanted and needed to read about the Nazi past. The battles he fought with the CDU and assorted reactionaries and exNazis were necessary battles. The role he played in 1968 when student activism reached its peak was arguably unique. Grass had become an institution by 1969, still something of menace to the stuffy and staid, a bogyman for the conservative and the provincial, but a pillar of the liberal establishment which took power after Brandt's epoch-making election victory. It would have been entirely ®tting in May 1979 had he accepted President Walter Scheel's offer of a Bundesverdienstkreuz, one of the very




highest distinctions in the republic. Ten years previously, Die Zeit had likened him to an heraldic beast on the nation's coat of arms or a national brand image as famous as the Mercedes star.25 He had moved with the tide of history: indeed he had helped to propel it forward himself, and his life story is part of the heroic narrative of the modern liberal German state, which has its own Whig version of the recent past. From Grass's mid-50s, however, with his campaigning against atomic missiles, his anti-American outbursts, his disenchantment with the FRG's version of technological capitalism, and his opposition to reuni®cation culminating in Too Far A®eld (1995), which generated the most hostile media storm ever to greet a work of German ®ction, Grass has found himself on the sidelines. His foes put this down to a radicalisation in middle age, making him one of those rare ®gures in public life who grow more committed with the years rather than less. But what is most striking in his writing of the last 40 years is his consistency. He campaigns for what he believes to be right and by 1980 the world was a different place then in 1960 or 1970. New battles had to be fought. Others of his generation had made their peace, however, with the ruling FRG consensus by then. Grass stood out because he was not yet ready to do so. In 1983 he called on young German men to boycott military conscription because of Cruise and Pershing missiles stationed on German soil. Three years later he turned his back on Germany to live for six months in Calcutta; in 1989 he resigned from the Academy of Arts, whose president he had been from 1983±86, in protest against their treatment of Salman Rushdie; in 1992 he tore up his SPD membership card because of the party's U-turn on asylum policy. Newspaper critics became increasingly sour in their treatment of his novels: The Rat (1986) is not as great a novel as The Flounder, Too Far A®eld more ponderous an undertaking than The Tin Drum, but the quality of his work was not really the issue. In 1990 the people of the GDR voted ®rst for the West with their feet, then for Helmut Kohl at the ballot box. What Grass had to say did not seem relevant any longer ± to West Germans at least. This has not stopped him nagging from the periphery, as one of the last Germans with a memory of 1933±45. There were signs as the 1990s neared their end that he and his public were moving closer together, however. Like many other liberals he reluctantly supported the NATO action in Kosovo. One of the themes of Too Far A®eld is that the German past might well ®nally be òver' and that a `normalisation' might at last be possible. The tone of My Century is no longer suffused with the anger which had animated his work from The Rat onwards. Yet reactions in Germany to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 were often grudging, the praise stinted. His and Thomas Mann, had not fared immediate German predecessors, Heinrich Boll any better. On the contrary, contemporory Germany's love-hate relationship with its greatest living writer has its roots deep in the twentieth century.

Multi-talented art student He turned up at the conference in 1955 in Berlin, a young man I did not know. An editor from a publishing house insisted to me at the very last minute that I had to send him an invitation by telegram.



Life and Art 19


Me: `What do you want?' Grass: Ì was sent a telegram'. Me: `You'. Grass: `Yes, me. My name is Gunter Grass'.

Me: `The sculptor?'

Grass: `Yes, I'm a sculptor as well'.

Then after pausing to cast a glance over the assembled participants, he said: `What sort of club is this?' Me: `The Gruppe 47'. Grass: Ì've never heard of it'. Then right at the end of the meeting he read his poem `Polish Flag' and they liked it. Hans Werner Richter26 Sheer determination carried Grass through the cold and hungry postwar years ± in de®ance of his father, who wanted him to earn a more conventional living. After his year in the potash mine, he served part of an apprenticeship in the winter of 1947±48 designing gravestones, just like Oskar in The Tin Drum, while waiting for the Dusseldorf Art Academy to re-open. Here he studied from 1948 to 1952. His very ®rst artistic me tiers were those of sculptor, working mainly in clay and bronze, and graphic artist, using ink, charcoal and water colours, and producing lithographs, etchings and woodcuts. His publisher's ®rst publicity revealed that he had played in a three-man jazz band during his Dusseldorf days. Word soon spread that he was an accomplished cook, which helped explain why the texture and smell of food suffused his writing, a constant feature from 1956 to the present, and a passionate dancer, who had married a ballerina, the Swiss-German Anna Schwarz, with whom he had four children between 1957 and 1965. All this added up to an impression of a bon viveur and multi-talented artist, equally at home in a variety of genres and ®elds of composition. À sculptor who wrote beautiful poems' is how the Gruppe 47 thought of him, according to Hans Mayer.27 In spite of these varied accomplishments Grass has often been taken for an autodidact, bursting with creative energy and raw natural talent but lacking that academic ®nesse which comes from a university education. His critics' insinuation is that he is not properly versed in the German literary and philosophical tradition, that his public interventions are often lightweight as a result, his treatment of the ideas of such ®gures as Hegel and Schopenhauer (in From the Diary of a Snail) or Heidegger (in Dog Years) not worth serious attention. Consequently he could never be a worthy inheritor of the erudition embodied by writers such as Thomas Mann. The rather rough-and-ready, self-taught Gelnhausen, who gives the assembled rhetoricians and



À sculptor, a beginner', he said, `rather mad but highly talented [. . .].'

Grass walked into the room where the readings One or two hours later Gunter were to take place. There was an audacious look to him, but he also gave the impression of having fallen on hard times and reminded me of a gypsy begging for money. I wanted to throw him out. I cannot remember any more exactly what I said, but the conversation went something like this.

Life and Art 21

Some critics took him to be naturally gifted, which was meant negatively rather then positively, but to this day I do not actually know what `naturally gifted' means. Either you are gifted or you are not. And if you are, then it is always natural. Academic education never hatches out a gift. What struck me early on was something else, however. For me, he had a sort of genius for with Gunter learning. I could observe how quickly he came to cope with his new environment, quite unprepared, quite ignorant of everything to do with it. I think when it came to knowledge of literature he caught up with the others at great speed; soon he knew his way round the literature of the 1920s and in a few years he had grown into an eloquent critic. May be the Gruppe 47 was a sort of school for him, a peculiar sort of school perhaps, but nevertheless a school. I can only guess how hard he must have worked in those ®rst years, I cannot prove it. [. . .] If I were a teacher, I would have to praise him as my best pupil.28 It is true that even when Grass attended his ®rst meeting in 1955 he was one of a minority of participants who had no university degree behind them. He was caught between the generations in this respect, as the founding Group members, 10 and 20 years his senior, had also been largely self-taught ± Richter himself (1908±93), Walter Kolbenhoff (1908±93), Alfred Andersch (1914±80), who grew to loathe Grass for his (1917±85), Wolfdietrich effortless success and the fame that went with it, Boll Schnurre (1920±89), and Grass's arch-rival, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920±), born in Poland to mixed German-Polish Jewish parentage, whose school career was interrupted by the Nazis rather more cruelly than Grass's own. Grass's immediate contemporaries, on the other hand, paraded impressive lists of quali®cations: the critic and publisher Klaus Wagenbach (1929±), who became a close friend, had written a PhD on Kafka, as had the novelist Martin Walser (1927±); the poets Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929±) and Ingeborg Bachmann (1926±73) also had doctorates in literature or philosophy; Uwe Johnson (1934±84), whom Grass admired most, was a former student of Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer at the University (1929±) had degrees in of Leipzig. Both Siegfried Lenz (1926±) and Peter Ruhmkorf literature and philosophy. By the time the Gruppe 47 folded in 1967, the proportion of university-educated to non-university educated was even higher. It was not ever thus in literary circles: Mann famously failed his Abitur, Bertolt Brecht never studied, and Goethe left university without a degree. Fontane, the hero of Grass's later years, left school similarly unquali®ed and started an apprenticeship. In Grass's case, the charge of autodidacticism misses the point. He himself proudly turns a perceived defect into a virtue and argues that his lack of quali®cations saved him from a frustrating professional existence which could easily have prevented him from exploring his talents. Living off little more than his wits until the age of 31



scholar-poets a lesson in life in The Meeting in Telgte, has been taken all too readily to be a self-portrait in this respect. Richter, the founder and chairman of the Gruppe 47 and one of a series of mentor as well as Willy ®gures to the young Grass, which included the editor Walter Hollerer Brandt, explains:

went with the territory, so to speak, of what he had chosen to do. Yet while his education was obviously disrupted by the war, he did have an opportunity to take his Abitur afterwards. He opted to take a different route and from 1948 to 1956 went tutors, Otto Pankok and Sepp to art school instead of university. His Dusseldorf Mages, whom he lightly satirises in The Tin Drum, left their mark on him and he has often taken the opportunity to express his gratitude. The Expressionist Pankok (1893±1966), whom Grass remembers as a distant but nonetheless impressive personality, is famous for his portraits of gypsies and Jews. He had fallen foul of the Nazis, who put his work into the notorious exhibition of Degenerate Art in 1937.29 After four years at the Dusseldorf Academy, Grass moved in January 1953 to the Academy of Fine Arts in West Berlin to study under Karl Hartung: it was Hartung as much as the former German capital that attracted him. He stayed in Berlin for three years, making a total of seven years of formal study, though as he remarks rather pointedly more than a decade later, Ì was a pupil at this time ± because sculptors and artists do not take degrees' (XIV:285). Whether he counted as pupil or student, he made the best use of his vacations in time-honoured undergraduate fashion, hitchhiking through Italy and France, sketching and writing, visiting galleries and museums. In apparently more idle moments he was developing the ®rst ideas for È nter what grew into The Tin Drum, which began to take up most of his time after Gu and Anna moved to Paris at the start of 1956. Hartung's motto was `Nature ± but consciously' (Natur aber bewuût) and he reprimanded Grass on his ®rst day for the lack of realist detail in his sketch of a ®sh ± in a typically Grassian sequence, the new pupil had ®rst drawn it before cooking and eating it, presumably all in the studio. Hartung told him: Ìnstead of using your eyes to look properly, you have invented ornaments. A herring is more than what you can invent' (XIV:285). Hartung's motto, and the working practice it delineated, in¯uenced Grass's approach to representation in both verse and prose as well as art. Amsel in Dog Years puts his words into practice too. The more signi®cant pattern is evident elsewhere: Grass learns a lesson in art which he applies to literature. It was also while studying with Hartung that he experienced the ®rst great intellectual debate to in¯uence his future thinking: Àt that time in Berlin an embittered battle was raging between ®gurative representational art and non-representational art' (FD:35). There was never much doubt that Grass would react against anything which smacked of 1950s Abstract Expressionism. This had greater consequences for his written works than for his drawings and sculptures: his aversion to all things abstract, whether in art, literature, or political argument, ®rst crystallised here. He followed other debates and movements in the world of art and was sometimes forced to take sides. He says of his ®rst water colours that they `were inspired by a direct encounter with [. . .] Parisian Modernism'. The poems of this period, on the other hand, `derived from the pathos of existentialism transposed into comedy' (FD:19). When he recalls pivotal educational experiences, they have both literary and artistic contexts: I found the names of authors that I had never heard before quite enticing and Dos Passos, Trakl, Apollinaire. The art they took hold of me completely: Doblin,




Life and Art 23

He quotes Kandinsky at the beginning of an essay on poetry, illustrating his points on literature with references to art or dance. Re-discovering the Spanish anti-fascist Picasso, still in exile from Franco, whose work Grass had seen in those forbidden prewar catalogues, is no less signi®cant than reading his literary `master', Alfred for the ®rst time. The Advantages of the Wind-Chickens (1956), sub-titled Doblin, `Poems and Drawings', was the ®rst result of this double interest: While in the years leading up to this, drawing and writing had gone their separate ways, now I allowed myself for the ®rst time to practise my fantastic representationalism in both disciplines; they lived from the same ink. FD:47 When The Tin Drum became the ®rst great landmark in postwar German literature and its author catapulted overnight into the public eye, where he has remained ever since, Grass was already well known to the FRG's literary world. Some the 31-year-old Gunter who knew him were nevertheless surprised to hear he was working on a novel. In addition to his bizarrely titled volume of `poems and drawings', he had written half a dozen plays, four full-length: Flood; Uncle, Uncle; The Wicked Cooks; and Thirty-Two Teeth; two one-acters: Ridden There and Back; and Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo, which had been performed in regional theatres and broadcast on radio. His work had also been published in journals, the newly founded Colloquium, Texte und Zeichen, and Akzente, edited by the and his verse included in anthologies of contemporary lyric poetry. in¯uential Hollerer, His career had started when he won third prize in a poetry competition organised by Èddeutsche Rundfunk, whose editor, the poet and writer Helmut Heissenbuttel, Su had also broadcast his plays. At his ®rst Gruppe 47 meeting he had been recruited immediately by a representative of a major publishing house. Grass recalls: I read and found listeners. I had a piece of luck which would-be writers rarely experience: I did not have to look for a publisher. Luchterhand, in the shape of their editor Peter Frank, knocked on my door [. . .] and gave me time to work on countless sketches for the volume they had agreed to accept. FD:47 Luchterhand remained his publishers for the next 35 years. Some of his critics, eager to score cheap points, have claimed he turned to novelwriting after failing as poet, painter and playwright. While he did not lack recognition in the second half of the 1950s ± he never had to look for outlets for his work ± the fact remains that had he not turned his hand to writing novels when he forsook the art world of Berlin for Paris in 1956, he would be regarded today as a minor poet, as the author of an existential verse manifesto Ìn the Egg', and not a great deal else. It is dif®cult to see that his plays, in¯uenced loosely by French



exhibitions of these years [. . .] opened up whole new worlds to me: Henry Moore or Chagall in Dusseldorf, Picasso in Hamburg. XVI:238


1955±56. I had written myself free. The panel of the Artist Association rejected my drawings because they were representational. No art school could hold me any longer. [. . .] I wrote dramatic scenes, one-acters, in quick succession, the ®rst play Flood, which is mentioned already in a poem in The Wind-Chickens. There followed the plays Uncle, Uncle; The Wicked Cooks; Thirty-Two Teeth, the one-acter Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo and drawings which go with the plays. FD:59 Few had taken much notice of him at the Gruppe 47 meetings held between 1955± 57. One exception was Wolfgang Hildesheimer, another art school boy (from London's Slade), who wrote enthusiastically of Grass's talents to Richter and had also bought a drawing from him for the princely and much needed sum of 100 DM.30 According to Richter, Hildesheimer whispered to him: `You know he's got more talent than all the others. He's going to be very successful.'31 Max Frisch ®rst in 1955. Fifteen years met Grass at a family dinner with his new in-laws in Zurich Grass's senior and already the leading light in contemporary Swiss-German writing, Frisch discovered half-way through the meal that he had been invited to say what he thought of the new precocious talent. He was struck by the unknown 28-year-old's self-con®dence, which bubbled over into a bumptious arrogance which Frisch evidently found less appealing: He obviously does not wear his beret at the table but a raspberry-coloured shirt He is a nephew with open collar makes up for it. Evening in a villa on Zurichberg. of the house, not in awe of the bourgeois porcelain and silver but not interested in conversation; he does not think much of that. Sculptor. What he thinks of the literature that is being written at the moment is already pretty clear by the soup; The Visit. He he does not even want to see a new play by Friedrich Durrenmatt, says he writes plays himself. We carry on with the meal. As I know the friendly house from earlier visits I am wearing a tie, which turns out to put me at a disadvantage when I cotton on to why I have been invited. I can only make polite objections when the host announces that the nephew is going to read afterwards. We are still on the cheese and fruit. The young man who up to this point had the air of someone waiting for his moment seems to ®nd the embarrassment of the older man amusing [. . .] When we get up from the table and go up the stairs for black coffee he takes his manuscript, waits silently on the elegant sofa until everyone has been given a brandy. I repeat my request to read the play at home. Nevertheless he says he is prepared to read just the ®rst act. There are people who can formulate a literary opinion straightaway, but I am not one of them, as I have said. Since his acts, as I am forced to admit, are very short, he reads all of them. A brilliant reader; afterwards he is happy even though I have not understood much.32



Absurdism, would warrant anything more than a footnote in literary histories. He explains that his decision to concentrate on writing was in part dictated by his failure to progress as an artist:

Nobody has ever claimed that Grass lacked con®dence in his own abilities. He admits himself he could appear cocky and on Frisch's death in 1991 he praised the older man's patience with his youthful arrogance. Another older author he encountered in Switzerland was Alfred Andersch, who had just published Zanzibar or the Last Reason, a minor postwar classic set among a group of Germans ¯eeing from the Nazis. Grass has repeatedly criticised the way the Nazis are referred to simply as `the others' in this book, while the refugees are described precisely and sympathetically. In 1998 he recalled that às a young author I was uninhibited and had no hesitation informing the imperious Alfred Andersch of my misgivings'. Andersch reacted `bad-temperedly' and said that he did not want to have anything to do with these `criminals'. But Grass could not leave it at that: Ì was so disrespectful and impudent that I said: but as a writer you have no choice.'33 The rift between the two never healed.

Artistic cross-connections Grass has continued to write poems all through his career, although after his third volume, Exhaustively Questioned (1967), they have been subordinated to his prose work. Verse is the genre where he will try out new themes and ideas, gather and test himself, allow himself more freedom before committing motifs and ®gures to a narrative. Poetry and graphic art are domains for re¯ection, rejuvenation and renewed selfdiscovery. After the press furore triggered by Too Far A®eld, he announced that, for the ®rst time in decades, he was taking up water colours on his Danish retreat on the Baltic Island of Mùn ± his way of escaping the media and relaxing. The result was the enchanting Findings for Non-Readers, which juxtaposes poems with pictures. When exploring a new idea, verse and graphics sometimes work hand in hand in an essentially supporting role to prose. Thus when he began work on The Flounder: `Poems and drawings encircled the theme, setting down marker posts in unchartered territory. Short prose to try out the ideas followed' (FD:159). Following the precedent set by The Tin Drum and From the Diary of a Snail, both The Flounder and The Rat contain numerous poems, and Show Your Tongue (1988), a far less signi®cant book, is divided into wholly separate prose and verse sections. Yet apart from Inmarypraise (1974), a poem followed by photo-montages by Maria Rama, Novemberland (1993), 13 sonnets interspersed with a matching number of sepia drawings, was the ®rst completely independent poetic publication for 25 years. The pattern with drama is even more sharply accentuated. Grass wrote his last play, a dramatic version of the middle section from Local Anaesthetic, in 1969. Of the two secondary literary genres, verse thus is the more important in terms of his complete oeuvre. The diachronic connections within and between the various genres and media are highly revealing of his creative method. There are continuities everywhere one looks. It is as if he stored up a treasure trove of images and associations in his earliest years which he has plundered ever since. The plays too feature ®gures and themes, often on the periphery of the dramatic action, which recur sometimes decades later in other contexts. The two rats in Flood discuss human attitudes towards them in much the same way as Grass elaborates in The Rat some 30 years later. But it was the poem, `Racine has his Coat of Arms changed', which encapsulates the dualist idea of



Life and Art 25

allowing the sublime and beautiful (the swan ± le cygne) and the grotesque and ugly (le rat) to exist side by side. The allegorical idea is cited in Cat and Mouse and reworked in The Rat 25 years afterwards. The forested world of the fairy-tale ®gures of Hansel and Gretel, ®rst of signi®cance in The Flounder and developed into one of the main narrative strands of The Rat, is evoked on stage in act two of Uncle, Uncle. Vasco da Gama, the `spice fetishist' (II:158), who became a key character in the third chapter of The Flounder, appears in The Wicked Cooks. This play gives the ®rst indication of how food, cooking and ingredients will supply a life-long source of imagery and associations, which Grass elaborates most fully in The Flounder. The links between the plays and the earlier prose works are even more numerous. Motifs, images and objects which feature in poetry, prose and drama provide him with ample artistic material. Cooks, nuns and scarecrows, hens and cockerels, snails and rats, ®sh and mushrooms, and occasionally human ®gures from his texts populate his drawings, which are by no means illustrations of novels, poems and plays. Not all of his prose works spawned graphic images, however. There are surprisingly few for The Tin Drum. Of episodes and images from other texts, only a minority merit artistic treatment. The number and variety of mushrooms, which corresponds to a section of the sixth chapter of The Flounder, is out of all proportion to the length of that speci®c section, which may nevertheless enjoy prominence in poetic terms ± the motif crops up again in Too Far A®eld. This suggests that in relation to his literary writings his artistic activity is most important during composition. It thus takes on a more private and experimental dimension. His other me tiers, particularly that of sculptor, also in¯uence his method of composition since he likes to work on all sections of a novel at once. Sculpture taught him that if he alters one detail he will have to alter lots of others. The patterned plans for the novels, which read like convoluted word pictures, show how individual motifs, ideas and episodes all ®t together like building blocks. Grass has always stressed the interdependence of literary and visual representation: Graphic art is more exact. It refuses to be seduced by the sound of the words [. . .] It is not until a verbal metaphor has been translated into a visual image that I can test whether it is going to be any good. XV:499 In terms of content the interdependence is easy to see: the poem `The Scarecrows', for example, elucidates in nuce the scarecrow theme of Dog Years. Drawings of scarecrows, some in preparation for a ballet, testify to the hold the motif exerted over his imagination during this period. What emerges, however, from study of the whole complex, is that the novel represents by far the most extensive exploration of the meanings which accrue to this particular motif ± the need for a totemic ideological symbol to assert communal identity. It is as if the scarecrow drawings, like the many images of Fonty and Hoftaller, which he produced while writing Too Far A®eld, form the novel's aesthetic or creative core. The relationship between Fonty and his Stasi shadow is at the centre of the novel and possesses as many nuances, explored over some 800 pages, as Grass drew sketches. This general pattern is repeated again and




again: his ®ctional prose ultimately takes ®rst place, invariably the site of his fullest expression, even if drawings and sculptures were completed ®rst. Short prose, more prose poem than short story, is another form he tried out in this early period, and his relative lack of success here is instructive for an assessment of the other two secondary genres. The ®rst example to be published, `Five Birds', was included in The Wind-Chickens, placed alongside the 41 poems and 11 drawings. In 1968, at the pinnacle of his fame, he played a trick on his public by publishing 13 short prose pieces entitled Stories under the pseudonym of Artur Knoff. This was the name of his uncle who had been killed in France in 1917 and whose stories the young Grass had discovered in the family attic.34 A mustachioed Anna Grass in men's clothes and masculine pose adorns the cover: Knoff himself is said to be a refugee from Silesian Hirschberg, born ten years after Grass himself. Grass knew that the critics always expected some kind of `Super-Tin Drum' and wanted to `protect' his must also have wanted to see what stories. He and his publisher, this time Hollerer, would happen if his famous name was not attached to his work. The result was entirely predictable: the slim volume was barely noticed. The fact is that the stories are not intrinsically good enough to excite interest. Stories' pseudonymous publication raises another question, however: who is the Grass? The blurb on the inside cover of Stories echoes the title poem from real Gunter Wind-Chickens: A brief text which expresses poetic principles precedes these stories. It ends with the words: `We can be read out loud. We are stories stories.' The emphasis on the repetition of the word `stories' is more than just a statement with a purely literary meaning. It encapsulates the experience of being a tiny story next to other tiny stories, of leading a life dependent on them and being able to offer resistance only by re¯ecting this fact in writing with a curved hand. Writing of this kind does not engage directly with politics, while Grass was doing little else in 1968. It does not aim to be judged on its content or `message' but ¯oats above and beyond the maelstrom of ideologies and parties. It was some 12 years before Grass's authorship of Stories accidentally emerged. If it was a trick it may have worked up to a point, but it remains the case that the stories only assume a value when we know they are written by the author of The Tin Drum. The same is true, with some quali®cations, for many of the poems. It is true also of the plays with the great exception of The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, which succeeds, like his novels, by dint of its arresting political and historical subject matter: the imagined dilemmas faced by Bertolt Brecht during the workers' revolt of 17 June 1953 in the German Democratic Republic. For that reason it is the only play by Grass which got close to becoming part of the international repertoire. The extremely personal character of the imagery in his verse often led critics and reviewers of the early poems to claim that Grass was an incomprehensible poet whose work simply resisted interpretation. In an in¯uential portrait of the new novelist, Klaus Wagenbach even characterised The Tin Drum in this way too.35 As a consequence only a handful of his poems, mainly those with direct links to the



Life and Art 27

novels or those with a clear line of narrative, gained much recognition. Those such as `Flood', `The Plague of Flies', `Tin Music', and the two four-liners `Gasag' and `Stadium by Night', `Diana and the Objects', `Nursery Rhyme', `Pan Kiehot', and Ìn the Egg' were frequently cited and anthologised. The autobiographical `Kleckerburg' is one of his most moving. Others which offer as great or arguably greater insights into his creative mind, and do so possibly in more subtle fashion, tended to be more easily overlooked. In recent years, critics, most notably Dieter Stolz, have begun to show that however idiosyncratic his ®elds of personal imagery appear, with their me nagerie of birds and animals, recipes and everyday household objects set side by side with mythological and biblical allusions, each line in each poem possesses a precise meaning. Grass is in fact not fond of ambiguity. In order to tease out that meaning by recognising the semantic patterns, it is necessary, following Stolz, to read most of the rest of his oeuvre and empathise totally with his creative mind. This was clearly impossible for his ®rst readers who would have enjoyed mood and rhythm, the individual images, humour and the often pointed last line. For Peter Ruhmkorf poems' signi®cance in the context of postwar lyric poetry lies in Grass's poetic use of everyday objects and his unusual metaphorical pairings, which challenged conventional (and highly conservative) notions of what `good poems' should be.36 What the drawings and etchings add to an appreciation of the novels is another matter. The leap from one medium and mode of representation to another is one which has taken place in the artist's mind. Image and text, sometimes re-combined for spin-off publications, were not originally intended to be appreciated next to one another. Similarly the early novels can be read and understood without any knowledge of the poems and plays which Grass was writing concurrently. They show another side of the multi-talented artist, inviting readers to seek and discover similar elements and related patterns in the novels, which may not be, once transferred to narrative, the most arresting. What does strike a reader of his novels is the absence of social, historical or political references in the early poetry and plays. He makes the most oblique of allusions to the Nazi era and World War Two; Danzig does not feature at all; the social reality of the years of the Economic Miracle hardly intrudes. What the other genres and media, especially the poetry, do highlight, however, is his focus on tangible objects which anchor his often allegorical ¯ights of fancy in the everyday world. As Grass has repeatedly stated, he begins with what he can touch, smell and feel. This was an attempt to get down to essentials, to strip away associations, and focus on the smallest components, words and objects. Objects proliferate in the poetry. He avows his preference for the concrete over the abstract: I have always refused to let my shadow-casting body stand in the shade of an ethereal idea. (I:112) He even puts objects before people, which means that he will always begin with the solid individual detail:




Life and Art 29

What I will describe can only refer to the button that stayed behind at Dunkirk, never the soldier that escaped buttonless.

He adapts this same approach when it comes to prose. Most of the chapter headings in The Tin Drum denote objects. The imagery in Cat and Mouse is similar as most of it derives from the multiple associations of Mahlke's Adam's apple and the objects he uses to cover it up. Meaning in Local Anaesthetic accrues rather like the tartar to the hero's teeth because everything in the novel relates to his dental treatment. The objects Grass chooses are by no means the most obvious for his purpose; the meaning he gives them highly personal, his combinations allegorical or emblematic. This is because his world is always seriously out of kilter: it makes more sense for Oskar to gaze at a column of ants as Danzig burns about his ears than it does to chronicle the military events with Tolstoyan realism. This lack of proportion opens up at the same time new perspectives. In the poem Òpened Cupboard' Grass can depict his skewed place in the cosmos with relation to items of clothing and footwear, just as a classical poet may have described a sunset or gazed into the ®rmament. In The Tin Drum Grass expresses poetic and thus human truth by elaborating the multiple associations of eels in the chapter `Good Friday Fare'; he re¯ects on the fragility of the world with reference to a pack of playing cards. In the poems the objects appear to come ®rst, the meaning, which depends on their juxtaposition with other objects and private associations, second. It is allegorical, that it is arbitrary and sequential, rather than symbolically uni®ed. Grass's style has often been called `baroque' because of the way he piles up his signi®ers. Imagery in the plays complements that in the poetry to depict a cosmos partly derived from Absurdism and the in¯uence, acknowledged by Grass, of Albert Camus, who also leaves his mark on The Tin Drum and beyond. Several critics, most prominently Werner Frizen, have lately turned to this subject matter and reinterpreted not only the early part of his oeuvre in the light of his reading of this period but subsequent writings as well. Grass is no longer the chronicler of everyday people's involvement in the Third Reich, no longer the author of `coming to terms with the past' and public campaigner for governmental reform, which had hitherto been deemed his achievements. Rather he is at bottom a nihilistic author whose ®gures search for meaning in a meaningless world. Citing Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Stolz explains how Grass expresses essentially unoriginal ideas, which had been the very currency of High Modernism for more than half a century, in a highly individual manner: Ìt is a question of leading a restless life in an absurd world without any reassuring principles.'37 According to Stolz, a catalogue of recurrent ideas and images in the poetry may look something like this: running away and the desire to escape; journeys to unknown destinations which recede ever further into the distance (also present in several plays); apocalypse; the need for a belief and the temptation to `jump' into it; the fear of absolutes and ideologies; the negation of all Christian imagery; the absence of transcendence and the futility of



(106)

hoping for either secular or spiritual redemption; semi-baroque vanitas and delight in transient sensual pleasure; the retreat into an imperilled and temporary idyll; the primacy of private experience over public affairs; the yearning to return to the security of a womb-like haven, and the melancholic realisation that the world offers no escape. The list is not exhaustive, minor motifs circle the larger clusters, and most poems relate to more than one of the above. Grass treats all these poetic themes in The Tin Drum, which replicates all the patterns of thought and feeling contained in the poems and plays. Indeed the thematic list of contents could be rearranged into a skeletal biography of Oskar Matzerath. The Flounder and Too Far A®eld, the two other major novels in which Grass reinvented both himself and his material two and four decades later, make use of many of the same components. The difference when it comes to novels is that Grass integrates the imagery into a speci®c social and historical context. Amsel and Matern and Pilenz and Mahlke, Oskar and the supporting cast of The Tin Drum have walked off the set of a Grass play and into an identi®able milieu. What the plays tell us is Grass looks like in the abstract, devoid of concrete details; what the world of Gunter it was not a world which had much resonance with theatre directors or the theatregoing public. Transferred to a novel the meaning of the imagery is more straightforward too. Readers of Too Far A®eld can work out for themselves the meaning of Fonty's musings when he gazes at the crested grebes in the Berlin Tiergarten: not knowing where their heads will re-emerge once they have disappeared under water, he wonders whether the patterns of history are similarly unpredictable and longs to copy them himself by `diving under' and eluding Hoftaller. In a poem, Grass would not have been as explicit. One of his most distinctive features as a novelist is that he has devised a new narrative method for dealing with time, memory, and perspective in each prose work. The structural principle of all his narrative texts derives from the ways the past relates to the present and even in some cases the future. Each novel's artistic success depends on his handling of this. If this is one of his greatest gifts, then he had no room to develop it in drama, which presents, in Goethe and Schiller's phrase, `the absolutely present' as opposed to `the absolutely past' of the epic.

Idealists, absolutists and crypto-social democrats: the plays The two one-acters are his most obviously Absurdist pieces: Beckett and Cocteau are mentioned in the dialogue of Ridden There and Back, sub-titled, after the opening scene of Goethe's Faust, À Prelude on the Theatre' because it is a play about a play in which nothing really happens until the end. The clown riding his rocking horse can make no progress, however hard he tries; he is `the hole in creation' (II:7). The play ends suddenly and unexpectedly with a vision of disaster. In Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo the action takes place on a train but the progress is no quicker, the destination, the object of the quest (a great White Whale called Moby Dick), never comes into view. The ®gures are chasing Absolutes that are ®gments of their imaginations.




Uncle, Uncle presents an archetypal Grass ®gure, Hermann Bollin, à nocompromise fanatic for systems' (II:71), a would-be serial killer who likes the company of adolescent girls and children. He keeps meticulous records on cards and ®les and wants the whole world to ®t into his preconceived pattern. He is described as àn idealist, an incorrigible do-gooder, a revolutionary bent on toppling the world. Destructive and pessimistic to his bones. A card-carrying nihilist' (86). He ®nds relationships dif®cult and has no friends apart from a mysterious Erwin who occasionally telephones him, seemingly with suggestions of possible victims. All Grass's revolutionaries demonstrate variations of the same mentality. Bollin is defeated in the end by two children who turn his own gun on him and shoot him, as if everything were taking place in a game. The Wicked Cooks is less realistic. It begins with `the birth' of a young cook from the mouth of a trumpet. The cooks spend all their time pursuing the Count because they believe him to possess the secret recipe for a miracle soup which will solve all their problems. They too think that life can be led according to a plan, a perfect schema, and that everything and everyone in the world can be made to match this pre-arranged pattern. They search for meaning and certainty. The Count has to convince them that they are chasing a rainbow, that the `Miracle Ingredient' does not exist. His soup is grey, Grass's own favourite colour, and the taste is always different because the proportions of the ingredients always vary slightly. The composition depends on individuality: I have told you often enough that there is no recipe, it is a question of experience, an adaptable expertise. You should know that no cook ever succeeded in cooking the same soup twice. 196 While his pursuers are ideologues, the Count has the makings of a good Social Democrat. The same battle lines are drawn up again in Local Anaesthetic, From the Diary of a Snail, and The Flounder. The ¯ood became a popular subject for postwar German writers, fumbling for appropriate means to represent the man-made Nazi cataclysm. The characters in Flood are oblivious of its causes, ask no questions, and take the rising waters as a natural event, not seeking to exert any control over them or other elements in their environment. Their own priorities are to save their possessions and to do so they meekly move up the ¯oors of their house, one by one, as the water laps at their feet. The play gently satirises common attitudes to Nazism which saw it as a natural disaster, at most the responsibility of a handful of individuals, quite unconnected to the actions of the masses. The play lacks social precision, however, its dialogues are obtuse, its images too forced to achieve either hard-hitting satire or Absurdist pointlessness a la Beckett. Thirty-two Teeth is richest in political and ideological associations. The central a weak and vacillating 35-year-old with a dangerously ®gure is one Ernst Fribose, unbalanced, indeed split personality, expressed by means of a Double who emerges is an evening-class teacher from behind his back or from under his bed: Òne Fribose is likewise an by profession and reads the writings of Pestalozzi. The other Fribose



Life and Art 31

evening-class teacher but reads crime novels' (212). In contrast to the characters in does have a past and his obsession with cleanliness is related the other plays Fribose in some unexplained way to the Nazi gas chambers. His `Double' encourages him to take decisive action with his ®ance e Franziska and wants him in particular to so something about the grammar-school teacher Purucker, who is both a pedant and a on to the path of certitude purist. Purucker succeeds in the end in tempting Fribose en route to the earthly utopia of the United States of America. Grass's ®ction positively teems with the type of opportunist exempli®ed here by who sails with the prevailing ideological wind and refuses to re¯ect on his Fribose, consequent mental and intellectual re-adjustment. The Double is more forthright: Our father was a baker, then came the war. Interrupted his studies, Iron Cross second class and so on, then struck it lucky as a POW, ®nished his studies, became a teacher in a Pestalozzi school. Has many interests, tends politically to the Left, but not too much. Exchanged nationalism for Europe. Has no longer got Walter Flex in his knapsack, oh no, nowadays evening-class teachers read Negro poetry. 255 Fribose's hygiene neurosis requires him to clean his teeth with new toothbrushes and homemade toothpaste. He has a phobia about the idea of another person using his toothbrush. It is Purucker's mission to `cure' him of this problem: The disgust which one human being can generate in another! You have to overcome this disgust which divides humanity and makes us stupid [. . .] Then human beings will come together once more. 217 This may seem a reasonable enough statement of intent, even though it is expressed by an extremely unsympathetic character, but it is, as becomes evident in the ®nal act, an idealistic proposition, indicative of a utopian mentality which will not stop at the use of violence. The contrast between Fribose's liking for crime ®ction and his admiration of the Enlightenment educationalist, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, is more apparent than real. Pestalozzi too was a utopian who wanted to mould the world to ®t his ideal; the villainous Purucker seeks to carry out his plan. To solve a mystery in a crime novel on the other hand requires a working method not dissimilar to that practised by the Double. He takes each case and each clue as it comes and resists the temptation to make the facts ®t a preconceived pattern. The Double, who at ®rst sight, possibly because of evil genius, expresses for the his Mephistophelian overtones, appears to be Fribose's ®rst time in Grass's oeuvre the basic idea of practical action based on sceptical premises: I have no principles. Each situation demands that different measures are taken. I do not construct a rigid framework and then act according to it, come what may. No, I decide from case to case. 234




to kill Purucker, he represents his conscience Even though the Double urges Fribose or his better nature. It is Purucker who wants all the characters in the third act, set in Pestalozzi's Switzerland, to behave as if they were ®gures in Goethe's Elective Af®nities, which would mean acting according to a pre-established formula. In the throws the Double overboard ®nal act, set on a steamer bound for America, Fribose and signs up with a dubious organisation orchestrated by Purucker. The promised land looks decidedly totalitarian. Grass will return to a number of the questions raised in Thirty-two Teeth: many of his major characters are dualists of one sort or another, split down the middle by the warring sides of their personalities. In The Tin Drum Oskar makes fun of dualist thinking as represented by the contrast between the harmonious Goethe and the passionate Rasputin. Sometimes this dichotomy is represented by two separate characters ± Pilenz and Mahlke, Amsel and Matern, Hoftaller and Fonty ± or two halves of an abstract binary opposition ± melancholy and utopia in From the Diary of a Snail or masculinity and femininity in The Flounder. If one side gains the upper hand, the result is fatal. The question, which Oskar fails to answer and which Amsel and Matern are still ®ghting over at the end of Dog Years, is how to cement the two parts together by putting something in the gap which separates them. What is at issue here is why Grass chose to present these ideas, so central to an understanding of his aesthetic and political views, in such bizarre forms. The answer may be that he was experimenting with genre and modes of expression, that if the poems represent the individual building blocks, the plays are narrative frames. What he apparently needed was a social and historical context which, he found, was more suited to the novel form. His ®rst version of Oskar, the eternal 3-year-old who observes his environment from a succession of privileged viewpoints, was the stylite, seated for all time on his pillar, wholly isolated and detached from the world beneath him which he found so nauseous. This is a character from a play. In The Tin Drum Grass plunges him into the world. When he emerges from his mother's womb, he declares in ringing, ®nal tones: `there was nothing more to be done about it' (III:55).



Life and Art 33

2

A world novel: The Tin Drum I had not thought that would happen at all, that someone in the Mid-West of the United States or in the South of France or Scandinavia could possibly be interested in this everyday tale of suburban stuf®ness in the transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism. Gunter Grass1 German authors produced a small number of international classics in the twentieth century. Works by Kafka, Brecht, Thomas Mann, and a tiny handful of others fall into that category, all of them written before the founding of the Federal Republic. The Tin Drum would head most critical lists for the period after 1945 and on many it Grass's most would be the sole entry. It remains both at home and abroad Gunter popular novel, its reputation reinforced by Schlondorff's 1979 ®lm, the only postwar German production to win an Oscar ± appropriately enough, given the hero's name. The Tin Drum launched the young Grass on his literary career in much the same way as The Sufferings of Young Werther brought Goethe fame at the age of 25 and Buddenbrooks established the 25-year-old Mann. The Tin Drum or Le Tambour became as well known in America or France as Die Blechtrommel had rapidly become in Germany. The author himself exuded all the exoticism of the born Eastern European story-teller, an impression his mustachioed visage and ¯amboyant persona did nothing to dispel. This too proved to have international appeal. In Gunter Grass the Federal Republic found it possessed a distinctive new voice, acutely aware of the multiple possibilities of language, able to exploit a seemingly inexhaustible range of registers, iconoclastic yet imbued with tradition. He could parody a multitude of genres ± from the lewd baroque love lyric to the sentimental Goethean journey ± while cocking a snook at all his literary and philosophical masters. Oskar Matzerath is Grass's ®rst great stylistic imitator: he can hardly ever describe an event, introduce a character, or qualify an emotion without nodding knowingly in the direction of a well-known literary source or popular turn of phrase. The ®rst third of The Tin Drum is reminiscent of nineteenth-century realism; that century's most notorious literary adulteresses, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, 34



Lives in History

may have inspired his portrayal of Agnes (her lover's name is a variation of Anna Karenina's, Bronski/Vronski). In other sequences Grass is an unabashed Modernist; and as Oskar's great text seems to ¯oat on top of so many others, Grass is one of the ®rst post-modern writers, although he would claim he learnt his trade from Sterne and Melville. Ralph Manheim, who translated all Grass's literary prose works into English until his death in 1992, would claim that he was due at least some of the credit for Grass's phenomenal success in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially the US, which in turn boosted his reputation in the FRG, hungry for any form of international recognition. By 1970, when his photograph appeared on the front cover of Time, Grass was almost as famous in New York as he was in West Berlin. Until Patrick Suskind's Perfume, The Tin Drum was the only German novel written after the war to turn a pro®t on that side of the Atlantic. Manheim somehow made Grass's writing sound American, leading reviewers to compare him with contemporary US novelists, the so-called `black humorists', Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, or practitioners of the modern picaresque, J.D. Salinger and Saul Bellow. The Tin Drum spawned American and British imitators, which meant it fed back into the AngloAmerican tradition, from which Grass had learnt in the ®rst place. English-language novelists from Rushdie and John Irving to Graham Swift have testi®ed to the electrifying experience of reading The Tin Drum for the ®rst time in translation.2 Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Irving's best-sellers, The World According to Garp and A Prayer to Owen Meany, who borrows his initials from Grass's hero, are unimaginable without The Tin Drum. Tom Crick, the narrator of Swift's Waterland, is a typically Grassian character: born in 1927 he is troubled by guilt through adulthood on account of deeds committed in his adolescence. The Tin Drum's popular success was immediate in Germany too. Grass had won the prestigious prize of the Gruppe 47 the year before publication, which signalled the admiration of his peers and delighted his publishers. This prize was not awarded automatically every year and Richter collected the money from the publishers present at the meeting. He recalls how easy it was to amass the sum of 5000 DM, considerably more than Grass had hitherto earned in a year. A year later Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote the de®nitively rapturous review: [Gunter Grass] shows our cultivators of literary allotment gardens, whether they rake their ¯owerbeds in a neo-Biedermeier or neo-Expressionist style, what is meant by the word `spade'. This man is a trouble-maker, a shark in the sardine pond, a rogue elephant in the domesticated reservation of contemporary German letters.3 With statements such as these, `the myth of The Tin Drum' was born. The same group of adjectives and epithets recurred in review after review: Grass was `bursting with energy', a `naturally poetic young lad', a `literary lumberjack', even the `Cassius Clay of contemporary German literature'; The Tin Drum was `bizarre', `juicy', `vital', à virtuoso performance', `fantastical', `colourful', `scurrilous', `sarcastic', `provoking', and, of course, ìnfantile' and `pornographic'.4 Terms such as



Lives in History 35

`politically subversive' or `morally challenging' did not ®t this image. When Grass subsequently took up his pen to do battle for the SPD, journalists invariably described his contributions in terms borrowed from the novel ± `Tin Drummer on tour', `From Drummer to Drum-Major'. To this day newspaper articles are likely to introduce him as the author of The Tin Drum; all his subsequent prose works have been compared with it ± invariably to their disadvantage. It is well to remember that Goethe and Mann encountered similar problems with their ®rst novels. Grass was reportedly irked when the citation for his Nobel Prize gave The Tin Drum pride of place. He always claims Dog Years is a superior achievement, though he did not suffer a similar indignity to Mann in 1929 when the Nobel Committee pointedly ignored The Magic Mountain in favour of Buddenbrooks. The centrality of The Tin Drum's themes and ®gures for Grass himself is indicated by the way he returns to them. Characters from it appear in Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. The hero of Local Anaesthetic, now a 40-year-old `grammar school teacher of German and thus also of history', ostensibly the embodiment of moderation and reasoned argument, was Oskar's friend, the nihilist teenage rebel who operated in the crumbling Danzig of 1944 under the name of the legendary Baltic pirate, Stortebeker. Local Anaesthetic thus belongs to the same corpus of material which Grass does not completely ®nish with until From the Diary of a Snail in 1972. Oskar makes walk-on appearances in all the major prose texts up to The Flounder, where he is cheekily placed at the end of an exalted European tradition, including Falstaff, Rabelais, Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote. In The Rat, Grass resurrects him properly in order to have him wiped out in the atomic cataclysm which engulfs that entire novel. Oskar's presence is felt too in The Meeting in Telgte, where the would-be writer Gelnhausen announces his intention to take the seventeenth-century literary world by storm in similar terms Grass himself used in his memoir-essay on The Tin Drum, `The Author as Unreliable Witness', which appeared in 1973. Even in Too Far A®eld, Grass's ®rst novel region, he cannot forbear to mention his with no connection to the Danzig/Gdansk ®rst and greatest hero, now monumentalised in an epic frieze depicting the `greats' from modern German culture (XIII:50). Oskar sits at the feet of Heinrich Heine, who wrote his own tale of a tin drummer set at the time of Napoleon. After the move to Paris at the beginning of 1956 Grass visited Heine's grave in Montmartre Cemetry, where the exiled poet had been buried exactly one hundred years previously. It was in a damp basement in the Avenue d'Italie that The Tin Drum over this period reveals an was written. Correspondence with Walter Hollerer ambitious and determined author, scraping about for money and perennially concerned about advances and fees, but intent on getting known and on selling his work. He told Heinrich Vormweg in 1986 how he used to hitch-hike back to Germany to get money by going from one radio station to another to give readings, `like the troubadours used to walk from village to village'. Thirty years later he enthused about `this glorious way of reading poetry in return for cash'.5 Most of the letters to Hollerer are taken up with arrangements for premiering his plays ± Flood in Frankfurt in January 1957, Uncle, Uncle in Cologne in March 1958, Ridden There and Back in January 1959, and Ten More Minutes to Buffalo the following month in Bochum, or having items published in Akzente. He also asks Hollerer for German books (a




translation of Rabelais, for instance) and Hollerer sends him the addresses of one or two writers living in Paris he might like to look up: Paul Celan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Roland Barthes.6 It is hard to imagine he had much to say to either Barthes or Robbe-Grillet, but Celan became a friend. On 12 November 1957 the new father of twins (Franz and Raoul were born in September) is pleased with how life has recently treated him: Ì am in a Sunday mood. Am pregnant with fat novel, forgetting about the theatre, a bit of poetry, eating well, sleeping lots, sons and wife doing ®ne in Switzerland.' In March 1958 he reports that he has started the novel again and in May that it is progressing well.7 In his ùnreliable' memoir, he recalls police actions in the Algerian quarter and mentions that he was arrested (along with some 3000 others) the day Charles de Gaulle was elected President and held for 24 hours, not even allowed to telephone Anna. He describes this unpleasant experience to Hollerer in some detail. June 1958 took him back to Poland where he presented himself to on his return: one of his mother's surviving relatives, as he reports to Hollerer Have met my seventy-seven year old great aunt Anna (the one with the wide skirts). When I saw her again after what must be ®fteen years, she just said: `So sit down man'. Deeply impressed, I took a seat. there you are again, little Gunter, Back from Poland and the ®rst encounter with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the next eight months were devoted to The Tin Drum, still un®nished when he won the Gruppe 47 prize and became a star.

Oskar's Danzig requiem The enduring signi®cance of The Tin Drum lies in the linguistically explosive way Grass unfurls more than 50 years of German history, stretching from 1899±1954, to reveal ordinary people's willing embrace of the Nazi regime, the suffering it ultimately causes them, which was preceded by their obliviousness to the suffering it in¯icted on others, and their refusal after 1945 to address the enormity of what had happened and their own role in it. While Grass was hardly the ®rst German writer to take on the subject of Hitler's Germany and to depict everyday life away from the front line of battle, what the Seghers, Arnold Zweig), all of whom had reached creative exiled writers (Mann, Doblin, maturity before 1933, could never do adequately was to render day-to-day life under the Nazis, for the simple reason that they had had no direct experience of it. The great postwar literary accounts of the period, which mark in many ways the pinnacles of creative achievement in the postwar German novel, had not been written in 1959: Jurek Becker's Jakob the Liar (1969); Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. From the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (1970±83); Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975±81); or Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood (1976) all appeared over the 25 years which followed. Of the had produced work worthy great names in German postwar writing, only Heinrich Boll of his subsequent reputation. As he published Billiards at Half Past Nine and Johnson Speculations about Jakob in the same year as The Tin Drum, 1959 was called the annus mirabilis of renascent German writing. In his magical memoir of 1959 in My Century, a swirling two-page sentence, the Nobel Laureate-to-be remembers how he and Anna



Lives in History 37

escaped the media attention at the Frankfurt Book Fair by dancing together ever more passionately. But the clamour of all those voices still gets through to them: `Success! Boll, Grass, Johnson are making the running', they yell in unison, `Billiards, Speculations, Tin Drum'; `Now at last German postwar writing has arrived'; `Despite Sieburg and the FAZ, the breakthrough has occurred' (MC:212±13). When someone shouts that sales have reached `Thirty-thousand!' and deals been struck with France, Japan and Scandinavia, the elastic on Anna's three-layered petticoat snaps. With affected nonchalance she casts it into the crowd with her outstretched foot. But her husband knows that something has changed in his life and that his relationship with his wife will never be the same again: Ànna and I had always danced together and we carried on when we had made a name for ourselves, even though we had less and less to say to each other from one dance to the next' (MC:214). The marriage broke under the strain of his fame and his drive to exploit it to the full for the public ± and his own ± good. The key dates of postwar confrontation with the past also all come after 1959, which itself could count as the ®rst in a line which has not yet ®nished. The Eichmann Trial took place in 1961 and was followed by the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt in the mid-1960s. Both generated pioneering literary or critical works: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Weiss's verse play, The Investigation. It was also in 1961 that Fritz Fischer stirred the ®rst great controversy in German historical circles, one which reverberated far beyond university departments, with his thesis of German aggression in 1914.8 The ground-breaking psycho-analytic study of everyday Germans' failure to cope mentally with what they had been through, Alexander and Margerette Mitscherlich's The Inability to Mourn, was published in 1967. The Hollywood series Holocaust achieved record viewing ®gures in West Germany in 1979, a feat emulated by the German television serial Heimat shown in the early 1980s. Television, cinema and other visual media reach far bigger audiences than books, a fact illustrated once more by Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and the Wehrmacht exhibition which toured Germany in the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, The Grass was the pioneer. Tin Drum stands at the head of this list. Gunter Grass insists, however, that he did not want to `come to terms' or `master' the past in the accepted sense and that he had not written an exercise in applied morality. The trio of prose works which follow, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, and Local Anaesthetic, all address this task more effectively. From the Diary of a Snail is a purely didactic work. Oskar feels a sense of guilt after the war and while he pokes fun at others' efforts to confront their national and personal shame, he refuses to be precise about his own feelings. After engineering his arrest for a murder he did not commit, he is relieved to be incarcerated in a psychiatric institution as it represents an escape from the world which he has failed to deal with adequately. The Tin Drum's famous opening line, `Granted: I am an inmate of a psychiatric institution', signals Oskar's intention to take on the world on his own highly original terms. Above all it is a fascination with Oskar which holds readers ± his refusal to grow and thus his rejection of the sordid and increasingly cruel adult world, his extraordinary and sometimes superhuman capacities (his fully developed adult selfawareness at birth, his ability to smash glass with his voice), his mixture of violent infantilism and adult opportunism, sexual prurience, disregard for the truth, and his




child's ability to observe events without apparently taking part in them. His behaviour is shocking ± and ultimately typical ± because he cares only for himself, for his personal comfort and the grati®cation of his own desires, for his supply of drums, for his own survival. As Grass concentrates on what comes within Oskar's limited purview, he reports the brutality which encroaches into his ®eld of vision all the more chillingly. It usually takes up no more than a few matter-of-fact lines of description. Oskar's narrative style is bound up with his sel®sh and self-indulgent personality; he invariably prefers an ironic pun to a moral judgement. His account of the defeat of Poland is one example, as he juxtaposes the Polish cavalry's `squadrons of melancholy and tradition' (III:324), which may indeed on isolated occasions have charged German tanks on horseback, with the Germans' modern ef®ciency, so manufacturing an evocative image of the Polish strategy. These latter-day Don Quixotes `kissed the ladies on the hand and always noticed too late that they had not kissed a lady's tired ®nger but the opening of an unadorned battle howitzer' (300). Oskar then offers an apology for his poetic extravagance: Please forgive Oskar his last rhyme as well as the poetic qualities of this battle description. It would perhaps be more correct if I were to list the number of losses suffered by the Polish Cavalry and give the statistics which would commemorate the so-called Polish Campaign with memorable solemnity. If you want, I could put an asterisk and keep the poem anyway. 325 If he prefers the suggestiveness of a literary image derived from a legend to hard historical fact, he stuffs his text with facts anyway, although he rarely pauses to comment or explain. History is in the detail in The Tin Drum. During the row between Alfred Matzerath and his new 16-year-old assistant, Maria Truczinski, which ensues after Oskar has interrupted them making love on the living-room sofa one lunchbreak, Maria complains that men are all equally incompetent in bed. In reply Alfred yells that if `she is so randy, she should get herself a foreign worker, the Frenchie who brings the beer, he could do it better and no mistake' (376). This is September 1940, four months after the fall of France, which means `the Frenchie', presumably a forced labourer, cannot have been there long. Alfred's wounded remark is apparently incidental and there is no need to waste words on its racism ± superior sexual potency is invariably projected on to inferior ethnic groups, indicating, among other things, the superior group's sense of insecurity. It is more remarkable that Oskar ®nds no reason to explain that `foreign workers' were in fact Zwangsarbeiter or Hilfswillige, brought from Nazi-occupied Europe to work in the Reich as slaves. Oskar mentions these workers on two more occasions, hinting perhaps that their presence made a greater impression on him than he is ready to admit. After the death of her second brother Fritz in the summer of 1944, Maria seeks solace in religion and, not ®nding satisfaction from Protestantism, makes her ®rst visit to a Catholic church. As she and Oskar enter, he notices that `behind us on the gravel between the railway lines female eastern workers with white head scarves



Lives in History 39

were raking and shovelling away' (464). In the next but one sentence he identi®es them as Ukrainians. He notices too that they have gone when he and Maria leave the church a couple of hours later. The detail impinges on his consciousness in the same way as the teenage Grass noticed similar things without really thinking about them. The third and last encounter with slave workers is also the most violent. After the Soviet `liberation' agricultural labourers he had supervised lynch Herr Ehlers, who had married Hedwig Bronski after Jan had been executed by the Germans. If Oskar's family and neighbours do not question the presence of these workers, they revel in German military successes which made their presence possible. Oskar learns the geography of eastern Europe from listening to the special news bulletins on the radio and boasts that he can still name obscure rivers throughout the Soviet Union. At Kurt's christening in August 1941 the ice is broken between the Matzeraths and the freshly Germanised Bronskis, when the conversation turns to the battle of Kiev and the number of enemy prisoners of war: The Baltic Ehlers proved especially agile, shot up a ®nger for each hundred thousand and then, when he had counted a million on both his extended hands, carried on counting as he beheaded each ®nger in turn. 396 Herr Schef¯er, who will be drowned in January 1945 when his refugee ship is torpedoed, changes the subject to U-Boat production, which was Danzig's main contribution to the war effort.9 Alfred eagerly takes up the topic to explain to Oskar's grandmother how many submarines are launched each week from the shipyards. If the Eastern Front spelt fear and misery, German soldiers often enjoyed their tour of duty in the west. Oskar's Lilliputian friends, Bebra and Roswitha, are still enchanted by the exotic romance of travel through Nazi-conquered Europe in the summer of 1943: `Bebra said Copenhagen. Roswitha panted Palermo. Bebra sang Belgrade. Like a tragedian Roswitha lamented the word, Athens. But both of them always fell into raptures at the mention of Paris' (421). If his postcards home are a guide, the hapless Fritz Truczinski, who never appears in person, relishes serving in France, but when he switches from the Western to the Eastern Front around the time of Stalingrad, we have entered a new stage of the war. If it made any sense to list The Tin Drum's striking features, episodes and characters, the list would look something like this. There is an immediacy in its robust, comic language and drastic imagery, in its uncompromising insistence on looking behind appearances in order to peer into the privacy of bedrooms and beyond, and the extravagance of its conceits. Oskar's parents live in what amounts to a menage a trois, in a house where when the lights accidentally went off at one party: It was unappetising to see the short-legged baker Alexander Schef¯er almost disappear into the mass of ¯esh that was Frau Greff. Matzerath was licking on Gretchen Schef¯er's gold-capped horse's teeth. 81




Oskar recalls observing both Alfred and Agnes and Agnes and Jan having sex together. When Alfred hires the young Maria, Oskar is the only person to be surprised to ®nd the middle-aged shopkeeper pleasuring himself upon his teenage employee. Grass makes no suggestion that the sexual morals of either the Matzerath household or the street in which they live were in any way out of the ordinary. They are, by any standards, a sordid mess. Oskar's ignorance of his paternity is matched by the uncertainty over Maria's son, Kurt. Either Oskar is Kurt's father, as he seems to have slept with Maria ®rst, or it is Alfred, who is probably Oskar's own biological and certainly his legal father. When Alfred marries Maria, his son's former girlfriend becomes his step-mother. Respectable burghers in 1959 were easily shocked by this unabashed portrayal of sexual morality in the innocent prewar years. While all minor and major ®gures are identi®ed by a peculiar motif, the women in Oskar's erotic progress all have a smell: nutmeg and cinnamon conjure up the Italian south embodied in his one true love, Roswitha. While the enticing aroma of vanilla envelopes Maria, whom Oskar introduces with as loud a fanfare as Nabokov lavished on Lolita, the whiff of vinegar emanates from the slobbish Frau Greff. On the other hand, he ®nds the smell of rancid butter from his astute peasant grandmother to be reassuring. Oskar's tale moves forward at a steady, well-regulated pace. The main incidents take the form of self-contained literary set-pieces: the Dusters sequence at the end of book two charts the rise and fall of a typical adolescent criminal band at the end of the war, as civilian order in Germany crumbled; through repeating and intermingling motifs in `Faith Charity Hope' Oskar recounts the events of Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938. The novel's characters repel and attract equally as they are all mildly corrupt grotesques. There is the homosexual vegetarian greengrocer, Herr Greff, with his passion for peculiarly shaped potatoes and boy scouts, complemented by his equally frustrated wife who takes sexual advantage of the adolescent Oskar in his three-year-old shape. There is the SA man Meyn who slaughters his tomcats because Schugger Leo has refused to shake his hand at Herbert Truczinski's funeral. This is in revenge for Meyn bundling out the Jewish Sigismund Markus from Oskar's mother's funeral. Meyn is also in mourning for Herbert, Fritz and Maria's elder brother, his old comrade from Communist days, who had killed himself in a bizarre embrace of the demonic ship's ®gurehead, Niobe. Meyn's killing of his tomcats results in his expulsion from the SA, which had commended his cruelty to human beings on Kristallnacht. Yet readers expecting the novel of the Nazi epoch are sometimes disappointed that Grass does not go in search of history by following the great events or the great ®gures in the manner of a conventional historical novel. Episodes with no direct historical resonance are no less pregnant with psychological or historical meaning, however. When Oskar is forced by the children in the Labesweg to eat their disgusting `soup' he ladles the bitter taste of a fallen world to his mouth. When he disrupts his ®rst day at school by banging his drum and fracturing his teacher's glasses, he marks himself out from his peers by enacting a time-honoured rebellion against social authority, which others fail to emulate. When he climbs to the top of the Stockturm, the medieval city keep containing its former dungeon, to look over



Lives in History 41

the doomed city he shrieks his disgust with all the passion of modern-day Jonah denouncing the mores of Nineveh. In the 40 years since publication, these images have been pored over by critics, none more so than `Good Friday Fare' where the sight of a horse's head used as bait to catch eels precipitates Agnes's decline and slide towards death. Oskar sometimes tries to make links between events on the stage of world history and the local goings-on, but he is more inclined to mock that type of historical narration. He delights in alliterative word play when making a connection between the German advance stalled in the mud at the gates of Moscow and his own efforts in Frau Greff's bed in the autumn of 1941. If his tale makes sense, it is at the micro-level only. As it is a family history, the family photograph album, one of the very few items the Grass family salvaged from their Danzig existence, is his starting point. Oskar's task is one of remembering and reconstruction, loss and mourning, telling a story which belonged to everybody who had lived through it but which had not previously been publicly told. Grass's most typical `little man' is one of Oskar's two `putative fathers', the grocershop owner, Alfred Matzerath. On the Kristallnacht, Oskar describes how he `warmed his ®ngers and his feelings over the public ®re' (259) made from books and artifacts looted from a synagogue, making no secret of his approval of the ®rst modern German pogrom which presaged the `Final Solution'. Yet Alfred is in other respects a decent man, a responsible father and sympathetic husband. He more than tolerates his wife's long-term affair, even welcoming Jan into the house for games of Skat after Agnes's death, which causes them both to grieve in equal measure. When Agnes reacts so violently to the sight of the horse's head squirming with eels, Alfred sends Jan into the bedroom to comfort her in an acknowledgement of his own inability to satisfy her emotional and physical needs himself. As a Protestant from the western Rhineland, he lacks the romantic soul of his Polish rival. At the end of the war when the authorities suggest that the stunted Oskar be sent to an institution, which meant death in the euthanasia programme, Alfred, a NSDAP party-member, fails to sign the necessary papers until the Soviets are at the gates of the city and it is too late. This is by no means his only decent gesture. He is at heart a reasonable, if one-dimensional, man. Yet he lends his full support to the physical and material persecution of the Jews and puts his national allegiance to the German Reich before his ties to his Cassubian in-laws after his wife's death. His behaviour was replicated by millions of ordinary Germans, captivated by the success of the Nazis, the fruits of which they were set to share, either unconcerned by the suffering which occurred all around them or able to block it out. Despite Oskar's own apparent unconcern for others, he catalogues fatalities, pausing to note each new death and its impact on the survivors. There are only three births in the whole of The Tin Drum, a remarkable fact since it chronicles more than 50 years. More precisely, the descriptions are of one birth (Oskar's own) and two conceptions, his mother's on the potato ®eld outside Danzig in October 1899 and his half-brother's on that sofa in the autumn of 1940. In contrast, Oskar notes the deaths of no fewer than 23 named individuals. The deaths take a number of forms. His maternal grandfather, the Polish nationalist, Joseph Koljaiczek, disappears by diving into the river in ¯ight from the Prussian police in 1913. Gretchen Schef¯er's




brother drowns too ± on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea. Gregor Koljaiczek, who takes his brother's place as Anna's husband, succumbs to ¯u in 1917. It is curious that no victims of World War One are recorded: Alfred is wounded and meets his future wife in a Danzig military hospital; Jan is declared un®t for military service several years in succession, to his and Agnes's delight. World War One casualties do enter the narrative, however, in a less direct but more macabre way when the stevedore who ®shes up the horse's head tells Alfred that the eels had been especially fat in the year of the Battle of Jutland ± 1915 ± when they had fed off the drowned sailors' ¯esh. As the next war approaches suicide becomes common: Agnes may not quite take her own life in May 1937 after seeing the horse's head but she undoubtedly gives up the will to live; Herbert Truczinski impales himself in the autumn of 1938, às the customs duties were raised and the border between Poland and the Free State was periodically closed' (235); Sigismund Markus takes poison to escape his persecutors on Kristallnacht; and Herr Greff hangs himself in October 1942 out of grief for his `darling, Horst Donath, who had [. . .] been killed on the Donetz' (403). The rest meet a more violent end. Both Hedwig Bronski's husbands are executed: Jan by the invading Germans at the beginning of the war and Herr Ehlers by vengeful underlings at the end. Alfred is shot by a nervous Red Army soldier after he has swallowed his party badge handed to him by his spiteful son with the pin pointing outwards. Roswitha is hit by a stray shell in June 1944 after the D-Day landings in Normandy. Soldiers usually die far from home, denying their grieving mothers an opportunity to visit their graves. When Oskar bids a silent farewell to his family and neighbours in June 1943 before setting off on tour with Bebra, he notes that three of his childhood tormentors are already dead: `the Schlagers' son was dead, the Eykes' son was dead, the Kollins' son was dead' (424). Nuchi Eyke `stayed on Crete', while Axel Mischke, the leader of the `cannibals' who had force-fed Oskar their soup, `caught it just before the end in Holland' (369). Of the six children who captured Oskar that afternoon in 1932, only Klein Ka schen and Susi Kater survived. Axel Mischke, Harry Schlager, Ha nschen Kollin, and Nuchi Eyke, are all three to four years older than Oskar, meaning they were born between 1920±21, two of the most dangerous years. Stephan Bronski, Jan's son, was a mere two months older than Oskar and had been recently promoted to lieutenant when he was killed in the Arctic, shortly before Fritz Truczinski was killed in June 1944 on the Eastern Front. By the end of the war civilians ®nd themselves in as great a danger as military personnel. In ¯ight from the Red Army a number of neighbours from the Labesweg tenement, Clockmaker Laubschad, who had reported Meyn for cruelty to his tomcats, Herr and Frau Schef¯er, and the surviving members of the Eyke and Schlager families are all drowned after boarding à former KdF-ship' (508) to evacuate them to the west, an incident Grass covers once more in The Rat. This `Strengththrough-Joy' ship can be identi®ed as the Wilhelm Gustloff, which had taken the Schef¯ers on cruises in prewar days: it set sail on 30 January 1945 from Gotenhafen (now Gdynia), carrying some 6±7000 refugees and was sunk that same night. A mere few hundred survived, making it the biggest German maritime accident in history (see pp. 166±7).



Lives in History 43

Mother Truczinski dies of apparently natural causes a little while later during the Soviet bombing, but the death of Fritz and the upheaval of the bombing raids had hastened her end. While both her sons had preceded her to their graves, she leaves two daughters to make new lives for themselves in postwar West Germany. Guste saw her husband for just 14 days before he disappeared to the Front never to return, but as she had already moved to the Rhineland to be with him, her younger sister Maria has somewhere to stay when she is evacuated with Oskar and Kurt in June 1945. Book two begins and ends with a drawn out death. The post of®ce caretaker Kobyella, veteran of Pilsudski's legendary legions, is propped up by Jan and Oskar to play Skat as the Germans pound the building with artillery. Six years later on the goods train which takes Oskar and his family west, Regina Raeck's uncle takes even longer to die of stomach cancer, while ridiculously boasting of his anti-Nazi credentials as a Social Democrat who ¯y-posted in wet weather right up to 1937. At the end of the war, Oskar still has his stepmother Maria and her sister Guste, his halfbrother Kurt, and his grandmother and great uncle who stay behind. Hedwig and Marga Bronksi/Ehlers are still alive, as are Frau Greff, who survives rape by the Soviet soldiers, and the old Heilandt, who had helped dig Mother Truczinski and Alfred's graves. All the rest are dead. But the dead are not forgotten: the Jewish Holocaust survivor Herr Fajngold still talks to his wife and family who met their end in Treblinka. Oskar's grandmother talks to her dead daughter Agnes, like her brother Vinzent who wakes up the neighbours shouting for Jan. As the dead play so central a role, cemeteries are favourite locations, funerals, which, as Oskar says àlways recall other funerals' (528), are frequent events. Before the war Oskar goes ®rst to his mother's, then Herbert's, where he is befriended by a kindred spirit, the mentally deranged Schugger Leo, who had once been training for the priesthood. He then assists at both Mother Truczinski's and Alfred's funerals in the ®rst three months of 1945. Once he has buried his father, he starts to grow after throwing his drum into his grave, which Schugger Leo alone notices. An unexpected death disrupts the best laid plans. His mother had wanted to be buried at the cemetery in Saspe but ended up, much sooner than anyone suspected, on the edge of the city at Brentau, where her stepfather Gregor Koljaiczek also lies. Jan, on the other hand, who had expressed a preference for Brentau, is buried at Saspe in an unmarked mass grave, shown to Oskar by Schugger Leo, who `certainly knew too where they had shovelled away Sigismund Markus' (322). Alfred is also buried ìn the same sandy soil' as his `Skat partner' (528) at Saspe, though Oskar can no longer recognise Jan's spot next to the North wall as the lime has long since weathered away. As the road to the Municipal Cemetery is blocked for non-military vehicles in January 1945, Alfred and the old Heilandt cannot bury Mother Truczinski next to her son Herbert at Langfuhr. They `chose her a place behind the May Meadow in Steffenspark' (510). Even though there are only two deaths in the third postwar book, those of Schmuh, who dies in a car crash after shooting 13 instead of 12 starlings, and Nurse Dorothea, the dead still dominate. Oskar spends the winter of 1946±47 working for a monumental mason chiselling headstones. Fortuna Nord is the name of the cemetery where Grass's own mother is buried.




