The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass 1032231645, 9781032231648

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Introduction: Class, Politics, and Memory
Chapter 2 The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965
Chapter 3 “A Literary Concept”: The Kulturnation in Divided Germany, 1965–1979
Chapter 4 “Distant but Not Foreign”: Memory Politics and the Future of Remembrance, 1980–2006
Chapter 5 Conclusion: Penelope and Sisyphus
Full Reference List
Index

Citation preview

The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass

This manuscript argues for the importance of Günter Grass as a political thinker in addition to his status as a novelist and public intellectual, capable of forming ethical responses to contemporary issues like neoliberalism and place of the petite bourgeoisie in social life. I define Grass’s trajectory as a thinker through his novels and speeches. Primarily, I draw attention to the role memory plays in Grass’s thought: that his work represented an intellectual and aesthetic response to the role Nazism continued to play in West German politics in the postwar era. To Grass, Nazism represented a resurgent threat unaddressed following the end of World War II. Later, Grass amended his concept of memory politics to address neoliberal capitalism, reiterating his radicalism and affirming the need for German society to resist the rise of extreme ideologies. Alex Donovan Cole is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK, specializing in Politics and Literature, German Political Thought, and Comparative Political Economy. He has undertaken education at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA; and Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, Oxford, England.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

146 Cultures of Currencies Literature and the Symbolic Foundation of Money Edited by Joan Ramon Resina 147 The Theory and Practice of Reception Study Reading Race and Gender in Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison Philip Goldstein 148 Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts Esterino Adami 149 Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time A Social-Semiotic Perspective Rosemary Huisman 150 The Words of Winston Churchill Jonathan Locke Hart 151 Islam as Imagined in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century English Literature Clinton Bennett 152 The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass Alex Donovan Cole 153 The Words of Winston Churchill Speeches 1933–1940 Jonathan Locke Hart 154 The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies Christopher Lloyd and Hilary Emmett For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge .com/Routledge-Interdisciplinary-Perspectives-on-Literature/book-series/ RIPL

The Politics of Remembrance in the Novels of Günter Grass

Alex Donovan Cole

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Alex Donovan Cole The right of Alex Donovan Cole to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Donovan Cole, Alex, author. Title: The politics of remembrance in the novels of Günter Grass/Alex Donovan Cole. Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022028245 (print) | LCCN 2022028246 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032231648 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032386140 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003276074 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Grass, Günter, 1927-2015–Criticism and interpretation. | Grass, Günter, 1927-2015–Political and social views. | Memory in literature. | Politics in literature. | Nationalism and collective memory–Germany. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PT2613.R338 Z6228 2023 (print) | LCC PT2613.R338 (ebook) | DDC 833/.914–dc23/eng/20220711/ eng/20220711 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028245 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028246 ISBN: 9781032231648 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032386140 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003276074 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003276074 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Gracie Cole Kentuckian union activist Too poor for a middle name

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

1

Introduction: Class, Politics, and Memory

2

The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965

21

3

“A Literary Concept”: The Kulturnation in Divided Germany, 1965–1979

51

“Distant but Not Foreign”: Memory Politics and the Future of Remembrance, 1980–2006

85

4

5

1

Conclusion: Penelope and Sisyphus

116

Full Reference List Index

129 136

Acknowledgments

Although cliché, it is nonetheless true that it would be impossible to name all the individuals who contributed to this volume’s completion. This work began as a dissertation, the origins of which came when I learned of Günter Grass’s death in 2015. I wanted to honor his legacy in some way, and the dissertation was the best way I knew to do so. Thus, I want to frst thank my advisor, Cecil Eubanks, for reading multiple drafts in nearly all forms in the years it took to fnish this book. Without his leadership, my work and life would be far poorer. I would also like to think of other members of my committee: Wonik Kim, James R. Stoner, Jr, Kevin Cope, and Gregory Schufreider. All these individuals provided the most valuable commodity necessary for all scholars: time and space to study and wonder. They also provided me fantastic advice in terms of turning this work into a publishable manuscript and deserve much praise. Finally, John Pizer deserves special adulation as my “unoffcial” committee member, who helped me translate some of the more diffcult German in this book and provided me with constant affrmation of my German skills when I was in doubt. Outside of my alma mater (and home country), additional individuals deserve credit here. Above all, I would like to offer gratitude to Richard Schade, a Germanist I had never had a chance to meet before his unfortunate passing, who brought me to the Grass Haus in Lübeck, Germany, and offered the best pub recommendations in Berlin. I would also like to thank Hilke Ohsoling, Jörg-Philipp Thomsa, Britta Dittman, and Helga Neumann for their infnite patience while I fumbled around in their archives like an American. Their care helped elevate this work well beyond my expectations, for which I will always be grateful. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, E.D. Urban, whose patience and careful editing of this document provided me much comfort and peace during some uncertain times. Without her, I would truly be lost.

1

Introduction Class, Politics, and Memory

Introduction: An Unlikely Mythmaker In the post–World War II West, we tell ourselves a familiar story: after defeating Nazism and uncovering its atrocities committed against the Jewish people, the liberal West banded together to ensure that these crimes would never occur again. International institutions like the United Nations, the European Union, and Yad Vashem arose in part to educate citizens living in the democratic West about the Holocaust and, hopefully, to prevent another one. A veritable library’s worth of literature developed around the topic of genocide, detailing the uniqueness of the Holocaust and relating the lived experiences of its survivors as cautionary tales about the dangers of tyranny and powerful states. Dual impulses emerged in the world’s attempt to reconcile with the atrocities: one, toward private, individual mourning, and another, toward publicity and national consciousness. The war divided Germany into two states: East and West. The Western state supposedly purged its Nazi elements following World War II and became, through the aid of the United States and the United Kingdom, a political and economic powerhouse. However, despite its economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, West Germany still possessed a black mark. Whatever “wonders” it could produce in its economy or culture, the German people still acquiesced to one of the most uniquely evil events in human history. The highly publicized Nuremberg trials in 1946 brought vital attention to the question of Nazi crimes and resulted in the hanging of ten Nazi offcials and the imprisonment of many others. In turn, the Eichmann trial saw the young Jewish State of Israel execute the Nazi bureaucrat for crimes against the Jewish people in 1962. In other words, the question of German guilt became a vital topic of profound public importance in the decades following World War II. This public discussion of German guilt extended to twentieth-century political theory and political science. For instance, Karl Jaspers argued in his famous essay, “The Question of German Guilt,” that Germany’s separation into East and West was a suffcient punishment for the Holocaust and that a German unifed state would resurge and pose a threat to the newly DOI: 10.4324/9781003276074-1

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Introduction

established European democratic order.1 The German émigré Eric Voegelin argued in Hitler and the Germans and other works that Nazism represented a corruption of the national German spirit and sought to create a “heaven on Earth” that undermined the nature of existence itself in exchange for an “Ersatz reality” as dictated by Nazi ideology.2 Another German émigré, Hannah Arendt, scandalized the press by famously describing Adolf Eichmann’s personality as “banal” in her coverage of the Eichmann trial. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the way atrocities emerged out of bureaucratic processes rather than simply from the dictates of ideology.3 Finally, the Jewish historian and political scientist Raul Hilberg completed a magisterial history of the Holocaust and its origins called The Destruction of the European Jews. This work advanced the argument that the Holocaust represented the most egregious violence enacted by a state toward its own citizens ever encountered in history. It also provided a death count of Jews murdered during the Holocaust: 5.4 million.4 All these theoretical accounts focus on the question of German guilt and, to a lesser degree, what political steps ought to be taken to prevent another Holocaust. None of them make specifc judgments about the contemporary German political situation at the time, however – they veer toward an American audience. And Germany was conficted: despite the lingering antisemitism and nostalgia for the early days of National Socialism, a 1946 survey revealed that 55 percent of West Germans viewed the Nuremberg proceedings as just.5 Among this 55 percent was a young displaced Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) and future Nobel laureate named Günter Grass. Upon hearing the former national leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, address the German people expressing remorse for his role in radicalizing Germany’s youth into National Socialism, Grass began to question his own Nazi upbringing and involvement in the Waffen-SS (Armed-SS). As the discussions regarding Germany’s national guilt expanded, so too did Grass’s interest in this question. However, his eventual contribution to that discussion differed radically in form and conclusion to that of his predecessors. The question of the current inquiry involves how Grass’s sense of political purpose and publicity squares with the private nature of memory and refection, with the goal of national forgiveness in mind. The German people of the postwar era were less focused on questions of “guilt” and “remembrance” and “reparations.” Popular West German entertainment took the form of sentimental “Homeland flms” (Heimatflme), extoling the greatness of a prewar Germany lost to the ravages of war.6 In fact, an opinion poll taken in the 1960s revealed that West Germans placed the Thirty Years’ War as the greatest tragedy in their history, outranking the World Wars, the Black Death, and the Holocaust.7 Most West Germans surveyed in the years following the war felt little guilt surrounding the crimes unleashed by the Hitler regime. According to the historian Jeffrey Herf, the immediate postwar years actually witnessed an increase of Germans who thought Nazism was “a good idea badly carried out”: between 47 and 55 percent

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3

of Germans. Herf notes a correlated decline in those who felt National Socialism was a bad idea: from 41 to 30 percent.8 Grass’s debut novel, 1959’s The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), differed from its contemporaries inasmuch as it focused on those Hilberg later identifed as the “bystanders” and “perpetrators” of the Holocaust rather than its victims. The Tin Drum artistically depicts Grass’s “lost homeland” of Danzig, a port city located in what is now northern Poland. In this novel, Grass attempted to explain to his readers the class conditions and general ethos that catalyzed Nazism’s rise. In Grass’s view, the petite bourgeois world of the lower middle class consisted of a “no-man’s land” wherein this “middle estate” (Mittelstand) was hated by the left and ignored by the right. His analysis of Germany’s political crisis also differed from the major theoretical treatments of the Holocaust in that he addressed contemporary Germany. To Grass, West Germany was not a newly minted liberal democracy elevated by the economic miracle to the level of a consumerist wonderland. Rather, it was a bourgeois society governed by former Nazis ruling a “generation unable to mourn.”9 Consequently, the third book of The Tin Drum details some of the less savory aspects of the West German society that Grass experienced as a refugee displaced in Düsseldorf. The conclusion Grass reached resembles the same conclusion that many artists of his generation reached: that the new German political order bore a striking resemblance to the old one. The Tin Drum represents an important starting point to a long literary career that examined vital questions often ignored in popular media and academic circles. Grass questioned the status quo before and after the Wende (fall of the Berlin Wall; literally “turning point”). He prominently criticized what he perceived as the Adenauer government’s friendly relationship with the far-right German National Party (National Partei Deutschlands (NPD)) and formed a friendship with the German Social Democratic establishment, including Chancellor Willy Brandt. Grass later became a ferce critic of Brandt’s domestic policy during the 1970s and, later, publicly feuded with Brandt and the German political establishment during German reunifcation. Along with Jürgen Habermas, Grass was one of the few public intellectuals to oppose German reunifcation in the 1990s. With this impressive resume, the most shocking moment of Grass’s career came in 2006 when he revealed that as a teenager, he was drafted into the Waffen-SS – a secret that supposedly undermined his decades-long reputation as a literary and cultural gadfy. However, this work takes the opposite opinion: with this expanded knowledge of Grass’s Nazi past, a new narrative about the German literary titan emerges. This new narrative sees Grass as not just a provocateur, but a raconteur: a storyteller of Germany and its place in the postwar political era. In a word, Grass’s novels and his trajectory as a writer to a political activist to a chronicler of his own literary status and memories show how those taken in by political extremism and ressentiment may fnd redemption in the world of history. Grass seeks

4 Introduction redemption by “writing against the fow of time,”10 weaving the past, present, and future together in a tapestry he calls Vergegenkunft.11 Until his death in 2015, Grass placed his political hopes on the idea that Germany could transform itself into a more open society, able to cope with its past traumas, and oppose the rising tide of neoliberalism. While skeptical of writing’s ability to transmute words into political action directly, Grass argued that writing could alert public consciousness in a way that could make a polity more aware of its past atrocities without giving in to extremism or mawkish self-pity. Grass is a double survivor. Physically, he survived the deadliest confict in human history in terms of lives lost as a prisoner of war and refugee. Morally, Grass survived the temptation to remain silent about Germany’s past and his own past as well. Far from plunging him into the dustbin of sentimentalist chroniclers of World War II, Grass’s Nazi past and his subsequent transformation made him one of his generation’s most vocal opponents of a kind of self-imposed historical amnesia. The possibility of understanding the Holocaust’s victims remains beyond the ken of the living12 – perhaps an accessory to the crime can help us to understand better the cause and the motives of this most heinous of national crimes. The present investigation into Grass’s literary and moral progression sees his life and work divided into three major “moments.” First, Grass acted as a “class historian” and narrator of Danzig’s petite bourgeoisie and its transformation and “seduction” into Nazism. This phase consists of Grass’s so-called Danzig Trilogy (Danziger Trilogie): his frst three narrative works, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), and Dog Years (Hundejahre). These 1works of the 1960s constitute an attempt to explain the psychological and class basis for the rise of Nazism and how the far-right ideology continues to operate in spite of its defeat to a culturally and politically conservative West Germany. The second moment of Grass’s career saw him work as a speechwriter for Willy Brandt and as an indefatigable defender of German Social Democracy. However, his disillusionment with Brandt’s domestic policy led to his gradual radicalization and embrace of democratic socialism in opposition to neoliberalism. In this moment, Grass turns back to the German literary past, evoking the Kulturnation (cultural nation) as a possible alternative to German nationalism that could allow the two German states to exist in a loose German “confederation,” an idea he takes from Karl Jaspers. Reunifcation meant the end of the Kulturnation, however, leading Grass to his third moment, wherein he becomes more conscious of his fame and place as a literary luminary and deconstructs his own work through confessional and experimental writing that discloses, among other things, the extent of Grass’s adolescent firtation with Nazism. The theme of remembrance and its implications underlies all these “moments” and themes in Grass’s work – however, “remembrance” in this case involves a particular form of cultural memory, as posited by Aleida and Jan Assmann. These threads will be further elaborated upon in the coming chapters. To illustrate both Grass’s place in twentieth-century history

Introduction

5

and this work’s theoretical position, I turn to a short biography of Grass, followed by a description of this work’s methodology. I strive to delineate Grass’s idea of the past in conjunction with the present, and the work that carrying memory to the future entails.

A Public Life: Günter Grass as an Author and a Thinker Günter Wilhelm Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig, now presentday Gdansk, Poland, in 1927. His father, Wilhelm, owned a small dry goods (Kolonialwaren) store over which the family lived.13 Grass’s mother, Helene, possessed Kashubian ancestry, making the young Grass part Kashubian as well. The grocer couple was also of mixed faith: Wilhelm was Protestant and Helene was Catholic. As a child, Grass attended a Catholic church in Langfuhr, leading to a long preoccupation with the Roman Catholic faith throughout his work.14 The Grass family apartment possessed little private area and thin walls – making his parents’ fghts and liaisons a semipublic affair.15 In a vital sense, Grass’s complicated family life refected the complex social and political realities of interwar Europe. The majority of the young Grass’s school friends and much of his extended family were Polish and Roman Catholic.16 Grass, however, was “ethnically German” (Volksdeutsche), meaning that his family, as German-speaking people separated from the homeland (Heimat) of the “Greater German Reich,” took great interest in the rise of Nazism. Subsequently, the young Grass joined the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend), taken in by its fascist ideology and promise of reuniting Danzig, and the rest of the Sudetenland, with its “true homeland,” the Greater German Reich; and, like Mahlke, in his novella, Cat and Mouse, Grass became obsessed with the prospect of dying as a submarine commander in pursuit of a “fnal victory” as an adolescent.17 Grass admits that his time at St. John’s Gymnasium in Danzig is “why I later had no trouble enrolling two of my characters – Eddie Amsel and Walter Matern, simultaneous friends and foes – in the school” in his novel Dog Years.18 Sociologically, Grass’s young age at the outset of World War II made him part of the “Anti-Air” (Flakhelfer) generation, whose members went straight from secondary school to wartime volunteer positions, usually assisting anti-air crews with fak cannons.19 Other prominent members of this age cohort include the German intellectual Jürgen Habermas and a young Pope Benedict XVI, then known as Joseph Ratzinger.20 At the age of 17, Grass enlisted in the Wehrmacht as a tank gunner and was eventually drafted into the Frundsberg division of the Waffen-SS when the infamous Nazi unit was in deep need of manpower at the war’s end. Grass did not reveal this association until 2006. Subsequently, Grass spent the fnal days of the war in a U.S. prisoner of war (POW) camp after being separated from his unit.21 In American possession, Grass and his fellow German POWs were taken through the Dachau extermination camp. At

6 Introduction the time, neither Grass nor the other Germans believed that what they were shown was authentic, calling it “Allied propaganda.”22 Following the war, Grass’s Volksdeutsche heritage became important again – he was expelled from the Sudetenland (German-speaking areas outside of the Greater German Reich) to Düsseldorf. Here, Grass enrolled in an art school as sculptor after a period of working as a stone mason. This period of Grass’s life saw a great widening of Grass’s literary and artistic knowledge as he became more familiar with the works of Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and the French existentialists.23 It was also during this artistic period that Grass began to refect upon Germany’s Nazi past. The Nuremberg trials resulted in the conviction of Baldur von Schirach, the national leader of the Hitler Youth. As one of the few Nuremberg convicts to express remorse for his involvement in the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, Schirach publicly acknowledged the authenticity of the Holocaust in a public radio announcement. As mentioned earlier, Grass was among those who heard the address and accepted the reality of the Holocaust, leading to the young art student’s frst feelings of guilt and responsibility regarding Germany’s wartime crimes toward the Jewish people. Around this time, Grass joined Group 47 (Gruppe 47), a gathering of writers, poets, and artists in Düsseldorf, whose work centered on the postwar German experience. Here, Grass met several of West Germany’s most prominent literary voices: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (with whom Grass would have a long public rivalry), Heinrich Böll, Paul Celan, and Hans-Werner Richter.24 This association prompted Grass to focus less on sculpture than on poetry and prose, leading to his frst literary award, the 1958 Gruppe 47 prize with which Grass completed his frst novel, 1959’s widely celebrated The Tin Drum. The Tin Drum, published when Grass was 32 years old, depicts the lives of adolescents and young adults respectively maintaining what they considered “ordinary” lives during the rise of Nazism among Danzig’s petite bourgeoisie. Unusual for “war novels,” Grass’s works do not depict wartime courage or heroism, but instead quotidian life during this period. Grass treats Nazism as a looming and distant threat, rather than an “explosion” that upends “regular” life – as part of the tapestry that came to dominate the foreground of living in the “Free City of Danzig.” The publication of Grass’s second novel, Dog Years, established him as one of the leading literary voices in West Germany. As a result, his work began to take on less of a refective tone and more of a political one. Grass moved to West Berlin and became more explicitly political in his writing, penning op-eds for newspapers like Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeittung. Additionally, in 1969, Grass published Local Anesthetic (Örtlich betäubt), a novel critical of the time’s growing campus protest movements. After winning the coveted Georg Büchner Prize in 1965, Grass became deeply involved in social democratic politics. Not only did he become Willy Brandt’s chief speechwriter during his campaign for chancellorship of Germany under

Introduction

7

the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD)) ticket, but he delivered 52 speeches throughout West Germany from the back of a converted Volkswagen bus.25 Unusually for European politics, Grass refused to join the SPD until after Brandt’s resignation from the chancellorship in 1974 so as to maintain his artistic independence and adopt progressive stances on controversial topics. For instance, Grass was a frm supporter of abortion rights prior to the SPD’s public advocacy of these rights. Grass catalogs his experiences campaigning for the SPD, as well as his deteriorating frst marriage to Anna Schwarz, in the 1972 novel, From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke). Throughout the coming decades, Grass remained politically active, but in less overt ways. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he became deeply concerned with environmental causes, as refected in his novels The Flounder (Der Butt) (1977) and The Rat (Die Rattin) (1986). Following the advice of his daughter Laura, Grass began sculpting again to combat a smoking addiction and prevent writers’ block.26 However, Grass continued his ferce anti-Nazi stance and was one of the most vocal critics of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s decision to lay a wreath with President Ronald Reagan at a Bitburg cemetery where SS offcers were buried. In the 1990s, Grass returned to public life, famously opposing reunifcation, putting himself at odds with the German political establishment and with his former mentor, Willy Brandt. This phase of Grass’s career saw Too Far Afeld (Ein weites Feld) (1995), a behemoth novel about life in the newly unifed East Germany. Afeld also engendered a major falling out between Grass and the prominent German literary critic and Gruppe 47 member, Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Despite, or perhaps because of, his propensity to seek out controversy, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. After his very public feud with Brandt and Reich-Ranicki over unifcation, Grass wrote a “retrospective” of the twentieth century entitled My Century (Mein Jahrhundert) (1999), beginning his turn as a writer of fctionalized memoirs. As a result, his writing again focused less explicitly on public affairs, opting instead to explore the intersections between memory and politics. In 1997, Grass met with the Polish Nobel laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska in Vilnius, Lithuania, to discuss “the future of memory,” whereupon Grass wrote an essay “I Remember Myself” (“Ich erinne mich”), probing the nature of memory as a literary device.27 Grass later claimed that without this essay he would not have possessed the courage necessary to disclose the extent of his relationship with the Waffen-SS.28 While Grass’s work could always be described as an attempt to “come to terms with one’s past,” Grass’s last major works, Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang) (2001) and Peeling the Onion (Beim häuten der Zwiebel) (2006), were especially self-aware, as Grass considered his own place in “his century.” Grass’s infamous decision to unveil his SS conscription came slightly before the publication of his memoir, Peeling the Onion. Despite the gravity of the revelation, Grass did not offer the typical excuses employed in such

8

Introduction

situations. Even before Grass’s revelation emerged, he wrote: “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.”29 Grass died in Behlendorf, near Lübeck, Germany, in April 2015, survived by a widow, six children, 18 grandchildren, at least one great-grandchild, and several generations of writers, artists, and intellectuals infuenced by his life and work. Grass possessed experiences few public intellectuals do. He experienced the rise of Nazism as a victim, a bystander, and a perpetrator. As a result, Grass’s SS revelation arguably makes his novels more relevant to a global audience now than at the time of their publication, considering the threat extremist ideology poses to the postwar liberal order. Thus, taking Grass seriously as a political thinker may help generate a response to such an ideological threat since his writings offer readers a multitude of perspectives both ideologically and personally seldom seen in contemporary political theory. That is, Grass’s work as a novelist, activist, and memoirist provides individuals and groups a means of measuring their experiences against his and responding in kind. Through his sense of memory and activism, one may arrive at a self-critical awareness of not only one’s past but one’s future as well. Grass’s form of historical literary memory and its connection to politics shapes the moral core of his writing. It also forms its intellectual core. Despite Grass’s deep misgivings about the German philosophical tradition, especially Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, he still employed its language from time to time. Curiously, in a television interview from February 1990, Grass mentions Jaspers as the source of his proposal to create a “confederated Germany” after the end of the Cold War.30 He also uses the Heideggerian word “thrownness” (“Geworfenheit”) to describe the condition of humanity in what he termed “Orwell’s decade” in a 1985 interview.31 While reluctant to ally himself with the German philosophical tradition, Grass was certainly aware of its important concepts and language. The next section seeks to understand how Grass himself understood some of these concepts and how they relate to the present study.

Strategies against Time: Methodology Günter Grass’s work purposefully defes categorization. As he says in his “Art of Fiction” interview, writing, illustration, poetry, and history all exist side by side “democratically” in his work.32 This eclecticism makes any broad political study of Grass’s work very diffcult without the aid of a methodological structure. Fortunately, in other interviews, Grass identifes a recurring theme in his work: “Loss. Total loss.”33 In the case of places, things, events, and people lost in politics or war, memory plays a central role in “recovering them,” even if they can only be retrieved in an incomplete and ephemeral way. Through writing, Grass refects upon the loss of

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9

his childhood home, Danzig; he refects upon the loss of his own innocence and dissolution with the world of twentieth-century ideology as he remembers it. Grass’s own refections on his past as a denizen of Danzig during one of its most painful and shameful historical periods reveal his desire for the forgiveness and redemption of one people before another. Succinctly, Grass seeks a German identity that can include not only her Jewish victims but also other oppressed peoples, namely, migrant workers and ethnic minorities. This section concerns itself with the methods Grass uses over his career following those ends. According to Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, writing represents one of the major strategies of and approaches to what they term “cultural memory.” Jan Assmann defnes cultural memory as the study of the inputs external to individuals’ own capacity to remember expressed and organized in different forms across history and cultures.34 Cultural memory moves beyond mere “social memory” and creates memorial linkages between generations, forming memories experienced by future posterity in the guise of institutional “containers” like archives, public memorials, museums, and family heirlooms. Books and writing also help form public memory. Aleida Assmann explains that writing both works as a metaphor for memory itself and preserves the content of certain important memories containing moral injunctions for future generations.35 Following the Assmanns, the literary scholar Katherine Stone argues that literature refects both the events and structures that compel individuals and groups to remember their lives in certain ways and translates these groups’ “inner world of feelings” into “linguistic signs” and “aesthetic patterns” intelligible to readers unaware or incapable of accessing the author’s “lived memory” themselves.36 A fact sometimes ignored in Grass scholarship: he never trained or “set out to be” a novelist. His fxation with writing began following his receiving an Olivetti typewriter as a wedding present.37 Grass attended art school with sculpture in mind. And, like a sculptor, Grass uses both his own recollection and historical research to build a convincing moral universe. For example, in Grass’s “Danzig Novels,” his writing brings forth a time period (early twentieth century), a locale (Danzig), a form of political organization (Free City), and an economic designation (petite bourgeoisie). While most of Grass’s readers did not personally experience these structures the way he did, they can access the versions of them that exist in his memory through his writing. Here arises an important distinction for both Grass and cultural memory studies. Aleida Assmann recalls F.G. Jünger’s distinction between memory as active remembering (remembrance/Erinnerung) and as an internal storage unit (memory/Gedächtnis) as representing cultural memory’s division between function and storage capacity respectively.38 Grass uses Jünger’s remembrance/Erinnerung–memory/Gedächtnis divide in his 1997 essay, “Ich erinne mich.”39 Through his writing, Grass performs acts of memory regarding Germanspeaking peoples’ role in the Holocaust preserved in books for future

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Introduction

generations that may have already forgotten it. Literary remembrance not only preserves that which a people does remember, it highlights the possibility that the data of memory may be lost either through an act of forgiveness or through intentional political manipulation of memory in the forms of its cultural expressions or places of storage (e.g., through the alteration of photos, the destruction of statues or memorial sites, or the destruction of archives). As historian Peter Burke writes, if “victors” write history, so too do can they decide what a society should forget.40 In writing, lost things may be preserved; peoples, places, and objects usually passed over in silence or forgotten may fnd new life through their absence in collective memory.41 Likewise, action may form the site of new and enduring memories that can escape the grasp of the state’s offcial capacity to compel memory or incur amnesia. In a pluralistic society with many political actors and channels for communication, writing can form sites of resistance in its ability for past “absences” to become present again through the act of remembering (Erinnerung) translated into new storage units or containers of memory (Gedächtnis).42 The storage function of Gedächtnis contains passive information and knowledge that can compel groups or individuals to act in pursuit of new Erinnerung or understanding of their place in the midst of history. In the case of postwar Germany, the memory of the Holocaust loomed large, suggesting a need to come to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) in letters and literature. Jan Assmann argues that guilt over a past wrong or a moral transgression codifes forms of memory preserved in a community’s founding myths or sense of moral purpose.43 Just as the memory of the Holocaust precedes the founding of modern Israel, so too does it determine the ends of many Western, particularly European political institutions.44 Injunctions to “never forget” the Holocaust permeate discussions of contemporary political importance. In the case of the Holocaust, forgetfulness may cause further genocide. Grass writes in “Ich erinne mich” that “Forgetting seals death.”45 Yet, forgetting a community’s role or agency in a past transgression may paradoxically come about through the success of political regimes in promoting material comfort in such a way that the past becomes unfamiliar to those living in the present. Conversely, it may come about through deteriorating or dysfunctional educational institutions. In any case, forgetting the very events that form a community’s cultural memory remains an open possibility. Jünger writes of a type of “preservative forgetting” that may maintain the moral essence a memory of a past transgression may cause but not necessarily all the details of its inciting incident.46 In other words, by evoking the shame and guilt of an individual’s or a group’s transgressions, that individual can place their past self before their victim in the present to demonstrate repudiation of their past actions and past self. Forgiveness and self-repudiation exist in tandem with one another but require a sense of time to properly convey.

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A problem arises when one considers the particularities of the German experience after World War II. From the description of self-repudiation that the phenomenologist Nicholas De Warren provides, the act of placing one’s past self before the victim must occur in the present. De Warren explains how this requirement creates a problem on the question of murder: “If forgiveness is essentially an ethical relation between offender and victim, the horizon of time that defnes the time for forgiveness, as initiated by the offender, is the death of her victim: the offender cannot seek forgiveness once her victim has passed.”47 In the case of the Holocaust, 6 million victims of German war crimes cannot respond to the pleas of their murderers. On the other hand, the question of “who” would need to ask for forgiveness and from whom lingers as well. Who represents the victims of the Holocaust and what body represents their memories? Who is the “I” that seeks forgiveness from the victim? One way around De Warren’s question involves writing. According to Milan Kundera, the European novel throughout its history – from Cervantes onward – describes and captures a deeply existential understanding of time similar to that offered in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.48 The creation of artistic works can, in a sense, alter the fow of time and create a miniature moral universe populated with the objects of one’s memory – objects of forgiveness and self-repudiation. Kundera identifes Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and Miguel de Cervantes as writers in the European tradition who “examine [sic] the role of myths from the remote past that control our present actions.”49 This tactic of using the past as a means of accessing present political questions explains much of what Grass and his milieu attempt in the middle of the twentieth century. However, this tactic ensures that the artistic engages with the political in terms of the period remembered and the present political context into which the work enters. The literary critic John Sutherland writes of the Nazi era and its connection with the arts: “After the war, writers such as Günter Grass had the literary equivalent (as Grass put it) of literary bomb-blast to work with.”50 For Grass and his fellow writers in Group 47, probing the past became a redemptive task, with German letters and language representing both an aggressor and victim of Nazism. Not only was this society drained of its intellectual and creative faculties after the defeat of Nazism, but a fraction of that society held a deep desire to fll that gap with German words capable of extending self-repudiation and self-forgiveness. As Grass later contends in his 1999 Nobel Lecture, writers of his generation sought to “take the goose-step out of German”51 and preserve the continuity and unity of German letters into the future. Following the example of Alfred Döblin and Franz Kafka, Grass sought to interrogate the past to seek political reform in the present. Grass’s conception of time, Vergegenkunft, frst emerges in his 1980 novella, Headbirths: or the Germans are Dying Out (Kopfgeburten: oder die Deutschen Sterben Aus). The neologism, Vergegenkunft, combines the three

12

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German tenses (past/Vergangen, present/Gegenwart, and future/Zukunft) to form a fourth tense that Grass’s longtime translator, Ralph Mannheim, called “paspresenture.”52 Ralph Mannheim’s translation from Headbirths falls drastically short of a useful scholarly defnition of Vergegenkunft, however. For Grass, Vergegenkunft as a concept hopes to collapse the boundaries separating past, present, and future, suggesting that the three concepts occur simultaneously, especially in attempts to recreate the past in poetry and fction. In a 1987 interview with the German novelist and public intellectual Siegfried Lenz for Radio Bremen, Grass further explains this concept: “The present is a very questionable concept. Already, the beginning of our conversation is past. Nothing is more ephemeral than the present, nothing as quickly feeting.”53 Grass further explains that the division between “myth” and “reality” maintained by Enlightenment thinking does not exist. He answers Lenz by stating that fantasy and reality are the same, adding “But then another concept of reality emerges, which takes fantasy and the power of fantasy which is a wholly different account of time with it.”54 While Vergegenkunft remains Grass’s answer to how these differing conceptions of time intersect in reality, Mannheim’s “paspresenture” tells us little about how it functions. Thus, the question becomes: how do past, present, and future intersect in reality and how can the English language capture Grass’s German playfulness? I attempted to retranslate this term via correspondence with Hilke Ohsoling, Grass’s literary secretary, and Per Ohrgaard, a friend of Grass’s and professor of German at Copenhagen Business School. Ohsoling wrote to me to explain that the notion of “pre-sent past” in Vergegenkunft captures the past and present tenses in German (Vergangen, past; Gegenwarts, present). “Pre-sent past” only excludes the future in its etymology, but not its construction – the future marks to where those in the present “send” objects, ideas, and memories from the past. Through this new translation, Grass’s playfulness with German comes through in English and contributes to an understanding of his thought on time. That is, Grass depicts a past already acknowledged and reacknowledged in letters, transmitted to the future amid the present. In his literary investigation of this “pre-sent past,” Grass employs three main strategies at different points of his career in differing artistic and moral constructs: memory as place, memory as canon, and his symbols of “onion and amber” depicted in his autobiography, Beim häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). I briefy discuss these three strategies in this section before presenting a plan on this work’s subsequent chapters. As mentioned earlier, Grass’s early Danzig novels employ vivid descriptions of places and locales of personal importance for Grass in a thinly autobiographical way. Aleida Assmann argues that this type of memorialization represents a powerful form of cultural memory because places themselves can act as “agents and bearers of memory,” capable of “retaining” memory

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far better than individuals can in living memory alone.55 In stories of personal resonance made legible in differing political contexts, that which has been lost can be “reactivated” and highlight a sense of continuity or discontinuity56 with what Grass calls the “feeting nownownow.”57 In the case of places of deportation and extermination such as Auschwitz, cultural memory may present these sites as crime scenes, museums, memorials, and cemeteries.58 For Grass, Auschwitz may represent the ultimate crime scene of the Holocaust, but the suburban bourgeois world of Danzig, Oliva, Langfuhr, and later Düsseldorf and Germany represents the spaces of premeditation and planning for the twentieth century’s greatest crime. Just as writing can reveal Ruth Klüger’s adage that “All those who live in the countries of the West after Auschwitz have Auschwitz in their history,”59 those same countries’ bourgeoise comforts can hide that fact. Thus, coming to terms with the past means unveiling that which is present but buried beneath a thin veneer of societal fourishing. As Grass writes in The Tin Drum, “even wallpaper has a better memory than ours.”60 If Grass is right, wallpaper can also aid in one’s forgetting by replacing the memory retained by the old, bare walls with new colorful and fimsy facades. As Grass became more active in politics, he investigated the German past beyond the Nazi period, becoming particularly fond of the Baroque period and its cultural importance in forming German literature and language at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. After the collapse of the Brandt chancellorship he helped bring to power, Grass attempted to construct a new German identity based in the German literary canon, which he called the Kulturnation (Cultural Nation). In emphasizing Germany’s cultural identity rather than its political identity, he argued that a new German national self-consciousness could emerge that would preserve Germany’s fragmented medieval past while preserving its contributions to World Literature and European letters. Jan Assmann alleges that canons, literary or otherwise, serve as a “straight pole, rod, level, ruler”61 that details how a structure, or in this case, a culture or civilization, should be bound and built regarding how it conceives of itself in law, morality, and memory.62 In keeping with Jünger’s notion of “preservative forgetting,” Grass argues that modern Germany should remember the Baroque literati’s moral skepticism, placing aside and forgetting the progressive historicism of German philosophy. Yet, Germany should remember why she placed German philosophy aside: its triumphalism about history and politics led to the Holocaust. Subsequently, Grass argued that Germany should remain divided as a constant reminder of that historical crime. Germany did not remain divided. In fact, it reunited in a rather public and, for Grass, “triumphalist” manner.63 As his new literary canon collapsed, Grass returned to the well, looking back on his own past in Danzig, albeit in a less fctionalized manner. In his work, he becomes aware of Jünger’s Erinnerung–Gedächtnis divide and employs it in his novels Crabwalk and Peeling the Onion, both of which involve his childhood home of Danzig.

