Günter Grass

by Michael Roloff

THOUGH not yet forty — he was born in Danzig in 1927 — Günter Grass today occupies a place in German letters normally accorded only to successful authors of a riper age. Hardly a week passed last year without some mention of him in the German press. His latest enterprise or utterance, his projects for the future, a new expression of outrage issued by someone “scandalized by his writings - everything about him has a unique way of turning into “news.”

Last June, for example, Der Spiegel, West Germany’s equivalent of Time, published a photograph of Grass on the Kurfürstendamm, hawking the Spandauer Volksblatt. This suburban Berlin paper’s sudden burst into the limelight was occasioned by Grass’s willingness to write for it at its usual thirty pfennigs (eight and a half cents) per line. Der Stern, the biggest of the illustrated weeklies, featured an interview between Grass and a sixteen-year-old schoolboy which ended with the boy asking him whether he still had anything to look forward to in life. Grass replied magnanimously: “Yes, a new novel by Uwe Johnson, because I’m somewhat tired of rereading the classics.”

Such star treatment is understandable in a country with few illustrious older writers to boast of. Grass’s hold upon the public imagination is partially due to his departure from the glorification of war and death, a theme which captivated an earlier generation of young Germans and has left them with little but a sharp sense of their betrayal. No defender of romantic values, Grass cuts savagely at the naïve idealism of his literary predecessors. The chief target in his third and latest novel, Hundejahre (“Dog Years”), is Martin Heidegger, the still-influential German existentialist philosopher, whose warm embrace of Hitler’s National Socialism in the 1930s earned him the bitter contempt of many of his former colleagues and students.

In one of Dog Years’ most spectacular sections, Grass satirizes Heidegger’s linguistic contortions in supplying the Wehrmacht high command with the secret code it employs during the siege of Berlin in order to retrieve the German shepherd Prinz, Hitler’s companion throughout the war. Prinz, the symbolic arch-Nazi in Grass’s fanciful work, is said to have escaped from the Führer’s bunker just before the explosion destroyed Hitler, and is now the watchdog in an abandoned potash mine in West Germany. And in the mine, whose enlarged shafts house a plant for manufacturing scarecrow images from German history, the eighteenth chamber of the plant is reserved for the production of hundreds of scarecrows resembling Martin Heidegger in his nightcap and buckle shoes, forever and ever mechanically mumbling garbled passages from his notorious philosophical tract, Sein and Zeit.

Because of his relative youth and his prodigious success, Grass has been subjected to more backbiting and carping on the part of critics (many of them hardly older than himself) than would have been the ease with someone of a more venerable age. The criticism, however, has altogether failed to dim his star, which has spread its light far beyond the confines of Germany. The Tin Drum, which has been translated into at least a dozen languages, was such a success in England that its British publishers adopted the drawing of Oskar —the stick-wielding dwarf which Grass himself drew for the cover of the German edition — as the new colophon for all Seeker & Warburg books.

In Berlin I said to Uwe Johnson: “I hear you and Grass are friends.” “We don’t fight,” was the oblique reply, which may signify something about Johnson, but which told me precious little about Grass. I knew, of course, from innumerable photographs and newspaper descriptions that he wore a formidable mustache. His face is the kind which apprehensive German mothers tell children to look out for when they go to play in the woods — faintly ferocious and with two deep-set brown eyes which bore into you like gimlets, though they can be as roguish as die blue eyes of little Oskar in The Tin Drum.

THE building in which Grass was living when I first went to see him was a half-bombed monstrosity, the left part of whose third floor had remained boarded and propped up since the end of the war. This is not an unusual sight in Berlin, even today. Both the eastern and western halves contain wide rubble-strewn stretches of wasteland, and even along the lavishly neon-lit length of Kurfürstendamm one can pick out the odd building which has bricks and boards instead of panes.

In Grass s living room there were no bookshelves to interrupt the white of the high walls, only drawings and paintings done by himself and his wife. The drawings of hens in the process of hatching and nuns in grotesque plumage are recognizable as illustrations in his two books of poetry.

I asked Grass about his boyhood, and he said that it was like any other German boyhood during the war. He was inducted into an anti-aircraft battalion at the age of sixteen, was wounded during the defense of Berlin, spent nearly a year convalescing in a Marienbad hospital and another year in an American prisoner of war camp — experiences he deals with in his novels. In 1946 he made a brief attempt to complete the work needed for a regular high school diploma, but walked out on the Just lesson, which began with the history teacher saying: “Well, where did we leave off? Right — the Ems dispatch. This reference to the notorious ruse whereby Bismarck precipitated the Franco-Prussian War was inducement enough for someone fresh out of a P.O.W. camp to skip class from there on in.

Grass then went into black marketeering. How much of a success he made of it, he did not say; probably not much, for he doesn’t look exactly unobtrusive. Subsequent to his black-market venture, he worked in a potash mine near Hanover, an experience that yielded the setting for the scarecrow plant in Dog Tears. In 1947 he enrolled in the Düsseldorf Art Academy, taking a job at the same time as a tombstone engraver (described in The Tin Drum). From this he moved on to work on building facades alter the I 948 currency reform.