Once Oskar lifts his gaze from his immediate surroundings the numbers of casualties multiplies even further. Thirty other Polish postal workers stood next to Jan in front of the ®ring squad. Five French nuns are sprayed with machine gun ®re on the Normandy beach in front of the German forti®cations in June 1944, days before the Allies launch their invasion. They were collecting crabs to feed the children in their care when the order was telephoned to clear the beach. In the autumn of the same year more than 100 submarine crew are burnt alive after an who grows up into Starusch arson attack in Danzig docks. Oskar's friend Stortebeker, in Local Anaesthetic, might have had something to do with it, a guilty secret which for the rest of his days. Once the Red Army has will haunt Stortebeker/Starusch arrived, the doctor who examines Oskar after his fall into his father's grave explains her exhaustion by saying she has not slept for three weeks: Ì was in Ka semark at the ferry with the transports of small children from East Prussia. Didn't get across. Just the troops. About four thousand. All of them caught it' (540). These particular children cannot be identi®ed, the incident is not recorded in the history books, but the brief account of it gives rise to Oskar's nightmare of the infernal merry-go-round. Finally, there are the thousands upon thousands of dead bodies that Herr Fajngold disinfects at the death camp of Treblinka: for he had sprinkled the dead with Lysol, not a single dead man, but the dead, what's the point of giving a number, the dead, I say [. . .] And he knew so many names that I got bored [. . .] the question of the life and death of a hundred thousand names was not as important as the question of whether life, and if not life, then death had been suf®ciently and punctually disinfected with Herr Fajngold's disinfectant. 544 Oskar on his sickbed cannot take too much of this reality, which is why he gets back straight away to his own concerns. In the postwar third book, set mainly in Dusseldorf instead of Danzig, every single ®gure is emotionally crippled. While the war and Nazism refuse to let them go, they refuse to address their recent experiences. Some live in the past, like Artist Lankes still guarding his Normandy bunker, the scene of his wartime atrocity, and the Kafkaesque guards who accompany Viktor Wehlun, survivor of the battle of the Polish Post Of®ce, to complete un®nished business by executing him. Others repress their feelings, like the drinkers in the Onion Cellar who ®nd surrogate emotional release with the help of a cheap stimulant, or the concertgoers who ¯ock to listen to Oskar in his new 1950s guise of performing guru and pop-star. The art students are incapable of painting what they see in front of them and produce great abstract patterns instead. Klepp, Vittlar, Schmuh and Lankes are postwar intellectuals and artists, deracinated and disorientated in comparison with ®gures in the prewar section whose place, in what proved a fragile social and historical complex, had been temporarily secure. Grass sets out to `de-demonise' the way the Nazi past was told. He has repeated this intention on numerous occasions. Oskar does this in the ®rst book by



Lives in History 45

showing his ®gures ± Jan, Herbert, those who attend the rally on the May Meadow, Agnes and others ± succumbing to superior irrational forces either within themselves or from outside. The idea that the Nazis seduced or tempted the German people always had demonic overtones; the idea that a dark curtain was drawn over Germany also robs individuals of responsibility for what they did. Oskar parodies these views by making the objects of passion, the temptation, into something ridiculous. On one famous occasion he destroys the ordered symmetry of the Nazi spectacle at an open-air meeting, where the stage in its regular contours signi®es a self-contained system of belief, by drumming his own anarchic rhythms from beneath the platform. By so doing he causes the Party rally to end in farcical chaos. This is a wonderful act of heroic subversion which ridicules what Walter Benjamin called `the aestheticisation of politics', unmasking the participants as members of the `credulous people' who professed faith in the all-promising `Father Christmas' while ignoring the evidence that he was in reality `the gasman'. Yet Oskar refuses the mantle of resistance ®ghter: I did not just drum against Nazi gatherings. At meetings of the Reds or the Catholics, the Boy Scouts and Spinach Shirts from the PX, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Young Poles from the Open-Air Movement beneath the podium. Whatever they had to sing, to bugle, to pray and to proclaim, my drum could do better. My work was thus destructive. And if I could not get the better of something with my drum then I killed it with my voice. 158 Oskar is no picaresque anti-hero in the mould of the Good Soldier Schweyk, a point critics have sometimes overlooked. His sarcastic satire of human behaviour has no solid moral or political foundation. He not only rejects all beliefs, religious or ideological, but also all ways of making sense of the world: he dismantles binary oppositions, mocking Nietzsche's famous Apollo and Dionysus in his games with Goethe and Rasputin, even Christ and Satan. He wants to exist somewhere in the middle and it turns out to be a void. He rearranges the past by shuf¯ing photographs from the family album without knowing which order he should arrange them in and behaves like a `juggler with bottles' (261) with the words `Faith, Hope, Charity', which he sees held aloft on a banner by a group of pious females observing the destruction of the Kristallnacht. While he destroys, however, he rarely creates anything from the wreckage and thus his central feature is also his greatest weakness: it leads to a moral ambivalence bordering on nihilism. Because he refuses all compromise with the world, he has ultimately no defences against the demonic `Black Cook', into whose hands he is delivered by the ®nal line of the novel. Oskar has no perspective, no hope for the future, and no answers. For all his linguistic power and his ability to re-arrange reality on the printed page, he can perceive no meaningful patterns in the world beyond his psychiatric bed. He refuses to judge, to psychologise, or to explain motives, remaining instead on the surface, trusting only what he can see, hear, smell or touch.




Lives in History 47

Scandal

George Steiner was in no doubt in 1964 what Grass's great achievement in his ®rst three books had been: By force of his macabre, often obscene wit, he has rubbed the noses of his readers in the great ®lth, in the vomit of their time. Like no other writer, he has mocked and subverted the bland oblivion, the self-acquittal which underlie Germany's material resurgence.11 If it is now universally accepted in Germany that remembering the past and facing up to the guilt was a necessary national process, then it is because of the persistent Grass. His point of view was by no means orthodox, nagging of people like Gunter however, in the 1960s. He was criticised immediately for blasphemy and obscenity in The Tin Drum, charges which dogged him in the early part of his career. An Austrian journalist and campaigner, Kurt Ziesel, petitioned the courts to prosecute him for the sexual episodes in Cat and Mouse. Ziesel, whose views had not noticeably changed since he had joined the NSDAP in 1931, left no stone unturned in his attempts to discredit SPD politicians and writers associated with the Gruppe 47. In 1969, after Grass had sued him, the high court in Munich granted him the right to continue to call Grass the àuthor of the most evil kind of pornographic smut' and `besmircher of the Catholic Church'.12 The insult of the novel had by now been compounded by the injury of Grass's political involvement with the SPD. Ziesel, who, thanks to prominent contacts in conservative circles, had become secretary of the Germany Foundation, published an anonymous pamphlet documenting his famous victory. He included verbatim quotations of the passages in Grass's works which he found offensive. He ®nds four pages of òbscene excesses' and two of comments which `besmirch the church'.13 These attacks had begun with some reviews of The Tin Drum and reached their ®rst climax with the scandal of the Bremen Literature Prize at the end of 1959 when the Bremen Senate overturned the recommendation of its Literary Panel and withdrew its bi-annual prize of 8000 DM. The senators, who had raised no objections four who used to dedicate his books years earlier when the prize had gone to Ernst Junger to Adolf Hitler, believed `the novel could not be morally or ethically defended in its entirety' and that `some chapters of the work should be put on the index of writings likely to corrupt youth'.14 One said: The novel The Tin Drum, which is doubtless the work of a highly talented author, is in my opinion one of those works which, rather than serving to stir people from their torpor, endanger, if not destroy, the human spirit and the human mind.15



To be denounced by Herr Ziesel, I said, as good as proved one's credentials as a good democrat. Horst Ehmke10

Some of the terminology had clearly Nazi overtones and in fact the only word not used against Grass was `degenerate'. This omission was subsequently made good by Ludwig Erhard, Federal Chancellor 1963±66, in a speech to the CDU party conference in July 1965, as the election campaign of that year began in earnest (see p. 89). Another leading politician who felt offended by the novel was Heinrich Federal President 1959±69. His opinion that Grass had written about things Lubke, that à husband would not discuss with his wife', recalling the comment made in the Lady Chatterley trial, would have been quaint had it not been for his attempt to restrict the distribution of Cat and Mouse.16 When Klaus Wagenbach defended Grass against charges of obscenity in Dog Years, he saw it as a straightforward political battle between Left and Right, between `republicans' and `nationalists'.17 Lubke, who had worked as an architect at Wernher von Braun's rocket factory on was dogged by accusations over his past. As he also suffered from Peenemunde, mental deterioration in his last years in of®ce, he symbolised the ageing, out-oftouch regime of the post-Adenauer years, which Brandt was to sweep away in 1969. In 1960 the Bremen senators' prudishness denied Grass the prize money, but their city-state lost out in the bad publicity the scandal generated. Bremen subsequently reformed the rules governing the choice of prizewinner in order to prevent state interference in future. The reform indicates that the scandal took place in a modern liberal state; the reasons for not awarding Grass the prize in the ®rst place belong to the more repressive era which found Frank Wedekind and Arthur Schnitzler too hot to handle. One thing was certain: no other new author had caused quite such a to-do in the brief history of the FRG. Liberal trends in German society were on Grass's side: he was not attacked on these grounds for his novels of the next decade, From the Diary of a Snail and The Flounder, both of which contain equally explicit episodes. The episodes of adolescent masturbation and particularly the incident where Mahlke is described wearing the stolen Ritterkreuz or Knight's Cross, the highest award for bravery in the German military, over his half-erect penis ensured that controversy on the matter of obscenity continued with Cat and Mouse. Luchterhand had called on Enzensberger, who had reviewed the novella enthusiastically, and other high-pro®le critics to counter the attempt made by the Minister for Work, Welfare, and Health from the state of Hesse to place the novella on the index of works which corrupt the young.18 Cat and Mouse, however, offended reactionary sensibilities in other ways too. Veterans' associations claimed that Grass had sullied the honour of all those soldiers who had won the Ritterkreuz; and expellees from Danzig threatened action on the grounds he had damaged the reputation of their city.19 The former sports teacher from the Conradinum, Theodor Wallerand, the reallife model for Mallenbrandt, wrote that the expellees should defend themselves against `this son of our city of whom we cannot be proud.'20 The Cat and Mouse scandal erupted for a second time when the ®lm of the novella was made in 1966. This imaginative low-budget production, directed by Hansjurgen Pohland, starred the left-wing cabarettist Wolfgang Neuss, who played the adult Pilenz reconstructing his adolescent past. His co-stars were two teenage brothers who played Mahlke at different stages of his development. Their names were Lars and Peter Brandt and their father had become Foreign Minister in a Grand Coalition




of Social and Christian Democrats in December 1966. An ex-resistance ®ghter who had fought against his compatriots had become the second most powerful politician in the land, an affront to all the `nationalists' Wagenbach had countered. To add insult to injury, Pohland's ®lm had bene®ted from a state subsidy of some 300000 DM. Franz Josef Strauû had already spoken against it in the Bundestag.21 In February 1967 the Frankfurt Federation of German Soldiers organised a rally attended by representatives from 75 veterans' associations. The scene they objected to most showed the younger Brandt dangling the stolen medal into his open winner of the Iron Cross ®rst and swimming trunks. The old Nazi Erwin Schonborn, second class, whose pamphlet on the incident begins with an invocation to Rudolf Hess as the legitimate German head of state, failed to prevent the ®lm's distribution. He failed too, in 1974, to get an injunction prohibiting its screening on TV. While he claims that the rally against the ®lm was the most impressive veterans' gathering since the end of the war, Brandt rather than Grass, the SPD rather than modern German literature, were the real targets of his campaign. In Cat and Mouse Grass imagines what it might have taken for a slightly gauche but otherwise unremarkable teenager to win the Knight's Cross in the last year of the war. He had been driven to do so in part by his anger that meetings of medal winners continued to be held at all. Those who attended them evidently clung to the notion that their deeds still merited distinction on the grounds they had fought bravely for still held what they had believed was a noble cause. Some, like Schonborn, unreconstructed Nazi views. They had failed, unlike Mahlke at the time of his disappearance, to recognise that they had served a genocidal regime and that the values they had internalised between 1933±45 had underpinned it. Grass expresses his position unequivocally in an election speech he delivered in April 1967 in Schleswig-Holstein: Today there is an association upholding the tradition of the German Ritterkreuz, which, from time to time, gathers together the surviving bravery specialists. It would be dif®cult to object much to this were it not for the fact that this association consistently proclaims that this military bravery had a meaning. Now, it can be proved that millions of German soldiers died for nothing; their death had no meaning; millions of German soldiers who thought they were Volk, and Vaterland and, more, doing good by bravely defending their Fuhrer, bringing the Germans' just cause to the world were, in fact ± and this has been proved too ± helping the organised crime. The majority of the German soldiers did not know this. Yet ignorance still does not give their death on the Wolchow, at Tobruk, or in Normandy any meaning. [. . .] The above association which upholds traditions is furthermore of the opinion that it must defend the honour of German war decorations. Yet medals and decorations were awarded by the leadership of the Reich which knew precisely how extensive the planned crime was for which the German soldiers did battle with their proverbial bravery. All that: the mass shootings, the extermination camps, the euthanasia murders are nowadays recorded in the archives and cannot be refuted. Nevertheless the traditional associations, like that for holders



Lives in History 49


If the dead cannot defend themselves, then a contemporary who was lucky enough to survive and brave enough to challenge the views of his youth will speak in their place.

Cat and Mouse: is Pilenz guilty? Cat and Mouse, which appeared in October 1961, two months after Grass had made his ®rst direct intervention in public affairs in response to the building of the Berlin Wall, was in the main greeted warmly by reviewers. They saw it as con®rmation of his over¯owing talent, all the more impressive for its comparatively sober tone and the lack of the extravagant imagery which had so characterised his ®rst novel. Even his most determined detractors, who attacked such novels as The Rat and Too Far A®eld so vehemently, acknowledge Cat and Mouse to be a classic: only The Meeting in Telgte enjoys the same status apart from The Tin Drum. They recognised that he had continued to reinvent traditional genres, in this case the classical nineteenthcentury novella, which Thomas Mann was thought to have brought to a conclusion with Death in Venice. Indeed, while Grass may be best known for his novelistic `baggy monsters', arguably his two most accomplished works are exercises in shorter forms. He hints as much to Helen Wolff after ®nishing The Meeting in Telgte when he says that `probably an author has to get the big chunks like The Tin Drum and The Flounder out of his system before he can reap the rewards of the shorter forms'.22 `The Great Mahlke' recalls Fitzgerald's `the Great Gatsby' and Fournier's `le Grand Meaulnes'. All three have their stories told posthumously by an admiring follower. They are all books for boys about boys ± in Cat and Mouse girls are slags or cissies, parents out of sight, and teachers remote, authoritarian ®gures. Mahlke is a hero because he can swim and dive the best, he is the biggest and strongest and, as they discover in one notorious episode, he has the largest penis. The boys are obsessed with anything to do with the military ± battles, victories, heroes or the tonnage and classi®cation of warships. They can rattle off these statistics in their sleep. Moments before Mahlke disappears for the last time he recites some of this knowledge to Pilenz who answers automatically. Mahlke's followers venerate the bits and pieces which their hero fetches to the surface from the air-®lled cabin of a sunken minesweeper in the Bay of Danzig where they spend their summers. The objects are more than souvenirs, they are relics, objects of a national military cult. But they are all forced to grow up quickly. Mahlke's distance from this juvenile mentality is signalled when he meets two youths who ask him for his autograph while he is running away with Pilenz:



of the Ritterkreuz, try to declare that their comrades sacri®ced their lives for the Vaterland. Any criticism of this deliberate falsi®cation of recent German history is equated by them with dishonouring the memory of German soldiery. Those who died back then cannot defend themselves today against the misrepresentation of the associations upholding tradition. XIV:236±7

Lives in History 51

By this time, still no more than 18, Mahlke has discovered that war is not a game. Mahlke always generated stories which stretched the imagination. Everything about him and his `legendary reputation' (32) is èarnestly meaningful and monumental' (139). The adult Pilenz still wants to make him into a hero and adds references to messianic self-sacri®ce, which he would have been hard put to identify at the time. But if Mahlke is Christ, then the self-dramatising Pilenz takes the role of Judas. When he comes across others who have known Mahlke during his stint of pre-military Arbeitsdienst, they also remember him instantly and relate their own anecdotes, bringing out Mahlke's dual qualities once more: a sergeant's wife seduced him after hearing about his penis; but he has saved lives by recovering explosives buried at the bottom of a pool by Polish partisans. Mahlke has always had a side to his character which was not related to his superior physical abilities. He admires his late father, who worked for the Polish railways and lost his life in an attempt to save others in a train accident. His son had initially emulated this feat by risking his own life to save a young boy from drowning. His removal of a condom which the other boys had placed on a door handle in order to upset one of their teachers had indicated his mature distance from his classmates. One point of continuity with The Tin Drum is Pilenz's literary artistry. His adjectives, observations, descriptions of weather and landscape are those of a selfconscious literary stylist. Like all novellas, Cat and Mouse lives by its use of symbols and leitmotifs. As a stylist, however, Pilenz is not wholly unrelated to the two Ritterkreuz winners who come to speak to the assembled schoolchildren and who turn their wartime experience into cheap poetry. Much of Pilenz's own imagery revolves around Mahlke's persecutor, the cat of the title, whose role is played by Pilenz himself, the school, or society as a whole, and the victim, the mouse Mahlke, known by his large Adam's apple, sign of his individual weakness and shame, indicative too of his great strength and potency. A vignette of the action is enacted on the ®rst page when a cat playfully attacks the sleeping Mahlke's Adam's apple, bobbing nervously up and down even in his sleep, as Pilenz and the other boys look on. The question which nags Pilenz is this: did the cat jump of its own accord, thus absolving the other participants of responsibility, or did Pilenz himself set the animal on his defenceless friend? No-one can remember who encouraged the cat to pounce. Each time Pilenz recalls the incident he states that it was one of the others, before one of them pins the blame on him: `Rubbish, for goodness' sake, Pilenz took the cat and put it on him ± didn't he?' (144). While Mahlke makes out that he has outgrown the incident, he never pretends to have forgotten it. After disclaiming guilt, Pilenz writes Ì, however, who brought your mouse to the attention of one and thus all cats, now has to write' (6). This procedure is highly characteristic of his



Mahlke placed his name and rank in the top lefthand corner on the last page of each exercise book. The lads were not satis®ed and wanted him to note down the exact number of tanks he had destroyed ± and Mahlke agreed and wrote down the information, as if he were ®lling in forms at the Post Of®ce, ®rst in ®gures, then in words. Then he had to put his rhyme in two more books. IV:163

supposedly confessional narrative method. He gives us more than one version of an event before owning up to the most incriminating, thus for all his notorious slipperiness, leaving us with a ®nal impression of honesty. Yet while he ultimately supplies details of his own guilt, he fails to add them all up and consider the sum of his involvement, thereby failing to confront his past. The problem is that he has done nothing he could be accused of in a law court, indeed nothing that anybody else saw. The consequences of his deed also remain uncertain. Pilenz is roughly two years younger than Oskar and a year older than his creator, which explains how he manages to get an Abitur. He is not the only survivor from school: `Some of us got through the war, live in small minor towns or large minor towns, have got plump, are losing our hair and earn a reasonable living' (44). Their immensely ordinary lives in the postwar period bear no relation to the monumental events of their youth. Pilenz now works in a Kolpinghaus, a charitable institution which provided accommodation for working-class Catholic men, similar to the He is a bachelor in his early Caritasheim where Grass himself lodged in Dusseldorf. thirties but shows little intention of settling down to start a family, unlike Oskar who had been rebuffed by society as a whole and women in particular. Pilenz is a wouldbe musician and violin lessons might take his mind off his problems if his religion, his reading, his work or his writing fail to do so. From Father Alban's comments, it seems that writing will be yet another form of therapy. Pilenz never investigates motives or looks into his characters' minds; instead he describes actions and appearances from the outside. This approach lets him down badly with Mahlke and is part of his refusal to address the substance of his story properly. He is disingenuous when he claims of his friend that Ì never got to know his soul. I never heard what he thought' (37). Mahlke does in fact try to communicate with him. The moments of insight in Cat and Mouse occur at those points when Mahlke is allowed to speak, or when the Ritterkreuz winners' speeches are exposed as empty ideology, when we glimpse Mahlke, in spite of Pilenz's distorting lens, not as a failed hero or saviour, but a forlorn, human victim whose death is pointless and whose exceptional qualities are channelled towards destruction and thus wasted. On occasions, Mahlke demonstrates a higher degree of human awareness than the narrator Pilenz will ever achieve and articulates a maturity which transcends all his friend's symbolism. Cat and Mouse consequently has to be read somehow against itself, against the grain of Pilenz's symbols. `The monosyllabic' Mahlke speaks for himself three times: in his conversation with Pilenz about his reasons for joining up; his letter home to his mother, which Pilenz is allowed to read; and in his ®nal account of the reasons for his desertion from the army, where he explains that he would tell the Conradinum pupils about what he had to do to win the medal. Mahlke's talk will differ greatly from the accounts he listened to in the same hall, designed to inspire and indoctrinate the schoolboys. Before leaving for the Front Mahlke explains to Pilenz that he is not quite sure himself why he has taken the step of volunteering: `you know what I think about it: the military, playing at war, and this over-emphasis on soldierly values'. He claims he would have preferred to do `something purposeful' (117). Pilenz reproduces but




Lives in History 53

You cannot imagine what a bad state everything here is in, how poor the people are and all the children. No electric and mains water. Sometimes you want to ask what the point of it all is ± but it has to be. 134 Mahlke apparently fails to make connections, but his raising these issues at all distances him from Pilenz. His brevity and ®nal acquiescence could be explained by his awareness of the military censor. Pilenz is that dangerous animal in Grass's ®ction, a would-be believer in search of a creed, yearning to `believe, believe in something or other, no matter what it was' (139). He was never really convinced by Catholicism as a boy but served at Mass because he wanted to observe Mahlke's increasingly frenetic worship. Even in adult life he cannot free himself from the Church's embrace, despite his continuing lack of faith. Had it not been for his betrayal of Mahlke, however, he would not want to `discover an early form of communism in Nazareth or a late form of Christianity in Ukrainian collective farms' (139). Even though he never pledged whole-hearted allegiance to Nazism and cannot be said to have `believed' in that either, he had not questioned any element of his environment as a boy. The foundations of his mental world were then swept from beneath him when the regime collapsed shortly after the death of his friend ± the symbolic event of his enduring crisis and the climax of the novella. Unlike Grass, he does not learn to live positively with a system of nonbelief, which Grass develops into a programme of scepticism over the decade and a half which follow Cat and Mouse. Mahlke values order and symmetry and cannot tolerate inconsistencies which disrupt ordered patterns. He takes great care with his appearance, covering up the irregularity of his Adam's apple and pressing his hair down in a central parting. When Pilenz sees him wearing the stolen Ritterkreuz he describes how its design `proclaims symmetry to be its credo' (104), which explains why Mahlke became obsessed with it in the ®rst place. With this perfect `counterweight' around his neck, his Adam's Apple is at peace. Grass said in an interview 25 years later that it was this `striving for symmetry' (129) which did for Mahlke.23 The only other occasion Mahlke seems to be at one with himself is after Tulla has made him masturbate, against his initial better judgement, in front of the other boys. His enormous penis neutralises the effect of his Adam's apple and, for once, `permitted his body an ordered shape by means of an admittedly bizarre yet balanced harmony' (41). Mahlke's obsession with symmetry is a sign of a mentality which wants purity at any price, ideological perfection or the certainty acquired by serving a cause which is right in every particular, which explains away the world's contradictions, promising its adherents the realisation of a dream which justi®es every



otherwise ignores both these remarks. The letter home some time later contains at ®rst nothing more than warm words to mother and aunt, an unremarkable soldier's missive, for which the Gothic script Grass hates so much is ideally suited. They are followed by some more revealing comments which Pilenz introduces with typical evasiveness as `more unimportant stuff, a bit of insipid landscape description':

personal sacri®ce and permits any crime committed in its pursuit. In the books that come after Cat and Mouse Grass portrays similar characteristics to be representative of the worst sort of ideological thinking. For Grass, the world is full of blemishes, stains which spoil the white radiance of perfection, and that is a fact which has to be accepted. Both politically and personally his characters require a strategy to deal with the world's obvious lack of harmony: Starusch is the ®rst to begin to think all this through. Mahlke, whose world is clearly shattered at the end of his short life, never gets that far because historical circumstances do not permit it. What makes Pilenz's dilemma all the more typical for postwar Germans is that he cannot be sure of the degree of his responsibility for Mahlke's death. After all, Mahlke may have intended to commit suicide after failing to report for duty at the end of his leave. The decision to desert was certainly Mahlke's alone; his attack on the headmaster after he had refused him permission to speak, as the other medal winners had done, to the assembled schoolchildren, was a step too far for which he would have been disciplined had he been caught. Pilenz tried to get him to stop and warned him against carrying his plan out. Desertion from the army carried the death penalty, which Mahlke knew ± and anyone who aided and abetted a deserter would fear punishment himself, which Pilenz knew too. On the plus side for Pilenz is the fact that Mahlke did not con®de his intentions to him in advance and did not ask for Pilenz's assistance until he had started his course of action. Pilenz did not force Mahlke to dive down to the cabin on the minesweeper where the boys had played in the summers of 1940 and 1941. The arrangements the two of them make concerning Mahlke's underwater refuge, now in a worse state than it had been when the boys swam out to the ship three years previously, may thus have been something of a charade. The suggestion that Mahlke will be able to lie low until evening and then row out to stow away on a Swedish ship in the bay which will take him to safety is particularly far-fetched. The ship turns out not to be Swedish anyway. On the minus side, one could say that Pilenz gives his friend the equivalent of a loaded revolver, escorts him to an empty room, and gives him to understand what his duty will be. With an echo of biblical betrayal he lies to Mahlke three times. He pretends he had learnt from Mahlke's aunt that the military authorities were already on his tail, thus encouraging him to ¯ee quickly. He even adds that they had already arrested Mahlke's mother. He claims too that he has hired the rowing boat to take Mahlke out to the hulk for just an hour and a half, whereas in fact he had paid for two hours and could thus have stayed with him longer than he did. In addition he reveals that he had concealed the tin-opener he had fetched while Mahlke was preparing to dive. In this way he denies his friend the intended means of survival, which makes his initial help in fetching the cans of food from Mahlke's aunt pointless. This detail is especially signi®cant for the way Pilenz lets the truth slip out the third time he mentions it. Having twice reminded Mahlke not to forget it, once he has disappeared he reveals he has been hiding it with his foot all along. He then shouts `tin-op-en-er! tin-op-en-er!' to get Mahlke to come back up, but knows in his heart that it is too late. He then fails to return, as he had promised, to help Mahlke




make his escape under cover of darkness. He comes back instead the following day to peer at the wreck through binoculars. Pilenz is certainly less than half-hearted in his offers of help to Mahlke. He ¯atly gang who might have been able to refuses to put him in touch with Stortebeker's shelter him. He will not let him hide in his family's cellar: Ì didn't want to have anything to do with that either' (162). He will do anything rather than get involved and regrets suggesting the mine-sweeper because the plan demands extra assistance from him. He seems to want Mahlke to be out of the way in order to be certain of saving his own skin, and subsequently invents the theory that Mahlke may be still alive in order to assuage his own conscience. Before diving beneath the waves for the last time Mahlke has consumed great handfuls of gooseberries which have brought on cramps and stomach ache. He had begun to eat these gooseberries before Pilenz went on his errand for food, was still eating them on his return, and then continued for what must be several minutes. It is because this feast made him unable to swim that Pilenz has to fetch a rowing boat. To get to the underwater cabin Mahlke will now need to hold his breath for at least a minute and negotiate several underwater obstacles while pulling his provisions, tied to his foot, behind him. Ordinarily, this would not have presented him with problems, but it is clearly impossible for him to do it in his present state. Yet afterwards Pilenz still waits for a signal to indicate he has made it to the cabin: `Since that Friday I know the meaning of silence' (176). One must come to the conclusion that as far as humanity to a fellow human being is concerned, helping a friend in need, Pilenz has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. A further instance of his failure to face up to what has happened is Pilenz's search for Mahlke in the present. He attends meetings of Ritterkreuz veterans, but, unlike Grass, does not view them with distaste. Grass had challenged these veterans to face the truth: Where, however, I often ask myself, is there a holder of the Ritterkreuz who has kept the remainder of his soldierly bravery for postwar life and who would be prepared to speak the truth, like this, for instance: `Yes, I have recognised that my feats on the ®eld of battle were meaningless. Without knowing and without wanting to do so I helped criminals who needed time and space to organise and carry out their murder of six million people. I was wounded four times. I have lost a leg. When the weather changes the stump hurts and reminds me. I refuse to wear medals which were awarded so that behind our backs murderers and their assistants to whom we had given total power could spread and carry on their crime!' But no Ritterkreuz holder has up to now ever spoken like that in public. XIV:237 Mahlke would have made that speech but did not live to do so; the question the text asks is whether Pilenz is mature enough to make it in his place, and it seems that he is not. He has got half-way there, but that is not far enough.



Lives in History 55


After Kafka ± after Mann

Simply sit yourself down, dear Pilenz, and get writing. You possess after all, however Kafkaesque your ®rst writing attempts turned out to be, a remarkable gift with the pen. Take up the violin or write yourself free ± the Good Lord did not furnish you with these talents for nothing. IV:126 The hope is clearly that writing about the past will have some therapeutic effect, as it had for some of the artists in the third book of The Tin Drum. Yet Pilenz's text never amounts to a successful act of expiation, and his problems remain as acute at the end of his tale as they were at the beginning. The clue here is Alban's use of the term `Kafkaesque', which Grass often used himself to denote a type of postwar West German novel which concentrated on abstract themes, such as metaphysical guilt, rather than everyday detail. He has distanced The Tin Drum from these accounts of Nazism, explaining that he consciously wrote against a tendency in the literature of the immediate postwar period which de®ned itself as placeless as well as timeless and which, whether its practitioners realised it or not, stood in the shadow of Kafka.24 He remembers, however, that he `came unstuck with his ®rst attempt to write a longer piece of prose which was called Die Schranke [The Court] and which borrowed its structure from Kafka and its extravagant metaphors from the Early Expressionists' (XV:326). We can only assume from the title that this had something to do with the workings of the law and speculate that Kafkaesque guilt might have been its central theme. In the surviving typescripts of The Tin Drum, the so-called Urtrommel, the ®rst two chapters are set at Oskar's lodgings rather than in the asylum, thus underlining a structural similarity with Kafka's The Trial, which begins in Josef K.'s lodging house. In view of Pilenz's other reading matter one imagines that the Kafka he would have emulated would have been the author of guilt, expiation, and metaphysical searching, as interpreted by Max Brod and rediscovered after 1945. Pilenz's attention to style would then account for the symbolism and the multiple layers of meaning, which would lead in turn to the suspicion that Grass, the author, if not Pilenz, the narrator, is lightly parodying this type of writing, the Kafkaesque scribblings of Pilenz's literary beginnings. Franz Kafka (1883±1924) died on the brink of fame and became known only gradually in the decade which separated his death from Hitler's takeover. After the war he was the greatest German-language discovery of the Gruppe 47. Kafka's world, that of Central European Jewish culture, was extinguished by the Nazis, who sent his three sisters and his lover, Milena JesenskaÂ, to their deaths in concentration camps. Despite the Nazis' best efforts, there were still links with this obliterated tradition of



In a comment which is often quoted, Father Alban advises Pilenz to express himself on paper in order to understand his inner torment better:

German-language Literature. Kurt Wolff, Kafka's publisher, who had ¯ed to New York, became Grass's American publisher. After his death in 1963, his widow and business partner, Helen Wolff, began a remarkable correspondence with her most popular German author which continued until she died in 1994. The Gruppe 47 writers professed, on the other hand, that they wanted nothing to do with Thomas Mann (1875±1955), the towering patriarch of German writing. Grass too has always underplayed his own literary links with Mann, which are numerous, perhaps because their two personalities are vastly different: after 1933 Mann defended German culture from the centre, whereas Grass prefers to ambush his opponents from the sidelines. Yet comparisons are inevitable and Grass published his ®rst book the year after Mann died. They share a Hanseatic background tempered by mixed parentage, which made both feel semi-outsiders. Both came to play a public role in response to historical circumstances after a dandyish youth devoted to art and aesthetics. Characters in The Tin Drum follow a curve of decline ending in death, which recalls Mann's `decline of a family' in his ®rst novel Buddenbrooks. Oskar's mother and Herbert Truczinski simply lose the will to live, like Thomas Buddenbrook, who dies from a stroke on reading Schopenhauer after a visit to the dentist. Buddenbrook's toothache is a metaphor for an inner weariness, a sickness with life itself, which Mann portrays as infecting the very heart of the bourgeois world in his novel: òf a tooth [. . .] Senator Buddenbrook had died of a tooth, people said in the town',25 while according to Oskar, Agnes Matzerath `died of a dish of eel soup' (III:458). While Starusch in Local Anaesthetic undergoes treatment for dental pain and battles against a hostile world, the ®gures in The Tin Drum put up little resistance. Mann's greatest account of surrender is Death in Venice, which stands comparison to his account of the fascist manipulation of an audience, Mario and the Magician. The depiction of the collapse of the will and the individual's fascination with seemingly irrational forces is similar in both texts. The spectators at the party rally in The Tin Drum follow an exotic, primeval call, as Gustav von Aschenbach does, when Oskar, emulating the Nazi performers on the stage, taps a seam of primitive feeling. Cipolla's demagogic control of an audience in Mario and the Magician resulted from a battle of unequal wills: it proved insuf®cient for a victim simply not to will the local Danzig something to happen for it to be prevented. Both Lobsack, demagogue, and Cipolla, who reduces his prey to the point of complete self abasement, are physically deformed: Lobsack is `hunch-backed and talented' (III:148) and Cipolla has à sort of hunched hip'.26 Both are clownish but consummate public speakers. The contrast with The Tin Drum is revealing, however. Mann ends on a politically optimistic note, as Cipolla is shot by Mario after he has publicly shamed him on stage. The implication is that the victim can only be pushed so far until he ®ghts back and attacks his tormentor. Grass explodes this comforting myth. While entertaining the troops in a Berlin air-raid shelter, Roswitha plays a similar game to Cipolla. Her total control is re-enacted by Oskar in the Onion Cellar. When Grass mentions Mann, it is the political author and pamphleteer who draws his attention: in 1965, he quotes Mann's complaint that `there is no more condescending scorn than that for the poet who ``makes the descent into the



Lives in History 57

political arena''' (XIV:124);27 after the election he condemns the way that CDU politicians attacked Willy Brandt for his years in exile and compares Brandt's vili®cation to the treatment meted out to Mann after the war. Yet when Grass staked out his own position with regard to authors of the Weimar period, attacking the Left for what he perceived to be their extremist rejection of workable democratic institutions, it is odd that he does not cite Mann as an obvious role model. In his ®rst campaign speech in the elections of 1965, he declared that èlections are appeals to reason', an argument he repeats frequently. Mann made a similar appeal in 1930, pleading with his listeners to ponder Germany's problems in as coolheaded a way as possible.28 Grass also took Ì sing thee, Democracy!' as the motto for his 1965 campaign, a line adapted from a poem by Walt Whitman which Mann had quoted in his in¯uential essay Àbout the German Republic'. Grass has sketched his own place in literary tradition on numerous occasions, claiming a lineage which, in the main, runs parallel to the dominant strand in German rather than Mann, the Baroque literature, citing Jean Paul rather than Goethe, Doblin rather than Weimar Classicism, while welcoming af®nities with authors from other languages, such as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Melville. Critics, however, have not in a lecture he always been convinced of the links he tried to establish with Doblin was essentially an ànti-classical writer' delivered in 1967. According to Grass, Doblin (XIV:264), who revised his style with each new novel instead of adding to a homogeneous corpus of works. He claims the same of his own work too. It is clear that Grass feels ill at ease at the cultural centre of things, preferring to subvert from below or parody from the periphery, a role which is dif®cult to reconcile with his own status as the leading German author of his times. When it comes to novel writing, he identi®es mainly with comic writers, picaresque antiheroes, and novelists who mixed styles and linguistic registers. In an interview given in 1970 he describes the tradition to which his ®rst novel is heir: It comes, and the same is true of me and my af®nities, very strongly from that European tradition of novel writing which stretches from the picaresque novel with all its breaks and discontinuities, Rabelais and the gaps that separate him from us, the delayed translation into German and the adaptation by Fischart. Then there is the ®rst great novel by Grimmelshausen, the other European links with England, Sterne, and his in¯uence on German writers from Goethe to Jean Paul, and then if in you follow on further from Sterne, to Joyce and Dos Passos and to Doblin Germany, who in turn in the same way can be linked back to Jean Paul.29 This is an avowedly European and international list. It is a literature of life, which takes account of the body as well as the mind, vulgar and ironic, subversive and experimental rather than discursive or philosophical.

Broken biographies: Dog Years This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath




before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloodyminded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things ± childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves ± that go on slipping, like sand, through our ®ngers. I have tried to learn the lessons of the midget drummer. And one more, which I got from that other, immense work, Dog Years: when you've done it once, start all over again and do it better. Salman Rushdie30

In July 1961 Grass wrote to Kurt Wolff that his next novel would take him another two years to ®nish, which it did. But it had not all been plain sailing. He had initially called the project `Potato Peelings', as the past had to be peeled away like the skin off a potato, but he quite soon realised that his overall concept would not work. Just that àfter a row with my muse it turns out after Christmas 1960 he wrote to Hollerer die Katz]; I have to that I have written a few hundred pages of prose for nothing [fur start at the beginning again'.31 `Writing for the cat' he might have been (given the title he gave to the novella which was blocking his progress), but it was certainly not for nothing. He had to ®nish Cat and Mouse ®rst, during the winter 1960±61, as it had been ìn the way'.32 But by Christmas the following year his second big book was nearly complete: `Soon, I hope, the hound will be under the earth, in a mine in fact; and there, where scarecrows are manufactured on an industrial scale, is where I want to leave him.'33 Back in Berlin, having recovered from a bout of tuberculosis, Grass began to meet politicians during the 1961 elections. While Richter famously overlooked inviting him to the ®rst meeting between Brandt and Gruppe 47 writers, he had invited him to the International Congress on Nuclear Disarmament held in London in January 1959, where Bertrand Russell gave the opening address, which seems to belie his famous claim that he had not suspected that his star pupil was interested in politics.34 Richter subsequently introduced him to Brandt (on Brandt's insistence) in August 1961, when Grass pledged his support to the party in general and Brandt in particular. One consequence of this new dimension to Grass's life was that the future SPD Finance Minister, Professor Karl Schiller, Grass's favourite SPD politician after Brandt, read the proofs of Dog Years. Whatever can be said against the way Grass depicts the rottenness at the core of the Economic Miracle in book three of the novel has to be said in the knowledge that he bene®ted from such expert assistance. Schiller, who became a godparent to Grass's third son in 1965, recalls: I got to know Grass at a reception. He was working on a book in which he claimed he was going to describe the Economic Miracle: Dog Years. He gave me the manuscript, I worked through it, and was able to give him some advice.35 Fellow writers also played a greater role with Dog Years than with The Tin Drum. Grass mentions the GDR poet and novelist, Johannes Bobrowski (1917±65), a native of



Lives in History 59


East Prussia and thus fellow Heimatvertriebener. Bobrowski responds in kind when he distances his own localised approach in Levin's Mill from Grass's all-encompassing epic undertaking:

When Grass invited Bobrowski to Hollerer's wedding in June 1965, he signed the invitation, `Your Adalbert of Prague', in memory of the tenth-century missionary to the region, a joke a West-Prussian can make to an East-Prussian.37 Bobrowski shared his fascination with the ethnic history of these Prussian-Slavic borderlands, an interest which in Grass's case reached its fullest expression in The Flounder, where Adalbert of Prague becomes a central ®gure. In Dog Years Walter Matern boasts mould, who was repeatedly about an outlaw ancestor, a ®gure in the Stortebeker caught at the same time as an ancestor of Bobrowski's and executed. Bobrowski had researched the same material for his history of his family: Between 1507±15 he was involved in actions against the Danzigers as agent to the outlaw leader Matern. It was because of him that the Danzig civic authorities quarrelled with the Governor of Culm who had no intention of moving against the highwayman. On 26 December 1515 Matern was caught by the Danzigers, followed shortly afterwards by Ostrowicki, who got away on 12 March 1516. Matern hanged himself in his dungeon.38 Uwe Johnson was a more signi®cant presence both in Grass's personal and creative life. He had moved from the GDR to the West in 1959 and lived close to Grass in his new home in West Berlin's Friedenau district. They bene®ted from discussions of each other's work. According to Johnson's biographer, these `workshop conversations' were particularly intense during the writing of Dog alsatian after he had Years: `That you could not ``see any change'' in the Fuhrer's come back from mating is a phrase Johnson always liked to quote.' 39 Grass also read from his manuscript at the Gruppe 47 meeting in Berlin during the week of the Cuba missile crisis in October 1962. Richter recalls `great differences of reacts to the opinion concerning the Heidegger parodies', where Stortebeker mountain of bones in Stutthof in mock-Heideggerian rhetoric.40 Grass claims, however, that he owes most to an uneasy admirer of Heidegger's, the Rumanian Jewish poet, Paul Celan (1920±70). Celan was a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supe rieure in Paris when Grass met him, as he recalled in his 1990 Frankfurt Poetics Lecture, `Writing after Auschwitz': His help never came directly since he parcelled it out in subordinate clauses, on walks in parks, for instance. Paul Celan's encouragement and assistance exerted more of an in¯uence on the novel Dog Years than on The Tin Drum, for example, at the beginning of the fairy tale which concludes the second book, when next to



Since it is not a big book and not by Grass, it takes place in the Vistula area but not on the great river itself. The Vistula is a big river as we all know: the Drewenz is a tributary ± of the Vistula.36

Lives in History 61

Grass goes over much of the same basic psychological and historical material in Dog Years for a second time, as he had recognised `that I had to unpeel the monstrous epic onion once more, layer by layer, and that I could not take my leave from this enterprise' (XVI:248±9). The novel follows the same chronological pattern as The Tin Drum and is divided once more into three books. The ®rst covers the pre-Hitler period, Èarly Shifts', narrated by Amsel, who orchestrates the composition of the entire novel; the second, `Love Letters', the Hitler years themselves; and the third the postwar period up to 1961, which is the story of Walter Matern, the ex-Communist, ex-Nazi, and one-time fervent Catholic actor who becomes an avenging anti-Nazi after 1945. The three narrators represent three types: the victim (Amsel); the witness (Liebenau); and the perpetrator (Matern). The distinctions, however, are surprisingly blurred. Despite the overlapping personnel and the continued focus on his childhood home, the ®rst thing to strike a reader is not the similarities with The Tin Drum but the differences, which matter more. None of the narrators in Dog Years, however, establishes a tone or character quite like Oskar's and none tells a tale as uni®ed as that narrated by Pilenz. Instead of a single narrative voice, Grass employs three diverging but complementary perspectives. He is well aware of the difference and insists that he prefers his second novel because it presents his reader with a greater challenge. Grass portrayed two Jewish ®gures in The Tin Drum: Sigismund Markus dies by his own hand at the beginning of the Nazi terror, Herr Fajngold appears once the Holocaust is over. Needless to say, the representation of Jewish characters is a sensitive area and most non-Jewish German writers who have strayed on to it (Uwe Johnson is an exception) have sparked critical rows, in many cases years after their work has been published. In 1963, Grass was defended from the mischievous charge of antiSemitism, lobbed in his direction by the GDR-apparatchik Hermann Kant, by none other than Reich-Ranicki.41 Two decades later, however, Ruth K. Angress found what she took to be his use of anti-Semitic caricature in The Tin Drum to be unacceptable. Sander Gilman, the most distinguished world voice in German-Jewish studies, followed her remarks with a similar critique of Grass's reproduction of Jewish speech in both The Tin Drum and Dog Years.42 Angress, who subsequently published a memoir of how she survived the Nazi camps as a child, was in no mood to take context into account. Like Gilman, she set up Grass as a target on account of his iconic status in German culture. S.S. Prawer, whose family background makes him no less quali®ed to judge the matter, supplies a critically more sensitive and ultimately more convincing reading of the Jewish toyshop owner's role in The Tin Drum. He shows that Grass's reaction to the loss of Central Europe's Jews is loving but not philo-Semitic, moving but not sentimental, and that the elements of caricature in the portrayal of Sigismund Markus are there precisely to be discredited.43 What Grass is trying to say in Dog Years through his depiction of the half-Jewish artist Amsel, who prospers in all periods and under all regimes, represents an



the ¯ak battery Kaiserhafen a mountain of bones, supplied by the concentration camp at Stutthof near to Danzig, towers into the sky. XVI:249

intensi®cation of his exploration of Jewishness and perceptions of Jewishness. Amsel is more complicated and is trapped by the way others see him. He is ironic and ambiguous, intellectually slippery, manipulative, chameleon-like in the way he can adopt a new identity and personality, an opportunistic intellectual who still undermines authority, who, to cap it all, survives the war by re-inventing himself as a rich entrepreneur. He wins the battle with his Ayran tormentor of old, Matern, who is now dependent on him. It is with Amsel that Grass is arguably suspect in his treatment of Jews and Jewishness. He is dealing in types and stereotypes which inevitably means he leaves real individuals behind. Perhaps in recognition of the impasse he had reached, he left the subject well alone until Too Far A®eld, where Professor Freundlich is not much more than a cardboard cut-out. In From the Diary of a Snail, which deals with the Holocaust more than any other of his books, his treatment is documentary and his central ®gure a non-Jew. It was this book, however, which upset Reich-Ranicki, as it was based in part on his own experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi Occupation. The problem is that Grass views the Holocaust from a non-Jewish, postwar German point of view, the nuances of which he can reproduce with matchless sensitivity. He is arguably less sensitive when it comes to how Jewish readers may react to what he has written. While Grass sets out to deconstruct the myths and stereotypes of Jewish identity in Dog Years, in books two and three he comes perilously close to reinforcing them. The notion of the Jew who wants to stop being a Jew and assimilate into Gentile society is at least as old as the Emancipation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Jews had never been properly accepted despite their contribution to German prosperity was demonstrated by the rise of anti-Semitism at the turn of the century and Nazi rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s. With Jewish assimilation came the idea of the `self-hating Jew' who rejected and loathed his origins, cast aside any reminder of his Jewish forebears, and re-invented himself as a Gentile. Amsel's father took this course of action to an extreme with the aid of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character, which puts forward the theory that principles of masculinity and femininity are polar opposites, that both genders contain traces of the other, and that the wholly negative character of the feminine can be overcome by the positive masculine principle. In one chapter he substitutes feminine for Jewish and masculine for Gentile and contends, as a Jew in a Gentile world, that Jewishness (like femininity) can be eradicated. Amsel counts as Jewish in the eyes of Matern and his group of SA thugs who beat him up and leave his crumpled, bleeding body for dead. The way his Jewishness is created in their minds and in his own is one of the high points of the novel. Amsel's father was born into à well-established Jewish tailor family' (V:39), a typically Jewish occupation, but left home at 16 to seek his fortune in Berlin. He returns 14 years later, `transformed, in the right faith, prosperous' (39) and sets up a business in 1896, a year after the canal was dug to reduce the danger of ¯ooding in Schwienenhorst on the opposite side of the Vistula from Nickelswalde where the Matern family live. Although his son believes àll origins are arbitrary' (39), Albrecht Amsel re-invented himself as a Protestant German. He sang in the local choir and exercised in the local gymnastics association because these are supposed to be




authentically German and de®nitely non-Jewish activities. While he claims his name was Dutch in origin, his neighbours keep the memory of his Jewishness alive, calling him `the rich Amsel ± or: ``the Jew Amsel''' (33). Even though his son only learns the truth about his father's origins at his mother's deathbed when he is 20, when he is beaten up at school because of his fat, freckled appearance, his tormentors instinctively call him `Yid!' (46). His Jewishness is thus forced upon him by others, eventually making him into an amalgam of anti-Semitic cliche s and stereotypes. If Grass evoked the city of Danzig in The Tin Drum, in Dog Years he conjures up the landscape of its immediate hinterland. History, not geography, is his theme, however. He elaborates various ®elds of imagery relating to digging and mining, to delving as deeply and as far back as possible in order to uncover the roots of what happened. Amsel mentions four dates in the opening section of the novel: like other recurrent motifs, they have an incantatory ring. Liebenau and Amsel look everywhere for deeper symbolic and mythical meanings in his past experiences. Amsel's mine is the ®nal image for such subterranean delving in the novel as a whole. Grass now delves a little further back in time than he had in his ®rst novel and recapitulates events in the century before the birth of Amsel and Matern, who both entered the world in 1917. While Matern believes he can trace his ancestry to a sixteenth-century robber rebel, Amsel mentions Swantopolk, Adalbert of Prague, Governor Rapp, and Pastor Blech ± all of whom will play signi®cant roles in The Flounder. The narrators are interested in the histories of the least consequential details, place names and people. Under a regime obsessed with the purity of genealogy, Grass stresses that all the ethnic and religious groups, which the Nazis set on one another, had been mixed from the beginnings of settlement in the region. Not even the pedigree alsatian is `pure' because three generations back he is descended from an indisputably Slavic she-wolf. The origins of the human ®gures are even less uniform, as Liebenau demonstrates with respect to his cousin, Tulla Pokriefke: You were baptised under the name of Ursula but were called Tulla from the beginning. This nickname probably derives from the Koschna wjer water spirit Thula which lived in the Osterwick Lake and whose name had various spellings: Duller, Tolle, Tullatsch, Thula, or Dul, Tul, Thul. When the Pokriefkes still lived in Osterwick they were settled as tenants on the Mosbrauchsba sch next to the lake, on the road to Konitz. From the fourteenth century to the year Tulla was born, in the year twenty-seven, Osterwick was spelt in the following ways: Ostirwig, Ostirwich, Osterwigh, Osterwig, Osterwyk, Ostrowit, Ostrowite, Osterwieck,

The Koschnawjer Ostrowitte, Ostrow. said: Oustewitsch. The Polish root of the means river island or island in a lake, village name Osterwick, the word ostrow, for the village of Osterwick had originally, that is in the fourteenth century, been situated on the island in Osterwick Lake. 153 Ursula, from the Latin word meaning `bear', denotes her animal qualities; `Pokriefke', on the other hand, is a Polish word meaning `saucepan lid'. Just as the



Lives in History 63

`years of doggishness' do not end in 1945 ± the Fuhrer's dog Prinz escapes from the Bunker on Hitler's last birthday and follows Matern on his vengeful odyssey through the new Federal Republic ± the `doggishness' itself did not emerge from nowhere. The Dog Years triumvirate of narrators has to dig deep to ®nd what they take to be its origins. Unlike The Tin Drum, Dog Years is not divided into more or less self-contained chapters, each of which depicts a startling episode with little overspill into the next chapter. Now everything overspills into everything else. George Steiner describes how Grass `suggests an action painter wrestling, dancing across a huge canvas, then rolling himself in the paint in a ®nal logic of design'. But he adds a caveat: àlthough Grass plots and ravels with crazy gusto, the book tends to fall apart. What sticks in one's mind is the general statement of chaos and the brilliance of discrete episodes'.44 It is true that there are no obvious breaks, apart from the gaps between the three books, and as a consequence the novel is best read in a few long sittings. It is more than the sum of its parts and its effect on its readers must be cumulative. Imagery is as important a structural principle as chronology and episodes are arranged by their ®eld of metaphorical reference. Grass now puts other things before narrative progression and expands all his metaphors. As the great literary purveyor of his extravagant fare, he weighs, touches, and smells his ingredients. They come from a dazzling array of sources ± mining, geology, and dike-construction, Prussian history and folklore, ballet and sculpture, the military, the media, economics, Weininger's Sex and Character and Heidegger's Being and Time, ®rst published with a dedication subsequently removed to his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl, in the year Grass was born. The sound, texture and fragrance of words are important. It is not always immediately apparent why he is telling us a particular incident ± such as Matern slaughtering sewer rats or killing frogs, or Tulla torturing the gypsyfoundling Jenny by making her eat jelly-®sh, or Tulla's frantic attempts to induce an abortion after her equally heroic efforts to get pregnant in the ®rst place. All these sections, narrated as semi-prose poems with strong rhythms and frequent repetitions, have a powerful impact on the senses and are calculated to cause nausea or leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth. There are lots of tastes and smells in Dog Years. They are all foul. If Oskar had often been captivated by the cleverness, the drama, or even the terrible beauty of his own formulations at the expense of documentary detail, the triumvirate in Dog Years now makes up for him. Half the novel, perhaps, provides economic data, details the involvement of ordinary, local characters, and describes the continuities in their behaviour pre- and post-1945. The other half, which overlaps and intersects with the ®rst from start to ®nish, consists of allegorical ideas transformed into stories. The basic idea behind Amsel's scarecrows is that we adopt beliefs and ideologies to mark off our territory from others and frighten them from our personal patch of ground. We plunder history and mythology to buttress them. The allegorical meaning of this motif (its `signi®ed') is thus easy to summarise and yet the material (the `signi®er') stretches over page after page. While Grass weighs down his fantasy with nouns and names, thus anchoring his abstract allegories in the material world, they sometimes take off from it and leave it far behind. If the




main failing of Oskar and Pilenz had been their refusal or inability to make connections, then that of Liebenau and occasionally Amsel is that they make far too many. Liebenau manufactures great mythological patterns from the minutest details. He shares a penchant for melodrama, suspense and a gradual narrative build-up with Amsel, taking ten pages over the episode of Tulla spitting at the infant Jenny. This is insistently rhythmic prose which slowly reaches a crescendo. The `Love Letters' and the Èarly Shifts' are divided into ritualistic, even operatic scenes: Tulla's transformation into a dog after the drowning of her deaf and dumb brother Konrad; the three attacks which she incites the dog Harras to make on the music teacher Felsner-Imbs; the beating-up and resurrection of Jenny and Amsel; the enforced sojourn of Liebenau and Jenny in the ice cellar; the mountain of bones outside Stutthof and the ®nally the `last fairy tale', where Prinz escapes from the and heads west. Some sections are simply repetitive from a thematic Fuhrerbunker point of view, but one of the most important aspects of Dog Years is the musicality of Grass's prose: he re-works and repeats ideas and motifs over the full seven or eight hundred pages. The lineage of the dog presented to Hitler is an incantation, while the `letters' written by Harry to Tulla, which each begin with a different form of address, give a clear sense of his emotional obsession. Another technique is the parodic montage of ideological scraps and fragments such as patriotic Prussian cliche s and phrases, or the ®nal scarecrow panorama of historical `turning points'. Such ideological language can be exposed in a variety of ways, which recalls some of the techniques of the `concrete poets', imitating too the great Viennese satirist, Karl Kraus, in his èxposing of the cliche ' (Entlarvung der Phrase). In such sequences (the litanies on the words `pure', `brown' or `black'), Grass strips slogans and hackneyed phrases of their ideological connotations. Liebenau sets the propaganda use of the word `pure', speci®cally racial purity, side by side with the manufacture of soap from Jewish bones. Elsewhere Grass eliminates main verbs, objects or verb complements from the sentences and jumbles celebrated quotations, ripping them out of their conventional context. The phrases are empty husks, devoid of any real sense, mere ideological distortions. The interlinking between personal biography and history is as central as ever. Amsel and Matern are born within a few weeks of each other in the third year of World War One ± Matern a day before Hitler's birthday on 19 April 1917. While Amsel never meets his father who is killed at Verdun before his birth, Matern's aunt goes mad after losing her ®ance , the dog Perkun's owner, on the Eastern Front. Matern's parents have waited more than a dozen years for his mother to conceive, her supposedly Protestant tardiness in this respect the reason for her mighty battle with her Catholic mother-in-law, who, in protest, has sat paralysed in a chair for a full nine years. She then erupts back into life at Matern's christening. The two boys become blood brothers at the age of eight and for a while complement one another completely despite their differences. Amsel is a half-Jewish Protestant, while Matern is brought up Catholic, though his mother came from a Protestant family. Both pretend to be Aryan, which is not true of either: Matern has Slavic forbears. Amsel is artistic, clever and sensitive, Matern strong and violent. Amsel is fat and in need of



Lives in History 65

protection until he learns how to protect himself when Matern sets the Nazi thugs of the SA on him. Matern is attractive to women and willing to protect his weaker friend until the day of his betrayal. Matern's temperament is typically German in Grass's interpretation: he is volatile to the point of instability, liable to extremes of action or belief, and never able to compromise or adopt a middle way between two poles, re-enacting the revolutionary violence of his famous ancestor. This typically German phenomenon merited Grass's attention during the election campaigns for the SPD. He told Der Spiegel at the height of the 1969 election campaign: Whoever looks closely will see that my literary work, and my attempt in politics to put my civil rights into practice, have the same starting point. In the novel Dog Years I believe I succeeded in portraying a German idealist ®gure who, while not an opportunist, over the shortest possible period sees his salvation in Communism, National Socialism, Catholicism and ®nally in ideological antifascism. At the end he pursues his version of anti-Fascism with Fascist methods. XIV:474 Grass continues to explore this personality type for the rest of his creative oeuvre. In Matern's love-hate friendship with Amsel, he wavers between complete acceptance of his friend and violent rejection. He needs, like Pilenz, and Klepp and Meyn in The Tin Drum, a belief, a faith or an ideology to which he can devote himself totally. It does not matter what that belief is. The contrast between Amsel and Matern may be only skin deep, however: both are mimics who change their identities or allegiances regularly. The Matern family has owned the mill at Nickelswalde since 1815 when the grandfather of Walter's grandmother, his great-great-grandfather (the same relationship which spans the same century between Fonty and Fontane in Too Far A®eld), built it on the site of an older mill, using money he made trading goods and secrets with both sides during the siege of Danzig at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The genealogy of the alsatians is equally impressive measured in dog years, since Perkun, great-grandfather of Prinz, has lived at the mill since before World War One: Matern's aunt's ®ance had brought the animal back from Lithuania and when asked would show his pedigree, which showed plainly to everyone that Perkun's paternal grandmother was a Lithuanian, Russian, or Polish wolf. And Perkun begat Senta; and Senta gave birth to Harras; and Harras begat Prinz; and Prinz made history . . . . V:23 The other three main ®gures, Jenny, Tulla and Liebenau, are ten years younger than Amsel and Matern. Liebenau's career is similar to Grass's own. He fails to complete his Abitur, is enlisted ®rst as a air force auxiliary where he mans a ¯ak battery, and then into the Wehrmacht. In April 1945 he has an experience he never forgets when he is wounded, which in¯uences in hidden ways the future course of his life. Jenny is adopted by Brunies after she has been left in a forest by gypsies. She




is given 18 January as a birthday, this being the day in 1871 the German Empire was proclaimed in Versailles after the Prussian victory over the French: another way in which an outcast group, or in this case a sympathetic liberal, tries to ingratiate itself with the dominant group. A German identity is imposed on her. Liebenau's postwar character is far more ®nely developed than that of Pilenz. As a broadcaster he makes capital out of the artistic and literary issues derived from past traumas. He is devious and untrustworthy, claiming with feigned nonchalance that Tulla had always pinned the responsibility on him for the dog's attacks on FelsnerImbs. He is obsessed with Tulla as Pilenz is obsessed by Mahlke and, like Pilenz, he trots along behind others, never acting ®rst, always copying and following, a young lad who `worked out in his head what others turned into real deeds' (408), whose violent urges are sublimated into writing. He hides his own complicity in the political crimes which he relates ± the persecution of Jenny and the denunciation of Jenny's adopted father. These are de®nite and deliberate criminal acts, but Liebenau, in contrast to Pilenz, does not explore them. Dog Years is a transitional novel, bursting with artistic ideas but animated by an anger which Grass directed increasingly at political targets in West Germany. But the invective needed a different sort of outlet if it was going to be effective. In October 1963, Konrad Adenauer, who had won four general elections for the CDU, ®nally stood down at the age of 87. A new era was beginning, one which saw writers catapulted into the limelight. For most of the next decade, this was to be Gunter Grass's forum.



Lives in History 67

3

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme! For you, I am trilling these songs. Walt Whitman1

A famous young man For without doubt, Gu È nter Grass is famous. None of the younger writers in Germany has had remotely as much success over the last decade or achieved as much fame. And Grass is only thirty-seven years old. His fame withstands the scrutiny of literary historians and is appropriate material for discussion in university seminars; it withstands the attention of a mass public, as his novels have print runs as long as those for classics or bestsellers. Heinrich Vormweg2 In the course of the 1960s, the de®ning, pivotal decade in the history of the old È nter Grass bestrode the public stage as no other German writer Federal Republic, Gu has ever done. This surprised Hans Werner Richter, who had not been alone in failing to notice his dishevelled young poet show an interest in politics, in contrast to most other members of the Gruppe 47. After Richter failed to invite Grass to Bonn in May 1961 to a discussion with the Social Democrats, it was Willy Brandt himself who insisted Grass came to their next meeting. It had been Grass's `model performance in East Berlin' at a German Writers' Congress that attracted Brandt's attention. Here, three months before the building of the Berlin Wall, Grass had denounced censorship and the lack of freedom of expression in the Soviet bloc.3 It was his willingness to speak his mind loudly and combatively, no matter who was listening, his ability to take on adversaries and `bring some colour' to campaigning, which Brandt coveted. As Frisch put it, Grass ìs not afraid of enemies, he seeks them out, that is what they are there for'.4 At the beginning of the media age, where image counted for everything and È nter Grass, whether professional politicians sometimes struggled to adapt, Gu terrorising middle-class good taste, outraging old Nazis, or representing the new 68



The Turn to Politics

liberal values of the state, appeared à natural'. Hans Mayer remembers the feelings of expectation aroused by another visit to the GDR, this time to the University of Leipzig in March 1961. Grass knew exactly how to enliven a public reading: he `loves surprises; he works them out in advance'.5 He immediately created a moment of high drama by announcing he had a message from a young Leipzig alumnus who had recently ¯ed west, Grass's new West Berlin neighbour, the novelist Uwe Johnson. A party apparatchik interrupted to reject the `best wishes' conveyed in the name of a traitor to the republic. Professor Mayer intervened to assert Johnson's literary achievement. The atmosphere was electric. Yet Mayer sees two sides to his illustrious guest: the ®rst is embodied by the wholly serious intellectual critic of public affairs; the other, quite simply, radiates all the charisma of a modern media personality: I remember a cartoon from this period in a major newspaper. The picture is of a packed theatre, presumably an opera house. On the stage a little man with the well-known moustache, in front of him a great number of microphones, all around him cameras. Standing next to him is the compe re, whose voice, as the caption makes clear, quivers with excitement as he introduces his guest: Ànd now, Ladies and Gentlemen, Gu È nter Grass will tell us about the weekend's weather!'6 Here was a star of print, screen and public performance. These were the talents he would soon put at the disposal of the SPD. Grass's ®rst statement in support of the SPD was his contribution to The Alternative or Do We Need a New Government?, a collection of statements for the SPD election campaign in 1961 by Gruppe 47 members. The volume sold more than 100 000 copies. Here he admits that Oskar Matzerath will hardly be voting for the party and hints that his readers might be surprised to hear him doing so. Indeed, he might even have surprised himself by backing a political party. Looking back in `Writing after Auschwitz' in 1990 he describes his political views in the 1950s to be based on a re¯ex oppositional attitude (the `count me out!' mentality), which of course characterises The Tin Drum too: As a burnt child it was enough for me, more from instinct than through argument, to be against the ®rst Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, against the nouveau riche ethos of the Economic Miracle, which had just begun, against the supposedly Christian double standards of the Restoration, obviously against rearmament and even more obviously against Adenauer's State Secretary Globke, his Stasi expert Gehlen, and against further gross misdemeanours committed by the Statesman from the Rhine. I can remember Easter Marches, animated by protest against the Atom Bomb. You had to be there and be against. The de®ant horror of the seventeen-year old who did not want to believe, had dissipated and given way to an all-embracing anti-attitude. XVI:238



The Turn to Politics 69

Yet when he offered his services to Brandt he could look back to the winter 14 years before that he spent in the Hildesheim potash mine. Here he had learned to admire veteran working-class SPD men, who imparted the second great lesson in his political re-education after the revelations made at Nuremberg. There were other formative experiences. The 1950s may have gone into history as a passive decade in West Germany, which is why Grass calls them a period of conservative `Restoration' (after the post-Napoleonic era from 1815±48 he explores most fully in Too Far A®eld), but politics were sometimes acted out on the streets. The spectacle could quickly turn ugly. Grass witnessed the workers' uprising in East Berlin in June 1953. Coming three months after the death of Stalin at a moment when a breakthrough into a postStalinist era seemed possible, this is the biggest date in the 40-year history of the È nter had been living in West Berlin, the most dangerous Cold GDR. Anna and Gu War ¯ashpoint, still marked by the air-lift of 1948±49, since January. On hearing of the trouble just over the other side into the Soviet sector of the city, they took the S-Bahn to the Lehrter Bahnhof, walked past the ruined Reichstag building and the Brandenburger Tor and watched from the wasteland of what was then Potsdamer Platz. In the chapter for 1953 in My Century dedicated to his memories of watching the demonstrators attack the tanks with stones, which fed into The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising a little over ten years later, he recalls: We stayed in the West. I don't know if Anna saw anything more or anything different. But we both saw the Russian infantrymen who looked no older then children digging in along the border. And further away we saw people throwing stones. There were enough stones lying around everywhere. Stones against tanks. MC:190 His anti-Communism was clear from this date, but it would be a while before he did anything to help the stone-throwers: We kept back in the West Sector. We loved art and each other very much and we were not workers who threw stones at tanks. But since then we have known that this battle repeats itself again and again. Sometimes, but then delayed by decades, the stone-throwers may even win. MC:191 The Soviet invasion of Hungary in October 1956, a much bloodier re-run of East Berlin in June 1953, impressed itself on him too. Even Paris was hardly at peace as France had been ®ghting an increasingly futile and brutal war in Algeria since November 1954. After The Tin Drum Grass won prestigious prizes and often stirred controversy as a result. The furore generated by the Bremen Literature Prize in 1960 ensured that a whiff of scandal permeated his persona from the beginning of his public career. Le Tambour was named le meilleur livre eÂtranger in 1962. A month after the election disappointment of September 1965, still smarting from defeat, Grass ticked off other




progressive intellectuals for not coming out in favour of the party of progress in his È chner Prize. The `Speech on What Comes acceptance speech for the coveted Bu Automatically' was condemned and discussed in equal measure. By this time he did not have to seek opportunities to speak in public. His views were in demand. He had in fact a seemingly voracious appetite for arguments. He picked a ®ght with the mighty Springer Press in September 1967 after three of its papers had published a fabricated report on Arnold Zweig, a Jewish communist novelist prominent in the GDR. This was not out of undiluted respect for Zweig, whom Grass had challenged in his letter to the GDR Writers' Union in August 1961 to condemn the building of the Berlin Wall, but out of dislike for Springer's antiCommunist tactics.7 A group of Springer journalists tried to sue Grass for libel and subjected him to tirades of abuse. Grass was taken to court by Bernt von Heiseler, an aristocratic poet of the old school who had prospered between 1933±45, for saying to an Israeli audience in 1967 that the award of the Konrad-Adenauer Prize to Heiseler amounted to an insult to all Jews, living or dead. Heiseler lost, but Kurt Ziesel, who had been behind the award, was taken to court by Grass for his subsequent comments. As the most famous author associated with the Gruppe 47, Grass was also a target for any attack on that increasingly high-pro®le grouping and was obliged to ®ght on the Group's account. He put his name to the legal suit against the CDU politician, Josef Hermann Dufhues, who had referred in January 1963 to the Gruppe 47 as a secret Reichschrifttumskammer because of the supposedly hegemonic left-wing in¯uence it exercised. To his own and his party's embarrassment, Dufhues was forced to climb down. As a result of the philosophical parodies in Dog Years, Martin Heidegger refused to have anything to do with the Academy of Arts, which had elected Grass a member in the year the novel came out.8 If conservatives saw Grass as a threat to the German way of life, left-wingers were dismayed by his anti-Brecht play, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising in 1966, and parted company with him completely during the anti-Vietnam radicalisation of 1968. Towards the end of the decade, Grass argued publicly with the street-®ghters in the students' movement. Passionate, energetic, never lost for a telling comment or crushing put-down, he was the ®rst enfant terrible and angry young man of the Federal Republic. His face appeared twice on the cover of Der Spiegel, an achievement crowned by a Time cover story in the spring of 1970. When President Kennedy made his famous visit to West Berlin in June 1963, Brandt, as Mayor of the western part of the divided city, invited his proteÂgeÂ to the reception. Once in power in Bonn, he took him on state visits. Richter was impressed with Grass's performance when he saw him speak at an election rally in 1965 held in Munich's Zirkus Krone: The huge circular building was full to bursting. I was only just able to get a seat in È nter stepped out from the sixth row which somebody had kept for me. Then Gu behind a curtain and went to the podium. He was greeted by applause. Everything seemed to be very cleverly arranged and his speech put those made by many a politician into the shade, nothing was boring, nothing rehearsed, everything seemed spontaneous, as if ¯owing from one idea to the next.9




Grass spoke at 52 public meetings in 1965, giving ®ve different speeches. He exceeded his 1965 performance at the next two elections, speaking on no fewer than 190 occasions during the campaign in 1969 and 129 in 1972. His achievements were unprecedented in FRG electoral politics and they have not been repeated since. His ®lled venues wherever he went in 1965 and ensured the SPD received media coverage, È rzburg he was greeted with a even if it was often hostile, in the local press. In Wu banner asking `What is the atheist looking for in the city of Saint Killian?' He responded with a brilliant quip which made the protestors from the student corporations (the semi-Masonic Burschenschaften) look like the schoolboys in short trousers they indeed were: Ì have come to look for Tilman Riemenschneider!' (MC:234±5). This was a reference to a radical Renaissance sculptor and mayor of È rzburg whose hands had been chopped off on the authority of the Prince Bishop Wu during the Peasants' Revolt of the 1520s. Riemenschneider clearly belonged to an alternative German tradition which Grass now sought to awaken. Elsewhere he told Catholics he wanted to legalise abortion and lectured to Heimatvertriebene to renounce their claims to the lost German provinces. When it came to discussing who had the better claim to these lands, Grass maintained in the autobiographical poem, `Kleckerburg', that the Baltic Sea spoke more sense than many of his compatriots: What noise does the Baltic make? ± Blubb, piff, pschsch . . .