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The latter novel includes Grass’s understanding of history as “onion” and “amber,” totems that refect the active and archival functions of memory, respectively. They also introduce a notion of memory and time as something that can be “frozen” or fowing through one’s decision to engage in Erinnerung. Aleida Assmann points to Hegel’s notion of a “shaft of forgetting”: whereby memories can be “frozen” or made inaccessible, but not completely forgotten or inaccessible to the logic of Erinnerung or active remembering.64 To Grass, this division shows a “dialectical” relationship between Erinnerung and Gedächtnis, whereby “the onion” of Erinnerung distorts the past but makes it emotionally affective and politically useful at the expense of its clarity. Conversely, the amber of Gedächtnis retains memory’s “accuracy” inasmuch as it can be preserved, but once in storage, it is hidden from the world of peoples, objects, and events. And, if one thaws the amber of memory, that memory is forever changed when it comes time to freeze it again. In depicting past worlds, Grass waves goodbye to others. He acknowledges that the tension between forgetting and forgiveness cannot be so easily overcome and that the former does not necessarily imply the latter, especially given the magnitude of Germany’s national crimes. Indeed, living in this new world of uneasy “forgiveness” does not imply that the old world no longer exists or extends into the new living world. Those of us who live in the world after World War II and the Cold War receive constant reminders of its devastation in public architecture, cultural artifacts, literature, and the ruling institutions’ agendas. This work seeks to temporally migrate with Grass – to “retrace his steps” through his writing. Where Grass beckons us as readers, scholars, and citizens remains unclear – as I hope to demonstrate in Chapters IV and V – even the notion of the “pre-sent past,” Vergegenkunft, comes with moral and theoretical diffculties. Still, this notion teaches that the past possesses meaning and value that does not simply exist to be “overcome” through political action but sent forward into the future through remembrance and writing. Thus, Grass’s writing may bring those living in the newly globalized world to a greater understanding of what tragedies may befall human being if resentment guides politics and politics totalizes humanity’s search for meaning. The current status quo in Western countries is falling into disarray and new narratives contend for favor. The question remains: what new narrative will dominate and will it lead humanity to a world of forgiveness or darkness?

The Politics of Remembrance, an Outline As a novelist, Grass captured the class anxieties and antisemitic prejudices that created Nazism. As a political activist, Grass sought to exorcize his country’s past demons. As a memoirist, Grass sought to implicate his own voice with these demons and deconstruct himself as an author and celebrity. This work hopes to bring together these three “moments” of Grass’s

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artistic, political, and personal writings under the banner of “class, politics, and memory” to elucidate Grass’s unique voice as one that can resonate with those living in industrialized countries in late liberalism. When looking at Grass’s work in this context, it becomes apparent that Danzig and Germany’s “forgotten pasts” have been mobilized in support of various ideologies, for good or ill. Vergegenkunft, the “pre-sent past,” materializes from Grass’s rendering of this “forgotten past.” Consequently, Grass articulates his desire for his writing to “become memory.” Through the creation, reproduction, and distribution of his writing, Grass seeks to place memory in the hands of a more emancipatory political end. Grass’s understanding of Vergegenkunft can hopefully ameliorate the tensions and problems of late capitalism better than conventional ideological doctrines such as social democracy and ethnonationalism. Due to the new ideological demands and dimensions of the current political crisis facing the West, those opposed to democratic decay in Germany and abroad must fnd a means of politically and intellectually reorienting themselves to these new demands of late liberalism. Grass’s writings provide one possible response to these demands. However, this response does not come without its own problems, as we shall see in the following chapters. For instance, the “pre-sent past” implies that “choosing” the memories the public ought to keep implies a resistance to ideology. Yet, without ideology, Grass runs the risk of removing the moral substance of public memorialization. And, while Grass maintains that moderate forms of socialism can help thread this needle, he does not provide a clear path between memorialization and anti-ideology. The following chapters consist primarily of research arranged and presented to better understand Grass and his place as a unique political thinker, well-equipped to address the problems of this age. Chapter II – The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965 In recounting his experiences growing up as a member of Danzig’s petite bourgeoisie, Grass creates a host of fanciful images in the Danzig Trilogy (The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1959), Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus, 1961), and Dog Years (Hundejahre, 1963)) and, consequently, details Danzig’s petite bourgeoisie’s seduction into National Socialism. This chapter details the memorial means Grass undertakes in his criticism of German society, and it further elaborates on how this criticism led Grass into the political sphere. From the seaside of Brösen to the trolley cars of Oliva, Grass populates his novels with characters, situations, and a sense of enchantment irrevocably lost after the advent of National Socialism. Through his depiction of this lost world, Grass concludes that the petite bourgeoisie embraced Nazism and consumerism to regain a sense of identity and material comfort that other political forces did not provide them.

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This arrangement had disastrous political consequences for the petite bourgeoisie. The class was never able to recover its way of life again after Germany’s loss in World War II, succumbing to a new form of consumer capitalism in the new Germany. Further, Grass argues that this new society provided little room for collective mourning over the loss of prewar German society or refection upon the crimes against humanity to which the German people acquiesced. The Danzig novels offer a warning that a political vacuum was emerging in postwar German politics that, if unflled, could lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence. For these novels, Grass won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1965, the highest literary prize in Germany. This success, and the political criticism he received for the novels, emboldened him to use his newfound celebrity to promote Willy Brandt and the left-wing Social Democratic Party’s (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) campaign for political power against the farright National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Party Deutschlands (NPD)). Chapter III – “A Literary Concept”: The Kulturnation in the Divided Germany, 1965–1979 In 1969, Willy Brandt and the SPD won West Germany’s chancellorship. In 1972, Grass published a fctionalized account of his time with the SPD called From the Diary of the Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke), which expresses his doubts and frustrations with his role as a political activist. The Brandt administration’s later collapse in 1975 hastened this discontent and led Grass to lose faith in mainstream politics altogether, prompting him to search for new sources of stability. He looks again to memory, but this time on a national rather than an individual scale. In 1977’s The Flounder (Der Butt), Grass recontextualizes Danzig as a new “Garden of Eden,” moving far beyond his own experiences and into the distant past. In particular, Grass fnds folklore, storytelling, and writing as constitutive concepts in forming a new German identity. In 1979, Grass develops these concepts to maturity in The Meeting at Telgte (Das Treffen in Telgte), reviving the Romantic ideal of the Kulturnation (cultural nation), which reconceives of Germany as a “literary concept” as opposed to a political one. In this work, Grass uses a fctional meeting of the Baroque era’s literati at the end of the Thirty Years’ War to argue that Germany’s identity rests in division and uncertainty. In Grass’s analogy, the German division during the Cold War represents yet another chapter of her unusual history; Germany may remain divided and still authentically German. These writings form the basis of Grass’s opposition to reunifcation as well as his continued aversion to mainstream politics. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunifcation of Germany lead Grass to amend the Kulturnation and to become more drawn to a more substantial politics of memory.

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Chapter IV – “Distant but not Foreign”: Memory Politics and the Future of Remembrance, 1980–2006 Amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunifcation of Germany, Grass’s thought evolves from a deep skepticism about partisan politics (found in his 1980s’ work) to an engagement with memory politics. In 1995, Grass returned to his position as a key public intellectual, publishing his major “post-unifcation” novel, Too Far Afeld (Ein weites Feld). Feld’s portrayal of the former German Democratic Republic’s citizens as victims of West German economic imperialism generated tremendous controversy. Citing the need to fght neoliberal capitalism, Grass’s political writings became more cosmopolitan and socialistic. Yet, these works remained detached from partisan affliation and concerned with the role of memory in public life. At a conference of Nobel laureates held in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1997, Grass develops a mature notion of memory he terms “Erinnerung” (remembrance). Here, Grass distinguishes the active and creative “remembrance” (Erinnerung) from passive “archival memory” (Gedächtnis), advocating for memory’s use in intellectual and political life. The “remembrance” concept leads to some of Grass’s most important late-era writings, such as 2002’s Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang) and his fctionalized memoir, Peeling the Onion (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, 2006). In these works, Grass does not just target post-unifcation German political stagnation. He takes aim at himself as well, appearing as a character in both works, as an aloof old writer and naïve young National Socialist, respectively. In the latter work, Grass reveals the full extent of his involvement in the Waffen-SS as an adolescent. Here, Grass provides a memorialization of his own role in Germany’s national memory, distancing himself from his own position of authority in German letters and politics and placing doubt on the veracity of pure “archival memory.” In this act of confession, Grass places his artistic work within the experiences and memories of others and of the German nation’s collective memory. In this chapter, I show that through this act of memorialization, Grass evokes a new interest in trans-class, trans-generational, and trans-national dialogues that involve Germany, but moves beyond her borders in both space, time, and memory. Chapter V – Conclusion: Penelope and Sisyphus Memory forms the core of Grass’s politics and allows him to transform the “raw material” of the mind into narratives. Memory also transcends the individual, allowing nations, groups, and systems to form their own narratives about the world and its functioning. Memory’s creative freedom does not always result in liberatory consequences, however, especially when extremist groups harness its power. Thus, a problem emerges: how can those living in neoliberal capitalism prevent memory from misuse by extreme ideological forces? For this answer, I posit a connection between

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Grass’s concept of memory and his evocation of Albert Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus.” To Grass, Sisyphus’s joy insists on the value of human life. This joy also involves scorning those forces that seek to upend this life for their own beneft. Human existence carries the extreme burden of moral responsibility; however, this book concludes that writing can lessen that burden by providing a record of loss and dependency that can both comfort and disturb. The moral responsibility innate to human existence cannot be obviated, only lessened in the imagination. Thus, the boulder that human beings collectively push is not “organic,” but weaved as a tapestry that all humans can access through the imagination. Borrowing a metaphor from Walter Benjamin, I argue that Grass’s work is not merely Sisyphean, but “Penelope work,” with democratic citizens taking on the role of Odysseus’s wife in Ithaca, constantly weaving and unweaving a tapestry to distract her suitors. In Grass’s case, the suitors represent ideological and political systems that conspire to upend human life for their own ends. To Benjamin, this “Penelope work” concerns itself with the immediacy of human life and “purposive activity.” For Grass, this “purposive activity” means constant refection on one’s own position in society and the effcacy of one’s actions. In the present time, modern democracy’s Penelopes wait not for Odysseus, but for Sisyphus, ready and willing to push the newly woven memory in new directions. Using Grass’s work as exemplar, I conclude that politics involves a process of intentional remembering and forgetting, of weaving and unweaving, over the span of collective human life.

Notes 1 Jaspers, Karl. The Question of German Guilt. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009, p. 61. 2 Voegelin, Eric. Hitler and the Germans. Edited by Ellis Sandoz. Vol. 31. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989, p. 27. 3 Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin Classics, 2006, p. 252. 4 See Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 5 Ibid, p. 206. 6 Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Penguin, 2006, p. 274. 7 Wilson, Peter. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009, p. 6. 8 Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 205. 9 Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Penguin, 2006, p. 416. 10 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 141. 11 This concept will be explained further in this chapter’s methodology section.

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12 See Howes, Dustin Ells. “‘Consider If This Is a Person’: Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, and the Political Signifcance of Auschwitz.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 266–92. 13 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives: Günter Grass. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, p. 19. 14 Di Napoli, Thomas. “Guilt and Absolution: The Contrary World of Günter Grass.” CrossCurrents 26, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 435–46, p. 438. 15 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives: Günter Grass. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, p. 24. 16 Grass spends much of his early career detailing that one of his uncles was killed by the Nazis during the Polish defense of their ethnic post offce. See, Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst (Lately: A Conversation in Autumn). Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017, pp. 67–8. 17 Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2007, p. 69. 18 Ibid, p. 37. 19 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives: Günter Grass. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, p. 29. 20 Grass claims to have met the future Pontiff in a POW camp following the end of the war. Scholars dispute Grass’s claim. See, Grass, Günter. Warum ich nach sechzig Jahren mein Schweigen breche (Why I Broke My Silence After Sixty Years). Interview by Frank Schirrmacher and Hubert Spiegel. July 2006. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Tim Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidel Verlag. 2019, pp. 770–1. 21 Grass recounts this episode in both From the Diary of the Snail (1972) and Peeling the Onion (2006). 22 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives: Günter Grass. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, p. 35. 23 Ibid, p. 45. 24 Thomsa, Jörg-Philipp, ed. “Grass, Kehlmann und die Welt des Barocks,” (“Grass, Kehlmann, and the World of the Baroque”). Günter Grass Haus, 2017. 25 Thomsa, Jörg-Phillipp, and Stefanie Wiech, eds. “Ein Bürger für Brandt: Der Politische Grass” (“A Citizen for Brandt: The Political Grass”). Günter Grass Haus, 2008. 26 Grass, Günter. Sechs Jahrzehnte (Six Decades). Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2014, pp. 259–71. 27 Grass, Günter. “Ich erinne mich” (“I Remember Myself”), In Die Zukunft Der Erinnerung (The Future of Remembrance), by Günter Grass, Miłosz Czesław, Wisława Szymborska, and Tomas Venclova, edited by Martin Wälde. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2001, pp. 27–34. 28 Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst (Lately: A Conversation in Autumn). Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017, pp. 106–7. 29 Grass, quoted in Preece, Julian. The Life and Work of Günter Grass. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004, p. 1. 30 Grass, Günter. Deutschland, einig Vaterland? (Germany, one Fatherland?) Interview by Joachim Wagner and Rudolf Augstein. February 1990. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Tim Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidel Verlag. 2019, p. 398. 31 Grass, Günter. Sisyphos und der Traum vom Gelingen (Sisyphus and the Dream of Success). Interview by Johano Strasser. June 1985. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Timm Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 2019, p. 311. 32 Grass, Günter. Günter Grass, The Art of Fiction No. 124. Interview by Elizabeth Gaffney, Summer 1991. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2191/the-art -of-fction-no-124-gunter-grass.

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33 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Interview by MarcChristoph Wagner. Video. Translated by Martin Kogi, August 2013. http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/gunter-grass-writing-against-wall. 34 Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 5. 35 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 174. 36 Stone, Katherine. Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature: Gender, Memory, and Subjectivity. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017, p. 4. 37 Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2007, p. 419. 38 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 19. 39 Grass, Günter, “Ich erinne mich” p. 28; Grass does not mention Jünger in his discussion of memory. 40 Burke, quoted in Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 128. 41 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 196. 42 Ibid, p. 39. 43 Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, p. 194. 44 Ibid, p. 60. 45 “Das Vergessen jedogt besigelt den Tod”; Grass, Günter, “Ich erinne mich,” p. 34. 46 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 156. 47 Ibid, p. 513. 48 Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003, p. 5. 49 Ibid, p. 5. 50 Sutherland, John. A Little History of Literature. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 165. 51 Grass, Günter. “To Be Continued …” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Inc., 2004, p. 274. 52 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics: From The Tin Drum to Crabwalk. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008, p. 195. 53 “Gegenwart ist ein sehr fragwürdiger Begriff. Schon der Beginn unseres Gesprächs ist Vergagenheit. Nichts ist vergänglicher als Gegenwart, nichts fient so rasch.” Grass, Günter. Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit (Imagination as an Existential Necessity). Interview by Siegfried Lenz, January 1981. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Timm Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 2019; Translation mine. 54 “Aber es entsteht dann ein anderer Wirklichkeitsbegriffe, der die Phantasie und die Kraft der Phantasie, den Zeitbegriff der Phantasie der ein ganz anderer Zeitbegriff ist, mitnehmen in diesen neuen Wirklichbegriff.” Ibid, p. 246; Translation mine. 55 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 281. 56 Ibid, p. 292. 57 Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion, p. 144. 58 Ibid, p. 313. 59 Klüger, quoted in Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 314. 60 Grass, The Tin Drum, p. 192. 61 Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, p. 90. 62 Ibid, p. 98. 63 Grass’s opposition to reunifcation will be further covered in Chapter IV of this work. 64 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 156.

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The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965

Introduction: The Discreet Charm of the Petite Bourgeoisie While West Germany focused on rebuilding its society from the ashes of World War II, its scholars and artists embarked upon a different task: discussing the role German civil society played in the Holocaust. In the late 1950s, Grass added his voice to this discussion. To him, the petite bourgeoisie served as the bulwark of the Nazi movement in Germany and in Grass’s hometown, the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Grass said, “The petit bourgeoisie is politically homeless […] dismissed by the rich and by leftwing ideology […] This abandoned stratum was the mass support.”1 Yet, Grass adds a curious note to his discussion of the petite bourgeoisie and Nazism: “I come from that background, and stand by it. There’s nothing more repugnant than people who play at being upper-class.” This interview reveals much about Grass as a thinker and a writer. He fnds himself frustrated by his petite bourgeois upbringing but “stands by it.” He blames this quasi-class for the destruction of Germany during the Nazi period and complicity in her greatest crime, the Holocaust. Yet, Grass also views this class as the willing victims of numerous deleterious political and economic processes. These paradoxes haunted Grass well into his adulthood, during which he became a famous and fnancially successful writer, penning his 1959 debut novel, The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel). This famous work resulted from Grass’s own frustrations regarding his political and economic upbringing, as well as what he considered the deep injustice of postwar bourgeois West German society. After his fight from Danzig at the end of World War II, Grass found himself in Düsseldorf. There, he found its bourgeois culture stifing and their unwillingness to discuss the Nazi crimes of the past decade maddening. In a word, the petite bourgeoisie supported fascism but also provided a sense of community and shared life for its members. Removed of its “pettiness,” the bourgeoisie swept away much of the particular “charm” of suburban life in the name of endless proft. The ethnic expansionism of National Socialism gave way to the economic limitlessness of the postwar German nation-state DOI: 10.4324/9781003276074-2

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and its attendant economic miracles (Wirtschaftswunders/currency reforms) and bourgeois conveniences. While this new world gained a sense of comfort and safety theretofore never experienced by the German peoples, it lost its ability to make sense of itself and its national crimes, according to Grass. In a 1999 interview with New Left Review, Grass says, “My understanding of narrative fction was always […] that it should tell a story from the point of view of people who do not make history, but to whom history happens: victims or culprits, opportunists, fellow-travelers, those who are hunted.”2 His early works serve as a profound testament to the idea that human beings are “trapped” in a history that they cannot understand or totally control. Moreover, this daunting past more closely relates to the present than they realize. Grass’s understanding and experience of “total loss” of his home city and class informed his writing from his frst novel, The Tin Drum, onward. Grass scholar Katharina Hall goes so far as to claim that Grass’s early works, especially his “Danzig Trilogy,”3 represent a family portrait of those living in the “doomed city”4 of Danzig. This form of writing as an extension of “family portraiture” fnds expression in the cultural memory work of Aleida Assmann, who argues that writing manages to create a link between the memory embodied in family letters, photographs, heirlooms with public memorialization found in monuments, museums, and archives.5 Important for Grass here is that the petite bourgeois historical actors in his early novels have a place that holds their memories; that is the heirlooms have a “container” in a place that bears their memory – Danzig.6 This understanding of memory places Grass in a literary tradition with other notable German writers, such as Thomas Mann, whose 1947 novel, Doktor Faustus, views the rise of Nazism and the bourgeoisie’s acquiescence thereof as a “Faustian bargain.” While Grass’s novels, especially his “Danzig Trilogy,” employ tropes of magical realism frequently, Grass does not view the rise of Nazism with such “whim” as Mann. Grass’s major use of fairy tale imagery in The Tin Drum implies that the Germans are a “gullible people who still believed in Santa Claus.” But “Santa Claus was really the gasman.”7 Grass’s writing forcefully breaks with the German literary tradition inasmuch as he reconstructs the grim reality of petite bourgeois life in his early works – chronicling the class’s travails through victimhood to perpetrator to victims again. Grass’s chronicle of the petite bourgeoisie mirrors Germany’s transformation from a “backwards society” into an economic and military powerhouse. Yet, he wants to remind his German readers that their comfort comes at a price and that the fouted past may very well become a dire future if not remembered (and, as we will see later in this work, forgotten) properly. This form of memorializing the Holocaust from the perspective of what Raul Hilberg refers to as “perpetrators and bystanders”8 is politically unorthodox and, as we will explore later, extraordinarily controversial.9 However, Grass’s early works – The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), and Dog Years (Hundejahre) – capture a

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voice forgotten by offcial accounts of history. That is, these books convey a sense whereby modern bourgeois society suppresses its past to attain a stable present. Breaking from modern philosophical notions of societal historical progress, Grass casts a certain kind of historical pessimism similar to Theodor Adorno and other Frankfurt School intellectuals upon modern society.10 Grass, however, does not advocate for a violent overthrow of capitalism. Instead, these novels link his adolescence as part of the “anti-air generation”11 in suburban Danzig to his later advocacy of social democracy. Traces of a new kind of memory that seeks to animate the past and bring it to the attention of those in the present permeate these early novels, forming the basis of the current discussion in this project.

A Brief History of the Petite Bourgeoisie Grass claimed the petite bourgeoisie as his own. But what does he mean when he makes this claim? According to the political scientist James C. Scott, “the petit bourgeoisie represents the largest class in the world.” This “class,” Scott emphasizes, includes not only the expected small shopkeepers and property owners but also small independent traders, artisans, and those whose only property may consist of some tools, a pushcart, or a vehicle. Decisively for Scott, however, is that the petite bourgeoisie is mostly in charge of their working day, able to set its own hours, which drastically differentiates them from the factory workers of the time.12 Despite their size, the petite bourgeoisie rarely speaks for itself, let alone is capable of organizing politically. Scott explains, “The one and only time, as near as I can tell, the petite bourgeoisie gathered in its own name was at the 1901 First International Congress of the Petite Bourgeoisie in Brussels. There was no Second Congress.”13 This lack of self-representation likely owes to the petite bourgeoisie’s status as a “successor” to the peasant classes of Europe. In the German case, the historian James Brophy notes that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, her peasants underwent an incomplete transformation into autonomous bourgeois subjects, ftting into an awkward societal position when industrial capitalism truly began in earnest in the nineteenth century.14 Lacking the constant supervision and precarity of the industrial proletariat and the respectability and property of the haute bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie struggled throughout the past two centuries to establish itself as an independent sphere of capitalist society, capable of organizing itself politically. Thus, scholars defne “petite bourgeoisie” in various contexts. A conventional economic conception of the petite bourgeoisie exists in the early writings of Karl Marx. In 1852’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx argues that the petite bourgeoisie arose as a semiautonomous class during the constitutional crisis following the collapse of the Third French Republic. He writes that the petite bourgeoisie existed primarily as a potential coalition partner for the nascent Socialist Party in France more than

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it served as an autonomous interest in French politics.15 More pointedly, Marx defnes the petite bourgeoisie as “a transition class, in which the interest of the two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted.”16 Further, the “Democrats” who represented this class imagined themselves as defending universal democratic principles rather than “narrow” class interests, according to Marx. Thus, the petite bourgeoisie lacks political orientation because its representatives do not see themselves as representing a class but a nation, according to Marx. Removed of political representation and economic mobility, the petite bourgeoisie lacks a home and an identity, doomed forever to be swept up in bourgeois politics as a potential “coalition partner,” “dismissed by the rich and by left-wing ideology,” as Grass said in 2010. The petite bourgeoisie in German society represents a middle estate or Mittelstand between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Donna Baker explains that the German word Stand possesses a preindustrial basis, implying a concern with status, not exclusively class.17 According to Baker, the middle estate was divided into three “sub-estates”: the small artisans and businessmen; the new middle-class industrial administrators; and the professionals, who occupied offces in law, medicine, and academia. Grass’s writing and childhood revolves around the frst group – Grass’s father was a grocer, like the character Alfred Mazerath in The Tin Drum. Baker argues that due to the tendency for larger frms at the time to buy and sell in bulk, the small petite bourgeois shops were more susceptible to market fuctuations and, therefore, shifts in status. This tendency, coupled with the lack of political representation, makes the petite bourgeoisie far more likely to embrace a “status-seeking” mentality, rummaging for its much-needed political representation in unlikely, and sometimes unsavory, places.18 Yet, this fear of losing status in capitalist society ultimately holds the petite bourgeois “middle estate” together. Baker explains that the aforementioned fear of lost status, combined with the desire for greater status, forms a kind of “negative unity” that creates a tenuous identity and, more importantly, a set of interests and concerns for the small Mittelstand.19 This anxiety created tension between the Mittelstand and socialist agitators in Germany’s fn-de-siecle. According to Helmut Walser Smith, “The socialists derided [the petite bourgeoisie] as standing-collar proletarians, caught between bourgeois aspirations and worker-like dependency.”20 Applied to Grass’s fction, Baker writes that the petite bourgeois small proprietor (Kleinbürger) was able to “make history” through Nazism. She contends that Grass tracks Hitler’s rise to power in small detail regarding household appliances: for instance, vacuuming replacing rug beating and Mazerath’s purchase of a radio to hear the Führer speak.21 Baker’s sentiment fnds a refection in this famous passage from Grass’s Tin Drum: “Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours.”22 This passage does not merely refect a statement of poetic importance; it reveals a facet of Nazism often ignored: its materialism. The historian Timothy Snyder points out that

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the Nazi concept of living space (Lebensraum) has origins in globalization and the petite bourgeois desire for haute bourgeois “creature comforts.”23 The “Aryan race” would not have to suffer while awaiting the news of the world; they would do so in comfort, just like the Mazeraths in The Tin Drum.24 Further, Snyder writes, “The term Lebensraum came into the German language as the equivalent of the French word biotope, or ‘habitat.’ In a social rather than biological context it can mean something else: household comfort, something close to ‘living room.’”25 If history has an economic telos for Grass, it is not toward the Marxist promise of a classless stateless utopia but toward “the bourgeois smug.”26 The aforementioned wallpaper gets painted over, and the old spaces of family gatherings become “living rooms” littered with numerous modern bourgeois “creature comforts.” In a word, Nazism and its racial conception of history destroy all objects that bear witness to the conditions and emotions held in the space of the petite bourgeoisie. As the glass shatters during Kristallnacht, so does the identity of the petite bourgeoisie in Danzig. They transform into willing participants in the twentieth century’s worst crimes seemingly overnight. Scott shares Grass’s mournful refection on the loss of the petite bourgeoisie. He writes, “Thwarted petty bourgeois dreams are the standard tinder of revolutionary ferment.”27 Intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School, particularly Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, however, found that the “German petit bourgeoisie proved to be the keenest supporters of Hitler.”28 Historical data bears out these intellectuals’ suspicions: the German historian Thomas Mergel writes, “The NSDAP [National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei] was a party of the publicly active parts of society: […] Every fourth teacher and every sixth self-employed person was a party member.”29 If society had truly changed toward “the bourgeois smug” in an age “barbaric, mystical, [and] bored,”30 there remained one option in dealing with the collapse of the petite bourgeoisie. Grass had to create new “wallpapers,” as it were. His work represents the creation of new objects upon which he could write old memories. Through writing, Grass manipulates time and shows a world where everyday life is interrupted by death, war, sexual discovery, and dislocation.31 Grass populates such a world with horseheads teeming with eels, pirate gangs, schoolkids eating seagull droppings, walking snowmen, and gold teeth. Further, his work fies directly in the face of Theodor Adorno’s injunction that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”32 Writing may be barbaric, but it is also necessary for curing the German people of the amnesia that rose with the new buildings (Neubauten) and economic miracles of postwar German society. To this end, Grass employs a set of symbols such as the titular tin drum that conjure memory like an incantation from Oskar’s constant drumming. However, as we will see in the coming sections, some instruments are better suited than others for the task of “de-Nazifying” society. Grass’s early work functions as a cold shower to the German people, reminding them of the sentiment expressed by the Italian chemist and

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Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi that the Holocaust “happened. Therefore, it can happen again. And it can happen anywhere.”33 Grass says in his Nobel acceptance speech in 1999 that after the fnancial success of his frst novel, The Tin Drum, “The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end.”34 Literature’s role in politics, then, to Grass, was to continue the fow of time by stopping it, by placing the past before us. The memory of the petite bourgeoisie, thus, is the rock upon which Grass builds his church as the once and future “Pope of German Letters.”

The Tin Drum: History through Horseheads “I begin long before myself” (“Ich beginne weit vor mir”). These opening words of the 1979 flm adaptation of Grass’s frst novel, The Tin Drum, convey the sense of time presented in its source material. In this novel, Grass conjures a petite bourgeois cosmos whereby death marks the passage of time and the events of the past bleed well into the present. The frst sentence of The Tin Drum encapsulates the crisscross of past and present haunting the protagonist Oskar Mazerath: “Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital.”35 Here, several facets of the novel present themselves to the reader. First, Oskar is unreliable as a narrator: Grass immediately places the veracity of Oskar’s claims into question by showing his nonchalant attitude toward his stay in a mental asylum. Second, Grass demonstrates the vagueness of time in the novel’s universe. The “granted” suggests a certain in medias res setting, but the reader is left in the dark of “where” that “middle” is exactly. Most importantly, Oskar demonstrates a sense of narratorial self-obsession. Like in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Oskar narrates events he could not possibly remember, such as his own birth. Oskar is the German bourgeoisie writ small – he is literally and metaphorically petite bourgeoisie.36 Literally, because Oskar remains physically a three-year-old throughout the frst two books of the lengthy novel – even when he does begin to grow late into the third book, he only grows a few inches. Metaphorically, Oskar’s small stature and rebellious attitude highlights the impotence of the lower-middle class in resisting Nazism and exhibits the absurdity of life under such conditions. Oskar is a dwarf with blond hair and blue eyes – beyond his obvious disability, Oskar represents, physically, everything that Nazism wants from a so-called “Aryan race,”37 albeit with the mind of a teenager inside the body of a three-year-old. This mismatch between body and mind grants Oskar the ability to pursue all manner of mischief and chaos while avoiding the consequences afforded to an adult. For instance, Oskar tempts his uncle and “presumptive father,” Jan Bronski, into stealing a necklace for his lover (and Oskar’s mother), Agnes Mazerath, and avoids Bronski’s fate on the fring line after Oskar unwittingly pulls him into a standoff between the Polish Post Offce and Nazi forces. In sheer defance of history, Oskar’s childlike visage allows

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him access to a train to West Germany at the end of the war – a “privilege” granted overwhelmingly to women and children escaping Soviet occupation.38 In a word, The Tin Drum presents the story of an anomaly and his misadventures – time moves nonlinearly and episodically. In terms of genre, The Tin Drum may best be described as a parody of the “formation novel,” or Bildungsroman – a genre closely associated with Germany’s “Poet Prince” Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe,39 particularly his early novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.40 According to the literary critic Franco Moretti, the Bildungsroman represents an inversion of antiquity – that youth, rather than agedness, represents “the most meaningful part of life”41 as well as the “essence of modernity” and its tendency to fnd meaning in the future, as opposed to antiquity’s focus on the past.42 Further, Moretti suggests that the Bildungsroman’s focus on youth and modernity represents a new mode of “class consciousness” on the part of the bourgeoisie. Moretti writes that these dominant ideological structures are “they are pliant and precarious, ‘weak’ and ‘impure.’” The ultimate ideological drive of the Bildungsroman is to allow its protagonists and, therefore, its readers, to “internalize” the contradictions of everyday life and “learn to live with it, and even transform it into a tool for survival.”43 Hence, certain contradictions are “resolved” through education, economic nomadism, and bourgeois institutions like marriage – “If the Bildungsroman’s initial option is always explicitly anti-heroic and prosaic – the hero is Wilhelm Meister, not Faust.”44 Oskar exhibits a hodgepodge of contradictions that are almost all a condition of his biology, not of his education or rejection of economic essentialism. Oskar claims that his inability to grow owes its existence to a conscious choice. (“It was there I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer, that I would stop right there, remain as I was – and so I did…”). Yet, recounting his own birth, Oskar claims, “I was one of those clairaudient infants whose mental development is completed at birth and after that merely needs a certain amount of flling in.”45 The accounts Oskar gives of himself contradict each other. On the one hand, Oskar was born possessing all relevant knowledge of life and his place in it. On the other, Oskar’s contradictions result from a certain “self-overcoming” and refusing to grow and, therefore, take part in the “adult world” and become a grocer. In the terms Moretti presents regarding the Bildungsroman, the contradictions of Oskar’s life need neither resolution nor “internalization.” Oskar has already performed all the work of a Wilhelm Meister at birth or at age three, depending on which of his accounts one accepts. Oskar’s self-descriptions mock the bourgeois values of “thrift,” “hard work,” and “self-overcoming” in favor of a selfimposed eternal childhood. The petite bourgeois world may not fulfll the ambitions of Wilhelm Meister for growth, but it can provide the comfort of a womb or a crib. When Oskar describes his birth, he also describes his home above

28 The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965 Mazerath’s grocery store. Oskar says, “The fat adjoining the story was cramped and badly constructed, […] it had a defnite middle-class character. At least in the early years of her marriage, Mama must have felt quite comfortable.”46 Oskar’s words convey much regarding the place of the petite bourgeoisie in his own (and Grass’s) life. First, Oskar’s perception of his own existence intimately corresponds with class-based notions of comfort and “success.” Second, in childlike fashion, Oskar seeks immediate gratifcation of his own base needs and considers instances in which these needs are not met in others as failures. Comfort rather than “respectability” ranks frst in Oskar’s hierarchy of goods. And nothing is more comfortable than a womb or a crib. Oskar says of his hospital bed early in The Tin Drum: “So you see, my white-enameled, metal hospital bed has become a norm and standard.”47 Oskar’s desire for distance, ironically, serves as one of his most relatable characteristics. Oskar’s petite bourgeois suburb names people by their economic function. Each character’s identity is intimately related to their occupation – “Mazerath the Grocer,” “Greff the Greengrocer,” etc. Curiously, Oskar builds his closest friendships with people on the economic periphery of Danzig-Langfuhr. For instance, Oskar strikes up a friendship with Herbert Truczinski, a local unemployed man in his neighborhood who, upon receiving a job at the local naval museum, becomes transfxed by the masthead of the ship Niobe and is fatally impaled on her.48 Likewise, Oskar admires Meyn, the neighborhood’s unemployed and alcoholic trumpeter, who spends his days drinking gin and playing music “too beautifully for words.”49 However, when Meyn places his talents in service of the local SA unit before the war and participates in Kristallnacht, Oskar says of him, “His playing was no longer too beautiful for words, because, when he slipped on those riding breeches with the leather seat, he gave up the gin bottle and from then on his playing was loud and sober, nothing more.”50 In a word, Oskar seeks a sense of belonging and novelty away from the excessively business and status-defned world of petite bourgeois suburbia in the “lumpenproletariat” of Danzig-Langfuhr. With the advent of Nazism, the eccentricities of Oskar’s world become “loud and sober, nothing more.” As the Nazi rostrums rise, all Danzig-Langfuhr’s artistic and economic life falls in goosestep with the dictates of National Socialism. Patrick O’Neill describes this movement toward Nazism through the novel’s focus on clothing. The way Oskar’s father, Alfred Mazerath, begins to assemble his SA uniform, beginning with the shirt and ending with the boots that “will soon be kicking in the windows of Jewish shop-fronts, is brilliantly choreographed,” O’Neill writes.51 Further, Grass’s linkage between Mazerath’s uniform and petite bourgeois capitalism has a historical basis: Mergel writes, Nazism did not present itself “as a movement that attracted ‘the many,’ funded primarily by admission fees to rallies and merchandizing.”52 The party uniform in question represents a very visible symbol of that “merchandizing.”