Grass is not a tall man, but his strong hands and broad, rounded shoulders testify to how hard he must have labored during those years. He said that he began writing and drawing when he was thirteen, and that he had never had any doubt that he would be anything but an artist. There was no sudden moment of revelation in his life. The successive stages of his career differentiate him sharply from the usual German writer, who, even if not university-educated or first apprenticed in a bookshop (the latter being the customary alternative approach in Germany to a literary career), is often enveloped with the aura of exclusively literary preoccupations.

In 1953 Grass moved to Berlin, where he has lived ever since, with the exception of the two years he spent in Paris writing The Tin Drum. He might well emigrate elsewhere, he said, if no longer allowed to live in Berlin; Düsseldorf and every other German city have simply grown too dreary. Even during the late-night runs. West Berlin has the wittiest bus drivers and conductors in Germany. He likes Berlin because of its combination of honesty and extreme artificiality.

Though he has deliberately chosen not to live in the Federal Republic, Grass is anything but a wallstraddler. He supported the West Berlin boycott of the S-Bahn (which, as distinct from the underground, is controlled by the East German railroad) as a protest against the erection of the Wall.

Grass is probably no more alienated from West German society and politics than other West German writers. In 1962 when the Group 47 (an influential group of poets, writers, and critics) met in Berlin and drafted a statement condoning the publication of military secrets, Grass refused to sign. Explaining his refusal, Grass remarked: “There are two groups in West Germany that want to destroy the West German constitution — the German nationalists and another group, present in this room.”

Outspoken criticism, of course, still has the ring of novelty in West Germany, particularly to politicians like FranzJosef Strauss, who was the chief instigator of the attack on Der Spiegel. The relationship between politicians and intellectuals, insofar as it exists at all, is one of mutual incomprehension. Grass, however, helps Willy Brandt with his speeches.

Originally, Grass said, The Tin Drum took the form of a long (and as yet unpublished) narrative poem, told from the point of view of someone perched on top of a tall monument. This vantage point, among other things, proved too static; but not until he one day saw a child crawl under a table during a party did the central idea of the book occur to him.

In The Tin Drum the two points of view — from under a table and from the top of a statue — have been combined, and they account for the curious double perspective from which Oskar views the world: absolutely detached, yet intimate, self-examining, and as an active participant. Grass added that he was disappointed because it had not occurred to people discussing the book that the other characters were meant as extensions of Oskar: for example, Herbert Truczinski, the waiter, whose scars Oskar points to with his drumstick, each scar yielding a story, and who impales himself on the siren figurehead in the maritime museum.

Grass says that his original intention had been to write Gruselmärchen, fairy tales with an uncanny and gruesome twist. These tales, however, have all crystallized around down-to-earth objects like sugar, eels, fizz powder, an Adam’s apple, a galleon bowsprit, a coconut-hair mat, German shepherds, scarecrows, the smell of butter, objects unburdened by any but the most elemental connotations and set down in a precise and realistic historical setting.

The fairy-tale elements, such as Oskar’s ability to shatter glass with his voice (which Grass said could be regarded as an analogy for the German rockets deployed against Britain during the last war), or, in Dog Tears, the miller’s capacity to divine the future from the whisperings of the maggots in his twenty-pound flour sack, extend the strict realism of the historical setting into a sphere where the fables outlive the memory of the events they refer to.

As has been pointed out, both The Tin Drum and Dog Years run into difficulty when Grass’s characters, who have their origin in Danzig and in his own childhood memories, encounter the realities of West German society. When Oskar in I he Tin Drum or Eduard Amsel. Walter Matern, and the miller with the sack full of flour and maggots in Dog Years are described in their Danzig setting, they are embedded, as are the fables, in a known and organic society. In West Germany, however, they live on the periphery of an evolving society, or they go underground. A discrepancy occurs here, with which Grass has had great difficulty.

In Dog Tears Amsel’s building of scarecrows as a boy is in character: it even serves a purpose. His constructing them along assembly line methods in an abandoned potash mine is a futile and grotesque conceit. The meaning of this image to the West German reader is clear enough: this is your past, the whole disastrous horrible past, assuming monstrous proportions underground. Implicit in such a conceit is the tacit admission that the writer understands the present only insofar as it reflects the past. As Grass has an unfailing nose for the manifestations of Nazism and the behavior of people who made it possible, he is, of course, still capable of showing the continued manifestations of the same behavior.

“Content as resistance, as an excuse for form,” Grass has written. The West German experience has not yet solidified for him. It is evanescent but oppressive, and Grass merely senses that there is still something desperately wrong.

Grass said he did not intend to continue the Danzig saga, though he’d thought of writing a book about present-day Danzig. And what was he working on at present? A play, he replied.

“I’ll probably call it The Plebeians Rehearse the Insurrection. Place of action: a rehearsal stage in East Berlin. Time: the seventeenth of June, 1953, the day the East German workers rose up against their regime. Someone the assistants call The Chief’ is rehearsing Coriolanus. Act One, Scene One opens with the insurrection of the plebeians — the Chief’s problem here is to make sure this insurrection won’t look pathetic or doomed when presented on the stage.