In German, in Polish: Blubb, piff, pschsch . . .

But at the Refugees' Congress, as everyone

was weary of celebrating their tradition

after journeys on special buses

and the Federal Railways, I put a question to the of®cials;

they had forgotten

the noise of the Baltic and invoked

the Atlantic instead.

I stood my ground: blubb, piff, pschsch . . .

They all shouted: strike him dead!

He has given up on human rights and pensions,

on compensation and his native city.

Listen to his accent:

that's not the Baltic, that's treason.

(I:197) Grass has never been popular with the majority of ex-Danzigers. Sudeten German extremists set his Berlin frontdoor on ®re in the dying days of the 1965 campaign to let him know what they thought of his arguments in favour of reconciliation with the Soviet bloc. Grass also moved in glamorous left-wing circles: his name had the aura of international chic, as his sales were even higher abroad than they were at home, and his contributions to public debate, like his literary publications, never had to wait long for translation. By all accounts he enjoyed the social side of his fame. His house in Berlin-Friedenau became a focal point for literary intellectuals, academics and




politicians. Anna called the district a Berlin `Schwabing' after the bohemian quarter of Munich.10 Her husband liked to cook for his guests himself, unless he È hmkorf he once accompanied them for a night on the tiles. According to Peter Ru danced into the early hours with a journalist and TV-presenter called Ulrike Meinhof.11 In 1965 he dressed up in drag to accompany his Skat partner, the debutante publisher, Klaus Wagenbach, to a mardi gras celebration at his Alma Mater, the Academy of Fine Arts.12 A journalist covering the 1969 election for Die Zeit painted a picture of a man, who, while always pushing himself to the front, is still interested in everyone he meets, always strikes the right tone and condescends to no-one, a human whirlwind, a chain smoker who rolled his own cigarettes, always the last to bed on the campaign trail, disappointed when petrol-pump attendants did not immediately know who he was, brimming over with con®dence in his own abilities, and surrounded `by beautiful women, reporters, trade unionists, party of®cials'.13 Helping the SPD win enough votes to lead a government coalition is undoubtedly his greatest non-literary triumph and the subject of his ®fth prose work, From the Diary of a Snail. His private life, however, lay in tatters at the end. He withdrew from the public fray to re-af®rm his literary reputation with another epic masterpiece, The Flounder. Why did he put himself through it? It was not for the money, as he did not get paid. Nor did he need to generate extra publicity to sell his books. Emotions clearly played a part: guilt for the past and an urge to compensate; anger at the unreconstructed attitudes of right-wing politicians and at the presence of former Nazis in public life; and frustration at the conservative social consensus. But there was also ambition, a desire to show what he could do, to be at the centre of attention: above all to make things happen. All this had motivated him too with his novels. In this respect, as indeed in others, art and politics were linked. Frisch recognises the strong sense of self-belief Grass needed to maintain the scale of his activities. Like Richter, who felt not only àstonished' but `just a little uneasy', Frisch was not entirely comfortable with what he saw.14 Richter suspected that Grass's ego drove him as powerfully as high-¯own sentiments and moral indignation. Erich Fried, who clashed with Grass over Vietnam at the last two meetings of the Gruppe 47, called him simply `power-hungry'.15 Grass claims himself that he just wanted to put his famous name to good use: When I was thirty-two years old I became famous. Since then Fame has lodged with us. He's always hanging about the place, being a nuisance, getting in the way. It's especially Anna that hates him because he's always running after her and making indecent suggestions [. . .] It is only because he is so lazy and besieges my desk to no good purpose that I took him with me into politics and set him to work as a hand-shaking front man. He's good at that. He's taken seriously by everyone, even by my enemies and opponents. VII:82 While he insists repeatedly that he speaks as a private citizen rather than as a writer, it was only because he had earned fame as a novelist that anyone listened to him. He




spoke as the author of a radical novel, à state citizen with a special reputation', as Frisch put it.16 A journalist, say, not to mention an industrialist or member of one of the liberal professions, would never have been granted the same attention. Franz Josef Strauû ®red wide of the mark when he joked that Grass was as quali®ed to talk on the German question as `Miss Germany' would be to discuss atomic weapons.17 Chancellor Ludwig Erhard missed the point too when he condemned writers' intervention in public debate because they `talk about things they do not understand'.

A broken critical tradition He is the `left-wing intellectual' who does what the left-wing intellectuals of the Weimar period did not do: he takes a positive view of the state, however imperfect the state is. Golo Mann18

Whatever the reservations of some of his literary colleagues, Frisch described a new phenomenon in German cultural and public life. German intellectuals either had not wanted anything to do with the mundane world of politics (Thomas Mann pre-1918), or had rejected the prevailing order outright, thus contributing to its replacement by something far worse (what Grass perceives to have been the mistake in the 1920s), or they had simply not been allowed a platform to speak at all. After 1945 German left-of-centre writers looked to France for their role models, across to Camus and Sartre and back to Zola, whose dramatic intervention in the Dreyfus Affair in 1898 came to be regarded as the seminal act of intellectual de®ance of popular prejudice. Grass entitles his ®fth and ®nal speech from the 1965 campaign Ìch klage an', a direct translation of Zola's J'accuse. . .! French intellectuals managed their relations with the state quite differently: their voice was respected, their views welcomed and noticed, or so it seemed to the Germans. While Grass has often acted alone ± and when his election road-shows hit the campaign trail in 1965 he performed for most intents and purposes as a one-man band ± whenever and wherever possible he has sought to work in unison with likeminded authors. This is because he is ever conscious of the need to make up for the mistakes of the older generations which contributed to Hitler's seizure of power. The ®rst priority was to cast off the legacy of cultural tradition, as he lectured his colleagues after the 1966 Gruppe 47 meeting in Princeton: Who wants to be like Stefan George and run around the place with starry-eyed disciples? Who would throw medical advice to the wind and live, like Rimbaud, with heady intensity and no life insurance? Who does not ®nd the daily ascent up Mount Olympus repellent, the arduous trudge which Gerhart Hauptmann embarked on every day, that feat of physical endurance which even Thomas Mann ± even if he did it for the sake of irony ± still performed in his old age? XIV:168




German writers had to un-learn the habits of their history: `For the place of writers is in the middle of society and not above or at the side of society' (XIV:124). They had to forget `the antiquated opposition between mind (Geist) and power (Macht)' and devote their energies to safeguarding democratic rights, which of course, compared with the antics of a Stefan George not to mention a Rimbaud, could appear frightfully dull. It is no accident that Grass's ®rst major public intervention took the form of a challenge to the distinguished chairwoman of the GDR Writers' Union, Anna Seghers, to protest against the building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. He could have written to Walter Ulbricht, the General Secretary of the SED, or to Ulbricht's proteÂgeÂ, Erich Honecker, who had organised the Wall's construction. He did not. He chose a colleague. While praising her classic concentration-camp novel, The Seventh Cross, he explains that he respects, but cannot share, her `dream' of communism. In words calculated to wound Seghers, he refers to what he took to be a similar confrontation between two German writers in 1933: I am not Klaus Mann and your mind cannot be equated with the mind of the fascist Gottfried Benn, nevertheless with the presumptuousness of my generation I invoke that letter that Klaus Mann delivered to Gottfried Benn on 9 May. XIV:39±40 This is strong stuff in view of Seghers' fate as a Jew and a Communist between 1933±45, but it anticipates the polemics Grass will launch in the future. Indeed, the quintessence of his style as a campaigner is present in this letter. His response to a dramatic public event was immediate, unequivocal and generated headlines. He calls for practical action. His argument is aggressive (the comparisons Seghers/ Benn; GDR/Third Reich), his rhetoric highly emotional, and his line of reasoning moralistic. Since he now lived in West Berlin, he had seen the wall being built, just as he had witnessed the bloody events of June 1953. He could not stand aside and pretend it had nothing to do with him. He reasoned that the same should apply to Seghers and all the other stalwart anti-fascists he listed in a follow-up letter. Yet, anticipating all his Cold-War polemics through to 1989, he still balances his criticism of the GDR with criticism of the FRG. The crucial difference between the two was that in the West writers were campaigning against public scandals. Grass also de®nes his own actions as a German writer by reference to past actions by other German writers. The failed Weimar Republic ± which capitulated to Hitler because too few democrats stood up to defend it ± is the test-bed for all his ideas and interventions. He takes Carl von Ossietzky, the radical editor of the WeltbuÈhne, imprisoned in the dying days of Weimar and killed by the Nazis in 1938, to be exemplary both for the 1920s and the 1960s, claiming `his battle with the emerging criminality of National Socialism left him hardly any time to become a friend of the Weimar Republic' (XIV:378). In his speech on being awarded the Ossietzky Medal in December 1968, entitled Òn Saying Yes and No', Grass also quotes one of the better known quips of another Weimar satirist, Kurt Tucholsky:





While clearly honoured to be awarded a prize named after the anti-Nazi hero who paid such a high price for expressing his views, Grass will not condone his behaviour entirely. Instead he praises what is genuinely democratic in the FRG and defends its enlightened laws and democratic foundations. He describes its constitution, the Grundgesetz, for instance, to be òur greatest possession' because à German state has never before enjoyed such a good legal basis to guarantee freedom' (XIV:91). He regularly interrupted his speeches in 1965 to produce a copy of it from his pocket, announcing to his audience that he always carried it with him. The FRG had much to commend to it and much untapped democratic potential. In the SPD it also possessed a political party with a tradition and set of policies to enable the young state to `come of age' as a democracy. As Grass makes no moral claims for literature, everything to do with politics takes place outside or beyond the literary realm. By separating his twin vocations he learned to have the best of both worlds, picking his way through the array of nonexistent or missed opportunities. At the end of From the Diary of a Snail he explains his dual vocation: A few weeks ago I was standing at the bar in the Bundeseck (Friedenau) and playing with beer mats. A few young writers approached me cautiously as if they were fearful of being called away at any moment. They talked sympathetically. (They thought my commitment must be important but wondered whether my writing suffered.) They spoke anxiously about their own talents, as if they had to be protected from gusts of wind. Yet after expressing such concern, they got aggressive when I demonstrated with the help of two beer mats how I cope from day to day: `This one here is my political work which I do as a Social Democrat and a citizen; this one is my manuscript, my job, my ``goodness-knows-what'''. I moved the beer mats away from one another, brought them close together again, propped them up against one another, covered up the ®rst with the second (then the second with the ®rst) and said: `Sometimes it's dif®cult, but I manage. You shouldn't worry so much'. But the young writers insisted on being worried about me and expected that I would toss one or the other of the beer mats from the bar. VII:298±9 He acts as a parent, a taxpayer, in short a citizen, rather than a writer or intellectual. He does not descend periodically from the great heights of his Ivory Tower to dispense his privileged insights for the bene®t of a benighted populace. He does not argue that he has more of a right to speak than others or that his views are superior to theirs because he has published poetry, plays and novels. His preferred forum was the public meeting, his priority to rouse individuals to make a difference by taking action themselves. This was historically a French de®nition of citizenship. The



What did Tucholsky say when he vented his mockery of the social-democratic banner: `This is not my republic'. ± And even in exile the German Left refused to stop tearing itself apart. I have learned my lesson. XIV:382

German tradition was summed up by the Berlin Commandant after the twin defeats against Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt: `calm is the citizen's ®rst duty'. Grass reversed the motto by arguing that citizens had a duty not to be calm but to make a fuss. He was encouraged by the public outcry over Brandt's decision in December 1966 to join the CDU in a Grand Coalition headed by the òld Nazi' Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a decision he decried himself. He had been heartened too by the public reaction to the Spiegel-Affair in October 1962 when Strauû was forced to resign. Anna, brought up in democratic Switzerland, had already taught him about òther forms of democracy where people as citizens state their views freely and directly' (XVI:260). By the mid-1960s a new generation of West German writers and intellectuals had emerged, most of whom believed they had some responsibility to play a critical public role. This was a time of political `commitment', the subject of a withering critique by Theodor Adorno. The 1960s were also an extremely creative and exciting period: È ll, Ingeborg Bachmann, Siegfried Lenz, Alfred Andersch, Peter Weiss, Heinrich Bo Martin Walser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Uwe Johnson were all publishing some of their best work. Most of them also managed to get into the news. German publishers no longer had to look abroad for contemporary writing. This new È ll, Walser, generation began to make its mark in the wake of The Tin Drum: Johnson, Bo and Andersch all published important novels in 1959 or 1960. Enzensberger had made his name as both a poet and essayist; Weiss became world famous with Marat/ Sade in 1964, the play that launched the career of Glenda Jackson in Peter Brook's È llerer London production. Grass moved at or near the centre of literary affairs. Ho chose Grass and Richter to issue the invitations for his wedding in June 1965, the È llerer social event of the summer for the city's growing number of literati, whom Ho and Richter had done their best to attract to the former German capital in the ®rst place. Even Enzensberger, whose more radical views in 1968 Grass found pretentious and theatrical, like Gesine Cresspahl in Johnson's Anniversaries, was a visitor to the Niedstraûe in Friedenau. Grass collaborated too with Bachmann by supplying some È chner-Prize Speech published by the Wagenbach Press, whose illustrations for her Bu founder Grass accompanied on a promotional tour in April 1965.19 His fraught but rewarding friendship with Johnson was crowned with a portrait in Too Far A®eld. Grass was fond of another self-destructive GDR-talent, Johannes Bobrowski. After using his material in Dog Years, he read a text by him on eight different occasions on the Wagenbach tour.20 Grass's friendship and professional collaboration with his most renowned È ll was caustic in his contemporary did not blossom until the 1970s. Heinrich Bo assessment of the SPD's strategy and earned a rebuke in `Speech on What Comes È ll did not endorse the party until Brandt's landslide triumph in Automatically'. Bo 1972. The pair clashed after Beate Klarsfeld had slapped Kiesinger in the face and shouted `Nazi, Nazi' in front of the delegates to the CDU party conference on È ll sent her roses and wrote the foreword to her book on the November 7 1968. Bo Federal Chancellor.21 Grass criticised him for supporting her. But after the SPD victory, Germany's two most famous contemporary authors appeared together frequently on television and radio, and spoke at the same public meetings.22 Two




months before his historic visit to Poland in December 1970, Brandt invited both to a meeting in the Chancellory to discuss the notion of Heimat, as Grass describes in his column in the SuÈddeutsche Zeitung. After Bo È ll had called for a fair trial for Ulrike Meinhof, Grass used the column to defend him from the Springer Press, whose campaign against left-of-centre intellectuals and politicians plumbed depths of È ll is supposed to have asked `Why not Grass?' when he heard the viciousness. Bo news of his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 ± a remark allegedly repeated by the ^ when he heard news of his victory in 1994. Bo Ã Oe, Èll Japanese Laureate, Kenzaburo defended Grass from an attack by the book-reviewer Hellmuth Karasek published in the Spiegel in 1984. In the meantime the pair had founded L 76, a journal dedicated to discussion of ideas on democratic socialism emanating from the Eastern bloc. Along with Siegfried Lenz, both refused in May 1979 to accept the Bundesverdienstkreuz.23 At Bo È ll's request, Grass was a pall-bearer at his funeral in È ll in the same breath as his great July 1985. Shortly afterwards he mentions Bo political hero: Like Brandt he was the victim of long-running smear tactics and the target for disgusting press campaigns. On the 19 July we buried the great writer and paci®st Heinrich Bo È ll. Since then we have been more lonely and ± I fear ± weaker.24 Grass de®ned his own public role by comparing himself with his contemporaries in his Princeton speech in April 1966. Speaking directly after Allen Ginsberg and responding in part to Peter Weiss's solemn announcement of his political standpoint the previous day, Grass gave his address the unlikely but typically Grassian title of Òn the Insuf®cient Self-Con®dence of the Writing Court Fools in Consideration of the Non-Existing Courts'. There had been a number of fools in his ®ction, even ones who could have embraced the role of court jester. Oskar stands somewhere in this tradition. What a `fool' says or writes does not always have to add up or be entirely consistent. He can provoke, cajole, break taboos, and, while making his audience laugh, remind them of things they would prefer to forget. A fool is not held to account. He has a licence to challenge or overturn all conventions while È ll the hero of a satirical vignette remaining close to the seat of power. Grass makes Bo in order to ridicule the conventional notion of `commitment': After many sleepless nights the Chancellor summons the writer Heinrich Bo È ll to his Chancellor-Bungalow. Without saying anything at ®rst, the committed writer listens sympathetically to what is on the Chancellor's mind and then, as soon as the Chancellor has sunk back into his chair, dispenses advice, brie¯y and irresistibly. After the advice session the Chancellor leaps out of his chair, his worries dispelled, and wants to embrace the committed writer; the latter, however, keeps his distance. He does not want to become a court fool and admonishes the Chancellor to turn his authorial words into political deeds. The world discovers to its amazement the following day that Chancellor Erhard has decided to demobilise the Bundeswehr, recognise the GDR and the Oder-Neiûe-Line, as well as expropriate all capitalists. XIV:170





That means making compromises. Let us be clear: compromise is a foreign word as far as poetry is concerned; we, on the other hand, live by making compromises. Whoever can endure this tension and stay active is a fool ± and changes the world. XIV:172 This speech was also one of his ®rst major attacks on the Left. Fried, a Jewish leftwinger, was furious at his treatment of Weiss, who, like Fried himself, had ¯ed the Nazis in the 1930s and continued to live abroad. Weiss had already been offended by Grass's reaction to Marat/Sade: after Weiss had tapped the rhythm to a song from the play at a reading at the 1963 Gruppe 47 meeting, Grass had commented simply `badly drummed' to him afterwards. Six months later he walked passed him angrily at the play's premiere.25 Weiss recalled too the `coldness and rejection from Grass' after his own Princeton statement, Ì come out of my hiding place', where he explained why he had come to oppose the American war in Vietnam. He even claimed that he `had expunged what happened in April 66 in Princeton from [his] memory' because the whole experience had been so painful.26 Grass was never universally popular among his fellow writers. Andersch, whose inaction during the 1965 campaign Grass publicly criticised, described his unease at `the sight of ®rst-rate writers, seduced by È nter Grass, improving election speeches for sixth-rate politicians'.27 He is Gu withering on the subject of Grass's political acumen: `because I think he is a political fathead and consider him to be dangerous, an anti-Communist from conviction or reasons of career advancement'.28 Opposition from these quarters did not deter Grass, however; if anything it strengthened his resolve. As he prepared for his mammoth efforts in the 1969 campaign, he wrote to Helen Wolff: It is quite remarkable, dear Helen, how tough (and sometimes just stubbornly de®ant) I have to be to buck the contemporary trend. Some are falling back into a state of resignation, others take refuge in revolutionary solutions. I cannot count on much help from my colleagues.29 The tough exterior did not protect him from hurt felt inside. In his next letter to Wolff, he writes that often enough his colleagues' growing rejection of his activities developed into `barely disguised enmity. It is not nice, but it's a consequence of what I am doing'. Most painful was the temporary break with Johnson.30 Ru È hmkorf took particular exception to the turn Grass's career had taken. Their renewed friendship in the late 1980s and 1990s shows how public comments, however sharp, rarely in¯ict personal wounds which do not heal. In a response to



In his next vignette it is Weiss who achieves similar results after a brief meeting with Ulbricht in East Berlin. But Grass does admit that he sometimes wished he could exert a similar in¯uence over Brandt before concluding that clicheÂs such as `conscience of the nation' and `committed writer' do not add up to very much. What is needed is a practical frame of mind and a willingness to get on with `the nitty gritty of democracy':


Back again to beginning of 60 [. . .] Cautiously getting to know Wagenbach and Grass. The latter in the wake of the success of his Tin Drum book, which broke over him so violently, was still very much accessible as a private individual. He was a serious Skat-player (that is somebody who does not just show his nasty side when playing Skat), a gifted palm-reader and entertaining story-teller, although he suffered early on from the general disease of epic writers of telling his `remarkable incidents' (those that had befallen him) twice or three times, no, thirty times (in contrast to lyric poets, who only tell the same joke once). I considered him from the start to be a real instinctive writer, whose concoctions were spiced up with the hottest ingredients; this made his easy way of getting on with others all the more estimable, and even when his fame opened up before him like some sort of magic purse, his personality remained, by and large, unspoilt. On the contrary, he valued contact with other people's controversial opinions and even though he and us Hamburg Marxists/Konkretists stood poles apart, we spent many nights together animated by schnapps and beer and fraternal feelings (during which some curious nocturnal pairings formed as the È ntergrass/Ulrikemeinhof). Uplifting hours then at the dissimilar couple of Gu `Lonely Hearts' Ball' opposite Mantheys on the corner of Lehmweg, where literary fame was as Hecuba, and `the gentleman with the moustache' was ®nally asked over the microphone to desist from his free style of dancing. Grass did not become a dif®cult case for those who knew him until the quality of his contributions to political debate no longer lived up to his growing need for unalloyed approval. He, who by nature, temperament, and because of his damaged background lent in fact to anarchism (the form which his personal rebellion against the suffocating petty-bourgeois con®nes took), suddenly tried to de®ne himself on the Left, which of course from lack of more profound knowledge of history and books did not get further than the SPD's Godesberg Programme.31 The point that Ru È hmkorf is making is that The Tin Drum is a radical, taboo-breaking performance, its author anarchic in his inclinations, disrespectful of all authority. Grass the politician was none of these things by the end of the 1960s.

Ì advise you to vote ES-PE-DE' Quite the statesman, quite the court poet, quite the Gerhart Hauptmann of the Second German Republic. Bernward Vesper32



Grass's criticism in another SuÈddeutsche column of the journal konkret, which È hmkorf had co-founded in the 1950s, he gives a barbed reÂsumeÂ of his once and Ru future friend's progress from outspoken radical to man of the Establishment. È hmkorf's high-handed dismissal of Grass's politics is typical of what the Ru intellectual Left thought of Grass. In between the point-scoring, however, he paints a memorable portrait. The fun-loving novelist, who had the literary world at his feet, was a social phenomenon:

Far more important, both for Grass and the cultural history of the FRG, than individual incidents and personalities, was his involvement with the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD. If his ®rst and greatest literary symbol is little Oskar, then his political trademark became the snail of Social Democracy, an allegory of the sluggish pace of progress. It was a cockerel standing on a dung heap, however, and crowing the letters Es-Pe-De that adorned the covers of his published speeches in 1965. This was his hopeful `wake-up call' to the nation, which, after voting the CDU into power at each election since 1949, should demonstrate the con®dence born of maturity in order to risk a change ± to `dare more democracy', according to the SPDslogan. Unlike other intellectuals who ®rst encountered political ideas in university seminars, Grass had his ®rst experiences of social democracy when he worked in the Hildesheim potash mine at the age of 19. While he had been repelled by the ®rst postwar SPD leader Kurt Schumacher's demagogic style at a rally in Hanover in 1946, the effect of the rank-and-®le was altogether different. Once more a key experience of late adolescence or early adulthood reverberates through his subsequent career. The teenage ex-POW listened to the arguments between ìnsigni®cant, harmless Nazis, who sought a refuge underground from the epidemic of denazi®cation questionnaires above ground, embittered Communists, and veteran Social Democrats': I listened and learned a great deal. For instance, how quickly the insigni®cant, harmless Nazis and the embittered Communists joined forces when it came to putting the boot into the humourless Social Democrats [. . .] I also learned to live without ideology in that potash mine. The morning ceremonies of the Hitlerjugend still rang in my ears, those oaths of allegiance which were sworn every Sunday to the ¯ag, to blood and, of course, to the earth. And already the Communists were trying to entice people with similarly dusty stage-props from the attics of their ideology. To be on the safe side, as a burnt child, I stuck to my taciturn Social Democrats, who did not drivel on either about the Thousand-Year Reich or the World Revolution, who already, in 1946, nine hundred meters below ground, were more progressive than their party leadership and had sent the remains of their ideological lumber up to the surface with the rest of the rubble. Already at this time, during a power cut, a programme was drawn up by veteran Social Democrats that was to see the light of day years later ± and nearly too late ± the Bad Godesberg Programme. I am grateful to all of them, emaciated from the salt and the heat, the often disappointed, sceptical Sozis, because they taught me to live without having a goal up in the skies, without symbols and military ensigns and without the help of cardboard cut-outs of heroic role models. XIV:138 Grass's whole theory of social democracy is contained here, a theory he learnt at the university of life before he reached the age of 20. It is even more signi®cant that the syllabus itself dates from the 1920s. In place of ideology he puts his idealised version




of a pragmatic social democracy, ever questioning, ever ready to compromise on the path to justice and enlightenment, more likely to take one step forward then two steps back than to proceed at a uniform pace, yet resolutely on the side of liberal progress, equality, tolerance, fairness and reason ± the `politics of small steps' rather than any `great leap forward'. Grass had been immediately captivated by Brandt's legendary charisma when they ®rst met. After making stylistic improvements to Brandt's speeches in 1961, during the next election campaign in 1965 he set up the Èlection Of®ce of German Writers', where aspiring authors, largely still in their twenties, worked on slogans and other material which the politicians could use. In the summer of 1965 Grass then embarked on his own independent speech-making tour of the country. What he initiated had grown into a nationwide movement by the next time the West Germans went to the polls in 1969. He recalls: What was a one-man enterprise (based on the support of a handful of students) in 1965 expanded four years later (after the Federal Assembly had elected Gustav Heinemann Federal President with the votes of the SPD and FDP) to become a Social-Democratic Voters' Initiative, which was active in about ninety constituencies, and which had set itself the goal of creating the conditions to make it possible for a Social-Liberal Coalition to be elected. XV:434 These WaÈhlerinitiativen (Voters' Initiatives), which enjoyed practical support from the party, were the model for the BuÈrgerinitiativen (Citizens' Initiatives) which proliferated in the FRG over the next two decades. They transformed the political landscape from the grassroots. Grass pioneered them. One of the keys to his success was that he was not a paid-up member of the SPD and consequently not subject to party discipline nor obliged to toe the party line where he disagreed with it. In 1965, none of the party hierarchy had a say either in the organisation of his tour or in the content of his speeches. While Brandt and Schiller wholeheartedly endorsed him, the architect of the party's entry into government, the arch-®xer Herbert Wehner, remained cooler. Grass deliberately chose topics not in the SPD manifesto and which were not broached by any of the parties: abortion and reuni®cation were the most important of these. The party did however quickly dissociate itself from him when there were public objections. The West Berlin SPD feared that Grass was more likely to put voters off the party in 1965 than to attract them.33 His next campaign, in 1969, was different as a result. `The oldest democratic party in Germany' (XIV:318) had not always been a force for moderation. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, August Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg had all been members or associates of it. The Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (the General German Workers' Association), founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863, changed its name to the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) in 1890, the year after the repeal of Bismarck's antiSocialist Statute which had banned all forms of Social Democratic political organisation except participation in elections. The SPD was already the most




popular single party by then. By 1912, with 34.8 per cent of the vote, it became the largest party in the Reichstag in spite of the voting system which was skewed against it. The SPD's most infamous act was then to vote in favour of war credits in 1914, thus lending its support to a war which pitched worker against worker, so betraying the principles of the Second International. After the war the party effectively split into a radical, revolutionary wing, which became the Communist Party (KPD) and which opposed the reformist majority of the SPD which preferred to cooperate with the established order rather than sweep it away altogether. This entailed an SPD alliance with the forces of reaction. It was the Social Democrat Gustav Noske who called in the Freikorps to liquidate the Spartacists in Berlin in 1919. The Communists' ®rst martyrs were the erstwhile Sozis, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Grass aligns himself unequivocally with Bernstein and the revisionists of the 1890s. Bernstein could not wait for capitalism `to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions' and wanted practical reforms to bene®t the underprivileged at once. He argued that the party should re-examine its `radical revolutionary dogmas' and admit, in terms of its theoretical objectives, to being `what in reality it is today: a democratic socialist party of reform'.34 A similar debate in Russia had led to the formation of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Whereas in Russia the majority Mensheviks lost out in 1917, in Germany the Social Democrats were always stronger except in the Soviet Zone in 1946 where they were coerced into a marriage with the Communists to produce the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The rest of the postwar SPD in the West, ®rst under Schumacher, a concentration camp survivor, then under former eÂmigreÂ Erich Ollenhauer, seemed destined to play the role of `natural party of opposition', never winning more than a third of the national vote in the ®rst three Federal Elections. Grass delves into the party's history and cites phases, personalities and issues to support his claim that the Social Democrats had been `the central pillar of parliamentary democracy' (XIV:443) engaged in a never-ending battle with left- and right-wing extremists. Female suffrage, for instance, was a Social-Democratic cause: Ìn 1919 the Social Democrats gave women the right to vote. A correct decision, even if the majority of women have so far not thanked the Social Democrats for this reform' (XIV:509) ± presumably by voting for the party. The SPD was the only party to vote against Hitler's Enabling Law in 1933, the only party to oppose the German Treaty in 1955, which led to re-armament and closed the door on uni®cation with the GDR by anchoring the FRG into western Europe. The SPD could also point to former members whose moral and personal integrity was beyond dispute: in a speech entitled `Hymn of Praise to Willy', Grass presents Julius Leber, mentor to the young Brandt, who, ìn contrast to politicians of the Right and the Left, showed a positive attitude to the Weimar Republic and its constitution' (XIV:104), and was executed by the Nazis in 1944. Bebel, the ®rst party leader, was imprisoned several times, and combined his political activism with a fulltime job. Because of his role in the Revisionist Debate he features in From the Diary of a Snail and The Flounder since `he himself, in his belief in the revolution and in his practical work as a great parliamentarian, was part of this split. He expressed it in his





During the day he ®lled up his order book (bannisters, door handles) and in the evening ± ®ve paces behind him a gendarme who had to be shaken off ± he met up with comrades, who were sometimes frightened, sometimes at each other's throats. Socialism, children, began with squabbles. Then, just like today, the classical question was at the top of the agenda, `Reform or Revolution?' Wherever I go ± whether to Gladbeck, Stuttgart, Delmenhorst or Gieûen ± the squabble is as alive as ever, the snails that want to jump. [. . .] Bebel wrote letters to Zurich and London. For it was never all that easy to explain to the businessman Engels how dif®cult socialism in practice actually was. (And how saddening it is and how comic: to say revolution and to mean reform.) But Marx was always whinging, always knew better, always far away, his thought was sharper, he always won the argument and applied his absolute principles. Only Engels (in letters) showed understanding and sent ten English pounds for the banned newspaper. Bebel died in Zurich in 1913. Willy Brandt has been wearing Bebel's fobwatch, which still goes, for a number of years now. VII:108±9 He could have added that Brandt who died in 1992 was born in the year of Bebel's death. Brandt's own biography is a recurrent point of reference and a source of inspiration. He had joined the SPD as a 17-year-old in 1930 when he came under Leber's in¯uence. He then brie¯y left the party to join a more radical alternative, returning to the fold during his period away from Germany where his èncounters with reality' (XIV:105) ± ®rst as a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, then in exile in Scandinavia ± taught him the value of moderate reformism. Grass portrays this change of direction as an exemplary process of political `growing up'. He even calls it à parable from recent German history' (XIV:104), which 1960s radicals should take to heart. Grass also took Brandt's understanding of his elder son, who had played Mahlke in Pohland's ®lm of Cat and Mouse, and subsequently got into trouble with the law during the student revolt to be exemplary. `Willy Brandt' was the underground code-name adopted by Herbert Frahm, the È beck salesgirl. It was when his illegitimacy and anti-Nazi illegitimate son of a Lu resistance were used by Adenauer in his `Brandt-alias-Frahm' smear, which he launched the day after the building of the Berlin Wall, that Grass learnt another lesson. Adenauer tried to turn Brandt's background into a test of patriotism ± Brandt had worn an ènemy' uniform, like many other German opponents of Hitler's regime ± and to make his whole `character' into a major electoral issue.35 Brandt was divorced and known to have had love affairs. He was suspected of having sympathised with the Communists in Spain, though he had not fought in the



very being' (XV:13±14). Grass explains to his children in From the Diary of a Snail what problems Bebel faced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century:


This defamation of a man who, like all victims of such campaigns, could not defend himself, was the ®rst reason for me to speak out in public (where only names count today and counted then) with the help of my fame, which I found at ®rst bothersome and which became more and more tedious. The fellow-traveller gradually earned his spurs as a Social Democrat; I have never felt that I belonged to them instinctively. XIV:472 After Brandt's sudden resignation in May 1974, Grass never quite rekindled his enthusiasm for the SPD, not warming to the more pragmatic skills of his successor, Helmut Schmidt. Grass felt, along with many others, that the reforming momentum had been lost. The party was no longer the main vehicle for his aspirations: gender and sexuality, hunger and poverty in the Third World, where he took his lead from The Brandt Report, the arms race and environmental destruction, all commanded more and more of his attention in the two decades that followed. After the success of Ostpolitik, the change to the abortion law, the more open and honest approach to the Nazi past, many issues which had exercised him had either been addressed or resolved successfully. As Grass's political programme is informed by a simple, moral understanding of the Enlightenment, it reaches back further even than the foundation of the SPD. As the SPD is a physical and political embodiment of the German Enlightenment, Grass sees himself as part of `the hundred-year old attempt of the German Social Democrats to make the European Enlightenment politically in¯uential in this country' (XIV:473). For Grass, the SPD represented an honourable tradition in German history. He always sets out to take a middle position because, in his view, the Germans had looked to the extremes of Left or Right for salvation in the past with catastrophic results. He believes that this too has been the historical destiny of the SPD, whose ability to evolve, to question its priorities in the light of developments, had been demonstrated most recently with its Bad Godesberg conference of 1959. Here the party had of®cially renounced Marxism and embraced the principles of a Social Market Economy ± while promising to lay greater stress on social provision than the CDU. This historic shift had two major long-term consequences. It improved the party's electoral performances at successive elections in 1961, 1965 and 1969 by making it seem `®t to govern' in the eyes of the mainstream. At the same time it meant a vacuum was created on the Left which swallowed up many erstwhile supporters on the way to victory in 1969. The party's chequered, non-revolutionary tradition had been tested to the limit in that crucible of German democracy, the Weimar Republic. The SPD was the largest single party at every election until 1932. After Philipp Scheidemann had proclaimed the Republic from the balcony of the Reichstag, the party supplied the ®rst



International Brigades. He had also written a book entitled Criminals and other Germans, the title of which could easily be reversed into Germans and other Criminals to show the author's lack of patriotic feeling.36 The assumptions which underpinned this type of thinking made Grass seethe:

Chancellor and President, Friedrich Ebert. Yet Weimar lasted a mere 14 years and Hitler did away with its structures and institutions with terrifying ease and the support of most of the population. The SPD was engaged in a constant battle with the KPD, who announced that the `Social Fascists' constituted the real enemy of the working masses. After 30 January 1933 many Social Democrats were persecuted alongside the Communists, sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald (like Schumacher), forced into exile (like Brandt and Ollenhauer), or executed (like Leber). In 1965 the `young democracy' of the second German republic had lasted a mere two years longer than its predecessor. It was by no means obvious that democratic ways of thinking had become robust enough to weather a sustained onslaught from either Left or Right. By 1975 the language of civil war had infused great tranches of debate, as the Baader-Meinhof terrorists bombed their way into the headlines and threatened to do more than just topple Schmidt's administration. The Republic ultimately emerged triumphant and the peaceful revolution of 1989 indicated the resilience of its democracy. Yet in the second half of the 1960s, such an outcome appeared by no means the most likely. The great test of Grass's loyalty to the party came with Brandt's decision to enter a Grand Coalition with the CDU after the Erhard administration had imploded in November 1966. Brandt became Deputy-Chancellor and took the post of Foreign Minister, keen to begin his policy of Ostpolitik. The ex-Nazi Kiesinger became Chancellor. Many intellectuals and students, who had supported the SPD in 1965, could not accept Brandt's decision. Grass too had to swallow hard to do so too after pleading in public with his mentor to re-think.37 He wrote to Helen Wolff on 15 December 1966 about `this terrible Grand Coalition' and con®ded that his election campaigning had ènded with a defeat'. Yet he must have known that SPD leaders had been disappointed not to be invited into government by Adenauer in 1961, had then eagerly participated in coalition discussions in December the following year, and that the policy of consensus, hammered out at Bad Godesberg, entailed behaving in opposition to all intents and purposes as if the party were already in coalition with the government.38 The SPD È bke, another ex-Nazi, when he stood for a had supported the CDU's Heinrich Lu second Presidential term in 1964. The whole point was that sharing power with the CDU was a classically pragmatic decision, an enactment of the principles of gradualism that Grass was beginning to expound. It indeed proved to be a step to taking over government in 1969. Grass, however, never accepted that Kiesinger should have been made Chancellor with or without SPD votes. He became active again only once he saw it was possible for the SPD to lead a coalition with the liberal FDP. In between the general elections of 1965 and 1969 he campaigned just once, in Schleswig-Holstein in 1967. His work behind the scenes was probably more important, however. He recognised more than the party itself that the student radicals felt unrepresented, as there was no voice in parliament remotely concerned to articulate their point of view. He took it upon himself to build bridges between the party leadership and the left-wingers left outside parliament, the self-styled èxtraparliamentary opposition'.




In the campaign of 1965, Grass spoke in more than 30 different West German cities and towns, very often places off the beaten track where the SPD did not traditionally enjoy much support. He delivered ®ve different speeches. He charged an entrance fee for his meetings and sold copies of his speeches, promising that the proceeds would go to buy books for conscripts in the Bundeswehr. Re¯ecting on the success of the ®rst leg of his tour, he reveals that he had made a pro®t of some 20 000 DM, that his was the ®rst election tour in the history of the Republic not to be ®nanced by taxpayers' money. The money he had made had been used to buy six libraries of 350 volumes each (®ve for soldiers, one for conscientious objectors), chosen by Uwe Johnson. Money from the second leg was to go on prizes for a competition to write new textbooks for German schools which would instil democratic values in the minds of tomorrow's citizens. This was Enlightenment politics in action. Grass in 1965 sometimes puts forward practical policy proposals. In `We have a choice' he made three: the reduction of the minimum voting age from 21 to 18 (on the grounds that men could be called up for military service at that age); the introduction of a paragraph into the Grundgesetz to guarantee the permanence of the electoral system; and the abolition of the `®ve-per cent hurdle', which requires political parties to get at least one twentieth of the electorate behind them to gain parliamentary representation. This has been one of the cornerstones of the version of proportional representation used in the FRG, but Grass argued against it on the grounds that it disenfranchised those voters who chose smaller parties. He never mentioned this point again. The voting age, on the other hand, was reduced to 18 during Brandt's ®rst term. In `The Emperor's New Clothes' he calls for improvements in the health service and better pay for nurses, before addressing one of the most highly charged issues in German politics: abortion, which was not legalised until 1974. As his younger sister worked as a midwife, he presumably knew what he was talking about. He claims that one million illegal abortions were carried out each year, that no fewer than 10 000 women died as a result of inadequate facilities, the incompetence of the backstreet practitioners or the complications entailed by illegality and social taboo, and that between 150 000 and 200 000 of these women became infertile after botched terminations. He termed this `medieval barbarism' (XIV:135) and argued that these awful statistics were the consequences of a health policy which elevated a prejudice, protected a taboo, and was justi®ed by the invocation of `healthy popular feeling' ± another phrase redolent of the Nazi era. One step in the right direction would be to acknowledge the usefulness of contraception, not simply in every marriage but also in pre-marital relationships. He recalls in 1990: I had to put away the speech after three times. The headlines were the same everywhere: `Grass for abortion!' I started talking about these issues very early and none of them had been agreed with the SPD. But I knew that Brandt would tolerate them [. . .] [Karl Schiller] was present when I ®rst gave `The Emperor's È sseldorf. Òh my God', he said, we're in for it now'. New Clothes' in Du XVI:260




Even though he was persuaded to drop the speech, abortion remained a key issue. The 1971 chapter for My Century concerns an illegal termination. Towards the end of Brandt's ®rst term in February 1972, Grass used his SuÈddeutsche column to lambast the Vatican, which had compared a reform of Paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code to Nazi crimes. As the Catholic Church had not issued a similar proclamation against the Nazis, Grass argued it had no moral authority to make such statements now. The Vatican was losing the arguments, however. Under the Grand Coalition, Gustav Heinemann as Justice Minister had steered through legislation granting equal rights to illegitimate children. Adultery was also decriminalised and the `Pimps Paragraph', which, among other things, made it a criminal offence for parents to permit a grown-up daughter to sleep with her boyfriend in the family home, was abolished too. Abortion was much trickier and Brandt needed his thumping second-term majority to put the reform on the statute books. `The Emperor's New Clothes' is a classic document of the Enlightenment politics Grass was encouraging. To compensate, perhaps, for giving the speech only three times, he returns to the motif regularly over the next 30 years. In 1965, he pleaded with voters to behave like the little boy in the fairy tale who was unabashed enough to shout out the truth. In other words, Grass wanted voters to think for themselves and not accept political reality on trust from those in power. Erhard takes the role of the vain Emperor, but both ministers and critics, the voters and citizens all participate in the swindle: The catalogue of things we had better not talk about stretches from the OderNeiûe-Line to contraception, from crackles on the telephone to the of®cially sanctioned murder on our roads. Don't say a word, citizens, or drown out your secret fear by clapping your hands. He is beautifully dressed, our emperor of the guidelines. As a precaution, put your hand over the mouth of the child who wants to speak out and mention the taboo. Like the untrustworthy fellows in Andersen's tale, our own tricksters have meanwhile been busy [. . .] They promise everybody everything: reuni®cation and the restitution of the eastern provinces, stable prices and tax cuts, higher rents for landlords, and cheap ¯ats for everybody else. XIV:129±30 In 1975 none of this would have raised an eyebrow ± action had been taken on just about every point. In 1965 Grass grabbed the headlines up and down the country. Thirty or more years after they were delivered, these speeches may be the least challenging part of his oeuvre. Their theoretical or intellectual content can be summarised in a few sentences. It is easy to point out the weaknesses in his arguments and to accuse him of super®cial treatment of political questions: he personalises issues (Brandt versus Erhard or Kiesinger); he tells stories instead of analysing problems; in 1969 he equates the political èxtremes' far too readily (leftwing students and re-nascent Neo-Nazis); in 1965 he often does not even bother with party policy. To read the collected essays by the radical Enzensberger, in




contrast, is to follow the exciting twists and turns of an original mind: it is an intellectual adventure. To read Grass's speeches is to wade through rather stolid homilies, homely parables and moralistic condemnations of opponents. Yet a criticism of this sort is misplaced because he wanted one thing and one thing only: votes. His speeches were intended primarily to be heard live in a hall packed with listeners, not read in quiet isolation. What further distinguished Grass from many of his equally vociferous colleagues was his stance in support of a mainstream political party which stood for moderation and reform. Most of his colleagues aligned themselves further to the Left. Very few of the new generation from the Èlection Of®ce of German Writers' were interested in the SPD at the election in 1969. Grass knew the emotional attraction of extreme solutions, which is why he opposed them.

Writers and politicians Grass's admiration for Brandt and Schiller was, of course, matched by his scorn for the CDU/CSU and its leading representatives in the mid-1960s, Erhard, Kiesinger and Strauû. He penned òpen letters' to both CDU Chancellors, demanding each time that they stand down. On election night 1965 he angrily confronted Erhard on live television and blamed his anti-intellectual comments during the campaign for the arson attack by Sudeten extremists on his home. Grass left the door in its charred state to remind one and all of the recidivist forces ranged against him. In contrast to professional politicians, however, he was allowed to lose his temper in public and he did so more than once, especially at the increasingly strife-torn meetings of the Gruppe 47. Erhard found it hard to take criticism from such quarters. He was perhaps stung by the direct tone of Grass's òpen letter'. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the end of World War Two, Grass criticised the government's timid policy towards Israel, dictated by fear of alienating the Arab world. He called the Chancellor `tactless, gaffeprone, and helpless' and argued that his comments were a `monstrosity' as he had and Chelmno, Thereinsulted the dead of Àuschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor sienstadt and Buchenwald', and, èven worse, given giving satisfaction to their murderers and torturers'.39 Erhard's reaction dripped with reminders of an epoch which had ended, or should have ended, in 1945. He condemned `the unappetising cases of degeneracy in modern art' (an especially unfortunate choice of phrase, to say the least), adding `we want to refrain in our campaign from beating the tin drum'. Writers who meddled in politics were `philistines and incompetents who make judgements on things that they simply do not understand'. In response to criticism by Rolf Hochhuth, he said (in a much quoted phrase) `that is where the poet stops and the whippersnapper [Pinscher] starts'. But Erhard's remarks did him more harm than good: his biographer calls the outburst `the worst rhetorical own goal of his career'.40 The young F.C. Delius compiled a minor classic of the documentary genre from statements made at the conference where Erhard gave his speech. It was published, of course, by Wagenbach.41 However indignant Grass may have felt, it was a sign of his success that the Federal Chancellor was driven to devote a section of his conference address to a man of the pen.




In contrast, the SPD actively courted writers, who found many of the leading ®gures attractive, like-minded men: Ehmke and Schiller were academics; Brandt, Erler and Wehner had been eÂmigreÂs. According to Schiller, it was President Kennedy who inspired the politicians.42 Richter organised encounters between the two sides at his `literary-political' salon, held in premises rented by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlins. The discussions were broadcast on national radio.43 It is rare that writers and politicians have met so frequently and taken such an interest in one another. Hans Mayer takes it as a matter of course that they did so: Presidential Elections in 1964. Federal Elections in 1965. This was why a dinner was held on the eve of the fourth election of a Federal President at the house of È nter Grass in Berlin. He had cooked himself. Let us say, in case I cannot Gu remember exactly what was on the menu, that we had ®sh soup and roast mutton. After the meal there began a long discussion between Social-Democratic politicians and German men of letters. The list of participants was impressive. Willy Brandt led the talking. Mayor of Berlin and Chairman of the Social Democrats. He was accompanied by his deputies, Fritz Erler and Herbert Wehner, and by two of his fellow Berlin Senators: the Senator for Economics, Karl Schiller, and the Senator for Art and Science, Adolf Arndt. I can see Ingeborg Bachmann next to Willy Brandt, remember the speeches made by Grass and Richter, Walter Jens or Carl Amery. Klaus Wagenbach was È llerer. Many others too. It there and Uwe Johnson, Martin Walser and Walter Ho was a real discussion about politics and literature.44 Yet while the politicians welcomed the writers' help, they did not necessarily believe that they had anything to learn from them. Horst Ehmke recalls introducing Grass to Gustav Heinemann, who became Federal President in March 1969, while he was still Minister of Justice in the Grand Coalition. When Grass asked him about books, he refused to be drawn; when Grass changed the subject to theatre, his rebuff was even more forthright: `my wife goes to the theatre and anyway we have enough drama around here', he replied.45 According to Richter, Helmut Schmidt once made a point of worsting Grass and other literary colleagues in argument, but the humiliation possibly toughened Grass's resolve: `Helmut Schmidt [. . .] was like a traf®c light that evening that had changed to ``red'', a warning which probably achieved the opposite effect in Grass's case, perhaps a sort of negative reaction: ``Now I'll show 'em'''.46 Yet Schmidt sustained a friendship with Siegfried Lenz. At the height of the Baader-Meinhof crisis in October 1977, at a moment when more than his Chancellorship seemed to hang in the balance, he invited a number of leading È ll, and Lenz) to a discussion.47 Grass could not attend since it writers (Frisch, Bo coincided with his ®ftieth birthday party. Schmidt insists in his memoirs that he esteemed Grass more than the latter realised and defended him in argument against conservatives. He also points out that for Grass to achieve what he did, a thick skin, an imperviousness to slights and insults in the media was not the least of his quali®cations.48 Grass called it a mixture of self-con®dence and youthful cheek.




Brandt is especially pleased that das geistige Deutschland (ìntellectual Germany') supported his `threefold effort on the securing of peace, invigorating democracy, and social renewal'. Against those who argued that political commitment had little effect, he is prepared to believe that Grass `probably got us some votes and undeniably brought some colour to the business of politics'.49 While Brandt never appears to have encouraged him to seek political of®ce, when he made his historic visit of reconciliation to Poland in December 1970 and knelt spontaneously in grief before the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he invited Grass to be a member of his eight-strong delegation made up of public ®gures, `who had been particularly concerned with this part of our treaty policy'.50 Brandt took an even smaller group on an equally momentous visit to Israel in 1973. Grass added a lighter touch to the proceedings as he ìnsisted on being allowed to draw Golda Meir', the Israeli Prime Minister.51 Whether he intended to do so or not, Grass did become a court chronicler, if not court poet, to the party. Brandt's gesture in Warsaw is the subject for the 1970 chapter in My Century. Both The Flounder and Too Far A®eld contain chapters on SPD history. The snail, and even its successor the dogged Sisyphus from Headbirths, became party trademarks and points of reference. Grass was articulating the democratic core beliefs of the maturing republic. Brandt has to thank him for his own place in a number of literary works, although he rejects the explanation given in The Flounder for his resignation: Ì cannot agree that power disgusted me, as È nter Grass suspected'.52 POUM or the Past is a Fellow Passenger is an account of an Gu aeroplane journey undertaken by `the Candidate' (obviously Brandt) and `the Writer' (Grass). `The Writer' cannot quite take the pace of the campaign trail and is inclined to nod off. One thing writers certainly can do if they want make a contribution to democratic politics is to improve the quality of politicians' speeches, as Grass knew from the personal experience of pepping up Brandt's scripts at the last election. Thus, in POUM, the Writer corrects the Candidate's use of a double genitive and a typically contorted mixed metaphor. Christian-Democrat politicians had made little effort to endear themselves with È bke attempted to organise meetings with conservative the intelligentsia. While Lu intellectuals, the more charismatic Strauû, intellectual heavyweight and hot-headed villain of the Spiegel-Affair, made no such overtures. For more than a quarter of a century, until his death in 1988, he was the Left's foremost hate ®gure. While Grass had refused to sign the declaration made by the Gruppe 47 in October 1962 protesting against the arrest of the Spiegel's editor, Rudolf Augstein, and the closure of the magazine's of®ces after Strauû had claimed Augstein had published military secrets, his tirades against the one-time Defence Minister were every bit as bitter as those of his colleagues. There are more entries under Strauû than under any other politician (apart from Brandt) in the index to the three volumes of his articles and speeches. While Grass does not merit a mention in Strauû's own memoirs, an insult he hurled in Grass's direction, to the effect that writers were like `rats and blow¯ies', gave Grass the title for his ®fth novel, The Rat. Yet in contrast to many of his colleagues, Strauû was never afraid to argue in public with his literary opponents: many regarded him as the victor on these occasions.53




In Headbirths, Grass imagines what would have happened to Strauû had he exploited his gift for rhetoric by making a career in writing rather than right-wing politics. The resulting pen-portrait reveals a surprising sympathy for the former Defence and Finance Minister and candidate in the 1980 elections. More astonishing still is Grass's apparent sense of af®nity with the Bavarian Premier: by imagining his adversary's literary career he re-writes his own. After sharing a convivial moment with the author of The Tin Drum after his Gruppe 47 prize, the imaginary Strauû evolves into something like Grass's frightening DoppelgaÈnger, the unbound Dr Jekyll to his restrained Mr Hyde. Strauû the writer, like Strauû the politician, still tends to extreme reactions, but this time of the Left rather than the Right, denouncing his erstwhile friend in the mid-1960s for his `relapse into pettybourgeois behaviourial patterns' (X:170). He joins forces with `Lettau, Fried, Enzensberger', the triumvirate of Grass's far-left foes, in support of the students. What motivated Strauû the politician, the desire for power and glory, Strauû the writer now gets from writing and the accompanying publicity: Everything about him which angers us in its raw state, his will to power, metamorphoses into energy, once he is operating with nothing more than words which diagnose the ills of our age and society. X:170 There were two sides to Strauû, however, as far as Grass is concerned: one was witty, larger than life and full of character; the other was an adventurer who sometimes showed little regard for the law. Strauû gets his own chapter in My Century, narrated by a stand-up cabaret artist who specialises in satirical impersonations of politicians. The year is not 1988, when Strauû died, but 1983 when he became embroiled in another of his illegal deals in that twilight region where the world of business meets the world of politics, this time with a cross-border component in the shape of the GDR foreign currency expert Hans SchalkGolodkowski. The narrator regrets Strauû's passing because the world of cabaret is the poorer without him but he leaves us in no doubt as to the darker sides of his personality. In the 1960s, Grass repeatedly returns to Erhard's outburst, Strauû's high-handed behaviour and subsequent lies to parliament over the Spiegel-Affair, Adenauer's prejudiced remarks on Brandt's illegitimate birth and, especially ± again and again ± to the presence of Hans Globke at the head of Adenauer's team of civil servants. It was more than the self-righteousness of CDU politicians which angered the German writers, even though their choice of words too often indicated a total lack of understanding of what the Nazi past meant. Most of West German society had simply picked up in 1949 where it had left off in 1933, or even 1945. The CDU seemed to regard the German defeat as a deeply unfortunate development which they, the governing party, subsequently had to deal with as well as they could, rather than as a morally just conclusion to the persecution and murder of millions. Strauû would boast that he had been in uniform all through the war and seen action on all the major fronts of battle. Grass and the liberal intelligentsia felt there was a need to





The student revolt The struggle against Grass is more important than anything else. Rudi Dutschke55 Politics was a generational issue in the second half of the 1960s and it often took place on the streets and on university campuses rather than at election meetings. Grass wrote to Kiesinger as if he were his own father when he beseeched him in November 1966 not to accept the nomination for the Chancellorship because of his earlier membership of the NSDAP. While young Germans followed international fashions, grew their hair long, smoked marijuana and listened to Jimi Hendrix, rejecting `bourgeois' sexual morality and conventional social mores just like their contemporaries in the USA, the UK and France, their rebellion was marked most decisively by their feelings towards their parents who themselves had been young adults in the Third Reich. Grass was not quite old enough to be seen as a father ®gure, let alone implicated in the great silence on National Socialism since he had broached that subject to greater effect than any other single individual. On the other hand, he was not quite young enough to feel dissociated from the past, as the students emphatically did. Like the adults in Local Anaesthetic, Grass was caught between innocence and complicity. He knew that as a German he could not escape the Nazi legacy and had spent much of the last ten years telling his compatriots that they could not do so either. The students, on the other hand, felt that Nazis cast no shadow over them as they had been tiny children in the 1940s. By espousing antiimperialism and interpreting the Third Reich in ideological rather than national terms, they could personally dissociate themselves from it. They learnt in the course of the next ten years and more that this was not possible. Scherbaum's conversion to democracy and reformism in Local Anaethestic may have seemed unrealistic wishful thinking in 1969. Thirty years afterwards it appears rather more plausible: the thoughtful young sixth-former pre®gured the future career of more than one youthful radical. Grass cites his own biography constantly in speech after speech, his date of birth, his unquestioning adolescent enthusiasm for the Nazis, his subsequent lessons in democracy and powerful feelings of guilt and shame. While his generation had been through its formative experiences very young, it was not left untouched by the founding decade of the Federal Republic, the `phoney Fifties' as he calls them in The Rat, when the political classes ignored the emotions and moral aspirations of the young. He cited his own case in an election speech to mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic, `The Round Figure of Twenty'.



make a clean break with the past and to make a fresh start. This was achieved in 1969. Grass maintained that `Willy Brandt possesses enough moral authority to close this chapter of our history'. (XIV:103). Brandt commented similarly on Heinemann's election to the Federal Presidency, saying that `This means that Hitler [. . .] has ®nally lost the war.'54


The hopes of the twenty-years-olds in 1949 turned all too quickly into resignation. It looks almost as if the political backbone of my generation has been broken. And if today's 20-year-olds react extremely suspiciously to today's 40-year-olds, their suspicion is marked by the fear that they, like the 40-year-olds, could very quickly sell out to the system and become ¯exible consumers who diligently and pragmatically pursue their careers, bending to the prevailing wind, because they have no political backbone. This is why I believe that my generation now has one last chance to win back the lost moral credit. Without the help of the 40-year olds of today the 20-yearolds will not achieve a political base. I can express this the other way round and reach the same conclusion: if history repeats itself and the hopes of the 20-yearolds in 1969 turn into resignation once again, then parliamentary democracy would have no substance and the ®eld be left open to the enemies of democracy on the Right. XIV:495±6 In Schelsky's view this generation had become `sceptical' because their original youthful idealism, potentially a force for good, had been betrayed and manipulated so utterly. This made them allergic to politics and accounted for the attitude summed by the motto ohne mich! (`count me out!').56 Grass knew that extravagant, idealistic hopes can never come to fruition, indeed that great wrongs can be committed in their pursuit, and ± sometimes equally damaging ± the disappointment which stems from thwarted idealism leads to a sense of betrayal, disenchantment and resentment which can be discharged in dangerous ways. This is his dichotomy between ùtopia' and `melancholy'. The ®rst great event of the students' revolt was the shooting of the 26-year-old student, Benno Ohnesorg, by a Berlin policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras. The names of both victim and assassin, as well as the date itself, 2 June 1967, immediately entered political folklore ± the ®rst terrorist grouping was called `The Movement of 2 June'. Ohnesorg was shot in a courtyard off a side street by the West Berlin Opera after the Shah of Iran, whose repressive domestic policies were the cause of the demonstration, had been invited to see a performance of The Magic Flute by the new Mayor of West Berlin, Heinrich Albertz, and the new Foreign Minister, none other than Willy Brandt. For most of the ®rst half of the following year ± the February anti-Vietnam Demo, the attempt on Rudi Dutschke's life at Easter ± the political temperature in West Berlin was never far below boiling point. Grass attempted to mediate between the students, the SPD leadership, and the wider public. He debated with the students in the hothouse atmosphere of a packed lecture theatre: Ònly a handful were a match for him', recalls Richter; Ì do not know', wrote the liberal editor of Die Zeit, Gerd Bucerius, `who in Berlin apart from Grass would have dared to do that'.57 But he enjoyed the verbal jousting and devised put-downs to silence hecklers. His favourite, which invariably worked, was to recite



Here he aligned himself with the so-called `sceptical generation', a term coined by the conservative sociologist Helmut Schelsky:


one of his own poems, `Steam Kettle Effect', which described the intimidatory tactics of hissing at public meetings. It contains the lines:

(I:173) This was what the reactionaries were saying, of course: the students led a pampered existence at the taxpayers' expense. It was Grass's way of saying that he had endured a harder time of it at their age, as he had not been to university like them. But the mood could often turn sour. After Dutschke's death in 1978, Grass described him in Headbirths, the epilogue to his debate with the students, as à textbook case of a German revolutionary' (X:160) and recalls: Àt the end of the 1960s the battle against him and his enemies was hard-fought: their respective hatreds made the Left and Right form an alliance against the centre' (X:161). In May 1968, Golo Mann, son of Thomas, suggested in the arch-conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Grass should stand himself for mayor of West Berlin: Because if anyone can make peace in Berlin, it is Grass. He knows and loves the city. He has one foot in the students' camp and the other on the same ground as those who value order and legality [. . .] The task of the mayor of Berlin is principally moral and political, both in West Berlin, where he would have to calm È nter the universities and the populace, and in the divided city as a whole. Gu Grass, Mayor [. . .] Extraordinary situations demand extraordinary people.58 Grass seriously considered standing and a committee of the liberal great and good was formed to promote his candidacy. He also gathered a group of likeminded academics and writers to advise the SPD on policy vis-aÁ -vis the students with the aim of attracting parts of the radical Left. Ehmke received a letter in autumn 1967 suggesting a meeting the following February, which turned out to coincide with the largest anti-Vietnam demonstration to date, on 18 February 1968. He too recalls making few friends within the SPD by calling for dialogue with the students.59 Klaus Schu È tz, the new SPD mayor, had initially tried to get the demo banned, then called on ordinary Berliners to show their loyalty to the US in a counter-demo. This seemed to be the of®cial SPD line; two prominent local Social Democrats were expelled from the party for marching against the Vietnam War on 18 February. Grass beseeched Brandt in private to intervene to cancel È tz's pro-American rally and to give the students a signal that the SPD took Schu them seriously and really did represent an alternative to the Christian Democrats.60 Arnulf Baring, who became a member of the so-called `Gruppe Grass', explains how the younger generations needed to look up to ®gures of authority:



Hissing makes equal,

costs little, keeps you warm.

But it costs somebody's money

to bring up this elite, witty and hissing.