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Consequently, Oskar’s powerful piercing scream and insistent drumming prove powerless to stop the ascent of Nazism. Oskar attempts to disrupt a Nazi rally by distorting the cadence of its marches with his own drumbeat and succeeds in making the crowd engage in a Rheinish waltz, but no more than that. Oskar says of his own failure, “Oskar was no prophet, he was beginning to feel hungry. […] I lamented neither for a biblical gourd nor for Nineveh, even if its name was Danzig.”53 The tin-ness of the titular drum serves a stark contrast to the brass drums and bugles of the Nazi party sweeping through the doomed city of Danzig. The ascent of Nazism implies the descent of traditional German culture for Grass. This cultural decline reaches its nadir in Beethoven’s banishment from the Mazerath’s living room, replaced by an image of Hitler by the family piano in Oskar’s home.54 The Nazi promise of “living room” in both its domestic and geopolitical varieties holds a strong sway over the doomed denizens of Oskar’s neighborhood. Yet, the economic realities behind the bourgeois comforts promised by Nazism prove too much to bear for Oskar’s mother, Agnes. In a particularly infamous scene, Alfred takes Oskar’s “holy family”55 to Brösen, a seaside resort town,56 where he purchases eels from a longshoreman. Until this point, Agnes had never witnessed how the eels her husband prepared for Good Friday were procured. The longshoreman produces a horsehead teeming with eels, crawling in and out of each orifce on the head. Agnes responds by “[disgorging] her whole breakfast, pouring out lumpy egg white and threads of egg yolk mingled with lumps of bread soaked in café au lait over the stones of the breakwater.”57 The scene of an intense argument between Agnes and Mazerath later that day results in Oskar’s attempt to fee into a closet, but he cannot ft as “Mazerath’s party uniform, felt the presence of sword belt and shoulder straps, and was unable to fnd my way back to the white folds of the nurse’s uniform.”58 Unable to cope with the source of her lifestyle, Agnes commits suicide, giving herself mercury poisoning by ingesting their grocery store’s canned fsh.59 Oskar takes refuge in others who have, ostensibly, “chosen” to stop growing. In a rare moment of emotional forthrightness, Oskar expresses deep rage at his mother’s death to Bebra, a dwarf circus performer: “She shouldn’t have done that. I can’t forgive her. […] To her I was never anything but a gnome. She would have got rid of me if she had been able to.”60 Oskar is not wholly wrong – the life of a gnome, even an “Aryan” gnome, was precarious, to say the least, in the Nazi-era “Free City.” Thus, even Oskar and his “tin drum” fnd themselves mobilized by Nazism as Bebra enlists Oskar in his propaganda unit, performing for Nazi offcers across Europe later in the book. Between dissatisfaction with seeing how “the sausage,” or in this case, the eels, “get made” and the utter impotence of art in the face of Nazi tyranny, there is only naked power waiting in the wings for Oskar. In a famous passage, Bebra tells Oskar, “Our kind has no place in the audience, we must perform, we must run the show. If

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we don’t, it’s the others that run us. And they don’t do it with kid gloves.” Bebra continues, “They are coming […] They will take over the meadows where we pitch our tents. They will organize torchlight parades. They will build rostrums and fll them, and down from the rostrums they will preach our destruction.”61 The promise of destruction does nothing to help Oskar “overcome” or “internalize” the contradictions of his life. If anything, the bureaucratic way the Nazis incorporate the Danzig Free City into the Sudetenland paves over any contradiction and eccentricity Danzig may have possessed. Danzig’s Jewish businesses and synagogues are destroyed in Kristallnacht; the city’s “romantic”62 Polishness perishes with the Polish post offce; and Danzig’s petite bourgeoisie, a locus of independent economic activity, becomes subsumed into the designs of National Socialism. The intense focus on economic gain and social propriety transforms into an obsession with racial purity and the will of the Führer. For both Oskar and Grass, the transformation of Danzig’s petite bourgeoisie represents nothing less than the “total loss”63 of a way of life. The later Soviet occupation that takes the life of Mazerath and expels Oskar from Danzig is a formality – Danzig truly dies on Kristallnacht. As Oskar ruminates on the loss of Sigismund Markus, the local Jewish toyshop owner and source of Oskar’s drums: “They took away my toy merchant, wishing with him to banish all toys from the world.”64

Cat and Mouse: Time Frozen in Water While Oskar presents one side of the Nazi-era petite bourgeoisie, his experience (and Grass’s) does not represent the experience of this class as a whole. As Scott argues, the petite bourgeoisie is simultaneously the largest and least politically represented class in existence under capitalism. Whereas The Tin Drum presents the history of the petite bourgeoisie in a more episodic nature, presenting long stretches of boredom punctuated by explosions of historical and personal development, Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus) represents the opposite. In this work, time fows “linearly” compared to the cross-chronological chaos of The Tin Drum. Time does not follow the shape of “events” and deaths as is the case in The Tin Drum either. Rather, Cat and Mouse presents the story of quotidian events elevated to the level of historical importance out of sheer boredom and a desire to participate in history through warfare. The novella’s narrative still stems from the recollections of its narrator, Pilenz, in the “present” of 1950s Düsseldorf like in The Tin Drum.65 However, Pilenz’s recollections appear much more coherent and lucid than Oskar’s constant contradictions and ontic disorder. But the “linearity” of Cat and Mouse’s temporal universe is a misnomer. Reddick illustrates that an early scene where the juvenile protagonists chew on seagull droppings represents the “excretal cycle” of their existence.

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That is, seagulls throughout the Danzig Trilogy represent “various forms of excrement and decay” and in Cat and Mouse in particular, “they become a kind of dominant presence […] a constant token of the threatening order of existence in which Joachim Mahlke is a representative victim.”66 Reddick’s exegesis fnds support in Grass’s text as he writes that the young boys could only spot “Rarely a stray cod. Only rumors of eels. We never once saw a founder.”67 Pilenz describes the gull droppings the youth of Brösen crack off the sides of its boats and docks, “The stuff tasted like nothing at all or like plaster or like fsh meal or like everything imaginable: happiness, girls, God in His heaven.”68 These two quotes underlie the seeming emptiness and bleakness of Brösen’s prewar youth’s lives and the interchangeability of all goods offered in that life. The waste of seagulls tastes just as good as “everything imaginable,” essentially initiating these youths into an endless cycle of boredom and decay exemplifed by the gastro-intestinal cycle Reddick describes. The narrator, Pilenz, attempts to overcome this cycle of despair by obsessing with his Polish schoolmate, “The Great” Joachim Mahlke. Mahlke differs from the other students not only through his nationality but also through his abnormally large Adam’s apple, over which he wears a large screwdriver bearing the insignia “Made in England.”69 Throughout the course of the novella, Mahlke hides his Adam’s apple under objects of increasing historical symbolic signifcance – a cat, a screwdriver, and eventually, an Iron Cross he steals from a Nazi offcer who visits his high school. As in The Tin Drum, Grass populates Cat and Mouse’s Danzig with found objects, but these objects do not “become memory” the way the “wallpaper” or Oskar’s drum does. Instead, Mahlke, with octopus-like intensity, gathers curiosities found ashore into a semi-submerged Polish ship that he and Pilenz occupy like a secret hideaway. Yet, the hideaway serves only as a storage place for objects that most of the adult world considers refusing. Mahlke removes these objects from their social world and arranges them in a museum of sorts, attempting to bring order to a stolid life thrown into deep doubt by the conditions of history that appear omniscient yet paradoxically distant. The “fnal victory” is ever at hand, but always just out of reach, and these adolescents missed the train, or submarine as it were, delivering them to wartime glory. In a stunning inversion of most accounts of war, Grass cosigns the actual events of the war, i.e., fghting and politicking, to the “background.” Cat and Mouse concerns itself overwhelmingly with the daily experience of those living in the Heimat (homeland) during the war. Even when Mahlke travels to fght in the German Navy, Pilenz leaves these travails out of the novella’s narrative. Instead, Mahlke’s homecoming, where his former principal denies him the ability to speak about his wartime “glory” due to the aforementioned Iron Cross he steals, receives far more attention as an important event than any individual act of war occurring in the world at the time.

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Grass writes as Pilenz, “For while I relieved myself, while the maggot-ridden dross of my age group accumulated behind me and under me, you gave me and my eyes no peace.”70 Pilenz treats “The Great” Mahlke as a living deity, a mythic fgure. In an early controversial scene involving childhood masturbation, Tulla Pokreifke71 screams after measuring Mahlke’s penis: “At least twelve inches!” Pilenz’s narratorial voice replies in incredulity: “That was an exaggeration, of course. […] Mahlke’s was frst of all a size thicker, second a matchbox longer, and third looked much more grownup, dangerous, and worthy to be worshipped.”72 At frst blush, Cat and Mouse seems removed from the intensely statusdriven world of The Tin Drum’s neighborhood. However, the Mittelstand’s search for status still makes its way into the world of Cat and Mouse. Desire for wartime glory replaces the bourgeois respectability that consumes the middle estate in the Danzig Trilogy’s other entries. Pilenz obsesses over submarines, ships, and naval adventure, just like the amphibious Mahlke. When a German submarine commander visits the young boys’ high school, Pilenz says of his speech, “No metaphor was too daring. For instance: ‘swaying like a train of priceless, dazzlingly white lace, the foaming wake follows the boat which, swathed like a bride in festive veils of spray, strides onward to the marriage of death.’”73 The Freudian subtext overfows – the desire for glory doubles as a desire for death. The commander’s injunction that “A submarine mission isn’t all shooting and tube fre one and tube fre two; for days on end it’s the same monotonous sea, the rolling and pounding of the boat, and overhead the sky, a sky to make your head reel, I tell you, and sunsets”74 meets no refection from Pilenz, even in his authorial recollection. The boredom of war beats the boredom of school in the seaside port of Danzig. Grass explores this “everyday existence” by evoking small details that reveal much about the nature of that world’s global economy. Early in the novella, Mahlke dives for “treasure” and Pilenz describes his fnd: “He showed us […] a steel screwdriver in one piece. Made in England. Stamped on the metal: Sheffeld.”75 This detail appears insignifcant, but Pilenz reiterates it in the same narrative space, referring to Mahlke’s screwdriver as “his English screwdriver.”76 The repeated reference to England, the epicenter of the industrial revolution and the latest inheritor of the Bildungsroman, continues themes explored in The Tin Drum. Moretti differentiates the English Bildungsroman from its European predecessor, asserting that the former focuses more upon the “fairy tale” aspect of good-versus-evil morality. In the former, Moretti writes that this so-called “common hero” is a typical feature of the fairy tale novel and serves as a “middle-class” fgure defned by their simplicity and relatability to general audiences. This hero may not have much wit, but he does have a country – he is English and appears most regularly in the annals of English literature.77 This “English hero,” unlike Oskar or Wilhelm Meister, achieves his goal when he is able to preserve and confrm the choices “made by childhood innocence.”78

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At no point in the Danzig Trilogy, least of all Cat and Mouse, are children “innocent” or moving toward a renewed state of childlike innocence. Rather, they slouch toward adulthood, absent of religious or parental authority. They instead identify deeply with the political authority of the time: Nazism. This childhood Nazism occurs not out of an abstract commitment to the party’s stated goal of a “Final Victory,” but a simple desire to quicken the date of this promised and unobtainable event. As a result, Pilenz, even in his remembrance, wants to quicken the date of the fnal victory. Time intersects with memory in Cat and Mouse, ironically, in the personage of a character from The Tin Drum. In two places, Oskar’s drum, that representative of the need to “drum up” memory, marches through the lives of the characters of Cat and Mouse. Early in the narrative, Pilenz recollects, In the midst of this spawn which would now be twenty-three years old, beneath the solicitous eyes of the grownups, a little brat, who must have been about three, pounded monotonously on a child’s tin drum, turning the afternoon into an infernal smithy.79 Again, later in the book, when Mahlke returns from a tour of duty, Pilenz refects upon Oskar’s presence amidst them in their meeting, “And then the little boy came back without the grandmothers, pounding his tin drum, circumnavigated us in a semicircle with his magical overtones, and at last vanished down the tapering path with his noise.”80 Just before the boys’ chance meeting – and Oskar’s “magical” intercession, Pilenz remarks, “Just in passing and without trying to tell a coherent story beginning with cat and mouse, some students from the Horst Wessel school, who were also being trained in the Brösen-Glettkau short battery, contributed a certain amount of new material.”81 The key phrase is “trying to tell a coherent story beginning with cat and mouse.”82 Here, the demands of remembrance confict with the accessible information Pilenz tries to “unfreeze” in his recollection. Oskar’s presence complicates the coherence and linearity of Pilenz’s narrative. The tin drummer’s intercession reminds the reader of memory’s unreliability regarding the petite bourgeoise’s ostensive distance from its age’s historical conditions that nevertheless strive for control over them. The real “cat and mouse” story of Cat and Mouse plays out between the petite bourgeoisie and history – Nazism in the case of Germany and the Sudetenland and the glory and camaraderie of war for this cohort of young boys. Mahlke is “great” inasmuch as he achieves the elusive prize upon completing his tour of duty: an Iron Cross. However, Mahlke’s valor theft earlier in the novel distances him from his boyhood friends and the authorities of his hometown as they deny him the privilege of speaking of his wartime experience to his former high school. Mahlke slaps his former principal and fees into the sea from which the novella’s fnal lines tell its readers, “You [Mahlke] didn’t surface.”83

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Pilenz leaves his readers in doubt as to Mahlke’s fnal fate but suggests that Mahlke’s real “death” subsisted in the denial of recognition on the part of his peer group. Mahlke eternally remains the “half an orphan” demigod, worshipped but fundamentally distinguished by his peers as an outsider – a Pole whose strange habits and curiosities still haunt the mind of Pilenz decades later. In other words, the absence of history in Cat and Mouse becomes a presence throughout the text, especially when Oskar’s presence becomes known to the reader. The effcacy of memory cannot undo the past; it can only conjure it forth like an incantation or the beat of a drum.

Dog Years: A Comfortable Hell In a 2013 interview with Louisiana Channel, Grass stated that among his greatest mistakes as a writer was underestimating the infuence of fnancial markets on liberal democratic society. Following the advice of Karl Schiller, the German Social Democratic Party’s (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD)) fnance minister, Grass included a discussion of fnancial markets in his second novel and third entry in the Danzig Trilogy, Dog Years (Hundjahre).84 Thus, Dog Years expresses a deep, if incomplete, criticism of Germany’s fnancial institutions in the early 1960s, as well as the transformation of Germany’s petite bourgeoisie into full-blown members of the haute bourgeoisie. To make this criticism more biting, Dog Years utilizes the language of transformation throughout – the novel’s primary symbol, the genealogy of the Liebenaus’ dog Harras, represents the move from the humble shopkeeping of the Liebenaus and Mazeraths to the factory ownership of the novel’s main character and frst narrator, Eddi Amsel. Reddick writes, “In the Third Book [of Dog Years], the main function of the dog image remains that of symbolizing a destructive spirit amidst the Germans, and demonstrating that it lives on, in Grass’s view, into post-war Germany.”85 The similar spirit of bourgeois aimlessness that consumes so much of The Tin Drum’s fnal book86 takes on a far darker, more violent tone in Dog Years, as evoked in the ambiguity of the title itself. The “dogs” in question blur the line between human and animal behavior among Danzig and Oliva’s petite bourgeoisie during the Nazi era.87 Dog Years reverses the import of time experienced in Cat and Mouse. While in Cat and Mouse, its adolescent characters living in the midst of empty time attempt to emulate historical time, the teenaged characters of Dog Years attempt to Quixotically “capture” historical time and reduce it to empty time. That is, recognizable historical events fgure more prominently in the plot of Dog Years than the other two entries in Grass’s early trilogy. For instance, Hitler’s visit to Danzig is treated as a major event in the life of the young Harry Liebenau, the narrator of the second book, even though he cannot meet the Führer.88 However, these events never awaken any sort of epiphany or refection into the interior lives of its characters – in fact,

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the transformations, or “metamorphoses”89 as Grass calls them, take place primarily in the outer characteristics of Oliva’s inhabitants. The extreme case subsists in the aforementioned Eddi Amsel, who undertakes three separate identities (the boy artisan, Amsel; the mysterious patron “Goldmouth”; and, fnally, the industrialist Brauxel), in order to hide his Jewishness and succeed in the world of German industry. Dog Years refects narratorial remembrance in a far more complex manner than the other two entries in the “Danzig Trilogy.” The previous two works had one narrator. Dog Years has three: Amsel/Brauxel, Harry Liebenau, and Amsel’s childhood friend and Eastern Front veteran, Waltern Matern. Each of these narrators shares, individually, their “slice” of memory with the text’s readers. However, the text’s structure defes temporal linearity. Amsel/Brauxel’s portion is the shortest and refects the novel’s present (1963) – with Amsel explaining his motivation in compiling the three perspectives into a “history” of Oliva. Put another way, “Brauschel’s hair is growing. As he writes or manages the mines, it grows.”90 Several facets of the text emerge from such an early passage. First, Amsel cannot keep his identity straight – he uses several different spellings for “Brauxel,” including Brauschel and Brauksel. Amsel links his inability to use a consistent spelling for his pseudonym to the passage of time, symbolized in the fowing of the Vistula River. Amsel writes, “What does a river like the Vistula carry away with it? Everything goes to pieces: wood, glass, pencils, pacts between Brauxel and Brauschel, chairs, bones, and sunsets too.”91 Amsel’s awareness of his own decaying identity illuminates a phrase in the passage cited above. “As he writes or manages the mines” reveals that Amsel does not merely manage the mines, but time itself and its fow. “Brauxel” refers to Amsel as if he is another person,92 yet remarks upon events well into the past that only Amsel could know, particularly the blood oath he makes with Matern on the banks of the Vistula at age nine.93 Amsel links history with the management of money and, therefore, with the management of time. He writes on New Year’s Eve, “The year is running out,”94 blatantly treating time itself as a commodity. The confation of time with capital shows that unlike the Brösen-based boys of Cat and Mouse who deeply desire the eruption of historical time to break up the monotony of empty time, Amsel desires empty time’s regularity in order to escape from the historical transformations to which he and others in his neighborhood were subjected in their youth. If Grass views his literary project as the attempt to allow the past to “continue” and “become memory,” Dog Years represents the contrary aim: writing as a form of capitalistic commodity designed to “stop time” rather than ensure its constant continuity. To this end, Amsel orders his current employee and former neighbor, Harry Liebenau, to write a series of “Love Letters” to his cousin, Tulla Pokreifke. These epistolary fragments constitute the lion’s share of the novel’s content. However, it should be noted that Liebenau’s letters are the

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result of an employer’s demand, not Oskar or Pilenz’s spontaneous, almost Proustian recollections. This “managed” time takes on the language of change and transformation. The novel’s focal setting, Oliva, a suburb of Danzig residing on the Vistula River, points to the impermanence of the objects that “record time” in Grass’s moral universe. To paraphrase W.K. Cunliffe, objects defne “being” in Grass’s novels.95 Oskar’s drum, Mahlke’s stolen Iron Cross, and Amsel’s scarecrows all symbolize the deep desires of their possessors. In the case of Dog Years, Amsel’s scarecrows represent Amsel’s attempt to keep the destructive forces of history at bay. The portly, half-Jewish Amsel often contends against the peasantry of Oliva due to his Jewishness and so endeavors to reinvent himself and show his mastery of Protestant thrift. Amsel discovers inspiration for his reinvention in the writings of the philosopher Otto Weiniger. Grass writes, “[T]he thirteenth chapter, entitled ‘The Jewish Character,’ showed that the Jews, being a feminine race, also have no soul, the extraordinary book found its way into households where otherwise only the Bible was read.”96 Amsel’s internalized antisemitism fnds expression in his creation of scarecrows, which he sells to his neighbors. However, these scarecrows’ function alters dramatically throughout the text. For instance, Amsel’s scarecrows become works of avant-garde art in Dog Year’s middle book, as Amsel, in the guise of the mysterious “Goldmouth,” writes a series of scarecrow-themed ballets for his childhood friend and daughter fgure, Jenny Brunies.97 Liebenau’s narration regarding Amsel captures perfectly his intent in scarecrow manufacturing: “Eddie Amsel built no scarecrows to ward off the sparrows and magpies with which he was familiar; he built with no adversary in mind, on formal grounds. At the most he wished to convince a dangerously productive environment of his own productivity.”98 In one of Dog Years’s most famous scenes, Amsel outfts his scarecrows with surplus SS uniforms and sends them down the Vistula River, signifying World War II’s erosion into history, supplanting the explosive historical time of the war with the empty time of bourgeois capitalism. Harry Liebenau’s narration proves instructive here, “And all this […] was recorded in love letters, three a week, to Tulla. History was made in January, February, March; but [Liebenau] searches for timeless words for Tulla.”99 Liebenau’s narration even juxtaposes Dog Years with Cat and Mouse: “No more poems written with adolescent sperm […] Once the screaming of that shed has splattered his ears like birdshot, his diary is restricted to simple sentences: The gun backs in to the shed. War is more boring than school.”100 Liebenau and Amsel’s antipathy toward history fnds expression in the lackadaisical attitude with which characters respond to events of political and historical importance. For instance, Liebenau and Tulla, in showing off their prized dog with which Hitler chose to sire his dog at the local NSDAP party headquarters, inadvertently take part in the Night of the Long Knives. Liebenau narrates, “They ate apple tart that Frau Raubal had baked and

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spoke of branch and root, of Strasser, Schleicher, Röhm, root and branch. Then they discussed Spengler, Goneau, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”101 Liebenau places greater emphasis here on Frau Raubal’s apple tart than on the persons and theories of National Socialism. When Tulla inadvertently reads the cue that signals the conspired killings of the SA, Liebenau merely says, “But Tulla was present when the newspaper men and photographers came.” As is often the case, Liebenau describes Senta, the prized Hitlerian dog, with more aplomb than his sister’s unlikely foray into history. “This was a historical dog, a sense of responsibility was in order.”102 Tulla and Liebenau speak of “the historical dog” to avoid being historical people. Liebenau narrates his cousin’s uncovering of the execution lager in an almost folksy manner. “There was once a pile of bones – so it was called ever since Harry’s cousin Tulla had spat out the words in the direction of the mound. ‘That’s a pile o’ bones,’ she said, helping with her thumb.” Tulla reiterates, “Bet you it’s bones. And what’s more human bones. Everybody knows that.”103 The gesture, “helping with her thumb” and the casual “Everybody knows that” conveys a sense that even the grandest crime of the twentieth century fnds no deep resonance with Liebenau. In one of Grass’s fnal interviews, he returns to this scene and describes Liebenau as a representative of his generation, with Tulla representing a later, more honest, cohort.104 He explains that Tulla can approach the reality of Nazism and its connection to their petite bourgeois milieu better than Liebenau can with all his Heideggerian prose despite her tactlessness. Grass says, “And Tulla is the only one who can see the skull and then come back and say, ‘that’s a pile o’ bones.’”105 Tellingly, Grass praises the petite bourgeois here for its clarity of language in the midst of horror, as opposed to the professional and academic classes’ Heideggerian language, which obfuscates more than it unveils. The image remains ever fxed on the pile of bones and the childlike “bet” regarding their authenticity. Such narration implies that the reader should agree with Tulla – there is no need for a greater authorial or professional speculative elaboration because “everybody knows that.” And they do. The memory of the Holocaust haunts the people of Germany, but Grass shows here, even in a nascent phase of encountering the Holocaust for the frst time, there is no space to publicly refect on Germany’s national crimes because the “facts” of the Holocaust are taken for granted. Nobody speaks because “everybody knows.” Contrast the blasé approach to the Holocaust with Liebenau’s grotesque depiction of Tulla’s unexpected abortion later in the novel. Liebenau writes, “Harry did the rest with horrifed curiosity: the fnger-size twomonths old fetus lay there in her panties. Made manifest: there. Sponge in gelatin: there. In bloody and colorless fuids: there. Through world onset: there.”106 Liebenau’s use of quasi-Heideggerian prose intersects with deep vulgarity:

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The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965 Placedness and abortion. Matter and work. Mother and child. Being and time […] The nihilating Nothing. Lousy luck. Come-to-be in errancy. Spitting cunt. Not even transcendental but vulgar ontic unconcealed ungrinded unstörtebekert. Washed up. Error fostered. Empty egg. Wasn’t a pre-socratic. A bit of care.” (Ibid, p. 327)

Liebenau varies between a detached “bourgeois” intellectual and intensely personal and harrowing description of Tulla’s abortion without changing the topic. Ironically, Liebenau uses the Heideggerian language of concealing and revealing to conceal guilt feelings regarding the recognition of a child’s death. Likewise, Grass’s elaboration on Heidegger throughout Dog Years107 suggests that the German intellectual tradition and its bourgeois defenders have failed to adequately address the Holocaust. Rather than unveiling national crimes, Heideggerian philosophy conceals “Being” under pages of dense phenomenological jargon. According to Grass, being buries time. In the same 2014 interview mentioned earlier, Grass calls Liebenau’s “Heidegger-gibberish,” “student speech,” divorced from any sort of real confrontation with “Being.”108 Even when gazing into the empty eyes of an exterminated human being or an aborted fetus, Liebenau still refuses to engage with his association with Nazism in a serious manner – a chilling indictment of Grass’s generation. Grass’s criticism of bourgeois intellectualism carries into the third book, “Materniads,” wherein Walter Matern, the murderer of the Liebenaus’ dog, Harras, former communist, and Eastern Front veteran, appears on a postwar radio children’s discussion program produced by Amsel/Brauxel and written by Liebenau. In this scene, a group of children cross-examine Matern regarding his wartime (and prewar) crimes. Under the guise of “discussion,” the children say, “Only those who enjoy discussion become, through discussion, human beings. Therefore to be a man is …” A chorus fnishes, “… to be willing to discuss!”109 This rhetoric takes on a religious quality: “O great Creator of dynamic and everlasting world discussion, Thou who hast created question and answer, who givest and takest away the foor, sustain us this day as we proceed to discuss the discussion-welcoming topic of discussion.” Of note, the children force Matern to publicly confess his killing of Harras, the Liebenaus’ prized German Shepard who begets Prinz, Hitler’s dog: “Just the same, it was she who persuaded me to poison the black shepherd Harras with rat poison.”110 As the “discussion” continues, the children unveil the never-ending nature of “discussion.” Grass writes, “Neither in the secular nor in the religious sense does democratic discussion culminate in absolution; it ends without commitment.”111 Put succinctly, “To discuss is to master the problems of existence.”112 Here, Grass pits the petite bourgeois anti-intellectualism represented by Matern against the bourgeois values of “respectable debate” and “discourse” against one another. No real

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“debate” can emerge in this environment – Matern is too ashamed of his crimes to atone properly, and the producers of the radio program are merely concerned with shaming Matern and delivering an entertaining and proftable piece of media. While the petite bourgeoisie wants to clean their hands of their complicity in Nazism’s ascent, Liebenau and Matern wish to turn this anti-intellectual evasion of guilt into proftable spectacle. Beyond the obvious irony that this “discussion” exists primarily to shame Matern for his wartime crimes, this notion of “questioning” and “discussing” draws to mind the work of the German postwar philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose 1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere appeared the year prior to Dog Years’s publication. While it is unknown if Grass read Habermas’s work in time for Dog Years’s publication, he lampoons many Habermasian tropes here.113 Grass here displays a skepticism toward Habermas’s notion of “communicative reason,” especially the idea that this concept results in a democratic consensus regarding the common good, suggesting discussion only begets more discussion, just as Senta begets Prinz. In fact, constant discussion reopens questions better left closed. For instance, one of the children in this discussion program remarks: “When it comes right down to it, problems solve themselves. All you need is a little patience. Take the Jewish question. We’d have gone on discussing with the Jews until they emigrated of their own free will and conviction.”114 Here resides the moral core of Dog Years and its connection to the petite bourgeoisie and the Holocaust. In abandoning its focus on community and self-propriety and taking on the norms and attitudes of the upper classes, namely the German military class and the “intellectual” and bourgeois notions of “discourse” and Heideggerian speculation, the petite bourgeoisie becomes an accessory to the most heinous of historical crimes. The logic of the Holocaust and its subsequent concealment in the German mind fow from this desire on the part of Germany’s middle estate to gain respectability and cast aside its smallness. Matern’s narration refers to the Rhineland as “Petit-bourgeoisie Babel.”115 Here, Grass suggests that Matern, much like the petite bourgeois Volksdeutsche is thrown into diaspora, scattered across Europe following the end of the war. Yet, these conditions do not register to West Germany as “punishment” so much as an inconvenience. The displaced Germans will descend into hell, but it will be a comfortable hell. Grass illustrates this notion of postwar Germany as a “comfortable hell” in the fnal scene of Dog Years. Matern and Prinz, the former canine companion of Adolf Hitler, now dubbed “Pluto,” enter Amsel/Brauxel’s hellish scarecrow factory. Matern confronts scarecrows displayed in various underground partitions like images in Dante’s Inferno. The scarecrow, earlier symbol of Amsel’s transformation from a “greedy, distrustful” Jew into a “thrifty and virtuous” Protestant, now takes the form of bourgeois contentment. Grass writes, “‘But what of man, in whose image the scarecrow was created?’ is answered by one and hundred philosophers: ‘The scarecrow question calls ourselves – the askers – into question.’”116 That is, the

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scarecrow, set loose in Nazi paraphernalia upon the Vistula, has been jettisoned like fotsam into time – eternally “self-grounded” in the empty time of bourgeois capitalism. In a fnal symbolic twist, Prinz, Hitler’s former lapdog abandons Matern and joins Amsel, marking Amsel’s fnal violent transformation into the industrialist, Brauxel. As Matern writes earlier, “Cured but unredeemed, master and dog leave the withered Lüneberg Heath. From this moment on, the clap is on the decline in Germany. Every pestilence purifes. Every plague has its day. Every joy is the last.”117

And Once More with Feeling: A Return to The Tin Drum What comes after the petite bourgeoisie collapses? Does the ascent of property rights and the economic regularity brought about by the currency reforms forestall any future attempts to return to fascism? Grass does, after all, highlight the dismal expulsion of “ethnic Germans” or Volksdeutsche from the Sudetenland and the deep poverty of Germans living under the intense rationing of postwar Germany in The Tin Drum. Even in the early phases of The Tin Drum, Oskar foretells the awful conditions of the immediate postwar period. In an early scene, Oskar uses his shrieking voice that can “shatter glass” to cut a small hole in shop windows, tempting people into petty theft. One such victim of Oskar’s mischief is his uncle and “presumptive father,” Jan Bronski, who Oskar tempts into stealing an expensive necklace, which he gifts to his lover and Oskar’s mother, Agnes. Oskar cuts his own description short: “Shortly after the war I exchanged [the necklace] on the black market for twelve cartons of Lucky Strikes and a leather briefcase.”118 The use of Lucky Strikes, a then-famous brand of American cigarettes, emphasizes the loss of national sovereignty and what Grass sees as the uniqueness of the German petite bourgeoisie. After Mazerath’s displacement, Oskar’s infant “presumptive son” Kurt begins selling fints on the black market. Oskar narrates, “[Kurt] had a ‘source’; he never told anybody who or what it was, though he never stopped talking about it. Even before going to sleep at night, he would say, instead of his prayers: ‘I’ve got a source.’”119 Put bluntly, the “source” of wealth and providence is no longer the God of Christianity but the provider of fints. This statement carries an extended ironic quality considering Oskar’s own grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, was wanted by Polish authorities as a serial arsonist.120 In a real sense, after their physical and economic displacement, the Mazeraths, now “bourgeois citizens” of the German Federal Republic, resemble Kashubian peasants far more than they ever did as shopkeepers in Danzig. Oskar, indeed, casts doubt on any attempt to romanticize such a period of time: “Today there are plenty of well-heeled critics of the economic miracle who proclaim nostalgically […] ‘Ah those were the days, before the currency reform! Then people were still alive!’” Oskar calls this tendency “the romanticism of lost opportunities,”121 suggesting that the ill-informed

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nostalgia of Germany subsists in their failure to “make it” in the newly established bourgeois economic order. Oskar’s skepticism, however, does not translate into “realism” or “pragmatism” here. This nostalgia exists regardless of its misguidedness, and it arises in part due to the spiritual and political emptiness of postwar Germany, according to Grass. This point fnds expression in Oskar’s stint as the drummer of a jazz band in Düsseldorf. In the previous book, Oskar buries his drum with his father, suggesting his “putting away childish things” and growing for the frst time in nearly two decades, albeit only about an inch. Ironically, during Oskar’s tenure in his band, “The Rhein River Three,” his drumming becomes “loud and sober, nothing more.” The band plays in Schmuh’s overpriced trendy jazz club, “The Onion Cellar,” wherein “The customers were uncomfortably seated on common crates covered with onion sacks, yet the plank tables, scrubbed and spotless, recalled the guests from the mine to a peaceful peasant inn as we sometimes see in the movies.”122 Removed of its dirt and grime, “The Onion Cellar’s” patrons recreate a sanitized version of the petite bourgeois past, escaping their comfortable lives into the decidedly uncomfortable, and if Grass’s account is any indication, traumatic lives of a doomed and displaced class. Moreover, Oskar’s band primarily plays to provide a soundtrack to the club’s real product. “The Onion Cellar had its specialty: onions. And moreover, the onion, the cut onion, when you look at it closely […] they could see nothing more, because their eyes were running over and not because their hearts were full.”123 Guests of the Onion Cellar pay top dollar to experience pathos, to cry in the midst of “this drought, this tearlessness” in the midst of “the tearless century.” However, Oskar points out that such “tearlessness” is “in spite of all the suffering and sorrow” felt by the guests not due to any hidden joy.124 Further, Schmuh, and Oskar’s band, regiment the onion cutting, counting off with whistle and drumbeat the beginning of the onion ritual and preventing the pathos from becoming a Bacchic orgy.125 Oskar responds with indifference, “I pulled my drum from under the bench, nonchalantly lit a cigarette, and began to drum.”126 The constant vacillation between pleasure and pathos comes about due to the advancement of global markets, overcoming the “exceptionalism” of German society. Speaking with Lankes, a former Nazi Oskar performed for during his time as a propaganda performer, about sailboats, Oskar says, “‘A new war of religion,’ I helped him. The fagship, I suggested, should be called the Mary Stuart or the De Valera or, better still, the Don Juan.” Oskar continues, “‘Death to all Puritans’ was the battle cry and this time the English had no Nelson on hand. Let the invasion begin. England has ceased to be an island.”127 The “Anglicization” of Germany through the expansion of the market society reaches its symbolic zenith in Oskar’s reunion with Bebra, the dwarf circus performer with whom Oskar played with during his propaganda tour during the war. Bebra now owns a media conglomerate, marking his transformation from circus performer to Nazi collaborator to large

42 The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965 business owner. Using the language of contractual obligation, Bebra promises to make Oskar a famous drummer by embarking on a European tour. In Faustian fashion, Oskar says, “I was to purchase Bebra’s mercy with my signature.”128 Without growing, Oskar transforms from Wilhelm Meister into Faust. In this bargain, the titular tin drummer loses what little of a new life he attained in Düsseldorf. Oskar says, “I did what I could to placate [Klepp, Oskar’s bandmate] but I did not give in, and there were no more expeditions to the Old City to drink beer or eat fresh blood sausage with onions.”129 Throughout The Tin Drum, Oskar makes constant repeated references to “his teachers,” Goethe and Rasputin, from whom he learns to read by fnding their books early in life. The two literary-historical fgures represent two sides of Nietzsche’s famous “Apollonian-Dionysian” distinction, with Goethe representing the “individuated” rationalism and measuredness of Apollo and Rasputin representing the communitarian intoxication of Dionysius.130 Oskar’s deal with Bebra represents the ultimate triumph of Oskar’s Apollonian Goethe in German society. When Oskar begins to perform across Europe, he writes, “Most of my listeners were not really up to Rasputin. My biggest triumphs were with numbers evoking not any particular happenings, but stages of infancy and childhood.”131 In other words, Oskar performs empty anthems for bourgeois audiences in an increasingly Anglicized Europe. Here, the triumph of “Goethe” is the triumph of capitalism. However, one should remember Oskar’s unreliability as a narrator; that is, his reading of Goethe is not exactly mature. In keeping with Grass’s notion of Germany as a “literary concept,” Goethe should triumph. Oskar’s artistic life represents an uncritical journey into the annals of European history. And, Oskar’s refusal to indulge in nostalgia is not the result of maturity but its opposite. Grass, in converse to Oskar, seeks nostalgic yearning in Germany’s literary past, which can help those living in history reformulate its national past – and present. To quote the literary critic Terry Eagleton, Today nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. […] Those who wipe out the past are in danger of abolishing the future as well. Nobody was more intent on eradicating the past than the Nazis, who would […] simply scrub from the historical record whatever they found inconvenient.132 This statement could easily have been penned by Grass with one important caveat – an ersatz nostalgia can easily be sold to people in a market society, just like in The Onion Cellar.