“The rehearsal of the insurrection scene,” he went on, “is interrupted by news of the uprising on Stalin [now Karl-Marx] Allee, reported first by stagehands, then by a delegation of construction workers. The construction workers ask the Chief to help them draft the proclamation for a general strike. The Chief doesn’t refuse their demand outright: lie’s willing to help write it as soon as the masons and carpenters have demonstrated just how the uprising started on the Stalin Alice. What he’s interested in is using the actual events for his production of Coriolanus, for his insurrection scene. The construction workers refer to Ulbricht and Grotewohl: he discusses the tribunes Sixinius and Brutus. The workers mention the raising of the norm; he emphasizes the importance of Sicilian grain shipments to Rome. The workers cite his own words back at him: he quotes Shakespeare. The workers appeal to Marx; he appeals to Brutus. The workers want him to support the uprising; he wants to use the workers for the rehearsal of the plebeians’ insurrection. The workers grow restless and don’t know what to do. He, the Theater Chief, knows what he’s after: on his stage the plebeians are victorious, but on the theater stage, where the construction workers’ revolt is mirrored, the workers’ uprising collapses.

“In actual history — for the seventeenth of June has become a historic date and in my piece. Soviet tanks crush the uprising. Whereas the workers consider the appearance of the tanks an act of fate against which they are defenseless, the Chief gives an impromptu speech about whether and how tanks can be deployed on the stage. Whatever happens, everything is turned into theatrical action; everything becomes a question of aesthetics.

“The Chief is analogous to Bertolt Brecht in some respects,” Grass said. “Brecht was rehearsing Erwin Strittmatter’s Katzgraben at the time of the seventeenth of June uprising, and he was writing his version of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which he had completed before his death in 1956 except for the crowd scenes. How the crowd scenes were to be played was something he never settled on until he had experimented with them in rehearsal. It was certainly Brecht’s intention to cast the plebeians in a more favorable light than they are in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Brecht’s attitude toward the seventeenth of June was wait and see. The statements he made at that time have never been made public, at least not in full. We know that he retired to Buckow for a while and wrote the Buckower Elegies, and that he continued to direct the Berliner Ensemble, the cultural showpiece of the East German government, and that he retained his Austrian passport. But primarily what I’m attacking in my piece is overaestheticization and the unwillingness to take a stand.”

I looked briefly at his drawings hanging on his living room walls, and asked about his apparent fascination with nuns.

“Continence,” he said, “continence.”

When first exhibited, these drawings of nuns stirred up a scandal comparable in scope to the indignation aroused by Grass’s novels. What, ultimately, is the root source of the outrage Gunter Grass seems inevitably to provoke? No less a person than President Heinrich Luebke once remarked, in a slightly scandalized tone: “He writes things you can’t even discuss with your wife.” A woman senator from Bremen was so incensed by The Tin Drum, when it was first published in 1959 that she took it upon herself to force the revocation of the city’s literary prize, which was to have gone to Grass.

Grass’s novels — stylized, fabulous, obliquely ominous make their strongest and sharpest impact through their presentation of the fatality of eroticism. The narrators he interposes between himself and these fables — Oskar in The Tin Drum, Eduard Amsel, Harry Liebenau, Walter Matern in Dog Years — merely temper the treatment of this subject with a kind of good humor.

Grass ruthlessly dispenses with the entire superstructure of ideas, sentimentalities, falsifications, evasions, and pseudomoralistic and pseudophilosophical conceptions which have been served up to German readers even by some of their best writers and poets. This is not to say that Grass has made himself the champion of sexual liberation in Germany. Grass’s attitude is complicated, but his presentation and his fables are explicit, realistic, accurate, and their impact on one’s defenses is shattering.

Sex leads to the downfall of many of his characters. It has disastrous consequences for Herbert Truezinski, who succumbs to the galleon figurehead’s amber eyes. For Oskar’s mother, the adulteress, it is no less fatal: her mania for eating fish, triggered by her initial revulsion to the eels in the horse head, is as simple and as astringent a portrayal of nymphomania as I know. In Cat and Mouse Mahlke’s oversized Adam’s apple — that concrete representation of his fatal sexual prowess, which he seeks vainly to conceal under a variety of emblems eventually leads to his doom in the half-submerged minesweeper; leads to his doom because he has been naïve enough to succumb to the vain lure of the Wehrmacht’s Ritterkreuz (“the knight’s cross”). Since he had to become a killer to be awarded this decoration, it led him straight into the Cat’s maw - - the army, war, and death — revealing to him his own fatal inclination to wreak destruction.

The impact of these archetypal fables is difficult to guard against because Grass’s whole style, his constantly shifting narrative technique and point of view, is meant to unsettle, to throw into doubt, to prevent empathy, identification, certainty, or facile rejection, while his tone keeps shifting from the humorous to the ominous, from the whimsical to the macabre.

Sex and death and fatality are combined in his books as in those of no other German writer, the only exception being Robert Musil. The German reader is not given the gratification of a Liebestod in Gunter Grass’s work, and it is reasonably clear that what he said about the nuns was not simply a joke.