Two out of three of the young people questioned and as many as three out of four students thought that the demonstrations were a good thing. They wanted reforms, wide-reaching reforms ± in effect a completely new, better beginning È bkes. Disappointed by the Grand Coalition, a after all the Kiesingers and Lu fossilised system, a narrow, tightly knit Establishment, and at the same time ambitious, spoilt, and emotional, this generation of young Germans coming of age in the postwar world was looking for its own view of things appropriate to the new times: living ideals, inspiring visions, ®gures of authority who could be trusted. It was not enough to have posters of Marx and Mao, Che and Ho. They needed real-life German role models too.61 The group canvassed Heinemann's candidacy for the Federal Presidency; their slogan was à candidate for questioning youth', as Heinemann, in their view, possessed the personal qualities and moral integrity that idealistic young Germans could respect. Grass appealed also to Theodor Adorno to come out in favour of the middle way. In a sense Adorno stood, not unlike Grass, between the two stools of the students, who demanded his unequivocal solidarity, and the authorities, who accused him of planting the seeds of rebellion in young minds. After feeling anger at the way Adorno had been treated during a public discussion with student leaders at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 23 September 1968, Grass asked him why he was afraid of them and why he would not distance himself from their clicheÂed arguments.62 He also beseeched Adorno to acknowledge some SPD achievements and not to reject the FRG in toto, as he appeared to do. Grass's letter is a campaign document, a private appeal to an in¯uential and respected public ®gure, dashed off the day he received a letter from Adorno, which requested clari®cation of comments reported in the press allegedly made by Grass about him. In reply Adorno acknowledges Grass's refreshing directness of tone and respectful collegiality, but his own letter, three times as long, personal and even moving in his description of the verbal attacks made on him, is deeply nuanced. It shows, moreover, that there were wholly honourable positions to be occupied to the left of the Social Democrats.63 Adorno refused to criticise the students because of the others condemning them and does acknowledge SPD achievements. He makes the ®ne distinction between open support, public criticism and silence, which implies neither. In less than a year, however, Adorno was dead. Grass believes it was the student con¯ict and the pressure put on him by both sides which killed him. The ugly scenes at the Frankfurt Book Fair evidently made an impression on Grass. He told Helen Wolff that the experience con®rmed his conviction `that over the following year I will have to arm myself against attacks from both sides; an activity which keeps me young and ®t'.64 In My Century the 1968 chapter is narrated by a former student militant, who had come to leftwing radicalism after a reactionary phase as a Heidegger disciple, and who now looks back shame-facedly at his role in the tormenting of `the humiliated Theodor W. Adorno' (MC:251). He and his comrades, led by another ex-rightwinger, sought to `strip' the philosopher `naked': `bit by bit he had to take off his protective theory and [. . .] place what remained of




his threadbare authority now in its patched-up state at the service of the revolution' (MC:250). In fact, however, they would have preferred to have him `done away with'. They jeered too at `the mustachioed writer who had sold himself to the Es-Pe-De' and who accuses them of àctionism which is blind in its fury' (MC:251). At the back of the hall stands an elderly gentleman from Czechoslovakia who tells off the narrator for talking rubbish in view of what had happened in Prague just one month ago. In the Èlection Of®ce of German Writers' Grass was associated with three students in their mid-twenties who shared his zeal to change the political culture of the Federal Republic. In the wake of the Dutschke shooting, one teamed up with Andreas Baader to plant incendiary devices in a Frankfurt department store. Thus began her tragic career as an international terrorist of the Red Army Fraction (the RAF or `Baader-Meinhof Gang'). Her name was Gudrun Ensslin and her life ended in a cell in the Stammheim high-security prison in October 1977. She was 37 years old. Another, her one-time boyfriend and father of her son, edited the `Voltaire Pamphlets', publishing one issue on Grass's tussle with the Springer Press in 1967. Not long after he withdrew from the political fray and wrote The Journey, partly on the subject of his father, Will Vesper, who had been a prominent and fanatical Nazi, and partly on the experiences which had made him into an embittered revolutionary. This became a cult book on its publication six years after the author's suicide in May 1971. He was 33 and his name was Bernward Vesper. His and Ensslin's path to disillusionment with the democratic process ®ts a pattern Grass has drawn repeatedly in his ®ction. A third made his name as a student militant before publishing the classic account of disillusionment with Marxist and È chner's account of the Maoist dogma, a short novel entitled Lenz, after Georg Bu madness of J.M.R. Lenz, the revolutionary Sturm und Drang playwright. His name was Peter Schneider and over the following three decades he became a distinguished novelist and left-liberal essayist, usually regarded as the 68ers' most representative cultural ®gure. Vesper's recollection of his and Ensslin's ®rst meeting with Grass at Christmas 1964, when they both pledged their support for the SPD, shows one thing Vesper perhaps did not intend: Grass's tireless work behind the scenes, cajoling and persuading, getting others to makes a contribution. Vesper is reminded of their encounter at the end of 1970 by an anti-Communist Grass diatribe in the SuÈddeutsche. He recalls that while he enjoyed the host's pork roast en croute, he clearly felt at a disadvantage when they were introduced as `two people who still believe in the revolution'.65 Grass quoted Rosa Luxemburg to him and evidently won the argument: But the teacher showed leniency, served me a piece of roast and urged both of us [Gudrun and I] to join the SPD. [Notwithstanding the good roast and the Cassubian casuistry, the feeling never left me that changes were necessary which a high-up SPD bigwig would not dare to even dream about.] 1964: meanwhile 6 years of the anti-capitalist movement, information, action, have passed. The Liberal's arguments never did have anything to do with reality anyway, which is why he has no need to change them.66




Four and a half months after reacting so resentfully to Grass's article on the Lenin Centenary Vesper took his own life. The reasons can be sensed in the bitterness of his recollection. From that Boxing Day in 1964 the tide of history had moved with Grass and the SPD. Despite the polarisation brought about by the Grand Coalition, the high radical hopes of June 1967 or Easter 1968, the students did not have a viable political plan, let alone the chance of a popular majority or backing from organised labour, which they believed had been `bought off' by the capitalists. Their revolution failed to materialise. Schneider, like Vesper, realised this too. His ®ctional ± and almost certainly ®ctionalised ± account of a meeting with his one-time `patron' in Lenz has points in common with Vesper's brief memoir, but there is nothing of Vesper's resentful tone. He also clearly believes that the older man is right but cannot yet bring himself to admit it: Lenz could tell from the patron's arguments that they had all already been published somewhere. [. . .] It disturbed Lenz that he did not have an opposite view to absolutely all the points that his former patron made. He had often nodded without meaning to. Nevertheless he felt suf®ciently provoked to want to contradict him on each and every point. After a few unsatisfactory attempts at contradiction he discovered that it was not so much what his patron said that irritated him as his digni®ed tone of voice and the suit he was wearing. In order to steer the conversation in a different direction, Lenz inquired about his companion's work and plans for the future. But he refused to be distracted and demanded Lenz state his view. At this point he pushed him into a doorway with his rather ample belly and failed to notice that he interrupted Lenz so often that Lenz did not get the opportunity of answering him. Lenz tried to slip away several times beneath his arm with which he held himself up against the doorway, but he could not get a word in until someone who lived in the house tried to get past them. `Didn't you say exactly the same thing before the students' rebellion even started?' Lenz asked. Ì can remember that you were warning about straying from the right path before anyone had even set out to do anything. While other people took to the streets and fought battles with the police, you wagged your ®nger at them, carefully distinguished right from wrong, increased your sales ®gures, and built houses. [. . .] Fine, they did not have to argue about that, the former patron replied as they continued walking, what was important was the result, what Lenz was doing at the present time, he was prepared to help him ®nd something practical and political to do. He then described what he meant by that. Lenz was not well informed enough to follow all the details, he just caught on to the word butter mountain, the European butter mountain had to be reduced. And while the former patron was already talking about the disappointing behaviour of some ®nance minister, Lenz could not help visualising the patron standing with a shovel in front of an enormous mountain of butter.67




Lenz's objection is to Grass's style rather than to the substance of what he says; it is emotional rather than intellectual. Lenz is dissatis®ed with the revolutionary scene in much the same way as Scherbaum in Local Anaesthetic. While the terrorists never numbered more than a tiny handful (Bo È ll's `six against sixty million'), their contemporaries understood what had motivated them to do what they did. It was an emotional step which tens of thousands of others privately contemplated: they were `sympathisers' in the eyes of the right-wing press. The other path led in the direction of the consolidation of parliamentary democracy and there was never really any doubt that this was the one the republic would take. Grass understood what motivated the terrorists too, which made his opposition to the students all the more vigorous. He understood also that the democratic path was in®nitely less exciting and that every step along it was likely to require a compromise. Yet once Brandt had been safely re-elected, he could not keep up his enthusiasm for long, opposition came much more naturally to him.

Ì meant myself just as much': Bertolt Brecht in the cross®re in The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising Premiered at West Berlin's Schiller-Theater in January 1966 The Plebeians encapsulates two themes familiar from Grass's speeches: the avoidable tragedy of German division and the place of the committed writer in society, in this case the behaviour of Bertolt Brecht during the violent suppression of what Grass has always argued was a spontaneous workers' uprising in East Berlin on 17 June 1953. Grass knew that this was the most controversial date in GDR history and the GDR authorities would denounce his play. Brecht, who had died in August 1956, was still the most controversial cultural ®gure in the FRG too: his plays were not performed in West Berlin after 1961, which lent added Piquancy to the construction of a mock-up of the Berliner Ensemble on stage at the Schiller-Theater. Brecht's poems had also been compared to the Horst-Wessel Lied by a German Foreign Minister. As The Plebeians treated such highly charged material, it was never likely to pass unnoticed. Grass not only became persona non grata in the GDR, his credentials with the FRG Left were shredded. The greatest insult of all was that he earned praise in Springer's newspapers. But it all kept him in the public eye: it was less than six months since È chner-Prize speech. the 1965 election campaign and three since his Bu Grass ®rst signalled his interest in the subject in a lecture he gave to the Academy of Arts, which had elected him to its ranks the previous year, in April 1964, the 500th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth. After visiting New York for the ®rst time in May, he wrote the play reasonably quickly: by the end of October the manuscript was ®nished. He told Helen Wolff that he hoped to deliver the ®nal version to Luchterhand the following March and begin work with the Schiller-Theater as soon as possible thereafter.68 He had entitled the Shakespeare lecture `The Prehistory and Posthistory of the Tragedy of Coriolanus from Livy and Plutarch via Shakespeare to Brecht and Me', which may have somewhat disconcerted his listeners expecting to hear a more conventional appreciation of English Renaissance drama. It was, incidentally, typical of Grass's over¯owing self-con®dence that he should allude to





himself, moreover to a play he had not yet written, in the same breath as these four great authors from two millennia of Western literature. What appeals to him most in the lecture is the intersection of the multiple historical sequences: Ancient Rome, Jacobean London, East Berlin. The workings of historical and narrative time, the ways the past intersects with the present, has been his greatest single preoccupation, stretching over 40 years from The Tin Drum to My Century. The lecture is one of the ®rst signs that he will develop this beyond the relatively straightforward juxtaposition of past and present in the three Danzig works. The Brecht-®gure in The Plebeians, known as the Boss, updates Shakespeare's seventeenth-century drama which deals with leadership and social organisation, popular revolt and populist politics, betrayal of both one-time allies and beliefs, and authoritarianism leading to tyranny or dictatorship ± to a twentieth-century context. This was becoming a fashionable approach ± Jan Kott's Shakespeare ± Our Contemporary had been published two years earlier. In a drama, however, unlike in a novel, Grass has no narrative voice to draw attention to discrepancies between fact and ®ction and to hint that an invented version of the past might contain as much or more truth than one that is veri®ed by the history books. This is the major difference between Before, his very last play, and Local Anaesthetic. The narrative version is far more satisfying because of the interplay between narrated fact and fantasy, past recollection and present experience. The Plebeians' critics, on the other hand, were all too ready to take the `mistakes' as bad history or, even worse, plain slander. What disturbed Grass most of all when it came to the uprising was not the controversy over Brecht's role but the way that both East and West quickly invented their own versions of what happened. For the West it was a popular revolt against Soviet Communism; for the East a failed Western-backed coup. The East could clearly not accept that its own workers could have reason to be unhappy since the state, in theory, was run for their bene®t. If their workers protested against a state decision, then agents provocateurs had to be at work whose aim could only be to destabilise the Communist regime in pursuit of the class enemy's interests. For the West, on the other hand, the strikers' aim had to be the removal of the communist system in favour of capitalism. Both versions, in Grass's view, served purely propaganda purposes as it was in both sides' interests to cement the status quo of a divided Germany. The truth about the uprising, that the workers were loyal to the GDR state and simply wanted to resist what amounted to an arbitrarily imposed pay cut, did not suit either side. Grass is thus `correcting' of®cial historiography in his work of dramatic ®ction. The innocent East Berlin workers, naively believing that because right was on their side allies from within and without the GDR would come to their aid, got caught in the middle and were crushed. Grass portrays them as honest, uncomplicated victims who are punished after acting bravely in their own immediate material interests. No-one from the West is manipulating them. While Grass came under ®re immediately for historical distortion, more important than factual `corrections' was the fact that he seemed to be calling Brecht a hypocrite for rehearsing a play on class struggle while refusing to join the ranks of the workers in the real struggle taking place on the streets outside. Brechtian theatre was supposed to be an open public forum where practice and theory came together,



100

where what happened on stage derived directly from reality, `re-presenting' it in unfamiliar but highly revealing form. This in turn led an audience to re¯ect rationally on their everyday lives, ultimately stirring them to action to bring about political change. There was no question that what went on in the theatre had a dynamic and close relationship with what went on in the practical lives of the audience. This is one assumption which Grass sets out to demolish. The Boss's words were not matched by deeds and the link between the intellectual and the masses has indeed been severed. Brecht's name is today as good as synonymous with the vexed theme of `the writer and politics'. Apart from Mann, he was internationally the best known German cultural ®gure in the post-1945 era. As his struggle against the Nazis reached back to the days of Weimar and his world fame was assured thanks to works like The Threepenny Opera, he enjoyed a unique personal and literary reputation. While Mann shunned both German states and settled in Zurich, Brecht, after acquiring an Austrian passport and a Swiss bank account, lent his considerable prestige to the ¯edgling `Workers' and Peasants' State'. In the cultural ®eld he became indisputably `the biggest name' (II:417) in the young GDR, as the Boss's foil, Kosanke, says in the last act of Grass's play. Whether he was politically one of the most signi®cant ®gures in the GDR is a different matter. This is one of the questions Grass explores. While Grass complained when his play was taken to be anti-Brecht, he could hardly deny that he intended criticism. He repeats some well-worn jibes in his Academy lecture, which is more barbed than the play that followed: We know that Bertolt Brecht did not interrupt his rehearsal work while the uprising went ahead in East Berlin and those provinces we know under the collective label of the GDR. [. . .] We know that an authentic version of Bertolt Brecht's written comments on the workers' uprising has not been published to this day. His heirs and publishers are guarding these texts. [. . .] We know that Bertolt Brecht came out of the workers' uprising without visible damage. He withdrew to Buckow and wrote poems like `Changing the Wheel', Ìron', and Èvil Morning'. His Berliner Ensemble continued to perform, he continued to be a cultural icon and advertisement for a state, to which, as far as his passport was concerned, he did not belong. XIV:82±3 This last failing continues to be used against Brecht by his right-wing critics; the charge was hardly fresh in 1964. Grass does not mention that the most famous comment on the uprising, that if the government is not satis®ed with the people it should dissolve it and elect another, is, of course, Brecht's own. In the play, however, the Boss eventually comes over positively as he speaks good sense and is proved right in the course of the action. He refuses to sign Kosanke's condemnation of the uprising, thus showing the distance that separates him from a tame state poet, and does eventually sign his own note of protest, which the authorities cut and edit, publishing a sanitised version which gives the impression that he supported them.





Some of those who disapproved of The Plebeians perpetuated the myth of Brecht's in¯uence over his political masters. According to Hans Mayer, had Brecht lived a few months longer the wave of repression which swept the GDR in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in October 1956 would have been far less brutal.69 Yet this myth of Brecht in 1956 is surely disproved by what Brecht did in 1953: the authorities would and could have got rid of him after Hungary had they needed to do so. `You too can be replaced', Kosanke warns the Boss. The Boss is an altogether elusive character, who will not readily explain his own behaviour. He is far happier rehearsing in the safe and reassuring con®nes of his theatre, where he exercises complete control over his work and the people who work with him, than he is discussing events in the world outside his theatre, which, he knows from experience, he has little chance of altering. He may plot a rebellion on stage and choreograph his own revolution in theatrical practice, but he has no faith in the messy protest taking place on the theatre's doorstep. He has seen it all before and knows that it has not been planned well enough this time for it to succeed. He asks the strikers with increasing exasperation at the end of the ®rst act: Have you occupied the radio station?

Called for a general strike?

Are you safe from western agents?

What are the police doing? Looking the other way?

Did you assure the Soviets that

You would stick with socialism?

And what if the tanks come?

(II:368) As a man of letters he prefers words to deeds. As a creative writer, whose ®rst talent is an ability to empathise with others, he only becomes concerned with the workers once they have failed and blood has been spilt. Then he feels sympathy, guilt and shame, but also an urge to withdraw from active life completely and to explore his pain in poetry. The Boss's dilemma was not obviously similar to anything Grass encountered as a public intellectual, though after 1969 he stood, as Brecht had done, close to the party of government. The Boss is dependent on the state which had promised him and his company a new theatre. The Berliner Ensemble moved to new premises in 1954. Grass was ®nancially dependent on the open market and has never needed to make any concession to it in order to prosper. Whether under capitalism or communism, writing novels is a one-man business while putting on plays requires ®nance, a building, and a whole team of helpers. In Grass's eyes, however, Brecht had let the Communist authorities use and abuse his world reputation and he fell into a trap not dissimilar to that which had ensnared many decidedly bourgeois German poets. Brecht is an antirole model ± like Tucholsky and Ossietzky, though for different reasons: From working on The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising I realised, for myself at any rate, that there exists a great divide when it comes to art and politics: on the one



102

side you have the writer and artist who puts the revolutionary demands down on paper; on the other side you have reality, which, lamentably, behaves differently from what the artist wants. This divide can only be bridged if the writer occasionally leaves his writing behind. If he says `politics', then he has to engage in politics at the grassroots. He cannot just stand on a high podium and strut about like a visionary, spouting wise words like an oracle, or behaving as if he were a great teacher. He has to show that he is a citizen as well. For the ®rst time I also noticed that even Brecht ± who in the 1920s quite rightly poured his scorn on those thoroughly bourgeois positions adopted by writers (Gerhart Hauptmann, for instance) ± that even Brecht in his last phase, dependent on the GDR government, thinking of nothing any more except his theatre, slipped into a socialist version of this bourgeois role and let himself be presented as a canonical author, even if he did not present himself in that way. I drew certain conclusions from that and thought that I had to call my own attitudes into question on the basis of experience and of what was going on at that time in everyday politics.70 Brecht's role was undoubtedly more nuanced than this and his attitude to the authorities permeated with ambiguities. He died too soon for his relationship with the state to mature. It is revealing that Grass rarely refers to Brecht elsewhere, whether his activities in the Weimar Republic, in exile in Scandinavia and the United States, or in the GDR. He returns to Brecht, however, in My Century by imagining a meeting between him and a poet who enjoyed similar iconic status and in¯uence in the West after the war, Gottfried Benn. Like Heidegger, Benn had been close to Nazism at the beginning and had never publicly distanced himself from it or given an account of his entanglement. Like Heidegger too, what he wrote transcended all ideologies. In the chapter for 1956 in My Century, Grass readily equates Brecht and Benn, making them into secret blood brothers who immediately understood each other's past and present dilemmas. Whatever the literary merits of the concept, it degrades Brecht. The Plebeians is ultimately not about Brecht at all; as Grass stated shortly afterwards: Ì meant myself just as much'.71 As an historical play, it is aimed, like all historical plays, at a contemporary audience and confronts contemporary questions. Grass understandably insists on this point: I did not intend to write a documentary piece about the way Brecht behaved [. . .] What concerned me was the dif®culty of the SITUATION, and I make a clear jump from a situation to the idea of creating a theatre play out of this situation. The Boss is the model of the poet and intellectual who does not come to grips with the political reality he has so often invoked.72 The wisdom he demonstrates is that a playwright's true place is in the theatre. If he joins the barricades then it is only as an ordinary citizen; Grass repeated this ad nauseam with reference to himself and his contemporaries. For Grass this is an uncomfortable truth and the hidden theme of another greater work a decade and a half later, The Meeting in Telgte.





At the beginning of The Plebeians the actors are getting on with learning and discussing their roles, working out their words and gestures for themselves in a collective spirit of collaboration, in what might be thought to be the typical Brechtian method. Before news of the building workers' strike reaches the theatre, the Boss seems to be living and breathing revolutionary politics: `So: let's do a didactic play. Make the audience cleverer! Here! Let's get the indoctrinated tribunes to show the Plebeians how to make a revolution and how not to make a revolution' (II:358). Moments later news arrives from the outside world that `something is happening in the city' (360). Soon the rehearsal is interrupted by the entrance of strikers from the Stalin-Allee. They have never previously been inside a theatre and know nothing about the famous actors' troupe. That their presence in the playhouse is evidently alien is something of a contradiction since even in Year Four of the new `Workers' and Peasants' State' the theatre was not supposed to intimidate the working classes to whom it was dedicated. They explain that the work on the showpiece boulevard had to be ®nished quickly and their production `norms' had been increased by ten per cent without warning and without consultation. This in effect amounted to a pay-cut. The strikers ask to see the Boss because they want him to help: `You see, we know that you are a great man, someone who has a name'; `You stand for something. No one can deny that. Everyone listens to you' (363): BRICKLAYER: PLASTERER:

. . . everyone said: go to him, he knows the brothers at the top, they know him . . . . . . from the international standpoint as well, you have what they call a reputation! 365

They believe, like Hans Mayer, that the Boss can make a difference because of the weight his name carries. He is after all respected for more than his poetic and theatrical work and his reputation extends far beyond the four walls of his theatre. The whole world would protest if anything happened to him. He enjoys in¯uence, they have been told, and could intervene on their behalf with the authorities, putting their case more eloquently than they could themselves. On this last point they may be right. The Boss's reputation may not be as valuable as they believe, but his way with words is a facility the workers lack, as Volumnia, the leading actress, expresses more forcibly: For there's a worse problem than the norm and the price

And a greater shortage and something more annoying

Than the lack of potatoes, the watered-down beer,

And that is their tongues' disability.

Their mouths can't do it.

All that comes out is: the norm. The quota.

And the normed super-quota.

But you, never a son of toil despite your cap,

You could put the words together for them



104


And create thick forests of exclamation marks So that they are listened to.

Formulating the views of others in the political struggle is, of course, a task writers can perform, as Grass had learnt when he met Brandt. It would not have cost the Boss very much to agree to this request right away and it would not have helped their cause one iota, but then, nor would any other actions have helped them either. This is the one of the play's tragic insights. The strikers are predictably unimpressed by the refusal of other social or professional groups to show support. The Boss is behaving no differently in their eyes from the students and professors in the Humboldt University where they had taken their case ®rst. The Boss calls the strikers' revolution `romantic' rather than `classical'. His lack of faith is soon vindicated. He can only go in search of another refuge to replace his theatrical haven, a house he has leased by a lake on the edge of Berlin, where he can shelter from the rough, unpredictable outside world now that his theatre no longer provides sanctuary. As an intellectual and an artist the Boss seems blinded by theory and the problems of representing in dramatic form what is going on before his eyes. Thinking and creating, he lays waste his powers of action. He is in fact deeply pessimistic. His memory of the Spartacists in 1918±19 feeds his scepticism which becomes, because it is determined by a loss of faith in a utopian ideal, total ± not offset like Grass's own by a commitment to pragmatic compromise. The Boss earns a place in the pantheon of Grass characters who veer between melancholic resignation and revolutionary utopianism. Grass's criticism of the type of intellectual represented by the Boss is in essence threefold. First that his revolutionary texts were ultimately no more than texts, poetic words arranged pleasingly on the page, which reduced the complexities of reality to some well-expressed formulae and aesthetically pleasing schema. His second point is that the workers are wrong, and so are all others who share their supposition, that prominent intellectuals who have earned their public reputations from writing plays, poems or novels can affect political affairs by lending their hallowed name to a manifesto or by marching in step with demonstrators. Grass learnt this lesson for himself and had endeavoured to act on it. His third and ®nal point is a plea for the separation of powers, this time between writers and the state. Writers cannot identify themselves so strongly with the political movement they support, especially if it wields power. They have to safeguard their independence, which the Boss has lost by boxing himself in so close to his rulers. The result is that he pleases nobody and achieves nothing. The fact that Brecht himself had little choice other than to emigrate once the GDR experiment began to disappoint him is immaterial. Some of his colleagues (Ernst Bloch, Hans Mayer, the young Uwe Johnson) did move to the West shortly after Brecht's death in August 1956, having discovered there was little they could accomplish under the SED regime. Grass's erstwhile critics may now concede that Brecht was caught on the horns of a dilemma which ensnared critical GDR-intellectuals until the state's dying days. In this respect The Plebeians is very much a GDR-play and a farsighted one at that.



(370)

106


Like the Boss in The Plebeians who retreated to Buckow after the uprising, Grass escaped regularly from the ultimately banal categories of public discourse into a more enduring truth. His lyric poetry reveals a side to him that had prevailed at the beginning of his career and would do so intermittently in the future but did not often ®nd expression in the mid-1960s. In Exhaustively Questioned (1967), he follows a sequence of political poems with the unlikely sounding `Pig's Head Brawn', where in a 120 lines of free verse he describes a recipe with many ®ne ingredients, including `rage', and suggests that preparing such a dish is more useful than protesting against the evils of the world. This is the tension between politics and art, the public and the private, the occasional necessity for a message versus aesthetic playfulness or pure personal pleasure. From his earliest days Grass has inclined to the second part of each pair, whose very point is that they have no point. The times through which he lived, however, made him pay attention to the ®rst. The poems with any political resonance are in a minority; it is peculiar how few have anything to do with the election campaigns and the issues he addressed in them. He does not satirise public ®gures or comment on public events. Nor does he put his poetic ®rst person, his lyrical Ì', in the midst of the political fray and re¯ect on his aims and feelings. But the tenor of many of the poems is intensely personal. The trials of an apparently failing marriage where neither partner speaks to the other, `Silent Evening', enhanced by joy in parenthood and the consoling delights of sex. There is self-doubt and self-questioning, as the title poem which stands at the beginning indicates, autobiographical re¯ections and reminiscences, including the famous `Kleckerburg'. The poet still enjoys the good things that life has to offer, eating food and especially making love, which gives him complete but temporary ful®lment. He is still acutely aware of his own mortality and the transitoriness of sensual pleasure and life itself. There is a shift away from the proliferation of objects (animal, vegetable and mineral), which so characterised The Advantages of the WindChickens and Gleisdreieck, towards people, colleagues or contemporaries. Apocalyptic fears have a more tangible edge and the general ®eld of reference is easier to identify and the references, still coloured with the same obtuse personal imagery, are often more solidly historical or political. In a handful of the poems Grass makes his own distinctive contribution to the revitalisation of the political lyric, which got underway in Germany in parallel to the increase in political militancy. His contributions to this genre in fact call the whole notion of the `protest poem' as written by Erich Fried in his hugely popular collections und Vietnam und into question. Fried's riposte in a review published in Die Zeit was predictably scathing.73 Peter Schneider, writing in the left-wing KuÈrbiskern, was not much more impressed either.74 Grass argued that protests must have a realisable goal, they should concentrate on practicalities, otherwise they will have no effect and serve simply to ful®l the emotional needs of the protestor. The sequence ÀNGER FURY RAGE' has two connected sections entitled `Fallen into Powerlessness' and `Do Something', which offer a sarcastic critique of popular forms



On cooking pigs' heads: Exhaustively Questioned


It's getting tight between the ideologues And sons from too good a background. They're coming closer. I want to get out. (I:160) Grass found himself ìn the middest' for the time being and would not be able to `get out' for some time to come.

`Burn, warehouse, burn!' Local Anaesthetic A burning department store with burning people conveys for the ®rst time in a European city that crackling Vietnam feeling (to be there and burn with the others) that up to now we have been lacking in Berlin. Dieter Kunzelmann75 Despite two plays, one volume of poetry, and a large number of speeches and articles produced over this ten-year period, writing novels remained ± as always ± Grass's self-de®ning activity. He had begun writing what became Local Anaesthetic, originally entitled Lost Battles, in the autumn of 1966 and commented to Helen Wolff that he had to hide himself away from the many public demands made on him in order to concentrate.76 Two years later he reported that he had been obliged to restructure his story to incorporate the Scherbaum story, which developed into the most memorable part of the novel: Basically, something similar happened as with Dog Years. Then it was Joachim Mahlke who disrupted an extremely artistic, attractive but extravagant concept. I had to get Cat and Mouse out of the way before I could have another go with Dog Years. This time the seventeen-year-old schoolboy has caused me similar dif®culties. ± But however wearisome this process is, I am glad that writing successfully is not a matter of following formulae. It's quite an old-fashioned activity really; you cannot rationalise it. If I had not put in the two years preliminary work, if I had not dealt with all the orthodontic waste material and the cement production, Scherbaum would not have come knocking at my door; and without Scherbaum I would have ®nished too early.77 It is instructive that Eberhard Starusch came ®rst in his mind. Local Anaesthetic marks a new beginning in several respects, though the style and structure stand out from his later prose work too. It is one of his least fantastic texts and one of his most conventional in that he picks a small group of characters and



of protest, undertaken more for the bene®t of those protesting than out of a realistic assessment of making a difference. Revolutionary students, `sons of too good a background', `so well-brought up', who threaten the beleaguered poet, make an appearance in the twenty-fourth poem, `Claustrophobia':


watches them interact with one another over a short span of time. The most obvious point of continuity is Starusch, the 40-year old grammar school teacher for `German È rtebeker in The Tin Drum and, less importantly, and thus history', whose career as Sto Dog Years, is worth tracing. The Nazi past still impinges on Starusch's consciousness with greater force than the democratic present. Local Anaesthetic is also the last novel before Too Far A®eld to employ a ®ctional narrator, since apart from the narrative tease of The Meeting in Telgte, Grass begins to create narrative personae to all intents and purposes identical with himself, except that they have certain fantastic powers such as recalling events millennia ago or seeing into the future. Starusch is the same age as Grass, shares his Danzig and Cassubian background, and even has a similar profession ± insofar as Grass was concerned with educating his fellow citizens at this time. Apart from Starusch, all the ®gures in both Local Anaesthetic and From the Diary of a Snail are essayistic cut-outs of one sort or another, whose function is to play a role in an argument or to represent a standpoint. In the debates between Starusch and Scherbaum, there rages a battle for the soul of the democratic German state. Both are typical members of their respective generations ± Scherbaum (born in 1949) is as old or as young as the FRG itself. Yet if he and Veronika Lewand, his on±off girlfriend, are young hotheads, ready to declare war on the society of their parents and teachers, Starusch is no straightforward Enlightenment spokesman. He may preach tolerance, moderation and praise the values of reasoned argument, but he lives in fear of the skeletons in the cupboard of his own teenage past. The nature of his dark secrets is the narrative mystery at the heart of Local Anaesthetic. It is the dentist who tries to discover what it is. Scherbaum is sarcastically contemptuous of his father's allegiance to democracy, which has obviously infected his own view of the FRG and its political representatives: My father naturally wasn't a Nazi. My father was only an Air Defence Warden. An Air Defence Warden naturally is not an anti-Fascist. An Air Defence Warden is a Nothing. I am the son of an Air Defence Warden, which means I am the son of a Nothing. Now my father is a democrat, just as he used to be an Air Defence Warden. VI:166 There were tens of thousands of West German 17-year-olds who would have identi®ed with that statement at the end of the 1960s. Scherbaum's revolutionary plan is to burn his pet dachshund Max in front of the CafeÂ Kempinski on West Berlin's KurfuÈrstendamm in protest against the West Berliners' complacency over the war in Vietnam. He is deterred from doing so not by Starusch's arguments, but because he does not want to grow up to be like his teacher who is still obsessed with deeds he committed himself as a teenager. In the end, however, Scherbaum reaches conclusions of his own accord which Starusch has spent his life agonising over. Tragedy is averted, history does not repeat itself. In this respect, Local Anaesthetic is the most optimistic of all Grass's novels. If that were all there was to it, however, it



108

would be little more than an illustration of a thesis, morally uplifting maybe but intellectually and aesthetically dull. Local Anaesthetic is not a simple roman aÁ these, however. Starusch is too uneasy in himself to be able to advocate Enlightenment values unambiguously, which is the role played by his cool cerebral dentist who treats him for his chronically misaligned jaw and in whose chair he narrates the ®rst and third sections of the novel. Starusch agrees only in principle with everything the dentist says regarding progress, the prevention of calamity through measures of social or medical prophylaxis, and universal welfare. While he accepts that scienti®c advances in health care provide a model for social advance, he believes this with his head but not with all his heart. This is his unacknowledged problem. For the dentist, progress will only be possible ìf politics emulates medicine and limits itself the world over to welfare . . .' (196). It is, in spite of the anticipation of John Lennon, a very middle-aged utopia: Imagine: a dentist and a schoolmaster rule the world. The era of prophylaxis dawns. All ills will be worked against in advance. As everybody is teaching, everybody will be learning too. As all are subject to tooth decay, all will ®nd themselves united in the struggle against tooth decay. Welfare and prevention will pacify the peoples of the world. No more religions and no more ideologies, instead hygiene and Enlightenment provide answers to the ultimate questions. No more failure and no more bad breath. Imagine. . . . 206 The dentist calls his patient's dental plaque `calci®ed hatred' (32) and believes that he can assess a person by peering into his mouth. Starusch's jaw is indicative of a repressed violent nature and the fact that he will always have `new pain', as he repeats in the novel's ®nal sentence, means that he will never overcome it fully and will consequently always need dental treatment, necessitating in turn endless repeat visits to the dentist's chair. What is true of his teeth, mouth and gums is true of his character. After ®nding Scherbaum's young teeth are in need of almost as much treatment as his teacher's, the dentist has more success both with treating them and educating the younger man's character. His advice is crucial to dissuading Scherbaum from acting. Most of the action is set in February and March of 1967, thus a few months before the death of Benno Ohnesorg (2 June 1967) and two months after `King Silver Tongue', as Kiesinger is nicknamed, came to the Chancellorship. Lewand, who represents the students' more dogmatic wing, is in the thick of the protest on 2 June. In contrast, Scherbaum has by then already outgrown this type of self-indulgent rebelliousness. He distances himself from the leftist student scene and does not want anyone from it to be associated with his planned action, which fascinates Lewand as much as it does Starusch and his colleague Irmgard Seifert, with whom he enjoys an inconclusive relationship. All four main characters are de®ned according to their view of the dog-burning plan. For Lewand, it is a straightforward revolutionary step. For Seifert it represents a possibility of making amends for her past shame of teenage





enthusiasm for Nazi Germany. For Starusch himself, who, because he encompasses all points of view and is the most rounded of all the ®gures, the immolation and all the associated issues are a metaphor for all his professional, political and personal problems. Part of him wants it to happen, part of him wants to prevent it. For this reason it assumes even greater importance for him than it does for Scherbaum. The distance between teacher and pupil is signalled by their choice of historical role models. Starusch suggests that Scherbaum can learn from the 17-year-old Danzig revolutionary Friedrich Bartholdy, whose story Grass tells at greater length in The Flounder. In 1797, Bartholdy, inspired by the French Revolution, organised a conspiracy of fellow pupils and Polish dockers to declare a free republic. He was found out and escaped the death sentence after a royal pardon but was sent to jail for 20 years (in The Flounder Grass has him languish for twice that long). In typical Grassian fashion, Starusch interprets the story as a warning against revolutionary designs. At their next meeting, Scherbaum reverses the roles of pupil and teacher. Starusch now has to ask him questions about a newspaper cutting stuck to his wall. It È bener, who was deals with the fate of another rebellious teenager, one Helmuth Hu È bener executed by the Nazis for distributing lea¯ets. According to Scherbaum, Hu È rtebeker: was more mature in his thinking than either Bartholdy or Sto He had already started by the age of sixteen. He didn't bother with demolishing churches and that kind of thing. No youthful anarchism. He wasn't a beginner like Bartholdy. He could do shorthand and morse code. 220 Starusch regrets his ignorance and thinks he should tell Hu È bener's story rather than his own when presenting the topic of anti-Nazi resistance to his class. From this point Scherbaum no longer needs his teacher and moves on to edit the schoolmagazine, a more mature form of social intervention. His ®rst project is an article È bener's behaviour in the year of his execution with Kiesinger's under comparing Hu Goebbels. Starusch makes no comparable progress. Age and biography thus determine the attitudes and behaviour of all the characters in Local Anaesthetic. The class of middle-aged intellectuals who sympathised with the students, and subsequently with the terrorists, do so, if Seifert is any guide, out of guilt for past actions and beliefs, whether they have a national or a personal basis: Irmgard Seifert and I were born in the same year. At the end of the war we were seventeen but already grown up. Whatever it is that prevents us from coming closer to one another, except when we are talking about teaching, we are united in our judgement of the most recent German history and its effects down to our own time. Only once we get to the Grand Coalition and Kiesinger's Chancellorship do we adopt different tones of voice: I tend to the cynical and am more hardened; she is inclined to protest. 59



110


This new unburdened generation ± believe me, Eberhard ± will ®nally put an end to this horri®c episode. These lads and lasses want to start afresh and not look back, like us, and live in the past. 140 Seifert's guilt syndrome has recently grown acute as, at home in her mother's attic, she has discovered letters and notebooks she wrote in 1944±45. They show her unswerving dedication to National Socialism, her `blind faith in FuÈhrer, Volk and Vaterland' (149) during her spell as a deputy leader of a rural camp where she was entrusted to help train 14-year-old boys in the defence of the Reich. Furthermore, without prompting or external pressure of any sort, she denounced a farmer who had refused to allow his land to be used for an anti-tank ditch. She now believes she has no right to a critical opinion of Kiesinger and feels she has been living a lie all her adult life. Starusch is quick to absolve her of guilt, pointing out that her unit of adolescent boys never saw action and that the farmer died peacefully in his bed ten years later. Strangely, he is far less decisive when it comes to his own past. Seifert's attitude to the present may be less productive than his, but her openness about the past contrasts with his prevarication. Like the unre¯ecting Maoist Lewand in relation to Scherbaum, Seifert represents a less complicated version of her ®anceÂ. She does not have the same qualms and bouts of self-doubt: everything is quite clear for her. Both women have `speaking names' which either suggest the purity or certainty of their beliefs: Seifert (from Seife meaning soap) and Vero (veritas). Starusch is named after a bird (like Amsel in Dog Years) and thus hops from one point of view to another. Lewand, who, Starusch would have us believe, succeeds in seducing her teacher on his treasured Berber rug, is another of Grass's femmes fatales, an ideological version of Oskar's Luzie Rewand, with whom she almost shares a name, not to mention Tulla Pokriefke. She eggs on Scherbaum from the sidelines, tells Starusch to lay off him, the purpose of her seductive mission, but eventually reveals the shallowness of her commitment by bowing out of the con¯ict into an early marriage. Once more there are shades of misogynist stereotyping, an issue he is forced to confront in The Flounder. Irmgard Seifert has her precursors in Grass's ®ction (Meyn, Klepp, Matern), but with her the type reaches maturity in the democratic present. Dedicating the 1949 chapter of My Century to this (female) type is programmatic of his view of postwar Germans: Left and Right are interchangeable; fanatical Nazis mutate into militant communists. The need for a cause or belief is paramount. The male narrator for 1966±68 in My Century regrets his former convictions born of intellectual and emotional confusion: he had switched from Heidegger to student radicalism. The switch shows too the consistency in Grass's ®eld of contemporary historical reference. Scherbaum is initially attracted to his plan because of the sacri®ce it would involve. All ideas of sacri®ce and redemption are, along with violent actions,



Seifert is convinced that they have failed to remain true to themselves and their youthful idealism, failed to make a fresh start because they ware tarred by the brush of the past. The students will make up for them:


`hateful, profoundly hateful' (32) to Starusch. The word `sacri®ce' is loaded with associations from Nazi Germany and Seifert frets over her past use of the word in her letter. `Redemption' has similar connotations. Both Seifert and Scherbaum insist that their actions or solutions be àbsolutely clean' (159) and Lewand accuses Starusch of ùnclean intrigues' (159) in trying to prevent the dog burning. This need for purity is a prerequisite of ideological thinking and is related to the ®xation on `the redemptive quality of his deed' (212). The dentist comments that `wherever you look, there's a hair in the soup' (160), another recurrent metaphor in Grass's work. The essence of Grass's own social-democratic position is that any notion of purity is a dangerous illusion: compromise and pragmatism are the alternatives the dentist and, at times, Starusch too put forward. In conversation with Lewand, Starusch attempts to explain himself: She sat down. Despite my great patience still unsure of myself, I spread out my arguments once more, which, on the one hand ± I had no choice ± spoke against Scherbaum's intention, while, on the other, conditionally acknowledging that he was partially right. And so the two sides of our conversation piled up: if she said ùnconditionally', I parried tentatively with `conditionally': she saw clearly, I listed several different, contradictory points of view. 226 The side of Starusch represented by the dentist is opposed (like Grass) to all absolute beliefs, systems, ideologies, and quick all-embracing solutions. Grass had a speci®c source for his central motif ± Scherbaum's plan to burn his dog in front of the high-class cafe frequented by wealthy middle-aged ladies. This is a lea¯et, `When are the Berlin department stores going to burn?', written in 1967 by Dieter Kunzelmann and distributed in West Berlin by Fritz Teufel and Rainer Langhans, all three members of the radical anarchist group, Kommune 1. After a department store had burnt to the ground in Brussels, killing nearly 300 people, the trio satirically advocated arson attacks on similar targets in West Berlin because they wanted to bring the horror of Vietnam home to the complacent West Berliners. This is precisely Scherbaum's objective too. The Kommune 1 trio were charged with incitement to arson and the ensuing court case attracted intensive and generally hostile media attention. Their arguments in favour of violent acts against property were broadly the same as those later used by Baader and Ensslin when they deposited their two home-made bombs in the Frankfurt department store in April 1968. Grass refers to both the Kommune 1 lea¯et and the Baader/Ensslin incident in his Ossietzky speech of December 1968: `Without the pathos-laden calls of the SDS, without the Kommune ± Lea¯et ± ``Burn, ware-house, burn!'' ± we would not have witnessed the department-store ®res in Frankfurt' (XIV:380). Yet it is Starusch (not Scherbaum) who dreams of bulldozing down whole shopping-centres to the same chorus of `Burn, ware-house, burn', expressing an af®nity with the violent extremists which accounts for his obsession with Scherbaum's plan. It would appear that when Starusch advocates Grass's own social-democratic principles of gradualist reformism he does so against the urgings of his repressed violent nature.



112

As a 17-year-old in The Tin Drum, Starusch was a violent anarchist whose rebellion was aimed, rather like Oskar's, against `parents and all other grown-ups'. He did not care what `they stood for or what they stood against' (III:491) and he rebelled for È rtebeker has its nihilist rather than political reasons. The legend of the historical Sto own contradictions and con¯icting versions: he was either a principled rebel or an opportunistic pirate, or, perhaps, a rather Grassian mixture of the two. Starusch is È rtebeker he was in 1944. But this cannot explain why not quite sure what sort of Sto he is even more evasive on the subject of his wartime past than Pilenz and, in contrast to Seifert, will not reveal what is troubling his conscience. What he does repeat is that he was sentenced to serve in what amounted to a Penal Battalion after the Dusters' Trial, which Oskar describes so memorably, and that he was detailed to clear mine®elds in the line of enemy ®re. On the basis of this punishment he can claim association with the resistance. Yet he may be repressing a memory of far worse culpability than that which troubled the narrator of Cat and Mouse. At one point when he thinks Scherbaum is still likely to repeat his resort to violence, he challenges him to get on with it: Do it then. If nobody does it, then everything will just carry on. I bet I would have done. I did a load of quite different things. Like when the submarine. There was a war on. There's always a war on. There are enough reasons to be against it. There were enough reasons then. Even though I am not sure whether we or our apprentices from Schichau, who had set up on their own under MoorkaÈhne and were allowed into the port area, because the submarine was supposed to go into dry dock, but the crew were still on board when the ®re started to spread on the deck and then got inside, that's why the ensigns and the cadets tried to escape through the portholes, and people said that because they were screaming so much they tried to shoot at them from motor launches. They couldn't pin anything on us (or MoorkaÈhne either). 138 His faulty grammar, his refusal to come out with a main clause after the long subordinate clause beginning èven though' (zwar in German) gives away his reluctance to confront the truth. As he never mentions this incident again, merely speaking in general terms of his youthful rebelliousness, the degree of his involvement in the fatal arson attack is never established. On another occasion he refers to his violent streak, which as an adult he has by and large learnt to keep under control, and uses the war as an excuse: Ì was only aggressive as a 17-year-old. But there was a war on and youngsters ran completely wild everywhere' (79). While Grass leaves this great gap in the past life of the novel's hero, he gives his readers enough clues to suggest that Starusch is harbouring a very guilty secret indeed, which would account for his obsession, his prevarication and his failure to free È rtebeker ignored overtures from communist himself from pain. In The Tin Drum Sto È rtebeker, the shipyard workers who want his gang to join the ®ght against the Nazis. Sto grammar school boy, cannot stop a splinter group of apprentices peeling off from his main group, however, and it is they who are then blamed for the arson attack on the





submarine, which, according to Oskar, claimed more than a hundred lives. It is this dreadful incident which Starusch then recalls in the follow-up novel, Local Anaesthetic. Instead of revealing his Sto È rtebeker past fully, let alone problematising his own actions like Pilenz, Starusch focuses, quite bizarrely, on his experiences ten years later at the age of 27, in particular his broken-off engagement to a woman he introduces in the ®rst of the novel's three sections as Sieglinde Krings. She is supposed to be the daughter of a cement factory owner, where Starusch, a young and apparently successful graduate in engineering, embarked on his ®rst career. This ultimately unhappy engagement takes up as much of the narrative as Scherbaum's plan, which is not even introduced until the second of the novel's three sections. In the briefer third section, after Scherbaum has thought better of his plan, Starusch returns to the dentist's surgery, where, with the help of some probing by the dentist, a number of different versions of his past are unfurled. None of these shows Starusch in a more ¯attering light; on the contrary. But what remains something of a mystery is why Starusch should try to cover his traces at all on this matter as he appears just to be bragging about things which would hardly interest the dentist in the ®rst place. There is little in the corrected version either of his engagement or his early professional life to incriminate him in the way Pilenz incriminates himself. Starusch appears simply to have told a series of boastful ®bs and to have re-invented the entire episode for the sake of doing so. Most critics have said that the versions are simply confused because Starusch enjoys making things up and left it at that. It is, however, possible to piece together the truth and rationalise Starusch's evasiveness. Starusch has been an orphan since the age of 17. His mother perished on a refugee ship in January 1945 and his father, whose death he does not mention, did not survive the end of the war. He had to make his own way after release from an American POWcamp, where `the re-education of a misspent youth began' (99). He ®rst distributed ration cards to ®nance his studies and apparently provided sexual favours to a number of abandoned women in a tenement block. This bizarre story has as much plausibility as his sexual bragging on other occasions, where he claims to sleep with both Sieglinde's friends once she leaves him. Yet his success with the opposite sex could easily be real since it accords with the dentist's ®rst revision of the reasons that the engagement failed: Starusch, the handsome young owner of a soft-topped Mercedes sports car, was chronically unfaithful. In the ®rst section Starusch reveals that having ®rst started to study German and art history he changed to engineering and did not re-train to become a teacher until Sieglinde had jilted him in favour of one Schlottau, an ex-soldier who had served under her father, General Krings. Schlottau in turn wanted his revenge on Krings for a demotion he suffered during the war. Starusch's decision, which he makes as he approaches his thirtieth birthday, to change degree course with a view to teaching represents a complete, programmatic break from his ®rst career: Ìf I am going to retrain, then totally. There's no point in her chucking out her money for nothing' (17). Starusch thus belongs to a long line of Grass characters who switch suddenly from one set of options or beliefs to another which is apparently contrary. A total change of this sort is symptomatic of a personality which veers from one extreme to another and which ®nds practical compromises in everyday life excessively dif®cult. It was Sieglinde, however, who ®nanced Starusch through his



114

second degree course, which led, a decade later, to his ®rst job in a West Berlin grammar school. He then spends what remained of her gift on dental treatment. She thus pays ®rst for a mental, intellectual realignment and then for the correction of a physical defect, itself indicative of his unbalanced character. As an engineer in the Krings factory, Starusch tells us how he devoted himself to improving the methods of dust removal from the cement-making process, a contribution to more ef®cient working and to environmental protection. There is otherwise little of the socially concerned individual about him, but he is proud of his success, crowned by an invitation to speak at a prestigious conference. When Sieglinde leaves him, Starusch runs away, pretending to his dentist that he murdered her and was on the run from the police. Many of Grass's characters choose ¯ight from crisis once a dif®cult set of circumstances has proved impossible to master. Oskar ¯ees to Paris once the police suspect him in the Ring®nger Case. Mahlke takes refuge under water once he sees no way out of his dilemma. Fonty tries to escape to Scotland at the beginning of Too Far A®eld and is brought back to face up to things by his secret-police shadow. Starusch's early career seems to have mirrored the economic success of the ¯edgling FRG and he presents his subsequent scepticism as indicative of intellectual disenchantment with the material success of Adenauer's republic. He claims to have become à successful young man amongst successful young postwar men' (27), having quickly gained recognition for his innovative professional work. His account of his engagement is punctuated with historical references to the economic and political development of the FRG: `the names Ollenhauer, Adenauer and the word re-armament' (25); the chorus of protesters who gather to shout abuse at Krings when he returns from Soviet captivity chant `count me out!'. Even though he has a glittering career ahead of him, assured of success after his engagement to the absent boss's daughter, neither he nor Sieglinde are contented. In fact quite the opposite. They are `pigeon-holed as the sceptical generation and more and more suspicious of improved performance' (29). Their opposition to the rampant materialism all around them foreshadows the teenage protests of the later 1960s. Starusch recalls: (. . .Politically we were on the same wavelength. She shared my opinion that humanity was being terrorised by overproduction and forced consumption.) What my pupil Vero Lewand proclaims today as class spokesperson of 12a, my ®anceÂe demanded more than ten years ago [. . .]: `We need ten thousand bulldozers to destroy all this shoddy materialism and unnecessary wealth.' 113 At this point the dentist interrupts with a diagnosis of Starusch's mental character, based on both tell-tale dental evidence and the stories his patient has been telling him. He places him in a dangerous German tradition of malcontents: Now listen to me, my dear fellow. While I was giving you those four injections, I listened to all that without saying anything. After all I left it up to you to occupy





yourself with whatever ®ctions you chose during the treatment. But now you have overstepped the mark. Calls to violence, even if they are put into the mouth of your former ®anceÂe or an immature pupil, ®nd in me an irreconcilable opponent. I will not have the fruits of minor progress, often enough ridiculously minor progress, and that includes my practice, which has been built up on the principles of prophylactic dentistry, destroyed just because your ®anceÂe has run off or because you're an underachiever, a failure, who now, with the help of muddled ®ctions, wants to make out the world has failed in general so that he can annihilate it properly. I know you. One plaque sample was enough. I suspected it as soon as I saw the X-ray. Here is somebody who, yet again, wants the reevaluation of all values. Here is somebody who, yet again, wants to disregard humanity in the name of a higher cause. Yet again, here is somebody who wants to measure the world with his absolute yardstick. He may make out he is modern. È bermensch, he adroitly avoids He does not intend to dust down the redundant U demanding new, socialist man, but his dissatisfaction, his yawn when presented with small but useful improvements, his desire to hack through knots with swift and indiscriminate blows, his yen for the most dramatic ending possible, his oldfashioned hostility to civilisation, which, progressively dressed up, wants to take us back to the silent-®lm era, his inability to work quietly and conscientiously for the good of humanity, his educative zeal which is prepared to replace a belief in nothing for a utopia and then exchange that little castle in the air for a gaping nothing again, his restlessness, his moody little brain, his delight when things go wrong, and his repeated calls to violence, all this gives him away. Bulldozers! Bulldozers! Not a word more. Off into the waiting room. I am not talking to you again until the anaesthetic is working properly. . . . 113±14 Here is no ordinary disciple of the Enlightenment. Seen in this light, Starusch, while sharing some biographical markers with both Oskar and Pilenz, becomes a more sophisticated version of the villain of Dog Years, Walter Matern. Unlike Matern he is aware of his true character, tries to control it, and is concerned to adapt to the modern democratic world. Yet, if the dentist's diagnosis makes sense, he emerges as a deeply disturbed individual. The dentist offers a number of signi®cant corrections to the account of Starusch's life given in the ®rst section, though we are still left with a fragmentary overall picture. Starusch does not attempt to contradict the results of the dentist's investigations and instead congratulates him by saying he should be working for the Criminal Police. There are two major disjunctions: between the young È rtebeker and the mature Starusch, who refers to his past self as Sto Sto È rtebeker so frequently; and between the mainly ¯attering portrait he paints of himself in the ®rst section, where he concentrates on episodes which occurred ten years after the È rtebeker episodes, and the other accounts prompted by the dentist at the end of Sto the novel. The ®ctional Krings has become confused with the historical Field È rner, the subject of an un®nished monograph which lies on Starusch's Marshal Scho desk. It now seems highly likely that everything he said about Sieglinde was pure



116

fantasy. The Krings cement factory never existed. Records at an Employment Of®ce show Starusch to have been a student trainee rather than a quali®ed engineer in the university holidays 1954±55 at a different factory altogether. Starusch's problem is portrayed through a series of intermediaries. Krings too is obsessed with past failure ± his military defeats on the Eastern Front ± and he re-plays his lost battles with his daughter, who develops into an expert on World War Two military strategy. Schlottau too lives in the past, in his case the demotion he suffered at Krings' hands from sergeant to private. Like Schlottau, neither Krings nor Starusch are integrated into their social environment because of their resentment about their own failure. Starusch recognises that this `Kringsian Complex' has been the motor for the most calamitous historical developments: One should compare other cases [. . .] and ask the question: what would the world have been spared if the Royal and Imperial Examination Commission of the Viennese Art Academy had not failed the candidate Hitler, who wanted to be an artist, but. . . For our people cannot cope with it: rejected under-achievers failures. They're crouching everywhere and lying in wait for their revenge. 76 Starusch is thus linked to Krings who in turn is linked to Hitler. This means that within the metaphorical framework of the novel, the recent course of German history can be explained with reference to its hero. He becomes a representative German ®gure, torn between past and present: if The Plebeians is a `German Tragedy', then Local Anaesthetic is a `German Novel', an emotional and intellectual survey of the `state of the nation'. The problems with Starusch is that he is an unhappy bachelor. In fact he does not seem to want grow up completely and derives a semi-masochistic pleasure by revelling compulsively in his dif®cult past. While he is 23 years older than both Scherbaum and his former ®ctional self and ten years older than Oskar at the end of The Tin Drum, he is trapped, like Oskar, in some sort of ageless limbo. Oskar believed that 30, let alone 40, was the age of marriage, integration into society and the acceptance of responsibility: Àt thirty you should start to make a living!'; Àt thirty you should marry!'; Àt thirty you should settle down!' (III:774) he announces on his fateful birthday. The Tin Drum ends when he is released back into the world on the very day he crosses the threshold of adulthood. He is frightened because his previous attempts to follow conventions, to marry and lead an ordinary life, had all ended in failure. Starusch parted company from Oskar at the end of the war and took a different route through the postwar rubble. Yet their careers throw up one remarkable point of comparison: both are eaten up by their failure to marry and both fantasise about killing women. Starusch imagines a number of gruesome ways of murdering Sieglinde just as Oskar pretends to have murdered Dorothea. Neither he nor Oskar carry out the murders and both give themselves up to the police after a period of ¯ight. Starusch may be employed and hold a position of responsibility, both things that adults should do in Oskar's view, but in other respects he is no further advanced than Oskar. On the positive side, by discussing and rationalising his emotions,




118


Starusch strives to answer many of the unresolved dilemmas of Grass's previous characters. The 40-year-old Starusch thus continues the story of the 17-year-old È rtebeker, which was also in part the story of Oskar, Pilenz and Mahlke, Amsel, Sto È nter Grass. Liebenau and Matern. It was in part also the story of Gu

Local Anaesthetic appeared in the middle of the 1969 election campaign, one of the subjects of From the Diary of a Snail. The SPD's success marked Grass's own transition from oppositional intellectual to friend of the Chancellor, even, on occasions, representative of the state. He gave little sign of feeling at ease in this new role. It is revealing that the only time he really upset anybody in this period, during the so-called `Kipphardt-Affair' in April 1971, he had changed sides. The dramatist and director Heiner Kipphardt lost his position at the Munich Kammerspiele as a result of another combative Grass article in the SuÈ ddeutsche in which he denounced the programme notes for a play by Wolf Biermann, Dra ± Dra, on the subject of slaying dragons. The offending material concerned a `gallery' of two dozen powerful representatives from the world of politics and business whose photos were to be printed as examples of modern-day dragons worthy of slaughter. Hans Jochen Vogel, the SPD-Mayor of Munich, was to have been included. In the end, the photos were not printed, but two pages in the programme were left blank with the explanation that this had ùnfortunately' been done on legal grounds. After Grass's article, Vogel ensured Kipphardt's contract was not extended.78 Grass himself won few friends over his actions: Martin Walser criticised him and the young Peter Stein, emerging as the country's leading theatre director, led a protest on the stage of the Berlin SchaubuÈ hne am Halleschen Ufer when Grass and Anna went to see Peer Gynt. Grass was obliged to stand up from his seat to defend himself before the play could commence. Kipphardt remarked later that `People are irritated because to the left of Grass you only have Beelzebub, the Russians, and the [terrorist] bombers.'79 Looking back 27 years later, Grass was convinced he had behaved correctly and claimed that several of Stein's actors had eventually apologised.80 Still, he had hardly adopted a public role in order to get fellow artists sacked. He admitted to Helen Wolff at the end of the summer that àll the fuss about the dispute with Kipphardt has quite taken it out of me'.81 This change in status explains in part why From the Diary of a Snail is the most anodyne of his major works. In terms of theme and content ± the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich, the overcoming of the Nazis' legacy in the present ± The Diary ®nally winds up the phase which began with The Tin Drum. But it rationalises so many of the uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable forces which had animated Oskar to such dazzling effect. The narrative strategy, not as compelling as Oskar's, points forward to the next major phase in Grass's writing which encompasses The Flounder and The Rat, both of which are narrated by a semi-authorial narrative voice and intertwine real and ®ctional events. In his ®rst experiment with his concept of the Vergegenkunft (`the pastpresfuture'), there are three simultaneous `levels': the



Sceptics and melancholics: From the Diary of a Snail

reports on the election; Hermann Ott's historical narrative of survival in Nazioccupied Poland; and the discussion of melancholy prompted by an invitation to È rer's quincentenary, which underlies the ®rst two. The give a lecture on Albrecht Du ®rst two sequences are `simultaneous events' (VII:86) insofar as what occurred in the past had a considerable bearing on the outcome of the election. History is alive, the past not buried. The account of the election may not be riveting reading matter but it is a record of the SPD's greatest victory, the most signi®cant turning point between 1949 and 1989, the only election in the history of the old FRG which produced a change in government. The aesthetic cogency of the two bigger novels varies according to how successfully he makes the relationship between the multiple strands of the stories dynamic rather than sequential. In The Flounder all time sequences coalesce with each other: none can be understood on its own, which makes the novel as a whole much more than the sum of its parts. In The Rat, in contrast, he drops one strand and picks up another simply to advance the progress of the story and the result is much less challenging. This is essentially true also of The Diary, but because its value is principally documentary, it does not matter that the strands can be read without reference to the other. The book is a statement of Grass's sceptical credo: I put scepticism against belief. I contest that anything can last for ever. My disgust at the absolute and other thumbscrews. Why I am against the claims of the `single truth' and in favour of multiplicity. (VII:149) His opposition to absolutes is a basic expression of his humanity. It is the classic liberal objection to Soviet totalitarianism which puts the interests of the collective before the rights of the individual, another priority he explains to his children, to whom the book is ostensibly addressed: You might one day, because in Germany theory is always given priority over reality, want to ®nd the solution in that total system which purports to be in harmony with itself and which promises painless transitions. (`The paci®ed existence'.) Belief could open your eyes to a ®nal goal and make you blind to people who have different world views. (`The few thousand unteachables'.) You could sanction wrong as a preliminary to the great all-encompassing system of justice. (`Subjectivism only holds us up.') It could be that the goal is everything to you and that the wishes of a few people in Bohemia mean nothing. (`Petty-bourgeois'.) I am right to fear that you may set yourselves the task, after you have failed to achieve supposedly lesser objectives, of using force to bring about at all costs the liberation of mankind through communism (`the truthful version'). I say: it could be. . . I say: I would then stand in your way. 403





While he learnt this lesson having been a child in Hitler's Germany, its direction here is anti-Communist. Grass felt he owed his four children, if no-one else, an explanation for his long absences from home on the campaign trail. They want to know why their father is away from Monday to Friday working for the ES-PE-DE: his youngest son, confusing Wahlkampf (èlection battle') with Walkampf (à battle with whales') was convinced that his father, some latter-day Captain Ahab, was hunting whales on the high seas. Having cleared up that misunderstanding, the frequently absent father wants his children to know how during his own childhood it was possible for the Nazis to achieve power. To make things easier for them he draws constant parallels between the 1930s and the 1960s. The advantage of simple stories is self-evident: Ì could only keep the children listening if I told the story of an individual or the ¯ight of a family ± which ended either in death or in the attainment of their goal, Palestine. . .' (XV:504). The problem with the book for older readers is that he is telling them what to think. He could well have felt the need of explaining himself to his reading public, however. After all, some felt he had let himself down by neglecting his proper vocation: creative writing. His personal and public evolution had taken most who knew him by surprise. Immediately after ®nishing The Diary he began to dedicate himself once more to art. Grass's didactic task is compounded by the fact that he is making a plea for moderation and the middle way. His critique of Enzensberger highlights his own unexciting task when compared to that of an international revolutionary: Just look at that funny Enzensberger: naughtily hops off to Cuba and is well away from everything, while you're stuck trying to build up enthusiasm for a shake-up of pensions for war victims and for the recognition of facts which have been gathering moss for decades. VII:80 According to Grass, those who adopt utopian ideals are interested only in quick, total solutions to the naturally miserable state of affairs on earth, a state which induces feelings of melancholic resignation in others. A ùtopian' striving, however, is usually a result of melancholy: revolution and resignation are `two sides of the same coin' (301). Utopia, à credulous girl: always travelling' (124 ± just like Enzensberger), justi®es violence in the name of the future. The former Nazi, fanatical paci®st, and right-wing extremist, Manfred Augst, who commits suicide in public at the Church Conference as a gesture of protest, is a `witness of the Absolute', àddicted to downfall and redemption' (170). He is no different from members of the left-wing extra-parliamentary opposition (the APO) in his fatal imbalance of ùtopian' and `melancholic' elements. His case provides an antithetical counterweight to Ott's initial success in curing his protector's melancholic daughter Lisbeth of her catatonic lethargy and the success of the SPD in winning the elections. His `ritualised protest' makes him, however, in Grass's scheme of things, an ally of the upright Scherbaum. Augst's conception of history is ®rmly under the sign of Saturn:



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His suicide is a surrender to melancholy, whereas other political èxtremists' overcome their natural bent towards this same feeling by espousing a ùtopian' political credo, which promises immediate relief. Augst lists a mixture of personal and social factors: The parties, the powers that be, money, the system, the geographical situation, the Liberals. A stomach ulcer at an early age and the ®rst-year exams. Then the lost war, the nepotistic cliques: the Freemasons, the Jews, the civil servants. Later on women (several, but one in particular). Nowadays the general material wellbeing, the ruling injustice, the shortage of hospitals schools accommodation laws, the lack of higher values, the lack of a deeper meaning. 176±7 His self-immolation is a ful®lment of Scherbaum's youthful ambition to burn his dog and is conditioned by his `preparedness for sacri®ce' (224) and love of `community'. Grass reveals that he and the members of the `Gruppe Grass' (not a term he uses himself) were not wholly unrelated to the Augsts of this world. `The fortysomethings' (54) are all male opinion formers of one sort or another, academics, È nter journalists, or writers. Arnulf Baring, himself a member, names them as Gu Gaus, who later held political of®ce as the FRG's `permanent representative' in East Berlin, the historian Eberhard JaÈckel, Kurt Sontheimer, who had written a book on Thomas Mann's defence of democratic values, Heinz-Josef Varain, and Siegfried Lenz, the doughty liberal novelist from East Prussia and life-long friend of Helmut Schmidt. A number of SPD politicians, especially Horst Ehmke, a fellow Danziger, È nhoff and Leo Bauer were and Erhard Eppler, are closely involved. Marion GraÈ®n Do allies. According to Grass: They measure each other up with the interest and pathos of professional undertakers taking measurements for a cof®n, soon bored by so much reason. Then they survey the younger generation, which people talk about so much, and the older gentlemen above and around them. Then they get excited and succumb to sudden ®ts of enthusiasm, joining forces with the youngsters by speaking of Final Objectives. (`Disgusting this new fashion for Schiller collars!' ± `Nauseating this trend for blue eyes!') They remain level-headed and stay focused on the middle term. Hitler's former Jungvolk has left all `morning celebrations' behind. Just don't get tragic heroic emotional. Their feelings quickly fade away from lack of a de®nition. Be sentimental in the cinema if you have to be at all. Don't own up to weaknesses.



Everything sounds hollow and turns out to be empty: the senselessness, the eternal circularity of everything, the pointlessness of all effort [. . .] the fact that it makes no difference and that words are buyable, the decay and the building up, the unending and the endless. . . . 123


They have got away lightly as they can even leave the problems of ageing ± so it seems ± to the thirty-somethings: `That's behind us. We have always been old!' This much is true: old before our time we cannot claim to have started out innocently from scratch in the Year Zero. Even in our dreams no virgin territory came into view. As we mistrust ourselves ®rst of all ± even Ehmke does as soon as he has to pause for breath ± we see no reason not to mistrust others. Cardsharps who never tire of catching themselves cheating. We are incurably conscientious. It looks as if we want to make up for the reduced performance of the decimated war generation through over-production. (We are doing our community service instead of going to the military.) Everyone of us has missed out on something, for which we cannot make amends by catching up later, and which now gives us headaches. That's why we're ®dgets, ®nger-tappers, adulterers, undressing women with our eyes but always under control. If anyone allows himself an outburst of infantilism, JaÈckel Major, who as an historian seems especially mature, will sober him up with a silent stare. Never, never again, never may we allow ourselves ± should we have allowed ourselves ± to be infantile. These, children, are my friends, if forty-somethings are blind enough to see each other as friends still. 54±5 This sceptical generation is on the point of taking over the reins of power. As Helmut Kohl, who probably shares more of their assumptions than either he or Grass would admit, is a contemporary too, they can be said to have stayed in government until 1998 when the `Sixty-Eighters' belatedly usurped them. They are inured to ideology and extremism, marked indelibly by adolescent memories of Nazism, caught between Dutschke, born in 1940, and Kiesinger, born one year before Hermann Ott alias `Doctor Doubt', in 1904. In contrast to all Grass's previous main ®gures, Ott is a completely positive character. His story is an allegorical parable ± a retrospective projection of Grass's sceptical, social-democratic and decent principles on to the Hitler period. Ott retains his political awareness, moral integrity and pedagogic commitment in the face of his neighbours' indifference and Nazi brutality. He risks his own life for the sake of his humane values and in so doing he corrects the failings of characters from Grass's preceding four prose works. His physical appearance, for instance, is chronically unsymmetrical but he makes no attempt, unlike Mahlke, to cover up this fact by disguising his blemishes: Everything about him was crooked: his right shoulder was lower than his left; his right ear stood out, his right eye squinted and raised the right corner of his mouth [. . .] His multiple crowns prevented him from having a parting. 27 Symmetry has wholly negative connotations for Grass because it denotes a nature that cannot tolerate imperfection or irregularity, which is why all totalitarian belief



122

systems construct symmetrical shapes like the Nazi podium in The Tin Drum. Ott `was made up of contradictions and never appeared unambiguous' (28), a gentle giant, a man who never used his own strength even when a mob from the Hitlerjugend beats him up. As a schoolboy, then as a student of philosophy and biology in Berlin, where he reads the arch-sceptic and native Danziger, Arthur Schopenhauer, and then as a teacher of German and biology, he lives up to his nickname of Doubt by mistrusting on principle everything he hears and reads. He doubts all truth claims and challenges and questions all assumptions. He wants to see the other point of view and tests propositions by turning them upside down to see what they sounds like when stood on their head. Like much good teaching, his lessons fall on deaf ears. Circumstances dictate that his 17-year-old pupils have little chance to re¯ect on his wisdom in riper years: `later in life in North Africa, on the Arctic Front, and in U-Boats they did not have an opportunity to pass thirty and reach the age of scepticism themselves' (31). Ott is related to the Renaissance abbess Fat Gret from Grass's next novel, since he `laughed systems to pieces and made every absolute belief jump over his own wit' (52). He sides with Schopenhauer against Hegel, `who condemned humanity to suffer from history as if it were a judgement' (52). Like Grass, his critique of ideology is all-embracing and he refuses to differentiate between the politics of Left and Right, between `left-wing Hegelians and right-wing Hegelians', all of whom `wanted to see someone mount the Weltgeist', as Hegel described Napoleon, ànd gallop into the distance ± and a little later it was indeed galloping' (52). Ott does battle with melancholy by telling stories, acting out plays and discussing newspaper reports with his brutish protector, encouraging him to adopt more reasonable and humanitarian behaviour. After his own professional defeats and personal disappointments (he has been engaged more often than Starusch and Oskar put together), he should, if he followed the developmental pattern of Grass's other characters, become resentful and melancholic himself. In March 1940, after he has been beaten up for helping Jews and summoned by the police a second time, he does what all Grass characters do when confronted by a dif®cult problem: he runs away. In contrast to Oskar or Mahlke, he knows that his problems have political causes and that despair, suicide or surrender to fate are not worthwhile options. Typically, he does not have a de®nite objective in mind when he begins his ¯ight and just jumps on his bicycle and pedals off. When he comes across the bicycle-shop owner, Anton Stomma, who had mended his bicycles before the German Occupation, he asks to be allowed to stay in his cellar in return for payment. This proves as uncomfortable and unidyllic a refuge from the horrors of the outside world as can be imagined. With the Cassubian Stomma, whose allegiance has swung between the two larger and more powerful ethnic groups in the region, according to which was in the ascendant, and his grieving daughter Lisbeth, Ott becomes part of an allegorical family. Since Stomma wants to look after his own best interests, he has recently germanised his name and become a Volksdeutscher. He also realises that it could be useful to keep in with the other side and having Ott, whom he takes to be Jewish, in his cellar could turn out to be a good insurance policy. Should the Germans lose the war, he will be able to claim he fought persecution by harbouring a





victim of the Nazis. Stomma is also Ott's opposite because he cannot tolerate more than one system or truth at one time. He wants Either/Or, Black or White, Gentile or Jew, German or Pole. He cannot see the virtue of both sides of an argument or the attraction of greyish uncertainty. He treats his German Gentile guest as if he were a Jew because he has worked with Jews and defended them. Ott also shows a number of what Stomma thinks are Jewish characteristics. Max Frisch in the minor dramatic classic Andorra had showed up the same point by treating the theme of Jewish persecution with reference to Gentiles taken to be Jews. Stomma is also violent, corrupt, and bad-tempered. By ®rst giving him money, then manipulating his suspicions, Ott, however, gets the better of him and succeeds for a while in taming his uncultivated temperament. The case of Lisbeth is more ambiguous as she is cured of her endemic melancholy by Ott's positively medieval medical treatment, namely the application of à few redlipped snails' (251) to ever more intimate parts of her body. She is a modern version È rer's Melencolia and an allegoric representation of Germania, which make the of Du connections with the election campaign clearer. A very special snail, which Lisbeth has found on her son's grave, has a miraculous effect on her mental well-being and gives her `the power of speech again' (256). Ott experiments by placing it on various parts of her anatomy and her progress culminates in what he terms `the normalisation' (264) on 6 November 1944. The special snail helps her to reach sexual climax, clinically noted by Zweifel in his notebook, and henceforth she is an ordinary young woman, whose energies are directed no longer towards death and graveyards but towards the everyday concerns of other ordinary young women. Later, in an act of apparent hubris, Lisbeth-Germania kills the instrument of her cure, the now repulsive looking snail, by stamping on it. She forgets her past melancholy in order to devote herself to material possessions: she is now an allegory of the postwar mentality which fostered the Economic Miracle. Her relapse indicates the dif®culty of victory, the necessity of small steps in the place of instant solutions. Defeat and failure, followed by renewed effort, are essential elements in Grass's programme. Ott ultimately fails in his cure of Lisbeth and himself ends up in a mental clinic. Grass based the episodes in Stomma's cellar on some of the experiences of the literary reviewer, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, whom he met ®rst in 1958, saw regularly at meetings of the Gruppe 47, and who over time became a personal enemy (see È nigsberg eÂmigreÂ Grass had met on his ®rst visit pp. 192±4). Erwin Lichtenstein, a Ko to Israel in 1967, provides the source for all the other Jewish material relating to the ¯ight to Palestine.82 Grass later revealed that he had long cherished the ambition of ®nishing Heinrich Heine's narrative fragment on the persecution of the Jews in the ®fteenth century, but soon realised this to be à pig-headed idea' and found it much easier and more productive to concentrate on the past he knew. Yet he still believes The Diary to be indebted to Heine since èvery story which takes place in Germany today began centuries ago'. In the era of The Rabbi of Bacherach, the Jews had been blamed for every mishap and calamity, as Heine explains at the beginning of his story, which Grass quotes in the forward to an exhibition catalogue of treasures from the Danzig Synagogue, `How shall we tell the children?':



124


Grass adapts the time-honoured explanation of social or natural `misfortune' in his account to his children of how the Nazis were able to exploit peoples' fears and use the Jews as a universal scapegoat for economic, political and personal ills. In 1932, two years after the Danzig government had become dependent on the twelve votes of the NSDAP, the Nazis organised a march through the city ùnder the slogan: ``The Jews are our misfortune'''. Their success was assured: As everybody knows misfortune, fears and wants to avoid it, everybody was happy to have the misfortune ®nally identi®ed and named, ®nally to know the origin of such things as in¯ation, unemployment, housing shortages and their own stomach ulcers. VII:18±19 This mentality has not been overcome by 1969, even though anti-Semitism no longer played a role in the FRG. Grass appends a report of an election visit to the town of Kleve, where his party are greeted with chants of `Who has betrayed us? Social Democrats!' explaining that the `search for traitors is as old as the wish to have misfortune explained'. (19) Grass is also obliged to take on resurgent Neo-Nazism since, with the rise of student militancy, had come a revival in the electoral fortunes of the extreme Right in the shape of the NPD which had scored its best results in the BadenÈ rttemberg state elections. These took place in April 1968 at the same time as Wu the controversial Emergency Laws passed through the Bundestag in the wake of the Easter riots following the attempt on Dutschke's life. For the liberal Left, this electoral success, repeated by extreme right-wing parties in the late 1980s and after reuni®cation in the ex-GDR, was frightening: for the radicals it was con®rmation that the democratic basis of the Federal Republic was crypto-fascist. It seemed as if the electoral landscape had become polarised by the Grand Coalition. Grass was especially outraged by the way the CDU voted with the NPD in the election for the German Presidency in March 1969. They were defeated and Heinemann's victory foreshadowed the parliamentary victory in September. It was the party's ®rst national success in 40 years. For that reason, Grass begins The Diary with an account of Heinemann's triumph. It is an intensely dramatic moment which the FRG had taken 20 years to prepare itself for: If I calculate exactly and write up each postponement ± not just the technical breakdown on the ®rst count ± in my `wastebook', then I ®nd that this day has



The great wave of anti-Semitic persecution began with the Crusades and reached a brutal crescendo in the middle of the fourteenth century at the end of the Black Death, which, like every other public misfortune, was supposed to have been caused by the Jews, who, it was said, had incurred the wrath of God through their blasphemy and with the help of lepers had poisoned the water supply. XV:506

126


The central irony of the text is that Grass is arguing by way of allegorical parable, which implies certainty and ®xity of thought, for openness, selfquestioning and pluralism: his allegory is even supposed to represent these concepts. The style is anti-melancholic insofar as boredom (ennui) and inactivity are symptoms of melancholy (spleen) and inspire `totalising' forms. The style is imbued with scepticism, apparently never reaching conclusions, dependent on subjunctives, ellipses, which he believes is a virtue of the Social Democrats. Grass describes Eppler as à Christian and Social Democrat who lives off the subjunctive' (150). Even Wehner, for whom Grass had shown previously little sympathy, demonstrates a principle of political debate which Grass's narrative strives to emulate: Suddenly, after quietly mentioning technical constraints, he fearfully spews out the word `sober', saws the sentence, as if it were a plank of wood, into short pieces of the same size, climbs a ladder to storm into the sky, which he (unaffected by vertigo) extends further and further and now climbs down ± in mid-sentence ± hesitantly, as if he were enjoying his boldness, piles up, no sooner has he arrived at the bottom amongst the short pieces of wood, a pyramid of subjunctives, allows it to collapse slowly (for me to write it down) and now laughs. 75 Like Oskar on his ten-meter diving board, Wehner refuses to jump into the arms of an ideology. Grass himself, however, seems to come perilously close to adopting ideological certainty, even though he proclaims himself to be certain of nothing except his own doubt. His text describes, more often than embodies, the literary and political principles which the politician Grass advocates. The Flounder, a product of ®ve years' literary work away from the everyday hurly-burly of political campaigning, seeks to set this right.



been in preparation for twenty years, even if he, Gustav, had no idea why he was being cooked for so long and how tough everything is in Germany, not just the beef. 7

4

Yes, I was always good at history.