Goodbye Danzig, Hello Berlin The famed twentieth-century political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “Action and speech […] are indeed the two activities

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whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the single events and their causation appear to be.”133 For Grass, this coherence cannot be taken for granted. Rather, the coherence of the past and its continuity into the future, the justifcation for what he terms the “To Be Continued …” of modern life, is the result of conscious, intentional, and daunting work of memory. This memory work decides what may be “pre-sent” from the past (Vergegenkunt) to the future by those writing and laboring in the present. And, as far as Grass is concerned, the history of the petite bourgeoisie is the history of the Holocaust. Grass imbues this story with the mythic fairy tale qualities of the European tradition of magical realism. Peter Arnds calls Grass’s carnivalesque mythologizing of the petite bourgeoisie’s lost history a kind of “memory work”134 whereby “the progress of history is temporarily suspended. Auschwitz in its permanence of unfathomable suffering is a kind of perverted carnival that suspends reality to the point that the progress of time, of history, becomes a doubtful dimension.”135 Grass’s fction, especially at this early phase, seeks to grow history’s coherence while refusing to yield its complexity. But the only path to that historical coherence is through remembrance, and, as Grass’s unreliable narrators show, the memory from which remembrance draws is anything but clear. Like a magic spell, Grass conjures forth the ultimate image of the twentieth century as a macabre carnival. After the Soviet occupation of Danzig ends, taking Oskar’s father, Alfred, with it, a Jewish Treblinka survivor named Fajngold appears and claims Oskar’s family’s grocery store. Fajngold helps bury Alfred and speaks of his time as a Sonderkommando (special detail) in Treblinka, sprinkling disinfectant upon corpses. That night, Oskar has a fever dream in which he is on a carousel, fanked by his “teachers” Goethe and Rasputin; the former keeps providing loose change that allows the carousel to continue spinning. Oskar recalls, “We prayed: Oh, our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change, we know you like to treat us to rides on the merry-go-round …. Please put your pocketbook away, say stop….”136 Note, here, it is the Apollonian Goethe and his enchanted pocketbook, with coins provided by Rasputin, that continues the march of history unabated, offering no opportunity to recollect the individuated thoughts that defne the Apollonian mode. Oskar continues, “A bit of madness with Rasputin and a bit of rationality with Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe….”137 The Holocaust “stops” time in Grass’s dark symbol of historical “progress” in the twentieth century. However, knowledge of the Holocaust does not awaken Oskar, or the German people, into a state of remembrance. As soon as the currency reforms make the goods of bourgeois capitalism available again, this “carousel of progress” continues again unabated. In The Tin Drum’s ultimate scene, Oskar fnds himself in his hospital bed dreaming of traveling on a

44 The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965 train, haunted by the Black Witch (Schwarz Kochin), a children’s nursery rhyme character. All the symbols employed heretofore in the novel food back to Oskar, but no real understanding of the historical situation comes. Oskar says, “Don’t ask Oskar who she is! Words fail me. First she was behind me, later she kissed my hump, but now, now and forever, she is in front of me, coming closer.”138 The image of history remains and forever haunts the people of Germany, but no resonance comes. To paraphrase Thomas Di Napoli, all the characters in Grass’s moral universe feel guilty but cannot explain why.139 They know not what they do. This condition of self-imposed historical ignorance allows Hitler’s lapdog to obediently walk over to Amsel in Dog Years, setting the carousel in motion all over again. And, the longer and faster the carousel spins, the more likely the reappearance of extremism becomes – the “spinning” may easily fade well into the background, creating the nihilistic boredom of Cat and Mouse’s Brösen or the restless escapism of Dog Years’s Oliva. At worst, the constant back-and-forth of the carousel creates the demand for Hitler to let the citizens “off” and escape time, as it were. At best, these people forget that they are even on a carousel, with the novel treating the restlessness of capitalist society as a homogenous empty time. To Grass, both of these options are unacceptable, forcing his hand in creating these early works cataloging the “forgotten face of history.” As Grass says in a late interview with Louisiana Channel, “The topic of my writing was decided for me.” And that the feeling of “Loss. Total loss” was the primary catalyst in this decision.140 That “forgotten face” can bite back. Grass’s early novels sparked massive controversy upon their release, prompting claims of obscenity from the Catholic Church and German Cultural Ministry regarding Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. The Tin Drum was even the subject of a book burning by a religious youth organization in Düsseldorf.141 In a late interview, Grass recounts that both The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse were sold under the counter in Southern Germany.142 Yet, these works also engendered a literary sensation of sorts. Grass even conducted early readings and public appearances on television prior to Dog Years’s publication, a practice unheard of at that time in West Germany.143 Taken together, Grass’s Danzig novels refect the complicated relationship between the petite bourgeoisie and Nazism. Above all, these works represent an earnest attempt to “come to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung)144 by inventing myths to counter Nazi propaganda that has, according to Grass, seeped its way into postwar German society. Grass’s new myths hoped to combine German literary affnities and themes regarding the nature of power and the loss of home with contemporary historical settings, allowing Germans to not only come to terms with their recent past but also see their pre-Nazi past in a new light. This new light would hopefully guide the way to a new democratic future, where Germany could join the rest of postwar Europe as allies in the new struggle for peace and human rights. Yet, this state of affairs could not come about

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for Grass without frst acknowledging the unique heinousness of Germany’s wartime crimes. The Danzig works provided the catalyst for Grass’s political activity inasmuch as they demonstrate the need for political advocacy. But in West Germany, Grass became concerned with a new threat to the new German democracy: Neo-Nazism. The popularity of the German National Party (the National Partei Deutschlands (NPD)) in the late 1960s represented a possible return to Nazi tyranny for Grass. Further, Grass argued that the Christian Democratic Union, then led by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, engaged in a cushy relationship with the nationalist party. In a December 1966 interview for Die Weltwoche, Grass linked two major themes of his Danzig works, the middle class and youth, to the basis of the NPD’s popularity: “The NPD rests upon three pillars: the dissatisfed middle class [Mittelstand] […], the old [NSADP] party members, and the youth. These three factors cannot be ignored.”145 Grass cautions in the same interview that the NPD had already attained more than 3 percent of the electorate in the previous parliamentary elections (Landstagswahlen) and that Willy Brandt and his Social Democratic cohort were among the few mainstream politicians in West Germany to understand the threat of the NPD to democracy.146 Returning to Arendt, the “coherence” of the polis cannot exist without the role of storytelling. But which polis gets what story? And what will these stories look like? Ironically, through Grass’s depiction of it, Danzig, now Gdansk, became a major site of German remembrance.147 As mentioned earlier, these “new myths” made Grass a literary superstar, but Grass decided to use this newfound position to become involved in German politics, focusing less on the affairs of the Soviet Union and the United States. Following the publication and reception of Grass’s Danzig Trilogy, he became embroiled in politics, eventually becoming a speechwriter for Willy Brandt during his successful 1969 bid for Chancellor of West Germany. However, this advocacy also made Grass a lightning rod for controversy, both in his political and artistic life.

Notes 1 Grass, Günter, quote in Jaggi, Maya. “A Life in Writing: Günter Grass.” The Guardian, November 1, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov /01/gunter-grass-interview-maya-jaggi. 2 Grass, Günter. The “Progressive” Restoration. Interview by Pierre Bourdieu, April 2002. https://newleftreview.org/issues/II14/articles/pierre-bourdieu -gunter-grass-the-progressive-restoration. 3 This work considers Grass’s frst two novels, The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) and Dog Years (Hundejahre), and frst novella, Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), as constituting the “Danzig Trilogy .” It should be noted, however, that some Grass scholars, notably Katherina Hall (2009), include 1969’s Local Anesthetic (Örtlich Betäubt) and 2002’s Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang) as “Danzig novels,” creating a “Danzig Quintet” (p. 68 ). Other scholars, such as Volker

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Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes argue the “pentalogy” angle but include The Flounder (Der Butt) from 1977 and 1986’s The Rat (Die Rattin) (Mews, p. 92 ). However, more recent Grass scholarship, such as Nicole Thesz’s 2018 critical compendium, The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, Stages of Speech, 1959–2015, and Siegfried Mews’s 2008 Günter Grass and His Critics, rely upon the earlier schema laid out by John Reddick and others. This work will follow suit, discussing the frst three major works by Günter Grass as the Danzig Trilogy. 4 Cunliffe, W.G. “Aspects of the Absurd in Günter Grass.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1966): 311–27, p. 323. 5 Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, p. 283. 6 Ibid, p. 294. 7 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. First Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage International, 1990, p. 203. 8 Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 19331945. New York: Harper Collins, 1993, pp. ix–xi. 9 Grass’s frst novella and second entry of Grass’s “Danzig Trilogy,” Cat and Mouse was infamously censored by the German government and Catholic Church for indecency. See: Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 60. 10 Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. New York: Verso, 2017, p. 387. 11 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 318. 12 Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 55. 13 Ibid, p. 54. 14 Brophy, James M. “The End of the Economic Old Order: The Great Transition, 1750-1860.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 169–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 173. 15 Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. New York: International Publishers, 2008, p. 49; Emphasis his. 16 Ibid, p. 54; Emphasis his. 17 Baker, Donna. “Nazism and the Petit Bourgeois Protagonist: The Novels of Grass, Boll, and Mann.” New German Critique, no. 5 (Spring 1975): 77–105, p. 79. 18 Ibid, p. 79. 19 Ibid, pp. 78–9. 20 Smith, Helmut Walser. “Authoritarian State, Dynamic Society, Failed Imperialist Power, 1878-1914.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, 307–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 315. 21 Baker, Donna. “Nazism and the Petit Bourgeois Protagonist,” p. 91. 22 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 192. 23 Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015, p. 13. 24 Late into the second book of The Tin Drum, the denizens of Oskar’s neighborhood in Danzig-Langfuhr congregate to listen to the news from the Eastern Front on their newfangled radio (TD, p. 301). 25 Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth, p. 14. 26 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 338. 27 Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism, p. 90. 28 Jeffries, Stuart. Grand Hotel Abyss, p. 192.

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29 Mergel, Thomas. “Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918-1939.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 423– 52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 439 30 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 343. 31 According to Reddick (1974), the Danzig Trilogy demonstrated the social ontology of the petit bourgeoisie. That is, time is marked by people’s deaths and the loss of life due to war, suicide, and simple bad luck (p. 30). 32 Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms, 17–34. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983, p. 34. 33 Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2017, p. 186. 34 Grass, Günter. “To Be Continued...” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Inc., 2004, p. 274. 35 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 15. 36 Baker, Donna. “Nazism and the Petit Bourgeois Protagonist,” p. 89. 37 Cunliffe, W.G. “Aspects of the Absurd in Günter Grass,” p. 320. 38 According to the U.S. State Department, “[The] vast bulk of people arriving in Germany from areas east of the Oder-Neisse line [which includes Danzig, Oskar Mazerath (and Grass’s) childhood home] are women, children and old people who arrive in all states of exhaustion and disease. Their plight is such as to give the impression they have been treated with utmost ruthlessness and disregard for humanitarian principles.” See: Douglas, R.M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 126–7. 39 Famously, Goethe appears as one of Oskar’s “teachers,” along with Rasputin in The Tin Drum. Oskar learns to read by fnding a copy of Goethe’s Elective Affnities in addition to a book about Rasputin. 40 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 19. 41 Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New York: Verso, 1987, p. 3. 42 Ibid, p. 5; emphasis Moretti’s. 43 Ibid, p. 10. 44 Ibid, p. 11. 45 Ibid, p. 47. 46 Ibid, p. 45. 47 Ibid, p. 15. 48 Ibid, p. 192. 49 Ibid, p. 196. 50 Ibid, p. 198. 51 O’Neill, Patrick. “The Exploratory Fictions of Günter Grass.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, 39–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 41. 52 Mergel, Thomas. “Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918-1939,” p. 434. 53 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 122. 54 Ibid, p. 211. 55 Ibid, p. 147. 56 Brösen is also the setting of much of Cat and Mouse, discussed in the next section. 57 Ibid, p. 150. 58 Ibid, p. 157. 59 Ibid, p. 162. 60 Ibid, p. 171. 61 Ibid, p. 114.

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62 Brody, Ervin C. “The Polish-German Confict in Guenther Grass’ Danzig: Pan Kishot in ‘The Tin Drum.’” The Polish Review 41, no. 1 (1996): 79–107, p. 80. 63 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Interview by MarcChristoph Wagner. Video. Translated by Martin Kogi, August 2013. http:// channel.louisiana.dk/video/gunter-grass-writing-against-wall. 64 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 205. 65 Midway through the novella, Pilenz mentions his frequent patronage of the Robert Schumann Hall, a concert hall in Düsseldorf, Germany, which confrms the novel’s “contemporary” setting (CM, p. 57). 66 Reddick, John. The Danzig Trilogy of Günter Grass: A Study of The Tin Drum Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 100. 67 Grass, Günter. Cat and Mouse. New York: Signet, 1964, p. 14. 68 Ibid, p. 9. 69 Ibid, p. 15. 70 Grass, Günter. Cat and Mouse, p. 99. 71 Tulla is a regular character in Grass’s fction – she appears as a major character as a child in Dog Years, which will be discussed in the next section, and as an old woman (and East German Communist sympathizer) in Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang), which I discuss in Chapter Four: “Memory.” 72 Ibid, p. 32. 73 Ibid, p. 61. 74 Ibid, p. 61. 75 Ibid, p. 15. 76 Ibid, p. 15. 77 Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World, p. 191. 78 Ibid, p. 182. 79 Ibid, p. 17. 80 Ibid, p. 92. 81 Ibid, pp. 90–1. 82 The metatextual import of this passage cannot be overstated – the text itself begins with the placement of a cat on Mahlke’s Adam’s apple (Ibid, p. 7). 83 Ibid, p. 127. 84 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” 85 Reddick, John. The Danzig Trilogy of Günter Grass, p. 211. 86 I discuss the third book of The Tin Drum in greater detail in the next section of this chapter. 87 The novel’s German title, Hundejahre, even uses the plural for “dog,” Hunde, meaning that “Years of Dogs” could serve as an alternative English translation of the title. 88 Grass, Günter. Dog Years. Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966, p. 258. 89 Ibid, p. 267. 90 Ibid, p. 38. 91 Ibid, p. 13. 92 The novel’s frst lines: “You tell. No, you. Or you. Should the actor begin?” exemplify Amsel/Brauxel’s “split personality” as the most fundamental aspect of Amsel’s character (DY, p. 11). 93 Ibid, pp. 16–7. 94 Ibid, p. 41. 95 Cunliffe, W.G. “Aspects of the Absurd in Günter Grass,” p. 313. 96 Grass, Günter. Dog Years, p. 37. 97 Ibid, pp. 338–9; Tellingly, Bebra, who in The Tin Drum, becomes a media magnate producing jazz records and artistic commodities, produces these ballets. 98 Ibid, p. 189.

The Petite Bourgeoisie in the Danzig Trilogy, 1959–1965 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

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Ibid, p. 347. Ibid, p. 349. Ibid, p. 161. Ibid, p. 162. Ibid, p. 313. Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst (Lately: A Conversation in Autumn). Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017, p. 72. “Und Tulla. ist die einzige, die dann hingeht, mit einem Schädel zurückkommtund sagt: Das ist ein Knochenberg.” Ibid, p. 84; Translation mine. Grass, Günter. Dog Years, p. 326. Heidegger’s work, especially Being and Time, appears throughout Dog Years, especially in its third book, “Materniads,” wherein Matern carries with him throughout his journey across postwar Germany a copy of Being and Time, “still containing dedication to Husserl” (DY, p. 369 ). Grass here highlights Heidegger’s removal of his Jewish mentor from his magnum opus to reiterate Germany’s betrayal and erasure, historical and physical, of its Jewish population. “Der Feldwebel, der plappert. dem Matern. das nach, dieses HeiderggerKauderwelsch, als Schülersprache.” In Letzter Zeit, p. 84; Translation mine. Ibid, p. 482. Ibid, p. 496. Ibid, p. 498. Ibid, p. 499. Habermas and Grass, did, however, know each other and maintained a professional and political relationship, sharing a platform at the 1968 Frankfurt Book Fair on the topic of “Authority and Revolution” (Jeffries, p. 344). Grass, Günter. Dog Years, p. 498. Ibid, p. 435. Ibid, p. 559. Ibid, p. 399. Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 133. Ibid, p. 434. Ibid, p. 25. Ibid, p. 435. Ibid, p. 522. Ibid, p. 525. Ibid, p. 525. Ibid, p. 531. Ibid, p. 533. Ibid, p. 546. Ibid, p. 554. Ibid, pp. 554–5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 41. Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 555. Eagleton, Terry. “Waking the Dead.” New Statesman, November 12, 2009, sec. Culture. https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/11/past-benjamin-future -obama. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Second. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998, p. 97. Arnds, Peter. “Günter Grass and Magical Realism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner, 52–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 53. Ibid, pp. 60–1.

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136 137 138 139

Ibid, p. 412. Ibid, p. 412. Ibid, p. 589. Di Napoli, Thomas. “Guilt and Absolution: The Contrary World of Günter Grass.” CrossCurrents 26, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 435–46, p. 438. Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, pp. 15–6. Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst. Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 77. Ibid, p. 96. [“Die NDP ruht auf drei Säulen: dem unzufrieden Mittelstand, den alten Parteigenossen, und der Jungen. Man kann diese drei Komplexe nicht toschweigen.”] Grass, Günter. Gespräch über Deutschland (Conversation on Germany). Interview by Erwin Leiser, December 1966. In Gespräche, 1958– 2015 (Conversations, 1958–2015), edited by Timm Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2019, p. 60; Translation mine. Ibid, pp. 59–60. Dowden, Stephen D., and Meike G. Werner. “The Place of German Modernism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 481–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201, p. 482.

140 141 142 143 144 145

146 147

3

“A Literary Concept” The Kulturnation in Divided Germany, 1965–1979

Introduction: From Deutschland to Germany In 1965, Sudetenland activists attempted to set fre to Günter Grass’s apartment in West Berlin on the basis that he was “advocating that Germany give up its claim to their homeland.”1 The assault on Grass’s home exemplifes the most vicious form of attack on him as a writer and political activist during the volatile 1960s in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD). Prior to this act of terrorism, Grass was subject to a number of obscenity and blasphemy inquiries.2 Religious groups went so far as to conduct public burnings of Grass’s early novels, particularly Cat and Mouse, for blasphemy.3 Despite his reputation as a literary troublemaker, Grass’s most public pronouncements supported the idea of political moderation and nonviolence. In fact, Grass begins his speech at the Belgrade Writers’ Conference at 1969 by proclaiming, “I’ll come right out with it: I’m against revolution […] I am at best a tolerated guest among proponents of revolution. I am a revisionist and worse – I am a social democrat.”4 Even if Grass’s ironic attitude toward writing continued well into his literary career, his commitment to social democracy collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Citing reunifcation as a major division between him and his political mentor and “moral better,”5 Willy Brandt, Grass infamously compared the union of the two German states as an annexation (Anschluss).6 In the 1990s, Grass’s writing took a consciously economic turn, concerning itself deeply with the place of markets in international politics. Consequently, he adopted the politics of democratic socialism7 and advocated for a German confederation of two states that would create a new German “self-image.”8 Following Karl Jaspers, Grass suggested that this self-image pays a massive debt to the memory of the Holocaust, opining that Germany should never exist as a unifed nation-state as punishment for its twentieth-century crimes. 9 In going about this new project, Grass revitalized the concept of the cultural nation (Kulturnation) as a form of “nationalist anti-nationalism”10 that sought to confate the German national identity with the German literary tradition. While Grass frst revisited this concept in his 1977 work The DOI: 10.4324/9781003276074-3

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Flounder (Der Butt), he formulated it more seriously in 1979’s The Meeting at Telgte (Das Treffen in Telgte). These writings, especially the last two, demonstrate the importance of “canon” as a source of historical memory Grass uses in his fction and political activism.11 In his earlier “social democratic” writings, Grass refects on his status as Germany’s “literary pope.” In 1972’s From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke), Grass explains his tenure as Brandt’s top speechwriter and expresses his forceful desire for incremental changes through a series of “letters” to his children. Snail also features an intersecting narrative of a Jewish schoolteacher named Hermann “Zweifel (doubt)” Ott’s fight from Danzig during World War. These two narratives synthesize to form what Rebecca Braun terms “authorial construction,”12 suggesting that historical consciousness and authorship itself relies upon ironic detachment and intertemporal dialogue. The 1972 novel’s central image, the snail, subsequently dictates the “pace” at which reforms should arrive for Grass. Slowly, carrying its home on its back, and always leaving a trail behind it, the snail represents Grass’s idea of “stasis in utopia.”13 Put another way, slow and incremental reforms best create the conditions needed to create a pluralistic and tolerably ordered society that could uphold order and ensure class compromise for generations to come. Acting as Germany’s literary Pope, Grass delivered a dubious encyclical in 1977 with The Flounder (Der Butt). The Flounder was highly controversial from its frst appearance, capitalizing on a media frenzy which involved early examples of “user reviews” from the German public as part of its marketing.14 Depicting German history as a setting for a historical “war between the sexes,” Flounder represents Grass’s frst attempt to reconfgure German letters as a place of German democratic renewal. A pivotal chapter depicts Agnes Kurbiella, the fctional “cook” for the Baroque poet, diplomat, and spy Martin von Opitz, and his roommate, the painter Anton Möller, and their occasional interlocutor, the dramatist Andreas Gryphius. In depicting this somewhat obscure trio in his bestselling and highly-marketed novel, Grass points to a sense of historical memory beyond himself. While much more occurs in this novel, for better or worse, Grass’s use of the German literary canon as a vehicle for democracy forms the basis of his revival of the Kulturnation. 1978’s The Meeting at Telgte rewrites the Westphalian Peace accords of 1647 from the perspective of Germany’s Baroque literati. Serving as an allegory for Group 47 (Gruppe 47), he creates a “literary appeal for peace.” In going about this transformation of Germany’s political past, Grass seeks to present an alternative German nationalism that forsakes economics and politics as its primary source of the national community, instead looking toward language and literary culture. As mentioned earlier, Telgte builds upon the ontic foundations laid in Snail, creating a sense where the past intersects with the present and informs future generations of the possibility of another future. The idea here is that a revised German canon can create

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a sense of continuity and hope that may inspire individuals to interact with the political in ways they otherwise would not. This chapter seeks to bring together all three of these novels to promote a synthetic understanding of Grass as a political thinker and novelist. Despite Grass’s disdain for “theory,”15 his work in this era shows a prolonged engagement with vital questions of political theory. Particularly, Grass hits upon the nature of political change and its effcacy, the importance of the past in formulating national identity, the question of when force and violence are acceptable, and the relationship between art and politics. However, if any question rises above all others in this “political phase” of Grass’s writing, it is time. Namely, how does a nation’s perception of time inform its way of living in the world together as a people? This question is especially vital considering the German nature of Grass’s writings and the unprecedented nature of Germany’s national crimes. In going about this investigation into the linkage of time and politics, I frst conduct a brief overview of social democracy, its major proponents, and certain events relevant to Grass’s thoughts. Next, I discuss Grass’s relationship with Brandt, using his speeches and letters to the German Chancellor. Finally, I analyze the three novels mentioned above: From the Diary of a Snail, The Flounder, and The Meeting in Telgte. As stated before, these novels, analyzed together, unveil a narrative that covers Grass’s conceptions of Vergegenkunft and Kulturnation as they relate to his transition from social democracy to democratic socialism.

Social Democracy in the West German Federal Republic, 1963–1972 Social democracy is a kind of bastard ideology. It is a form of ideological “revisionism” that seeks to reform Marxism by creating a “third way” between liberalism and communism by upholding what Sheri Berman terms “the primacy of politics.”16 By this phrase, Berman contends that “orthodox Marxism” posits that economic conditions alone would suffce to upend capitalism as it was predicated on the contradiction of the forces of production and the relations of production,17 whereas social democracy argues that the path to a transformed society runs through electoral politics and mass organization of workers. Succinctly, political organization is prior to and necessary for economic reforms under capitalist economies. Berman locates the origins of this belief in the potency of politics in the so-called “Kautsky-Bernstein debate” in which the German socialist Eduard Bernstein and the orthodox Marxist Karl Kautsky differed regarding the proper way to bring about socialist reforms following Karl Marx’s death in 1883.18 Bernstein emphasized the importance of reform and the extension of liberal rights, especially franchise and trade unionism, to win socialism.19 The idea was that a political movement could organize workers in such a

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way that could promote their material interests while avoiding the punitive risks that accompany revolutionary politics. The “goal” of social democracy does not subsist in the “arrival” of an ideological endpoint. Rather, “Progress” here means the improvement of the material well-being of these political groups organized by social democratic politics. To Adam Przeworski, “class compromise” entails a rational form of political engagement as the utility of incremental improvements offered by social democratic politics outweighs the uncertainty of upending the political system (even if those benefts are eventually greater after the revolution).20 By enforcing political discipline upon working classes, social democracy hopes to win reforms that reduce future economic uncertainty and allow for the continued movement toward a more equitable economic order in such a way that is compatible with democracy. During the late 1960s in West Germany, social democracy fourished. Under the leadership of Willy Brandt, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) portrayed itself as a counterweight to the remnants of Germany’s Nazi past on the right and as a voice of moderation in comparison to the popular student movements on the left. In keeping with social democracy’s historic tradition of “class compromise,” the SPD sought greater political gains for workers without resorting to the revolutionary violence of groups such as the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Faktion (RAF)). In the feld of international politics, Brandt promoted opening diplomatic relations with the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Brandt called this strategy “East politics” (Ostpolitik), and it found support among a vast swath of the West German populace in the 1960s. According to the historian Andreas W. Daum, the early 1960s saw a considerable shift in the thought of moderate conservatives in Germany away from Konrad Adenauer’s defensive thinking regarding the East.21 Daum reiterates that by 1972, under the direction of Brandt, the popularity of values associated with Ostpolitik (openness to the world, détente, and education) reached new heights.22 Among other things, this renewed focus on relaxed relations with the East attracted Grass to Willy Brandt. The two began corresponding in 1964. After Grass won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1965, Brandt signifed to Grass that he was “ready” (bereit) to begin a relationship between the SPD and Germany’s writers.23 By the end of the decade, Grass became one of Brandt’s top speechwriters and closest friends in the literary world. However, Grass eventually criticized Brandt for focusing too much on the international side of politics, ignoring the challenges U.S. hegemony posed to West Germany’s welfare state and environmental politics. While Brandt was still Chancellor, Grass bemoaned his administration’s lack of domestic politics (Innenpolitik) and struggled to maintain a certain “energy” (Ehrgeiz) for social democratic politics.24 In a 1970 interview, Grass says, “However strong environmental damage is, if we wish to solve this problem, we will have to reach different ideas about the distribution and use of property.”25

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Consequently, Grass’s relationship with Brandt and the Social Democratic Party was more complicated than was alleged by his left-wing critics. Although critical of utopianism and revolution, Grass still possessed views to the left of the SPD leadership, especially on issues like abortion access and environmentalism.26 However, his opposition to what he termed “radical courses” (Radikalkuren) placed him in opposition to far left-wing student groups like the German Socialist Student Association (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), who were committed to radical change and violent direct action.27 Even as late as 1978, Grass wrote in Die Zeit that “Once again salvation or perdition is expected from outside. A new type of astral angel is now on the drawing board. Release from this earthly veil of tears is expected from cosmic space.”28 In the words of Tony Judt, writers and artists, including Grass, “all born between 1927 and 1932 – now focused their work increasingly upon Nazism and the failure to come to terms with it.”29 This so-called “anti-air” or ’45 generation30 (Flakhelfer Generation) essentially skipped the end of their secondary education and went straight into military service, often becoming the victims of expulsion from the Sudetenland after the end of World War II.31 According to Judt, this ’45 generation differed from the younger ’68 generation in terms of political consciousness. As the German flmmaker and political activist Rainer Werner Fassbinder said, “Our democracy was decreed for the Western occupation zone. We didn’t fght for it ourselves.”32 Terrorist groups, most notably the RAF, staged a series of public bombings and hostage situations throughout the 1970s, reaching their zenith in 1972.33 Mass student protest erupted throughout Germany in opposition to its “Emergency Laws” and against the apparent “emptiness” of bourgeois German society.34 The longstanding ideological division between social democracy and communism emerged again in the 1960s. Grass’s served double duty as a public intellectual. Not only did he serve as the voice of his own generation through his career as a novelist, advocating moderation and civility in an extremely fraught political climate, but also he spoke directly to the so-called ’68 generation through his speechwriting activities for Willy Brandt. During the 1969 federal elections, Grass took to the road, traveling in a converted Volkswagen van, delivering speeches across West Germany. In his stump speech, Grass emphasizes the need for political reform, domestically and internationally. For instance, he questions why, if a man could land on the moon, 60 percent of the world’s population remains illiterate.35 He relates this paradox to the election at hand by stating: “Our inhumane development policy is important and decisive for the states of the third world, so that must be part of our policy however popular our successes in space may be.”36 Later in this same “VW Bus Speech,” Grass connects this concern with internationalism with the National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)). He warns “that a Neo-Nazi party, the NPD, is trying prove that landing on the moon, we are far from living there.”37 The

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message of this speech: the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and NPD must be defeated and exposed as prolonging societal Nazi-era traumas and risking the possibility of unnecessary and costly international confict. The fate of humanity and Germany are interwoven and require defeating any sort of far-right political resurgence. The “VW speech” refects a universalism in both message and audience. Conversely, Grass also spoke directly to West Germany’s youth in earlier speeches regarding the appeals fascist and reactionary ideologies make toward young people. In doing so, he evokes his own personal experiences in the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht (but not the Waffen-SS). In a speech in 1966, Grass compares the ideological appeal of the NPD to the Nazi furor that took over German-speaking territories in the 1930s. He remarks upon the NPD’s calculated appeal to the youth, saying that just as Baldur von Shirach and Artur Axmann of the Hitler Youth misled Grass’s generation’s youthful idealism, so too were the NPD’s Adolf von Thadden and the CDU’s Friedrich Thielen.38 He continues that “Only now, and years later, did I understand the extent of what incredible crimes had been committed in the name of my generation’s future.”39 Grass cautions that his “petit bourgeois world was given over to these crimes […] the then-current division of Berlin and Germany was tragic, but that the promise of a democratic future could not elude those in the present.” Further, “at least the Federal Republic offers democratic security.”40 These two speeches, taken together, illustrate the generational and ideological tightrope Grass walked during the contested 1960s. His task involved convincing older moderates to consider more “radical” and cosmopolitan politics and younger radicals to accept the reality of the Federal Republic and the limits of social democracy. This task bifurcated Grass into different “versions” of himself: a public fgure/activist and a private citizen. According to Rebecca Braun, Grass engaged in a prolonged form of “authorial construction” throughout this period. She writes that even as early as 1972, at the height of his importance as a public intellectual, Grass began to develop a “whimsical” version of himself in his texts, primarily From the Diary of a Snail.41 Furthermore, Braun claims that Grass continues this style of narration in 1979’s The Meeting at Telgte. She argues these texts reveal a tension in Grass’s self-conception and his place in the public sphere, prompting vital questions regarding the place of art and writing in the political arena.42 This position between the social democratic ’45ers and the radical ’68ers increased Grass’s public profle in the West German press. As mentioned earlier, Grass won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1965, which convinced Willy Brandt, as well as the SPD’s fnance minister, Karl Schiller, to establish a public relationship with him and other German writers. The early letters between Grass and Brandt reveal a reticence on the former’s part. Grass genuinely feared for the direction and stability of the BRD in the mid-1960s. In October 1966, Grass implored Brandt to cosign Pope Paul VI’s encyclical

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Christi Matri as a “citizen of the world (Bürger der Welt” and Mayor of Berlin (“Regierender Bürgermeister einer Stadt”)43 in hopes of ending the Franco-American invasion of Vietnam and praying for peace. This uncharacteristic religious appeal on Grass’s part (while Grass was Roman Catholic as a child, he no longer practiced the faith in his adulthood) implies his willingness to appeal to “non-rational” or “non-political” sources of political consciousness, including religion and literature. Further, it demonstrates Grass’s desire to “bridge the gap” between “traditional” institutions like the Catholic Church and Germany’s increasingly fraught political culture. In another 1966 letter to Brandt, Grass asks the German politician: “How can we continue to defend the SPD as an alternative party if Willy Brandt’s political profle becomes unrecognizable in the perpetual monotony of the Great Coalition?”44 Grass continues, “Our country’s youth will turn away from the state and its constitution; they will run to the left and right if this lousy marriage [between the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)] is consummated.”45 In these early dealings with Brandt and the SPD, Grass worries about the youth’s fight to further radicalization if another “Grand Coalition” government between the SPD and the Christian Democrats occurs. The face of Willy Brandt as an “alternative politician” and the SPD’s status as an “alternative party” also strike Grass as unbelievable if the Grand Coalition continues. In response to Grass’s concern, Brandt concurs that “The Democratic left and our country would not only be poorer, but weaker as well. The conscience of the Social Democratic Party does not attack outside of this party.”46 However, he also cautions that Grass should “Not worry about the political profle of Willy Brandt.”47 The idea expressed here from Brandt to Grass subsists in promoting the SPD as a moral alternative to the other political parties, especially the CDU/CSU and removing the latter from power entirely rather than sharing it in a Grand Coalition. In Brandt’s mind, focusing more on the conscience (Gewissen) of the SPD rather than his own personal appeal or attacking other political parties directly, the SPD would win power. In an early show of defance toward Brandt, Grass took to the pages of Die Zeit in December 1966, responding to this letter with an article entitled “The Conscience of the SDP.” (“Das Gewissen der SPD.”) In this article, Grass asserts that the SPD can both attack outside parties, namely the NPD, and maintain its “conscience.” Grass writes, “If a member of the NSDAP from 1933 can be applauded today as Federal Chancellor, then National Socialism can be made acceptable again.”48 This “well-applauded Nazi Party member” is a reference to the then-Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who was a party member from 1933 to 1945. To Grass, his presence in government contributed to the growing NPD, which Grass alleged no major political parties in West Germany took seriously enough. He asserts, however, that politics need not remain a “dirty business” and suggests that those worried about the resurgence of the far-right need not emigrate but engage

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in politics domestically. Grass says near the end of the article, “We will remain here. We are the state. It will not be splintered. The sulking corners remain empty.”49 Having become tired of the uncertainty associated with expulsion and war, Grass took a frm stance against violent campus protest in his 1969 book, Local Anesthetic. However, Grass still maintained his aversion to bourgeois consumerism in his public writings and lectures. In his 1969 address at the Belgrade Writers’ Conference, Grass says, The most dim-witted high school student is beginning to realize that the destruction of factories, even if they produce consumer goods, might encounter considerable resistance; that the industrial countries of both the East and West have to increase their productivity if the already foreseeable catastrophes of the Third World are to be averted.50 In the same address, Grass affrms social democracy’s emphasis on the socalled “primacy of politics” by stating “Medium-range reformist goals, associated with plans for fnancing, were decisive. Reason managed to extend its base by a hand’s breath.”51 Grass felt that the demands of students and activists of the “New Left” must be taken seriously, especially as they relate to the material well-being of the working class. However, improvements to the conditions of workers and the BRD’s reckoning with its Nazi past must remain the topic of party politics rather than revolutionary action. Despite Grass’s misgivings, Brandt’s personal history as a political dissident during the Nazi era meant his persona was intimately connected with the image of the SPD as an antifascist party. As a result, Grass describes his time as a speechwriter and advisor to Brandt as a “learning experience.” In a 2013 interview, Grass states that he had to “learn to be a social democrat.”52 Part of this “learning” subsists in the usage of “non-political” and “non-material” concepts for political ends. While Grass denied that literature could impact politics directly,53 his writings, especially in the 1970s, demonstrated a sort of affnity between writing and management of the public sphere. Concepts shunned by “scientifc socialism” and Soviet “dialectical materialism” such as myth, narrative, nationhood, and conscience took on a matter of deep importance for Grass during this time. In a 1981 address to a writers’ conference in Lahti, Finland, Grass says, “Isn’t literature, the Enlightenment’s wayward child, especially suited to invoking the beginnings of our modernity?” He continues, Couldn’t writers impart to Reason the actually quite rational insight that fairy tales, myths, and sagas are not products of another reality outside our own […] but are part of our reality, and […] represent us more clearly – in spite of their exaggerations than Reason.54

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I emphasize that Grass, especially in Telgte (and later Too Far Afeld), acknowledges a tension not merely between the public and private sphere but between the past and present as well. As Jan-Werner Müller writes, Telgete serves both as an allegory for the rise of nationalism via its setting during the Westphalian Peace and as a description of the topics encountered by Group 47, namely, the question of how writers could help maintain national unity.55 This literary reconfguration of German history could, in Grass’s mind, reverse the idea of the German Sonderweg (or, unique tragic German path to modernity) and refocus the question of German guilt regarding the Holocaust in the public sphere. In other words, if Germany were a “literary concept” as Grass claimed it was, anachronistic and selfdetached writing could form the basis of a new German “self-image” that could move Germany past its national crimes and nationally unite under the banner of German culture (Kultur). As I argue throughout the remainder of this chapter, Grass maintains his focus on Kultur throughout his career but will later abandon social democracy, opting instead to utilize Kultur as a countervailing force to neoliberalism.

From the Diary of a Snail: Grass on Grass In Grass’s semi-autobiographical account of his political campaigning for the SPD in the late 1960s, Grass describes his literary fame in a detached manner, as if he is discussing someone else. “When I was thirty-two, I became famous. Since then, Fame, has been with us as a roomer […] Everybody takes him seriously, even my opponents and my enemies.”56 Grass tellingly includes this detail in his description of “Fame,” though: “He likes to have his picture taken, forges my signature to perfection, and reads what I scarcely look at: reviews.”57 In Snail, Grass presents an author famous for his political writings and novels. Paradoxically, he offers his fame as the factor which grants his political writings and activities their credibility. In a short space, Grass creates a sense of extreme anxiety and self-consciousness regarding his effcacy in politics and its infuence on future generations. Famously, Snail begins with the epistolary words: “Dear Children.”58 In Snail, Grass expresses extreme doubt, a concept so pervasive that he even nicknames a character “Doubt” (“Zweifel”) in the novel.59 He grants this moniker to the Jewish Danziger schoolteacher and snail enthusiast, Hermann Ott, who in the novel’s “second story,” escapes from Danzig by hiding in the basement of a bicycle repair shop throughout the war. Not only do Zweifel’s wartime experiences mirror Grass’s;60 they serve as a record of the Jewish plight from Danzig during the rise of Nazism and Germany’s ultimate defeat at the hands of the Allies. Grass, in effect, divides this novel between a narrative of his own material and personal “success” and the failure of a society to protect its most vulnerable members on the cusp of one of history’s greatest atrocities. Succinctly, Snail aims to raise doubts about the

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effcacy of political action, the value of fame, and the import and reliability of the novel’s writer himself. As discussed in the last chapter, the late 1960s were a busy time not only for Grass but for the SPD itself. In 1967, Grass accompanied Brandt to Israel61 and was by the German politician’s side when he dramatically knelt at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970.62 Personally, Grass’s life was also fraught. Intersecting with the Zweifel narrative and Grass’s recounting of his experiences with the SPD is his account of his divorce from his frst wife, the dancer Anna Schwartz. Throughout the novel, Grass updates his children and, subsequently, his reader, on the deterioration of their marriage, making explicit references to the passing of Anna’s lover, Vladimir Kafka, the Czech translator of Grass’s works, from cancer. Of Kafka’s death, Grass writes, “Vladimir, whom Anna was so attached to, who was my friend – began to die; and on October 19, 1970, he died […] That nearly drove us … Because of his [sic], Anna is, and I am …, As for you, we asked for your patience.”63 Through Grass’s detached authorship, he demonstrates something for which he has never been found wanting: a loss for words. Indeed, he punctuates much of Snail with silences and absences, prompting the reader to ponder political and aesthetic questions rather than search for conclusions from a famous author. Even the novel’s frst pages represent Grass explaining to his children a justifcation for his absence as a father. As one of Grass’s children asks him, “Why should anyone travel when home sweet home [sic]?”64 Grass responds by explaining the history of the Holocaust and Danzig’s role therein – he summarizes the political history of the Holocaust with phrases: “It all begins, children, with: the Jews are. The foreign workers want. The Social Democrats have. Every petit bourgeois is. The niggers. The left-wingers. The class enemy. The Chinese and Saxons believe have think are … [sic].” The next paragraph jumps immediately to: “Signposts with changing inscriptions but identical destination: destroy unmask convert smash eliminate pacify liquidate re-educate isolate exterminate.”65 In this conversation, Grass unveils a tremendous skepticism of all political ideologies. He even implicates the Social Democratic Party in Germany’s national crimes.66 Indeed, Grass connects this skepticism of politics to an absurdist conception of life: “absurdity, the eternal cycle, the futility of all effort and the recurrence of the same, forever the same puppets, the monotony of it all and the venality of words, tearing down and building up […] and of course, production and consumption.”67 References to the insuffciency of personal and political endeavor abound. He consistently evokes Albert Camus’s Sisyphus and rebukes G.W.F. Hegel’s absolute idealism as “totalizing.” Early in the novel, Grass’s child asks him, “Who’s Hegel?” He answers, “Somebody who sentenced mankind to history,” and adds, “Thanks to his subtlety, every abuse of state power has to this day been explained as historically necessary.”68 So far in this novel, Grass dismisses religion, philosophy, ideology, and the nation-state

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as relevant sources of meaning. What, then, remains? As eluded in the last paragraph, Grass’s devotion lies in “drawing” or “think[ing] things so hard I see them.”69 Here, Grass connects the absurd search for meaning with the imagination and its expression through art and symbolization. Sisyphus’s stone, an image that long occupies Grass, does not represent a mere aesthetic affectation on his part but forms the image of his “saint”:70 a tragic fgure doomed to roll a boulder up a hill eternally as punishment for defying death. In Snail, Grass seeks to add a symbol to the existing pantheon of literary devices. Almost immediately at the text’s outset, Grass describes his “snail.” It seldom wins and then by the skin of its teeth. It crawls, it goes into hiding but keeps on, putting down its quickly drying lines on the historical landscape, on documents and boundary lines, amid building sites and ruins, in drafty doctrinal structures, far from well-situated theories, skirting retreats and silted revolutions.71 When asked by his child, “What is the snail,” Grass replies, “The snail is progress.” He then defnes progress as “Being a little quicker than the snail … and never getting there.”72 In practical terms, the snail represents the social democratic tendency to favor incremental reforms meant to enhance the lives of a politically organized working class as opposed to the revolutionary appeals of Soviet Communism. In philosophical terms, the snail represents aversion to any type of thinking that seeks to totalize the search for meaning. In addition to Hegel, Grass mentions thinkers like Heidegger and Marx as totalizing doctrinaires. Of Heidegger, he writes, “Doubt who recently […] has been wearing the round-windowed spectacles of those condescendingly bright students who brandish the word ‘irrelevant’ as though wishing with Heidegger to say ‘forgetful’ of being.”73 In contrast, Grass poses Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard Bernstein favorably as skeptical thinkers. If the snail means progress, it relates to time, and Snail contains some of Grass’s most elaborate musings on the question of “time” and “history.” For the Grass scholar Mark Cory, the snail represents a force that weaves stories together, that protects against overconfdence in the face of victory, and that serves as a kind of “Rosetta stone” for understanding the past in hopes or preserving the possibility of a future.74 Grass spends much of Snail discussing the qualities of snails, including the fractal shapes on their shells. In fact, Zweifel passes much of his time in prewar Danzig studying snail shells. Grass writes, “Doubt collected snail shells in labeled glass tubes and larger specimens that he bought cheap from the Kühne Mustard Company.”75 This discussion of Zweifel’s snail collection places the reader in a certain place and a certain time – the reference to the Kühne Mustard Company places the Jewish schoolteacher amidst the petite bourgeois milieu

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of Grass’s other fction, furthering the fractured relationship between reader and author, time and place, past and present. Further, the snail begins to take on a kind of identity for Grass’s own character. His children in the book ask Grass, “What kind of snail are you?”76 He responds by saying, “I am the civilian snail, the snail made man. With my forward, inward drive, with my tendency to dwell, hesitate to cling, with my restlessness and emotional haste, I am snail-like.”77 In a playful swipe at Hegel, Grass states, “It would actually seem that when Hegel spoke of the Weltgeist [world Spirit], what he actually had in mind was not someone on horseback but a mounted snail.”78 Grass blatantly connects the snail symbol with various theories of history, suggesting movement not toward a fnal ideological goal, but in accordance with one’s material and social aims. To wit, he writes, “I am a Social Democrat because to my mind socialism is worthless without democracy and because an unsocial democracy is no democracy at all.”79 Here, the snail stands in for the concept of political moderation itself, opting to move or progress away from West Germany’s Nazi past as represented by the CDU and the legacy of Konrad Adenauer. However, the snail also does not move in the direction of dialectical materialism or Soviet Communism. Rather, he uses the snail to mark direction in a “third way,” consistent with how social democrats have defned themselves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.80 Grass writes, “The snail doesn’t hesitate before thresholds […] Arrives by fts and starts and looks to see what the lilacs are doing out in front.”81 For Grass, these “fts and starts” mark the petty frustrations of political life. He speaks of time away from family throughout Snail and the pressures of fame. He talks of travel sickness in Cologne, marking the occasion by saying, “I had no business being visibly nauseated in public.”82 Frustration with thinkers like Marx and his intellectual followers punctuates Grass’s journey: “Marx kept carping: he was always more intelligent, he was more intelligent, he was far away, thought more clearly, had the last word and applied, his absolute measure.”83 He gets caught up in extremely technical debates on highly precise topics like currency valuations. “To revalue or not to revalue? [Karl] Schiller and [Franz Josef] Strauss in the spotlight. Kiesinger’s ‘Never!’ What the experts and other extras say.”84 This waxing and waning, stopping and starting, induces a sense of melancholy and deep frustration in the text. Grass writes, The word Weltschmerz [pain with the world] is untranslatable. Schwermut (heavy-heartedness; melancholy) is also indigenous and so is German Grübelei (brooding). It’s not the usual grief people get because someone has died or gone away […] This way of sitting signifes neither despair nor grief.85 To this end, Grass becomes enamored with the concept of melancholia as it relates to movement, personifying it in the fashion of Albrecht Dürer’s painting of the same name and proclaims, “Saturn is her planet.”86 He says

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of her, “She collects buttons, defeats, letters, and (like Doubt) empty snail shells.” Further, “Her sister’s name is Utopia, a gullible little thing; always on the road […] Power is known to her and so is vast, self-cancelling knowledge.”87 This connection between the snail and melancholy/utopia forms the novel’s moral basis, creating Grass’s “stasis in progress.” In a word, Saturn, named for the Titan who creates time in Greco-Roman mythology, governs melancholia. Utopia, however, stands outside time as a possibility, as a goal. The snail represents the spatial passage of human individuals between time and their ambitions, unable to abandon the “homes” they carry with them or advance the passage of time. Early in the novel, Grass defnes his “snail,” his sense of personality and individuality defned by his past, as “categorically earthbound.”88 Foreshadowing the sense of melancholy in the search for a better world, Grass says to his children, “Hardly anything, believe me, is more depressing than going straight to the goal. We have time.”89 It must be mentioned that Grass seeks meaning from melancholia in German terms, using the German language. As quoted earlier, Grass looks for untranslatable words like “Weltschmerz” and “Schwermut” to express his deep sense of dissatisfaction and weariness with the world. He only fnds Dürer’s image a compelling ft for his feelings. And, when he does fnd words, he begins to use them poetically, using short sentences and lists of characteristics of “Melancholy and Utopia.” Yet Dürer’s image itself remains German. Here, Grass uses the German artistic canon to illustrate the emotions associated with political activity in a way he fnds insuffciently able to with words alone. Grass looks toward the past for an image to ft with his feelings of listlessness. Since Grass was well-ensconced in the literati of his time – knowing artists and critics like Volker Schlöndorf, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Marcel Reich-Raniki, and Christa Wolf – it is telling that Grass fnds a respite from contemporary politics in the medieval artistry of Dürer and not the world of modern poetry or art. Grass fnds a sense of respite for the snail: stasis on the road to “Utopia,” in melancholia. However, Grass does not describe this respite as existing outside of history. In the novel’s concluding essay, “On Stasis in Progress,” Grass says, “Saturn still rules; but his reign is no longer exclusively disastrous, for it secures the area of melancholy as a place of contemplation.”90 This sense of stasis, this clearing for the formation of contemplation, does not necessarily necessitate a place for “theorizing,” so much as for dreaming. Grass says that the feeling of melancholy and its attendant contemplation “Has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that fnds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.”91 Further, “theorizing” “gives permanence to things as they are. Of the common people it demands earnest fulfllment of duty and resigned contentment. Melancholy is reserved for the knowing, the leading elite, the holders of power.”92 The snail intervenes to serve as the metaphor for the past, as the thread that weaves stories together and prevents the victors of elections and successful revolutionaries from running roughshod over other peoples.93

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By focusing on the snail’s struggle between melancholy and progress, Grass hopes to bring the conversation regarding Germany’s past to a human level, emphasizing those trampled underfoot by totalizing ideologies and their associated political movements. In Grass’s own text, “Doubt” serves as a pedagogical example of someone oppressed by Nazi violence – while Grass makes use of statistics regarding Danzig’s Jewish population throughout the text, the focus of the story remains on the person of Doubt. Grass’s use of German anecdotes and idioms, settings, and symbols seeks to demonstrate that the ability to remember and mourn the past lies within Germany’s grasp so long as it possesses the political will and moral sensitivity to do so. As Grass says in the novel’s concluding essay, “Only those who know and respect stasis in progress, who have once and more than once given up, who have sat on an empty snail shell and experienced the dark side of utopia, can evaluate progress.”94 However, are all symbols and representations of stasis effective in creating conditions for political moderation? A conundrum that follows Grass’s entire artistic career becomes apparent here. On the one hand, Grass clearly understands the effcacy and import of symbols in politics, having lived through Nazism. He says in his 1999 Nobel speech that much of his work is a recovery project to remove “German of its goose-step” following Theodor Adorno’s declaration of “writing after Auschwitz” as “barbaric.”95 Yet, in attempting to rewrite Germany’s national symbols toward social democratic ends, does Grass reveal the futility of this project? That is, are these symbols not “up for grabs” themselves? The critical scholarship on From the Diary of a Snail reveals the tensions in Grass’s symbolic work here, namely, the question of whether the snail suffces as an adequate political symbol in light of the very real divisions in German society throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. In the American novelist John Updike’s review of Snail, he writes that the snail “symbolizes too many things; Willy Brandt; the vagina, the human masses, moderate progressiveness, the author himself.”96 Siegfried Mews contends that Updike’s view represents a consensus among Grass scholars with varying degrees of intensity.97 Namely, according to Neal Ascherson of the New York Review of Books, Grass does not pay suffcient attention to world events, primarily the events of Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, ushering in an era of military fascism in Chile.98 Further, the German critic Wolfram Schütte characterizes Grass’s text as fundamentally bourgeoisie and describes his rejection of utopianism refective of “the lower middle class’s attitude of resignation and skepticism.”99 In a word, these criticisms of Grass’s work echo an anonymous review in Time Magazine of his previous novel, Local Anesthetic, that Grass is a “Fanatic for moderation. He is a moderate the way other men are extremists. He is a man almost crazy for moderation.”100 Grass’s “fanaticism” for moderation reveals two major faws in social democracy, namely, that its lack of an international focus provides an

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incentive for capital fight to countries with business climates more favorable to their own interests.101 And that its connection to the individual nation-state and position as a third-way movement distances the ideology further from the socialist order it hopes to transition toward, but closer to the fascist political economy that social democrats, particularly Grass, wished to escape. Berman reiterates Grass’s fears, writing that nearly all major “party families” in the interwar period contended that they represented a “third way” between capitalism and Soviet Communism.102 The difference between fascism and social democracy lies in the latter’s commitment to mass democracy and protection of liberal rights. In the 1969 SPD’s case, this commitment to democracy entailed a confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past and a demand for the denazifcation of German politics. Grass was the cultural spearpoint of the SPD’s antifascist effort. Yet, as Cory points out, Snail presents a Grass who views even the victory of the SPD in 1969 as a liability, capable of overreaching and collapsing back into the bourgeois consumer society birthed at the end of Nazism.103 However, this consumer society would doubtlessly be very different from Nazism from Grass’s position. As expounded in The Tin Drum, postwar consumer society held no strong political preferences, only complaints and consumer demands. If there are no fascists to fght in a consumer liberal society, how then does the SPD maintain its place as an alternative party? Snail, in part, represents an attempt to formulate a response to what scholars would later term “neoliberalism,” by evoking the snail as a metaphor for the good of politics in situations of “normal time.” Grass confers neither the splendor of Homeric heroes nor the tragic pathos of Sophocles’ Antigone in navigating the diffcult and confusing terrain of modern politics in Snail. Rather, the snail replaces religion as Marx’s “sigh of the repressed creature.” Melancholia and her Saturn, that is, time itself, rule the day, suggesting that the political places a burden upon humanity that no one can individually bear, prompting a skeptical Sisyphean attitude toward “progress” while refusing to abandon that burden. Unlike Camus, Grass does not need one to imagine Sisyphus happy. If politics and its associated melancholic properties constitute a burden, how is that burden overcome? Grass suggests in the text that collective action will ameliorate, but not necessarily obviate, the pain of politics. His playful conversations with his children and his descriptions of his home suggest a sense of futurity and “value” in view of the crushing pressure of preserving a nation’s democratic order. The novel’s framework provides a sense whereby narrative, and its ability to craft a world of the symbolic order and belonging, can bridge generations and their stories about themselves together through the snail. Yet, a small detail suggests that not even the world of home is safe from ideology. Grass writes: “When I was ffteen, I wanted, in my thoughts to murder my father with my Hitler Youth dagger.”104 What is worth saving from From the Diary of a Snail? The image of the snail, although intriguing, does not give a viable path forward for politics

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beyond social democracy. Berman notes that European social democracy has lost its connection between parties and their constituents, especially at the local or regional level,105 suggesting the need for a renewed focus on “communitarianism.”106 The snail does not provide a very strong focus on the importance of space in politics but of time. While Grass evokes German concepts and images in Snail, he evokes ideas and language, not necessarily places. There is a disconnect between German letters and thought and the place of Germany in Snail that Grass must overcome. Ironically, he fnds the humous for his planned Kulturnation in revisiting Germany’s Baroque literati and their experiences in the Thirty Years’ War in his new two works, The Flounder and The Meeting at Telgte.

The Flounder: Learning to Count to Three Grass wrote The Flounder (Der Butt) as a fftieth birthday present to himself.107 He also intended it somewhat as a gift to the recently unseated Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt. On July 14, 1977, Grass wrote Brandt to inform him of The Flounder’s publication: Perhaps, The Flounder will even manage to communicate my political experiences to you more clearly and in a more complex way than letters or brief conversations can. Because as a rule, the book should generally be smarter than the author in terms of its particularity.108 At this point, Brandt’s vision for a transformed West German society appeared lost. The Guillaume Affair and several sex scandals put an end to Brandt’s plan for economic and social reform. The German Autumn (Deutscher Herbst) soon approached, a period marked by political radicalism and domestic left-wing terrorism at the hands of the Red Army Faction (Roter Armee Faktion (RAF)). While praising Brandt as a “formidable diplomat” (vielbeanspruchter Diplomat der Deutschen)109 for Germans abroad, Grass complained in an October edition of the Frankfurter Rundsschau that Brandt and the Federal system failed to protect society from the “criminal police” (Kriminalpolizei),110 whom he argued abused their power in response to RAF terrorism. Grass later said that Brandt was unfairly “hated” in German domestic politics at the time, suggesting that the collapse of his chancellorship spelled the beginning of “left-fascism” (Linksfascismus) among the youth in West Germany (an opinion he claims he shares with “Professor [Jürgen] Habermas”).111 This sense of political ambivalence and historical pessimism carries over to the novel itself. The Flounder does not concern itself with just one theme or time period. It covers diverse topics ranging from women’s liberation movement, left-wing extremism and Maoism, Third World famine, the December 1970 Polish Protests against the Soviet Union in Gdansk, to Baroque German folklore, and the Guillaume Affair.

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The Flounder’s plot zeroes in on a contemporary unnamed news reporter and his girlfriend’s, Ilsebill’s, newly announced pregnancy, however. Each chapter in the novel represents one month in the latter’s pregnancy. The couple does not get along well. The unnamed male narrator possesses far more moderate politics than leftist Ilsebill and often bemoans her feminist tendencies while tending to traditionally feminine chores like dishwashing. In a self-referential passage, the two argue, “‘You and your shitty snails!’ ‘You and your shitty leaps!’”112 (The former refers to Grass’s use of snails as a symbol for incremental political progress; the latter to Mao’s Great Leap Forward). Grass posits the two lovers against one another and concepts against one another: male vs. female; moderation vs. radicalism, Nazism vs. Communism, capitalism vs. socialism, etc. Yet, Ilsebill’s pregnancy represents a future possibility of “a third.” Early in the novel, the narrator contends, “The plural begins with three. Three is the beginning of multiplicity, the series, the chain, and of myth.”113 The novel presents a series of dyads that seek solution in the possibility of “a third,” a future, a new world. The Flounder’s “myth” involves the eponymous founder, himself a reference to the Brothers Grimm’s The Fisherman and his Wife (Der Fischermann und seiner Frau), whose affnity toward the masculine helps create fre and, therefore, history. The Flounder appears throughout time, usually in Danzig, to whisper advice into the ear of men at critical points of history, allowing them to maintain their patriarchal dominance over women across time. In the novel’s present, the late 1970s in West Germany, the Flounder announces his intention to defect to femininity to three lesbian feminists called Siggie, Maxie, and Frankie. The three decide to place the Flounder on trial in a “feminal” for his crimes against womankind. The narrator takes great interest in this trial because he claims to be the latest “incarnation” in a long line of men given over to the Flounder, ranging from the Stone Age to the 1970s. By extension, Ilsebill represents the latest incarnation of these men’s wives and lovers, whom the Flounder frustrated in their attempts to innovate history, usually through the culinary arts. These men and their feminine cooks suggest an affnity between historical development and cuisine. As Grass writes, “History is forgotten between hunger and hunger.”114 For instance, at one point during the “Feminal,” the Flounder justifes his actions by suggesting that women did aid history in their traditionally feminine roles as cooks. He says, “The women’s historically conditioned loss of power has been widely overestimated. Since the early Middle Ages, home and kitchen, the bed and hence the realm of dreams, child rearing, and the all-important household treasury, have been the preserve, of the female sex.” He argues, “You could call it division of labor. The small change of politics; the so-called dirty work, as well as military affairs with all their dangers, was left to the men, whereas the women … .”115 The Flounder’s complementarianism contradicts his actual advice given in the Middle Ages when he explains to that era’s male to not let Sister Dorothea, that era’s cook, “develop a logic of her own, […] What she doesn’t understand will

68 “A Literary Concept” always be beyond her understanding. As a woman, you see, she’s not really entitled to logic.”116 These contradictions blur the dyads between fact and fction, history and myth. Here, Grass considers the importance of the latter two in determining the former two. In a display of Grass’s “new tense,” Vergegenkunft, he writes, “We are contemporary only for the time being. No date pins us down. We are not of today. On our paper most things take place simultaneously.”117 Not only does time operate in a nonlinear, overlapping, and constantly intersubjective way, narratives make up the memory of those who must live under time’s spell: “Stories live longer than fgures.”118 Grass’s narrative method being established, he then moves to fnd what is lasting in these “stories” – what emotion or theme or lesson. In keeping with Grass’s favored social democracy, he constructs stories of class compromise and of “proletarian fervor” in the Middle Ages. For example, Grass spends much time in this novel discussing the Lübeck Artisan Uprising of 1408 and the Danzig Rebellion of 1575 as proto-proletarian uprisings119 and draws comparisons to more contemporary events, such as the Prague Spring, the Great Leap Forward, and the Gdansk Labor Uprising. Grass does not favor his era’s feminism, however. Despite his reputation as a Burgerschreck for supporting abortion rights prior to the SPD’s adoption and chiding the nuclear family, Grass distanced himself from the burgeoning feminist movement of the late 1970s, likening himself to a “oriental patriarch”120 when it came to his own proclivities for birthing children out of wedlock. And, while much of The Flounder lampoons radical feminism, one of the novel’s clearest thematic statements comes from one of the lesbian leaders of the “feminal.” She says in response to the Flounder’s denunciation of medieval “proletarian” protests as proof that the time for revolution is “always unripe,” “You’re wrong […] no, what sweeps away your stupid facts is the proletarian principle of hope. Hope clears away the rubble from history. Hope frees the road we call progress from time-conditioned encumbrances. Hope springs eternal. For it alone is real.”121 Grass’s narrator calls her words “evergreen” and the Flounder pseudo-intellectually remarks that her ideas can also be found in Augustine and Ernst Bloch.122 This contradiction between narrators forms an additional dyad in the text’s search for “the third.” It also provides readers with another place to look for this “third”: myth and folklore. The feminal’s notion that the Flounder’s pessimism constitutes “stupid facts” suggests there can be “smart facts” or even “smart lies” and “dumb lies.” As Grass’s narrator implies that narratives and myths outlive fgures, Grass appears in search of a smart lie. Grass constructs a subplot to answer the novel’s main narrative question: how can the idea of hope and the importance of storytelling form sensible political alternatives for German society after the Guillaume Affair? Grass fnds his frst attempt at a serious answer in the story of his Baroque-era cook, Agnes Kurbiella.

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Even before Grass “arrives” in the Baroque era, his narrator alludes to its primary literary fgures: Simon Dach, Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, and Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Although each of these literati appear more prominently in Grass’s later, more mature work, The Meeting in Telgte (Das Treffen in Telgte), he frst takes up with them in an extended fashion in The Flounder. Primarily, Grass concerns himself with Opitz and Gryphius and their meeting in the former’s apartment in Danzig during the Thirty Years’ War. Opitz served as a diplomat and a double agent; he served Protestants powers while translating antiheresy manuals for the Jesuits.123 By contrast, Gryphius remained an austere and pessimistic Protestant, seeking artistic material for his “German tragedy.” Likewise, the painter Anton Möller takes residence in the same house as the Opitz, along with their cook, Agnes Kurbiella. Grass writes of Opitz and Möller that they “needed inspiration, sensual encouragement, call it fre, in their cold stoves, if they were to wrest some achievement, a last fare-up of youth, from their middling talents.”124 They fnd it in Kurbiella’s cooking. Making egg and chicken soup and other late medieval delights, Agnes becomes a muse to the artists, allowing Opitz’s poetry to take form, “creating” the German language and her poetry. Grass writes, “Thanks to Opitz, high-level writing was set free from its centuries-long Latin captivity; he was an emancipator.”125 Grass links Opitz’s poetry with his diplomacy, suggesting through Gryphius, “Opitz, had given to diplomacy what was owing to Poesy; for the sake of accented and unaccented syllables, he, Opitz the rule giver, had thrown a veil of verbiage over all man’s misery.”126 Another dyad forms. Art opposes politics. But, to Grass, art creates the words through which politics operates. Opitz does not just create pleasant words for Grass, he creates a language “liberated” from Latin, that is, Catholic control, and continental power structures. Danzig replaces Rome for a feeting minute in the cultural imaginary in this text. Yet, to Agnes goes the praise in this Baroque “incarnation.” In his recounting, the Flounder tells the feminal that “I would like to praise woman’s power to serve as Muse by telling you about Agnes. She was more than Möller and Opitz together. Not even a Rubens, not even a Hölderlin could have used all she had to offer.”127 The Flounder then undercuts his praise: “Only in her cooking was she creative, when she coddled Opitz’s sick stomach with potted calves’ brains, and asparagus tips, all the more creative when she sang over her cook pots.”128 The narrator concurs that Agnes serves as the frst “grandly loving woman” the Flounder “may well, with fshy calculation, have thought up.”129 Considering her undying love a potential source of “domination” over masculinity,130 the Flounder schemes to diminish her inspirational powers by introducing “subterfuge” in the person of a Swedish Cavalryman “Ensign Axel” who rapes Agnes during the Siege of Danzig in 1639, producing a child. Following this tragedy, Agnes meets another poet in 1689, Quirinius Kuhlmann, who according to the

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prosecution “fed Agnes Kurbiella’s confusion with his speculations […] He, too, had exploited her as a Muse. He had manifested dangerous phantasms and gone to his death, drawing the old woman with him.”131 The same year Kurbiella dies in a witch-burning when her traumatic outbursts and esoteric beliefs “fed to her” by Kuhlmann attract the attention of occupying religious authorities. This story does not identify the third. It only points to a lasting vestige to assist hope: love. The Flounder elaborates upon his reasoning for devising Kurbiella’s humiliating and shameful death: he fears Agnes Kurbiella’s example will undo “reason” as the measure of human being, which he establishes in the Middle Ages. He says, “That and that alone is your true strength. No man has it. Not your intelligence […] No, it is love that will change the world […]Love alone will remain.”132 The Flounder’s statement suggests an overly hopeful, perhaps even Utopian dimension, of Grass’s thinking. Yet, Agnes’s death suggests that love does not provide the suffcient “cure” for the wiles of human history and power. Rather, love can only “conquer all” when it aids humanity’s creative drives. Agnes’s love fnds expression in her cooking, and the men who love her create, driven forth by Agnes’s culinary creations. Moreover, Agnes tries to create life with Möller, as the latter impregnates Agnes, inspiring him to paint her pregnant image. For Grass, creation is a loving act. Even when art satirizes or eviscerates a target, it must do so out of love for that which the satirist wants to see changed in the world. Agnes’s pregnancy mirrors Ilsebill’s pregnancy and the narrator’s desire for a “third” to enter the world. The Flounder’s love of power and desire to continue male dominance disrupt the creative milieu developed in the Baroque period. The Flounder’s feelings of inadequacy and misgivings about love highlight Grass’s general skepticism of the German intellectual tradition’s placement of “reason,” especially historical reason and “dialectics,” as the prime philosophical value. To Grass, notions like “class struggle” and “Weltgeist” act as self-fulflling prophecies that inadvertently drive the world toward confict. Rather, following the guidance of the Schopenhauerian “Doubt” from Snail, he suggests that a more skeptical, myth-driven view of history must replace one guided exclusively by confict. And this view’s operating principles ought to be love, hope, and natality. Grass writes: Because history presents itself as an inevitable alteration of war and peace […] this vicious circle must remain forever unbroken – unless it is broken by those who have hitherto made no history […] whom I have subjected to make history […] I am referring to women and their role as mothers. (Ibid, pp. 514–5)

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Fittingly, The Flounder ends with the birth of Ilsebill and the narrator’s also unnamed daughter. The feminal fnds the Flounder guilty and sentences him to watch other founders being eaten before being released into the wild. While Ilsebill and the narrator remain separated as a couple, the arrival of new life causes the latter to rethink his role in history vis-à-vis its women. In the last paragraphs of the novel the narrator bemoans, feeling he has “fallen out of history,”133 running after Ilsebill, who “has already passed [him] by.”134 The Flounder’s ending suggests an openness to the future beyond power dyads, capable of embracing the third. Yet, Grass’s picture remains incomplete as he weaves down a very shocking path to arrive at this somber ending. In the work’s penultimate “month,” Grass depicts a disturbing lesbian rape scene that leads to a grisly murder. In his account of “Ascension Day” (a Church Feast Day that doubles as Father’s Day in Germany), the narrator recounts the horrendous events that befall his ex-fancé, Billy, at the hands of the Sapphic feminal’s leaders. Succinctly, Siggie, Frankie, Maxie, and Billy decide to fout gender roles on Ascension Day, dress as men, and drink heavily in a remote biker bar. A “pink pecker” or artifcial penis appears at some point which allows the women to emulate standing urination and upend their “penis envy.”135 As the evening progresses, Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie take turns using the artifcial penis to rape an inebriated Billy. Becoming aware of their tremendous moral misdeed, they leave Billy in the woods, where a group of bikers gang rape her and leave her for dead. Grass compares this occasion to the rape that befalls Agnes during the Thirty Years’ War136 with a dirge: “Oh, ye warriors for the cause. Ye dreamers, dreaming of the great day. Ye heroes always ready to antedate your death. Ye battlers for justice. Ye victors over life. Attackers and defenders. Ye death-despising men.”137 Grass also provides a less dramatic name for this crime: “artifcial fuck” (Kunstfck).138 Grass intends the Kunstfck to provide a sense of moral ambiguity to the novel’s proceedings before providing his musings regarding natality and the tragic nature of history in its conclusion. Grass scholarship attempts to square this shocking scene with his conclusion’s sense of complementarianism and cautiously optimistic moral skepticism. In keeping with Grass’s political themes, Ronald Spiers argues that the Kunstfck represents a radical version of his criticism of those “holding power” in society. That is, Grass does not want to exclude women from society’s ruling offces but argues that no revolutionary betterment will befall women simply by them taking part in these offces. Matriarchy is no acceptable replacement for patriarchy, and the Kunstfck demonstrates the danger of abandoning what Grass considers natural differences between the genders.139 In an earlier volume of essays on The Flounder, Helmut Koopmann suggests likewise that Grass’s overall narrative strategy of offering multiple narratorial structures suggests his desire to not see either the feminal, the Flounder, or patriarchal

72 “A Literary Concept” history “dominate” society; that instead Grass wants to make continuous writing possible, which should always include women’s perspectives as key matters of literary importance.140 John Sandford highlights Grass’s acknowledgement of the need for feminist arguments in his search for a “narratorial” third way.141 Rather, Sandford argues that Grass’s major complaint is against the “aggressive and separatist feminism” of the late 1970s and appeals to a sense of androgyny to move “beyond masculine and feminine” in The Flounder.142 Sandford does admit, however, that despite Grass’s appeals to androgyny as a possible “alternative” to the gender binary and historical male dominance, androgynous characters do not meet particularly good treatment in Grass’s novel.143 For example, the Kunstfck occurs because the novel’s most prominent queer characters decide to consciously faunt gender norms on a male-centered holiday. More recent Grass criticism highlights this sexist tendency in Grass’s work. Helen Finch contends that the Kunstfck scene represents the novel’s only real space where biological sex and performative gender exist as separate concepts, suggesting the possibility of a “third” when it comes to gender relations. Yet, the only creative act these women perform involves the rape and abandonment of their friend using an “artifcial penis.”144 The word Grass uses to denote artifce in “Kunstfck” is “Kunst,” the same word most often used to denote art in the German language. In this choice of words, Finch’s point becomes sharper: men express some sort of truth with their lies throughout The Flounder – in fact, certain lies told by men denote intelligent engagement with myth. Finch demonstrates that in the one scene where gender norms become opaque and androgynous, Grass associates the very act of phallic performativity with transubstantiation. She highlights the following quote from The Flounder: “How easily nature lets itself be fooled. […] For if a wafer can be the fesh and a swig of undistinguished wine the blood of our Lord Jesus, then an artfully conceived stopper […] can bring salvation or at least a bit of redemption” (Grass, The Flounder, p. 481). Finch notes that no irony or wry narration from a character like The Flounder appears during this pivotal scene, making the narration less distant from Grass’s own intent as a writer.145 While The Flounder possesses many important and capable women characters, none of them openly challenge societal gender norms through androgyny. Even in later novels where Grass consciously revisits fctional women in the Danzig Trilogy like Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang), they do not serve to undermine gender essentialism, suggesting a pattern of “male creativity and female passivity.”146 Timothy Malchow’s recent book, Günter Grass and the Genders of German Memory, supports Finch’s claims and suggests this pattern exists throughout Grass’s work, even as early as The Tin Drum. Malchow indicates that Grass’s division between male and female parallels the German Fatherland (Vaterland) and nature itself and implies that women nourish the land and

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men make history.147 Even the fercely independent woman cooks of The Flounder remain cooks after all.