Ask me about plague or in¯ation.

I know the peace accords off by heart,

the Teutonic Knights, the Swedish peril,

and can tell you all the Jagellonians

and all the churches, from St John

to Holy Trinity, baked brick red.

I:197)

A state of the nation novel: The Flounder Grass wrote in January 1973 to the editor of Akzente that he had started on a big new book: My literary writing powers, which were ¯owing up until last year, were completely exhausted with the Snail book. For the next project, which is much larger in scope, I am greedily collecting material, which is why no-one can entice even small items from me.1 The Flounder is his second epic masterpiece after The Tin Drum and marks a new literary and intellectual departure. When it was all ®nished, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who had known him since the Gruppe 47 meetings of the mid-1950s, wrote a congratulatory review, a `Birthday Letter', in Merkur. The new novel, `the splendid Abitur certi®cate of your art', coincided with Grass reaching 50. For Hildesheimer, Grass was the type of writer who had to prove himself repeatedly. He issues a friendly warning: Did you think during the years of hard work that (one day) you will be sixty and one day perhaps even seventy-®ve? You will have dif®culty beating this book, which depended on your sublime mastering of the most intense literary experience. But perhaps you have other ideas? Perhaps you intend to do other things and have already started on them? Perhaps you are fed up with 127



The End of History Man

128


The Flounder took some four to ®ve years to complete, which is more than any of his other novels ± The Tin Drum took three, for instance, the same as Dog Years and Cat and Mouse put together; Too Far A®eld was written in little more than two. He did not begin committing his ideas to paper until 5 January 1974; by December 1975 he had ®nished some 500 pages and had also made many drawings and etchings. In January 1976 he wanted to begin the second version, intending to have it ®nished by March 1977, a remarkably accurate prediction.3 `Hurrah! The Flounder is ®nished', he writes to Helen Wolff on 1 March 1977: Ì think it's good; I have put in everything which makes me the person I am.'4 The novel's position in Grass's oeuvre is pivotal: it appeared 18 years after The Tin Drum, coincidentally the same gap between it and his next epic masterpiece, Too Far A®eld. As The Tin Drum spawned material he used for the next ten years, so the ideas for The Meeting in Telgte, Headbirths and The Rat all germinated in the ¯at belly of the magical talking ®sh who himself had slithered out of the brother Grimms' fairy tale, `The Fisherman and his Wife'. It is remarkable that, while Grass ®nally leaves the Nazi period behind, he sticks to which he recreates his roots by drawing on personal experience of Danzig/Gdansk on the page from the stretch of Baltic coast which had remained in the Federal Republic. His home city remains his historical crucible. The sections of the novel set in the present are narrated from a newly purchased rural base, far away from the hectic sprawl of West Berlin, in the village of Wewels¯eth in Schleswig-Holstein. This most northerly and maritime Federal state, washed by the Baltic in the east, became a `home from home' for the exiled son of Danzig. It is off this coast that the Flounder is caught, though he is last seen off Polish shores, in conversation with the narrator's Polish cousin, Maria Kuczorra. Grass sets sections of both Headbirths and The Rat in Schleswig-Holstein too, underlining his emphatically North-German tastes and background, which is re¯ected equally strongly in his great friendships: È beck), Johnson and Richter, both born and brought up on with Brandt (born in Lu Baltic islands, as was Grass's second wife Ute Grunert, whom he met while working on The Flounder. The Flounder is emotionally the most autobiographical of all his works. Grass became a father for the ®fth time in the summer of 1974 when his new partner, Veronika Schro È ter, whom he had met on the election trial in 1969, gave birth to a daughter they named after his mother, Helene. It is to `Helene' ± mother and daughter ± that the novel is dedicated. It was mainly this new relationship, which had ended by the new year of 1976, rather than the separation from Anna, who remained with their other children in West Berlin, which is reproduced in the strained exchanges between The Flounder's narrator and his irritable wife, Ilsebill. È ter really did want a `Bosch According to his Polish translator, Veronika Schro washing-up machine', just like Ilsebill.5 The German-born British feminist, Eva Figes, whom Grass visited in London while working on his manuscript, also features in the novel as Sophie Rotzoll, the revolutionary conspirator and cook to Napoleon's Danzig governor. Grass borrowed her feminine version of the Prometheus myth



everything? That would be understandable ± but it would not be like you at all.2

from her seminal feminist text, Patriarchal Attitudes; she returned the compliment by È ger, dedicating her next novel, Seven Ages, to him.6 Another girlfriend, Ingrid Kru gave birth to a daughter shortly afterwards, which explains the section entitled Ònly Daughters'.7 But before the novel was ®nished Grass met Ute, who is portrayed as Ulla Witzlaff. It is her ear that is shown on the cover of the book, listening to the Flounder. She and Grass married in 1979. If the resurgent German women's movement gives Grass his ideological ballast, his troubled private life guarantees the novel's emotional truth. He wrote to Helen Wolff that Ìn a peculiar sort of way my manuscript has bene®ted from these constant tensions; most of my efforts have been dedicated to watching it does not become too obviously autobiographical.'8 While Ilsebill and her nameless husband hardly lead a model marriage, it is the ®rst time his central ®gures have been married at all. From The Tin Drum to Local Anaesthetic his male narrators had all been unhappy bachelors; from The Flounder onwards the central ®gures all have partners. What that says about his attitudes to his ®rst marriage, I will leave to the speculation of future biographers. After the election campaign of 1972 Grass had rationed his public appearances and articles. In July he stopped writing his column for the SuÈddeutsche and did not take sides during the press and police furore over the Baader-Meinhof terrorists or the scandal of Chancellor Brandt's Berufsverbote, which banned members of leftwing organisations from holding state jobs. He left that to BoÈ ll and others; his political work had been done for the moment. But political issues and personalities do make occasional entrances on to the grand stage of world history in The Flounder. As it is ostensibly composed between October 1973 and July 1974, the nine months of Ilsebill's pregnancy, Brandt's dramatic resignation in May 1974 causes the narrator to pause. The CIA-sanctioned overthrow of Salvador Allende's reformist regime in Chile, `where there was a little hope' (VIII:118), on 11 September 1973, was an earlier sign that disappointments would mount up. The world oil crisis, precipitated by a meeting of the oil producing countries in October 1973, situates the novel at the point where postwar economic optimism gave way to despondency in the light of sluggish growth ®gures, in¯ation and unemployment, not just in West Germany but across the western world. Eric Hobsbawm calls the period which ended in 1973 a 30-year `golden era' of welfare capitalism. After this date, western economies, even the mighty German powerhouse of the European Community, experienced slowdown for the ®rst time since the 1930s.9 The narration of The Flounder thus straddles a key date in West European as well as West German history. 1977 too is sometimes said to be a pivotal year in the 40-year history of the old FRG. In October, the Schmidt government saw off the terrorist threat. Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells in Stammheim high security jail on the same day as a Lufthansa jet, hijacked by Palestinian activists to secure their release, had been stormed by German marines at Mogadischu in Somalia. When the body of Hanns Martin Schleyer, chairman of the Federal Employers' Association, who had been kidnapped the previous month, was discovered in the boot of a car soon afterwards, it was clear that the state had paid a high price. But the `hot autumn' constituted the climax to the terrorists' campaign,



The End of History Man 129

130


the whole business ± terrorism, foreign reactions, security hysteria on the domestic front ± quite depressing; but the Flounder does not seem to care about any of it. He is swimming and swimming.10 The novel was an unexpected success. More than 250 000 copies were sold in hardback in under six months. The money not only helped regularise arrangements in his private life; he also donated 200 000 DM to set up the Alfred DoÈ blin Foundation to award an annual prize to a promising young German author. Reactions in other parts of the world were similarly overwhelming. Playboy published extracts in the US, appropriately enough according to the novel's feminist critics. Yet Grass did not feel that commercial success was matched by the standard of debate the novel generated in the German Feuilleton, the review sections of the major newspapers. He told Helen Wolff that `the critical reactions in the Federal Republic (whether positive or negative) have shown that most literary critics are not up to The Flounder's multi-layered themes'.11 He had commented to her similarly on Local Anaesthetic, but could have had little idea of the gap that would open up between him and his reviewers after The Rat and then Too Far A®eld. The tale of the talking ®sh who ful®ls every wish his lucky captor makes to him ± for a new house, a castle, to be made Emperor, then Pope, and ®nally to be as powerful as God and to gain control of the motion of the sun and the stars ± is one of the best known in the Grimm Brothers' collection. The editors of the Penguin edition place it at the beginning of their selection. It is both a moral and political parable which apparently con®rms the legitimacy of the feudal social order, since the poor couple are both thrown back to the `pisspot' whence they came. This is their rightful place in the order of things and their wishing to alter their lot on earth is an offence against the cosmic order. Nature responds violently: the heavens darken, the winds gather such speed that the ®sherman is nearly swept away into the torrents each time he returns to the Flounder to convey his wife's increasingly ambitious wishes. Yet their very desire for change, their patent dissatisfaction with their social circumstances and the suggestion that change is possible show a dangerously rebellious spirit in the era of the French Revolution. There are versions of this fairy tale in many different national and regional cultures. As the Flounder in Grass's novel informs the `Feminal', à Latvian variant is extremely interesting' (57), as it presents the husband rather than the wife in the role of villain. He has a different wish-list: he wants to be invincible in war. He wants to build bridges over the widest river, live in houses and towers which reach into the clouds, drive fast wagons which are pulled by neither the ox nor the mule, he wants to sail in ships which go



the culmination of events which had begun with the devices planted in a Frankfurt Department store in April 1968, the fruits of a mentality Grass had explored in Local Anaesthetic. Grass wrote to Helen Wolff after the novel was published that he found


This suppressed version articulates the fable of history which informs the novel's structure and accounts for the historical catastrophe which occurs in `Father's Day'. The ®sherman's last fateful wish, the equivalent of Ilsebill wanting to be God, brings about the ecological apocalypse: And as the man right at the end, ignoring his wife Ilsebill's advice that he should be satis®ed with what he has already got ± `Now we shouldn't want to wish for anything more but be contented with what we've got . . .' ± wants to travel up to the stars ± Ì want to ¯y up into the sky . . .' ± all the splendour, towers, bridges, and ¯ying machines collapse into pieces, the dykes break, drought descends, sandstorms wreak havoc, the mountains spew ®re, the old earth starts quaking in order to shake off the rule of man and a great coldness ensues with the advent of the new ice age which covers everything. 445 This is a moralistic eco-parable, clearly foreshadowing the cataclysm which engulfs the world of The Rat. There is a profound sense ± for all humanity but especially for the Germans, which is even stronger in The Rat ± that we are living now in some kind of `post-historical' limbo, faced with a stark choice: either to perish as victims of industrial or ideological hubris (`Father's Day' in The Flounder, the atomic war in The Rat); or to start completely afresh with radically new social and political precepts (a new matriarchy or the social order of the genetically engineered `Rat People'). The choice is still available in The Rat, although the chance of a new beginning seems now much slimmer and the vehicle for articulating it faintly ridiculous for that reason. In both novels the mid-twentieth century catastrophe has called the premises of western modernity into question. Geography becomes history in The Flounder when the story is wrenched from to West Berlin, where Sibylle Miehlau ¯ed from the Soviet invaders Danzig/Gdansk in 1945, for the ®rst of the two postwar chapters. Yet in the ninth and last chapter of the Lenin Shipyard strike in 1970. The last of the narrative returns to the Gdansk the novel's 11 women cooks is unashamedly Polish. Insofar as the novel posits a future, it is not going to be male and not going to be German. In spite of the sense that western civilisation has run its course, The Flounder belongs to a clutch of encyclopedic twentieth-century German novels which set out to examine everything which falls within their orbit. The entire course of human history is the subject of endless debate: the rights and wrongs involved in the constant con¯ict of the sexes, the value of reform over revolution, the increasing imbalance between nature and society, or the sustainability of man-made progress versus inscrutable cosmic fate. These are all `grand narratives' into which Grass interlaces a multitude of petits reÂcits, showing how the supernumeraries on the stage of world events warrant attention and how oral or simply unpublished traditions have been overlooked in



underwater. He wants to rule the world, dominate nature and look down upon it by raising himself above the earth. Ì now I want to be able to ¯y too . . .'. 445


written accounts. The man who told the history of World War Two from the eyes of a three-year-old, now peers from below at the great underbelly of human affairs. Food is a metaphor for this whole enterprise since he concocts his meals from ingredients not often used in modern cookery, offal and stomach linings, grains, wild mushrooms and root vegetables. Yet all his stories are drawn into some greater historical scheme, where the particular is still related to the universal. Frederick the Great may not be the hero of chapter ®ve, but his great plans for reform have touched the lives of the impoverished members of the peasant household he visits, even though their lot has not been improved in the way he envisaged. By saying that the arrival of the potato in West Prussia had far greater consequences than the outcome of the Seven Years' War (1756±63), Grass does not invalidate the great story of Prussian ascent and social progress, he merely shifts the emphasis. Less than 200 years later, however, the universal stories which offer coherent explanations for the progress of human affairs, be they Christian, Marxist, Hegelian or nationalist, seem to have reached a de®nitive end-point. The deeds of Hitler and Stalin ®nally invalidated all notions of progress. Grass's understanding of the Holocaust as a `caesura and permanent fracture in the history of civilisation' (XVI:239) was popularised by Theodor Adorno. In his ®rst Auschwitz lecture in 1970, Grass contended with Adorno that the Holocaust was a `temporal turning point': It is true that since Auschwitz our calendars have not started again at zero, but in our thinking ± rarely consciously, yet inevitably in our subconscious ± we do have a new method of measuring the years and centuries, as signi®cant as the change from BC to AD. Since Auschwitz human beings have been thinking differently; we force ourselves to think differently. XV:49 Grass argues too that scienti®c `progress' has entailed the denial of both nature and femininity ± which in The Flounder's ®eld of metaphor are synonymous. Once men begin to assert themselves, they realise that `nature requires masculine dominance rather than feminine tolerance' (VIII:44). As the She-Rat comments at the end of history: èver further upward, ever more giddily thought out [. . .] Look how crumpled his progress looks now he has stumbled' (XI:15). After the Holocaust, the Flounder is no longer the master of his Mephistophelian pact with the male sex: You can blame me for Alexander and Caesar, the Hohenstaufens and the Teutonic Knights, even Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm, but not Hitler and Stalin. They are not my responsibility. What happened afterwards, happened without me. The present is not my present. My book is closed, my history is over. VIII:574 The last two women, Sibylle Miehlau and Maria Kuczorra, are already citizens of the post-patriarchal world.



132

In a sense, Grass's conception of historical development is nevertheless still triadic. Broadly speaking, he borrows from the Idealist German tradition (Hegel), revolutionary Marxism (Ernst Bloch particularly), and Christian theology. After the ahistorical and distinctly authoritarian age of matriarchal welfare, there follows the Fall from innocence precipitated by the Flounder impishly whispering into the ear of the hapless stone-age Edek that his role in producing offspring is not, as he had hitherto supposed, inessential. This triggers the switch from mental stasis, which the matriarch prolonged by suckling her men on her mythical third breast, to restless movement, heralding the entry into history, the age of knowledge and alienation, progress and the economic subjugation of the environment, all of which set in train the sequence of events which lead to the twentieth century. Matriarchy and patriarchy are two parts of a triad, the third of which is left open at the end of the novel. In the present, humanity stands on a second threshold similar to the one which separated matriarchy from patriarchy, since the Flounder, `the so-hated masculine principle' (410), `recently raised to the status of Weltgeist' (517), who `drones on eternally about progress' (72), has ®nally abandoned men and offered his services to women. In English, The Flounder would be known as à state of the nation' novel. Because Grass is dealing with Germany, the state of the still non-existent nation could be examined only by delving into the past. To tell the story of Germany from Danzig is also to tell it from the margins. The great English polymath, Anthony Burgess, acknowledged in his own pastiche of the encyclopedic genre, Earthly Powers, that Grass and The Flounder stood in this peculiarly Teutonic tradition which had taken new shape in this postwar incarnation. Burgess modelled the great work of his ®ctional hero on chapter headings and poem titles taken from it. Burgess's narrator stumbles across the multi-volume novel by accident on a voyage from Honolulu to San Francisco shortly before World War Two: The whole of his seven-volume novel sequence under the general title Father's Day (Vatertag) was there. It was my excitement at the discovery, my conviction that here was perhaps the greatest novelist of the age [. . .] though remembering that ®rst reading in William Meldrum's somewhat pedestrian rendering, it is the German titles of the constituent volumes that come most readily to mind: Dreimal Schweinekohl; Nur ToÈchter; Wir sassen zu Dritt; Hinter den Bergen; Wie Er Sich Sah; Arbeit Geteilt; Woran Sie Sich Nicht Erinnern Will.12 His Austrian Jewish novelist, writing in the ®rst half of the century, shares no biographical markers with Grass, but his life's work is similarly ambitious, the vitality and life-af®rming spirit of the novel offset by a rejection of progress and allpervasive awareness of death. It sounds like a baroque feast which celebrates the senses and stimulates the intellect. Burgess combines impressions of Robert Musil, who shows similarly little `moral sense' and presents a `cynical response' to `the coming of the modern age and the anachronism of empire' in The Man without Qualities.13 The dissolute Bu È rger family are modelled on the eponymous heroes of Mann's Buddenbrooks, who veer fatally between bourgeois respectability and artistic





bohemianism. The seedier, more vulgar details, on the other hand, are a jokey reference to Grass. The impression of scholarship in The Flounder is, up to a point, misleading, however. Grass uses his sources sparingly and precisely. His scope remains highly localised in terms of detail. Historical characters, such as the evangelical Adalbert of Prague and the mystic Dorothea von Montau, coincidentally canonised in the year before the novel was published, are major regional ®gures, as well known to German as Robin Hood in Nottingham or the Pied Piper in Danzigers or Polish Gdanskers Lower Saxony. Grass learnt about them at school, as his chapter on Dr Stachnik, a former teacher in the Conradinum, testi®es. He mentioned the scion of the great local merchant family, Eberhard Ferber, Mayor of Danzig in the 1520s, in his open letter to Siegfried Lenz on the subject of the latter's acceptance of the Bremen Literature Prize in 1962.14 The allusion was impressively obtuse to those unfamiliar with Danzig history, but the Ferber family were to Danzig what the Fuggers were to Augsburg or the Gonzagas to Mantua. The Danzig novelist, Elsie Sparwasser, had made them into the heroes of Ferberblut, published in 1953, a forgotten work which È blinesque ¯air for descriptive experiment. Governor mixes a nostalgic tone with a Do Rapp, on the other hand, had made a prior entrance into the realm of historical ®ction in Seton Merriman's Barlasch of the Guard in 1903.

`Social-Democratic Rabelais'15 The Flounder is possibly Grass's most important contribution to the history, practice and theory of social democracy. In each historical chapter, revolt, reform and a striving for a better world are key topics. He not only depicts episodes from the `Revisionist Debate' in the 1890s, but also explores a basically social-democratic ethos in all the historical sequences. An ethic of social-democratic pluralism informs the `dialogic' structure of the novel, which always offers an alternative point of view and always calls its own assumptions into question. This narrative strategy is remarkably similar to Grass's understanding of the never-ending process of revisionism which for him is the very de®nition of democratic socialism and social democracy: The history of democratic socialism is the history of revisionism. The German Social Democrats since Bebel's time have tested their ideas against changed circumstances in reality and adapted pre-formulated programmes, in other words they have engaged in revision. XVI:89 All views in The Flounder are revised and tested against reality and each opinion and interpretation made relative to every other. In thematic terms, SPD-type reformism is easy to identify. History begins with male liberation from a reÂgime where all cultural and artistic activities, always masculine phenomena, stand under complete censorship. The chronological narrative continues through the uprising of the Danzig guilds in 1378, the social disturbances during the Reformation in the wake of the Peasants' Revolt in the 1520s, the efforts for peace of



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the proto-social democrat and baroque poet, Martin Opitz, arriving at Enlightenment reform movements (Amanda Woyke) and the radical aims of the French Revolution (Sophie Rotzoll) and ®nally the `history of the workers' movement' (Lena Stubbe). While the `Feminal' wants to see all history in vulgar-Marxist or crude feminist terms, all the historical tales reinforce Grass's own polemic against any form of extremism. He is against the 17-year-old revolutionary Friedrich Bartholdy who declared, `freedom must be founded on violence!' (VIII:453) and borrowed his slogans from Marat, Danton and Robespierre; he inveighs against the `Lutheran lackey Hegge' (248), who sought to rid the world of Popish idolatry. Grass argues against `the Hegges of then and nowadays' (297) and sees little difference between them. Hegge caused only suffering for others: `Disturbances, the guilds in uproar, iconoclasm, and cris de guerre which brought about precious little change, engendering nonetheless violent intervention by the Polish King' (251). He is no different from his reactionary adversary Abbot Jeschke whose views are also àbsolute' and who `dreamt of enjoying his bene®ces in a perfect world unsullied by heresies' (254). Both are ideological purists of the sort encountered elsewhere in Grass's ®ction. Sophie achieves more than the revolutionaries by biding her time and waiting for her moment, although she misses her main target, Governor Rapp, whereas Bartholdy, her impatient ®anceÂ, whose fate Starusch invoked as a negative example to Scherbaum, languishes 40 years in prison for his teenage political enthusiasm. A similar negative impression of revolution emerges in the medieval chapter. Sieglinde Huntscha, a `Father's Day' survivor, who is prosecuting the Flounder in this chapter, wants to see the fact that the revolt occurred at all as à triumph of the medieval proletariat' (182). She is forced to reconsider her view after the Flounder explains that the guilds were led by à dissolute patrician' (182), who was motivated by private rancour rather than social justice. The historical manifestation of the narrator is the conciliatory Albrecht Slichting, whose ostensibly `questionable behaviour during the uprising of the guilds against the patricians' (180) evinces a typically Grassian urge to compromise and not to leap from a particular case (the brewers' dispute with the civic authorities) to sweeping general conclusions. The outcome of the revolt, which is suppressed with customary ruthlessness, is ultimate victory for the brewers, as the offending beer imports from Wismar are indeed stopped. No one else bene®ts, however. Revolt failed, but reforms were necessary: ìt would indeed have been sensible to shake up the patrician order, which had been corrupted by the hereditary principle, by admitting some guild representatives, in the magistrates' courts, for instance' (183). In the Reformation chapter others suffer execution in Hegge's stead, including Fat Gret's father who joined the revolt: Hegge himself escapes with Gret's help. Gret carries on her father's work and thanks to an almost social-democratic strategy achieves far more than the extremist agitator: She never lost interest [. . .] in the rights which had been denied the guilds [. . .] What cost her rebellious father his head, the democratic mutterings and seditious speeches which could be heard from the guilds, was carried on by the daughter: quietly, however. 267





She not only takes her revenge by plotting the murder of her father's executioners but, years later, persuades the victorious Polish King, Stefan Bathory, to impose `milder conditions on the city' (268), when he takes control of it. She is a living image of Grass's own social-democratic principle of narrative, bewildering her important guests who can never make out whether she is `for the patrician council or for the lowlier associations' (247), whether she agitates in favour of the Hanseatic League or the Polish Crown, `whether she was Catholic on the outside and infested with Lutheranism on the inside': And yet everybody listened to the scatological good sense of her table talk. She justi®ed the actions of some, inoculated others with scepticism, dispensed all manner of tactical advice and in the long term only served the practical interests of Saint Birgit's Convent. 247 The author of The Flounder would no doubt be pleased if similar things were said of his social-democratic novel. Gender is the other great battleground. Sexual politics were linked to social democracy through such seminal books as Bebel's Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Women and Socialism), the foundation stone of the author's own education in social democracy, recommended to him by none other than Willy Brandt. But the tradition of Bebel, Brandt and Grass has always had its challengers. One of the Romantic poets was unequivocal in his opposition to the anti-male version of the Grimms' fairy tale: For my part, I do not like the fact that in the other fairy tale all man's doings and strivings, his dream of greatness, comes so cruelly to nought. We would not have anything that is sacred to us, the great story of history, the glorious Empire of the Hohenstaufens, the towering Gothic cathedrals, if dull contentment with his lot was man's destiny. If we decided to pass on the fairy tale to the public in this form and announce that all masculine striving leads to chaos, then man's authority would soon be held up to ridicule. 446 The male poets thus falsify truth, denying an alternative to the sanctioned account of history. Their burning of the offending manuscript is an act of historical vandalism and ideological oppression. Men insist upon their own exclusive version of history because, as Runge remarks: `we human beings can only ever tolerate one truth and not the other at the same time' (450). The union of the two stories should produce something approximating more closely to the truth, which, for Grass, in both narrative and political terms is ¯uid and evolving rather than ®xed and absolute. The union of male and female, which in its physical form produces a baby daughter at the end of the novel, could point to a way out of the malaise of midtwentieth century history. What the emotional and intellectual corollary of the physical union will achieve, however, remains a mystery. `The other truth' expressed



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in the second version contains in nuce the female point of view, the woman's version of history, which has been denied or distorted by men. Grass's purpose in writing The Flounder is to put such omissions and falsi®cations right. What remains uncertain is whether the second version would be anything more than an inverted image of the ®rst. When asked by Runge which of the two versions was correct, the old woman had replied ```The one and t'other together''' (445). This insight provides Grass with both his principle of narrative and the political `message' of the novel. The Flounder is also a `counter-narrative' to conventional historical accounts both and indeed the whole of Europe. Ownership of Danzig/Gdansk's of Danzig/Gdansk past was still by no means settled in the 1970s. The different ways of spelling the name are loaded with importance: to name something is to possess it, as Oskar had already hinted: `From Gyddanyzc they made Danczik, from Danczik came Dantzig, (III:520). One which was later written as Danzig, and today Danzig is called Gdansk' clear purpose was to correct popular German historiography of the region, for too long in the hands of the right-wing expellees who set out to demonstrate the `Germanness' of the city from the Middle Ages to 1945 and to èstablish' the Germans' rightful claim to it.16 The Communist Polish authorities too had reason especially his portrayal of not to like Grass's account of the history of Polish Gdansk, events in the Lenin Shipyards in 1970. None of Grass's books were of®cially available to Polish readers until the 1980s because his use of German names for places and streets now in Polish hands was unacceptable to the Polish authorities.17 In Grass's novel no nationality comes out any better than any other, as it makes little difference to his succession of female cooks which set of men is in power. If the chronological survey appears at times confused (the succession of wars and rebellions are dif®cult to differentiate from one another, like the battles and campaigns in Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus), this is only because the history of the region itself is muddled, complex and contradictory. Any unitary interpretation is woefully insuf®cient. While Grass believes that `the Polish claim to land [in the west] to compensate for land [lost in the east]' to have been justi®ed, which means he has no quarrel with the Polish acquisition of `former German territories', he refuses to accept the wilder Polish claims of legitimacy: I do not, however, subscribe to the chauvinistic Polish point of view according to which these have always been Polish lands. I think that's crazy, you would have to start by looking at the tribal migrations in the Dark Ages.18 However crazy it may sound to hark back to the tribal migrations, that is, of course, precisely where the nationalists on both sides do start.

False Messiah on Father's Day When The Meeting in Telgte followed The Flounder, the signi®cance of the baroque fourth chapter of the novel seemed to grow. Yet from his debut Grass had been called `baroque' and The Tin Drum, his modern picaresque tale of war and peace, compared with Grimmelshansen's great seventeenth-century masterpiece, Simplicissimus,





whose eponymous hero ®ghts against all that Fortune can throw against him to survive all the battles and the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. Grass's renewed interest in seventeenth-century literature seemed to con®rm these comparisons. Grimmelshausen, through his depiction of the Battle of Wittstock, impinges too on The Flounder, as Grass now brings the battle into a ®gurative constellation with the poets Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius. The baroque theme in The Flounder goes in fact much further than this because the action of the fourth chapter is taken up once more in `Father's Day', where the promise of delivery held out in the seventeenth century from the cruel cycle of death and destruction is not kept. The narrative and symbolic links between these two chapters, which extend beyond the similarities between the two central women ®gures, Agnes Kurbiella and Sibylle Miehlau, show that the use of seventeenth-century material in The Meeting in Telgte was hardly coincidental. The relationship between the two chapters is the fulcrum of the novel. In chapter four of The Flounder, Òn the Burden of a Wicked Age', a tired Opitz, poet and diplomat, is visited by the ®ery young Gryphius in Danzig. The year is 1636, 18 years after the long war started, 12 before it would end. Gryphius argues that poets should concentrate on poetry, leaving politics to politicians, and accuses Opitz of wasting his talents and betraying his vocation. Opitz, who has learnt the hard way that nothing is as simple as it appears when one is 20, reacts sceptically. He gets the better of the argument. Indeed of all the male historical and ®ctional characters in the novel, Opitz is the most positive, the personi®cation of principled pragmatism, despite rumours of unresolved paternity claims and accusations of opportunism. His political plan is to get the Swedes to join an anti-Habsburg coalition with the Poles in order to avenge the devastation wreaked on his home region of Silesia by the Habsburgs: Whereupon one month later on 4 October 1636 the Imperial troops were separated from the Saxon forces and defeated between the woods and the marshes at Wittstock on the Dosse, a tributary of the Havel, by the Swedes under the command of Marshal Baner, who would not have won had it not been for the Scottish regiments under Lesley and King. After uncounted losses on both sides, ¯ags, cannons, and other pieces of booty were counted. Nothing else. 316±17 Grass's phrasing gently echoes that used by Friedrich Schiller in his History of the Thirty Years' War, a book Grass had praised to a journalist during the 1969 election campaign.19 Wittstock is a useless, pointless victory which brings about no change whatsoever and certainly no turn for the better. While Opitz's intentions were good, his aims impeachable, the forces ranged against him were simply too great. The baroque complex of motifs in `Father's Day' encompasses two separate areas. The ®rst is the Battle of Wittstock which the four Berlin lesbians are able to remember from their past incarnations, just as they can cite their roles in other past epochs. The second link is provided by the baroque cook and silent muse, Agnes, who devotes her culinary skills and sexual attention to two artists



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simultaneously, Opitz and the painter Anton Mo È ller, before warming the hearth and the bed of another poet, Quirinus Kuhlmann, next to whom she is burnt at the stake for witchcraft. Even though all the nine or eleven cooks are related to one another and the story of each refers to the stories of all the others, the connections between the tenth, Sibylle or Billy Miehlau (1929±63) and Agnes Kurbiella (1619±89) are the strongest. Like Billy, Agnes is de®ned by her sel¯ess passivity, sacri®cing herself for her men, and she seems uniquely contented with her subordinate role. Her name recalls Christian self-sacri®ce and redemption: Agnes means `the lamb of God' (Agnus Dei). It is no coincidence that she shares the name with Oskar's `poor mama', since Agnes Matzerath, who looked to the church for salvation, dies a pointless death after becoming suddenly nauseated by her life at the beginning of her second pregnancy. She could not choose between two men either. In The Tin Drum, all signs of spring or fertility, let alone life after death, are negated by her death, which resulted from an illness which began on Good Friday. At the beginning of the epoch of bourgeois marriage, Agnes Kurbiella's main characteristic is her ability to love, ùnconditionally, with dedication and self-sacri®ce, in silent humility, with a bountiful heart, until death and beyond, sel¯ess, unquestioning, uncomplaining' (338). Her love is not based on equality and does not presuppose a response. While Agnes seems unable to choose between two men, Billy cannot choose between the sexes. Both women have been raped by several men in their youth: Billy by `®ve or seven Russians. In the cellar. On potato sacks' (589), like Lina Greff in The Tin Drum. She was ®fteen or sixteen when this happened. Agnes's story is similar and she was even younger: in the spring of 1632 on the Hel Peninsula the thirteen-year-old Agnes was orphaned by Swedish cavalry men from Oxenstierna's occupying regiment, who raped her repeatedly, using her like a mattress. 327 She is not sure either how many there were and speaks of `four or ®ve Swedish fellows' (345), but somehow she remembers one of them with nothing but fondness ± Àxel was said to be his name' (344). She continues to think of Axel for the rest of her life, forgiving her attackers, and then overwhelming other men with love. Her reaction appears incredible to feminist readers who see it as evidence of the author's total incomprehension of women's feelings, indeed proof of his misogyny. Ruth K. Angress, who achieved fame as Ruth Klu È ger after publishing her account of surviving the Holocaust (see p. 61), is unequivocal: Grass `simply asks us to believe the unbelievable'.20 This line of argument cannot be upheld on two counts. First, Grass is working symbolically ± the whole of `Father's Day' is not meant to be àntilesbian' as is so often assumed. Second, he is portraying a saintly individual whose life is a female imitatio Christi. The whole point of Christ's love for mankind was its inexhaustibility; his powers of forgiveness could not be measured in human categories. On account of her alleged mental instability and her extraordinary virtues, Agnes must die a martyr's death half a century later in far-away Moscow, but it was ònly the unpoetic world that called Agnes mad, possessed, bewitched and




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ridden by Belial' (360). The narrator hints that there other versions of her death than the one that has been passed down:

The òther truth' is kept under wraps on this occasion. Yet there is a further reference to the cruci®xion because she is burnt next to `Kuhlmann and two other male fanatics for blasphemy and political conspiracy against the crown of the Tsars' (360). If Agnes is the unknown, unrecorded female victim, the male trio correspond to Christ and the two thieves cruci®ed on either side of him. References to the Cruci®xion are repeated in `Father's Day'. Billy is 33 years old. On `Father's Day', celebrated in Germany on the Day of Christ's Ascension, MaÈxchen directs the new rape and àrti®cial fuck'. We now hear a further version of the fairy tale to lull the hapless Billy to sleep. Ilsebill is now a sex-crazed housewife who devours one male partner after another, wishing ®rst for a ®reman, then a lawyer, an anarchist, the Federal President, a ®lm star, then an orchestra conductor. None of them, however, can satisfy her for very long. When she eventually asks the ®sh to bring òld Beethoven' back to life, she makes him angry and he sends her back to her modern equivalent of `the pisspot' which housed the peasant couple in the Grimms' tale: `From now on and for the rest of time, whether she likes it or not, she'll have to make do with her Max. Every Saturday after ®shing' (618). MaÈxchen's next statement after ®nishing her story, Ì want to make her child, make her a child, make her a child. . .' (619), turns out to be her equivalent of Ilsebill's last ùnnatural' wish, which brings about Billy's awful humiliation and death. MaÈxchen can remember her past life: That was when I was called Axel Ludstro È m. We were encamped on the Hel Peninsula with Oxenstierna's own regiment. A bunch of smooth-chinned Swedish horsemen. It was in May when I picked up a Cassubian wench, Agnes was her name, in a dip in the sand dunes. The other lads had a quick go with her as well. 624 The identity of the rapist is thus the same on both occasions. MaÈxchen now succeeds in imitating all the worst male qualities and becomes responsible for a crime which in the novel's terms of reference, its symbolic system, is worse than all the other male crimes in the episodes which have gone before. All past battles in The Flounder, in particular Wittstock, function as preludes to the much worse events of the twentieth century. In Christian symbolism the ®rst phenomenon (Wittstock or the rape and martyrdom of Agnes) would be called a pre®guration of the second (the rape and murder of Billy). Because `Father's Day' ends so catastrophically, ®rst with Billy's arti®cial rape at the hands of her three girlfriends, then with her murder by male Hell's Angels, it is a negative ful®lment of



No, I do not want to describe how the wind suddenly subsided, a cloud opened, rain fell, and a miracle nearly happened. It is known after all that the Flounder's version was accepted by the feminists' tribunal. 359

all historical shimmerings of hope in the entire novel, most especially Agnes's willingness to sacri®ce herself for others and her capacity for sel¯ess love. `Father's Day' thus `takes back' any promise of release or proto-Christian redemption from the vicious cycles of historical violence. In contrast to the sacred scripture, Grass makes both parts into negatives in his pessimistic secular text: the second event does not redeem the ®rst but con®rms its original literal awfulness. `Father's Day' forms the epilogue to the tragedy of male history which has been propelled by the `Final Objective Men'. In contrast to other recapitulations of the plot, which are fairly frequent, it does not belong to an authorial commentary or personal reminiscence of the narrator. The catastrophe is both the high-point and the absolute end-point of male history, the telos of the ®rst eight chapters. It is not merely the great Enlightenment narratives of Schiller, Hegel or Bloch that are bankrupt. The promise of the scripture has disappeared too.

Feminism and The Flounder The Pasha of Danzig strikes again.

Alice Schwarzer21

Grass was clearly treading on dangerous territory in his treatment of gender. The narrator of `Father's Day' appears to share every time-honoured anti-lesbian prejudice. This would hardly have been surprising for Grass's readers. While he had created a series of contradictory, ambiguous male characters in his ®rst ®ve prose works, his women were all either maternal nurses (Oskar's `poor mama'), duplicitous Madonnas (Maria Truczinski), or threatening she-devils (Tulla Pokriefke). In her best-selling novel, The Death of the Fairy-Tale Prince, Svende Merian expresses a personal reaction to the famous opening scene in The Tin Drum, as depicted in È ndorff's ®lm. The episode concerns the improbable conception of Oskar's Schlo mother on the potato ®eld outside Danzig, which occurs after her arsonist father Joseph Koljaiczek, running away from two Prussian policemen, takes refuge beneath Anna Bronski's skirts and emerges, once the police have gone, mischievously doing up his trouser buttons. The day after seeing the ®lm, Merian explains her `vague feeling that Grass did not just want to depict a bankrupt form of sexuality, but that he unwittingly expressed misogynistic views which he had failed utterly to think through'.22 Until The Flounder, Grass seems to have been unaware of possible hostile responses from women readers. In the 1960s he was after all more used to attacks from the Right on the basis of alleged pornography. The Flounder elicited hostile criticism from women critics and reviewers. Grass was voted `Pasha of the month' by the newly-founded feminist magazine, Emma. One female reviewer declared: While claiming to be a book friendly to women, The Flounder is, in fact, extremely hostile to them, an uninsightful book which is not built on analysis or enlightenment but rather on shock-effects, designed to fascinate a bourgeois public by breaking new taboos.23





Another female critic acknowledged that the male sex comes off rather worse than its opposite, as within the historical symbolism of the novel the male mentality carries exclusive responsibility for the climactic carnage of the mid-twentieth century. Yet she turned this too against the author.24 Angress attacked Grass on a number of grounds: his focus upon passive, stay-at-home women taken from his imagination, rather than active heroines from history (Sophie Rotzoll rather than Bettina von Arnim; Lena Stubbe rather than Rosa Luxemburg); the outrageous promiscuity of the male narrator and the emotional stupidity of Ilsebill; and the way women are de®ned solely by their physical needs and attributes. In short, for her, the novel is a ragbag of trite, anti-feminist clicheÂs. Time did not heal these wounds. Ten years later, Eva Figes' German publishers, Frauenoffensive, refused to include her È nter Grass . . . from Sophie', in the German edition of Seven Ages.25 dedication, `For Gu The evidence for the novel's misogyny does appear at ®rst sight to be compelling. The contemporary women in the `Feminal' are emotionally inadequate, inconsistent, dogmatic and unpredictable, unable to compromise with one another politically, dependent upon men for technical assistance when machinery breaks down. They conform to every saloon-bar prejudice of the emancipated man-hater. They do not even mean what they say seriously: each melts passively into the arms of the narrator once alone and separated from her sisters. Grass projects his socialdemocratic hostility to the extremists of 1968 on to one of the social movements which grew out of the students' protest: the feminists conform in every respect to his view of the dogmatist. But what is new in The Flounder is that the male voice is no longer unchallenged. While Ilsebill does not take up the story herself, she undermines both his point of view and his sexual supremacy in the same way as the `Feminal' questions the Flounder's account of history. She may cut an unimaginative ®gure in her refusal to participate in the narrative, but she does recoil at her husband's occasionally violent imposition of meaning and refuses to comply with his narrative and sexual whims, denying that `the male prerogative of penetration' is `compensated by the female right to refuse entry' (9). She objects, for instance, to the male creation of Aua, the ®rst, three-breasted woman, the unchallenged matriarch of pre-historic society, as a `masculine wish-projection' and example of `typical male titmania' (11). Just as the narrator is sexually immature and deceitful in the manner of full-bloodied males down the ages, Ilsebill is trapped by her social role and sexual stereotype. At one point she remonstrates with him: `You want to make a witch or a saint out of me, whatever suits you best. We are not living in the Middle Ages' (165). Yet while there is an attempt at sexual equality in their marriage, narrative equality will never reached as long as the pen remains in her husband's hand. The Flounder's critics should admit that Grass does, on a more concrete level, put forward a strong pro-female case in the text. The cooks in the post-matriarchal age comprise an impressive collection of assertive, courageous female characters. Until Grass gave them centre stage in his novel, they had been unsung heroines. He sets out to correct the masculine bias in conventional history and myth-making: that it was Aua who brought ®re to (wo)mankind, not the male Prometheus, whose rebellious spirit suffuses the text with fatal consequences; that it was a woman who



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was responsible for introducing the potato to West Prussia in the eighteenth century, not Frederick the Great, whose military feats are insigni®cant in comparison; that it was Mestwina, the third and last of the matriarchal cooks, who murdered Adalbert of Prague in the year 997, and not the male Borussians. The signi®cance of this date for Danzig history is similar to that of 1066 for England, which means that the woman who committed the founding act of the city's history has been written out of the historical record. The Flounder explains how the falsi®cation occurred: I too deeply regret that a woman was denied the right at this time to produce martyrs. They said to themselves: judged subjectively, a certain Mestwina may have smashed Bishop Adalbert's skull with an iron moulding, but objectively, judged in front of history, it must have been men, the heathen Borussians. And that is why all the historical sources in what, deceptively, appears to be a contradiction of the facts attribute to the Borussians the feat of having made ecclesiastical history. 134 One of the problems with the male grand narrative is clearly that much of it is a forgery. The point about the novel, however, is its stringent male honesty. Grass does not imply he has been in agreement with the women's movement all along or has recently undergone a conversion ± God forbid, there is, after all, nothing worse than a convert. He decides instead to put up a last-ditch ®ght for patriarchy, the case argued by the Flounder for the bulk of the narrative, and to fend off the feminist assault while he still can. But the male narrator, who helps in the house, feeds his pregnant wife sumptuous meals, and attends his daughter's birth, is unwilling or unable to transcend his masculinity in other respects. Because Grass employs a regressive male voice, all nine or eleven women in his historic pantheon are treated in terms of myth and stereotype, which makes The Flounder into a history of the male narrative of womankind, a historiography of the male account of sexual relations and a mammoth ®ctional statement of the current male view of women, sex and gender con¯ict. The Flounder himself anticipates reactions to his biased self-exculpating account: his versions of the various stories are thus coloured by his knowledge that he no longer has an exclusive right to the words he uses and the semantic patterns and hermeneutic structures he employs. The women in the `Feminal' want to take over his words and replace his structures. The giant ¯at-®sh becomes, as the trial reaches its conclusion, literally more and more transparent, which may be a metaphor for the textual transparency of Grass's novel. The narrator acknowledges his own onesided presentation and offers a disclaimer against taking everything he writes at face value: `but please don't expect an accurate report of the trial from me. First, I am not a lawyer, and second, I was from time to time in the dock. They did after all deal with my case too' (56). He is unable, for instance, to describe Fat Gret's backside or Dorothea's domestic negligence without acknowledging that his views and the




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That's right, Ilsebill: we are dealing with the male fear of being bitten like this. There are theories which say that all women harbour the wish to bite of men's balls as well as their pricks. Chapter headings in eagerly devoured books carry the phrases, Trap-Cunts and Penis Envy. The Vagina dentata is a well-known symbol. 377 Women's rejection of the narrator's assumptions and self-af®rming myths, be they matriarchs, muses or witches, is felt in his text. The Flounder is a novel about male myths about women. Dorothea is the bad housewife and negligent mother whose religiosity is sublimated hysteria. While Gret embodies male castration angst, Agnes typi®es saintly devotion. She is followed by a potato-faced earth mother (Amanda), a patient Griselda (Sophie), the put-upon housewife (Lena), and ®nally the frustrated lesbians. To hold this against Grass is unfair since the very system of values which produced this way of thinking is precisely what he perceives to be in crisis. On the other hand, his own understanding of femininity, and the alternative women might offer, is hardly original. This failure of his imagination engenders a blank at the centre of his text. At the end of `Father's Day' the glimpse of hope for a feminine future is immediately eclipsed by the male violence which ensues. Moments before Billy is raped and then killed, the scales fall from her eyes and she seems to recognise what she takes to be a fundamental truth. Her new (old) feeling of femininity has something to do with `tenderness' and `motherly warmth': `what a new feeling: to be a woman'. She resolves: Ì want to. As a woman and nothing else. And no shilly-shallying. I will . . .' (627). She is left no time to articulate these new thoughts further, so we do not know whether her de®nition of femininity really would be a new way forward, but it sounds unpromising. If there is nothing, this feminine epiphany included, at all new in the things said about women in the novel, it can only be the ways in which they are said which are of interest. At the end, Grass ®nds himself in a double-bind. He wants there to be the possibility of something better than the patriarchal order: women's superiority to men would represent one way out. Yet if he invests his hopes in women or an idea of femininity, he risks a return to the swamp of the ®rst chapter and the accusation that he is retreating to that old masculine (now male chauvinist) refuge: the idealisation of woman. Thus whichever way he turns, he confronts male inventions of the female. That essentially is the dead-end which the novel reaches. What we have in the last chapter is an assertive, independent woman, now with the Flounder to advise her, who appears poised to imitate past male behaviour, albeit in less extreme form than the trio in `Father's Day'. As she disappears into the distance with the Flounder, it may be that the roles have simply been reversed and that the female order will merely repeat the mistakes of the old male regime. Grass restates his view in an interview:



assumptions which underpin them are threatened. When the narrator tells his story of Gret biting off Hegge's testicle, he knows the Freudian interpretation both of the episode itself and his narrative choice of including it:


In all the attempts, all the promises that we have been able to see and which one must take seriously, there is no feminine counter-image ± not yet. I say that one is desirable. But I do not know what such a counter-image would be like. These are answers that women would have to provide.26

Writers and the state, 1647±1979: The Meeting in Telgte The Meeting in Telgte, published two years after The Flounder, is again about writers and politics, the truncation of linguistic unity by national or political boundaries, a perennial topic in the history of modern Germany, the effect that mere words in favour of a better world can exert on political affairs, and the battle between brute power and the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment (tolerance, peace, reason), which Grass projects back more than one hundred years before the era of Lessing and Kant. Those who meet in 1647 to discuss `the poverty and happiness of poetry as well as the misery of the Fatherland' (IX:19) are men of the pen ± poets and rhetoricians, playwrights and publishers. They gather at the invitation of Simon Dach, a poet È nigsberg, the future cradle of the German Enlightenment, from East Prussian Ko where the ®rst Prussian King will be crowned in 1701. They meet at an inn on an island in the river Ems as it ¯ows through the Westphalian town of Telgte, which lies in the west of the German-speaking lands, between the historic Catholic cities of È nster and Osnabru Mu È ck. Here, in 1647, negotiations between the great powers to put an end to the Thirty Years' War had been progressing for some three years. For the three days of their meeting the poets are shut off from the world, though its representatives have a habit of bursting in and spoiling things. The world creeps into their poetry too. While Dach works for a royal patron, the Great Elector of Brandenburg no less, he is happier with the rising third estate, fellow BuÈrger, the non-aristocratic middle classes. The rakish aristocratic aesthete, Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau, stands out among this company. The result of the poets' dispute over poetics points to the rise of the bourgeoisie too. Christoffel Gelnhausen, whose literary fame will eventually eclipse the rest, wins the day with his mockery of courtly rules of decorum and bienseÂance. Hope for the future lies with him ± which is why he gets all the best lines. One striking feature of Grass's oeuvre is the number of times he writes about other German writers. This begins with The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, continues in The Flounder, The Rat and Too Far A®eld, which positively teems with writers from a 200-year period. My Century continues the trend with imaginary encounters È nger, Benn and Brecht. The heroes of The Meeting in between Remarque and Ju Telgte are, however, as little-known to German readers as they are to British or American. They are, with a few exceptions (the sonneteer Gryphius, Paul Gerhardt, the great hymn-writer, the mystic Angelus Silesius, perhaps) as good as unknown ®gures. It is possible that Grass learned a lesson from the reception of his Brecht play, which generally ignored the issues he addressed because of the polemic against an



Ilsebill's story would be a remarkably different book: it would be up to her to write it, as Grass has stressed: `the book should continue but written by a woman'.27


iconic cultural ®gure. Controversy in The Meeting in Telgte is unthinkable, thus giving Grass a clear ®eld. It was clear to him, however, that English-speaking readers, who had been provided with a `glossary' for Dog Years and The Tin Drum, would need some guidance. He suggested to Helen Wolff that John le CarreÂ, who had shown himself in conversation to be à knowledgeable reader of The Flounder', should be asked to supply an introduction to the English edition.28 The proposal was entirely apt, as le CarreÂ had studied German at Oxford and endowed George Smiley, his most famous character, with a love for German baroque poetry, Grimmelshausen in particular. Le CarreÂ presumably refused as the task eventually fell to the Cambridge Germanist, Leonard Forster. The Telgte poets are convinced of their moral superiority over the ambassadors, military commanders and politicians. Grass unabashedly shares these sentiments and argued after the book was ®nished in a speech he gave on a Goethe Institute tour of China that `writers and poets have represented the ``better Germany'': writers È ll and Biermann have always from Logau and Lessing to Herder and Heine and Bo been the better patriots' (XV:520). In 1965, he had asserted his credentials to speak on the subject of the German nation by citing the superior achievements of German men of letters in the eighteenth century: Before a German state even existed, there existed, since Klopstock and Lessing, a German literature. While the mental exercises of medieval scolasticism still impeded progress at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the philosopher from Halle, Christian Wolff, was laying the foundation stone for the Enlightenment. When the rulers of the petty states in this country were engaged in their wars and skirmishes with one another, a pietist from Swabia called Friedrich Karl Moser was writing his enlightening and pioneering essay on The German National È rger Spirit. The Swabian Schubart, the brothers Stolberg, and the ballad poet Bu take their place next to Klopstock, Lessing, and Herder at the beginning of our still young literary tradition. One hundred years before Bismarck, Germany was united through language, by German writers and philosophers, who spread the spirit of the Enlightenment through this country. XIV:125 Germany may have been divided politically, whether in 1647 or 1947, 1765, 1965 or 1979, but linguistically and culturally it was a single entity, which meant the poets' domain stretched further than the politicians'. The most obvious point in common between the baroque writers and their twentieth-century counterparts in the Gruppe 47 is that they come together at a time when Germany lay in ruins after the most destructive con¯ict hitherto known to history. The Thirty Years' War was fought from Bohemia, where it began, to the Palatinate, from Saxony and the North German plain to the Rhineland and Bavaria. It left swathes of the countryside depopulated as whole armies lived off the land, plundering provisions from civilians. The greatest contemporary account of the war, Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus and its two sequels, Courasche and Springinsfeld, show there to have been no point to the series of battles and campaigns. The central



146


The living crawled from beneath corpses, children wandered around looking for their parents with heart-rending cries, babies sucked at the dead breasts of their mothers! More than 6000 corpses had to be thrown into the Elbe in order to clear the streets; a far greater number of the living and the dead had been consumed by ®re; the total number of those killed is estimated at 30,000.29 Schiller found the events at Magdeburg so terrible that he believed that `history has no language, the art of poetry has no brush'30 with which to depict them. The baroque poets thus encounter a problem which writers after 1945 confronted too: the question of a suitable literary treatment of the horrors of the recent German past. Silence may in some cases be the appropriate response if literary accounts run the risk of trivialising human suffering. Dach's comment, that `the misery of Magdeburg could only be met with silence' (IX:50), brings to mind Adorno's dictum that it is barbaric to write poems after Auschwitz. If there were no obvious victors in 1647, all German forces, whichever side or sides they had supported, lay vanquished. `Germany', in the shape of Saxony, Prussia and Austria, took a century to recover. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was ®nished as a political force, however, even though it would continue in name for a further 150 years. France was the master of continental Europe. It was a victory for German particularism: the future lay in the petty Absolutist courts, relegated to second-class status vis-aÁ-vis their European neighbours. Asserting themselves culturally and linguistically against French in¯uence would be another task which would take the Germans more than a century. According to the Sonderweg (or `special path') theory of German history this was catastrophic in more ways than one. Bourgeois liberal forces lost out to Royalist reaction in the Peace of Westphalia, German social evolution was arrested and Germany already launched on its fateful route to Hitler. Enlightenment Germany lost out once more in the post-Napoleonic settlement of 1815 and again in 1848, the period Grass explores in Too far A®eld. Germany was then uni®ed by the nationalist reactionary Bismarck in 1871 rather than by the liberal nationalists in 1848. 1871 then led to 1914; defeat in World War One to 1933 and World War Two. Each time, the `better Germany' was beaten. In The Meeting in Telgte, Grass went in search of cultural ®gures who could have set Germany on a less special path. He was thus obliged to write about another such defeat. Grass also wants to understand better the pre-history of the Gruppe 47; as the narrator states on the ®rst page: The stories of today do not have to have happened now. This one started more than three hundred years ago. That is how far back all stories reach which take



characters, the ®rst real heroes of German realism, ®nd themselves ®ghting for one side then another as Fortuna dictates. But Grimmelshausen was not the only German writer to depict shocking images of this war. According to Schiller, writing more than a hundred years later, when the Habsburg commander, General Tilly, appeared at the end of the siege of Magdeburg, the ground was littered with dead:

148


Richter's idea for the Gruppe 47 was that it would in¯uence and educate public opinion by propagating the new values of democracy, civil rights, social responsibility and anti-Fascism. It also provided the liberally minded men and women of letters with a sphere of opposition which did not exist anywhere else in the public realm. After 1949, left-of-centre forces were kept well away from power. Even among poets, harmony does not always rule. With the exception of Gelnhausen, all of them are Protestants and not instinctively minded to show tolerance for Popery in any shape or form. For that reason Dach had not originally planned to meet in Telgte at all, known for its shrine to the Virgin. Some look askance at the suggestion that they honour the memory of the recently deceased Spee von Langenfeld, the most lyrically powerful of the German Metaphysical poets ± and coincidentally a Jesuit. Hoffmannswaldau paci®es them by citing Spee's denunciation of witch-burning, Cautio Criminalis. His success in argument shows that the poets do share a set of basic values. More to the point from a late twentiethcentury perspective, Spee is reclaimed as an enlightened campaigner, like Opitz in The Flounder. Spee is not the only `committed' writer mentioned or present at Telgte. Several others have experienced political service and tried to work directly for the common good. At the forefront of these is Georg Weckherlin who has made the journey from London where he works as a state secretary for Oliver Cromwell. At times he feels that his years of drudgery count for nothing set against just one of his odes: `we have only made everything betterworse!' (164). He can only tell of his `collected defeats' (163) and has never achieved his life-long objective of securing the support of Protestant England for the Palatinate's cause in the con¯ict with the Holy Roman Emperor. All the writers feel there is `nothing more certain than their powerlessness and insuf®cient knowledge of political forces' (162). The baroque proclamation, `The Appeal for Peace by the German Poets to their Princes' (55), `the wretched manifesto' (160) is anodyne in the extreme, restricted to harmless generalities and platitudes. It has to be re-written twice before it is lost in the ®re: Ànd so that which would not have been listened to anyway was left unsaid' (173). The poets' semi-utopian refuge, the fragile idyll at the Bru È ckenhof, is threatened by intruders who have no regard for ®ne words and noble thoughts. But they are corrupted from within and from the start, since they turned a blind eye to Gelnhausen's unethical requisitioning of the premises on the ®rst evening when he had turfed out Libuschka's original guests, some of whom were plague-ridden, claiming he is under orders to do so from both the Swedes and the Emperor. When asked for written con®rmation, he draws his sword, `called it his quill and asked who wanted it in writing ®rst' (17). The high-minded proceedings begin with this bad omen.



place in Germany. I am writing down what began in Telgte because a friend who gathered his colleagues around him in the forty-seventh year of this century is celebrating his seventieth birthday. And yet he is older, much older ± and we, his friends from today, are all ashen grey too from back then. 7

Reviewers of The Meeting in Telgte tried at ®rst to match up the baroque ®gures with their twentieth-century counterparts. But Grass had not intended to settle old scores or give his verdict on individual contributions to the Group's 20-year history. Apart from Dach, none of his ®gures has a model in real life. Nor does the ®ctitious meeting correspond to a particular meeting of the 29 held between 1947 and 1967, many of which took place at similarly remote and atmospheric locations. Grass does, however, borrow a number of factual details which make his ®ctional meeting a combination of all the historical meetings. Richter's rules apply at Telgte. One by one the participants sit at the front of the room to read from a manuscript which is then discussed and criticised under Dach's chairmanship. Richter stipulated that the reader could not respond to this criticism and that the discussion must be limited to the text which had been read out: there was to be no discussion of theories or fundamental issues unconnected to the speci®c text. Dach too hopes to keep discussion of theory to a minimum; those who take it in turns to give readings do not join in the discussion of their own works. Dach also decides the order of readings. The disputes and the incidents at Telgte are representative of everything the Group did and tried to do in its 20-year existence. Their anti-Catholicism anticipates the anti-Communism of the 1940s and 1950s and the split between East and West Germany. While some GDR authors attended some Gruppe 47 meetings (Johannes Bobrowski won the prize in 1962) and more were invited than were permitted to come after the Berlin Wall was built, the Group was emphatically an FRG phenomenon. Everything that happens at Telgte corresponds to something which occurred in reality. The reaction of the prudish protestant cleric, Paul Gerhardt, to Gre¯inger's lewd love poetry, anticipates Wolfdietrich Schnurre walking out of a reading by Gisela Elsner on the grounds that he found it pornographic.31 Gelnhausen, for all his similarities with his creator, has comparable ambitions to an unknown technician Richter encountered in a radio van working for the SuÈddeutscher Rundfunk. His name was Martin Walser. Like Gelnhausen, Walser declared he was better than the established writers and would soon prove it.32 He won the prize two years later. On the ®nal day at Telgte, the poets dine on freshly caught pike, as Richter and his guests at the very ®rst meeting had done thanks to their hostess, Ilse Schneider-Lengyel. This latter-day Mother Courage had also rustled up a black-market sack of potatoes, much appreciated fare in the days of universal shortages and rationing. The journey to the conference venue is another minor topos in writing about the Group, although there are no accounts of participants being ambushed by highwaymen, as Schneuber and Moscherosch were in 1647. Travelling the length or breadth of Germany was not necessarily much less arduous an undertaking in the years immediately after 1945, however, and required planning and ®nance. Richter is not the only participant to recall the slow, uncomfortable progress they made to the ®rst ever meeting on the Bannwaldsee, ®rst in an overcrowded train, then, once the specially booked bus failed to materialise, in a `wood gas' lorry.33 The three days, which were really two full working days and three nights, from Thursday evening to Sunday morning, gave the meetings their special rhythm. Grass exploits this





temporal dimension to dazzling effect: the mood at Telgte, the feelings of the poets about themselves and each other evolve dramatically from the ®rst morning to the second evening. It is a roller-coaster ride for all concerned. While the meals denote these shifts in mood most graphically, the physical bio-rhythms of some participants are exposed in other respects: after a night of erotic exertion or alcoholic elation come exhaustion and a hangover. Read in this way, The Meeting in Telgte is an amusing textual collage made up from familiar disputes, unplanned events, verbal exchanges fuelled by ambition or ideology, alcohol or sentiment. The more the reader knows about the Gruppe 47, the more he or she can pick up. Yet however brilliant the text's style and structure, however witty the asides and apercËus, and even though the little-known poets and grammarians are taught a harsh lesson, returning home convinced of their own insigni®cance and powerlessness, The Meeting in Telgte is ultimately a selfcongratulatory text. Even the writers' short-term failure is disguised triumphalism since they derive moral superiority from being on the losing side, which is clearly in every respect the better side. In 1979, the Gruppe 47 writers had not failed, the SPD government many of them had helped get elected had been in power for ten years, and most of the values Richter had promoted for 20 years longer than that were shaping state policy. Grass himself, however, was going to feel increasingly isolated in the years ahead. The turning point came a few months after The Meeting in Telgte was published with NATO's so-called `double-track' decision to station a new generation of atomic missiles in western Europe. His faith in the FRG state was dented, if not shattered, by this development which heralded up to two decades of estrangement from the democratic regime he had so recently championed.