The Meeting at Telgte: Germany as Kulturnation These misgivings mar The Flounder as an individual novel in Grass’s career, but it still serves as a major milestone in Grass’s artistic and political development as the 1977 novel allowed Grass to revisit the Baroque period and with it, Grimmelshausen, Opitz, Dach, Gryphius, etc. Indeed, Grass considers this era incredibly important not only to the formation of German letters but in his own recollections of art. In his autobiographical novel, Peeling the Onion, Grass equates his early meetings with artists like Paul Celan and the “European Social Democratic Big Three (Brandt, [Olaf] Palme, [Bruno] Kreisky” to “friends of the Baroque, like Andreas Gryphius who liked to call everything vanity of vanities, and Martin Opitz before the plague got him and Grimmelshausen’s Mother Courasche and Grimmelshausen himself, when he was still Gelnhausen.”148 Likewise, Grass’s suggested “literary education for workers” include Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus as a foundational text.149 It is no coincidence that Grass recounts the Baroque era as essential to his politics and that when all three of the aforementioned “big three” abated in anticipation of a decade dominated by Kohl, Reagan, and Thatcher, the Baroque returned in full force in Grass’s novels. While he produced some of the most offensive and shocking material of his career in The Flounder, it provides a temporal direction to his wonderings about a world after Willy Brandt. For Grass, this new world resembled the Baroque past far more than any fctive matriarchal future. On this foundation, he attempts to build a new canon or ordering set of texts150 not only for German literature but also for the German nation itself in his next novella, The Meeting in Telgte (Das Treffen in Telgte). In The Meeting at Telgte, Grass alters the focus of his political fction to the early modern period and the Thirty Years’ War. Indeed, his preoccupation with the Thirty Years’ War as a pivotal moment in the history of German letters stays with him well into his career. Upon winning the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1999, Grass refects upon Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, “What would Germans know about the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War if not for this [Simplicissimus], who with his worm’s-eye view recounted the events that the historians in their diligence, as lifeless as it is precise, arranged for us purely chronologically.”151 This notion of a “worm’s eye view” and its connection to Grimmelshausen do not simply represent a rhetorical fourish by Germany’s “conscience.” Even in Grass’s late career, in 1999, he remains fascinated by Grimmelshausen as a sort of “progenitor” of the German literary tradition. And, if Grimmelshausen does serve as this “father” of German literature, for Grass this fact implies that German letters must concern themselves with the concerns of history’s losers: peasants, refugees, victims, criminals,

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and minorities. Why then, if “Germany” could produce a Grimmelshausen, does it continue to express such a violent past that stretches well into the twentieth century? For Grass, postwar Germany fnds itself inhabited by a “gullible people”152 whose desire to recreate prewar normalcy outweighed the need to construct a new, more just political order. Grass’s novella, thus, remains integral to the reception of the Thirty Years’ War as a didactic politico-literary device. Unlike much of what would become “Europe,” the German people were not granted statehood at the close of the Thirty Years’ War. This denial haunted the German peoples throughout the next three centuries, fnding profound expression in German poeticism. Fittingly, Grass terms Telgte a “narrative poem,” or Ehrzälung.153 Telgte possesses little plot: namely, a collection of German Baroque writers, artists, and musicians gather in Telgte to craft an artistic response to the recent Treaty of Westphalia. While crafting this artistic response, the poet Andreas Gryphius grows tired of discussion, takes a vase representing German unity,154 and drives it to the foor. It does not break, inspiring these artists to agree to a peace accord. However, upon writing it, the inn wherein the meeting takes place catches fre. Grass implies that the innkeeper, herself a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, burns down the inn, but does not defnitively state such. Succinctly, the novella’s ending suggests that all the artists, despite their differing conceptions of “true Germanness,” proper grammatical form, and artistic intent, leave with the idea that the German language itself forms the essence of German identity. In Telgte, Grass seeks to express the deep longing to overcome the exigencies of a political organization through mythopoeic language. To wit, Müller writes that through Telgte, “Grass could claim that the German poets had always been the real patriots.”155 Grass views the prospect of a German unifed German nation-state (Einheitsstaat) as an error, resulting in atrocities. Therefore, in Telgte, he presents an alternative vision for Germany that associates its national identity with its letters and language, not its historical political organization. To Grass, the history of a people subsists in their letters and those letters coming to terms with the complexities of that history. In Telgte, he envisions a politics both commemorative and linguistic, aiming to recover the notion of Germany as a fractured Kulturnation, bound by a language and literary tradition opposed to injustice and excessive state centralization. In the 1960s, Grass took his place in the acclaimed German literary circle, Gruppe 47 (Group 47). Within the context of Grass’s literary and political celebrity, he would publish the short “novella,” Telgte, which emulates the form of Baroque prose stories as a means of discussing the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust through the setting of the Thirty Years’ War. Grass’s depiction of these artists’ meeting suggests that Germany cannot and should not coalesce into a unifed, Westphalian nation-state. Linking the Thirty Years’ War to the Holocaust, Grass suggests that a

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unifed Germany always results in tyranny, though he could not have anticipated the coming reunifcation. Grass instead argues that the German literary tradition represents the essence of the German nation and its peoples. However, he argues that a unifed German language does not justify a unifed German state. According to Grass, this German literary tradition can navigate the diffculty of belonging to a nation that fundamentally cannot fnd political expression in a conventional way. He considers German letters an unfnished project. Grass consciously juxtaposes the Thirty Years’ War with World War II to ward off what he considers the dangers of political centralization given over to revanchist tendencies by German nationalism. Telgte, therefore, represents the fctive apotheosis of Grass’s literary anti-nationalism. However, in Grass’s opposition to German unifcation, both linguistic and political, he formulates a new and unique brand of national identity that seeks to locate German identity in its letters as opposed to its state. Consequently, Grass seeks to revisit this history to address a new historical threat: looming societal breakdown due to ideological violence and apathy regarding Germany’s wartime crimes in the postwar era. In a 1980 interview, Grass explicitly links Grimmelshausen’s writings on the Thirty Years’ War with his experiences in Nazi Germany. He says, “It took Grimmelshausen a long time to process his personal experiences into Simplisscimus. My generation also needed time to be able to shape the period from 1933–1945 if you want to defne it so simply.”156 While Grass doubts that literature can advance society toward an ideological endpoint, certain literary projects can provide a sense of continuity regarding one’s place in a polity – and these projects can advance moral questions that inescapably involve the nation-state. If Telgte has a main character, it is the German language. Early in the novella, a council of artists, writers, and musicians gathers in the village of Telgte “for the purpose of giving force to the last remaining bond between all Germans, namely, the German language they held in common, and – if only from the sidelines – uttering a political word or two.”157 This group convenes in 1647, the penultimate year of the Thirty Years’ War, to discuss the Westphalian Peace and its implications for the German language. For instance, Grass’s version of conservative German poet Johann Lauremberg says, “‘Wherever German speech is written, High German it must be’ – and praised his unspoiled Nether German as against the stilted, affected, now euphuistic, now bombastic chancellery, or High German.”158 These seemingly pedantic debates regarding the nature of the German language resonate with Grass, an author who rejected the 1996 German language reforms and who as late as 2010 said, “One cannot punish the language for having been abused. Even though I had the greatest anger for my fatherland, the unbreakable link is the language. I wanted to go back to its richness.”159 Telgte, thus, marks a serious attempt to revisit this linguistic and cultural richness through a fctionalized debate regarding the Treaty of

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Westphalia, albeit from the perspective of artists. Grass does not allow this discussion to resolve, however. He writes, “Restlessness remained. A searching for everything and nothing […] But with the poets I carried controversy, thesis and antithesis, along corridors and up and down stairs.”160 According to Braun, this fctive gathering of authors in Telgte “provides both a linkage to and a critique of the notion of the author as a self-appointed ‘conscience of the nation.’”161 Thus, Grass constructs the events of Telgte, but not its setting. Germany’s absence as a nation-state in Telgte highlights the Federal Republic’s presence as one in the late 1970s. In Telgte, as in Grass’s other fction, he connects this desire for normalcy with a widespread “forgetting” of Germany’s national crimes. Early in Telgte, Grass reminds readers of the Holocaust. The character Zesen fnds a river strewn with corpses. Grass describes this scene with meta-literary quality: “The house was beset by evil omens; there would never be peace; because the language had not been kept pure, because mutilated words had swelled up like drifting corpses.”162 Grass, thus, seeks a sense wherein political organization fnds its aesthetic expression in particulars. The congregants at Telgte may have reached a political accord, yet that accord’s substance remains lost to time. The fact that an accord was reached at all, for Grass, represents the hope of “the West” in general and Germany in particular. More importantly, this accord’s mere existence points to a possibility of a German identity that can persist unbounded by Germany’s current political organization. Yet, Grass, as someone upon whom Germanness was foisted, accepts the language and literary past of those who displaced him. Grass, through his identifcation of Germany with the Kulturnation, expressed through Vergegenkunft, radically rewrites history from a “worm’s eye view.” To illustrate Grass’ use of Vergegenkunft in Telgte, the writers and artists assembled agree upon an ahistorical “peace treaty” to embody the “true Germany” of letters. In reaching this accord, Grass writes, “No one hesitated. All, including even Gerhardt stood up for their literary undertaking, prepared to fght for it. The war had taught them to live with adversity.”163 This “fght” results in an artistic manifesto whereby “No ultimate truth was proclaimed. In plain, simple language the assembled poets entreated all parties desirous of peace not to scorn the preoccupations of the poets, who though powerless, had acquired a claim to eternity.” Further, “they looked into the future and pointed to some of the possible dangers and burdens implicit in the forthcoming peace […] that the restoration of the old order […] might God forbid! – be accompanied by the old, accustomed injustice.”164 This “fnal version of the appeal for peace”165 seems naïve for Grass, an author who, inspired by Camus, calls Sisyphus his “saint.”166 Yet, true to Grass’s saint, the inn wherein the “peace conference” occurs catches fre, possibly by arson. This event evokes images of the 1631 Magdeburg fre, an incident whereby a Sweden-supporting Imperial city of Magdeburg was

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viciously attacked by General Heinrich Graf zu Pappenheim, resulting in the destruction of 1,700 of the city’s 1,900 buildings.167 Grass concludes the text: None of us got lost. We all arrived. But during that century no one assembled again in Telgte or anywhere else. I know how much further meetings would have meant to us. […] But who set the Bridge Tavern on fre I don’t know, I don’t know.168 This paragraph indicates both the strengths and weaknesses of Grass’s intent in Telgte. Grass presents a stunning, vivid portrait of a Germany that might be, but he does not indicate where Germany exactly will follow, especially after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s reunifcation.

Conclusion: Can Snails Jump? Grass’s focus on the overwhelming guilt for Germany’s Nazi crimes persists, but the divided nature of his Kulturnation revival provides a form of solace when one considers Germany a part of a wider community of nations. This sentiment ironically echoes a Brandtian admonition: “We want to be and become people who are good neighbors, at home and toward the outside world.”169 The desire to become a better neighbor requires understanding one’s relationship with another – that is, to understand what “Germany” is compared to other nations. Perhaps Grass fumbles on this question. The popularity of reunifcation was certainly greater than Grass imagined, for example. Müller’s claim that Grass inadvertently creates a Hegelian metaphysics of Auschwitz remains more convincing than his accusation of Grass’s sentimentality. This latent Hegelianism, however, appears earlier in Grass than one may think. In the concluding essay of From the Diary of a Snail, Grass notes, “If work and leisure are soon subordinated to this one utopian principle – absolute busyness – then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without confict will dawn, perpetually – and without consciousness.”170 This may be the most Hegelian sentence Grass ever produced, and it reveals much in the way of his project. Namely, that to maintain a sense of progression and continuity in society – in order to create a future that does not forsake or elongate the past – civil society must remain distinct from the technocratic domain of the workplace and other managerial elites. Maintaining civil society requires one to retain the consciousness of one’s place in space and time. This consciousness depends upon a memorialization that does not rely on “offcial,” state-sponsored histories of the past nor of an ideology that valorizes the future. Rather, one must utilize the space granted by literature and mythos to imagine the past and future as present to humanity in the present. And, in the most challenging step of this

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process – share the knowledge gained through this kind of imagining with the world. One must not forget that the snail itself is subject to history – it represents the “categorically earthbound” status of human being. As a result, the snail itself changes and can recognize times where certain political ideas and processes no longer serve the needs of human fourishing in a community. To Grass, social democracy, the defnitive ideology of the snail, could not deliver in its mission of resisting the “primacy of economics” as the “short” twentieth century dragged into the technocratic twenty-frst. The need for a dynamic and mythopoeic form of remembrance became apparent to Grass in The Meeting at Telgte. History partially dictated the pace and the intensity of Grass’s anger and love for writing and politics. Grass’s allies changed throughout this time. Grass and Brandt famously feuded over the pace and effcacy of German reunifcation, with Grass taking to the pages of The Paris Review to accuse his former political mentor of foolhardily leaping into reunifcation, offering a path to unity that did not give consideration to the dismal economic state of East Germany.171 Grass found himself entwined in a veritable “noman’s land” in the 1990s, under attack by the very literary establishment that praised his works in the decades prior and considered something of a doomsayer and pariah among fellow left-wing intellectuals. The connection between memory and politics presents yet another challenge for Grass’s political project: namely, for the so-called confederated German state. Obviously, the existence of reunifcation negates the possibility of Grass’s planned cultural confederation between East and West Germany. Still, the problems with the idea present metaphysical diffculties for Grass’s democratic socialism going forward. As Marx writes, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”172 Grass’s writings owe a debt to Marx’s adage. However, Grass argues that without a sense of continuity and consciousness this history will serve the ends of ideology rather than humanity. Therefore, the task for Grass’s late period involves creating a space for memory that relies neither upon the guilt of a Sonderweg nor upon the dictates of an ideological map for humanity. Space must be yielded in time for the fow of humane political imagining.

Notes 1 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives: Günter Grass. London: Reaktion Books, 2018, p. 92. 2 Ibid, p. 91. 3 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics: From The Tin Drum to Crabwalk. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008, p. 60. 4 Grass, Günter. “Literature and Revolution or the Rhapsodist’s Snorting Hobbyhorse.” In On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983, 93–9. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, p. 93.

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5 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Interview by MarcChristoph Wagner. Video. Translated by Martin Kogi, August 2013. http:// channel.louisiana.dk/video/gunter-grass-writing-against-wall. 6 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives, p. 139. 7 Ibid, p. 127. 8 Grass, Günter. From Germany to Germany. Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 2012, p. 27. 9 Grass, Günter. Deutschland, einig Vaterland? (Germany, one Fatherland?) Interview by Joachim Wagner and Rudolf Augstein. February 1990. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Tim Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidel Verlag, 2019, p. 397. 10 Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unifcation and National Identity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 81. 11 Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, p. 90. 12 Braun, Rebecca. “Authorial Construction in From the Diary of the Snail and the Meeting at Telgte.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 97. 13 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 290. 14 Mews, Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 141. 15 Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country, p. 74. 16 Berman, Sheri. The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 6. 17 Bernstein, Eduard. The Preconditions of Socialism. Edited by Henry Tudor. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 13. 18 Ibid, p. 21. 19 Ibid, p. 36. 20 Ibid, p. 177. 21 Daum, Andreas W. “The Two German States in the International World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Martin Walser Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 730. 22 Ibid, pp. 730–1. 23 Brandt, Willy, and Günter Grass. Der Briefwechsel (Correspondence). Edited by Martin Köbel. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2013, p. 110. 24 Grass, Günter. Ich bin Sozialdemokrat, weil ich ohne Furcht leben will (I am a Social Democrat because I Want to Live Without Fear). Interview by Leo Bauer, December 1970. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015) edited by Tim Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidel Verlag, 2019, pp. 107–8. 25 "[…] wie stark Umweltschmertz ist, und daß wir, wenn wir dieses Prolem lösen wollen, zu anderen Vorstellungen gelangen müssen bei der Verteilung des Eigentums, beim Gebrauch des Eigentums." Ibid, p. 108; Translation mine. 26 Preece, Julian. The Life and Work of Günter Grass. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 82. 27 Grass, Günter. “Ich bin gegen radikal Kuren (I am Against Radical Courses).” Twen, January 1969, p. 72. 28 Grass, Günter. “Racing with the Utopias.” In On Writing and Politics, 19671983, 51–74. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, p. 52. 29 Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. London: Penguin, 2006, p. 416.

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30 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 318. 31 Douglas, R.M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 42. 32 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, quoted in Judt, Tony. Postwar, p. 417. 33 Ibid, p. 470. 34 Ibid, pp. 417–8. 35 Grass, Günter. “VW Bus-Rede (VW Bus Speech),” August 1969, p. 479. 36 “Im gleichen Maße, wie unsere bischer unzulängliche Entwicklungspolitik für die Staaten der Dritten Welt bedeutsamer und entscheiden der teil unserer Politik sein muß, ist auch die Entwicklungspolitik immer noch ist, und so unpopular Entwicklungspolitik immer noch ist und so populär die Erfolge im Weltraum sein mögen.” Ibid, p. 480; Translation mine. 37 “[…]Daß eine Neonazistische Partei, die NPD, bemüht ist, uns zu beweisen, daß wir trotz der Mondlandung hinter dem Mond leben." Ibid, p. 481; Translation mine. 38 "Ich gebe aber zu bedenken, daß seine geplante Entscheidung von der Herren Thadden bis Thielen genauso mißbraucht werden wird, wie die Idealismus meiner Generation von den Herren Schirach und Axmann mißbraucht worden ist." Grass, Günter “Rede an einen jungen Wähler der sich versucht fühlt die NPD zu wäheln.” NPD. Grass, Günter. “Rede an einen jungen Wähler, der sich versucht fühlt die NPD zu wählen (Speech to a Young Voter Who Feels Tempted to Vote for the NDP),” November 1966. Grass 1581. Akademie des Künste Berlin, p. 182; Translation mine. 39 Jetz erst, und Jahren später in immer erschreckenderem Mass, begriff ich, welch unfaßliche Verbrechen im Namen der Zukunft meiner Generation begangen worden waren." Ibid, p. 183; Translation mine. 40 “[…] gebenden Kleinbürgerlichen Welt gegenüber zu schärfen. Heute zwanzig Jahre später, weiß ich daß viel getan worden ist, daß unser provisorischer Teilstadt, die Bundesrepublik, schlect und recht, aber immerhin demokratischeparlementarische Sicherheit Bietet." Ibid, p. 183; Translation mine. 41 Braun, Rebecca. “Authorial Construction in from the Diary of the Snail and the Meeting at Telgte,” p. 97. 42 Ibid, p. 109. 43 Brandt, Willy, and Günter Grass. Der Briefwechsel (Correspondence), p. 116. 44 “Wie sollen wir weiterhin die SPD als Alternative verteidigen, wenn das Profl eines Willy Brandt im Proporz-Einerlei der Grossen Koalition nicht mehr zu erkennen sein wird?” Ibid, p. 121; Translation mine. 45 “Die Jugend unseres Landes jedoch wird sich vom Staat und seiner Verfassung abkehren; sie wird sich nach links und rechs verrennen, sobald diese miese Ehe beschlossen sein wird.” Ibid, p. 121; Translation mine. 46 “Die demokratische Linke und unser Land würden nicht nur ärmer, sondern auch schwächer warden. Das Gewissen der Sozialdemocratischen Partei schläght nicht außerhalb dieser Partei.” Ibid, p. 127; Translation mine. 47 “Sorge um das politische Profl Willy Brandts sollten Sie sich nicht machen.” Ibid, p. 127; Translation mine. 48 “Wenn ein NSDAP Mitglied von 1933 bis zur Kapitulation heute und mit Applaus Bundeskanzler werden kann, wird der Nationalsozialismus wieder hoffähig gemacht.”, Grass, Günter. “Das Gewissen der SPD (The Conscience of the SDP).” Die Zeit, December 12, 1966. Grass 1583. Akademie des Künste Berlin, p. 195; Translation mine. 49 “Die bekannte Pose: Politik ist und bleibt ein schmutziges Geschäft? Also Auswanderwollen und ähnliche Sentimentalitaten? Nein. Es wird hiergeblieben. Der Staat sind wir. Es wird auch nicht abgesplittert. Die Schmollwinkel bleiben leer.” Ibid, p. 195; Translation mine.

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50 Grass, Günter. “Literature and Revolution or the Rhapsodist’s Snorting Hobbyhorse,” p. 99. 51 Ibid, p. 97. 52 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” 53 Lutz Koepnick writes, “It is one of the vexing ironies of postwar German culture that it took […] television, and a mini-series designed by commerciallyoriented American producers, the NBC drama Holocaust, in order to pierce the wall German art and literature had more or less built around the representation of the death camps in the 1940s and 1950s.” See, Koepnick, Lutz. “Culture in the Shadow of Trauma?” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 711–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 714. 54 Grass, Günter. “Literature and Myth.” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 2004, p. 195. 55 Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country, p. 84. 56 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail, p. 75. 57 Ibid, p. 75. 58 Ibid, p. 3. 59 Ibid, p. 25. 60 Grass discusses his time in a bicycle shop and credits his inability to ride with his survival in World War II in his memoir, Peeling the Onion (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel), discussed in Chapter IV: Memory 61 Brandt, Willy, and Günter Grass. Der Briefwechsel (Correspondence), p. 139. 62 Preece, Julian. Critical Lives, p. 80. 63 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail, p. 145. 64 Ibid, p. 10. 65 Ibid, p. 16. 66 In order to maintain artistic independence while serving as Brandt, Grass did not serve as an active member of the SPD until 1982 “in a gesture of solidarity after the FDP [Free Democratic Party] withdrew its support for the social-liberal coalition and enabled Helmut Kohl to begin his long term as chancellor[…]” Preece, Julian. Critical Lives, p. 125. 67 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail, p. 116. 68 Ibid, p. 46. 69 Ibid, p. 4. 70 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” 71 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of a Snail, p. 5. 72 Ibid, pp. 5–6. 73 Ibid, p. 52. 74 Cory, Mark E. “Sisyphus and the Snail: Metaphors for the Political Process in Günter Grass’ ‘Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke’ and ‘Kopfgeburter oder die Deutsche sterben aus.’” German Studies Review 6, no. 3 (October 1983): 519–33, p. 529. 75 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail, p. 61. 76 Ibid, p. 62. 77 Ibid, p. 63. 78 Ibid, p. 63. 79 Ibid, p. 73. 80 Berman, Sheri. The Primacy of Politics, pp. 15–6. 81 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail, p. 99. 82 Ibid, p. 100. 83 Ibid p 102. 84 Ibid, p. 81. 85 Ibid, p. 116. 86 Ibid, p. 117.

82 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106 107 108

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110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

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“A Literary Concept” Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 9. Ibid, p. 9. Ibid, p. 293. Ibid, p. 289. Ibid, p. 294. Cory, Mark E. “Sisyphus and the Snail,” p. 521. Grass, Günter. From the Diary of a Snail, p. 310. Grass, Günter. “To Be Continued...” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Inc., 2004, p. 274. Updike, John. “Snail on the Stump.” New Yorker, 1970, p. 184. Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 127. Ascherson, Neal, quoted in Ibid, p. 126. Ibid, p. 123. Schütte, Wolfram quoted in Ibid, p. 109. Przeworski, Adam. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Studies in Marxism and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 46. Berman, Sheri. The Primacy of Politics, p. 205. Cory, Mark E. “Sisyphus and the Snail,” p. 522; Arguably, Grass was right about the problems with the 1969 SPD. A number of scandals, including the Guillaume Affair, ousted Brandt from offce in 1974, leading to the ascent of his replacement, Helmut Schmidt. Grass, Günter. From the Diary of a Snail, p. 74. Berman, Sheri. The Primacy of Politics, p. 188. Ibid, p. 214. Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 147. “Vielleicht gelinngt es dem Butt sogar, Dir deutlicher und vielschichtiger meine ins Erzählte übersetzen politischen Erfhrungen mitzuteilen als ich es – sei es in Brieft, sei es in allzu knapp bemessenen Gesprächen – kann. – Denn in der Regel sollte das buch (als Summe) klüger als der Autor in seiner jeweiligen Prteikelhaftigkeit sein.” Brandt & Grass, pp. 668–71. Translation Mine. Grass, Günter. “Im Ausland geschätzt - im Inland gehaßt” (Praised Abroad – Hated at Home). Interview by Werner Holzer, Karl-Heinz Krumm, and Roderich Reifenrath, October 1977. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Tim Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidel Verlag, 2019, p. 212. Ibid, p. 209. Ibid, p. 215. Grass, Günter. The Flounder. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1979, p. 329. Ibid, p. 15. Ibid, p. 21. Ibid, p. 54. Ibid, p. 137. Ibid, p. 128. Ibid, p. 293 In the case of the former, the historian Rhiman Rotz argues that many of the participants in the demonstrations against the Hansas in Lübeck were, in fact, artisans and merchants, not necessarily antecedents to “proletariats” in the Marxian sense. See: Rotz, Rhiman, “The Lübeck Uprising of 1408 and the Decline of the Hanseatic League.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 121, no. 1 (1977): 1–45. Preece, Critical Lives, p. 103. Grass, Günter. The Flounder, p. 149. Ibid, p. 149.

“A Literary Concept” 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

137 138 139 140

141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

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Ibid, p. 245. Ibid, p. 252. Ibid, p. 256. Ibid, p. 244. Ibid, p. 257. Ibid, p. 257. Ibid, p. 266. Ibid, p. 269. Ibid, p. 283. Ibid, p. 268. Ibid, p. 539. Ibid, p. 540. Ibid, p. 459. Ibid, p. 464; See also, Spiers, Ronald. “The Dualistic Unity of Der Butt.” In Günter Grass’s Der Butt: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History, edited by Philip Brady, Timothy McFarland, and John White. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, p. 30. Ibid, p. 476 Ibid, p. 481. Spiers, Ronald. “The Dualistic Unity of Der Butt.” p. 24 Koopman, Helmut. “Between Stone Age and Present or the Simultaneity of the Nonsimultaneous.” In The Fisherman and His Wife: Günter Grass’s The Flounder in Critical Perspective, edited by Siegfried Mews. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1983, pp. 79–80. Sandford, John. “Men, Women, and the Third Way.” In Gunter Grass’s Der Butt: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History, edited by Brady Philip, Timothy McFarland, and John J. White. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. p. 174. Ibid, pp. 179–80. Ibid, p. 180. Finch, Helen. “Günter Grass and Gender.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner, 81–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 93–4. Ibid, p. 93. Ibid, p. 87. Malchow, Timothy. Günter Grass and the Genders of German Memory: From The Tin Drum to Peeling the Onion. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Grass, Peeling the Onion, p. 186. Grass, Günter. “Der Lesende Arbeiter” (“The Reading Worker”). Die Zeit, February 22, 1974. Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, p. 91. Grass, Günter. “Literature and History.” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Inc, 2004, p. 257. Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. First Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage International, 1990, p. 203. Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 169. Ibid, p. 180. Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country, p. 83. "Grimmelshausen hat eben sehr lange gebraucht, um seine persönlichen Erfahrungen in die Simpliziaden hineinzuverarbeiten. Meine Generation hat auch Zeit gebraucht, um die Periode, wenn mann sie einmal so simpel datieren will, von 1933 bis 1945 gestalten zu können.” Grass, Günter. Die liegengebliebenen Themen (The Abandoned Topics). Interview by Wolfram Schütte, January 1980. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015) edited by Tim Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidel Verlag, 2019, p. 224; Translation mine.

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157 Grass, Günter. The Meeting at Telgte. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981, pp. 27–8. 158 Ibid, p. 43. 159 Grass, Günter. quoted in Jaggi, Maya. “A Life in Writing: Günter Grass.” The Guardian. November 1, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov /01/gunter-grass-interview-maya-jaggi. 160 Grass, Günter. The Meeting at Telgte, p. 147. 161 Braun, Rebecca. “Authorial Construction in from the Diary of the Snail and the Meeting at Telgte,” p. 107. 162 Ibid, p. 66. 163 Ibid, p. 163. 164 Ibid, p. 189. 165 Ibid, p. 189. 166 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” 167 Wilson, Peter. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 2009, p. 469. 168 Grass, Günter. The Meeting at Telgte, p. 199. 169 Brandt, Willy quoted in Daum, Andreas W. “The Two German States in the International World,” p. 731. 170 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail, p. 290. 171 Grass, Günter. Günter Grass, The Art of Fiction No. 124. Interview by Elizabeth Gaffney, Summer 1991. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2191/the -art-of-fction-no-124-gunter-grass. 172 Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 2008, p. 15.

4

“Distant but Not Foreign” Memory Politics and the Future of Remembrance, 1980–2006

The Fall and Rise and Fall of Günter Grass To say Grass’s career went through many changes in the last decades of his life would be an understatement. From Snail and Telgte, one can observe at least two vital and interconnected transformations in Grass’s political thinking. First, the spatial scope of Grass’s writing moves beyond Danzig or Germany in this era. While Grass’s novels The Flounder and Call of the Toad touch upon internationalism, Too Far Afeld suggests that the solution for its characters resides in seeking out international relationships and maintaining them. Second, the political center of gravity in Grass’s work moves away from German social democracy to a moderate form of democratic socialism. While Grass does not become a Marxist, he still exhibits deep skepticism of the justice and legitimacy of global capitalism and the modern nation-state. A focus on the importance of international exchange between labor traditions unites these two themes in Grass’s political writing – suggesting the need for solidarity with migrant workers and a renewed commitment toward a politics that privileges the concerns of a working class broadly conceived. His goal is now not only the material improvement of the working class but the transition to a socialist economic system undergirded by a democratic political one. In 1993, Grass left the SPD over the party’s refusal to acknowledge asylum rights for immigrants from the former Soviet Union after reunifcation.1 Paradoxically, Grass’s embrace of democratic socialism came after the economic system faced its most crushing political defeat. For many in Western intellectual circles, most notably Francis Fukuyama, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of history defned as global ideological confict on the scale of the Cold War.2 As we can see from Grass’s writings in Afeld and earlier, he remained unconvinced. A plethora of people, including those in former East Germany, found the new order hostile to their prior conceptions of politics and economic life. A rising tide of migrant workers, especially Turkish workers, who played a major role in the rebuilding of Germany were now facing legal persecution after the fall of the Wall. For Grass, Germany was the embodiment of a specifcally twentieth-century DOI: 10.4324/9781003276074-4

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arrogance that continued to bury its past and, therefore, its present in pursuit of a technocratic and inhumane future. However, the need for international comradery between peoples in Europe and beyond meant that the forms of conventional political organization dominant in the Cold War could no longer adequately resist the threat of neoliberalism to the environment to Grass. Neither could the ideologies of the twentieth century preserve a sense of continuity with the past needed in order to preserve one’s sense of place in the world for Grass. If liberal democracy and Soviet Communism defeated National Socialism in World War II, neoliberalism destroyed Soviet Communism and social democracy in the postwar era. The logic and language of austerity arguably undid the civil society created in the ashes of World War II, primarily its institutions of social protection. A new form of politics that consciously deals with the past and the legacies of national atrocities that elide “offcial” accounts of history must emerge to confront ideological movements that seek to “freeze” the world in a never-ending frenzy of consumerist “archival memory.” Language and culture constitute the concepts needed to cross national borders to formulate a political response to neoliberal capitalism. However, these political concepts must remain privileged over economic ones to oppose neoliberalism consistently and effectively. For there to be a “public memory,” there must be a public. Grass’s later works on the politics of memory place a greater premium upon the development of the individual political psyche in relationship to the “events” so common in Grass’s work, especially in the Danzig Trilogy. In this fnal phase of his career, Grass expands upon the foundation of the Kulturnation. Having abandoned the political viability of this so-called “nation of letters,” Grass turns his attention to how these letters interact on a personal level with the political, leading one to the import of civil society in the face of encroaching neoliberalism, as well as its backlash in the form of farright populism. In all these guises, Grass still places a premium on the value of public speech – however, for speech and memory to serve as effective concepts, they must upend national histories and public dogmas, seeking the independence of truth from ideology. Grass did not retreat from his own place in the creation of that “public dogma” in Too Far Afeld and Crabwalk, discussing the literature’s role in GDR and his own involvement in the German remembrance of its own diaspora following the end of World War II, respectively. In 2006, Grass unveiled publicly the extent of his involvement with the Waffen-SS, resulting in his autobiographical novel, Peeling the Onion.