Orwell's decade The 1980s, which ended tidily on 9 November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, mark for Grass a return to the public stage, this time as an independent campaigner pursuing his own issues rather than a propagandist for a political party. While he continued to be associated with the SPD, speaking regularly at party gatherings, May Day rallies, and trade union meetings, he stood ®rmly on the Left, having possibly more in common with the newly founded Greens. The great issues of the 1980s promoted by the `new social movements', which had by and large grown out of the students' protests, commanded his attention: poverty in the developing world, which Brandt's North±South Report (1981) had pushed up the public agenda; the desecration of the natural environment in advanced industrial society; support for a `third way' in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas or for SolidarinosÂcÂ in Poland; and, most of all, because everything seemed threatened by it and connected to it, the nuclear arms race between the two superpowers. Grass called for massive cuts in arms and the transfer of funds from military purposes to concerted aid programmes. He held that a cure for the nation's terminally-ill forests should be given the highest priority and that the balance of power between East and West had become so perilous, the consequences of a false move, miscalculation or misunderstanding so terrible, that a



150

fundamental re-thinking of policy was urgently necessary. This meant unilateral nuclear disarmament by the West, the ®rst step of which policy had to be rejection of the new missiles. Grass appeared on electoral platforms in 1980, when Schmidt successfully fought off Strauû for the Chancellorship, and once again in 1983, when the new Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, defeated Hans Jochen Vogel, one of Richter's old allies. For a while it looked as if he might rediscover his political home in a reformed SPD once the era of managerial pragmatism embodied by Schmidt had ended and the party was free to develop fresh policies in opposition. But the party failed to rejuvenate itself as it had done at Bad Godesberg a quarter of a century ago. Out of of®ce, the SPD opposed the new missiles, however. A motion at a special party congress in November 1983 was passed by 400 votes to 14.34 The new generation of SPD politicians was headed by Oskar Lafontaine (1943±), a vigorous and imaginative politician from the Saarland, who bucked national trends to oust a È cken in 1985. Many trusted he could do the same in Bonn. CDU-regime in Saarbru He wrote the preface to Learn to Resist. Political Counter-Speeches 1980±1983 (1984), where Grass explains his opposition to Western re-armament. Lafontaine points out that these `®rst-strike' weapons have the capability of killing more people in the Soviet Union in a few minutes than the twenty million the Wehrmacht managed in four years. The poet and the politician appeared to speak with one voice on this momentous issue. Yet Grass did not throw himself into the election campaigns in the 1980s. The new SPD ultimately failed to inspire him in the way that Brandt had done. Consequently, his decision to sign up as a rank-and-®le member in 1982 (at Vogel's instigation), signals the normalisation of his relations with the party rather than an intensi®cation or a renewal of commitment. He in effect returned to the more conventional role of an ìntellectual' in twentieth-century Western states. The ®rst part of the `dual track' decision pledged NATO to negotiate cuts in intermediate-range atomic missiles in order to build upon the success of the two Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT I and II), signed in 1972 and 1979 during the period of detente between the USA and the USSR. What came next seemed to invalidate this intention immediately. For starting in 1983, a new generation of missiles, Cruise and Pershing, equipped with atomic warheads and able to penetrate deep into Soviet territory, was to be installed in Nato bases in the UK, Italy, and the FRG ± ostensibly in order to bargain from à position of strength' with Moscow. Whatever the strategic or psychological merits of the decision, there were many in Europe who doubted NATO's sincerity, and the continent woke up to realise what had in reality been true since the late 1940s: it was on the frontline of a possible war. Yet, and this fact was never lost on the Europeans, it was in Washington rather than in London, Rome or Bonn where the decision to use these new weapons would be taken. Within a year each side of the dual track announcement, the two most in¯uential NATO countries had elected ®ercely anti-Communist leaders: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in May 1979; and Ronald Reagan entered the White House 20 months later. The new American President spoke on occasions as if he believed a nuclear war with what he called the Èvil Empire' were `winnable' if





restricted to the European `theatre' ± winnable, that is, to the Americans who would then preside over the rubble of the old continent. Cruise and Pershing were a response to escalation on the part of the Soviet Union, which, since the mid-1970s, had been busily installing its own new missiles, SS20s, into its satellite states in Eastern Europe. These, the Kremlin claimed, were deployed to counter existing Western superiority and bring the two sides on to equal terms. In fact parity was a chimera in this game of bluff and counter-bluff, each round of which raised the stakes to previously unimaginable levels. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was the term for the most likely scenario. The nuclear clock edged nearer to midnight while politicians and disarmament campaigners debated the pros and cons of deterrence with a ®nesse earlier ages had reserved for theological exegesis. The Cold War arms race, like that between Britain and Germany before 1914, was self-perpetuating, obeying a contorted logic all its own and leading nowhere except to confrontation. This was a new terrain for Grass. He had not participated in the anti-nuclear campaigns of the Adenauer era, nor had he commented when the world had previously stood on the threshold of a nuclear confrontation during the Cuba missile crisis in October 1962. He remarked in December 1981 at the special meeting between writers from the two German states that: `For me too, that is for somebody who is not in fact inclined to be carried along by apocalyptic moods, the end of the human presence on planet earth has become imaginable' (XVI:30). Many Europeans felt similar anxiety and none more than the Germans. Nowhere in the world did there exist such a high concentration of atomic warheads as on German soil. Nowhere in Western Europe were there as many military bases, aerodromes, weapons dumps, barracks and as many visible signs of military activity. Tanks and armoured personnel carriers rumbled through villages on nocturnal exercises; jet ®ghters roared overhead, patrolling the German±German border. In effect, the FRG, not to mention the GDR, was a permanently militarised zone, never further than one or two steps from a red alert. To travel to West Berlin by rail or road was to traverse the terrain of the Cold War and to step back to the immediate postwar period. `We are still occupied' was a common German refrain which betrayed a nationalist strain in the virulent anti-Americanism of some the peace protesters. Unless exempted on the grounds of conscientious objection, all German 18-year-old men had to serve a year and a half in the Bundeswehr. Each young German male thus had to decide for himself whether to serve in the military. Grass had supported the Bundeswehr in 1965 by raising money to buy books for conscripts. In one of his less fortunate photo opportunities in 1966 he had even been pictured sitting in the cockpit of a Star®ghter. This endorsement of things military was unthinkable now. Mass demonstrations against the new missiles took place all over Europe, but nowhere did people take to the streets in greater numbers than in the Federal Republic. Grass marched at the front throughout. The new peace movement rapidly grew into one of the most powerful vehicles of civil protest in the republic's short history. In October 1983, nearly half a million demonstrators descended on Bonn;35 protests against visiting American dignitaries often turned violent, particularly in West Berlin; the Krefelder Appell, calling for the abandonment of Cruise and



152

Pershing, collected two-and-half million signatures; and opinion polls consistently showed a majority of Germans opposed to the new missiles, which had been agreed to by a Social-Democrat Chancellor and installed by his Christian-Democrat successor. What singles out the West German peace movement from very similar protest organisations in the UK, Italy, Holland, and even France and Spain, was that it was an integral part of a much wider force for change, the Greens, who were themselves a peculiarly German phenomenon. Grass's analysis of the ills of advanced industrial society is basically theirs. Less than a week after the SPD voted against the stationing of the missiles, thus disavowing the policies of the Schmidt administration, the Bundestag voted the other È rttemberg. way and the ®rst missiles arrived at Waldheide near Heilbronn, Baden-Wu In reaction, Grass signed a joint statement with other writers and academics calling on young Germans to refuse to enter military service. Their argument was that the stationing of new weapons of mass destruction, something the Bundestag and the Federal Government has empowered the Americans to do, makes the Bundeswehr part of an offensive strategy, which perverts the obligation of defence which is written into our constitution. This had to be resisted.36 Though Grass was not the sole author of the appeal, he had made similar arguments independently elsewhere. While both his language and his position vis-aÁ-vis the state had changed radically, when he attacks the state it is in defence of the Grundgesetz, which he had carried in his pocket throughout the 1965 election campaign. He adopts the stance of a Verfassungspatriot (`patriot for the constitution'), arguing that he remains true to the spirit and to the letter of the legal principles upon which the FRG was, after all, founded. It is not an argument that can be dismissed lightly. Yet Grass's distance from those in power was now wider than it had been in the days of Erhard. By taking the case to the constitutional court a year later, where it was dismissed, he made clear that he felt that parliament had acted illegally. This was the ®rst but not the last time he made such a claim and he was now, arguably for the ®rst time, on the losing side in a major political battle, the SPD defeat of 1965 notwithstanding. Losing was a feeling he was going to get used to, however, in the years ahead. He retreated this time to ®nish The Rat, where he found an outlet for his disappointment. Once this failed to make an impact, he left the country for Calcutta. He had had enough of the society of plenty.

A critical intellectual in the post-modern era Those who used to be way out in front on the Left

now, going backwards, take sharp turns to avoid me

as they emerge from the Right;

will we soon collide, as they,

now coming from above,

¯oat down from the sky?

(FNR:121) The intellectual climate in the FRG had changed since the 1960s and many had grown weary of the `committed writer'. The 1980s witnessed a protracted debate on





the Enlightenment, whose disciple Grass remained, the anti-Enlightenment, and the end of both. After what came to be called the political Tendenzwende in the mid1970s, a general shift or `sea change' in social values and political attitudes back towards the Right, the old-fashioned adherents to the Enlightenment cause were challenged more and more vigorously. Their ranks were beginning to deplete too. È ll, Weiss and Johnson were all dead by 1985, while Enzensberger and Andersch, Bo even Walser had moved with the times. The thesis put forward by Peter Sloterdijk in The Critique of Cynical Reason, a highly in¯uential history of the modern Enlightenment, was that the intelligentsia had become all but completely enlightened in the sense understood by Lessing and Kant (both cited by Grass in The Rat), as they were no longer in thrall to superstition, religion or ideology. The Enlightenment in Kant's famous de®nition (`the emergence of mankind from his self-incurred immaturity') had achieved its objectives.37 Yet the ability to understand both the natural world and the mechanisms of society no longer entailed a belief in social or ideological change, practical action or a hope for a better future and `the right life'. The enlightened had turned cynical because, according to Sloterdijk, `modernity knows very well how ``to think historically'', but has been sceptical for a long time whether the history we live in is at all meaningful'.38 Enzensberger now echoed these views, eulogising `the joys of inconsistency' in a famous essay.39 The enduring value of reason is self-evident to Grass both with regard to the atomic question and the blight of nature: `We pose a threat to ourselves, not the forces of nature. We are not condemned to suffer some inscrutable fate, rather our very own botch-up' (XVI:30). The imagery Grass uses to describe his actions denotes a slackening in con®dence over the 20 years since he praised the snail's sluggish progress. The drawing of an outstretched hand gripping a quill which adorns the cover of The Meeting in Telgte represents the writers' gesture of de®ance. Nothing writers can do will stop terrible things from happening, any rosy view of their effectiveness is illusory, but that does not mean they will either go away or shut up. In Headbirths, Grass cites the cursed Sisyphus, who has no hope of ever placing his boulder on the mountain and resting at its summit, as a metaphor for his own social-democratic efforts. Although the text is full of de®ant statements and gestures of refusal, the overall mood is one of helplessness. The sub-title of Learn to Resist, Political Counter-Speeches, suggests that Grass is one against many and speaks out against of®cial consensus views. The title of his ®rst collection of articles, On What Comes Automatically, had an altogether different ring. Sisyphus is succeeded by the She-Rat, like the Flounder a former spokeswoman for the Enlightenment, now resigned to its failure, who has watched the human march to Armageddon from below. She has warned mankind of every peril in history, always abandoning leaky ships in time, but never have human beings taken any notice. Two years later Grass's only reaction to the poverty he encounters in Calcutta is to announce his shame, the cultural meaning of `showing your tongue'. The whole edi®ce of western Enlightenment thought crumbles in the face of mass poverty and the life which sprawls within it. In the debate on reuni®cation Grass then dubbed himself Cassandra, a role adapted for The Call of the Toad, as a toad's doleful croaking is said to presage doom. The snail of Social



154

Democracy, slow in its movements, unburdened by the weight of ideals, had been an allegory for collective progress, inching its way forward painfully slowly but moving forward nonetheless. The snail's successors document a shift from the political centre to the periphery; from trying to make history move in his direction to seeking solely to act against it in order to prevent worse from happening. Prominent younger writers were less likely to assume that writers and intellectuals had a moral obligation to play a public role. Peter Handke (1942±), often credited with winding up the Gruppe 47 with his comments on `descriptive impotence', who eschewed most forms of ideology and social ìssues' in his honed volumes of prose, was the quintessential writer of the 1970s, which went down in literary history under the label of `New Subjectivity'. The cultural conservative, Botho Strauss (1944±), is similarly representative of a turn to tradition in the 1980s. After `New Subjectivity' there emerged a Germanic variation of `Post-Modernism'. The imported catch-phrase ànything goes' implied that art and literature had neither a social purpose, nor a sense of commitment, consisting of visual patterns, literary È rger imitations and `language games', revelling in what the left-wing critic Christa Bu called ùncommitted aesthetic enjoyment'.40 Writers such as Patrick Su È skind (Perfume 1985), Christoph Ransmayr (The Last World 1988), or the Italian author Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, published in German in 1982), reigned supreme in the literary hit-parades ± a feat Grass last achieved with The Flounder. The Rat, on the other hand, received mixed reviews and failed to create the impact its author wanted. Show Your Tongue failed to provoke a debate at all, which fact Grass blames on the political character of the times and the whims of literary reviewers. Returning from Nicaragua in October 1982, Grass describes the FRG `with its outer hardness and inner banality' as à rich, excessively satiated country' (XVI:50), where people chatter endlessly about trivialities, while the world looks as if it might destroy itself at any moment. For him there was a fundamental lack of seriousness in all areas of public debate engendered by a short-sighted refusal to address matters which really counted and aggravated by the dictates of the electronic media. He bewails the lack of real polemic on contemporary television screens, which relays endless `jabbering' (SYT:17) and follows dubious principles of balance. The fact that such programmes are made to educate and inform makes the matter all the worse. He calls it `that talk-show chattering [. . .], that would like to be thought enlightened but only contributes to the misery I am citing here' (XVI:122). In his assessment, Western civilisation is the `slave of a false concept of progress' (XVI:30), in thrall both to the urge `to know everything' (XVI:21) and to technological, scienti®c advances for their own sake. For him it is incontrovertible that the recent results of progress are: `Poverty, hunger, starving people, polluted air, poisoned waters [. . .] and stockpiles of weapons which seem to grow higher of their own accord and which are capable of destroying humanity many times over' (XVI:57). He elaborates his own `Dialectics of the Enlightenment' with reference to de la razon produce monstruos, which has two the famous aquetint by Goya, El sueno can mean either sleep or dream. possible interpretations since the Spanish sueno Either `the sleep of reason' gives rise to Goya's monsters, thus if reason and its spokesmen fail to be on guard, irrational forces (the DunkelmaÈnner) will triumph





once more; or it is `the dream of reason' and thus the products of human reasoning (applied science and technology) which will, if left unchecked and not brought under rational control, lead the world to catastrophe. The ®rst interpretation is evidently what inspired his earlier commitment to the SPD. He believes he speaks for all enlightened Germans when he writes that: Às burnt children of an epoch in which reason slept and the monster called fascism was born we demand that reason should be awake constantly' (XVI:121). Yet with the problems which confronted humanity in the 1980s, which, he believed, had their origins in the application of reason, the second interpretation was now more appropriate. This is clearly not a neo-Marxist or materialist view: he does not expressly blame those who own and control scienti®c knowledge for their economic gain. Grass is in fact nearer to a moralistic anti-technologism, which plays a role in Too Far A®eld: he seems to see the use of science as the source of wrong and he does not spell out the particularities of the speci®c economic context. In a rational world, he argues, there would be no billions to ®nance the provision of cable television just because technology now enables us to do so. The money would be spent instead on connecting every household with long-distance heating using surplus capacity from electricity-generating stations: `Long-distance heating in place of cable television is the reasonable alternative!' (XVI:74). That would indeed be a rational use of resources in a sensible world. The suggestion sounds nevertheless hopelessly homespun because Grass, perhaps playing the faux-naif, ignores the capitalist economic dynamic at work: the `free' market is motivated by short-term pro®t and clearly sees there is more money to be made from cable TV than from environmentally-friendly projects. Besides, people would have said that they wanted cable television. Yet, in Grass's view, we use technology to produce goods we often do not need and in the process we use up irreplaceable natural resources and litter the planet with toxic substances. His mission is to point out the illogicality of all this and he resolves to offer stubborn personal resistance to technological change. With regard to the atomic question, the mere fact that we possess such lethal weapons makes it inevitable that sooner or later they will be used. In The Rat, human beings are responsible for their extinction simply because `they always have to try out what they have thought up'.41 The villains in his view, the weapons and the machinery of industrial production, are products of science, thus of reason, and thus ultimately of the Enlightenment. The nuclear threat, like the death of the forests, is an Enlightenment problem ± and Grass is an Enlightenment supporter. For the sake of the dying forests, the forces of reason have to be brought under control. There must be a change in the balance of power. This battle for supremacy is played out in The Rat, which is consequently àn attempt to continue the story of the damaged Enlightenment project' (XVI:255); `to work for a reform of the Enlightenment by means of the Enlightenment'.42 Grass places literature at the disposal of reason because the function of stories, myths and fairy tales is to expand and to enrich our rational understanding of the world. The point he makes again and again is that we are all now òne-dimensional men' (in Herbert Marcuse's phrase) because an essential part of us has been suppressed or destroyed (nature, art, femininity, the imagination or `rattishness', are all metaphors



156

for this in The Rat). In all ®ve narrative strands in the novel he relates how this vanished Òther' might be recovered before the world goes up in a puff of smoke. Grass's tactics and objectives had changed since his campaigns for Brandt. His chosen media were now the set-piece speech or of®cial lecture, the newspaper article, interview or public letter. He gave key-note speeches on the three most signi®cant anniversaries of the Third Reich: the ®ftieth anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power, 30 January 1933 (Òn the Right to Resist', published in Die Zeit), and 8 May 1945 (`The Present of Freedom', also published in Die Zeit), and the ®ftieth anniversary of 1 September 1939 (`Shame and Disgrace', published in the SuÈddeutsche Zeitung). He uses these occasions to lecture his compatriots on the special burdens placed on them by their history, even going so far as to claim that because of what had happened between 1933±45, they were morally obliged to resist Cruise and Pershing. From 1983 to 1986, he was President of the Àcademy of Arts' in West Berlin and made two contributions to a series of lectures on `The Poverty of the Enlightenment'. Ten major articles or written versions of speeches appeared in the national press, six in Die Zeit, between February 1980 and September 1989. `The Annihilation of Mankind has Begun', which is one of the two most important statements from the point of view of his literary work, was his acceptance speech for the Antonio-Feltrinelli-Prize in Rome in November 1982. He chose the New York PEN conference held in January 1986 to attack the Cold-War mentality. For all this activity he was still not sure whether or not anybody was listening to what he had to say. In the autumn of 1986 he left the comfort of the West for Calcutta.

Exotic encounters Grass ®rst travelled beyond Europe and North America when he went to Tanzania in the spring of 1971. On returning he wrote to Helen Wolff that he had enjoyed it so much that he did not want to come back.43 Over the next 16 years, culminating in the six-month stay in Calcutta in 1986±87, he sought out less well-off countries in both Africa and Asia. In May 1980 he wrote to Wolff that after three Asian trips he was more fascinated than ever by the continent and that he wanted to pursue this fascination further.44 The crisis of reason and the de®ciencies of Western civilisation are the central concerns of Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out published in 1980 which chronicles the third of these journeys. By turns ironically detached from his narrative and angrily involved in the politics which permeate it, Grass describes the debilitating worries conjured up in German minds by the new decade, transporting his story to Indonesia in order to put German concerns into a clearer perspective. Germany is dying, its young couples no longer having children in suf®cient numbers to replenish the population; the Third World, despite material hardship, disease and malnourishment, is thriving ± at least numerically. The future, which was Polish rather than German at the end of The Flounder, now belongs to the Ìndian, Chinese, African, cheerful children' who appear from nowhere on the last page, brimming with care-free humour and vitality, who `bring the streets to life, wave from windows, jump off walls, become innumerable', while the heroes of the story, òur childless teacher couple [. . .] don't





know what to say in German' (X:174). In The Call of the Toad the future belongs to Chatterjee's `World Society' of rickshaw-riding Bengalis, who, by the end of the The millennium, have injected the same vitality into Polish society in Gdansk. whole of the old worn-out continent of Europe needs to be revitalised by the energy and over¯owing fertility of the Third World. The hero and heroine of Headbirths, Harm and Do È rte Peters, `veterans of the student protest' (13), are both schoolteachers on the verge of middle age, who take an educational summer holiday far from home in the hope of ®nding fresh classroom material for their pupils back in Schleswig-Holstein and of settling the matter of whether or not to introduce a baby into such a threatening world. They travel under the auspices of specialist tour operators, `Sisyphus Travel', who have perfected a method of making money from similarly minded Western liberals, anxious to see `real life' in the countries they visit rather than follow the usual itinerary of ruined temples and sun-kissed beaches. The Peters' deliberations on whether to have a baby may sound at times rather pained, their readiness to slum it, literally, for a night or two in a shanty town may be self-righteous, but Grass captures an authentic tone. They are very de®nitely `post-utopians', disinclined to bouts of melancholic depression, having thoroughly outgrown the melancholy±utopia syndrome set out in From the Diary of a Snail. They may see no sense of purpose in the society around them ± `he misses clear perspectives, she bewails the lack of a general sense of meaning' (17) ± but they both strive in their personal lives, through teaching and grassroots political activism, to ful®l moral obligations, he a Social Democrat, she hitherto a Liberal, now pondering a vote for the Greens. Grass's gently ironic portrait of this so very German and so very earnest couple is the highpoint of the book. Grass and the Peters are not the ®rst Western intellectuals to travel to exotic climes in search of renewal. Like many of his predecessors, Grass sees Germany and Europe as old, if not ®nished, and seeks in the East an alternative to the soulless world of analytical Western thought, which, as its technological achievements threaten to smother authentic experience, now sits face to face with the limits of its own `progress'. But, as usual in modern times, the East refuses to surrender its promise and retreats endlessly from the foreigner's gaze: it is inscrutable, closed and oblivious to the Western traveller, infuriatingly unconcerned with the West as a whole, and all attempts to `help' in particular. It is also unable to offer assistance to those who visit. È rte interprets the bat which ¯ies into her hair as the ìncarnation of all the While Do fears of the Eighties' (96), it most certainly embodies the terrors of the unknown country in which she ®nds herself. Harm, on the other hand, taunts the massive volcano in Bali, to which local myths ascribe divine powers, and wants to bring Western Enlightenment to a society which languishes in the dark ages: Ì want to extirpate every superstition' (89), he shouts heroically at the inanimate mass, which steadfastly refuses to react. He is taught a lesson which Grass tried to teach Enzensberger a decade earlier. His efforts might be put to better use in his own country: `You should set yourself tasks which are suitable for you. You do not have to cope with the heavy casualties in the con¯ict on the island of Timor but with the election campaign back home' (98), he is told by a native of Bali.



158

Like Grass in Show Your Tongue, the Peters discover only what they came to ®nd and fail to ®nd answers to questions which can only be answered at home. They see themselves and their country re¯ected everywhere and are lost, emotionally, politically, as well as geographically. Their journey is consequently one of nondiscovery, their specially purchased vacuum-packed liver sausage, which slowly decomposes inside its wrapping, a present for a long-lost friend in Bali whom they never succeed in tracking down, supplies a suggestively ironic symbol of the sterility È rte ®nds the tour guide's of their interaction with the countries they visit. Do suggestion that she take a handsome local lad as a mate in place of her all too cerebral husband tempting but she turns it down. She puts off for the moment his vision of the future in which `Sisterly bonds will unite the continent. The South-East and the North-West will become one. Willingly, yes [. . .] even happily Europe will be dissolved into Asia' (155). In this western encounter with the exotic, there are two speci®c aspects which stand out. The ®rst is that, for Grass, the poverty he comes across in such alien places, exuding smells, colours and textures in such great abundance, can exert a curious aesthetic attraction, what he calls `the (unwritten) aesthetics of poverty' (SYT:71). The way shanty-town dwellers use up every scrap of material, knowing the practical value of every bit of rubbish for their `sheds which are made from rags, plastic tarpaulins, cardboard, and jute sacks' (SYT:71), he ®nds in a perverse way attractive ± perhaps reminding him of his own student sculptures. He sees terrible beauty in the debris and his only tangible reaction to the appalling degradation of Calcutta is to draw and describe the human misery all around him. Yet while his art ultimately digni®es rather than degrades or exploits its human subjects and on the whole the moral dimension keeps the aesthetic ®rmly in check, he comes perilously close to romanticising their otherness in time-honoured Western tradition. Grass strives to take what he sees on its own terms rather than his own, neither looking away from the squalor nor belittling those he meets with self-indulgent pity. He gives instead matter-of-fact reports of his encounters, testing his instrumental rationalism: `Just don't get abstract. Stay with the concrete. You are a witness' (DW:105). Calcutta is otherwise everything that Germany is not, vibrant, chaotic, sprawling, unpredictable and rich in variety and in its vitality it is apparently capable of eternal self-regeneration. Above all else it is real: ìn contrast to Frankfurt am Main there is life here' (VIII: 235), says the narrator of The Flounder. When he returns 15 years later, the uncertain aside has grown into a hymn to the shanty towns: `placed next to the glass-fronted pride of the Deutsche Bank beauty would immediately be on the side of the sheds, and truth too, even the future (SYT:35). His comparison drips with ennui, which was one of the reasons for his journey, but it turns on a rather dubious notion that poverty is morally more beautiful than the technological structures which glorify the big Frankfurt banks. Show Your Tongue had a predictably bad press. As Der Spiegel had even sent a reporter to `spy' on Grass's movements in the sprawling Bengali metropolis, the magazine's panning of the book was pre-programmed. In other sections of the increasingly hostile media, his reasons for leaving Germany, his failure to stay longer





in the Calcutta slums, and his choice of subject-matter in this diary-cum-travelogue, were all held up to ridicule. It rapidly became a common-place for inter-cultural critics to say that his Westerner's gaze had alighted only on the objects he had wanted to see, or even, that his reactions were little better than `colonialist'.45 This misses the point of what he wanted to do. India as seen by Indians is, of course, a very different place, but what concerned Grass was the link between himself, a campaigner for justice and a bearer of Western Enlightenment tradition, and the mass proverty for which Mother Teresa's Calcutta had become synonymous. If there is a connection between Western prosperity and Third World poverty, this is a valid subject for inquiry. Grass discovered that his Western learning failed him at every turn and he went back to Germany aware that if he was going to make a difference, he would make it there, not on the Indian sub-continent. Yet in exploring this issue he once again displeased a sensitive specialist interest group with a growing lobby that was based not only in western universities. His visit to Nicaragua in September 1982 had been a rather different undertaking: he stayed for only a week as an of®cial guest of the three-year-old Sandinista regime. His decision to accept the invitation and his overwhelmingly positive report on the visit, which included a tour of a `model prison', gave rise to a spat with the Peruvian novelist and essayist, Mario Vargas Llosa. The right-wing German press leapt on Vargas Llosa's criticsms, adding more of their own. It gave them a heaven-sent opportunity to accuse Grass of being soft on Communism, a charge to which he had hitherto been quite impervious. Seventeen years later, after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize, the London Spectator dug up the affair in an article remarkable for its author's recall of the most unlikely details. In it he attempts to smear both Grass and the Nobel Prize itself in time-honoured McCarthyite fashion. Grass tested the patience of his staunchest supporters, however. Even the editor of the critical edition of his collected works, the otherwise faithful commentator Volker Neuhaus, takes evident exception to this `revolutionary tourism'.46 In one sense, the ill-tempered debate with Vargas Llosa was surprising. If there is one writer in recent times who was meddled in politics more than Grass himself, it is Vargas Llosa, who, in 1990, even stood for the Presidency of Peru. Their exchanges, which rumbled on for the best part of four years, centred on Grass's support for a revolutionary regime whose record on human rights and free speech, the Peruvian argued, Grass would have condemned had it pertained anywhere in his native Europe. That Grass had been an of®cial guest did not help his case. Grass's point, however, was that the Sandinistas had achieved much in three years, that they had replaced a vicious US-backed dictatorship, and that their wish to be indepedent of both Washington and Moscow was genuine. Like SolidarinosÂcÂ in Poland, they represented a possible `third way' between the two superpowers. Vargas Llosa and Grass did not part on friendly terms at the end of their contretemps, but both in fact used Nicaragua to put foward arguments whose relevance was closer to home. From his youthful days as a fan of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa had developed into a ®erce, though liberal, anti-Communist. For him, as for Ronald Reagan, Nicragua was allied to Cuba which was allied to the Soviet Union. No possible good could come from this unholy constellation. Western intellectuals who supported Nicaragua indulged



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revolutionary fantasies which could ®nd no outlet in their rich homelands. Grass, on the other hand, had always hated Èither/Or' arguments and binary oppositions (Goethe/Rasputin; Utopia/Melancholy; masculine/feminine) and sought to overcome the US/USSR divide in just the same way he or his ®ctional characters had overcome others. It was possible, contrary to what Vargas Llosa subsequently claimed, to live and work in the Soviet bloc as a writer and not be a supporter of the regime; and it was possible for the Nicaraguans to steer a path independently of Castro and Brezhnev. These were essentially German, or at least European, arguments. Grass would soon have the opportunity of making his point on his native soil.

Fiction against the bomb: The Rat After producing four books in relatively quick succession during the 1970s (From the Diary of a Snail, The Flounder, The Meeting in Telgte and Headbirths), Grass decided to give himself a break from writing. He reported to Helen Wolff on 29 April 1981 that it did him good to have time for drawing and etching and, especially, as he had abandoned it for a quarter of a century, sculpture. Sixteen months later he announces that the break has refreshed him ± he had also been producing lithographs and modelling in clay ± and that he has `not been so relaxed and happy for a long time'. Yet storm clouds are gathering and `what is going on in the world ± either on my doorstep or taking a view of the big, frightening picture ± can hardly make anyone happy'.47 The hotting up of the Cold War was bound to feature in his ®ction pretty soon. He picked up his pen once more in September 1982 for a report on his visit to Nicaragua. But it was his acceptance speech for the Feltrinelli Prize in November, `The Annihilation of Mankind has Begun', which signalled the direction his literary work would take. He also seems to have missed standing in the limelight. He told Wolff before setting off for Rome to receive the award: Ì am looking forward to the operatic spectacle; the Italians are the only ones who know how to honour poets'.48 By June 1983, he had begun work on the `rats project', although progress was extremely slow.49 A year later, however, he was working on the ®rst typed version and a year after that was preparing the fourth and ®nal version for printing.50 He recalls that The Rat `was supposed to be a book which took up old stories once more in order to deliver them to the newest of all catastrophes' (FD:267). It is a book about all sorts of related endings which are subsumed in the Ultimate Ending of the end of the world. It was thus tempting to see it as the author's personal leave-taking from his own ®ctional world, his Àdieu Welt', especially in such a valedictory poem as `Taking Leave' which he recites frequently at public readings. Oskar Matzerath, who reappears as a 60-year-old video impresario, is ®nally laid to rest; and the Flounder's story is shown to have taken the bleakest of turnings and the hopes for the future at the end of the novel have proved illusory. Had Eastern Europe not crumbled and the Cold War not ended in 1989, The Rat could have seemed a ®tting last word on the terrible course of European, speci®cally German, history in this century. Reality, for once (and for the time being), had a happier ending and the changed political





circumstances inspired Grass to continue writing after all. Until the atomic threat was removed, however, it seemed to him that the history of this century, which began in Sarajevo in 1914, continued in Danzig in 1939, would enter its ®nal, most violent, and briefest chapter on the German±German border. No-one at the time could say for certain that Grass was wrong. The Rat expresses by literary means ± stories, images, fantasies and parables ± much of what Grass had said in pamphlets, articles and lectures. It is a vehicle for ideas and opinions, much in the manner of Voltaire's Candide or Swift's Gulliver's Travels, even though Grass negates the implicit belief of the eighteenth-century Enlighteners that satirical literature might embarrass its target, or serve otherwise as a force for general human improvement. Satirists historically knew that they enjoyed one advantage over their powerful opponents who could lock them up and ban their books, and that was that their satires, if they were good enough, would be read by future generations. Time was on their side and posterity would judge in their favour. Grass had now stopped believing this and The Rat for this reason is a satire on satire, which explains the `silliness' of some of the stories: the smurfs who come to life after grandmother Koljaiczek's 107th birthday; the image of Madonna and Child created by Oskar and his grandmother and venerated by the post-human rats; the ratchildren of Hamelin; or the antics of some of the fairy-tale characters. The author no longer believes in his own satire. There was also a limit to what could be usefully said on nuclear disarmament, the threat of nuclear war or the apparently related danger of environmental destruction, and those limits were often reached in the press, in pamphlets, in technical literature or even in parliament. For this reason, The Rat in its totality is the least challenging of his novels. In attempting to renew the Enlightenment project, Grass takes full account of the almost impossible task of pitting words, stories and ideas (an Enlightener's only weapons) against what appeared to be the inexorable human march towards atomic oblivion. This is ®ction against the Bomb: `because I want to use words to postpone the end' (XI:16). When he imagines delivering a speech to the Bundestag in which he gives mock-praise to the neutron bomb in the manner of Swift's A Modest Proposal, he thanks his listeners for their èloquent absence' (240). No-one is listening any more. The despairing cries of Oskar and the She-Rat could be the author's own: If chickens had laid square eggs like dice, human beings would have called them progress, she mocked; and he thundered [. . .] Do rivers have to ¯ow uphill and mountains turn upside down for you to understand? 321 Knowledge of his own powerlessness does not mean that Sisyphus will ever give up. He continues às if' someone out there is still reading and listening (as in the real world outside his text they were). Facts also fail to impress too, because `human beings are fed up with documentaries. So much reality wears them out' (84). But the idea that the cartoon smurfs and the fairy-tale ®ctions might still succeed where hard facts and warnings have failed is an illusion. If the world does destroy itself it will not be because its cynical inhabitants were under-informed. The disciples of the



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Enlightenment have done everything they can, but nothing has worked. Dead Wood, the third part of what Volker Neuhaus calls his `trilogy of the apocalypse', consists of drawings juxtaposed with sparse quotations from a variety of sources, documentary and literary. There is no original text from the author himself: words have had their chance and failed to serve their purpose. There is no point in saying anything more. The Rat revolves around a duel of words and stories between the last survivor of the human race and his dream-world partner, spokeswoman of the rat population, the erstwhile companions and now successors of mankind. While it is unclear at times, even to the narrator, who is actually dreaming about whom and what is fact and what fantasy, by the ®nal sections of the book it has become clear that the postHolocaust world of the rat has gradually swallowed up the narrator's human ®ctions, one after the other. The narrator is ®ghting for his life: `What did my ``No'', my `Ì am'', `Ì still am'' help me? Her voice was louder, triumphed: you are gone, she said, gone!' (32). The narrative is founded on the clash between the She-Rat's cold reportage, explaining the rationale to the pre- and post-history of the world's end, and the fantasies and ®ctions of her human companion. She speaks of homo sapiens and their accomplishments as historical phenomena ± Òver! she said. You existed once. You have been, remembered as a delusion' (10) ± referring to all promises of doing better next time in the imperfect subjunctive ± `you would have and you would have'. The moment has passed, time has run out, there is no hope. The SheRat calls the years between 1945 and World War Three, the only war in the history of mankind to be named in advance, simply `the inter-war period'. There is nothing and no-one left apart from colonies of rats and those ruins of human habitation which have remained unscathed thanks to the technology of the neutron bomb ± the ultimate capitalist weapon because it kills people but leaves real-estate and cultural monuments unscathed. The She-Rat differs most from the Flounder in her own position and in¯uence visaÁ-vis world history. Whereas he started off centre stage and only gradually lost his command of events, she never gained the ear or the respect of humanity. She now only appears in a dream, almost as an afterthought after it is all too late. The carefully balanced narrative nexus of The Flounder has been obliterated: there is now no stability and no centre, which is why the several narrative strands have no essential link to one another and all retell the same basic tale. They are kept going only by dint of the narrator's will until even he can no longer resist the ®nal and terrible endpoint and suffers ignominious dismissal at the She-Rat's command. After his con®dent opening sentence, Àt Christmas I wanted a rat for myself', he gradually fades from the centre to be pushed out of history altogether, like the male narrator at the end of The Flounder. If he controls all his strands of narrative at the beginning, he is soon forced to allow the She-Rat to dictate what goes on in his text, trapped in his space-capsule orbiting the earth after the atomic explosion has occurred, he is one of the most `de-centred' narrators in the history of the novel and drifts ever further out of reach from his stories, miles above the ground of reality ± or at least what used to be reality. Telling stories, an existential and moral necessity in Dog Years, is all there is left for a Sisyphean narrator to do.





The Rat is another narrative experiment with Grass's abiding theme, temporal perspective. He has devised once more a new narrative standpoint. The tales do not stand in any dynamic relation with each other, as they had done in The Flounder, but follow instead a linear trajectory, ending abruptly and inevitably with `the Big Bang'. The dif®culties of writing against the passing of time with no promise of a future are thus internalised in the text. In The Rat, everything is simultaneous which also means that everything has already happened and that the premises of linear narrative have been invalidated. Neuhaus explains that Grass researched the Christian and Judaic tradition of apocalyptic writing and sought to imitate it insofar as he presented two aeons existing side by side with one another, the post-human aeon of the She-Rat next to the still-existing world of the narrator.51 The story of human life on earth has in fact already ended once the narrative begins. Each of the ®ve major narrative strands, concerning Oskar Matzerath, the fairytale forest, the painter Malskat, the feminist-scientists measuring pollution in the Baltic Sea, the rat-children of Hamelin, as well as the post-human section depicting a society of rats and genetically constructed rat-people or Watsoncricks, concern a last-ditch attempt to rescue humanity from the brink of destruction. This would ful®l the Enlightenment promises of Lessing's The Education of Humankind, which is mentioned on the very ®rst page. Lessing's account of the progress of reason, which presumed a benevolent higher being and an endless amount of time, as the programme was to be perfected in eternity, is another Enlightenment `grand narrative' which has served its time.52 The ethic which inspires the ®gures in each of the ®ve stories is a counter-ethic to that of technological reason headed by the bumbling German Chancellor, who with his passion for Buttertorte is a clear pastiche of Helmut Kohl. The rats are not the only would-be Enlighteners: Oskar, head of the `Post-Futurum' video company, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm themselves, `Special Minister for Environmental Protection' and State Secretary responsible for ìncreasing Forest Damage' (117) respectively, the forger Malskat, and the evil stepmother with her magic mirror all proffer advice, predict what will happen and use their various artistic media as means of education. Contained in these various `lessons' is a parable of history. Rats have been present since the beginning of time, feeding off the garbage of war, the corpses and litter left behind by the human armies. Because they perform this intrinsically useful function, human beings have always reviled them, called them vermin, and done their best to exterminate them completely. This is indicative of a fatal imbalance, which neutered Racine's creative genius in Grass's 1960 poem. Rats are the presumed antithesis or persecuted Òther' of mankind ± history's eternal Jews. They survived both the Great Flood and the atomic `Big Bang' by burying themselves in the ground and have been present at every major historical event and calamity. Never have human beings noticed them except to blame them (falsely) when things have gone wrong. Always they have written rats out of history. Yet unlike human beings, rats have known both how to adapt to changed circumstances and when to abandon a sinking ship. The con¯ict between the principles of `rattishness' and `humanity' has underlain the development of history from the beginning; the cry, `The rats are our misfortune', resounded from the Black Death down to the Third



164

Reich. Only once man and rat have come together does humanity have a chance of survival. Once this union has been achieved through progress in the practical application of genetics, all will be well and `the crooked timber, which the philosopher Kant said, symbolises humanity for all time, can, we know, ®nally be straightened' (188).53 In the thirteenth century, the children of Hamelin perish because they sought social and sexual union with the rats (which the punk children shortly before Ùltimo' try to emulate) and are punished by the frightened civic authorities of the medieval town. They offer one of several utopian alternatives to a doomed society and it is crushed (as usual) at its very inception. The medieval ratchildren, depicted in one of Malskat's friezes, ¯ee to the underwater city of Vineta to found a new civilisation there, usurping, however, in the process the existing utopian matriarchy. Twentieth-century history is integral to two stories: that concerning the fresco painter, Lothar Malskat, exposed for artistic fraud during `the phoney Fifties', while the real counterfeiters, Adenauer and Ulbricht, prospered; and that following the voyage of Die Neue Ilsebill. Malskat is the latest addition to that line of fools in Grass's ®ction which had culminated most recently in Gelnhausen. He is, metaphorically speaking, jester at the dual courts of Bonn and East Berlin. His fake Gothic bestiaries, which he pretends to have uncovered and restored, deceive everybody for two decades. They contain more `truth', however, than any `genuine' work of art because they can be read as coded warnings of the atomic apocalypse, the immediate causes of which Grass traces to the years immediately following 1945. Malskat's fraudulent frescoes are certainly more honest than the policies pursued during that decade of Cold War confrontation and German reconstruction. He articulates a valuable `counter-speech': òh if they had only let his pictures alone, especially as he revealed the truth, and repealed the true swindle [. . .] the mess of the state founders' (429). All artists, however, should recognise Malskat as a cousin, even those who do not deal in forgeries, because all art is imitation of the truth. Oskar too warns his readers of his inherent untruthfulness on the ®rst page of The Tin Drum; Pilenz, Amsel, the narrative voice in The Flounder, and most spectacularly the foolish Gelnhausen all have problems with the `truth'. Making up stories is one childhood habit Grass has never outgrown. His narrators' slipperiness and ability to embellish the facts are what makes them human and what makes their texts `real'. Whereas `truth' in the hands of the powerful is a weapon of oppression, literature is an instrument of liberation. With Malskat, Grass takes this insight to an extreme: Malskat's disgrace and punishment for forgery is equal to the banishment of poets from Plato's Republic. Grass varies the moral of Malskat's story in the fairy-tale sequence. Fairy tales are a metaphor for the imaginative and humane potential of literature, supplying once again `the other truth' to the world of reason. Without this counterbalance humanity cannot survive `because with the forests, [. . .] the fairy tales will die out too' (17). Consequently, the fairy-tale characters (Snow White, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin and their associates) are the sole source of resistance to the suicidal policies pursued by the country's leaders ± `but in the Grimms' forest resistance is growing' (240) ± and a delegation sets off for Bonn to capture the government. Fact and





fantasy are in open con¯ict and for a brief moment the `fairy tales' are in control: `Bonn is without a government. We, the fairy tales, have seized power!' (334); Àll power to the fairy tales!' (357). Their power is shortlived, of course, and their utopian refuge, laden with all the Romantic associations only a German forest has, is bulldozed down and the government rescued. Force triumphs fatefully over fantasy once more. The legendary Vineta is a further potential site of resistance. This lost Atlantis on the bed of the Baltic, which ± so Grass's version of the legend has it ± will one day be rediscovered, redeemed and restored `by women, of course, ®ve in number, one of whom will have Slavic ancestry and be called Damroka' (97), is said to have been the richest and largest city in Europe in pre-medieval times. It was built on the island of Usedom and had a rich mixture of religious and ethnic af®liations (Heathen and Christian, Slavs and Germans). There are two accounts of its downfall: according to the ®rst, tensions between rival ethnic groups led to a war in which the whole city was destroyed, plundered and later swallowed by the sea; according to the second, the population was engulfed by the waters as divine retribution for avarice and lascivious living. The associations with a lost matriarchy are all invented by Grass.54 Like the children of Hamelin, whom Malskat depicts entering Vineta, and the modern punk children, the women from Die Neue Ilsebill appear to show a route to historical salvation. They all supply a pre®guration of the (false) utopia of the rat The past and future utopian project ± the matriarchal people in post-human Gdansk. society of Vineta, which the feminists try to re-establish in the present ± fails for reasons all too familiar from history: the matriarchal Vinetan order in the Middle Ages is overthrown by the invaders from Hamelin; the moment the feminists rediscover the legendary city the ®nal explosion occurs. Grass originally wanted to call the novel The Sea or The New Ilsebill (FD:263) and thus hints that the Baltic voyage undertaken by Damroka and her crew of feministscientists was his starting point. It is probably the most rewarding of the several stories and links The Rat not only to The Flounder but, through the sinking of the refugee ship, Wilhelm Gustloff, to The Tin Drum as well. Disasters are somehow more complete at sea and the German word Untergang, which suggests decline, doom and disaster all at once, is most vivid with reference to a stricken ship. Grass's message for the imperilled Spaceship Earth is most convincing too in his account of ships and shipwrecks from history, from which rats, according to the proverb, are the ®rst and so often only ones to escape. In one of his fantastic video ®lms, Oskar depicts the Swedish invader, Gustavus Adolphus, landing with his troops on Usedom and begins to manufacture a complicated allegory of never-ending human con¯ict, completed later by the narrator. There are two other images of a violent maritime past in Oskar's ®lm: the voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet to the Paci®c in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904±5, where it was promptly sunk; and the sinking of three ships in 1945, including the Wilhelm Gustloff, loaded either with German refugees or concentration camp prisoners, by British bombers or Soviet torpedoes in the closing stages of World War Two.55 The account of the Russian Fleet's progress suggests the pointlessness of con¯ict and the fragility of existence. After sailing half-way round the globe, the glory of the Russian



166

Navy was blown out of the water as soon as it arrived in the Eastern Paci®c. The second image is the most important and Grass gives further details later in the novel. The Cap Arcona was carrying thousands of concentration camp prisoners who had been evacuated from the camp at Neuengamme near Hamburg as the Germans attempted to extinguish all evidence of their machinery of death from the advancing Allies. They were then killed by their would-be liberators, the British, who took the ship to be a military target, ®ve days before hostilities ceased. Prisoners from Stutthof, who had been evacuated in large open barges, were massacred on the same stretch of coast in Schleswig-Holstein. As they struggled to the land, expecting to ®nd freedom, they were rounded up and shot by German forces, a few hours before the arrival of the British. He makes these separate disasters into one single episode, which provides him with an exemplum of past horror ± the apparently fatal cycles of historical suffering. The episodes also pre®gures the atomic con¯agration, which in contrast to the Biblical apocalypse, offers no hope of a better world to come. Grass contrasts these images of death with images of secular or utopian redemption from the misery of human history, as he does throughout the novel. The terrible sinkings of the Wilhelm Gustloff and the Cap Arcona are placed in a temporal complex, involving past, present and future, where the awfulness of the past negatively pre®gures a utopian future. As Damroka and her colleagues begin their scienti®c mission, they cast anchor in È beck Bay, where Siggi, FraÈnki and `das MaÈxchen' had earlier caught the fabulous Lu talking ®sh. Damroka still holds secret confabulations with the Flounder, although he himself never comes to speak in the novel as his mission has failed and his active role in human affairs ®nished. His honeyed words to the female sex turned out to be `hopes and wonderfully pretty promises'; his changing sides had no effect for `the gentlemen still have their hands on the controls' (63). Die Neue Ilsebill was launched in March 1900 but ordered by a Hamburg ship-owner in October of the previous year, the date of Oskar's mother's conception on the potato ®eld. The freighter's fate mirrors the course of twentieth-century history and at the end of World War Two she too was used to evacuate refugees but escapes the violent end of the Wilhelm Gustloff and Cap Arcona in order to supply an image of hope and possible salvation on its ®nal mission in the post-human era. The women attempt to make good the terrible actions of the Swedes in the Thirty Years' War and of others in all previous wars, which have now become an inverted Blochian Vorschein of future harmony, rather than a pre®guration of more horror. The ship's charred wreck carries the Rat where their arrival is greeted by the pealing of bells and the People to Gdansk promise of the new era. But this is only an ironic image of debased redemption because the Rat-People soon adopt the habits and faults of their human predecessors ± like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm upon whom they are based. The same ship had also carried the ®ve feminists to the promised matriarchy of Vineta as the human world ended. Like all the other ®gures in the novel, Damroka and her companions are poised between two realities: the polluted Baltic, which is both the object of their scienti®c investigation and the scene of past horror, and the dream (inspired by the Flounder) of the lost matriarchy of Vineta. The women do indeed ®nd their utopia but their entrance to the city, augured by the siren-like





singing of the jelly-®sh, coincides exactly with the ®nal unthinkable explosion. The terror of fact once again triumphs over fantasy. The women undo what Adorno and Horckheimer describe as Odysseus' fateful trick of deceiving the sirens, thus denying nature and overcoming the allure of myth, to begin the use of reason as a tool of domination. The GDR coastal patrol guards (all male) are unable to hear the singing, the `choruses of jubilation which greet ``Die Neue Ilsebill'' and guide the ship's progress' (252). The women now follow the `Medusa song' (251), walking down mysteriously to the lost city where they meet the children-rats from Hamelin. The women `take back' the harm done by the male Odysseus, but it is now too late and at the moment they enter the city they realise that rats are already there, `that there is no refuge anywhere any more' (314). The `Big Bang' resounds and they are burnt to a cinder. All movement towards a better world, a new start is thus negated. The Rat failed to capture the public imagination or provoke controversy. The fact that it did not upset anybody, in such startling contrast to so many of his other publications, is, given the subject matter, probably its greatest failure. The novel did È nter Ratte.56 give rise to a rather tedious parody, however ± Der Grass by a certain Gu The Rat generated hostile reviews in Der Spiegel, Stern, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Die Welt; however, Grass more than the novel itself was the object of scathing criticism. The comments hit home and clearly hurt him. He felt that there was something which made them quite different from the attacks he had sustained in the 1960s. A few months after the novel appeared, he wrote to Helen Wolff: You know, dear Helen, that I do not incline to moaning but I can con®de in you that the large number of sustained attacks ± it began with the PEN-Congress in New York, carried on in the Federal Republic and resulted in horri®c character assassinations when The Rat appeared ± has not left me unscathed. In boxing, one would say: he's reeling. My journey to Asia, which I have been looking forward to for so long and which I wanted to embark on for serious reasons, now has an additional urgency: I am running away. It is true that since the days of The Tin Drum I have got used to taking ¯ak ± early fame brought with it envy and malice ± but the tone they use for me now is of a different quality. They want to stamp on what I have to say and they are succeeding.57 It did not help either that Grass had missed the peak of public anxiety over atomic war. Mikhail Gorbachev had arrived in the Kremlin, people became optimistic that lasting cuts in atomic weaponry could be achieved, a peace treaty signed, and war averted. Had Grass written his novel seven years earlier and averted the Germans to their danger, its impact could have been immense. At the end of the 1980s it seemed that Grass, at the age of 60, had reached the end of his literary career and he signalled as much himself. In The Rat, he had put his characters to bed ± and not only that, his whole poetic world had been obliterated in a puff of atomic smoke. The Rat was the end of a project that had begun with The Tin Drum, which is why there are more references to his ®rst novel than there are in any of his other works of ®ction. After German reuni®cation, which transformed all domestic and international issues overnight, Grass's concerns suddenly all seemed quaintly



168

historical. Unlike Harm and Do È rte Peters, the citizens of the GDR needed no lessons in vitality to bring down their regime and initiate the break up the whole postwar settlement in Europe. The threat of a new world war evaporated. Thanks either to anti-pollution measures or to natural adaptability, even the German forests proved more resilient to Waldsterben than Grass had suggested. The causes of Third-World poverty also seemed suddenly more complicated than they had in the wake of decolonisation, when Brandt had compiled his North±South Report. This all meant that a mere four years after publication, the outline of history in The Rat looked quite outdated. Even the omniscient Flounder had apparently been outwitted.




5

The galloping Weltgeist Grass should have been left stranded by the historical changes of 1989±91, as ± mercifully ± he was proved so overwhelmingly wrong. Yet the very opposite proved to be the case. The next ®ve and a half years turned into one of the busiest and most productive phases of his entire career. The reason was simple: he could now write once more on what had always really been his favourite theme: Germany and the Germans. Ideology was also back in fashion ± the monetary ideology of the market place: as communism had been ®nally and utterly discredited, the economic values of the free market were set to reign unchallenged. The old sceptic could hardly let that pass without a ®ght; and ®ght he was determined to do. The year before the fall of the Berlin Wall found Grass quite coincidentally on the German±German border in the Harz sketching stricken trees for Dead Wood: the threat to the German forests was a pan-German phenomenon. Like everyone else he followed the momentous events in Eastern Europe with amazement: from midsummer 1989 they took a series of increasingly dramatic turns, each one more unexpected than the last. The ®rst climax came in Peking on 4 June when the Chinese government massacred pro-democracy protestors on Tiannamen Square, the same day as ice-breaking elections in Poland which resulted in a resounding vote for Solidarnos c , the independent trade-union movement born in the shipyards of This conjunction neatly and bloodily illustrates the dual character of this Gdansk. year of revolution, the mixture of threat and promise, fear and hope that spread across the Soviet bloc like a contagion. In August, the Hungarians relaxed border controls to allow GDR-citizens to walk into Austria, where they were greeted by none other than Otto von Habsburg, son and heir of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor. Hundreds more had taken refuge in the FRG embassy in Prague, demanding to be allowed to emigrate. In the GDR itself there followed the charade of the fortiethanniversary celebrations of the state's founding in October, the subsequent change in the leadership when Erich Honecker ®nally gave way to his crown prince, the deeply unpopular Egon Krenz. This in turn intensi®ed the weekly protest marches in Leipzig and elsewhere, culminating in the biggest political demonstration in German history on the Alexanderplatz on 4 November. The writers Christa Wolf, 170



Wrong Side of the Wende

Christoph Hein, Stefan Heym and Heiner Muller all spoke to the crowd in favour of reforming socialism: ìmagine we had socialism and no-one wanted to leave' opined Wolf, paraphrasing a slogan from the 1980s West German peace movement. Theo Wuttke, alias Fonty, the hero of Too Far A®eld who hates nothing more than crowds and ostentation, joins them, but his attempts to dampen down the euphoria are drowned out in the excitement. The grassroots campaigns in the GDR wanted to realise the Prague dream of 1968 by creating `socialism with a human face': freedom of expression and freedom to travel were among their prime objectives. There was initially no thought of throwing off communism, let alone of joining the Federal Republic or adopting free-market capitalism. Once `History' started to happen in earnest on Schabowski casually announced at the end of a 9 November, however, when Gunter press conference that travel between the two German states would no longer be restricted, everything changed at a stroke. Events, which had already been moving at an unprecedented pace, now went into overdrive: the demonstrators famously changed their slogan from Wir sind das Volk, meaning that they, the people, in whose name the GDR state had been founded, should at last have a say in how it was run, to Wir sind ein Volk, by which they meant the two Germanies should become a single political entity. Many West German politicians and intellectuals were caught out by these developments. The younger generation in particular did not know how to react, leaving it to those with a distant memory of a united Vaterland. When Grass turns the events into ®ction he picks out this age group once more. The main characters in Too Far A®eld and The Call of the Toad are all roughly contemporary with Oskar, Pilenz, Amsel and Matern. Martin Walser, born the same year as Grass, who had written about the pain caused by German division during the 1980s and been bombarded with criticism, now seemed vindicated. He greeted the move to national unity. The Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the same age as the novelists, native of Halle in Sachsen-Anhalt, and tireless advocate of Ostpolitik through the 1970s and 1980s, knew instinctively what he wanted and helped Helmut Kohl, just three years younger, to seize the initiative which he never subsequently relinquished. Kohl, a history graduate with a PhD in postwar politics, spoke ceaselessly of historical opportunities, determined to seize `the coat of history' as it swished past him, as Bismarck had done in 1870. What the Protestant Prussian had achieved through war, the Catholic Rhinelander would manage without spilling a drop of blood. All this horri®ed Gunter Grass. He did not like the way the original revolutionary movement had been hijacked by the nationalist uni®ers, nor the way the West dictated the terms of reuni®cation. Germany had existed as a single entity only once before, between 1871±1945, and the precedent, to put it mildly, was not auspicious. In December 1989 at the SPD's annual conference in West Berlin he revived his old idea of `two confederate states', this time, adapting Gorbachev's proposal, occupying adjacent rooms ìn the European House' (XVI:227). What he feared was the prospect of national uni®cation under terms decided by the nationalists, which appeared to mean a repeat of 1870 rather than a second attempt to make 1848 work.



Wrong Side of the Wende 171


Grass was as busy as he had been at any time in his public career. Before the conference speech in December, there had been a major interview in the Spiegel a week after the fall of the Wall, followed by a heated TV-discussion in February 1990 with the magazine's founding editor, Rudolf Augstein, whom Grass had lightly satirised all that time ago in Dog Years. This was rushed out in paperback form the following month, as well as a collection of his comments on the national question from the 1960s to the 1990s.1 By coincidence, Grass delivered the Frankfurt Lecture on Poetics in February, a national annual event, which now had far greater political resonance than otherwise would have been the case. While he would quite possibly have given it the same title and picked the same theme had he spoken the previous year, `Writing after Auschwitz' now helped to push home his anti-uni®cation message: `Whoever is thinking about Germany at the moment, and looking for answers to the German question, has to think about Auschwitz' (XVI:233), he intoned. The war and the Holocaust still informed everything Grass said, perhaps even more powerfully than in the past. Mainstream liberal opinion, on the other hand, held that after more than 40 years of thinking about Auschwitz the Germans had come to some conclusions and that the rest of the world had no reason to fear a reuni®ed German state. At last something good was happening to them, something which brought them credit in the eyes of the world, at last the reminders of World War Two were disappearing. Grass saw it differently: `Writing after Auschwitz' ®lled two full pages of Die Zeit on 23 February, his second major article in three weeks in that newspaper. A paperback edition appeared in June. Another major Zeit-article followed in May, `What am I saying? Who is still listening?' In June he spoke at a meeting held in the historic Reichstag building for the campaign for a was duly printed democratically constituted Germany: `Report from Alt-Dobern' in the Frankfurter Rundschau. To mark uni®cation itself in October he spoke at another Reichstag meeting: À Bargain called the GDR', duly published in Die Zeit, became his best-known catch-phrase and was also issued in paperback. These high-pro®le speeches, interviews and articles add up not only to a coherently formulated critique of government policy but also to a heavyweight media presence which top politicians could well envy. The four pamphlets in 1990 were followed by another anthology the following year which included three more major newspaper articles.2 In June 1992 came his ®rst literary treatment of the Wende, as the days of heady change came to be known, the doom-laden The Call of the Toad. It was savaged by Reich-Ranicki in the ever more hostile Spiegel and received lukewarmly by other reviewers, altogether a dress rehearsal for the slaughter of Too Far A®eld three summers later. In November 1992, Grass delivered a major speech on racism and intolerance, `The Speech on Loss', also issued as a paperback, which attracted all the more attention as it coincided with the arson attacks in Molln and Solingen which claimed the lives of eight Turkish Germans. His predictions of racist intolerance and a rise of the extreme Right seemed to be becoming reality in 1992. In 1993 he published 13 sonnets on the theme of Germany. He called them Novemberland as Germany had passed through so many historical convulsions in that month (the armistice and beginning of the Weimar Republic in 1918; Hitler's Bierkellerputsch in 1923, the Kristallnacht in 1938, and now the fall of the Wall).



172

There was also a book-length interview on the decision to alter the clause on political asylum in the Grundgesetz, a decision which had led to his resignation from the SPD in December 1992.3 At the end of August 1995 came Too Far A®eld. Grass contended that there was more than one option available to the nation in 1989±90, more than one form of co-existence imaginable. Brandt, however, had made SPD opposition to the process of full uni®cation extremely dif®cult by declaring that `what belongs together should be allowed to grow together', a resonant formulation which proved to be his last signi®cant political statement. Thus, when Grass began to articulate his critique of what quickly became a triumphalist West German takeover, he did not have, for the ®rst time in a public career which had spanned three decades, even the tacit support of his political mentor. But he enjoyed little open support from other quarters either, failing, also for the ®rst time, to join forces with colleagues by signing joint statements or sharing platforms. When it came to the general election in December 1990, which in the summer of 1989 Kohl seemed certain to lose to the clever Lafontaine, the Chancellor made hay with his opponents: while he played the national card with western voters, he promised instant wealth to easterners, `blossoming landscapes', a phrase he would come to regret. They both rewarded him. Lafontaine, on the other hand, had seemingly nothing to say ± often the fate of left-of-centre parties at moments of national crisis or grand decision-making ± except to warn of hastiness and the excessive cost. Part of the problem for Lafontaine was that, not only did he come from the Saarland, the most western part of West Germany which had not even been incorporated into the FRG until 1955, but, born in 1943, he had no memory of a united Germany. It was a term, like Vaterland, which he would have treated with the utmost caution if he had uttered it at all. Had Lafontaine won the 1990 election and formed a `red±green' coalition, his accession to the Chancellorship would have meant the passing of power to the generation of the `Sixty-Eighters', whose experience had been exclusively West German. The Greens themselves, the real inheritors of the Sixty-Eight spirit, were left high and dry in 1990, failing even to pass the 5 percent hurdle for the ®rst time in their brief history. Their rejection by the uni®ed German electorate was all the more cruel as they had merged with the GDR civil-rights campaigners, surely the most quickly discarded revolutionary vanguard in history. Of all the western parties, the Greens' failure to establish themselves in the East has been the greatest, despite this heroic alliance. There were no other sources of opposition to Kohl. Voices from the GDR had seemingly been discredited by having campaigned for a cause the masses had so overwhelmingly rejected when given the choice. The ideological war against the idea that the East had anything worth preserving had begun immediately the Wall was breached, which put the reformers on the defensive. The ®rst step was to break the self-con®dence of the very GDR population who had been responsible for the overthrow of the regime. The Western press all attacked the state's economic performance, industrial backwardness, and Stasi infestation. Drug abuse in sport was an even more convenient target. A year previously GDR athletes had beaten the two superpowers by topping the medals table at the Seoul Olympics, a remarkable





achievement for such a comparatively tiny state. The idea now that their athletes had bene®ted from illegal substances coursing through their bodies was a powerful symbol for the hidden rottenness of the whole state, riddled by an underground network of spies and informers. After athletes, writers had been one of the state's greatest assets in the eyes of the world. From June 1990, the beginning of the `Literature Quarrel' prompted by Christa Wolf's What Remains?, GDR writers came under concerted attack for supporting a state they believed in reforming rather than abolishing. Grass closed ranks with Wolf arguing that her `books had weight because broken lives spoke through them, and because the seduction of individuals by ideology was her constant theme' (XVI:272). While he failed to support the experimental poet and publisher Sascha Anderson when he was exposed as a Stasi agent, he had no time for Wolf Biermann's denunciation of him. In Too Far A®eld it is none other than Fonty who writes the reports on his amiable but rather super®cial young neighbours in the tenemented bohe me of East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg. As the summer of the `Literature Quarrel' wore on, Grass felt besieged. On 30 May he wrote to Helen Wolff that nobody much was listening to what he was saying.4 Peter Ruhmkorf went to lunch in Behlendorf on 1 August and reports that: GG feels utterly sidelined, dumped on the edge of history like a piece of old furniture [. . .] Told us how he had recently had to give an article on the imperilled state of the nation to El Pais because the Spiegel didn't want to print and Die Zeit ± `Yes, Die Zeit: ``this week we're unfortunately full ± next week too ± and you won't want to wait three weeks'''.5 The liberal consensus in foreign policy and relations between the two German states, which had held sway throughout Kohl's Chancellorship, had been swept aside. Grass's point was that the Right was intent on extirpating any idea of an alternative to free-market economics; the D-Mark was the measure of everything. He criticises the àrrogance', `triumphalism' and `high-handedness' practised by the `superior smart alecks and know-alls' (XVI:226) from the West and supports the notion that the GDR had paid the price for Nazism on behalf of all Germans. For this reason, he demands unconditional ®nancial compensation be paid to the GDR by the FRG, a form of Lastenausgleich, the word used for payments made by Bonn to individuals who suffered damage and losses during and immediately after World War Two, often concentration-camp survivors. With such ®nancial clout, the GDR could negotiate with the FRG over the future of Germany on an equal basis and not be held to ransom. His criticism took a number of forms, evolving as the situation itself evolved while showing consistency on key points. In December 1989, he supported the efforts of the GDR demonstrators to reform the socialist system. He seemed more inclined to applaud the reform communist Hans Modrow, who had replaced Krenz, than his own Chancellor. He even said he wanted to learn from the GDR population because they had won their freedom by taking to the streets, whereas freedom had been imposed on the FRG all those years ago by the Western allies. He thus invoked once more a preference for the grassroots democracy which he had championed in the 1960s. The second part of the comparison was hardly



174

new: `The Present of Freedom' (`Geschenkte Freiheit') was the title of his address on the fortieth anniversary of 1945. The ®rst part, however, was pure heresy. But Grass did not stop there, as he also wanted the SPD to learn from the democratic changes in Eastern and Central Europe: democratic socialists, a label he had often accepted for himself, could show social democrats the way forward. This brief text delivered in the heat of the moment contains the core of the arguments he developed over the next year and more. He was proved wrong on at least one point: contrary to his prediction, the Allies did indeed let the Germans unite. His fear that a united Germany would represent a danger to its neighbours has also so far proved unfounded. What Grass got right, however, required in®nitely more insight: Uni®cation in the form of annexation of the GDR would add up to a loss which could not be made up because, as far as the citizens of the other Germany, soon to be taken over, are concerned, nothing would remain of their identity which they had asserted under great duress and struggled for in exemplary fashion at the end. Their history would be swallowed up by the mind-numbing call to unity. XVI:228 He recognised that the people had to salvage something positive from their 40-year collective history, which meant the West would have to make compromises by settling for less than total ideological and economic victory. The GDR, always depicted as the bride in this hastily arranged marriage, had to be able to bring something from its past to the union, but its dowry was spurned, its trousseau cast aside by its rich new husband. A settlement based on consensus would entail discussion and interaction on all matters, from the most mundane to the most elevated, on schools and educational quali®cations, social security and property ownership, economic planning, health, abortion, childcare, holiday entitlements, the media, even traf®c regulations. On all these questions except the last the GDR was forced to adopt the FRG model: Easterners would say that the green arrow allowing cars to turn right at traf®c lights was all that they had left of their past. Resentment began to smoulder before the treaties were even signed. By May 1990, when Grass travelled to the cradle of the revolution in Leipzig, things had apparently been decided. The CDU had won the ®rst ever democratic elections held on GDR territory on March 18 and the two German states were set on the course to monetary union, `which had pushed aside the ``children of October'', those real revolutionaries, who, using non-violent means, had broken the power cartel of state and party' (XVI:265). Grass supported unequivocally their proposals for a new German constitution, a requirement conforming to the spirit if not the letter of the Grundgesetz, a point he never tires of reiterating. Having argued from the human perspective up to now, he attempted an economic forecast, which deserves more respect ten years after he made it than it earned at the time. He predicted that an exchange rate of 1:1 would bankrupt GDR businesses sooner rather than later. The Treuhand, the body designated to wind up GDR enterprises by either selling them off or closing them down altogether, would not serve eastern interests since




176


This hasty botch-up will not permit `what belongs together to grow together': rather it will increase the forty-year-old distance between the two sides: attracted by prosperity, rewarded with unemployment, the Germans on this side and the Germans on the other side will feel more alienated from one another than ever before. XVI:269 Grass called on the Bundesbank to veto monetary union and on President Weizsa cker to refuse to sign the legislation for it. He wanted all sections of society, the centre and the regions, the Bundestag and its GDR counterpart the Volkskammer, government and opposition, the churches and the trade unions, even `the much maligned intellectuals' (270) to decide together on what new form or forms the new Germany should take and what its constitution should be. Instead what Bonn was pushing through amounted to little more than an Ènabling Law' which resembled that of 1934.