Too Far Afeld: Distant but Not Foreign Upon Too Far Afeld’s release in the newly reunifed German Federal Republic, the news magazine Der Spiegel released an issue featuring a cover of famed German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki literally tearing the

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novel apart.3 While Grass critics, notably Julian Preece (2000), defended Grass’s 1995 work as among the frst major statements about the East’s place in the newly reunifed Germany by a Western author,4 the damage to Grass’s almost theretofore unquestioned status as “Germany’s conscience” had been done. The popular consensus among Grass’s contemporaries in the West was that Too Far Afeld was “unreadable” (Radisch, 1995), took an overly positive view of the former German Democratic Republic, and ignored the extensiveness of its surveillance state operated by the Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Stasi)). Despite, or perhaps because of, Grass’s appeal to the citizens of the former East, Too Far Afeld was more warmly received by literary critics in the former Soviet East Germany. Mews (2008) asserts that out of 161 reviews in German from September to December 1995, 31 were unambiguously positive (21.1 percent of the total). About 28.6 percent of these positive reviews were published in the East and 20.7 percent in the West.5 Why this discrepancy in critical reception for one of Germany’s most beloved authors? An answer lies in the continuity between Telgte and Afeld regarding the nature of the Kulturnation. In Afeld, Grass attempted to provide a sense in which the former East could not only become a part of the new unifed Germany through letters and writings, but that this new unifed Germany could embrace its place as a part of a new international community, bound by a common concern for economic and political justice rather than mere economic utility. Instead of reconceptualizing a fctional Wende (period of German reunifcation; literally, “turning point”) as he does for the Westphalian Peace in Telgte, Grass sets fctionalized people based on literary personae in the very real setting of the Wende, suggesting that their conversations and speech acts “inspire dialogues between past and present.”6 Too Far Afeld does not follow a strictly linear narrative progression seen in many novels. It almost seamlessly blends past and present, linking the novel’s protagonist, Theo “Fonty” Wuttke, and his experience as a former GDR functionary and sometimes dissident, with the German novelist and critic of the 1871 unifcation of lesser Germany, Theodore Fontane. The novel suggests that Fonty is something of a “reincarnation” of Fontane, and the novel’s narrator, an unnamed researcher of the Fontane Archive, calls the latter “the Immortal.” Yet, Fontane in the novel’s narrative represents not only the person of Theodore Fontane and his later iteration, “Fonty,” but the entirety of German literature, from Grimmelshausen to Friedrich von Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe onward. “Fonty […] could take notes on French military airfelds and their environs. […] generously sprinkled with literary references: Goethe and the cannonade at Valmy; Schiller and Joan of Arc.”7 Fonty’s observations as a Nazi war correspondent (prior to his displacement in the GDR) echo Telgte’s sense that even the “real” events of history – its wars and treaties – are more accurately refected in literary thinking than

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in the rationalistic world of “fact-based” statistical and “scientifc” analysis. Afeld’s archival narrator says, “We were familiar with Fonty’s penchant for dipping deep into the past. The Archives knew which sources he was drawing from. And we knew that he had more than enough landscapes whose chief claim to fame was that they had become battlefelds.”8 Too Far Afeld’s plot, like Simplicissimus before it, involves the misadventures of a seemingly unremarkable man throughout history. Beginning as a war correspondent for the Nazis (and sometimes collaborator with the French resistance in Dresden), then becoming a literary agent and fle courier at the East German Archives in Berlin, and following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a courier at the Treuhandanstalt company overseeing reunifcation, Fonty serves as a silent witness to constant turnovers of ideological power structures in his own lifetime. The fall of the Berlin Wall, however, unleashes Fonty’s inner voice as he convenes with his “shadow,” the Stasi agent Ludwig Hoftaller, a confdant of unknown allegiance and himself the “reincarnation” of the eponymous literary spy Tallhover from Joachim Schädlich’s novel of the same name. The two have impassioned discussions regarding German literature, history, and the destiny of the newly unifed Germany. In these discussions, whose settings range from a rowboat in the Hiddensee to a McDonald’s restaurant in West Berlin on the night of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, Fonty often takes on a moralistic and defeatist attitude, opining about the loss of identity and purpose after the “Peasant and Workers’ State’s” demise, often using Fontane as a literary inspiration, as happens in the novel’s opening scene in at the German McDonald’s. In Fonty’s words, “I have a colossal distaste for crowds that are bound and determined to become an event […] Victory spawns stupidity.”9 Hoftaller often adopts a more absurdist, detached perspective on Germany’s history, suggesting the futility of ideological schemes, the inevitability of Western capitalism’s victory over traditional cultural mores, and the place of history as one of eternal recurrence and endless suffering. In an early scene in the novel, Hoftaller opines to Fonty about the upcoming “Day X,” when the now-obsolete Eastern Mark was replaced by the new, “stable” Western Deutschmark. He says, “Sure, our products’ll be good for nothing and our factories’ll be what the West’s been calling them for months now: scrap […] But the shelves will be flled. And in no time fat. Western stuff, beautifully packaged.”10 Hoftaller concludes, “Deceptive packaging, just new pressures in place of old – that’s all we can expect.”11 Hoftaller’s depiction of the world fnds symbolic expression in the paternoster (our father). The paternoster is an elevator in the Treuhand building where Fonty works that moves in a rectangular pattern, up and down, and left to right. Afeld’s narrator compares this elevator to a “prayer wheel; for which reason this old-fashioned passenger elevator, which despite heartfelt protests, has been decommissioned almost everywhere nowadays, was known as a ‘paternoster.’”12 The paternoster not only seems to accompany

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Fonty throughout his past lives as a fle courier for the Nazis, the GDR, and now the private arm of the Federal Republic, but serves as a metaphor for history itself, with the narrator even calling one of Fonty’s trips up “historic.”13 In a scene between Fonty and Hoftaller in the divinely named elevator, Fonty drunkenly pontifcates about the cyclical nature of history: “The collapse of the Soviet Union does not mean the end; no, a self-aware life, nationalist and religious, consistent with its most ancient traditions, will ultimately triumph. Terrible and inexcusably stupid, I know.”14 Fonty’s discussion of the inevitable triumph of the “inexcusably stupid” sounds more like one of Hoftaller’s rants on the ideological interchangeability of East German communism and West German capitalism than one of Fonty’s characteristic musings on the thoughts of Fontane. Hoftaller notices this irregularity and speaks with Fonty’s daughter Martha, telling her “The excitement of the last few days is taking its toll. Assume it’s his nerves again.”15 According to the Grass scholar Stephan Brockmann, The Treuhandanstalt building represents a sense of continuity amidst constant change: the building once housed Hermann Göring’s Aviation Ministry and after reunifcation now serves the end of privatizing East Germany’s industry.16 Brockmann further relates this sense of historical continuity as a symbol of Fonty’s disillusionment with East German communism.17 The scene wherein Fonty laments the collapse of the ideological structure that undergirded his faith in the working of human history and existence itself reveals Grass’s moral and literary ambition for politics. During the absurdity and confusion brought about by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, what remains is the possibility of human connection between peoples who were once separated by space and time. Hoftaller and Fonty, although both “comrades,” possess a “cat and mouse” relationship. Fonty is a functionary whose past as a dissident during Nazism represents a latent danger for the state that Hoftaller works to uphold, but to which he is not completely committed. These two men should not be friends. Yet through their discussions, the two begin to understand one another’s perspective and the cause of their doubts as well as the extent of their hopes for a better world. The doubt fnds its source in history. The uncertainty of the course of history is readily apparent during the Wende. Even if one accepts a “cyclical” view of history, one’s place in that cycle does not appear certain, especially in light of the twentieth century’s catastrophes. The source of hope, Grass suggests in Afeld as he does in Telgte, resides in the reconceptualization and remembrance of this history through literature. This remembrance becomes action with a simple question posed to Fonty by Hoftaller: “Remember Dresden?”18 By asking this question, Hoftaller opens a deluge of memories for the East German literatus and functionary. Fonty attempts to mask his past life as a dissident by evoking his past life as a literary correspondent for the GDR, but Hoftaller shows no quarter: “When I say ‘remember Dresden?’ I don’t mean the countless resolutions

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offered by the stamp collection and aquarium keepers, and defnitely not the wishes expressed by the ‘Literature and Cultural Heritage’ crowd.”19 Here, Hoftaller reveals his knowledge of Fonty’s ideological and sexual promiscuity. He informs Fonty that not only has he tracked down a granddaughter whose existence was unknown to the East German functionary, but he has told her of Fonty’s existence and whereabouts. Fonty’s French granddaughter, Madeleine, arrives shortly thereafter at his vacation home in Hiddensee. Madeleine is a graduate student studying German social history and leftist social movements and is a social democrat in the fashion of Eduard Bernstein.20 Her relationship with her grandfather forms the political and moral core of Too Far Afeld and demonstrates the direction Grass hopes the Kulturnation will take after reunifcation. Just as Fonty admires French culture due to Fontane’s connection to the Huguenots, Madeleine admires Germany for her grandfather’s secret stance against Nazism, which ultimately led to her existence. Thus, Grass presents to his readers the idea that through one’s personal history and affectations, one may seek the other with ethical openness and genuine love. Undergirding this newly formed relationship is the evocation of Marcel Proust in Madeleine’s name. Nicole Thesz writes that Madeleine’s name evokes the French cookie dipped in tea that begins Proust’s long work of memorialization and links her presence with the concept of memory itself in Grass’s text. Moreover, Thesz suggests that their pairing implies the possibility that memory can link generations – and nations – through dialogue.21 Grass’s evocation of Proust’s biscuit from In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) suggests that memorialization can spring forth from human will more often than previously thought. Too Far Afeld draws strict attention to Berlin’s architecture. The novel even begins with an evocative depiction of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, replete with “Wallpeckers” quick to chip pieces of the Wall for sale as souvenirs, suggesting that the entrepreneurial spirit of the West has already taken hold in the GDR even before its dissolution.22 Yet, as the novel progresses, Grass’s narratorial voice pays less attention to the grand memorials of German Communism and Soviet Strength and more to individual behavior, particularly Madeleine’s. For instance, during a rowing outing, Grass describes Madeleine’s gestures: “And Madeleine […] offered him, as he climbed in, her small childlike hand.”23 In a later discussion on Fontane’s novels Eff Briest and Jenny Treibel, Grass’s narration privileges Madeleine’s demure gestures over Fonty’s pontifcations: “Madeleine was sitting next to us, her knees primly together, the tip of her nose lowered, and her fngers clutching a handkerchief in her lap.”24 Here, Grass juxtaposes the memory mediated through literature and history and expressed to the other in communication with the offcial forms of memorialization present in state-sponsored architecture and monuments. These offcial forms of memorialization represent “powerful forces that infuence individuals even against their will.”25 The dominant structures

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of memory here have the potential to intersect with the intimate forms of remembrance that Grass privileges in his depiction of Fonty and Madeleine’s relationship. In a vital scene midway through Afeld, Madeleine and Fonty discuss the future of Germany and the possibility of a future constitutional convention for the newly unifed state that could replace the extant basic law (Grundgesetz). The two resort to offcial slogans of their respective nations. Grass writes, “[Madeleine] charged the Germans with self-destructive insanity, [Fonty] with self-righteous chauvinism. If she exclaimed ‘Vive la France!’ he parried with ‘Long live Brandenburg!’ The debate was heated, more bitter than sweet.”26 Madeleine has the last word in German before “resort[ing] to her mother tongue” as she proclaims, “Germany is no longer merely a concept but a powerful fact.”27 Madeleine not only contradicts Fonty’s literary conceptions of German self-identity here, but Grass’s as well. In calling Germany a “powerful fact,” she discounts the possibility of a Confederate Germany. As such, she suggests to Fonty and to the novel’s German readers that Germany’s restored economic and political power, represented by the newly unifed Federal Republic’s place in the European Union after the collapse of the Soviet Union, portends the return of old problems. Namely, that a resurgent Germany could produce a second Shoah. Like in Telgte, this fear is not resolved; no “fnal appeal version of the appeal for peace”28 reveals itself in speech or writing here. The communicative approach to history offered by German intellectuals like Jürgen Habermas is limited by the facts of history, even if these facts are reconceived in literary memory. Whereas in Telgte, the artists of the meeting reach an accord that is lost to time, in Afeld, all the confusions and contradictions of reunifcation are recorded in archival form, preserved for posterity. Grass thereby proposes an ironic sense of detachment from, but not necessarily an abandonment of, the forms of memorialization that dominate political consciousness. By emerging oneself in the myths of other countries, one can gain a certain enlarged perspective that is “distant but not foreign”29 to one’s own traditions and myths. Grass, in an interview with New Left Review, upholds this interpretation of the moral dimension of his work. He says: “Socialistic or social-democratic … Lost their faith in the European labour movements […] Parting with one’s own tradition is a form of surrender, that leads to accommodation with […] neoliberalism” (Grass, New Left Review). Grass demonstrates this balance between detachment and chauvinism through Fonty’s actions throughout Too Far Afeld. Fonty, depressed and committed to further following in the footsteps of his “Immortal” Anglophile doppelgänger, decides to abscond to England, a country that in Grass’s novels represents the domination of markets over traditional European culture and priorities and a country Fontane worked in as a journalist for years. Fonty laments, “I am in no hurry, now that the Workers’ and Peasants’ State is gone, to play the hero to take out my anger on this state where

92 “Distant but Not Foreign” things went passably well for me.”30 After being hospitalized due to a panic attack, Fonty hears his granddaughter’s voice almost religiously compelling him to “Take up thy bed and walk.”31 Fonty eventually does and, following the conclusion of the Treuhand’s work, leaves for France, inspired to explore Fontane’s Huguenot ancestry. The novel ends with the following concluding remark from Fonty: “By the way, [Eff] Briest was wrong. I, at least, believe that although we have gone far afeld, an end is in sight.”32 Preece considers this ending uncharacteristically optimistic for Grass.33 By leaving Berlin, Fonty symbolically buries the former East Germany and allows the formation of new memories to occur. The paternoster burns down, suggesting an escape from the repetitive cycle of ideological violence and destruction that burdens Germany from its stillbirth in 1648 to its rebirth in 1990. Yet, Brockmann suggests that the ending of Afeld poses problems for this interpretation of the novel and, therefore, for Grass’s political project as well. He argues that the destruction of the paternoster signals merely the end of a particular model of history, not the end of history’s cyclical nature itself. In fact, the archive’s destruction may prevent future generations from ever truly understanding this period’s motions, cosigning it to obscurity forever.34 By extending Brockmann’s argument to the pattern of twentieth-century German history and its associated literary memorialization, a few facts become clearer. Germany, in its fascist and communist forms, relied upon the literary and the mythic to impose an ideological structure upon Germany. In the fascist case, the state used images of an Aryan race biologically destined to destroy “international Jewry” and their false “inventions” of history, religion, morality, and international fnance.35 In the Soviet-controlled GDR, the images of Germany’s Protestant past, especially the Peasants’ Revolt, and the literary tradition of Goethe and Schiller were placed in continuity with German communism. The images of the Peasant Revolt leader Thomas Müntzer and the writer and poet Goethe adorned the face of the 5- and 20-Mark notes, respectively. In both cases, the German literary tradition served the ends of extreme ideologies. Brockmann’s reading of Too Far Afeld’s ending implies that the literary impulses of Germany will likely serve the forces of capital in the newly unifed German Federal Republic as they served fascism and communism. As demonstrated before, Grass harbors no illusions about the dominance of capitalism in European society. He writes in 1992’s Call of the Toad, “What was lost in the war is being retaken by economic power. True, it’s being done peacefully. No tanks, no dive bombers. No dictator rules, only the free market.”36 This domination of history by the market defnitely extends to literary society for Grass. Yet, he also contends that in the present, one does not have to accept the domination of any ideological or economic system as “an inevitability” and, further, doing so “abandons” one’s tradition and identity to the forces of “history.” Rather, one must take account of what has remained static in these changes and use it as a part of one’s own

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political tradition in an open and ethical manner. For Grass, the fact that Nazism interprets itself as German fascism and the GDR saw its project as German communism reveals a crack whereby the forces of nationalism may be bent in the direction of literary cosmopolitanism. However, Grass cautions that one’s relationship to their own ideological framework and conception of Kulturnation must not fall into chauvinism or nihilism: one must remain “distant but not foreign” to the forces of history and ideology to realize a sort of cultural internationalism that places a premium on literary and linguistic concerns and not necessarily on economic ones.

A Remembrance of Things Present: Grass’s “Memory Work” How should the German people memorialize themselves and by what means? Grass rejects a Hegelian conception of progress guided by Spirit toward Absolute Knowledge. Likewise, Grass rejects the restoration of National Socialist glory and its associated wartime camaraderie. Rather, Grass seeks to bend existing political institutions in service of a common good informed by Germany’s diffcult and complicated past. He argued that Germany under the Gerhart Schröder and Angela Merkel governments could not contain the pressure of either right-wing political violence or neoliberal capitalism, the latter of which he contends had replaced communism as fascism’s “alternative.” Grass wished to “mobilize” images of a fragmented Germany in opposition to both visions, neoliberalism and fascism, while remaining conscious of the deleterious consequences of the latter represented in the image of Auschwitz. Opposition to these paths implied a rejection of neoliberalism as well, as he considered neoliberalism to dilute the experience of history, replacing it with a mere “consumeristic” vision of the world and politics.37 To Grass, this opposition could emerge only if Germans overcame the guilt of Auschwitz through an open-ended and unending dialogue about what German identity means for the future. The path to this dialogue lies in a fairly obscure essay Grass wrote on the occasion of a conference of Nobel Laureates in Lithuania on the topic of memorializing the Holocaust. The year 1997’s “I Remember Myself” (Ich erinnere mich) marks Grass’s frst real “thesis statement” in the fnal stages of his career: that the way one processes and remembers events is instrumental to the maintenance of public order and cultural fourishing in the twenty-frst century. In a late interview with Heinrich Detering, Grass stated that without this essay, he would not have possessed the courage to write his autobiography that disclosed the extent of his involvement with the Waffen-SS.38 In this essay, Grass provides an account of what “memory” has meant in his own life and work, touching upon his frst return to Danzig/Gdańsk after World War II, the death of his uncle during the Nazi attack on Danzig’s Polish post offce, and even the cheap fzzy candies that he famously features in The Tin Drum. Strikingly, Grass proceeds from these images into an uncharacteristically analytic discussion of “memory” and the act of “remembrance.”

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Grass draws a distinction between memory (Gedächtnis) and remembrance (Erinnerung). He writes, “Remembrance is more than the memory’s trained accuracy. Remembrance is allowed to cheat, illustrate, pretend, but memory likes to act as an incorruptible accountant.”39 Grass contends that an author is a “professional rememberer”40 and must rely more upon remembrance to generate images that can produce moral growth in the public consciousness. He continues, “[so] – the author exploits his remembrance and, if necessary, the remembrance of fctional persons. Remembrance is to him a treasure trove, a garbage dump, an archive.”41 Grass’s distinction between memory and remembrance entails the former constitutes the “facts” that make up “history” in the intellectual or academic sense; on the other hand, history’s meaning or moral worth emanates from the ability of human persons, fctional or otherwise, to recall and recreate their lived experience. Here, Grass builds a sense of history more in common with ancient poetry’s emphasis on the moral meaning of lived experience than mere accuracy. Yet, this affnity for history’s moral content as opposed to its facticity does not entail that memory and remembrance never meet. Grass describes his writing as an attempt to return home, or at the very least, fnd a replacement homeland, an “Ersatzheimat.”42 However, this search requires the technical precision intellectual histories seek to provide in order to tell the writer where the stories are and whether they should be told. He writes, “Remembrance was milked with calculation, so that it fed a generous portion to an obsessive narrator who, from a special perspective, saw the great as small, the small as great.”43 “The facts” here represent the “milk” that the author pasteurizes with their “special perspective” that is fltered through their own “remembrance.” This allows the author to fnd what is missing from the world of “facts” or from the public imagination and provide nourishment for them. Grass provides some examples: he states that the plight of exploited immigrant workers in Germany from Lithuania, Poland, and the Soviet Union and the expulsion of the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) from the Sudetenland did not receive suffcient attention in fction or history.44 He also brings his attention to the then-current confict in the Balkans.45 Above all, Grass suggests that literature, namely postwar literature, possesses a responsibility to capture the voices of those dispossessed or killed in the war. However, these memories become a burden when not processed correctly or given time to pass into the social consciousness. That is, they can be used to further stun a people into complacency or fear of reprisal, as Grass contended was the case for modern Germany at the time of his death. To this end, Grass argues that the victims of violence (Opfer von Gewalt) possess “a right to forget” (das Recht, vergessen, ja)46 the guilt of their oppressors. This right is diffcult to practice, however, considering that many of these victims are dead, unable to return to the world and “forgive” those who have oppressed them. Thus, there exists a chasm between the past and present for Grass that can only be overcome by “remembrance.”

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He writes, “When we plan the future, the past has already left its scent in the so-called virginal terrain and erected signposts that lead back to the past.”47 Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”48 Benjamin’s sobering suggestion, however, does not imply that documents and artistic artifacts of civilizations should cease production. Here, the “pre-sent past” (Vergegenkunft) emerges again. In the perusal of documents and accounts of the past, fctive and “offcial,” citizens must choose which accounts of the past serve what ends; whether the past is ft to be sent into the present. As stated earlier, Grass mistrusts ideology but still wants memory to engage in politics and be conceived of politically. Yet, in many respects, politics cannot simply “do away” with ideology entirely without doing away with the moral concerns and concepts Grass wishes to realize politically. Thus, the problems of the past here must contend with the ethical quandaries of the present. Socialists and social democrats are not the only groups that practice remembrance, after all. Grass is not naïve enough to contend that art alone can provide a response to the excesses of neoliberal society. In his Nobel lecture, he says, “At present [literature’s] role is to entertain, to serve the fun culture, to deemphasize the negative side of things and give people hope, a light in the darkness.”49 In contrast, Grass maintains that his role in “contemporary art” is to reform language of its fascistic biases and offer a glimpse of a world often passed over by the “fun culture,” which he contends is stunningly similar to the fascist cult.50 To that end, the following “memory novels” discussed here provide a lucid account of Grass’s thinking during this “memory phase” of his career. The “memory milk” Grass writes of here subsists in his articulation of the many new diffculties created in the post-Soviet era of world politics. The nourishment subsists in the renewed call to resist totalitarian ideology and thoughtless consumerism. Yet, one should not forget that these novels do not represent any sort of “fnality” in Grass’s thought. They do not “solve” the problems of history, and they do not free those living in the present from the responsibility to remember the past well. Rather, they serve as lodestars on the path Grass takes to his position that writing, speaking, and acting represent fraught but necessary steps toward a better society.

Crabwalk: Forgetting What We Must Remember Crabwalk begins with a confession. “‘Why only now?’ He says, this person not to be confused with me […] Because I wanted to cry the way I did at the time, when the cry spread across the water, but couldn’t anymore.”51 The narrator of Crabwalk, Paul Pokriefke’s desire to cry, to mourn the loss of his son to Neo-Nazism and, later, to prison, evokes the postwar psychology of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, who claimed that the Germans who lived through World War II were a generation “unable to mourn.”52

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However, the “generation” here unable to mourn now includes the “sixtyeight” and “eight-nine” generations, whose members have inherited the guilt of Auschwitz from their parents. As Müller writes, “By 1979, Grass argued that guilt was being passed down the generations, comparing this process to the hereditary guilt depicted in the Old Testament. Schuld [guilt] now became like Schulden [debts] which could never be paid off.”53 In keeping with the religious/economic metaphor, Crabwalk argues that the wages of non-forgiveness is death. That is, the fragile consensus borne out of political bargaining and memorialization can collapse into ideological violence if the living memories of history’s victims are not acknowledged.54 Grass adds a caveat that he previously articulates with less maturity in Call of the Toad: the perpetrators of the Holocaust, the most unspeakable of national crimes, the Germans, also experienced terror in World War II at the hands of the Allies. And, suppression of that victimhood, of that pain, and its subsequent memorialization may result in the violent resurgence of German nationalism. For Grass, public and private speech acts, especially between generations, provide the salve for excessive repression. These speech acts are best facilitated amidst the institutional backdrop of a democratic order deeply concerned with its posterity – the “To Be Continued …” of Grass’s Nobel address. He contends here that the overwhelming focus on the Holocaust in the German historical discourse has left those outside the traditional victim-oppressor binary with no means to transmit their experiences into the political discourse, making nostalgic fascism a more attractive alternative to neoliberalism for them. Rather than viewing Germany’s identity as an unattainable ideal spawned by the incongruity of Germany’s varying dialects and histories, Grass contends that neoliberalism admits to only one “real” German identity: the bourgeois consumer. In a 2002 interview with New Left Review, Grass says, “What’s being sold today as neoliberalism is simply a return to the methods of nineteenth-century Manchester liberalism, in the belief that history can be rewound.”55 Yet, this neoliberal subject associated with Manchester liberalism cannot content itself with a life of hedonistic wealthgetting, according to Grass.56 Dissatisfed, the new neoliberal “unifed” German will look toward German identity in its history – and Grass fears that National Socialism will resurge as the only viable “unifed” alternative to the neoliberal subject. If Crabwalk has a practical moral message, it is: failing to suffciently deal with the German diaspora following World War II and its implications for other peoples will have disastrous outcomes for European politics. Briefy, Crabwalk concerns the family history of three generations of Pokriefkes. The narrator, Paul’s son, Konrad “Konny” Pokriefke, becomes obsessed with the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a decommissioned Strength through Joy (KdF (“Kraft-durch-Freude”)) cruise ship carrying refugees feeing Danzig by the Soviet Union on January 30, 1945, by speaking with his grandmother, Tulla, a recurring character in Grass’s fction.

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While on the ship, Tulla loses her parents and gives birth to Paul. Out of his obsession, Konny creates a website (blutzeuge.bz) detailing the history of the ship, its destruction, and its namesake: the Swiss National Socialist and Strasserite, Wilhelm Gustloff, who was killed by a Jewish teenager, David Frankfurter, and called a martyr by Adolf Hitler. Upon his arrest, Frankfurter is asked why he killed Gustloff, to which he responds, “Because I am Jewish.” Konny, donning the name Wilhelm in his chat room, begins a friendly rivalry with an ostensibly Jewish teenager bearing the name David. The two agree to meet in person at a decommissioned memorial to Gustloff. When “David” spits on the memorial, Konny produces a pistol and kills him. Konny tells the police that he killed David because “I am German.” At Konny’s trial, the prosecution reveals that “David” was the pseudonym of the German Gentile Wolfgang Stremplin, outraging Tulla. The court sentences Konny to prison and Paul visits him regularly, prompting him to abandon Neo-Nazism, symbolized by Konny breaking a model of the Wilhelm Gustloff. However, Paul’s concluding narration implies that Konny has become a martyr for online Neo-Nazis. From the very outset of Crabwalk, the guilt and trauma regarding the Gustloff’s sinking and its attendant tremendous loss of life follows the Pokriefkes like a Biblical curse. Paul was born on a lifeboat escaping the ship and Tulla’s hair turns white upon seeing “all them little children, head down in the water.”57 On the sinking itself, Paul writes, “This accursed thirtieth. How it clings to me, marks me.”58 The text’s maritime setting and allusions to curses and intergenerational confict evokes, for Gary Baker, Homer’s Odyssey, suggesting Grass uses the familial setting as a means of establishing a “middle voice.” According to Baker, the “middle voice” necessarily blurs the line between victim and perpetuator, suggesting a narratorial “capacity to absorb the meaning of both constructions.”59 Fitting the maritime theme of both Homer’s Odyssey and Grass’s work, Crabwalk makes references to many cities throughout Germany and the former Sudetenland: Berlin, Schwerin, Mölln, Davos, Danzig, etc. None of these locales represent a Heimat (homeland) for any of the characters, however. All of them except for Paul yearn for a more “authentic” existence in past German states. Fittingly for Grass, no “variation” on Germany represents the “authentic” “Germany.” It is up to the characters here to discover the language necessary to express their “metaphysical anxiety” regarding their place in history and use it.60 In other words, Crabwalk revives Classical questions regarding the polis applied to the modern nation-state: how can a city be constructed in speech? How can those living in “the middle” of history cope with their place therein and come to occupy a home? Grass gives a Classical answer to a Classical question: he emphasizes the import of intergenerational political speech. Despite the lack of homeland in Crabwalk, the text represents a brief homecoming for Grass. His evocation of Danzig in Crabwalk brings to mind the earlier Danzig Trilogy. The absurdity of people feeing a ship

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feeing a city feeing an army alludes to The Tin Drum’s opening chapters, wherein Oskar’s grandfather, Josef Kolzjaicek, fees Polish authorities by diving underwater, never resurfacing. The import there is that escapes beget other escapes – and no one evades death.61 Moreover, Crabwalk features many of Dog Years’s major characters, most notably Tulla Pokriefke. Harry Liebenau and Jenny also appear in the text as characters or references. In a moment of metatextual irony, Dog Years itself appears as a plot point, making Grass himself a character in his own fction. He writes, “Soon after the publication of that mighty tome, Dog Years, this material had been dumped at his feet. He – who else – should have been the one to dig through it, layer by layer.”62 The casual “who else?” here references Grass’s (and Tulla’s) presence as a “taboo-breaker” regarding German suffering. The historian R.M. Douglas notes that for many foreign citizens living in Germany, Crabwalk portended a return to unhealthy German obsessions with questions of innocence and guilt among the post-war generation.63 However, Thesz contends that Grass’s role as a “taboo-breaker” in the frst decade of the twenty-frst century was overstated.64 Douglas notes that the reticence of Germans to discuss the postwar expulsion problem and the loss of the Gustloff did not emerge from a “conspiracy of silence,”65 but from the fact the conversation itself remains fraught with questions as to the extent to which ethnic Germans complied with Nazism and, therefore, brought their tragic fates upon themselves following the war.66 Consequently, upon Crabwalk’s publication, Der Spiegel published as its cover story an article on Grass’s book and the Gustloff disaster, proclaiming the 1945 maritime tragedy, “The German Titanic.”67 Thus, Grass’s text and its attendant controversy were not lacking in media attention. Still, Grass depicts himself in the said text as a pitiable character, motivated more by maintaining his media image as a “taboo-breaker” than by a conscious attempt to break “taboos” about German victimhood following the collapse of Nazi Germany. Further, Grass appears in Crabwalk as a distant “mentor” fgure to Paul, guiding his writing and acting as a sort-of secular priest to Paul. Grass reassures Paul that his absence in Konny’s life was not the only factor contributing to Konny’s Nazism and his eventual murder of his friend and political opponent, Wolfgang Stremplin, after the latter spits on a memorial to the “martyr” Wilhelm Gustloff. Grass ironically detaches himself from the process of writing, both as a character in his own fction and as the “pope” of German letters. In keeping with previous endeavors to allow historical victims to speak through writing, Crabwalk seeks to memorialize oral traditions regarding the immediate postwar “population transfers” in writing.68 Konny’s obsession with the Gustloff disaster emerges from spoken conversations with his grandmother, Tulla Pokriefke. Konny’s simultaneous obsession with the historical fgure of Wilhelm Gustloff spawns from the internet’s contingent of Neo-Nazis, ready to converse with Konny about National Socialism and its “virtues.”

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It is important to note that Tulla, a young Nazi sympathizer in Dog Years, expresses socialism informed by her identity as a citizen of the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” of the German Democratic Republic. The discrepancy between Konny’s Nazism and Tulla’s socialism reveals a lacuna. While Tulla gladly recounts her experiences of trauma aboard the Gustloff to the young Konrad, she does not pass on any historical context or ideological values to him – Konny is utterly alone when it comes to fnding an ideological or historical account as to why such an event occurred and what its implications are. In fact, Tulla’s socialism “slips” when she is informed during Konny’s trial that his victim, Wolfgang, was not, in fact, Jewish but assumed a Jewish identity on the internet based on David Frankfurter, Wilhelm Gustloff’s Jewish assassin. Tulla says while “abandon[ing] all efforts to speak High German,” “What a swindle! How was my Konradchen supposed to know that this David was a fake Yid? So he was fooling himself and other folks, presenting himself all the time as a real Yid and going on and on about our Guilt.”69 Tulla’s slippage into her regional accent and youthful antiSemitism has a precedent in Dog Years where the young Tulla calls Eddie Amsel a “sheeny” while the latter paints a portrait of the Pokriefkes’ prized dog, Harras.70 In this brief outburst, Tulla unveils decades of repressed anti-Semitism and unexpressed animosity toward the contingencies of history: mocking the recently departed Wolfgang for his “role-playing as ‘fake yid.’” Yet, Wolfgang’s moonlighting as “David” reveals, too, a desire for Germany’s youth to participate in history by recreating it. Tulla’s outburst demonstrates the inadequacy of the German law system in its response to youth violence, especially this violence’s association with Germany’s Nazi past. Grass, in interviews, has described Tulla as a mouthpiece for his generation, albeit a very brusque one.71 To that end, Grass’s anti-unifcation stance bleeds out too here through Tulla, asking that after the collapse of the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State,” what identity can Tulla express beyond her personal experiences that, as Paul writes, have been “marked” by personal tragedy, Nazism, and Communism? Such a loss of identity occurs even before reunifcation with Tulla losing her family’s photo album and her parents aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Grass writes, “Tulla Pokriefke would never see the photo album and her parents ever again. I use this order deliberately, because I am fairly certain that the loss of the photo album was especially painful for Mother.”72 The loss of these pictures represents the loss of “remembrance,” meaning that only the “facts” of the Wilhelm Gustloff can now adequately stand in for Tulla’s memory, creating a vicious cycle of inter-generational ideological resentment. Grass juxtaposes Tulla’s postwar experience with his own.73 While Grass and Tulla both come from the Danzig Free City, Grass fnished the war in an American POW camp and found himself in Düsseldorf before the partition of Germany into East and West. Tulla, however, did not

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escape East Germany due to the Gustloff’s sinking and settled in Schwerin. In his speech before the Nobel Committee in 1999, three years prior to the publication of Crabwalk, Grass suggested that his writing was motivated in part by “Our duty to take the goosestep out of German, to lure it out of its idylls and fogged inwardness.” Further, “I imposed on myself before discovering the richness of a language I had all too sweepingly pronounced guilty.”74 Note here, Grass’s discovery of German as a language of richness, that deserves a future, was self-imposed – or, as Grass would say in a late interview “decided for me.”75 That is, Grass hoped to pursue writing as a deliberate form of “remembrance,” emotionally and intellectually weaving a human history from the pieces of memory and its attendance “archive.” In his Nobel lecture, Grass says: The only way writing after Auschwitz […] could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past to come to an end. Only then could postwar literature in Germany justify applying the generally valid ‘To Be Continued…’ […] and the much desired and prescribed forgetting be reversed with a steadfast ‘once upon a time’. (Grass, “To Be Continued,” p. 274) Grass, in Crabwalk, attempts to reverse this “forgetting” without a “once upon a time.” Whereas previous works use whimsical and disturbing magical realist tropes, Crabwalks’s events are depicted realistically without resorting to any magical elements. However, Grass uses water as a metaphor for time and history in this novel in order to present a facsimile of oral history that troubles offcial accounts of victimhood. Grass goes about this through the use of symbols. Namely, the symbol of the crab and its titular “scuttling” act as a metaphor for the “pre-sent past” (Vergegenkunft) and water serves as a symbol for history itself and submergence as a means of communing with others in and across time. The German word Gang commonly translates to “walk,” as Krishna Winston does in her translation of Crabwalk. However, Gang may also mean “path” or “passage” that one “walks.” The “scuttling” of the crab suggests a path through the narrow passage between victim and perpetrator, as Baker suggests. Grass writes through Paul Pokriefke, “But I’m not sure how to go about this: […] do I have to sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working forward fairly rapidly?”76 Paul suggests, however, “Only this much is certain: Nature, or to be more precise, the Baltic, said yea and amen more than half a century ago to everything that will have to be reported here.”77 Paul’s language, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, treats water as a symbol of history and one’s “submergence” in history as means of secular confession, implied by the “amen,” a conscious religious reference in a narrative otherwise untouched by religion.