Grass and the German Question, 1953±89 It is an apparently intriguing paradox that the most trenchant critic of reuni®cation should have made German unity and the slim prospects of uni®cation a dominant theme in his electoral speeches as far back as 1965. Even though Brandt's Ostpolitik then buried the issue for a generation, Grass sustained his own interest in the other German state through the 1970s and 1980s. His letters to Helen Wolff, where he invariably comments on his travel plans or reports on recent journeys, bring out how frequently he visited the other side of the Iron Curtain after his return to Poland in 1958. He experienced the drama of division from the other side in West Berlin, which he regarded, according to the blurb on the inside cover of the Penguin editions of his novels, às the city closest to the realities of the age'. He was resident in Berlin in June 1953 during the uprising in the Soviet Sector and in August 1961 when the Wall was built. Unlike other West German novels or plays with a crossborder theme, the action in The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising takes place exclusively in the òther' German state. He emulated this feat in Too Far A®eld. The building of the Wall prompted his ®rst public intervention in politics; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 is an event of equally devastating magnitude which infuses the anti-totalitarian theme of From the Diary of a Snail. In 1989, Grass could point to a succession of contributions to the subject of German±German relations, German nationalism, and uni®cation, which spanned



western ®rms coveted the GDR's retail and distribution system but not its industrial plant. He condemned the way the western corporate state bought out the nationalised industries in order to shut them, thereby eliminating a future source of competition, while pro®ting from the new market for their own consumer goods. The D-Marks that ¯owed east would return west immediately because easterners would spend them on western goods, resulting in a western boom and an eastern slump:

three decades. If there is a thread running through all his polemics, it is his support for GDR-citizens rather than the GDR-state, tempered by nagging criticism of the West. As Volker Neuhaus insists, the only thing Grass ever said in favour of the GDR was that the authorities deserved some credit for not following the Chinese example in 1989 by opening ®re on their own people, as they had done 36 years earlier.6 Grass's most extensive intellectual confrontation with Soviet-bloc Communism had come in a public exchange of letters with a Czech author and reform Communist, Pavel Kohout, which took place between the autumn of 1967 and spring of 1968.7 Kohout's hopes for his creed appeared to be vindicated when Alexander Dubc ek took over in January 1968. The fact they were dashed in August would not have given Grass any satisfaction. Their correspondence came about after Grass had responded to what quickly turned out to be a forged letter, ostensibly on behalf of Czechoslovak writers, suffering under the boot of the Communist regime, appealing to their Western colleagues to come to their aid. Peter Weiss and Heinrich also mentioned by name in the appeal, both smelled a rat. Grass dashed off a Boll, reply. Free speech and freedom from censorship were two issues which prevented him from ever having even a sneaking admiration for the Communist bloc, in contrast to colleagues such as Weiss. At the same time, Grass does not want to be boxed into an anti-Communist position and seeks a middle path between the two ideological monoliths. He did not always have time for such niceties, however: the anti-Lenin polemic which so angered Bernward Vesper in January 1971 could have been written by a Pentagon Cold Warrior (see pp. 97±8). Interpretation of recent history takes up most of the correspondence with Kohout: Grass could not accept that Stalin's deeds, which matched Hitler's in his view, could in any way be excused. Kohout uses sophistry to argue the opposite. Grass had also enjoyed numerable contacts with colleagues on the other side of the border. In May 1961, he attended the German Writers' Congress held in East Berlin. Here he had declared himself ®rmly on the side of the West because, so he argued, while freedom of expression might be endangered there, it did at least exist, in contrast to the East. It was because of his contribution to this congress that it came to the attention of both Richter and Brandt that Grass had the stuff of a homo politicus.8 This becomes Grass's line in the 1960s: while his colours remain pinned to the Western mast, his attacks on the other side are balanced by admissions of failings in his own camp. After accepting Hans Mayer's invitation to give a reading at the University of Leipzig in the spring of 1961, where he had caused trouble by mentioning Uwe Johnson, he took part in a broadcast discussion between GDR authors, including leading apparatchik Hermann Kant, and members of the Gruppe 47 at Richter's Literary and Political Salon in the Erdener Straûe in March 1964. Although this was intended to be the ®rst in a series of such meetings, no more took place after intervention by the Stasi.9 Later in the same year he attended the Conference of the Weimar Academy to discuss `German Reality re¯ected in Contemporary German-language Literature'. He insisted once again on making a point in favour of Johnson by reading from The Third Book about Achim before bringing up the taboo subject of his next play, the uprising of June 17 1953.





According to press reports he was the most provocative of the western guests.10 After The Plebeians the GDR did not invite him again. East Berlin remained, however, an integral part of the divided city and he continued to meet GDR-colleagues, debate with them, and support them against the authorities he repeatedly denounced. It is no doubt why Johannes Bobrowski informed the editor of the Stuttgart-based Merkur that one reason he did not want to review Dog Years was that Grass was regarded as a persona non-grata in East Berlin. The other reason was that they were friends.11 Grass was on friendly terms with a number of other GDR colleagues. In addition to Johnson, whose GDR experiences remained a source of inspiration for the rest of his days, Hans Mayer, who followed his student westwards in 1963, Hans Joachim Scha dlich and Erich Loest, an ex-Communist who had spent seven years in Bautzen jail, stand out. Mayer is the only contemporary apart from Richter who can be recognised in The Meeting in Telgte; he is present at Oskar Matzerath's sixtieth birthday party in The Rat; and his name is mentioned in Too far A®eld. Grass designed book covers for both Loest and Scha dlich and read extracts from Scha dlich's Attempted Proximity on his national tour to promote The Flounder in the autumn of 1977. He congratulated Loest publicly on his seventieth birthday in 1996; Scha dlich supplied Fonty's `day-and-night-shadow' Tallhover/Hoftaller in Too Far A®eld. Grass's second wife, Ute, must have been an even greater in¯uence than these ex-GDR friends. Born on Hiddensee, which the couple can make out on a clear day from their retreat on the Danish island of Mùn, she had come to the West at the age of 25 in 1961. Between 1973±76 Grass participated in regular meetings between East and West German authors which took place in private ¯ats in East Berlin. From the East came Scha dlich, Jurek Becker, Sarah Kirsch, Rainer Kirsch, Heinz Czechowski, Thomas Kunert, Sibylle Hentschke; from the West Peter Schneider, Hans Brasch, Gunter Christoph Buch, Christoph Meckel and Nicolas Born, whose death from cancer Grass movingly describes in Headbirths. They took it in turns to read to each other from their work in progress, Grass from The Flounder, Scha dlich from Tallhover. The East Germans had all moved West by the end of the decade. Grass himself was sometimes hindered by the authorities when they refused to grant him entry visas, as he recalled in 1998.12 The writers met even though they believed the security services were listening to them, suspecting that one of their number was secretly taking notes to pass on to the Stasi.13 After reuni®cation, when the Stasi ®les were made public, these suspicions, however, proved unfounded. Nonetheless he encounters ceased after Biermann's expulsion in 1976. Grass recalls in My Century that Biermann had rehearsed his Cologne concert, which so angered East Berlin that he was prevented from returning to the GDR, in Grass's workshop in Niedstraûe (MC:286±7). Grass's line on the national question changes over the years with the evolving international situation. In the 1960s he had accused the CDU of abandoning the GDR population by following a policy of Western integration and re-armament which had cemented division and helped bring about the Berlin Wall. This policy had been rati®ed with the German Treaty of 1955, which authorised the creation of the Bundeswehr, entry into NATO, and, until such hopes foundered on American



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opposition, the aim of acquiring atomic weapons. Founder membership of what became the European Economic Community followed. Grass quoted Erich Ollenhauer, who pointed out in December 1954 that `re-armament has been given a clear priority over reuni®cation' (XIV:205). In a 1965 election speech entitled (after Schiller) `What is the German's Fatherland?,' he contended that Adenauer's policies were `to the short-term bene®t of the Federal Republic and the lasting detriment of our GDR compatriots' (XIV:112±13). In 1965, one reason to vote for Brandt was that he would represent the disenfranchised East Germans. This meant that Western votes counted double: `We have the choice. On the other side, in Leipzig, Rostock, and Magdeburg, seventeen million compatriots are watching us' (XIV:107). The lip-service paid by CDU politicians both to uni®cation and to the restitution of the 1937 borders angered him intensely. From fear of displeasing the Heimatvertriebene, they would not publicly accept the postwar settlement which had deprived the combined GDR and FRG of one quarter of the prewar German territory. He knew all too well how dif®cult it is to accept these realities: Silesia, eastern Pomerania, East Prussia ± as someone who comes from there, I can only speak the truth through gritted teeth while tearing out my own hair: we have gambled them away, lost our chance, by taking on the whole world, we lost them. XIV:113 `Through gritted teeth' is an understatement, concealing one of the great creative tensions in his work: his emotional attachment to his home and his grief over its loss jostles with an understanding of German guilt and a rational appreciation of the justice of what happened. Reason wins out over emotion; guilt leaves no room for resentment. Yet he could still sympathise with his parents' and grandparents' generations who yearned to return permanently. His position hardens in one important respect: he did not suggest in the 1960s that the Germans deserved division because of the Holocaust, which he came close to saying in 1989±91. Grass wanted a peace treaty, followed by disarmament in both German states which could then form a confederation in which both parts retained a large degree of independence from one another: For the structure of the two German states is federal in its very nature. In both states this federal structure is con®rmed by law. Article number one of the GDR constitution still af®rms that: `Germany is an indivisible democratic republic; the are its foundation. . .'. But it is only in the Federal Republic that federal Lander this federalism has been able to have an effect and prove its lasting value. The other state, that is the GDR, shows its uniform Prussian colours and tries to distract attention from the existing differences, between Mecklenburg and Saxony, for instance. And yet federalism, that is a legally-anchored system where the individual states exist with one another, next to one another and, as far as citizenship of a single state is concerned, for one another, is the only basis for the two German states which can be upheld. These two German states have only so





far existed against one another. Thus the tradition of dualism has been continued to the point of splitting. Germany has rarely, and then only under duress, been a unitary national block by a federal system. On without the checks and balances provided by the Lander, the other hand, German history teaches us that the federal structure of our country has driven us again and again to a position of separatism right down to the present day. [. . .] It was not until the drastic remedy of Prussian nationalism, which produced results as extreme as they are well known, that Germany was uni®ed. We have not been able to ®nd a balance. Between nationalism and separatism there is, however, one possibility which we have used all too rarely: confederation, or the economically strong but politically and culturally loose association of the Lander. XIV:251 He never quite spells it out but this German confederation would have been militarily non-aligned, even demilitarised. To think like this was tantamount to treachery in the worst phases of the Cold War. In many ways, however, he was ®ghting yesterday's battles even in 1965 by invoking the German question at all. Adenauer had effectively won the argument in 1957 when he secured an absolute majority in the third set of general elections. Uni®cation was not really on the SPD agenda after that. In fact the party did everything it could to neutralise its weakness on the issue either by not mentioning it or by adopting the CDU line. For fear of losing votes the party disowned Grass's comments on the eastern provinces.14 Yet while he supported Ostpolitik wholeheartedly when Brandt came to power and no longer made reuni®cation a campaigning issue, he never lost sight of what was happening in the òther German state' in particular and the Eastern bloc in general. Too much of his past was bound up with it for that.

Burying the past or melting-pot utopia: The Call of the Toad It was not that he wanted to have it back. He wanted to be allowed to regret the loss. To be allowed to say, `wouldn't it be nice if we still had it!' That's what he wanted. (Martin Walser, Dorle und Wolf, 1987) It was not only East Germans and East Europeans who took delight in the sudden freedom to travel after 1989. Westerners raced eastwards too, some West Germans to visit their ancestral lands in East and West Prussia. Grass enjoyed his contacts east of in 1990 the Oder, receiving an honorary doctorate from the university of Posnan He found new readers in post-Wende Poland, and exhibiting his work in Gdansk. some of whom expressed disappointment when this `Polish author who writes in German' had seemingly abandoned his Polish theme in Too Far A®eld. Above all, it was in the ex-GDR itself that Grass found a new cause and a new base. In literary and thematic terms The Call of the Toad is a bridge between two worlds, that which ceased to exist on 9 November 1989, one week after the action of the



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novel begins, and the `New World Order' which replaced it, the ®rst action of which was the Gulf War which sours the mood of relative optimism in both Grass's postWende novels and is the subject of its own chapter in My Century. But Grass ducks addressing the internal consequences of reuni®cation in his ®rst work of post-Wende ®ction. He turns instead to German±Polish relations, the borders of the German nation state, immigration from beyond Europe set against expulsion from old German territories, racial harmony between Europeans and non-Europeans, and environmentalism. It is a liberal agenda for the new era, but in the solutions the book appears to advocate, Grass succeeds in forcing his liberal-minded readers to address their own unacknowledged prejudices on race and nationality. Remarkably, given his public statements, the sudden political changes do inspire a freshness of tone and a hopeful turn to the future. Alexander Reschke, the German ex-Danziger, now a professor of art history in Bochum, and his Polish ®ance e, Alexandra PiaÎtkowska, a restorer of gilded artifacts who was born in Polish Vilnius, now Lithuanian Wilno, both feel the full weight of history on their shoulders and decide to redress past wrongs through practical measures. Grass picks up a number of threads from previous works. Reschke and the unnamed narrator are old school chums, both expelled from Danzig in 1945, and it which once more provides Grass with a setting. The narrative frame, is Gdansk, constructed around the relationship between two former classmates, recalls that of Cat and Mouse insofar as one tells the story of the other after his death, although the anonymous narrator now claims to have no memory of his subject. The narrator in fact sounds suspiciously like Grass. He is a professional writer, which is why Reschke sent him a parcel of documentation and a covering letter suggesting he write up the story. Grass is back to doing one of the things he undoubtedly does best: chronicling the experiences of his generation. The narrator's role as collator and interpreter of information anticipates that played by the team of narrative archivists in Too Far A®eld. He compiles his report on the ill-fated `Polish-German-Lithuanian Cemetery Society' ± which in return for a fee enabled German expellees from the Danzig region to return to the land of their birth one last time for burial ± from photographs, receipts, bank statements, and a diary-cum-notebook sent to him by Reschke before his fatal honeymoon car accident. The similarities of theme and structure notwithstanding, Grass's handling of narrative time in a tripartite schema is original and central to the ways he expresses views in literary rather than ideological form. He transcends the purely programmatic arguments he had made in his articles in order to test his readers' liberal credentials, to explore ideas on cultural difference and cross-fertilisation, which are now embedded in a thoroughly literary context. The narrative invites doubt, irony and ambiguity by placing ideas in a constellation made up of human characters faced with the uncertainties, challenges and temptations brought about by historical upheaval, and juxtaposes the reality of the past and the present with imaginary visions of the future. For Grass's critics, the message of The Call of the Toad seemed to be simply and crudely that German revanchism was not dead and that today's Germans would (re-)colonise their eastern neighbours. This is not quite what happens in the text,





however. The British±Bengali rickshaw entrepreneur, Mister Chatterjee, the third most important ®gure ± who is modelled loosely on Salman Rushdie ± appears to be a mouthpiece for Grass's views. He turns out, however, to be highly dubious. In the portion narrated from the eve of the new millennium, it is Chatterjee's Bengalis who have taken over the Vistula Delta and the `New Germans' ± who have settled as a result of the Cemetery Society ± clearly belong to a bygone era. The key to assessing Chatterjee's vision of a multicultural `World Society' lies in the progressively shifting narrative vantage point. Grass describes another attempt to break out of the repetitive cycles of history into the future (the emergence of Chatterjee's `World Society'), reveals gradually the negative and authoritarian aspects of this attempt, and ends on an ambivalent note. The fact that hero and heroine are killed in a road accident after their ìdea to reconcile peoples' (XII:16) has disintegrated, prompts the narrator to end with the words, `let them lie there' (299). This ending either invalidates both their attempt to bring Poles and Germans together and their association with the `World Society', or it reinforces Chatterjee's case for a car-free, ecological future, which had been an integral part of his programme all along. The present is poised delicately between an awful past, the promise of change for the better and a fear that the mistakes and disasters of the past will recur, but the dynamics of the three forms of narrative time are belied by the deliberately unassuming tone. There is, ®rst, historical time, which encompasses the crimes of the past, the realities of 1945±89, and which has impinged on the lives of all the German and Polish characters. All events, the good as well as the bad, which take place in the outside world belong to historical time: the opening of the borders, the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Treaty between Germany and Poland that ®nally recognised the Oder-Neiûe Line, and towards the end, once events take a turn for the worse, the American-led war in the Persian Gulf. into a multi-ethnic city of the dead (Germans, Historical time has made Gdansk Russians, Poles, even Tartars), if not the living. Running parallel to this historical temporal dimension is personal time, which unfolds as the love affair between Alexander and Alexandra blossoms and they dream of working against history by repairing past wrongs. They want to put back the personal into history by helping people realise their personal aims. This attempt is defeated when others usurp their plan for ®nancial pro®t and then seemingly annulled when history claims them back on the last page. The causes of their failure are possibly to be found within themselves and can be traced to their all-too-human foibles: Alexander's facility with money is as ominous as Alexandra's residual bigotry. Finally, there is imaginary time, the truly literary, ®ctional realm which belongs to Chatterjee and which appears to offer an escape from the disasters of the past and the fears of the present. For a few months the two elderly lovers keep a step ahead of history. A week after the story commences when the Berlin Wall is breached, they come to hear `the hooves of the charging Weltgeist', which powers `the great events in politics' (76). Their peaceful plan was thus conceived before the spectre of an enlarged Germany became a reality, before the renewed disputes over the German±Polish border, and Initially all goes well and before Germans were allowed visa-free access to Gdansk.



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their concept, inspired by Alexandra's motto, `where politics ends and people begin' (33), seems vindicated. Their own growing affection for one another, free of past resentments and lingering rancour, corresponds to a new feeling of tolerance and harmony in Europe as a whole. Their union is clearly symbolic of something far greater ± the rapprochement of their two countries. Here too there are worrying signs, however, since Grass appears all too willing to deal in stereotypes: the German is male, better educated, and older than his Polish mistress who is given to sudden emotional outbursts and swings in mood or allegiance. Grass repeats the pairing in Too Far A®eld in the wedding of the 57-year-old West German businessman to Fonty's 38-year-old daughter, who has a similarly chequered ideological past and excitable temperament. While Alexander's part of the plan starts successfully, her part never does so through lack of funds. While their relationship survives, elsewhere old animosities soon come to the surface. Personal and historical time intersect on one last occasion on the day of the ®rst burials, mid-summer 1990, which also saw of®cial German recognition of the Polish±German border: Since, even at a different place, events of high political signi®cance took place on 21 June, people said later that the Reschke±PiaÎtkowska couple understood how to combine meaningful dates with their own interests. 113 Shortly afterwards, at the exact mid-way point in the text, on an idyllic outing into Cassubia interrupted by the foreboding cry of one solitary toad, Alexandra announces they should cease `because is still beautiful' (her grammar, 120) and is dismissed by her partner: `yet the suggestion to stop while it was still beautiful marked the turning point in their story' (121). Their hopeful attempt to atone for `the century of expulsions' (32) has been put into question by reports of Kurdish refugees driven from their homes in the aftermath of the American victory over the Iraqis. There is nothing they can do to stop an event which was made possible by the `New World Order' just as much as their own plan. On the anniversary of their chance meeting, they discover that graves of Russian POW's from World War One have been desecrated by Polish revanchists. From that moment Alexander and Alexandra exist èlevated by their idea, more and more out of line with their nations' (142). What they set in motion has now gained a momentum of its own. The Germans are not satis®ed with a cemetery and demand the reburial of those already laid to rest in Germany, before clamouring for holiday complexes, old peoples' homes and golf courses. A well-meaning idea opens the gates to re-colonisation. If historical time crushes the personal temporal dimension, imaginary time appears to exist independently. Alexander projects a vision of the future, incorporating elements of the `World Society', Chatterjee's rickshaw enterprise, and the `German-Polish Cemetery Society', ten years into the future, to the year 1999. The future he imagines is ecologically friendly thanks to the ubiquitous rickshaw which has made environmental pollution nothing but a bad memory; racial strife belongs to the past because Poles and Bengalis have learned to live with





one another; thanks to global warming, soya beans are now cultivated on the banks of the Vistula where the Bengalis have made their home. In the 18 months covered by the narrative, Chatterjee certainly makes astounding progress, establishing factories all over Poland, exciting interest in all major European capitals and injecting hope, money and new ideas into his new country, which is sorely in need of all three. Race and ethnicity had bubbled under the textual surface of all Grass's literary writing, but this utopian `World Society' is remarkable for two reasons. The ®rst is that Grass, perennially allergic to utopian dreamers of any sort, seems to treat it positively until the very end of the novel when his con®dence appears to wane. The second is that by proposing the abolition of all racial, religious and cultural differences in the name of peaceful co-existence and co-operation, Chatterjee goes against the grain of contemporary multicultural thinking, voicing ideas Grass had made his own in the preceding decade and which had their roots in the theories of the American `Melting Pot' at the turn of the century. Rather than fostering difference and upholding the rights of minorities to maintain their separate identities, which is the current conventional recipe for inter-racial harmony, Chatterjee will do away with all distinctions through a peaceful process of cultural symbiosis. This prescription for future harmony transcends the Enlightenment notion of tolerance and understanding of difference, which Lessing in his classic Enlightenment play on the subject, Nathan the Wise, based of the equal validity of the three great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity). Grass (through Chatterjee) offers instead what he terms `symbiosis' ± a biological process bringing two entities into a state of mutual dependency in which their original separate identities are subsumed into a new duality. Grass, Rushdie and Chatterjee are living examples of this. Chatterjee envisages `the symbiosis Kali±Mary' (41), uniting the Indian goddess with the Virgin Mary, as the religious culmination of `the Polish±Bengali symbiosis' (231), which would mean that Polish Catholic and Bengali Hindu forsake the integrity of their original ethnic and religious identities in order to merge into something new, thereby liberating themselves from tradition, custom and history. Èverything, as the Greeks knew, will come to a state of ¯ux' (40). Chatterjee's utopian Bengalis ± far removed incidentally from those Grass describes in Show Your Tongue who know the day-to-day reality of inter-communal strife ± are teaching the Europeans a lesson they have forgotten in the epoch of the modern nation state. Chatterjee embodies the `people-melting processes' (41) which will shape this `new re-mixed Europe', where, so he promises his German±Polish companion: `the egocentric anxieties of your compatriots will be lost' (40). While the `Cemetery Society' is devoted to the past and to the wishes of the dead (they conceived it on All Souls' Day after a visit to a graveyard), Chatterjee is indisputably on the side of the living and devotes his energies to the future. As the German±Polish plan founders on resurgent German claims (the Polish±Lithuanian part never gets off the ground), Chatterjee's rickshaw enterprise thrives. The German±Polish plan, however well-intentioned at the outset and however much guided by the spirit of forgiveness and mutual understanding, inevitably keeps awareness of ethnic



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differences and origins alive. The Germans who return are reminded of what they have lost and this rekindles irredentist longings, which in turn reawakens the suspicions of their Polish neighbours. Chatterjee, in contrast, by making all such differences a thing of the past, would remove potential grounds for future strife. He thus offers a radical solution to the national and linguistic disputes which have dogged this region in the modern epoch and which fuelled Hitler's propaganda machine more than half a century ago. By broaching the issues of expulsion and immigration, Grass confronts two dif®cult subjects. Any suggestion that the German expellees have any sort of claim on the `lost provinces' immediately raises the issue of the post-1945 German±Polish border and the diminished size of postwar Germany. Since acknowledgement of the expellees' suffering could be seen to legitimise the claims made by their once electorally powerful associations for the `return' of these vast areas, the question of what they endured in leaving their homes and on the trek to the west could not easily be addressed. What Reschke and Piatkowska want to do is to bury the problem once and for all by consigning it to the past. Grass is nevertheless treading on territory which could explode in his face at any moment; he beats a middle path by zig-zagging across the mine®eld. Grass had always believed that politicians had abused the expellees by `playing war games in the sand': It is the former refugees who pay the price for these games in the sand to continue. Their hopes are constantly fed. Worse than that: the way the latent homesickness, particularly of the older Silesians, Pomeranians, and East Prussians, is abused is part and parcel of the game. Old people are promised a peaceful return to their homes after one scenario or another is elaborated on the drawing board: the collapse of Communism; six million Chinese ride to the rescue; Europe is united with the sweep of a hand. Allies are enlisted wherever they can be found. Franz Josef Strauû [. . .] has any number of cheap recipes up his sleeve. I do not hesitate to call this playing with the feelings and hopes of old people, who continue to mourn their lost Heimat, unscrupulous. For twenty years ± as long as the Federal Republic has existed ± the proclamation of sandpit victories has spread insecurity among the former refugees. The way illusions have been fostered in order to win votes has prevented many refugees from settling down in the west. Ready to leave at any moment, they sat among their packed suitcases, placing their trust in a policy called a `Policy of Strength', whose sandpit victories have since been shown to be empty by reality. XIV:502±3 This extract from a speech delivered in September 1969 contains the germ of the idea for The Call of the Toad: take pity on the old, understand their feelings and face up to the truth rather than stir up old grievances, are still his basic tenets. Grass had publicly supported Rushdie many times since the Iranian fatwa issued in February 1989 which called on all good Muslims to murder Rushdie for expressing





blasphemous views in his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Grass pays tribute to him now by means of a veiled portrait and a set of intertextual references. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had also depicted trans-cultural migration and ethnic hybridity. The fatwa and the Iranian attempt to foment racial strife on the basis of words contained in a work of ®ction are not causally related to renascent German intolerance and economic imperialism, as Grass portrays them here. They are, however, at least for Grass, twin phenomena born of the same spirit of repressive non-acceptance of the right of others to live, to write and to think freely. What is clear to both writers is that those who oppose new ideas in a work of ®ction, oppose also new formations in society and new propositions of social identity. A unitary interpretation of the world and the authoritarian social organisation which it underpins are both threatened by a multicultural social mix with its multifarious value systems, as well as by a literary genre which explores social and moral diversity. This is the pluralist narrative form of the novel, which both Grass and Rushdie characterise in their individual but closely related ways. Echoing the title of Rushdie's novel, Alexandra condemns Chatterjee's plans as `Witchcraft and worse, ``Satanic Art''' (XII:236) because the Virgin Mary is de®led by association with a heathen goddess. Alexandra, the mouthpiece of Polish bigotry, is hostile to Germans, Russians and the newly arrived Bengalis. While Alexander regrets that the Polish authorities have never commemorated the artist Daniel Chodowiecki, she calls him a `traitor to Polish cause' (64) because he worked for the Prussians. Within the metaphorical language of The Call of the Toad, Alexandra stands for an ideal of purity, uniformity and sameness, which, as her own biography neatly illustrates, has never coincided with reality. By making her speak these words, Grass recalls also Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha, who, after trying all his adult life to assimilate into British society and deny all traces of his origins, ®nds that he transmutes into a cloven-hoofed devil, half man, half beast ± an involuntary manifestation of his hybrid, jumbled-up self. The mutation is a metaphor for his two warring selves; it is his past's revenge for his rejection of his family, his country and its culture. His father had warned him before he left Bombay for the UK that À man untrue to himself becomes a two-legged lie, and such beasts are Shaitan's best work.'15 Once his nightmare is over and he regains his former shape, he learns to accept both parts of himself: he learns to live as a hybrid, which in Rushdie's view is the only true authentic state for an Indian citizen. All the characters in The Call of the Toad are hybrids of one sort or another: few are prepared to admit it. The point about Chatterjee, however, is that he has his darker side; the point about ìmaginary time' in which his projects ¯ourishes is, of course, that it is a fantasy. The narrator is ®rst perturbed to learn he was named after Subra Chandos Bose, the nationalist Indian leader prepared to enter into any alliance to secure Indian independence, a description of whose memorial opens Show Your Tongue. Alexandra's objections that Poles will become no more than coolies if the only work they can get is pulling rickshaws is at least half-justi®ed. Least propitious which bore of all is Chatterjee's association with Lenin, via the shipyards in Gdansk Lenin's name for 40 years and, who, like both Alexander and Chatterjee, `built no ships, only had ideas' (167). The story's ending suggests it might well be better not to



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Execution of an author First you help them to gain fame and notoriety, then you shoot them down, just because it is them, you go for the direct hit, if they make the only proper use of their public name to intervene, by necessity in public, with their name, which you have helped them aquire in the ®rst place, in favour or against something. For what is the use of the `name' in a quiet garret? Are they supposed to keep their `names', well-polished like the family silver, so that they can be admired in a display cabinet? 16 Heinrich Boll The Call of the Toad is a slight work which was never likely to be Grass's last word on the great events which took place at the end of the twentieth century in Germany. In fact he carried on writing with barely a break after its publication, returning to two authors he had praised in Show Your Tongue: Theodor Fontane, a favourite of Ute's, whose mammoth Napoleonic novel Before the Storm accompanied her to Calcutta, and Hans Joachim Scha dlich, whose historical fantasy of the eternal secret policeman, Tallhover, a decidedly Grassian exercise in uncovering historical continuities, found a place in his own reading bag. As an old friend from the cross-border encounters of 20 years ago, Scha dlich was ready to sanction the unexpected resurrection of his literary character in his colleague's work. Ute's passion for Fontane was a greater inspiration. It was another experience in Calcutta, which Grass relates in My Century in the chapter for 1987, a dream of Ute sitting under a pear tree back home in Wewels¯eth and talking to a white-haired gentleman who turns out to be Fontane himself, which made her husband start reading the works of his rival for his wife's attention. After the dream there was another presence in their marriage: wherever they went, Theodor Fontane went with them. In February 1993, Grass wrote to Christa Wolf that Ì have been working on a manuscript since 2 January and been having conversations with my ®ctional characters who are slowly starting to come to life.'17 A couple of weeks earlier he had told Helen Wolff that he was `still unsure at the beginning of an adventurous journey. I do not know where it will take me, but as soon as I can see more clearly I will give you a more precise report'.18 He wrote Too Far A®eld on Mùn in the Baltic, from his holiday house in Portugal, as well as in Behlendorf, where he and Ute had lived since 1986. At each location he has a chest-high writing desk, which enables him to work standing up. As he did not want details of his project to leak, he engaged the services of an unemployed young German scholar, Dieter Stolz, to gather



launch revolutionary notions of any sort into the world at all. Imaginary time may be nothing more than illusory time. Grass repeats the pattern in Too Far A®eld: Fonty too must escape from history. As Fonty says after it is suggested he move to work in the Brandenburg town Pasewalk: Àfter all it was here that that Austrian corporal lay in the military hospital and decided to go into politics. It was here that everything started which is still far from being over' (XIII:330). The question at the end of the major novel is whether that history is ®nally over after the new era has begun.

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It is going to be another epic. I am now about half way through, having ®nished the hand-written version and reached about page 320 of the ®rst typed version. I am breaking new ground to a certain extent with this book: everything happens in Berlin, which makes it my ®rst Berlin novel; it covers a period of more than 100 years and by confronting Fontane's life and contradictions with the contemporary situation (after the fall of the Wall) in Berlin and the surrounding area, in Neuruppin, for instance, it is supposed to be a sort of biography of Fontane. After the political frustrations of the last few years I have taken refuge quite literally in my work on the manuscript; my political interventions ± in the form I have practised them for decades ± began to get absurd: nobody was listening, even though the audience was large. I have warned often enough about the predictable consequences of this ill-fated German uni®cation process which is now at a stage which makes me fear the worst. A mental division is now discernible which runs deeper than the division during the time of the Wall. That all feeds into my book but embedded in a story and in German history, beginning with Bismarck and his wars to unify Germany (1864, 1866, 1870/71) and running right up to the present disaster.19 His warnings at the beginning of the decade had all clearly come from the heart; it was a subject which would not let go of him until the big book was out of the way. In My Century, the post-Wende entries are restrained in comparison. By the time he had ®nished the manuscript at the beginning of 1995, Grass was con®dent that he could be proud of what he had written. The unprecedented wave of criticism and condemnation which washed over the novel on publication in August took him quite by surprise. In a sense, however, he had predicted something of the affair in a witty speech delivered the previous year, entitled Òn the Secondary from a Primary Perspective'. Here he argued that in the post-modern media age `the newly published book is not itself the event: the response to it is' (XVI:407), a process which is replicated in all areas of cultural activity, as the orchestra conductor is paid more attention than the composer, the exhibition organiser more than the painter whose work is the subject of the exhibition. Fonty, in conversation with a young German literature student at his daughter's wedding, echoes this view by upholding the virtues of reading the original texts at the expense of the critical interpretations. Life swiftly followed art when the novel was published. Press coverage of the row generated by Too Far A®eld soon began to concentrate more on the affair than on the novel itself, which, as commentators felt ever more willing to admit they had not read it, slipped ever further into the background. In Der Fall Fonty, some 500 pages of newspaper cuttings on the novel, swiftly compiled by the indefatigable Daniela Hermes, Grass's editor at Steidl, the reviews take up less than half as much space as the reactions to the reviews.20



material in the Fontane Archive in Potsdam, in the Treuhand building in Berlin, both key locations in the novel, as well as from a number of other sources. In November 1993 he sent the promised report on his progress to Helen Wolff:

In the Munich speech, Grass also alluded to the canings he had often received in the press. They seldom marked him for long, he said, as he had too much selfcon®dence, but in Too Far A®eld, Fonty quotes Fontane to rather different effect: àll reviews are written as if by criminals' (XIII:549). Fonty receives a review of sorts of a text he is commissioned to write on the history of the Treuhand building, until recently the GDR Haus der Ministerien and before that Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe ministry (and now the new home of the Federal Ministry of Finance). Fonty's text is a miniature version of Grass's novel, as he stresses historical continuity rather than change. The authorities' reaction to his history also reads like a premonition of what Grass's critics would say about his novel: Fonty's òn the whole ironic style distorts the true picture' because he dwells `too much in the past and lacks a positive perspective on the future' (637). His failure to mark off the new use of the building from the previous two is `negligent' given that the market economy now has priority. What upsets any remotely triumphalist interpretation of recent German history is the way both Fonty and Hoftaller see FRG free-market democracy to be simply the third regime they have encountered so far this century ± after the Third Reich and the GDR. The new order too has its favourites and renegades, its winners and losers, its sacred cows and articles of faith ± and its ways of dealing with dissent. The critics were annoyed by the novel's historical comparisons: failed revolutions in 1848 and 1953; uni®cation in 1870±71 and 1989±90; wars against France in 1870 and 1939±45; repression under Metternich and Manteuffel and under Ulbricht/ Honecker; anti-Socialist laws under Bismarck and the banning of opposition in the GDR; spying for Prussia, spying for Goering, or snooping for socialism. Yet at the end of Too Far A®eld, there are strong signs that this history has indeed ®nished and that the continuities will ®nally cease. Madeleine Aubron, Fonty's newly rediscovered French granddaughter, certainly seems to think so. Fonty does after all disappear with her to France, having said farewell to Hoftaller and given the slip to his pursuers from the Fontane Archive whom Grass regiments to narrate the novel as an anonymous snooping collective. Reviewers, on the other hand, took Hoftaller's words on German history to be Grass's own and believed Too Far A®eld implied that nothing ever changed in German history, which was depicted as some sort of revolving elevator, repeating itself endlessly, an idea they believed to be crudely symbolised in the Paternoster lift in the Haus der Ministerien. This is an over-hasty misrepresentation of this particular image, one of the main purposes of which is to convey a sense of surviving the `turning points', the changes from one regime to another. What made the row over Too Far A®eld more surprising was that Grass had earned warm words from his ®ercest critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, after a reading from the unpublished manuscript in April 1995 at Reich-Ranicki's invitation at the Jewish House in Frankfurt. Reich-Ranicki had then invited Grass to the public celebration of his seventieth-®fth birthday in July. Grass did not attend in person but sent gifts and best wishes.21 The ®rst three chapters of Too far A®eld had also appeared in an ex-GDR literary periodical, Neue Deutsche Literatur, in May, when who subsequently issued a retraction, another powerful critic, Martin Ludke,





could express himself only in superlatives. Over the summer, however, the mood somehow changed. The Spiegel, the magazine which had sent a journalist to tail him in Calcutta, believed it had secured exclusive rights to pre-publication extracts and that Steidl, Grass's publishers, broke this agreement by showering the world's media with advance copies (the Spiegel itself had ordered no fewer than 87). Other sections of the press began to say they were being manipulated in an orchestrated marketing and sales campaign. While the advance copies were sent out in June, Steidl had imposed an embargo on reviews until 28 August, one week before publication (an absolutely standard practice). The date marked, quite coincidentally, the anniversary of Goethe's birthday. The publishers had also held a meeting with booksellers to discuss marketing and sales strategy and produced a brochure and posters. While Gerhard Steidl spoke of an opus magnum, the word was spread, initially by the mail-oder book-chain Zweitausendeins, that Grass had produced a Jahrhundertroman (à novel of the century'), a term subsequently attributed to Grass and Steidl and held against both of them. The critics' hunger for such a novel, `The Tin Drum of reuni®cation', was to be satis®ed. Germany's greatest living author was to supply it. At the end of the summer `silly season' (the Sommerloch or `summer hole', as it is known in German), Grass became front-page news once more. With the exceptions Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau, beleaguered redoubts of of the Suddeutsche liberalism, the major papers damned him in language usually reserved to blacken an opponent at election time. On 4 September, at the ®rst reading from the published text, held in Prenzlauer Berg's Kulturbrauerei, where Fonty holds a ®ctional address just before disappearing, TV crews and press delegations outnumbered members of the public in the audience of 500. Even CNN reported the event. By then the CDU General Secretary, Pastor Peter Hintze, had launched a personal attack in response to second-hand reports about the way Grass treats the assassination of the Treuhand boss, Detlev Rohwedder.22 Birgit Breuel, his successor, and Klaus von Dohnanyi, exSPD mayor of Hamburg, ripped Grass's ideas out of their literary context to castigate him for historical inaccuracy.23 While all this attention was great news for sales, the talk was of the àssassination' or èxecution' of an author who expressed uncomfortable views. Grass was reportedly deeply hurt and initially withdrew to telephoned to Mùn to paint and wait for the temperature to fall. Peter Ruhmkorf proffer his support on 23 August: At 20.30 ®nally decided to call Grass on Mùn, but sent E. to the phone ®rst. As she handed me over, she made her ®nger and thumb into a little beak: `very faint voice', she whispered. `So, you poor old fellow', I said, and he moaned audibly on account of the humiliations and insults he had suffered. Has turned his back on the literary world and is going off ìnto the woods every morning to do some water colours' [. . .] On Ranicki only brie¯y that he never wanted to see him again in his life.24 The passion poured into the novel was now spent; in its place came hurt at the reactions to it.



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Hintze's equally hurried reaction to Grass's comments on government asylum policy in October 1997 provoked inauspicious comparisons with Ludwig Erhard's outburst of 1965. By then there were signs of a mini-renaissance of the heroic period of critical intellectuals, as well as signs of regret at the way Grass had been treated two years earlier, capped a year later with the SPD±Green election victory. In Hermes' next compilation of press reactions, most comments on Grass are positive.25 But a year after Kohl had been re-elected for a second time on the back of reuni®cation euphoria, criticism of his life's achievement met with short shrift. It was left to the Vice-President of the Bundestag, the Green, Antje Vollmer, to mount a defence; Lafontaine managed some words of support too. The hostile reviews, the chorus to Reich-Ranicki's aria of invective, are all, to greater or lesser extent, hatchet jobs. The novel is not judged as a novel; the innovative narrative strategy, which involves an anonymous collective of `footnote slaves' from the Fontane Archive which recount two years in Fonty's life, is barely acknowledged; humorous satirical passages are passed over, though most critics, quite bizarrely, have their favourite chapter. Nobody notices the pre-eminence of the theme of biography or recognises the careful structural use of repetition: Fonty's three attempts to ¯ee Germany, for instance, or Madeleine's two visits to Germany, an allegorical Marianne come to soothe the German soul. Grass's multi-layered allegorical style is declared mechanical, as reviewer after reviewer simply states the novel to be a failure in aesthetic terms and then takes issue with what he or she perceives to be the author's opinions on reuni®cation, which he had either expressed himself in other contexts or put into the mouths of his characters. The campaign against Grass had a number of causes. It was partly a delayed reaction to his anti-reuni®cation speeches. He had justi®ed his equally well publicised refusal to countenance changes to the Grundgesetz, restricting the right to political asylum, by invocation of the Third Reich, peppered with charges of government racism. While the novel's reviewers do not impress with their skill at literary criticism, their knowledge of Grass's anti-German position over the last ®ve years is not open to dispute. It must have dawned on them gradually that he had produced a GDR-novel, a genre some of them had done their best to discredit during the `Literature Quarrel'. What Grass does most effectively in Too Far A®eld is to dignify everyday life in the ex-GDR, the careers, the setbacks, the compromises and bad consciences, and to dramatise the affection born of familiarity for institutions and procedures, accommodation, transport, consumer produce, rituals and songs. It took Fred Jameson, an American Marxist, writing in the London Review of Books, to note this achievement.26 Too Far A®eld articulated the obstinate feeling that in spite of the suffering endured under the regime, the restrictions, the shortages, and the unfairnesses (which Fonty and his family suffer more than most), 16 million people felt an understandable sense of belonging. Once the parameters of the debate had been established, the ex-GDR rallied to Grass and the affair became another `German±German quarrel'. `Winning makes you stupid!' says Fonty. In true Brechtian fashion, Grass had written his novel from the losers' point of view. Generations and personalities are once more a key to this affair. Iris Radisch, who said in Die Zeit that the novel was ùnreadable' and would not have been published





had it been by an unknown author, was not born when Grass began writing. Gustav Seibt, who condescended in the Frankfurter Allgemeine to give a plot summary of the sort of novel Grass should have written, was barely half Grass's age. Other main players, on the other hand, who may or may not have had scores to settle, had known Grass for most of their long professional lives. Hellmuth Karasek, ReichRanicki's henchman on the notorious Literarishes Quartett broadcast, had cut his teeth in the days of the Gruppe 47, reviewing Cat and Mouse as a 27-year-old tyro. In 1971, during the `Kipphardt-Affair', he had twice attacked Grass ± from the Left.27 By 1984, he had already apparently switched sides and used an article in the Spiegel to criticise Grass's performance on a TV-programme, prompting the intervention of 28 Karasek had also once stated that The Rat was one none other than Heinrich Boll. of his three least favourite works ± along with Hitler's Mein Kampf and the writings of Stalin. He was unlikely to give Grass's next major novel a favourable hearing. The key ®gure, however, was without doubt the godfather of popular literary criticism in the FRG, Reich-Ranicki. He and Grass had known each other since before the publication of The Tin Drum, which Reich-Ranicki famously failed to spot in advance and damned in a review he felt obliged to revise.29 Germany's greatest living critic was bound to have something to say on the new novel by Germany's greatest living novelist. Other major papers published damning reviews; in addition to Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine, both the left-wing tageszeitung and the right-wing Die Welt, even the Bild-Zeitung, but it was the Spiegel cover for Monday 21 August 1995, showing a computer-generated image of Reich-Ranicki tearing up the novel, which immediately became the objet de scandale. To some, the image was a reminder of the spirit of Goebbels' book-burning, to others a possibly bad-taste visualisation of the meaning of ver- or zerreiûen. Reich-Ranicki followed up his written onslaught with a ritual rubbishing on TV three days later when he and Karasek insisted that Grass had written a tedious tract, quoting the views of characters in the novel as if they were the author's own. Karasek compared Grass with Goebbels for having criticised the criticism made in the reviews published thus far. It was at this point, however, Thursday 24 August, that opinion began to swing against the critics. Reich-Ranicki and Karasek even failed to hold on to their viewers during the broadcast. Reich-Ranicki and Grass had ®rst met in the summer of 1958 in Warsaw after Grass returned to Poland for the ®rst time since 1945 to collect material for The Tin Drum. Neither had yet made a name in the FRG; both were to do so shortly afterwards, Grass with his novel, Reich-Ranicki with his reviews. Grass ®rst published a brief account of their encounter in 1973 in his memoir of how he came to write The Tin Drum when he committed a story to paper that he had often recounted privately: that Reich-Ranicki had phoned Andrzej Wirth, who had arranged their meeting, to denounce him as a Bulgarian agent (a story Grass was still repeating after his reading in the Kulturbrauerei). Reich-Ranicki hit back more than 15 years later with a more detailed account, ®rst published in the Spiegel in April 1990 and repeated in his autobiography in 1999.30 The Polish-Jewish-German critic, who had been deported as a schoolboy from Germany in 1938 and survived most of the war in the Warsaw Ghetto, had not been liked by the other members of the Gruppe 47, after he attended his ®rst meeting in



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the year Grass won the feÃted prize in 1958. There was even a campaign to get him disinvited. A letter from him to Richter beginning with the words `Mein Fuhrer!' suggests there was a touch of anti-Semitism in the Group's treatment of him.31 His rivalry with Grass was, however, greatest of all, though there is no evidence that Grass supported the attempted blackballing. None of this stopped Grass adapting Reich-Ranicki's story of surviving the Holocaust in From the Diary of a Snail, where it becomes the story of Hermann Ott. While he acknowledges the source, he had not apparently ask Reich-Ranicki's permission, which rankled. When they next met, Reich-Ranicki asked for his share of the royalties, which, he says, made Grass blush, and agreed to settle for a present of one of the author's drawings to be selected and handed over after a meal prepared by the artist. It was not until his review of The Rat that Reich-Ranicki began to get nasty. Grass responded with a poisonous, even libellous, pen-portrait in his next book where he described his critic as: someone who can demonstrate that his carping criticism is founded on one solitary principle, that of socialist realism. At the same time I recall his restless presence during the last meetings of the Gruppe 47: an amusing literature fan, loveable even when he got it wrong. It was not until the editorial board of the FAZ loaded him with power ± big money knows what it wants ± that he began to slate his subjects with bad grace, even malice. SYT:31 Reich-Ranicki's next move was his memoir of their ®rst encounter, prefaced by an account of the meal at Grass's Wewels¯eth house in 1973. Meals feature prominently in recollections of meetings with Grass, Reich-Ranicki is the ®rst to claim he is a poor cook. Reich-Ranicki's account of their ®rst meeting nicely supplements other memories of the young would-be novelist: I went to the Hotel Bristol, where Grass was supposed to be waiting for me at 3 o'clock. The hotel foyer turned out to be empty and I could not see a West German author anywhere. Just one seat was occupied, but by a man who did not belong there. The Bristol was the only luxury hotel in Warsaw, frequented almost exclusively by foreigners, whose clothes set them apart from the local population. The man in the seat was, however, scruf®ly dressed and also unshaven. What is more he appeared to be doing something which is not usually done in the foyer of a superior hotel: he was dozing. Suddenly he jumped up and strode towards me. But it was not his imposing moustache which frightened me, rather his gaze, an obstinate, ®xed, glazed stare which had something about it. You had better not sup with him, I thought to myself, I would not like to meet him down a dark alley, if he does not have a revolver in his trouser pocket, then he's got a knife. While all this was still passing through my mind, the young man introduced himself very politely [. . .] In order to clear up the matter of the obstinate, glazed




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He mitigates the allegation of drunkenness somewhat by stressing that apart from a certain absent-mindedness and taciturnity, Grass held his liquor well and showed no dif®culty walking or talking. He was nevertheless unimpressed, found conversation dif®cult until the subject turned to the novel Grass was writing, which he felt sounded uninspired. He had called Wirth to say that the man in the foyer looked like a former Bulgarian partisan now working for the Sports Ministry in So®a (not quite the same as calling him a Bulgarian agent). To conclude that there was bad blood between the two of them would obviously be an understatement. The enmity is not the only reason for the furore in 1995, but it was the spark that ignited the ®re.

Fonty/Fontane: broken biographies in Too Far A®eld According to Fonty, the GDR past will make it impossible for the new Germany to integrate its former citizens who will become à burden to the enlarged West State thanks to our dowry, the defect in our biographies' (XIII:564). Biography is the single most important theme in Too Far A®eld, as Grass attempts to articulate the intricacies of GDR collective experience, explain the contradictions between collusion and opposition, between welcoming the state's demise and identifying with its 40-year past. For this reason we learn the year all the characters were born, where their parents came from, what they did, and when they died; we ®nd out how lives have intersected with the relevant phases of German history and discover the compromises all have made with the powerful. By adding the biographies of the parents of the two septuagenarian leading characters, Grass effortlessly encompasses the whole century: the idea of Fonty and Hoftaller recalling their past existences as Fontane and Tallhover gives him a way of treating up to 200 years at once. Grass has never found one time sequence enough. Fonty and Hoftaller, in effect, remind the other characters, who have experienced only segments of the twentieth century, of what they have experienced as Germans over the past two hundred years. In Fonty's case, his double life is a source of double grief: he has two sets of skeletons in his cupboards, and corpses scattered beneath the ¯oorboards of two family homes. In either guise he is weak-willed: `Whether with Tallhover or Hoftaller, he gave in under pressure' (47), but in both guises he is an inveterate survivor. While Fonty copes essentially with three regimes (National Socialism, GDR-socialism and free-market democracy ± he is too young to have been marked by Weimar), Fontane encountered two very different Prussian states (before and after 1848) followed by Bismarck's Reich. Hoftaller/Tallhover has served them all in the 1840s to the last days of `real existing socialism' in the 1980s. from the Vormarz One of the ®nest conceits in Too Far A®eld has Fonty recovering from a nervous collapse brought on by his ®rst foiled attempt to escape to England in Fontane's footsteps by writing about his early life. He goes back in on himself to re¯ect on his childhood, interweaving his own biography with Fontane's, his Òne-and-Everything', to ®nd moments of unalloyed joy, unsullied by murky compromise. A similar



stare straightaway: Grass had drunk, as he told me two hours later, a whole bottle of vodka by himself over a lonely midday meal.32

conceit has Hoftaller, in his guise of family friend, handing over Martha Wuttke's Stasi ®le, handsomely bound in leather, to its rightful owner on her wedding day. As she starts her new life at the side of a West German businessman at the dawn of the new era, Hoftaller, who had once hired her to spy on her own father, relinquishes his hold on her. The ex-SED member, who has traded her faith in communism for Catholicism, could wish for no more appropriate present. Her carefully transcribed pillow talk could still get her into trouble. She is, of course, the latest variant of the most durable character type in Grass's ®ction, the true believer who exchanges one cause for another. The lives of all Martha's family, her three brothers who stayed in the West in 1961, her mother, expelled from Silesian Breslau in 1945 where both her parents were killed in the ®ghting, her uncle, Fonty's brother-in-law, who lost his life on the Eastern Front, her dyed-in-the-wool Social-Democrat grandfather, the lithographer Max Wuttke, have all been shaped by twentieth-century German history, its political twists and sudden about-turns, its defeats, ideological turning points and accumulated disappointments. As a Social Democrat, Max Wuttke is betrayed by both the Nazis and the Communists and recalls Ulbricht and Goebbels conspiring to neutralise the SPD: `Clubfoot and Goatee-Beard at the same table. Commies and Nazis together against us Social Democrats. That was too much' (255). The Nazis put him in a camp for six months; the SED threatened him with another for not agreeing to the enforced merger of SPD and KPD in 1946. Wuttke senior wisely moved to West Berlin which meant the Berlin Wall cut him off from his son in 1961. While Grass does introduce West Germans, among whom we must include Fonty's son Friedel, the former 1960s radical turned pro®t-hungry theological publisher, they remain, with one exception, caricatures. The exception is the Treuhand boss, based on the assassinated Rohwedder, who becomes a genuinely tragic victim, aware of the wrong he is doing but reluctantly convinced of its necessity. The other Westerners are interested solely in money, wanting to know the price of everything while showing disdain for the worth anything has for others. While the East Germans have a series of dates which mark off their individual and collective experience (1953; 1961; 1965; 1968; 1976), the West Germans have just one: 1968 in the FRG, having very little to do with a Soviet invasion, refers to a purely personal phase of youthful rebellion. Mention of his past as a `Sixty-Eighter' embarrasses Friedel, at bottom an unreformed ideologue who, with Mao's Little Red Book in one hand, had sold posters of Che Guevara in the late 1960s. By 1989 he knows nothing except the values of the market. The Treuhand Boss, on the other hand, represents the gentler wing of the 1960s upheaval, having become a mildmannered liberal with a heavy conscience. Theodor Fontane (1819±98) attracted Grass for a number of reasons. A proli®c letter writer, impecunious journalist and Prussian historian, theatre reviewer, government agent, and, in the last two decades of his long life, critical novelist, he was a descendant of Huguenot eÂmigreÂs who arrived in Brandenburg at the end of the seventeenth century after Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Like Grass, Fontane never got an Abitur, but took an apprenticeship in a pharmacy. In contrast to his literary contemporaries, he spent his life at the centre of German





history, which he wrote about in three massive chronicles of Bismarck's wars of uni®cation, three memoirs, several travelogues, as well as his more famous novels, which he did not begin writing until the age of 60. He was the most cosmopolitan German writer since Heinrich Heine, and conformed least to any Romantic stereotype. Like Heine he earned his living exclusively from his pen, but could not always choose his employer. He died on the eve of the twentieth century as Germany, under the leadership of the same Prussians whose foibles he had dissected, stood poised to take on the world in two world wars. Fontane is a writer that each new German regime since his death has somehow been able to make its own. If conservatives liked his attachment to old Prussia, leftists pointed out his support for the SPD late in life; while the Nazis quoted his anti-Semitic outbursts, the GDR could happily claim him as part of the progressive heritage. For the FRG post-1989, he is a liberal, open to international in¯uences, who stands ®rmly in the European tradition of social novelists. For Grass, he is a slippery character who hates being pinned down. When Fonty poses next to his statue, the narrating archivists half expect à passionate declaration on the human right to be ambiguous' (593). This refusal to commit himself is allied to an admirable ability for landing on his feet after sudden changes in political or personal circumstances. As he `knew how to twist and turn' (399), `to dive under and resurface somewhere else' (143), like the crested grebes or `diving ducks' he enjoys watching in his beloved Tiergarten, he succeeds each time in establishing himself anew, whether in ¯ight from an amorous entanglement or after extrication from an ideological allegiance. Fontane's support of the proscribed Herwegh-Club during the early 1840s was always dif®cult to marry with his membership of the patriotic Tunnel uber der Spree thereafter. In 1848 he had stood on the barricades yet had moved in right-wing circles months previously. After the failure of the revolution, he apparently changed sides again and made his name by writing patriotic ballads. His radical friends fared less well after 1848: `Two ± Blum and Jellinek ± were shot later by ®ring squad in Vienna. Two came to sticky ends in America'. But Grass's Fontane shows more character than another pair, who met a possibly worse fate and `became Saxon philistines' (399). Fonty lives his own twentieth-century life in imitatio Fontani partly through accident and partly through design. He repeats Fontane's romantic dalliances in his mid-twenties, marries a similar type of woman shortly afterwards, and has the same number of children in the same order (three sons followed by a daughter). Once Hoftaller reveals that he is in fact Fontane's great-great-grandson from the hushed-up illegitimate line, facial and physical resemblances become less surprising. Fontane's moves still prey on Fonty's conscience because there are two many analogies with his own life: `The conspirators' circle in Leipzig, the dalliance in Dresden, the Berlin days as apothecary and revolutionary: nothing happened without repercussions' (79), even if he has to wait 100 years for them. Fonty wincingly recalls Fontane writing to his friend Bernhard von Lepel some time in the 1850s: I sold myself to the reactionaries for thirty pieces of silver a month. One simply cannot manage as a decent person. I am starting as a paid-up hack for



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When confronted with Fontane's anti-Semitic statements, Fonty can only reply that Ì would like not to have written some of my letters or not to have written them like that' (61). Yet neither his wife or daughter like Fonty's friend Professor Freundlich for reasons which sound suspiciously anti-Semitic. Fontane was similarly ambivalent. Having any number of Jewish friends, readers, and supporters he expressed strongly philo-Semitic views, leading one critic to call him `the philo-Semitic anti-Semite', an entirely apt tautology.33 `Nobody goes innocently through this life' (678), Fonty remarks towards the end, after his second attempt to escape his past has ended in ignominy. Fonty and Fontane might be guilty of serving a series of unsavoury or even criminal regimes, but there is a question mark over the value of their assistance each time. Both tend to embellish their reports for the security services with irrelevant material, to shoot off at tangents, and to digress down inappropriate avenues, all of which makes their letters such fascinating reading. While Fonty at one point says he wrote `gladly' for the Stasi, he is capable of placing two mutually contradictory statements side by side, both of which re¯ect his views, both of which are valid. Furthermore, their collusion with the forces of oppression, far more extensive in Fonty's ®ctional than in Fontane's historical case, was hardly the most signi®cant act in either life. Fonty calls his failure to leave the GDR Kulturbund, the `Culture Federation' designed to give intellectuals a forum for their activities which could be monitored by the state, àt bottom cowardly' (338), but, mixing up his own life with that of `the Immortal', he denies he has ever been of any use to the politicians: As ever inconsistent in my opinions there was no relying on me politically. You know that I was neither a paid-up Kreuzzeitung man nor a fanatical liberal intoxicated with freedom; the Vossische newspaper, despite all the respect I had for it, could not enthuse me either. And even if I did make half sympathetic remarks on Social Democracy in letters to Friedlaender, it by no means followed that my father, who as an apprenticed stone printer was obviously a socialist, could have signed me up to support Bebel. Humanism yes, but in the party never! 349 Fonty has always reacted to circumstances: the Hitlerjunge became a war reporter, ®ling copy from Poland, Czechoslovakia and France. He has Tallhover to thank for this comfortable wartime berth, but as usual there is a catch: he has to `®nd out what is being said in of®cers' circles, keep himself informed of troop morale, and to listen for mutterings during soulful evenings in the mess' (70). Just as Fontane spied on in 1850s London, Fonty spies on the of®cers and men of the es German emigr Wehrmacht, just as he will spy on colleagues during his Kulturbund lecture tours and on his neighbours in Prenzlauer Berg. Martha's comment on his war-time reporting re¯ects the view which haunts her father: ìt must have been pretty awful, not quite



the Adler-Zeitung with pages in honour of Manteuffel. Contents: the MinisterPresident tramples the dragon of revolution. 127


fascist, but it was propaganda all the same, enough to be ashamed about it still' (219). Yet although he was of®cially working for the `war reporting and propaganda section', which had employed Bebra, Roswitha and Oskar on their tour of France in The Tin Drum, Fonty's reports from France became popular because of his eye for everyday details which had little to do with the war. The case against him is further muddied by his help to the other side, the underground resistance to Hitler. In his capacity as courier, he unwittingly delivered messages for both the nationalist plotters in July 1944 and the communist Rote Kapelle, who operated from the same building as Goering's Air Ministry. Furthermore, in an episode he would prefer not to discuss because a private in®delity went hand in hand with a brave betrayal of the Nazis, `corporal Theo Wuttke let himself be used from early 44 by a small group of independent partisans' (428) in occupied France. As he soon after abandons his pregnant French girlfriend, who is hounded out of Lyons after the Liberation, head shaven, for having slept with an enemy soldier, and the rest of the group, including her brother, are arrested and killed `many remember him as a scoundrel, nobody as an anti-fascist hero' (421). Some suspected him of playing a double game from the start and having given his French friends away. But Fonty's motivation and the possible interpretations of his deed 45 years later, when his previously unknown French granddaughter arrives on his doorstep with a medal for his heroism from the French Communist Party, are impossible to disentangle. This is the sense of the novel's title, a quotation from Fontane's Ef® Briest: `guilt is too broad a ®eld and unity an even broader one, but truth is the broadest of all' (295±6). Grateful for the distraction of a love affair, he might well have simply wanted to spend time with his girlfriend. Once the war was over, Wuttke returned to his Berlin ®ance e, whom he married on 16 October 1945, 95 years to the day after Fontane's marriage (and ± quite coincidentally ± Grass's birthday). It was chance rather than choice which led him to settle in what became East Berlin ± his aunt owned a ¯at in the Kollwitzstraûe. Wuttke became a primary school teacher but resigned from what could have been a promising career on a matter of principle in 1951. Henceforth he worked as a parttime Kulturbund lecturer, travelling the length and breadth of the new GDR for the next 25 years to give talks on Fontane's life and works. His lectures were often censored or banned altogether, although those on wholly uncontroversial subjects, like `How the Prussian Nobility chatted at the Dinner Table', gave him the most joy, allowing him for brief moments to make a precious escape from day-to-day pressures, one of the novel's most frequent leitmotifs. He resigns from this post too, a when Biermann's little late he decides in retrospect, in the wake of the Sangerstreit citizenship is revoked in 1976. This, according to the novel, is the last and for that reason most signi®cant turning point in GDR cultural history. Protests and defections from the state's intelligentsia henceforth multiplied: ònly losses since then' (345). Wuttke, not known as Fonty all the time, is never professionally successful and to his wife's chagrin he turns down job offers in the state administration. He never joins the SED. When his three young sons, who had grown increasingly impatient with his eccentricities, stayed in the West in 1961 to be brought up by his widowed



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sister in Hamburg, the remaining family in East Berlin found themselves under suspicion. Republik¯ucht was a serious crime and the family were seriously implicated. It turns out that they did not suffer more only because the middle son Teddy agreed to spy for East Berlin. Hoftaller frequently had his work cut out protecting his òbject' from worse punishment. But Fonty's demotion to `®le messenger' in the Haus der Ministerien after 1976 is akin to the fate suffered by Czechoslovak intellectuals after 1968 when they were set to work as petrol-pump attendants or nightwatchmen. Wife and daughter were both ashamed and continue to be worried that people would tell jokes about their humiliated father and husband. Illegitimacy is another leitmotif: establishing origins is part of the quest for truth. Madeleine is the most glaring product of an illicit liaison, but Emmi, Fonty's wife, is another, like Fontane's own wife. It turns out of course that, three generations back, Fonty is descended from Fontane's own illegitimate daughter. On his forty-®fth wedding anniversary Fonty discovers the reason Emmi had reacted so calmly to evidence of his wartime indiscretion in the shape of Madeleine. His own ®rst son Georg had had a different father, thus neither spouse can raise an accusing ®nger. Fonty had last seen his Emmi in October 1944. When he comes back from a POW camp at the end of the summer 1945, the baby is already teething, which means he must have been born some time in the spring. The truth is as ever elusive, appearances deceptive. Hoftaller is a less appealing but in many ways more ambitious ®gure than Fonty. Grass wants to show two things through him: that this type of operative was not invented in East Berlin, having stalked through German history for at least 100 years before the GDR was founded; and that the ubiquitous Stasi was run by human beings not monsters. Born on 23 March 1919, Hoftaller, who has no family and no known interests outside his work, has been marked, personally and culturally, by 40 years of GDR society, whose end he openly mourns, even though he claims to have helped bring it about. The way he buys up the last supplies of Cuban cigars before currency union and equips himself with one of the last Trabis indicates his reluctance to let go ± nostalgic for the past before it is even over. The squat 70-year-old makes pathetic attempts, however, to demonstrate his allegiance to the new order by wearing American clothing ± baseball cap, training shoes, CocaCola T-Shirt and Bermuda shorts. He whistles into the wind saying that `We don't care about elections, do we Fonty? Elections don't change anything, at least nothing fundamental' (83), insisting it is merely a matter of a costume change: À short Wende period, the usual exchange of shirts, that's all. We know all this from before, don't we? This costume change on the public stage' (271). Like the archivists, who complain that their lives have lost any meaning after Fonty disappears in the last chapter, Hoftaller encounters an existential crisis when the GDR collapses, lamenting that `my work activities increasingly lose their meaning, if they did have any meaning in the ®rst place' (705). His problem was shared to varying degrees by all other GDR state functionaries: after giving his life to the state, the state suddenly ceases to exist. Unlike many others in his predicament, he makes no excuses and indulges in no special pleading. Instead he takes refuge in bizarre fantasies of grandeur and insider knowledge, which so many of the novel's





critics took literally. He claims that changing allegiance from one regime to another has always been his speciality and that he is devoted to stability, which was always a pan-German concern. His dedication to this international cause exceeds his loyalty to the state of the moment, which makes it unsurprising that his anti-immigration plans for post-1990 `fortress Europe' are so reactionary. The Wuttkes do not like Hoftaller and Fonty too is often not pleased to see him. No one appreciates the smell of his cigars: the way they open windows to freshen the air after his departure is a comic expression of his demonic nature. But demon or not, he nurses the whole family back to health in the last section of the novel. When he tells Martha that `your father is closer to me than you can imagine. The many, many years . . .' (709) he hints at a love which, deep down, is reciprocated. In his fever, Fonty dreams that the pair of them have mistakenly exchanged their sets of false teeth, a sign their relationship reaches into the most private corners of life. As Tallhover until 1953, when Scha dllich's novel ends, Hoftaller claims to have kept his nose clean, never working for the Gestapo, for instance. As Tallhover or Hoftaller he does not like blood, preferring gentle persuasion backed up by blackmail, coercion and threats. Grass does not want us to believe that Hoftaller is a decent man, but he makes clear that he is not malicious and does nothing for personal gain, which makes him thoroughly incorruptible. He also sees part of his duty to lie in protecting Fonty from himself and regrets not having looked after other writers who got themselves into trouble. He blames himself, for instance, for Johnson's death in the unfriendly West (on the island of Sheppey in the Thames). Hoftaller's security interests are thus double-edged. Like the team of narrators, Hoftaller is colourless, not because he fails to divulge personal details but because he has so few. When he does emerge as a real person the effect is all the more arresting. One key episode takes place on the legendary Glienicker Bridge, a favourite location for the handover of agents from East to West and vice versa. At Fonty's suggestion, the pair pretend to be agents in the process of exchange, walking towards and then past each other, exchanging a greeting as they pass, head bowed, on their way to a new life in the old country ± one of several images of Grass's own text, which is ultimately a playful re-enactment of past deeds and texts. Fonty and Hoftaller discover one useful thing on the bridge: `you remain who you are on either side' (493). We learn even more about Hoftaller's self-esteem because `people like him could get access to this sluice for agents only in their dreams', a fact which degraded them to third-class status. He and his like `were good enough to do the dirty work: outside duty, subject observation, looking after informants, routine reports, paper work, now and again a trip somewhere' (489), but never got near anything more glamorous. He wants to lead a more exciting life and is delighted to be able to tear up the remaining Wuttke family ®les while riding in the big wheel in Treptow because it reminds him of the famous scene in The Third Man. If Hoftaller yearned for glamour, he yearned for recognition even more. It is this sad, lonely old man who articulates the theory of recent history which got Grass into such trouble. Hoftaller assures us the West knew during the 1950s that the Berlin Wall would be built and claims to have helped East Berlin procure the materials to build it from the West. He says it was the Stasi's idea to open up the wall



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in November 1989, the Stasi's idea to push for German unity (the Leipzig demonstrators were their unsuspecting puppets). The next stage of the plan was to bankrupt the West German state by encouraging it to swallow its smaller eastern neighbour. Germany would be uni®ed in poverty. The biographies of the secondary characters illuminate aspects of Fonty's own as they also have a highly ambiguous view of their own pasts. Freundlich's father, a Communist deputy in the Reichstag before 1933, a Jewish communist exile (old thereafter, belonged to the GDR's founding generation of alte Kampfer campaigners) who believed in `the good cause' (382). Born in Moscow in 1935, Freundlich was taken as a young child by his exiled parents to Mexico after stopovers in Shanghai and the USA ± a familiar enough itinerary for Hitler's political enemies. In 1990 he spits at Hoftaller that his father `should have reckoned with your sort' (382), supporting the idea that it was the Stasi who spoiled the dream of a better world under socialism. 1989 suddenly changed the meaning of the entire past for everyone, but for a Jewish communist like Freundlich there are particularly cruel ironies. He takes his own life when he is stripped of his university post because of past membership of the SED. Even though he fell foul of the party, like his father before him, and relinquished his privileges, he is still treated after 1989±90 as if he had remained a member to the end. Yet, having not previously paid much attention to his Jewish background, he now ®nds that he is regarded as a Jew by his Western èvaluator'. As an ex-communist, Freundlich deserves to lose his job. As a `surviving Jew', he is told, he should understand more than anybody that the West does not want to repeat the mistakes made after 1945 with regard to dealing with those who supported the old regime. The question the novel asks is this: should Freundlich be a Jew, thus a victim who deserves sympathy and help, or a communist, thus an evil perpetrator who should be punished? The truth is that he is both and neither. Like all the East German characters, his unique experience refuses to ®t into the pat West German categories. Martha and Emmi cling to their identities by defending the past without mourning its passing. For Emmi `there were a few happy years here, certainly at the beginning'; for her daughter `what was here once is ®nished and over anyway, even if I always say that not everything in our republic was bad' (767). What is true of Emmi and Fonty's marriage, that `what we have been through together all through the bad years is what we have in common, and things like that bind you together' (210), is true of the citizens' relationship with one another, if not to the state itself. When Martha's childhood friend, Inge Schwerinski, starts them all singing the old propaganda songs at Martha's wedding, she asserts a value in their shared past, recalling their time in the youth brigade: ìt was sometimes really nice, wasn't it? Us as young pioneers with our scarves' (309). The guests from the West either want confessions of guilt from everybody or to hear how life under socialism was no different from incarceration in an immense concentration camp. Everyone has to be pigeon-holed, either as lackeys of the system or defenceless victims. Emmi tries to explain that ìt was meant well, back then, all that never-ending Bau auf, even if it did not all go right' (311). She welcomes change, just like her husband who can ®nally escape his past and ®nd freedom,





but she also wants to be allowed to remember `what it was like in those days when we were still amongst ourselves' (311). `Friendly memories were in the majority' (159) insists Fonty to himself as he stands in line to change his GDR savings into D-Marks, trading the fruit of his labour, attached to memories of experiences he itemises mentally, for the crisp new notes and shiny coins. All the characters refer to a good phase in the GDR's ®rst decade when they were able to believe in the state's positive propaganda. Before 1953, `we all still believed, full of hope, that we were on the right path' (561). Even one of the archivists refers to `the period of reconstruction when socialism was close to all our hearts, not just on banners' (481). He mentions the dates of two massive setbacks, 1953 and 1961, before `the eleventh Plenum, when all hope had come to nothing' (482) in 1965. The history of intellectuals' identi®cation with GDRsocialism was the history of disaffection, which came for different individuals at different moments. For Grass in this novel hope has always been treated this way in modern times: freedom ®ghters in the wars of liberation against Napoleon were rewarded by the repressive Karlsbad Decrees in 1819, the year Tallhover and Fontane were born. But Fonty wants to `relativise' the GDR past completely: `What's all this talk of an unjust state! Within this world of de®ciencies we lived in a comfortable dictatorship. Believe me, Emilie, over there, in Wuppertal or Bonn, they only cook with water too' (324±5).

Making sense ± ®nding truth Employing an anonymous and colourless collective of archivists to narrate the action of the novel is an original strategy: Grass's novels had in the past generally depended on the deceptive character of a beguiling story-teller. The undisclosed number of collaborators from the Potsdam Fontane Archive, which in Cold War days served as a rare and treasured site for East-West academic interaction, hide their individual personalities behind their shared enterprise. Yet they are as much marked by the state which has employed them all their lives as all the other characters. They let slip one or two personal details, enabling us to notice when a new voice has taken over the story: there is one woman, who reveals that Fonty is an incorrigible ¯irt; one is a lapsed Catholic, who is asked for that reason to assist at Martha's wedding; one was condemned to spend a year working in a bauxite mine in the mid-1960s; another has worked at the archive since the founding of the GDR. Since their identities are tied up with the state and its history, whose cultural values they have more or less internalised, the whole novel is narrated from a resolutely GDR perspective. A team is the ideal means to embody the spirit of a state which subordinated the needs of the individual to the collective. The narrators say `we' automatically; the occasional reversion to Ì' brings the reader up with a jolt. Their background determines their characteristic thoroughness, which is manifested in repetitions and constant re-starts, as well as by their coded style of expression. Too Far A®eld is a narrative version of a seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. Details in the novel may be characterised by a prosaic realism, but they invariably reveal a series of meanings. It is a novel where everything either stands for



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something else or is expressed in terms of something else; both main characters live their lives through another: Fonty through Fontane, Hoftaller through Fonty; all new events are interpreted through past events. Grass in fact makes all the characters `stand for' something ± hence the range of biographies ± and when he brings them together, or places them in a speci®c location, all the details speak. The chapter set in McDonald's where Fonty celebrates his seventieth birthday shortly after the fall of the Wall depends on the contrast between character and setting, between past and present resonances of the Scottish family name, between nineteenth-century popular culture, as exempli®ed by Fontane's mock-Scottish ballads, and our contemporary take-away, three-minute variety. In the vast panorama unfurled over 800 pages, vignettes on the periphery of the action either highlight events taking place at the centre or introduce semi-independent but related themes. The truth, which it is the business of the archivists to unearth, is located in these details. The archivists excel at the game of following up the least likely clues, as Fonty acknowledges: `Nothing is more fascinating for archivists and secret policemen: they both feed in the same way on trivia' (532). One reason for this style is censorship: the security police helped determine the shape of literary texts by giving writers rules and boundaries, making them say things more imaginatively, as well as lending their works a resonance they could not possess in free-market countries. Yet there are moments in the novel unburdened by extra meaning, and there are without doubt Fonty's favourite. When he pauses to help a little boy, who has no idea of Fontane or any of the great events shaking the world, to tie up his shoe-laces it is a moment of high lyrical intensity. Fonty likes to carry chestnuts in his pocket from the magni®cent tree in the courtyard of his Kollwitzstraûe ¯at, the point of which is that they have no point. In its more conventional guises, allegory works best when the `signifying' element ± say, the wedding of Fonty's daughter to the West German businessman ± is credible without its `signi®ed', in this case the relationship between the two German states. The marriage is taken, of course, straight from reality. An overwhelming majority of marriages between East and West Germans were between West German men and East German women. Whenever the press called German uni®cation a marriage, it portrayed the East as the bride, the West as the bridegroom. Martha, with her orthodox political past, prior engagement to a communist, sudden conversion to an alternative creed, her impetuousness, and swift dissatisfaction with her husband clearly stands for the GDR people or the former GDR state. Grundmann, super®cially interested in her family and their ways, but uncomprehending of their sensitivities, honourable in his treatment of his new wife but far more eager to work for pro®t in the new federal states, equally obviously represents the FRG. Even their pre-1989 courtship in far-away Bulgaria reproduces the awkwardnesses in the Cold War German±German relationship. But their marriage, the centre-piece of book two which stretches over the rest of the novel until Grundmann's death in a highly emblematic car crash, holds our attention because neither it nor the story of reuni®cation which is told through it is either dull or predictable. Not all the details have an allegorical counterpart: it would clearly be absurd to see Grundmann's mortally ill ®rst wife, who is present in Bulgaria when the couple ®rst meet, as





allegorically signi®cant. What her role conveys is that there is from the start something distinctly odd if not downright suspect about the whole business. After Grundmann's death, Martha has the money Grass had demanded as Lastenausgleich or compensation for the GDR as a whole and decides to start making it work for her. Madeleine is another highly allegorical character. She is the ghost of Fonty's past who returns to enchant rather than to haunt him, dispelling his fears and showing him at the end of his life how to live again. As an incarnation of the Frenchwoman from Heine's famous poem `who smiles away the German worries', she does what no German can do. As a child of 1968 she may be a Trotskyist, like the rest of her family back in Montpellier, but she is resolutely non-dogmatic and indisputably on the side of the angels, averring that Ì still don't know what real communism means; perhaps it's the same with the meaning of real Christianity' (434±5). Her knowledge of nineteenth-century German literature and history puts any German of her age to shame. She also speaks German with an elegance which has been lost and which can only come from books. Despite standing for these ideas, she is still a ¯esh-and-blood literary character whose relationship with her newly found grandfather makes him feel young and frivolous once more. Because Fonty is fetched by the product of his secret, sinful past and taken from Germany to France, where he tastes freedom and happiness for the ®rst time in his life, he is in the end redeemed by his own history. There is thus, for him at least, an end to the burden of the German past. Madeleine can look at it all from a French perspective, arguing òn German unity I can only say this: it is a normal event from a French point of view: while not exactly desirable, it is quite acceptable' (451). The last words we hear from him, which are also the novel's last words, are written on a postcard from France, presumably the Cevennes region, whence his ancestors originally came to Germany, and where Madeleine's mother had been brought up. He says that for his part he sees an end to the `®eld', however `far' it might have once seemed. Given the multiple historical and biblical resonances Dieter Stolz has identi®ed for the phrase, this can only mean that for this highly representative individual German, history need no longer be a cause of German neuroses.34 If this is a correct interpretation, then the novel means more or less the opposite of what every unappreciative reviewer alleged. Like all Grass's novels, Too Far A®eld is built around a number of highly visual and poetic concepts. Rowing is a metaphor for remembering, dipping into the waters of the past and disturbing the still waters of time, which is why Fonty and Hoftaller and Fonty and Madeleine spend so much time on the Tiergarten lakes. Some of the images are deceptively obvious: stuf®ng the incriminating Stasi documents into the sofa, after which Fonty is sick from drinking too much red wine. Grass delights in literalising one metaphor showing Fonty and Hoftaller `changing places' in the rowing boat. Yet the way the two old men carefully co-ordinate their movements for fear of capsizing, locked in a precarious embrace entirely dependent on one another, is an extremely poignant image of their predicament. One of the richest images is the Paternoster lift in the equally symbolic Haus der Ministerien. Grass makes the boxlike space, the ceaselessly revolving, doorless lift, suf®cient for no more than two people, into one of the novel's most revealing loci. In addition to transporting its



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passengers from top to bottom and round again, it brings individuals of high and low rank together. Fonty has shared journeys with Goering, with GDR ministers, as well as with the Treuhand boss, who becomes his friend. Fonty also ®rst meets his wife in the Paternoster, which gets its name from its similarity with rosary beads used by Catholics to remember their prayers: passengers who stay on for a full circuit have just enough time to say the Òur Father'. And if they fail to get off before one of the turning points, they may feel they have added reason to do so. The Paternoster also represents everything that is slow and out-of-date with the old GDR-state. Fonty's ®rst and only triumph in the new republic is to save it from the modernisers until an unknown arsonist uses it to spread ®re through the building. The Paternoster's slowness had always endeared the machine to Fonty, who also likes walks and rowing boat rides, both of which gain a similar symbolic value to rides in the lift, as they afford time for thought, historical whimsy and reminiscences. Fonty travels to Hiddensee àt good old Reichsbahn speed' (334), preferring trains, especially if they still have compartments where people can talk, to cars ± even Hoftaller's brand new Trabant. Speed in turn is a preoccupation of the West which values ef®ciency and money-making at the expense of interaction between individuals, conversation and contemplation, all of which can be had in the Paternoster, in a rowing boat or in a train compartment. When Grass himself was asked what he thought the GDR and its population would bring to enrich the FRG, he replied, in the spring of 1990, that it would be their `slower pace of life and corresponding greater amount of time they had for conversations'.35 Speed is the cause of Grundmann's death. Emmi saw it coming: `Had an idea that something like that would happen. Something bad! Nothing good could come of it, all that speed' (708). Like Grass, Fonty does not have a driving licence; like Grass, he writes by hand, preferring sometimes a quill to a fountain pen, before giving his manuscript to his wife for typing, just as Fontane had done. Grass still uses a manual Olivetti typewriter dating from the 1950s. Holding on to old, slower ways of doing things is one way of keeping in touch with the past, which the old GDR did far more effectively than the FRG. Fonty even wants to bring back the coloured lithographs of Fontane's childhood made by from Neuruppin, in whose ®rm his own father worked, to replace Gustav Kuhn television, which shows images far too quickly for viewers to absorb them. He himself is a piece of walking history who looks out of place, `left behind' or `left over' from another epoch. The adjective most frequently applied to him is `latterday' or `yester-year'. When he attends the ceremony at Sans Souci to mark the return of Frederick the Great's earthly remains, the call `Fonty for King!' goes up and `people thought they were encountering Prussia's virtues in digni®ed shape' (734). Like its hero, Too Far A®eld is deliberately and outrageously `not of its time' in terms of either length or style (Bloch's notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit is a recurrent theme). This was not just because Grass was approaching his own seventieth birthday, but because the two German states had lived according to different time scales, which meant that there was something ungleichzeitig about the whole of East Germany, in any number of ways more closely connected to the German past than the Americanised West. On Hiddensee, it is suggested that Fonty's eccentricity is in fact





quite common in the old GDR: `Lots of them look as if they are in costume, perhaps in the style of the 1920s' (342). Just as the archivists miss things, they sometimes notice details which are irrelevant. In the days leading up to reuni®cation, as Fonty, Emmi, Hoftaller and Madeleine go rowing in various combinations, there is a torn scarlet dress on the bank, which the narrator notices two days in succession. Has there been a murder, a rape, a violent struggle? We never ®nd out, although we expect to do so. The dress, it turns out, is a clue from another story, from another world; there may be no point following it up, but then there was no point in mentioning it either. But Grass, the author behind the archivists, is no better than them. When Hoftaller blackmails his friend into posing beside the statue of the Ìmmortal' in Neuruppin, two unknown ®gures wander into the narrative frame, à contrasting pair, who were living a completely different novel' (592). He wears a beret and stoops, pipe in hand, like an artist `searching for motifs', peering bad-temperedly over his crooked glasses, while she takes photographs according to his instructions. Amazingly, they do not see Hoftaller and Fonty. Her long, curly hair gets in her way, prompting him to mumble through his drooping moustache that she should get a hat. The reader has to use his and Ute Grass, presumably own detective skills to identify the tourists as Gunter gathering material for their novel, which makes them miss what is right in front of them: `[they] have to photograph everything, but they manage not to look at anything closely' (593). In case there was any doubt that Grass shares some of his hero's foibles, he uses the same word to describe himself and Ute as others use to denote Fonty, `latter-day' or `yester-year'. Archivists collect and interpret documents, much like historians, even novelists, and very like secret policemen. The archivist-cum-Stasi snooper becomes one of the representative ®gures of the state. Everyone in Too Far A®eld seems to be reporting on everyone else: Fonty writes reports for Hoftaller who in turn writes them on Fonty; Fonty collects data on Fontane for which reason the Fontane archivists collect data on him. Martha has written about her father for Hoftaller; her brother Teddy spies for East Berlin to protect his family. There is seemingly nothing that has ever escaped Hoftaller: he has everything and everyone covered and has even made it his business to know Fontane's life and texts. The novel's narrative strategy thus mirrors the blanket state surveillance. The archive is less successful in its mission to track Fonty. They have known him since the beginning of the GDR and their increasing interest in him de¯ects their attention from the real object of their enquiries, Fontane. But Fonty can ®ll gaps in their sources, seemingly through intuition, and knows everything better than them because he knows the material better. Hoftaller investigates Fontane to ®nd out about Fonty; the archivists do it the other way round. The spurned Lene in A Suitable Match (Irrungen Wirrungen) is based on Fontane's own abandoned Dresden girlfriend, who bore him two children, one of whom, according to Hoftaller, is Fonty's own great-grandmother. In the last section of the novel, Fonty uses his expertise on Fontane's works to plug a gap that still exists in history: the identity of the Treuhand boss's assassin, who turns out to be a humble East Berlin cleaning lady.



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Fonty can sympathise with the couple's failure to notice him because `he tended too to overlook what did not suit him, and to ®ll up gaps with creatures of his imagination' (592). The archivists do not know everything, and speculate how Hoftaller blackmailed Fonty into turning back from Tegel airport on his second attempt to get away. They do not know for sure where he has gone at the end and do not even have a lead on Hoftaller who also disappears. Doubts, grey areas, uncertainties, gaps will always remain: `The archive did not know everything' (85), partly because they look in the wrong place. Archivists and secret policemen, like historians, however, like to have a complete picture: they do not like the type of gaps which Fontane and Fonty leave behind. As a novelist, Fontane is famed for his àrt of leaving things out' since he concentrates on what leads up to big events and what comes after them rather than on the big events themselves: `Something has to stay secret, not everything can come to light' (544). There are gaps too in Fontane's recorded biography, moments where he escapes the most diligent researchers in their attempts to piece together his life from the rich documentation he left behind. His wife burnt some of their correspondence, and other matters were too sensitive to discuss. For Fonty these are both moments of freedom and moments he dreads. Fontane's time in London in the 1850s is equally shrouded in ambiguity; the facts of his arrest behind enemy lines in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, his interrogation, imprisonment and subsequent release are still disputed. Was he spying for the Prussians or was it his curiosity which led behind enemy lines? And why did the French not shoot him? Was it after intervention from Bismarck, from in¯uential Jewish admirers, or, as Hoftaller reveals with a ¯ourish, from the Franco-Prussian security services, working in tandem as usual? The empirical fact-®nders will never quite get the measure of their prey because `their stored knowledge which as a rule is only half-knowledge' (544) deals only in what they can see. Grass makes Fontane's ability to elude his posthumous pursuers into a structural narrative principle, a metaphor for the writing of history and for the dif®culty of establishing truth about an individual life or about any other subject.




1 Life and Art 1. Gu È nter Grass, Ateliers des meÂtamorphoses. Entretiens avec Nicole Casanova (Paris: Belfond, 1979), 30. 2. Klaus Rainer Ro È hl, Fu

Ènf Finger sind keine Faust (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1974), 29±30.

Ã e, Gestern, vor 50 Jahren. Ein Deutsch-Japanischer Briefwechsel 3. Gu È nter Grass/Kenzaburo Ã, O È ttingen, 1995), 46. (Steidl: Go 4. Quoted by Heinrich Vormweg, GuÈnter Grass mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986), 25. 5. Salman Rushdie, `Gu È nter Grass', in Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981±1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 273±82, here 279. 6. Vormweg, GuÈnter Grass, 23. 7. Janina Grabowska, `Historischer Abriû', Stutthof. Ein Konzentrationslager vor den Toren Danzigs. Mit einem historischen Abriû von Janina Grabowska (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1995). Ã e Gestern, vor 50 Jahren, 94. 8. Grass/O 9. Ekkhardt Rudolph (ed.), Protokoll zur Person. Autoren uÈber sich und ihr Werk (Munich: List, 1971), 60. 10. Vormweg, GuÈnter Grass, 23. 11. Ibid., 26 and 24. 12. Letter to Helen Wolff, 21.03.1969. 13. Carl Tighe, Danzig/Gdansk. National Identity in the Polish-German Borderlands (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 90. 14. Volker Schlo È ndorff, Die Blechtrommel. Tagebuch einer Ver®lmung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1979), 39. 15. Ibid., 121. 16. Grass/Casanova, Ateliers des meÂtamorphoses, 18. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Michael Minden, Ìmplications of the Narrative Technique of Der Butt', GuÈnter Grass's Der Butt. Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History, eds Philip Brady, Timothy McFarland and John J. White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 187±202, here 197. 19. Grass/Casanova, Ateliers des meÂtamorphoses, 21±2. 20. Vormweg, GuÈnter Grass, 27. 21. `Der lernende Lehrer. Warum ich bei Hermann Ott, genannt Zweifel, gern in die Schule gegangen waÈre', Die Zeit, 20.05.1999, 41±3. 22. Ekkhardt (ed.), Protokoll zur Person, 75. 23. Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder. Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany ± a Pledge Betrayed (London: Warner, 1997), 430±2. 24. Gu È nter Grass, `Rotgru È ne Reden', in Grass, Reinhard Ho È ppner, Hans-Jochen Tschiche, È ttingen: Steidl, 1998), 7±33, here 32±3. RotgruÈne Reden (Go 25. Horst Kru È ger, `Das Wappentier der Republik. Einige Augenblicke mit Gu

È nter Grass' (1969), in Ènter Grass. Auskunft fu Èrtz Gu Èr Leser, ed. Franz Josef Go

(Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984), 56±62. 208



Notes

26. Hans Werner Richter, `Was war und wie entstand die Gruppe 47?', in Hans Werner Richter und die Gruppe 47, ed. Hans A. Neunzig (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1978), 122±3. 27. Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf. Erinnerungen (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1984), vol. 2, 298. 28. Hans Werner Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge. Einundzwanzig Portraits aus der Gruppe 47 (Munich: Hanser, 1986), 122±3. 29. Cyrus Overbeck and Oliver Mu È ller, Otto Pankok. Maler, Gra®ker, Bildhauer. Eine Biographie È sseldorf: Droste, 1995). (Du 30. Letter from Hildesheimer to Richter, 24.12.1957. In Hans Werner Richter. Briefe, ed. Sabine Cofalla (Munich: Hanser, 1997), 251±2. 31. Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, 124. 32. Max Frisch, Die Tagebu È cher. 1946±1949/1966±1971 (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1978), 715±16. 33. Gu È nter Grass/Harro Zimmermann, Vom Abenteuer der AufklaÈrung. WerkstattgespraÈche (Go È ttingen: Steidl, 1999), 47. 34. Artur Knoff, Geschichten (Literarisches Colloquium Berlin: Berlin, 1968). See also Àrtur Knoff' (1989) (XVI:215±16). 35. Klaus Wagenbach, `Gu È nter Grass', in Schriftsteller der Gegenwart. 53 PortraÈts, ed. K. Nonnemann (Freiburg: Olten, 1963), 118±26. 36. Peter Ru È hmkorf, Die Jahre die ihr kennt. Anfa

Èlle und Erinnerungen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1972), 106±9.

37. Dieter Stolz, Vom privaten Motivkomplex zum poetischen Weltentwurf. Konstanten und Entwicklungen im literarischen Werk von Gu È rzburg: Ko Ènter Grass (1955±1986) (Wu Ènigshausen and Neumann, 1994), 55.

2 Lives in History 1. Interview with Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Gunter Grass. Text und Kritik (1978), 1±39, here 5. 2. See Henrik D. Engel, Die Prosa von Gunter Grass in Beziehung zur englischsprachigen Literatur. bei Salman Rushdie, John Irving, Bernard Malamud Rezeption, Wirkungen und Ruckwirkungen u.a. (Berne: Peter Lang, 1997). 3. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, `Wilhelm Meister auf Blech getrommelt', in Von Buch zu (Neuwied/Berlin: Grass in der Kritik. Eine Dokumentation, ed. Gert Loschutz Buch. Gunter Luchterhand, 1968), 8±12.

4. Alexander Weber, Gunter Grass's Use of Baroque Literature (Bithell Series of Dissertations: London, 1995), 148; Die Blechtrommel. Attraktion und AÈrgernis. Ein Kapitel deutscher 11±12. Literaturkritik (Luchterhand: Darmstadt, 1984), ed. Franz Josef Gortz, 5. Vormweg, Gunter Grass, 43±4. 6. Letter from Walter Hollerer, 09.07.1956. 7. Letters to Hollerer, 24.03.1958 and 01.05.1958. 8. Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland Droste, 1961). 1914±18 (Dusseldorf: 9. Tighe, Danzig/Gdansk, 178. 10. Horst Ehmke, Mittendrin. Von der Groûen Koalition zur Deutschen Einheit (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1994), 152. 11. George Steiner, À Note on Gunter Grass' (1964), in Language and Silence. Essays 1958±1966 (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 133±40, here 140. 12. Ìn Sachen Ziesel', Gunter Grass ± Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, eds Heinz Ludwig (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1971), 305±27. Arnold and Franz Josef Gortz 13. Kunst oder Pornographie? Der Proceû Grass gegen Ziesel. Eine Dokumentation (Munich: Lehmann, 1969). Ziesel revealed his authorship to the editors of Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung. 14. Ìn Sachen Bremer Literaturpreis', in Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 265±81, here 270.



Notes 209

Notes

15. Ibid., 272. 16. Rudolf Morsey, Heinrich Lubke. Eine politische Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1996), 320. (ed.), Von Buch zu Buch, 101±3. 17. Klaus Wagenbach, `Marginalie' (1963), in Loschutz 18. See Ibid., 51±69.

19. Blech getrommelt. Gunter Grass in der Kritik, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Gottingen: Steidl, 1997), 30±1.

20. Quoted by Boleslaw Fac, `Fast alle seine Bucher . . .', in Gunter Grass im Ausland. Texte, Daten, Bilder zur Rezpetion, eds. Daniela Hermes and Volker Neuhaus (Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1990), 155±69, here 164. 21. Erwin Schonborn, Soldaten verteidigen ihre Ehre (Bierbaum: Frankfurt aM, 1974), 10, 16. Quoted from Der Spiegel, 26.12.1966. 22. Letter to Helen Wolff, 22.01.1979. 23. Gunter Grass/FrancËoise Giroud, Wenn wir von Europa sprechen (Luchterhand: Frankfurt aM, 1989), 74. 24. `Gesprache mit Gunter Grass', Text und Kritik (1978), 1±39, here 5. 25. Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Ba nden, vol. 1 Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie (Frankfrut aM: Fischer, 1960), 688. 26. Ibid., vol. 8, Erzahlungen, 680. 27. See Ibid., vol. 12, Reden und Aufsatze, 793. 28. Ibid., vol. 11, 870±90. 29. `Gesprache mit Gunter Grass', Text und Kritik (1978), 1±39, here 6. 30. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 277. 31. Letter to Hollerer, 28.12.1960. 32. Letter from Grass to Kurt Wolff, 16.07.1961, in Kurt Wolff, Briefwechsel eines Verlegers 1911±1963, eds Bernhard Zeller and Ellen Orten (Frankfurt aM: Schef¯er, 1966), 487±8, here 486. 33. Letter from Grass to Kurt Wolff, 21.12.1962, in ibid., 487. 34. Letter from Grass to Richter, 10.12.1958, in Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 274. 35. Quoted by Klaus Roehler and Rainer Nitsche, Das Wahlkontor Deutscher Schriftsteller in Berlin 1965. Versuch einer Parteinahme (Berlin: Transit, 1990), 30. 36. Johannes Bobrowski, `Zu meinem Buch Levens Muhle, 34 Satze uber meinen Groûvater', Gesammelte Werke in Sechs Ba nden, ed. Eberhard Haufe, vol. 4 (Berlin: Union, 1987), 337. 37. Johannes Bobrowski oder Landschaft mit Leuten. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs 1993), 701. im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar (Berlin: Akademie der Kunste, 38. Johannes Bobrowski, `Zur Geschichte der Familie Bobrowski', Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, 318±26, here 323. 39. Bernd Neumann, Uwe Johnson (Hamburg: Europa ische Verlagsansalt, 1994), 392±3. 40. Richter, `Was war und wie entstand die Gruppe 47', in Neunzig (ed.) Hans Werner Richter und die Gruppe 47, 147. 41. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, `Gunter Grass, unser grimmiger Idylliker', Deutsche Literatur in West und Ost. Prosa seit 1945 (Munich: Piper, 1963), 216±30; Hermann Kant, Èin Solo in Blech', Neue Deutsche Literatur 8:5 (1960), l5l±5, here 154. 42. Ruth K. Angress (later known as Ruth Kluger), À ``Jewish Problem'' in German Postwar Fiction', Modern Judaism 5 (1985), 2l5±33; Siegbert Prawer, `The Death of Sigismund Grass', in Danzig, Between East and Markus. The Jews of Danzig in the Fiction of Gunter West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Literaten und Deutsche University Press, 1985), 95±108; Sander Gilman, `Judische Literatur. Antisemitismus und die verborgene Sprache der Juden am Beispiel von Jurek deutsche Philologie 107 (l988), l69±94. Becker und Edgar Hilsenrath', Zeitschrift fur 43. See Julian Preece, `Gunter Grass, his Jews and their Critics: from Kluger and Gilman to Sebald and Prawer', in German-Jewish Literature since 1945, ed. Paul O'Doherty (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming). 44. Stenier, À Note on Gu È nter Grass', in Language and Silence, 133±40, here 138 and 136.



210

Notes 211

1. The Portable Walt Whitman, selected and with notes by Mark van Doren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 192±3. (ed.), Von Buch zu Buch, 202±7, 2. Heinrich Vormweg, `Der Beruhmte' (1964), in Loschutz here 202.

3. Letters from Richter to Grass, 31.05.1961, and Brandt to Richter, 07.06.1961, in Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 343±4 and 344±5. 4. Frisch, Die Tagebucher, 718. 5. Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf, vol. 2, 238. 6. Ibid., 237±8. 7. See Gunter Grass. Der Fall Axel C. Springer am Beispiel Arnold Zweig. Eine Rede, ihr Anlaû und die Folgen (Berlin: Voltaire Pamphlets, 1967), ed. Bernward Vesper. 8. Grass/Zimmermann, Vom Abenteuer der Aufklarung, 87. 9. Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, 129. (ed.), Von Buch zu 10. Quoted by Geno Hartlaub, `Wir, die ubriggeblieben sind . . .', in Loschutz Buch, 211±6, here 211.

11. According to Ruhmkorf, Die Jahre die ihr kennt, 133. 12. Roehler/Nitsche, Das Wahlkontor, 7. 13. Wilhelm Johannes Schwarz, Àuf Wahlreise mit Gunter Grass', in Manfred Jurgensen (ed.), Grass. Kritik ± Thesen ± Analysen (Berne: Francke, 1973), 151±65, here 165. 14. Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, 129. 15. Letter from Fried to Richter, 01.07.66, Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 608. 16. Frisch, Die Tagebucher, 721. 17. Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 70. 18. Golo Mann, `Hiergeblieben. Der Staat sind wir', in ibid., 117±20, here 119. Zufalle. 19. Ingeborg Bachmann, Ein Ort fur Mit dreizehn Zeichnungen von Gunter Grass (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1965). 20. Johannes Bobrowski oder Landschaft mit Leuten, 701. 21. Beate Klarsfeld, Die Geschichte des PG 2 633 930 Kiesinger. Dokumentation mit einem Vorwort von Heinrich Bo ll (Darmstadt: Metzler, 1969). and Markus Schafer Grass' in Viktor Boll (eds), Fortschreibung. 22. See the entries under `Gunter Bibliographie zum Werk Heinrich Bo lls (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1997). 23. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.05.1979; 30.05.1979. 24. Èin notwendiger Dialog uber weite Distanz. Briefwechsel zwischen Sho Ãhei Ooka und Grass', in Hermes/Neuhaus (eds), Gunter Gunter Grass im Ausland, 181±96, here 194. 25. Peter Weiss, Notizbucher 1971±1980 (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1981) 2 vols., 731; 1960±1971 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt aM, 1982) 2 vols., 237. Notizbucher 26. Weiss, Notizbucher 1960±1971, 492; Notizbucher 1971±1980, 731. 27. Quoted by Stephan Reinhardt, Alfred Andersch. Eine Biographie (Zurich: Diogenes, 1990), 410. 28. Ibid., 390. 29. Letter to Helen Wolff, 21.03.1969. 30. Letter to Wolff, 17.07.1969. 31. Ruhmkorf, Die Jahre die ihr kennt, 133±4. Schroder 32. Bernward Vesper, Die Reise. Ein Romanessay. Ausgabe letzter Hand, eds Jorg and Klaus Behnken (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), 499. 33. Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 55. 34. Susanne Miller and Heinrich Potthoff, A History of German Social Democracy From 1848 to the Present, trans. J.A. Underwood (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), 50. 35. Hans Peter Schwarz, Adenauer. Der Staatsmann: 1952±1967 (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1991), 596. 36. Gunter Struve, Kampf um die Mehrheit. Die Wahlkampagne der SPD 1965 (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1971), 63±5.



3 The Turn to Politics

37. Public letter to Brandt, 26.11.1966 (XIV:188), published in the Frankfurter Rundschau. 38. Struve, Kampf um die Mehrheit, 41±2. È ber das Selbstverstandliche.

39. Òffener Brief an Ludwig Erhard' (1965), in Grass, U Reden Offene Briefe Kommentare (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1968), 5±6, here 5. Aufsatze 40. Volker Hentschel, Ludwig Erhard. Ein Politikerleben (Olzog: Munich, 1996), 572±3. È ber Arbeitgeber, Pinscher und das Volksganze. Eine 41. F.C. Delius, Wir Unternehmer. U Dokumentarpolemik anhand der Protokolle des Wirtschaftstages der CDU/CSU 1965 in (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1966). Dusseldorf 42. Roehler/Nitsche, Das Wahlkontor, 29. 43. See Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 476±8. 44. Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf, vol. 2, 345. 45. Ehmke, Mittendrin, 49. 46. Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, 130±1. 47. Helmut Schmidt, Weggefahrten. Erinnerungen und Re¯exionen (Berlin: Siedler, 1996), 92. 48. Ibid., 93. 49. Willy Brandt, Erinnerungen. Mit den ``Notizen zum Fall G'' (Berlin: Ullstein, 1994), 281. 50. Willy Brandt, Begegnungen und Einsichten. Die Jahre 1969±1975 (Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 1976), 532. 51. Ibid., 592. 52. Brandt, Erinnerungen, 325. 53. Letter from Andersch to Richter, 08.11.1964, in Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 536±8. 54. Quoted by Hermann Glaser, Die Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik, 3 vols. (Frankfurt aM: Fischer, 1990), vol. 3, Zwischen Protest und Anpassung, 90. 55. Quoted by Joachim Kaiser, `Den Grass wachsen horen', Suddeutsche Zeitung, 14.02.1969. 56. Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation. Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend (Dusseldorf: Diederichs, 1963). 57. Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, 132; Gerd Bucerius, `Wogegen sie ka mpfen, das (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 100±4, here 102. wissen sie', in Arnold/Gortz 58. Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 117±20, here 120. 59. Ehmke, Mittendrin, 83±7. 60. Letter from Grass to Brandt, 19.02.1968, in Arnulf Baring in collaboration with Manfred Machtwechsel. Die AÈ ra Brandt-Scheel (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Gortemaker, 1982), 66. 61. Ibid., 67. 62. Letter from Grass to Adorno, 17.10.1968, in Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946±1995 (Hamburg: Rogner and Bernhard, 1998), 3 vols., vol. 2, 471±2. 63. Letter from Adorno to Grass, 4.11.1968, in ibid., 472±4. 64. Letter to Wolff, 07.10.1968. 65. Vesper, Die Reise, 208. The article by Grass in fact appeared on 2 January 1971: `Politisches Tagebuch. Was nicht vom Himmel fa llt' (XV:83±5). 66. Vesper, Die Reise, 500. 67. Peter Schneider, Lenz (Rotbuch: Berlin, 1973), 25±6. 68. Letter to Wolff, 30.10.1964. 69. Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf, vol. 2, 141. 70. Interview with Ekkehardt Rudolph, `Die Ambivalenz der Wahrheit sagen' (1975), in Volker Neuhaus (ed.), Werkausgabe in zehn Ba nden (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987), vol. 10, Gesprache, 180±9, here 188. 71. Ibid., 49. 72. Programme notes to the RSC's production in July 1970. Quoted by H.F. Brookes and C.E. Fraenkel (eds), Gunter Grass, Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (London: Heinemann, 1971), xix. (ed.), Von Buch zu Buch, 183±8. See 73. Erich Fried, Ìst Ausgefragt fragwurdig?', in Loschutz Steven W. Lawrie, Erich Fried. A Writer without a Country (Berne: Peter Lang, 1996), 296±9.



212 Notes

74. Peter Schneider, Ìndividuelle Sachlichkeit', in Franz Josef Gortz (ed.), Gunter Grass: Leser (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1984), 186±92. Auskunft fur 75. Quoted by Glaser, Die Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik vol. 3, 299. 76. Letter to Wolff, 05.10.1966. 77. Letter to Wolff, 07.10.1969. 78. See Ìn Sachen Kipphardt', in Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 353±405. 79. Letter to Anna and Peter Hacks, 30.03.1972, in Hans Kipphardt, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Uwe Naumann with Pia Kipphardt (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964±82, 196±7. 1989), Ruckediguh. Blut ist im Schuh. Essays, Briefe, Entwurfe. 80. Grass/Zimmermann, Vom Abenteuer der Aufklarung, 122±4. 81. Letter to Wolff, 27.08.1971. 82. Erwin Lichtenstein, Die Juden der Freien Stadt Danzig unter der Herrschaft des Nationalso zialismus (Tubingen: Mohr, 1973).

4 The End of History Man 1. Letter to Hans Bender, 25.01.1973, in Briefe an Hans Bender, ed. Volker Neuhaus (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 151. 2. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, `Butt und die Welt. Geburtstagsbrief an Gunter Grass', Merkur 31 (1977), 966±72, here 966. 3. Letters to Helen Wolff, 31.01.1974; 08.12.1975. 4. Letter to Wolff, dated 30.02.1977. . .', in Hermes/Neuhaus (eds), Gunter Grass im 5. Boleslaw Fac, `Fast alle seine Bucher. Ausland, 155±69, here 167. 6. Engel, Die Prosa von Gunter Grass in Beziehung zur englischsprachigen Literatur, 207±23. 7. Volker Neuhaus, Schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit. Zu Leben und Werk von Gunter Grass (Munich: dtv, 1997), 163±8. 8. Letter to Wolff, 01.03.1976. 9. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914±1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 257±86. 10. Letter to Wolff, 07.11.1977. 11. Letter to Wolff, 26.04.1978. 12. Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1981), 283±4. 13. Ibid., 284±5. 14. Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 278. 15. Thus the entry under Grass in the `Findex: Menschen und Begriffe' in Peter Paul Zahl, Die Ein Schelmenroman (Berlin: 1979), 511±25. Glucklichen. 16. Cf. Rudiger Ruhnau, Danzig. Geschichte einer deutschen Stadt (Wurzburg: Holzner, 1971). 17. Tighe, Danzig/Gdansk, 268±88. 18. Grass/Giroud, Wenn wir von Europa sprechen, 78. 19. Schwarz, Àuf Wahlreise mit Gunter Grass', in Jurgensen (ed.), Grass. Kritik ± Thesen ± Analysen, 163. 20. Ruth K. Angress, `Der Butt ± A feminist perspective', in Gertrud Bauer Pickar (ed.),

Grass's Der Butt, (Munchen: Adventures of a Flounder. Critical Essays on Gunter Fink, 1982), 43±50, here 48.

21. Alice Schwarzer in a spoof review of a new Grass novel, Die Welt, 31.12.1977. 22. Svende Merian, Der Tod des Marchenprinzen. Ein Frauenroman (Hamburg: Bunt-Verlag, 1980), 160±1. 23. Marieluise Janssen-Jurreit, `Tragische, kaputte Endzielmanner. Grass' Gunter ma nnerkritischer (?) Roman aus feministischer Sicht', Die Weltwoche 17.08.1977, 25. 24. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Gunter Grass. Text und Kritik (1978), 90±3, here 93. 25. Engel, Die Prosa von Gunter Grass in Beziehung zur englischsprachigen Literatur, 209. 26. Grass/Casanova, Atelier des me tamorphoses, 178.



Notes 213

Notes

27. Ibid., 179. 28. Letter to Wolff, 12.03.1980.

29. Friedrich Schiller, Geschichte des Dreiûigjahrigen Krieges, in Samtliche Werke IV. Historische

Schriften, ed. Herbert G. Gopfert with Gerhard Fricke (Munich: Hanser,1958), 482. 30. Ibid., 480. 31. Richter, `Was war und wie entstand die Gruppe 47?', in Neunzig (ed.), Hans Werner Richter und die Gruppe 47, 146. 32. Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, 249±50. 33. Heinz Friedrich, `Das Jahr 1947', in Hans Werner Richter (ed.), Almanach der Gruppe 47 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962), 15±21, here 19±20; and Neunzig (ed.), Hans Werner Richter und die Gruppe 47, 78±9. 34. Dennis L. Bark, David R. Gress, A History of West Germany (Blackwell: Oxford, 1993), vol. 2, Democracy and its Discontents 1963±1991, 407. 35. Ibid., 402. 36. `Verweigert Euch!', Widerstand lernen, Politische Gegenreden 1980±1983. Vorwort von Oskar Lafontaine (Luchterhand Darmstadt: Neuwied, 1984) 97±8. 37. Immanuel Kant, `Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkla rung?' (1784), in Werke in sechs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Banden vol.6, 51±62. 38. Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1983), 10. 39. Enzensberger, `Das Ende der Konsequenz', Politische Brosamen (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1982), 7±30. È sthetik des Widerstands', Tradition und 40. Christa Burger, `Mythos von Weltuntergang ± A Subjektivita t (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp, 1980), 17±23. 41. Grass/Giroud, Wenn wir von Europa sprechen, 99. 42. Ibid., 82. 43. Letter to Wolff, 04.05.1971. 44. Letter to Wolff, 19.05.1980. 45. On the press reaction, see Sjaak Onderdelinden `Zunge zeigen in den Zeitungen', Gunter Grass ± ein europa ischer Autor? eds Gerd Labroise and Dick van Stekelenburg (Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992), 205±29; and Arnold (ed.) Blech getrommelt, 177±83. Also Vridhagiri

Grass und Indien ± ein Katz-und-Maus-Spiel' in Gunter Ganeshan, `Gunter Grass ± ein Èischer Autor? 229±45. europa

46. 'Im Hinterhof. Bericht uber eine Reise nach Nicaragua' (1982, XVI:41±51). Stephen Schwartz, Ìgnoble Nobel, The Spectator, 9.10.1999. Neuhaus, Schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit, 186±90. The debate with Vargas Llosa is documented at length by Grass im Kontext der Dick van Stekelenburg, `Der Ritt auf dem Jaguar ± Gunter Grass ± ein europaÈischer Autor? 169±203. Revolution'. Gunter 47. Letter to Wolff, 11.08.1982. 48. Letter to Wolff, 23.11.1982. 49. Letter to Wolff, 02.06.1983. 50. Letters to Wolff, 06.06.1984; 01.07.1985. 51. See Volker Neuhaus, `Gunter Grass' Die Rattin und die judisch-christlichke Gattung der Apokalypse,' in Labroise and van Stekelenburg (eds), Gunter Grass ± ein europaÈischer Autor? 123±39 52. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, `Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts', in Werke, vol. 8, 489±510. (Munich: Hanser, 1970) ed. Herbert G. Gopfert, 53. See Immanuel Kant, Ìdee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht' (1784), in Werke, vol. 2, 31±50. 54. See J.D.H. Temme, Die Volkssagen von Pommern und Rugen (1840), 23±7 (reprinted in Hildesheim: Olms, 1976). 55. See Julian Preece and D.G. Bond, `"Cap Arcona'' 3 May 1945: History and Allegory in Grass,' Oxford German Studies 20/21 (1991±1992), Novels by Uwe Johnson and Gunter 147±63.



214

Notes 215 56. Gunter Ratte, Der Grass (Frankfurt aM: Eichborn, 1986). 57. Letter to Wolff, 03.06.1986.

(Gottingen: 1. Rudolf Augstein/Gunter Grass, Deutschland, einig Vaterland? Ein Streitgesprach Steidl, 1990); Deutscher Lastenausgleich. Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot. Reden und (Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1990).

Gesprache

2. Gegen die verstreichende Zeit. Reden, Aufsatze 1989±1991 (Frankfurt: und Gesprache Luchterhand, 1991). treten. Ein Gesprach 3. Gunter Grass/Regine Hildebrand, Schaden begrenzen oder auf die Fuûe (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1993). 4. Letter to Wolff, 30.05.1990.

5. Peter Ruhmkorf, TABU I. Tagebucher 1989±1991 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1995), 334.

6. Neuhaus, Schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit, 208.

7. Gunter Grass/Pawel Kohout, Briefe uber die Grenze. Versuch eines Ost-West-Dialogs (Hamburg: Wegner, 1968).

8. Letter from Richter to Grass, 31.05.1961, in Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 343±2. 9. Letter from Richter to Enzensberger, 12.06.1964, in ibid., 501±2. 10. Dieter Wellershoff, `Sie sind zu lange allein geblieben', in Reinhard Lettau (ed.) Die Gruppe 47. Bericht. Kritik. Polemik. Ein Handbuch (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967), 498±502. 11. Johannes Bobrowski oder Landschaft mit Leuten, 225. Reden, 8. 12. Grass/Hoppner/Tschiche, Rotgrune 13. Grass/Casanova, Ateliers des me tamorphoses, 186±7. 14. Arnold/Gortz (eds), Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 35. 15. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988), 48. 16. Heinrich Boll, zu trauern. Schriften und Reden 1983±1985 `Leserbrief', in Die Fahigkeit (Lamuv: Bornheim-Merten, 1986), 115±6. 17. Letter from Grass to Christa Wolf, 9.2.1993, in Christa Wolf, Auf dem Weg nach Tabou. Texte 1990±1994 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1994), 255±7, here 256. 18. Letter to Helen Wolff, 14.01.1993. 19. Letter to Helen Wolff, 12.11.1993. 20. Der Fall Fonty introduced by Oskar Negt, ed. Daniela Hermes (Gottingen: Steidl, 1996). gives an account of this in Ich habe Lust, im weiten Feld . . . Betrachtungen 21. Peter Ruhmkorf Schach®gur (Gottingen: einer abgeraumten Wallstein, 1996). 22. Hermes (ed.), Der Fall Fonty, 36±7. 23. Birgit Breuel, Àuferstanden aus Romanen'; Klaus von Dohnanyi, `Du verspielst jeden Dialogs', in ibid., 158±60 and 161±6. Respekt als Figur des offentlichen 24. Ruhmkorf, Ich habe Lust im weiten Feld, 40±1. 25. Daniela Hermes/Manfred Bissinger (eds), Zeit, sich einzumischen. Die Kontroverse um Gunter Steidl, 1998). Grass und die Laudatio auf Yasar Kemal in der Paulskirche (Gottingen: 26. Fred Jameson, `Prussian Blues', The London Review of Books, 17.10.1996, 3±7. (ed.), Von Buch zu Buch, 27±8; 27. Hellmuth Karesek, `Der Knorpel am Hals', in Loschutz `Gunter (eds), Grass und die Narren' and `Ballade vom armen G.G.' in Arnold/Gortz Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 379±80 and 391±3. `Leserbrief', in Die Fahigkeit 28. Boll, zu trauern, 115±6. 29. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Àuf gut Gluck getrommelt' and `Selbstkritik des Blechtrommel Grass. Aufsatze Kritikers', in Reich-Ranicki, Gunter (Zurich: Ammann, 1992), 11±18 and 19±28. 30. Reich-Ranicki, `Statt eines Nachworts: War Gunter Grass ein bulgarischer Spion?', in ibid., 155±65; and `Junger Mann mit ma chtigem Schnurrbart', in Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), 381±92. 31. Letter from Reich-Ranicki to Richter 1.07.1967, in Cofalla (ed.), Richter. Briefe, 649±50.



5 Wrong Side of the Wende

216

Notes


32. Reich-Ranicki, Gunter Grass. Aufsatze, 159±60; Mein Leben, 384±5. 33. Wolfgang Paulsen, `Theodor Fontane. The Philosemitic Antisemite', Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute, Year Book 26 (1981), 303±26. 34. Dieter Stolz, Gunter Grass. Zur Einfuhrung (Hamburg: Junius, 1999), 175±7. 35. Spiegel interview with Willy Winkler, in Grass, Deutscher Lastenausgleich, 13±25, here 17.


Abitur 2, 14, 22, 52, 66, 195 Academy of Arts 19, 71, 99, 157 Academy of Fine Arts (Berlin) 22, 73 Adenauer, Konrad 17, 18, 48, 67, 69, 92, 115, 152, 165, 179, 180 Adorno, Theodor 77, 96±7, 147 Akzente 23, 36, 127 Albertz, Heinrich 94 Algerian War of Independence 12, 70 Allende, Salvador 129 Amery, Carl 90 Andersch, Alfred 21, 25, 77, 79, 154 Anderson, Sascha 174 Angress, Ruth K. 61, 139, 142 Apollinaire, Guillaume 22 Arbeitsdienst (Work Service) 2, 3, 7, 51 Arendt, Hannah 38 Arndt, Adolf 90 von Arnim, Bettina 142 Augstein, Rudolf 91, 172 Auschwitz 17, 38, 60, 68, 84, 89, 172 Baader, Andreas 112, 129 Baader-Meinhof 86, 90, 97, 129 Bachmann, Ingeborg 21, 77, 90 Bad Godesberg 80, 81, 86, 151 Baring, Arnulf 95, 121 Barlach, Ernst 13 Barthes, Roland 37 Bauer, Leo 121 Bebel, August 82, 83, 84, 134, 136 Becker, Jurek 37, 178 Beckett, Samuel 31 Behlendorf 174 Bellow, Saul 35 Benjamin, Walter 46 Benn, Gottfried 75, 103, 145 Berlin 2, 13, 19, 23, 30, 62, 72, 73, 94, 105, 112, 188, 195, 196 Berlin Wall 71, 75, 149, 170, 176, 178, 182, 188, 195, 200 East Berlin 68, 79, 100, 101, 165, 174, 177, 178, 199, 200, 206 June 1953 Uprising 70, 75, 99; see also GDR

West Berlin 22, 35, 60, 70, 71, 75, 82, 99, 108, 112, 128, 131, 152, 171, 176 Berliner Ensemble 99, 101, 102 Bernstein, Eduard 82, 83 Berufsverbote 129 Bierkellerputsch 172 Biermann, Wolf 118, 146, 174, 178, 198 Bild-Zeitung 192 von Bismarck, Otto 82, 146, 147, 171, 188, 189, 194, 196, 207 Der Blaue Reiter 13 Bloch, Ernst 21, 105, 133, 141, 167, 205 Bobrowski, Johannes 59±60, 77, 149, 178 Heinrich 10, 19, 37, 38, 77±8, 90, 99, Boll, 129, 146, 154, 177, 187, 192 Born, Nicolas 178 Brandt, Willy 17, 18, 21, 48, 49, 58, 59, 68, 70, 71, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84±5, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 105, 128, 129, 136, 150, 151, 173, 176, 177, 180 Brasch, Thomas 178 von Braun, Wernher 48 Breuel, Birgit 190 Bremen Literature Prize 47±8, 70, 134 Brook, Peter 77 Brecht, Bertolt 21, 27, 34, 71, 99±107, 145, 191 Bucerius, Gert 94 Georg 97 Buchner, 71, 77, 99 Buchner-Prize Bundesverdienstkreuz 18, 78 Bundeswehr 78, 87, 152, 153, 178 Burgess, Anthony 133±4 Calcutta 19, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 187 Camus, Albert 12, 29, 74 Cap Arcona, the 167 le Carre , John 146 Casanova, Nicole 11 Cassubia 6, 8, 9±10, 11, 14, 42, 108, 123, 183 Castro, Fidel 160±1 Catholicism 8, 10, 14, 15, 39, 46, 47, 52, 53, 61, 65, 66, 88, 135, 145, 148, 149, 184, 195, 202, 205

217



Index

218 Index

Dach, Simon 145, 147, 148, 149 Dachau 4, 86 Dahn, Felix 13 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, Danzig/Gdansk 17, 28, 29, 36, 40, 42, 43, 45, 50, 57, 60, 61, 63, 66, 72, 108, 125, 128, 131, 133, 134, 137, 141, 158, 166, 167, 170, 180, 181, 182 Delius, F.C. 89 Alfred 22±3, 37, 58, 130 Doblin, von Dohnanyi, Klaus 190 Donhoff, 121 Marion Gra®n Dos Passos, John 22, 58 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 13 Dreyfus-Affair 74 Dubc ek, Alexander 177 Durer, Albrecht 119, 124 Dufhues, Josef Hermann 71 Friedrich 24 Durrenmatt, Dusseldorf 11, 18, 20, 22±3, 45, 52 Dutschke, Rudi 93, 94, 95, 97, 122, 125 Eastern Front 2, 40, 43, 45 Eco, Umberto 155 Ehmke, Horst 47, 90, 95, 121, 122 Eichmann, Adolf 38 Election Of®ce of German Writers 82, 97 Elsner, Gisela 149 Emergency Laws 125 Emma 141 Engels, Friedrich 82, 84 Enlightenment, the 32, 85, 87, 88, 108, 109, 116, 145, 146, 147, 153±4, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 184 Ensslin, Gudrun 97, 112, 129 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 21, 35, 48, 77, 88, 92, 120, 154, 158

Eppler, Erhard 121, 126 Erhard, Ludwig 48, 78, 86, 88, 89, 92, 153, 191 Erler, Fritz 90 FDP (or `Liberals') 86, 158 Figes, Eva 128±9, 142 Fischer, Fritz 38 Fontane, Theodor 9, 21, 66, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194, 195±7, 198, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207 Ef® Briest 13 Forster, Leonard 146 Fournier, Alain 50 Franco, General 3, 23 Frank, Peter 23 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) 38, 95, 168, 192 Frankfurter Rundschau 172, 190 Frederick the Great 143, 205 Fried, Erich 73, 79, 92, 106 Frisch, Max 14, 24±5, 68, 73, 74, 90, 124 Frizen, Werner 29 de Gaulle, Charles 37 Gaus, Gunter 121 GDR 19, 27, 60, 70±1, 74, 83, 92, 99±107, 125, 149, 152, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 189, 191, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206 Genscher, Hans-Dietrich 171 George, Stefan 74, 75 Gerhardt, Paul 145, 149 Gilman, Sander 61 Ginsberg, Allen 78 Globke, Hans Maria 17, 69, 92 Goebbels, Joseph 4, 110, 192, 195 Goering, Hermann 189, 198, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 21, 30, 31, 33±4, 36, 46, 58, 161, 190 Golodkowski, Hans Schalk 92 Gorbachev, Mikhail 168, 171 Goya, Francisco de 155 Grand Coalition 48, 77, 86, 88, 90, 96, 98, 110, 125 Grass, Anna (ne e Schwarz) 9, 14, 20, 22, 27, 37, 70, 73, 118, 128 Grass, Franz (son) 11, 37 Grass, Gunter Advantages of the Wind-Chickens, The 23±4, 27, 106

Before 100



Chodowiecki, Daniel 186 CDU 17±18, 49, 67, 77, 81, 85±6, 89, 92, 95, 125, 151, 175, 179, 180, 190 Celan, Paul 37, 60 Chagall, Marc 23 Cervantes, Miguel de 58 Don Quixote 36, 39 Chelmno 89 CNN 190 Colloquium 23 Cruise Missiles 19, 151, 152 Czechoslovakia 4, 197 1968 Soviet Invasion of 97, 119, 176, 177, 195, 199 Czechowski, Heinz 178

Call of the Toad, The 15, 17, 154, 158, 171, 172, 180±7 Cat and Mouse 2, 7, 17, 26, 29, 36, 38, 47, 48, 49, 50±5, 59, 84, 107, 113, 128, 192 Dead Wood 170 Dog Years 2, 3, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 26, 33, 36, 38, 48, 58±67, 77, 107, 111, 116, 146, 163, 172, 178 Exhaustively Questioned 25, 106±7 Findings for Non-Readers 25, 153 Flood 23±5, 31, 36 Flounder, The 3, 5, 10, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 36, 48, 50, 60, 63, 73, 83, 91, 110, 111, 118, 119, 126, 127±45, 146, 148, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 178 From the Diary of a Snail 1, 4, 10, 15, 16, 20, 31, 33, 36, 38, 48, 62, 73, 76, 83, 108, 118±26, 158, 161, 176, 193 Gleisdreieck 106 Headbirths or the Germans Are Dying Out 5, 10, 17, 91, 92, 128, 154, 157±9, 161, 178 Inmarypraise 25 Learn to Resist. Political CounterSpeeches 151, 154 Local Anaesthetic 3, 17, 25, 29, 31, 36, 38, 45, 57, 93, 100, 107±18, 129, 130 Meeting in Telgte, The 18, 21, 36, 50, 103, 108, 128, 137, 145±50, 154, 161, 178 My Century 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19, 37, 70, 88, 91, 92, 96, 100, 103, 111, 145, 178, 181, 187, 188 Novemberland 25, 172 On What Comes Automatically 154 Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo 23±4, 30, 36 Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, The 27, 70, 71, 99±107, 117, 145, 176, 177±8 POUM or the Past is a Fellow Passenger 91 Rat, The 10, 17, 19, 25, 26, 36, 50, 91, 93, 118, 119, 128, 130, 131, 145, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161±9, 192, 193 Ridden There and Back 23, 30, 36 Show Your Tongue 25, 155, 159±60, 184, 186, 187, 193 Stories (Artur Knoff) 27 Thirty-Two Teeth 23±4, 31±3 Tin Drum, The 3, 8, 12, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34±46, 50, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 80, 92, 100, 108, 113, 117, 118, 123, 127, 128, 129, 139, 141, 146, 166, 168, 190, 193, 198

Too Far A®eld 5, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 19, 25, 26, 30, 36, 50, 62, 66, 70, 77, 91, 108, 115, 128, 130, 145, 147, 156, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 180, 181, 183, 187, 188, 189, 191, 194±207 Uncle, Uncle 23±4, 26, 31, 36 Wicked Cooks, The 23±4, 26, 31 Grass, Helene (mother) 4, 8, 11±13, 15, 128 Grass, Raoul (son) 11, 37 Ùncle Franz' 6, 8, 9, 12 Grass, Ute (ne e Grunert) 128, 129, 178, 187, 206 Grass, Waltraud (sister) 4, 11, 87 Grass, Wilhelm (father) 4, 5, 8, 11, 15 Greens, the 150, 153, 158, 173, 191 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 128, 130, 136, 164, 165 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von 137±8, 146±7 Grundgesetz 76, 87, 153, 173, 175, 191 Gruppe 47 18, 20±1, 23±4, 35, 37, 47, 56±7, 59±60, 68±9, 71, 74, 79, 89, 91±2, 127, 146, 147±8, 149, 150, 155, 177, 192, 193 Gryphius, Andreas 138, 145 Guevara, Che 96, 195 Handke, Peter 155 Hartung, Karl 22 Hauptmann, Gerhart 74, 80, 103 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 20, 123, 133, 141 Heidegger, Martin 20, 60, 64, 71, 103, 111 Hein, Christoph 171 Heine, Heinrich 36, 124±5, 146, 196, 204 Heinemann, Gustav 82, 88, 90, 96, 125±6 Heiseler, Bernt von 71 Heissenbuttel, Helmut 23 Heller, Joseph 35 Hendrix, Jimi 93 Hentschke, Sibylle 178 Herder, Johann Gottfried 146 Hermes, Daniela 188, 191 Herwegh-Club 196 Hess, Rudolf 49 Heym Stefan 171 Hildesheim (potash mine) 16, 70, 81 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang 24, 127±8 Himmler, Heinrich 7 Hintze, Peter 190, 191 Hitler, Adolf 1, 2, 8, 11, 18, 37, 47, 56, 61, 65, 83, 84, 93, 117, 120, 121, 122, 132, 147, 157, 177, 192, 198 Hitlerjugend 2, 5, 14, 123, 197



Index 219

220 Index

Irving, John 35 Jackson, Glenda 77 Ja ckel, Eberhard 121, 122 Jameson, Fred 191 Jean Paul 58 Jens, Walter 90 Jews/Jewishness 6, 9, 10, 12, 17, 22, 41, 42, 44, 61±2, 64, 75, 123±5, 133, 189, 192, 197, 201, 207 Johnson, Uwe 21, 37±8, 60±1, 69, 77, 79, 87, 90, 105, 128, 154, 177, 178, 200 Joyce, James 58 Ernst 13, 47, 145 Junger, Jungvolk 2, 14, 121 Kafka, Franz 34, 56±7 Kandinsky, Vassily 23 Kant, Hermann 61, 177 Kant, Immanuel 145, 154, 165 Karasek, Hellmuth 78, 192 Kautsky, Karl 82 Kennedy, President J.F.K. 71, 90 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 17, 77, 86, 88±9, 93, 96, 108, 110, 111, 122 Kipphardt, Heiner 118, 192 Kirsch, Rainer 178 Kirsch, Sarah 178 Klarsfeld, Beate 77 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 146 Knoff, Artur 27 Kohl, Helmut 19, 122, 151, 164, 171, 173, 174, 191 Kohout, Pavel 177 Kolbenhoff, Walter 21 Kommune 1 112 Kosovo 19 (Kaliningrad) 4, 124, 145 Konigsberg konkret 80 KPD 83, 195 Kraus, Karl 65 Krenz, Egon 170, 174

Kristallnacht 41, 42, 43, 46, 172 Ingrid 129 Kruger, Kuhlmann, Quirinus 139, 140 Kunzelmann, Dieter 107, 112 Lafontaine, Oskar 151, 173, 191 Langenfeld, Spee von 148 Langhans, Rainer 112 Lassalle, Ferdinand 82 Leber, Julius 83, 86 Lenin 98, 177, 186 5, 9, 131 Lenin Shipyards (Gdansk) Lennon, John 109 Lenz, Siegfried 21, 77±8, 90, 121, 134 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 145, 146, 154, 164, 184 Lichtenstein, Erwin 124 Das Literarische Quartett 192 Lithuania/Lithuanian 4, 15, 66, 181 Loest, Erich 178 Logau, Friedrich 146 London Review of Books 191 Luchterhand 23, 48 Heinrich 48, 86, 91, 96 Lubke, Ludke, Martin 189 Luftwaffenhilfe 2 Luxemburg, Rosa 82, 83, 97, 142 Mages, Sepp 22 Manheim, Ralph 35 Mann, Golo 74, 95 Mann, Klaus 75 Mann, Thomas 9, 19, 20, 21, 34, 36, 37, 50, 57±8, 74, 101, 121, 133 Manteuffel, Baron von 189, 197 Mao Tse-Tung 19, 96, 111 Marcuse, Herbert 156 Marienbad 4 Marx, Karl 82, 84, 96 Mayer, Hans 20±1, 69, 102, 104, 105, 177, 178 Meckel, Christoph 178 Meir, Golda 91 Meinhof, Ulrike 73, 78, 80 Melville, Hermann 38 Moby Dick 30 Merian, Svende 141 Merkur 127, 178 Merriman, Seton 134 Metternich, Clemens von 189 Minden, Michael 12 Mitscherlich, Alexander/Margerette 38 Modrow, Hans 174



Hobsbawm, Eric 129 Hochhuth, Rolf 89 Hoffmannswaldau, Hoffmann von 145, 148 Hollerer, Walter 21, 23, 27, 36, 37, 59, 60, 77, 90 Honecker, Erich 75, 170, 189 Hungary 170 1956 Uprising 70, 102 Husserl, Edmond 64

Index 221

Nabokov, Vladimir 41 Napoleon 36, 66, 70, 77, 123, 132 NATO 18, 19, 150, 151, 178 Neuengamme 167 Neuhaus, Volker 160, 163, 164, 177 Neuss, Wolfgang 48 Nicaragua 155, 160±1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 46 NPD 4, 125 Nobel Prize 12, 19, 36, 37 Noske, Gustav 83 NSDAP 4, 10, 17, 42, 47, 93, 125 Nuremberg Trials 4, 70 Race Laws 17 Oder-Neiûe-Line 78, 88, 182 Ã e, Kenzaburo O Ã 7, 78 Ohne mich! (`Count me out!') 69, 115 Ohnesorg, Benno 94, 109 Ollenhauer, Erich 83, 86, 115, 179 Opitz, Martin 135, 138, 139, 148 Orwell, George 150, 167 Ossietzky, Carl von 75, 102 Ostpolitik 85, 86, 171, 176, 180 Pankok, Otto 22 Paris 22±3, 36, 40, 60 Pershing Missiles 19, 151, 152 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 31±3 Picasso, Pablo 13, 23 Pilsudski, Marshall 43 Playboy 130 48, 49 Pohland, Hansjurgen Poland/Polish 1, 7, 9, 10, 15, 18, 21, 37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 51, 63, 66, 72, 78, 91, 110, 124, 128, 135, 136, 137, 150, 158, 160, 170, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 192, 197 Polish Post Of®ce (Danzig) 6, 8, 45 Pomerania 10, 179, 185 Prague 97, 170 Prawer, S.S. 61 Princeton 74, 78, 79 Prussia/Prussians 4, 42, 64, 65, 67, 141, 145, 147, 189, 194, 195, 196, 198, 207 East Prussia 10, 45, 60, 121, 145, 179, 180, 185

West Prussia 7, 132, 143, 180 Pynchon, Thomas 35 Rabelais, FrancËois 36, 37, 58, 134 Radisch, Iris 191 Rama, Maria 25 Ransmayr, Christoph 155 Raspe, Jan Carl 129 168 Ratte, Gunter Reagan, Ronald 151, 160 Red Army 2, 12, 43, 45 Red Army Fraction 97 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel 21, 37, 61±2, 124, 172, 189, 190, 192±4 Remarque, Erich Maria 13, 145 Richter, Hans Werner 18, 20±1, 24 35, 59±60, 68, 71, 73, 77, 90, 94, 128, 148, 149, 151, 150, 177, 178, 193 Rimbaud, Arthur 74, 75 Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross) 48, 49, 50±5 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 37 Klaus Rainer 2±3 Rohl, Rohwedder, Detlev 190, 195 Peter 21, 28, 73, 79±80, 174, Ruhmkorf, 190 Rushdie, Salman 4, 19, 35, 58±9, 182, 185±6 Salinger, J.D. 35 Sartre, Jean Paul 74 171 Schabowski, Gunter Scha dlich, Hans Joachim 178, 187, 200 Scheel, Walter 18 Field Marshal 116 Schorner, Schiller, Friedrich 30, 138, 141, 147 Schiller, Karl 59, 82, 87, 89, 90 Schleyer, Hanns Martin 129 Schmidt, Helmut 85, 86, 90, 121, 151, 153 Schneider, Peter 97, 98±9, 106, 178 Schneider-Lengyel, Ilse 149 Volker 10, 11, 34 Schlondorff, Schnitzler, Arthur 48 Schnurre, Wolfdietrich 21, 149 Erwin 49 Schonborn, Schopenhauer, Arthur 20, 29, 57, 123 Veronika 128 Schroter, Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel 146 Klaus 95 Schutz, Schuhmacher, Kurt 81, 83, 86 Schwarz, Anna; see Grass, Anna Schwarzer, Alice 141 SED 83, 105, 195, 198, 201 Seghers, Anna 37, 75



Mùn 25, 178, 187, 190 Moore, Henry 23 Moser, Friedrich Karl 146 Heiner 171 Muller, Musil, Robert 133

222 Index

die tageszeitung 192 Tannenberg 13 Teufel, Fritz 112 Texte und Zeichen 23 Thatcher, Margaret 151 Theresienstadt 17, 89 Thirty Years' War 15, 138, 146, 167 Time Magazine 35, 71

Tolstoy, Leo 13, 29, 34±5 Trakl, Ernst 22 Treblinka 45, 48 Treuhand 175, 187, 189, 190, 195, 205, 206 Tucholsky, Kurt 75, 76 Tunnel uber der Spree 196 Ulbricht, Walter 75, 79, 165, 189, 195 Varain, Heinz-Josef 121 Vargas Llosa, Mario 160±1 Vesper, Bernward 80, 97±8, 177 Vietnam 71, 73, 79, 95, 108 Vistula 1, 7, 60, 182, 184 Vogel, Hans Jochen 118, 151 Vollmer, Antje 191 Voltaire 162 Vonnegut, Kurt 35 Vormweg, Heinrich 9, 68 Wagenbach, Klaus 21, 27, 48±9, 73, 77, 80, 89±90 Walser, Martin 21, 77, 90, 149, 171, 180 Warsaw 193 Warsaw Ghetto 17, 91, 192 Weckherlin, Georg 148 Wedekind, Frank 48 Wehner, Herbert 82, 90, 126 Wehrmacht 15, 16, 38, 66, 151, 197 Weiss, Peter 37, 38, 77, 78, 79, 154, 177 Weimar Republic 18, 34, 58, 74, 75, 83, 85±6, 102, 172, 194 Weininger, Otto 62 Weizsa cker, Richard von 176 Die Welt 168, 192 Wewels¯eth 128, 193 Whitman, Walt 58, 68 The Wilhelm Gustloff 43, 166±7 Wirth, Andrzej 192, 194 Wittstock 138, 140 Wolf, Christa 37, 170, 174, 187 Wolff, Christian 146 Wolff, Helen 9, 15, 57, 79, 86, 96, 99, 107, 118, 128, 129, 130, 146, 157, 161, 168, 174, 176, 187, 188 Wolff, Kurt 57, 59 Die Zeit 19, 73, 94, 106, 157, 172, 174, 191, 192 Ziesel, Kurt 47 Zola, Emile 74 Zweig, Arnold 37, 71



Seibt, Gustav 192 Shakespeare, William 99, 100 Sieburg, Friedrich 38 Silesius, Angelus 145 Sloterdijk, Peter 154 Sobibor 89 Solidarinos c 150, 160, 170 Sontheimer, Kurt 121 Spanish Civil War 3, 84 SPD 2, 9, 19, 47, 49, 66, 68, 69, 73, 76, 80, 81±9, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 118, 119, 120, 121, 134±7, 150, 151, 153, 156, 171, 173, 175, 190, 191, 195, 196 Spartacists 83, 105 Sparwasser, Elsie 134 Spectator, the 160 Der Spiegel 66, 71, 78, 159, 168, 172, 174, 190, 192, 193 Spiegel-Affair 77, 91, 92 Springer Press 71, 78, 97, 99 Stachnik, Dr, 14, 134 Stalin 132, 177 Stalingrad 4, 6, 15 Stasi 5, 26, 69, 173, 177, 178, 195, 197, 199, 200±1, 204, 206 Stein, Peter 118 Steiner, George 47, 64 Stern 168 Sterne, Lawrence 35, 36, 58 Stolz, Dieter 28±9, 187, 204 Strauss, Botho 155 Strauû, Franz Josef 49, 74, 77, 91±2, 151, 185 Strength-Through-Joy (KDF ± Kraft durch Freude) 13, 43 Stutthof 6±7, 15, 60 Sudeten Germans 72, 89 Suddeutscher Rundfunk 23, 149 Zeitung 78, 80, 88, 97, 129, Die Suddeutsche 157, 190 Suskind, Patrick 35, 155 Swift, Graham 35 Swift, Jonathan 162

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