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Paul’s employer is Günter Grass himself, here again, pointing to himself as an impediment to Germany’s ability to shuffe off the weight of its horrifc past by “interrupting” or “editing out” the voices of victims. Ironically, Grass is writing Paul’s account as an author, providing an imitation of the oral history Paul seeks in his “scuttling.” Continuing a metaphor Grass builds in Too Far Afeld, the “paternoster” in the offce building of history continues to move, but through speech, one can “direct” its movement, at least laterally. Grass, however, in editing Paul’s story, advises against jumping into the sea while weighted down. This confessionary act implies a “readiness” to rejoin history and its public structures. The “pre-sent past,” thus, works here as a therapeutic device, suggesting that through a more humanistic understanding of the past in keeping with the theme of “remembrance,” the present passage opens, suggesting the formation of political alternatives that prevent one from drowning in the cold seas of time. What then happens when guilt does not factor into one’s understanding of the past? Konny, unlike Paul, belongs to the “grandchildren’s generation” or “eighty-niners” [Enkelgeneration] who Grass praised in My Century as the cohort that destroyed the Berlin Wall. Konny, also unlike Paul, is not motivated by guilt to kill Wolfgang “David” Stremplin. Even though the foundations of Konny’s actions lie in the “traumatic past” that forestall communication between Paul and Konny,78 Konny seeks an ordering reason for the Gustloff’s sinking in his violent behavior. During his trial, Konny, when he learns of Wolfgang’s lack of Jewishness, says, “That doesn’t change the situation in the least. It was up to me to decide whether the person known to me as David was speaking as a Jew and behaving as such […] I fred as a matter of principle.”79 Later, Konny states, “I shot because I am German – and because the eternal Jew spoke through David,”80 evoking the infamous Nazi propaganda flm, The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude). In a sense, Konny plays a parody of a Nazi, or an approximation to what a German teenager imagines a Nazi to be. Late in his trial, Konny’s lawyer attempts to argue that his actions were not premediated and, therefore, deserve a lighter sentence of manslaughter. Konny argues contra his own lawyer: “I took my time and was perfectly calm. No, hate played no part in this. My thoughts were entirely practical.”81 In a particularly odd sequence, Konny suggests that the entire “triad” of actors in the Wilhelm Gustloff tragedy, Gustloff, Frankfurter, and the Soviet submarine commander, Aleksandr Marinseko, are all, in fact, heroes to their respective countries. In his trial, Konny says, “I call for the erection of a memorial on the southern bank of the lake, in the place where I honored the martyr’s memory in my own way, ….”82 Uncharacteristically for a Nazi, Konny then says, “I do not hesitate to say that there are likewise reasons on the Jewish side to honor [Frankfurter] … by means of a sculpture either in Israel, where David Frankfurter died at the age of eighty-two, or in Davos.”83 Konny denies “German exceptionalism” here – no appeal to the intrinsic virtues of the Aryan race or the special

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path (Sonderweg) of Germany into an “advanced culture” fnds its way into Konny’s speech, suggesting a kind of action motivated only by a misunderstanding of nationalism, identifying Germany itself with Nazi violence, but not the systematic genocidal violence of Auschwitz. Konny’s actions simultaneously refect a masculine exhibition of particularistic violence toward someone “behaving” as a Jew, yet devoid of any passion, refecting only “practicality.” Konny resembles his ideology-free father more than either would care to admit. Konny’s similarity to Paul reveals a historical paradox. The fnal words of Crabwalk read: “It doesn’t end. Never will it end.”84 If “it,” meaning history and its subsequent drama, does not end and oral history is the primary way those living in history understand it, then never ending may also mean constantly beginning. Why should Paul be “the middle voice” between Konny and Tulla? Why can Paul not be the beginning voice, pursuing a new approach to the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster? When Konny, at the end of the novel, smashes the Gustloff model Paul gifts him, does that not signal a new beginning?85 Likewise, when Paul notes that Konny’s personal prison library contains “two volumes of Kafka,” does this choice of literature reveal a new identifcation with the German literary tradition? These questions remain unanswered in Grass’s text, and this silence produces new questions. Namely, how does one not succumb to nihilism in light of such unceasing and horrifc historical “progress?” Even if one can choose the past they remember, what ensures that decision’s rightness or wrongness? Grass alludes to the presence of historical happenstance and chance in one’s life. Humans are, to borrow a Heideggerian phrase, “thrown” (geworfen) into the world and only choose the directionality of their path by choosing their own heroes and traditions made transparent in the world of human historicity. However, through an understanding of history marked by “remembrance,” one can orient themselves to the world in which they are thrown. This orienting of thrownness involves a conscious recognition of history and concepts, as well as how one receives and interprets information and language. While nothing other than the weight of history and posterity can “judge” the ethicality of one’s remembrance, the use of language can serve as a sort of “guard rail” for the “pre-sent past.” For instance, on the website the Neo-Nazis erect in Konny’s memory, the new “martyr” for National Socialism, a fairly uncommon word appears in the site’s URL: camaraderie (Kameradschaft). This word carries intense political import. In this context, Paul interprets this word as an identifcation with National Socialism. However, the word Kameradschaft also appears in the German leftist tradition to which Grass, Brecht, Böll, and a bevy of other German writers belong. The legendary Austrian director G.W. Pabst’s 1931 flm, emphasizing the possibility and importance of German–French cooperation on the cusp of looming Nazism, bears the oneword title: Kameradschaft. The ambiguity of such a term echoes a sentiment

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expressed earlier in Crabwalk: “Never, he said, should his generation have kept silent about such misery, […] merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the topic to the right wing.”86 The need for a community is apparent here, but more vital from the Grassian perspective is a community that speaks and listens to the voice of its vulnerable members. The Wilhelm Gustloff event and the word Kameradschaft provide sterling examples of the importance of the creative function of memory. Kameradschaft in Paul’s life, and perhaps in the German public sphere, means “Nazism.” In the “68 generation,” it meant Baader-Meinhof terrorism. In the pre-Nazi era, it meant international friendship, and so on. However, for Grass, these associations are made after the fact – the reception of ideas primarily occurs in response to events rather than in anticipation thereof. That certain concepts do not get forgotten in ideological violence remains of the utmost importance to Grass. Concepts like Kameradschaft, unity (Einheit), and culture (Kultur) must fnd their political expression outside state and ideological agents, that is, outside of “memory” and in “remembrance.” Here, Grass echoes the insistence of Bebra in The Tin Drum that “We must run the show. Or others will run us.”87 That is, if citizens and public fgures of goodwill do not take responsibility for events, concepts, words, and symbols, somebody else gladly will take possession of abstract notions of “time,” “remembrance” and “memory” itself. If Grass’s “political” novels represented Grass’s vision of an “anti-nationalist nationalism,” here Grass maintains an “anti-populist populism.” Citizens must take responsibility and control of their own language or other groups will. Grass’s continued focus on public speech, however, deeply refects memory as movement through the middle voice’s “path.” Like the heroes of Greek poetry, all individuals living in history, even if that history is “empty time,” fnd themselves in medias res in their own lives, standing betwixt the past and present – full of memories of the past and anxieties regarding the future. When Grass “predicts” the future, his divinations foretell human extinction, environmental catastrophe, and ecological degradation.88 The future does not exist for Grass – only the past remembered well and remembered poetically can serve as a guide because, following the “pre-sent past” (Vergegenkunft), the past bleeds into the present and carries individuals into the present. The future is, in fact, a construct of the past and the remembrance of those who lived it. The motion Grass suggests here is that of the crab, scuttling backward to move forward, ducking in and out of the past in light of the present. Grass does not, however, reserve this task for his fctional characters. As Braun repeatedly points out, Grass treats himself as a fctional subject par excellence. In From the Diary of a Snail, Grass paints “the portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man” – viewing himself as a product of his own construction and literary repute. Snail, however, only shows Grass dipping his toe – or claw – into the cold waters of history. Grass would fully immerse himself in his own past in his next major work, Peeling

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the Onion, presenting a view of himself that would inalterably transform his reputation as “Germany’s Pope” and push the process of memory politics to their absolute limit. This new view, nevertheless, deconstructs Grass’s own literary and intellectual persona, presenting him as an observer of his own past for the frst time rather than through fctional personages.

Peeling the Onion: Abdicating a Literary Papacy It is impossible to discuss Grass’s autobiographical novel, Peeling the Onion, without discussing Grass’s 2006 revelation that he was conscripted into the Waffen-SS as a teenager. While previously open about his role as a tank gunner in the Wehrmacht, even writing a fctionalized account of this time in From the Diary of a Snail, Grass never spoke about the extent of his involvement with National Socialism except with other members of Gruppe 47. Grass claims they were uninterested in Grass’s involvement with the SS.89 In his 2013 interview with Louisiana Channel, Grass claims he tried to reveal his SS involvement as early as 1960s but was dissuaded by other members of Gruppe 47. According to Grass, they said that modern Germany was “uninterested” in the past crimes of individuals, opting instead to focus on Germany’s economic recovery, especially following the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). Some survey data and historical evidence corroborate Gruppe 47’s claims. The historian R.M. Douglas writes that following the war and its subsequent resettlement, German citizens were very apt to blame the Soviet Union and Communism for their losing the war as well as their subsequent poor treatment. This anti-communist sentiment allowed the Christian Democrats, headed by Konrad Adenauer, to win the frst Federal elections in 1949.90 As a result, Grass’s writing, especially the Danzig Trilogy, employs autobiographical renderings of himself through fctional characters. Nevertheless, Grass’s reputation as Germany’s most preeminent writer and public intellectual declined sharply and seemingly overnight. According to Siegfried Mews, an April 2006 poll in the German cultural magazine Cicero ranked Grass as the most infuential German countryman or woman. The same magazine ranked Grass twelfth by October.91 Grass’s declining reputation extended beyond Germany as the Nobel Peace laureate Lech Walęsa of the Polish anti-communist organization Solidarity suggested that Grass’s honorary citizenship to Gdańsk be stripped.92 Further, Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany rebuked Grass, leading to the withdrawal of an offer for an honorary doctorate from Israeli Netanya Academic College.93 Grass’s SS controversy can best be encapsulated in the German historian and public intellectual Joachim Fest’s admonition, “I can’t understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, and a rather smug one, could pull this one off.”94 In a 2010 interview, Grass discussed the discourse surrounding his SS confession: “What I do is sometimes – at least in Germany – met with

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wounding campaigns […] I’ve decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn’t feel any more.”95 This revelation and its fallout overshadowed the book it preceded. Subsequently, these revelations also overshadowed the thematic continuity between Crabwalk and Peeling the Onion. In Crabwalk, characters bemoan their “inability to mourn” the past, refusing to confess their victimhood and acquiescence to extremist ideologies that bring about that victimhood, blurring the line between victim and perpetrator. Peeling the Onion immediately exposes Grass’s silence regarding his role in the SS: “Today, as in years past, the temptation to camoufage oneself in the third person remains great.”96 Just as another German Pope did in 2013, Grass abdicated his role as the “Pope” of German letters. There is absolutely no ambiguity regarding Onion’s narrator. Günter Grass is deconstructing himself as an individual who experienced history frsthand rather than as a writer who recounts the experiences of others. What does Grass’s self-deconstruction in this autobiographical novel reveal politically? In Onion, Grass shows his readers how the “sausage is made,” as it were. Like The Tin Drum, Grass employs unreliable narration to reveal the impossibility of appealing to the past without poeticism. However, unlike The Tin Drum, Onion tells its readership its narration is unreliable. Grass sprinkles all sorts of “honest lies” into his fctionalized account of his childhood: phrases like “I can’t remember” and “It didn’t bother me” and “Wedontdothat” recur throughout the text. These verbal motifs prompt the reader to not only distrust Grass’s recollection as narrator, but to doubt Grass’s revisiting his topic-of-topics, his petite bourgeois Danzig childhood and the rise of Nazism, as an author. In Snail, Grass speaks of himself as two people: himself as a writer and as a celebrity. The goal there was to present a sense whereby Grass’s reputation distanced himself from his “authentic” self, his art. In Onion, Grass reverses this equation: Grass, as the public intellectual, crafts a novel that brings his “authenticity” as a writer and class historian into question. Grass’s radical self-doubt here points to a skepticism of politics itself. If one cannot recall one’s own life with precision, how does one’s ability to prescribe ethnic and political categories and identities on others fare? To Grass, the pre-sent past’s (Vergegenkunft) confation of the past and present reveals a sense whereby individuals living in nation-states in the twentyfrst century are “utterly dependent” upon others, not only for material support, but to verify their own identity as well. The self is unknown to the self without the other. Moreover, the other and the self cannot communicate without a shared conception of narratorial and political memory that can give life meaning in the face of empty time. Yet, the sense of shared struggle may not be enough to sustain a polity. National Socialism represents an extreme form of solidarity among a type of person, while radically excluding Jews, Romani persons, socialists, communists, and homosexuals to the point of imprisonment or death. While the past places a burden upon

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the present, it also produces a power whereby those in the present may draw upon these histories and their moral content to make decisions about the future of a polity, even if that present must contend with the existence of ideology. Consequently, many of Grass’s recollections in Peeling the Onion involve public places, but not the people who occupy those spaces. According to Thesz, Grass interacts with objects rather than persons in Onion, fnding the sources of his recollection in forgotten ephemera and memorabilia, offering a kind of Proustian refection upon his past.97 Grass dwells deeply on the social function of objects and places of memory rather than their content so as to ascertain specifc characteristics of human beings. Namely, he relates these “places of memory” to the imperfect ability to recall the “facts” from the “storehouse of memory.” Rather, in Onion, Grass argues that remembrance trumps memory; that the “objective” objects of human activity cannot remember for us – only fawed creatures with a limited capacity to remember well can. Grass writes, “Found objects, which, when invoked with suffcient intensity, will begin to reveal their mysteries.”98 He fnds a condition in his own life he terms “the third hunger (Der dritte Hunger)” which he describes as “The need to make an image for myself of everything standing still or in motion and thus of every object that throws a shadow and even of the invisible, the Holy Ghost and Its Intimate Enemy, that ever effervescent capital.”99 To wit, Grass associates memory deeply with artistic creation. Here, Grass evokes a famous quote from The Tin Drum: “Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours.”100 Objects, whether found or created, are not passive “things”; they participate in human being through their “witnessing” human activity. That is, they can recall perfectly, what they cannot do is remember in the fawed and guilt-ridden way human beings do, making the need to rely on “remembrance” rather than “memory.” As a result, Grass evokes the symbol of the “onion,” writing, “Memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so that we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.”101 Extending the metaphor, Grass writes, “The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth.”102 The “truth” of remembrance here is separate from the “facts” of memory. What truth does the onion reveal? Paradoxically, the knowledge that memory can never perfectly capture the vividness and diversity of life as lived. Rather, writing captures in “amber” the social and political import of lived history – it transforms “history” into objects, ready to reproduce for others to “peel” their own memories. He writes, “Amber may tell us more than we wish to remember: it preserves what should have been digested and secreted long ago. It retains everything it receives in its soft, still liquid state. It refutes excuses.”103 To follow Grass’s penchant for Catholic

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imagery, Peeling the Onion’s narrative serves as a monstrance around the work’s central claim: The songs are still there too: ‘Onward, onward! Trumpets are blaring their fanfare! Onward, onward! Youth knows nothing of danger!’ Claiming ‘They seduced us!’ does not excuse the youths who sang them and hence does not excuse me. No, we let ourselves, I let myself, be seduced. (Ibid, p. 36) More than half a century after the fact, Grass’s text undoes the claims of ignorance by the “anti-air” Generation regarding its role in the rise of Nazism. Grass reiterates his insistence in Cat and Mouse that the German youth, in Danzig and otherwise, approached Nazism with great aplomb and enthusiasm. Grass writes, “Even through the present, with the Führer’s speeches, the blitzkriegs, submarine heroes, ace pilots, and suchlike military details, was a subject I knew backward of forward.”104 This knowledge and excitement was facilitated through the image, “Not one newsreel failed to show submarines returning home victorious […] I had plenty of opportunity to picture myself swathed in oilskins, covered with spray, spyglass trained on the dancing horizon.”105 To directly link Onion to Crabwalk, Grass, after witnessing a newsreel displaying reports on the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster, recounts: “I thus imagined what those seventeen year-old doomed to an early death in the icy Baltic must have had in their sailor-capped heads: …. Like me, they believed in a miracle: the fnal victory.”106 Further, the call of military service inspired by the Gustloff disaster was treated as a much-needed respite from the petite bourgeois world of debt collectors, grocery stores, post offces, church, and school. Grass states that “It took all of an hour to reach the goal of my dreams of heroism.”107 Grass’s “dreams of heroism” never came to fruition. In training, Grass encountered much of the same boredom he found in the schoolhouse. Instead of teachers bemoaning the loss of student morality, Grass met corporals who yelled Heideggerian phrases at him and young Jehovah’s Witness pacifsts. Grass writes, “The Heideggerian turns of phrase of a corporal who claimed to have studied philosophy threaded their way through our school slang.”108 Seeking an escape from the boredom that arose from Grass’s frst unsuccessful attempt at escaping boredom, Grass greeted his conscription into the Waffen-SS with a sense of excitement and anxiety. Upon learning about the frebombing of Dresden, Grass remarks, “A chorus sang ‘If Others Prove Untrue, Yet We Shall Steadfast Be,’ the song of the Waffen SS.”109 Reiterating a theme from Cat and Mouse, Grass spends much of his novel discussing the fow of time he experienced rather than any nationalistic depiction of wartime glory. “After is always before. What we call the present, this feeting nownownow is constantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to

108 “Distant but Not Foreign” only in lead-soled shoes.”110 According to Carol Costabile-Heming, time in Peeling the Onion works in a linear but episodic manner.111 True to form, Grass describes the decimation of a squad he joins with after the Battle of the Bulge in third person with particular reference to time. “He [Grass] is still armed, still holding his submachine gun at the ready. A gas mask dangles uselessly from him like an elongated drum.”112 Two items of enormous importance emerge from Grass’s description of his “comrades’” deaths. First, Grass, at the beginning of the memoir, describes the third person as a form of “hiding,” of “receding” into fction, away from one’s own memory. Here, Grass takes out the amber because the onion has failed him.113 In the scene described above, he evokes the onion, “He looks like a character who has escaped from a Grimm’s fairy tale. He is about to cry. He clearly doesn’t like the story in which he appears.”114 This scene differs greatly from the fctional persona Grass invents for himself in Snail. Here, Grass is himself not a character. And, Grass the author invites his readers, living in the postwar world, to take pity upon the amberized image of Grass the boy, forced to kill in pursuit of some type of national glory. Second, Grass casts doubt upon his own account, prompting his resorting to the amber. Later in the text, he writes, “Memory likes to refer to blind spots. What has stuck turns up uncalled for, under various guises; it enjoys disguise. Often it gives only vague information.”115 The image Grass describes above, again, focuses more on Grass’s “disguise,” his SS uniform, and his father’s watch, a perfect combination of nationalist “elite” soldier and a grocer’s son. These two images come to their thematic conclusion when after Grass and his “unit” are captured and placed in a POW. camp, they demand an extra ration of brandy in observance of Hitler’s birthday. “Isn’t today Adolf’s birthday? So where’s the extra ration? And the chocolate, the cigarettes, a shot of brandy for the toast! Heil, mein Führer!”116 The “Heil!” is ironic, but it is the irony of desperation. The only place to turn for Grass, and much of the German people, is the bourgeois world of postwar consumer capitalism. Time may have stopped for Grass here, but it continued apace for those living in the postwar West. As established earlier, Grass lived a public life witnessing and commenting upon history frsthand. However, he dedicates none of his memoir’s space to recounting tales of Willy Brandt, German reunifcation, or cavorting with literati like Salman Rushdie or Volker Schlöndorf. Instead, Grass recounts his “propaganda visit” to Dachau, attending art school, and receiving an Olivetti typewriter upon which he writes The Tin Drum as a wedding present. In a word, Grass ruminates on what he considered his biggest mistake, his youthful Nazism that “he allowed to seduce him.” As Anne Fuchs writes, Onion represents a confessional narrative that reveals the guilt and shame of one’s past misdeeds with the renewed promise of a future where one can come to terms with this shameful past.117

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Onion’s narrative ends when Grass begins writing The Tin Drum, suggesting a sense of circularity. It is only through public engagement can those who have acquiesced to evil can overcome their personal, and national, sense of guilt and responsibility. And even if they succeed at this task, they cannot wholly overturn guilt so much as it can illuminate it, making sense of regret accessible to those living in history. The fruits of this illumination lie outside the author’s control – and when they preserve the image the onion provides with amber, the author places such a pristine image in a public space, accessible to all who seek it. Grass cannot dictate the ideological content of the image of himself, crying, facing death with a submachinegun in hand. Just as Konny with the Wilhelm Gustloff, this image can be mobilized in a Nazi direction, implicating Grass as a victim of Allied aggression. Yet he explicitly suggests a direction he wants his images to take. “In this debate among the gods of the existentialist doctrine of salvation […], I took sides – frst gingerly, then vehemently with Camus. But I went further: […] I made stone rolling my daily discipline. I liked that Sisyphus.”118 To Grass, remembrance can never end because the past does not end. Just as Sisyphus rolls the boulder up the hill daily, so must those who lived through the traumatic past of the war remember their place in that history. However, while the guilt cannot subside, the responsibility can be faced collectively and publicly through a sense of forgiveness, prompted through literary confession. The past is ahead of us, prompting one to return to its origin in order to understand the fault line between that which humanity should not forget and that which it must remember. Still, Grass, following Camus and the image of Sisyphus, suggests that a commitment to and a love of life itself can aid in the need to remember well – keeping hold of the moral worth of the individual and society, while hopefully discarding the resentments and anxieties that memory can instill.

Grass: Peeled, Not Chopped Through Grass’s distinction between chopping and peeling the onion, he evokes numerous references to cooking in Snail. In Snail, Grass uses cooking as a metaphor for political activity, suggesting political action requires a sense of taste, patience, and fnesse. Here, Grass takes the metaphor a step back. In order to reach the point of “cooking” in politics, the food must be prepared – the onion has to be peeled in order to be cut. And, cutting the onion in such a way as to be ft for cooking requires a certain mastery so as not to befoul the ingredients. As Salman Rushdie points out in his essay on Grass, “The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images.”119 As Grass implies in Onion, the “stuff” of metaphor must be borne across as well. Memory provides the raw material, the main ingredient of political life for Grass in this late phase of his literary career. But the goal remains political action.

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The key feature of the three texts discussed in this chapter is movement across time. Whether through the highways of German history, the seas of time, or the kitchen of political memory itself, Grass highlights movement as a major feature of memory and life itself. Memory aids the process of “bearing across.” Just as Grass reminds us that “Funerals always make you think of other funerals”120 in The Tin Drum, here memories remind one of other memories. Furthermore, metaphors help one recall other metaphors. Metaphors provide the means of traversal from time to time. In a sense, metaphors help those in the seemingly horizonless morass of neoliberalism “fnd land” for the migrants of time Rushdie describes in his essay on Grass. However, where does the metaphor take these migrants of time? Onion begins with Grass returning to the end of his childhood and ends with Grass recounting the beginning of his writing career. Crabwalk, however, provides a very sobering vision of where metaphor will take us: nowhere. Time greets those living in history whether they possess a homeland or not – and the lack of homeland does not shelter one from ideology. In fact, it often breeds resentment and a desire for vengeance often found in ideology. Grass suggests the issue of modern politics is not primarily a question of “when” but “where” in this “memory” phase of his work. The need for a dwelling place, capable of providing ontic migrants with a sense of danger and adventure so as to avoid the temptation of violent ideology in the midst of empty time, overwhelms Grass’s fction, especially his “memory fction.” As Thesz reminds readers of Grass, he places a high premium on public speech, to “speak out” on issues of supreme political importance.121 But seldom do Grass scholars emphasize Grass’s close attention to familial drama. Crabwalk’s tragic character subsists in its characters’ unwillingness to speak trans-generationally. As a result, they, and Germany by extension, lose their connection to the shared memory of the past, resorting only to bourgeois social climbing or radicalism. Their homeland [Heimat] resides before them, but neither Paul, Tulla, nor Konny will reside there – their sense of belonging and, therefore, of acting, thinking, and willing together sinks into the waters of time like a decommissioned Strength through Joy ship. In keeping with Grass’s 1974 essay, “Roll Your Own,” in the absence of a communal order that can facilitate memory, the writer must reach those lost in the cloud of collective unknowing and bring their intuitions closer to a concept of the common good. Grass writes that writing, like smoking, is “cheap. Lots of fun. Passes the time.”122 However, writing can only conjure memories and point where they can go; it can never substitute the need for political action, nor can it, on its own, “advance” any sort of historical process or “dialectic.” The writer can suggest how society should take shape but cannot seize this matter and mold it like a sculptor. At the end of the day, one must “roll their own,” whether “it” is a society, a home, or a community. Grass advocated a democratic socialism that opposes neoliberalism and seeks a renewed relationship between historical victims and perpetrators,

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but by the time of “Ich erinne mich,” Grass had given up on his speechwriting career. He had not yet abandoned his role as Germany’s literary pope. In 2006, he did just that, but still did not stop writing. However, his writing took on more ironical and acerbic qualities; his 2012 poem, “What Must Be Said” (“Was gesagt werden muss”), sharply criticized Israeli foreign policy, leading to a prohibition against Grass preventing him from entering Israel. Grass explored other unseemly topics in his later writings. For instance, he describes making his own funeral arrangements and sharply criticizes Angela Merkel in essays collected in the posthumous volume, Of all that Ends (vonne Endlichkait). Grass lost his crown, but kept his tongue, offering a path whereby other writers, German and beyond, could build upon the legacy of German letters.

Notes 1 Preece, Julian. The Life and Work of Günter Grass. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. xvi. 2 See: Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006. 3 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics: From The Tin Drum to Crabwalk. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008, p. 264. 4 Ibid, p. 271. 5 Ibid, p. 267. 6 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass: Stages of Speech, 1959-2015. Rochester: Camden House, 2018, p. 130. 7 Grass, Günter. Too Far Afeld. Paperback First Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 2000, p. 55. 8 Ibid, p. 57. 9 Ibid, p. 49. 10 Ibid, p. 110. 11 Ibid, p. 111. 12 Ibid, p. 60. 13 Ibid, p. 476. 14 Ibid, p. 158. 15 Ibid, p. 159. 16 Brockmann, Stephen. “Günter Grass and German Unifcation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 129. 17 Ibid, p. 131. 18 Grass, Günter. Too Far Afeld, p. 311. 19 Ibid, p. 312. 20 Ibid, p. 348. 21 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 142. 22 Grass, Günter. Too Far Afeld, p. 5. 23 Ibid, p. 350. 24 Ibid, p. 640. 25 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 131. 26 Ibid, p. 385. 27 Ibid, p. 385.

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28 Grass, Günter. The Meeting at Telgte. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1981, p. 189. 29 Grass, Günter. Too Far Afeld, p. 344. 30 Ibid, p. 588. 31 Ibid, p. 603. 32 Ibid, p. 658. 33 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 272. 34 Brockmann, Stephen. “Günter Grass and German Unifcation,” p. 133. 35 Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015, pp. 8–9. 36 Grass, Günter. The Call of the Toad. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. 206. 37 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Interview by MarcChristoph Wagner. Video. Translated by Martin Kogi, August 2013. http:// channel.louisiana.dk/video/gunter-grass-writing-against-wall. 38 “Und ich glaube, ohne diesen kleinen Aufsatz hätte ich nicht den Mut gehabt, selber autobiographisch zu schreibe.” Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In Letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst (Lately: A Conversation in Autumn). Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017, pp. 106–7; Translation mine. 39 “Erinnerung ist […] mehr als das auf Genaukeit zu schulende Gedächtnis. Erinnerung darf schummeln, schönfärben, vortäuschen, das Gedächtnis hingegen tritt gerne als unbestechlicher Buchhalter auf.” Grass, Günter. “Ich erinne mich.” (“I Remember Myself.”) In Die Zukunft Der Erinnerung (The Future of Remembrance), by Günter Grass, Miłosz Czesław, Wisława Szymborska, and Tomas Venclova, edited by Martin Wälde. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2001, p. 28; Translation mine. 40 “Der Schriftsteller erinnert sich professionell.” Ibid, p. 29; Translation mine. 41 “So beutet er seine Erinnerung aus und notfalls die Erinnerung frei erfundener Personen. Erinnerung ist ihm Fundgrube, Müllhalde, Archive.” Ibid, p. 29; Translation mine. 42 Grass, Günter. “Ich erinne mich,” p. 29. 43 “Mit Kalkül wurde Erinnerung abgemolken, auf daß sie in satten Portionen einen ichversessenen Erzähler verköstigte, der aus besonderer Perspektive das Kleine groß, das Große klein sah.” Ibid, p. 30; Translation mine. 44 “Für viele zu spat, sind wir gegenwärtig gezwungen, uns an das Schicksal Hunderttausender Zwangsararbeiter zu erinnern, die aus Polen, aus Litauen, der Sowjetunion und vielen anderen Ländern kamen und an die Fließbänder der deutschen Kriegsindustrie gestellt wurden.” Ibid, p. 32; Translation mine. 45 “Das Schweigen der Opfer ist dennoch unüberhörbar. Da niemals Frieden war und die Gegenwart auf dem Balkan und im Kaukasus an vielen Schrekensorten dieser Welt, von Mord, Flucht und Vertreibung bestimmt ist, wird das Erinnern als Nachhall überlebter Leiden nigh aufhörren.” Ibid, p. 32; Translation mine. 46 Ibid, p. 33; Translation mine. 47 Wenn wir Zukunft planen, hat die Vergangenheit im angeblich jungfräulichen Gelände bereits ihre Duftmarken hinterlassen und Wegweiser gepfockt, die in abgelbte Zeiten zurückführen.” p. 32; Translation mine. 48 Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books, 1988, p. 256. 49 Grass, Günter. “To Be Continued...” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Inc., 2004, p. 271. 50 Ibid, p. 274. 51 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2003, p. 1. 52 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 160.

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53 Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unifcation and National Identity. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 80. 54 Fittingly, Grass found inspiration for writing Crabwalk in right-wing violence towards Turkish immigrants in the early 1990s. Thesz (2018) writes, “Grass’s novella is informed by incidents of right-wing violence that took place after reunifcation. Konny hails from Mölln, a small West German town where three Turkish citizens were killed in an attack by young neo-Natzis on November 22, 1992 […], to which Grass alludes in the cycle of sonnets, Novemberland (1993)” (p. 163). 55 Grass, Günter. The Progressive Restoration. Interview by Pierre Bourdieu. New Left Review, Text, April 14, 2002. https://newleftreview.org/II/14/pierre -bourdieu-gunter-grass-the-progressive-restoration. 56 In his 2013 interview with Louisiana Channel, Grass suggests that “This neoliberalism” that has taken hold of Western Europe represents a threat to democracy itself, suggesting that neoliberalism has “leveled social behavior” by unleashing “the individual, with its predatory mentality” that is “in fact a relapse into the nineteenth century.” Grass calls neoliberalism “the curse of our time.” 57 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk, p. 149. 58 Ibid, p. 122. 59 Baker, Gary. “The Middle Voice in Günter Grass’s Crabwalk.” The German Quarterly 83, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 230–44, p. 231; This “blurring” fts considering Grass consciously points out that Gustloff was, in fact, carrying materiel in addition to refugees. 60 Ibid, p. 230. 61 Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum. First Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage International, 1990, p. 36. 62 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk, p. 79. 63 Douglas, R.M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 359. 64 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 158. 65 Douglas, R.M. Orderly and Humane, p. 2. 66 Ibid, p. 3. 67 Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, p. 315. 68 Ibid, p. 318. 69 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk, p. 195; emphasis mine. 70 Grass, Günter. Dog Years. Greenwich: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966, p. 173. 71 Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In Letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst, p. 84. 72 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2003, p. 115. 73 Grass’s inspiration to join the Wehrmacht came from seeing a newsreel of the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster, a fact Grass and I explore in Peeling the Onion and the next section of this chapter, respectively. 74 Grass, Günter. “To Be Continued...,” p. 274. 75 “Grass, Günter. Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” 76 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk, p. 3. 77 Ibid, p. 3. 78 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 160. 79 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk, p. 196. 80 Ibid, p. 204. 81 Ibid, p. 209.

114 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

“Distant but Not Foreign” Ibid, p. 207. Ibid, p. 207. Ibid, p. 234. Thesz (2018), following Katharina Hall, argues that Konny’s actions emerge from a “general desire for recognition” “reminiscent of Mahlke’s dreams of lecturing from the stage of his former high school’s auditorium” in Grass’s frst novella, Katz und Maus (p. 167). Likewise, Thesz writes that Konny’s destroying the model as “a sign that Konny is still prone to extreme and performative action” (p. 169). Ibid, p. 103. Grass, Günter The Tin Drum, p. 114. See Shaf, Monika. “Günter Grass’s Apocalyptic Visions.” In The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass, edited by Stuart Taberner, 111–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Grass, Gunter. “Gunter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Douglas, R.M. Orderly and Humane, pp. 315–6. Mews, Siegfried. Günter Grass and His Critics, pp. 2–3. Ibid, p. 336. Ibid, p. 336; Additionally, in 2012, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai would condemn Grass and declare him persona non-grata following the publication of Grass’s poem “Was gesagt werden must” (“What Must be Said”). Fest, Joachim quoted in Seiffert, Rachel. “Not Me: A German Childhood by Joachim Fest - Review.” The Guardian, August 10, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/10/not-me-joachim-fest-review. Jaggi, Maya. “A Life in Writing: Günter Grass.” The Guardian, November 1, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/01/gunter-grass-interview-maya-jaggi. Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2007, p. 1. Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 175. Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion, p. 54. Ibid, p. 248. Grass, Günter The Tin Drum, p. 192. Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion, p. 3. Ibid, p. 4; In this quote, Grass draws an immediate juxtaposition between the self-induced “peeling” of memory’s onion as opposed to the onion-“chopping” seen in The Tin Drum. The difference consists in the intentionality and care put into “peeling” the layers of memory, as opposed to the evisceration of chopping, suggesting exploitation and commodifed nostalgia. See Chapter II, “Class,” for a prolonged discussion on the place of the onion in The Tin Drum. Ibid, p. 60. Ibid, p. 30. Ibid, p. 69. Ibid, p. 71. Ibid, p. 71. Ibid, p. 73. Ibid, p. 117. Ibid, p. 144. Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne. “Overcoming the Silence: Narrative Strategies in Günter Grass’s “Beim häuten der Zwiebel.” Colloquia Germanica 41, no. 3 (2008): 247–61, p. 249. Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion, p. 137. Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne. “Overcoming the Silence,” p. 254. Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion, p. 136.

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115 Ibid, p. 162. 116 Ibid, p. 146. 117 Fuchs, Anne quoted in Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne. “Overcoming the Silence,” p. 250. 118 Grass, Peeling the Onion, p. 337. 119 Rushdie, Salman. “Introduction.” In On Politics and Writing, 1967–1983. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. p. xii. 120 Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum, p. 402. 121 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, p. 1. 122 Grass, Günter. “Roll Your Own.” In The Günter Grass Reader, edited by Helmut Frielinghaus, 41–4. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2004, p. 44.

5

Conclusion Penelope and Sisyphus

Reading Grass after “The End of History” Another, more contemporary, story we like to tell ourselves in the West: following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the defeat of Communism signaled the indefnite success of liberal democracy and its attendant neoliberal capitalism. The age of great ideological wars and class struggle was said to be at an end, replaced with the coming of an “end of history” foretold by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama.1 However, one must take the counsel of the historian Adam Tooze into account when evaluating Fukuyama’s thesis: to Tooze, Fukuyama thought West Germany was the country that most clearly signaled the turn away from history, not the United States.2 Consequently, Germany found itself at “ground zero” at the beginning of the end of history. Dissatisfed East Germans soundly rejected the prospect of extending Soviet-style socialism in Germany and voted overwhelmingly for Helmut Kohl for Chancellor (Bundeskanzler) and German reunifcation in 1990. As described in Too Far Afeld, the Treuhand corporation oversaw the wholesale privatization of the former East German state, incorporating it into the capitalistic West. Seemingly overnight, Germany ceased its role as an object of global economic and foreign policy and became a major power in its own right, eventually taking on a signifcant role in the European Union and committing frmly to the project of free trade and “international community.” Thus, Germany currently serves as both a major component of and a litmus test for the neoliberal project’s sustainability in the twenty-frst century. As expounded in the last two chapters, Grass held considerable skepticism regarding the future of neoliberalism, warning that the expansion of the market into the realm of international politics would yield disastrous implications for a democratic response to a so-called “globalization backlash.”3 In a 2013 interview with the Danish museum “Louisiana Channel,” Grass exclaimed that “Currently we’re seeing the unnecessary decay of our democracies.” In the same interview, he called neoliberalism “the curse of our time” as it “has unleashed the individual, with its predatory mentality.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003276074-5

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Simply put, Grass admits that the key task of his project, to “write against the fow of time,”4 failed. Time kept fowing, whether one wrote or not, and the consequences of this continuing fow meant the erosion of democratic rights due to a type of “political atrophy.” The advance of the bourgeois consumer society Grass railed against in The Tin Drum continued unabated, replacing collective political action with the naked self-interest of market forces. While Grass contributed to the SPD’s victory over the nationalist NPD in 1969, he could not repeat this feat in subsequent decades. The success of populist right-wing parties in the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil in the twenty-frst century testify to the failure of writing alone as a strong bulwark of European-style social democracy. In other words, liberal and social democracies currently face their greatest challenge since World War II. By the end of Grass’s life, it appeared more evident that this battle of ideologies cannot be fought effectively through the written word – in no small part because literature’s infuence upon politics cannot be measured in a direct way. So, where do these sad facts leave Grass? He cautioned that those living in an era seemingly removed from the struggles and contingencies of the past must consciously remember these struggles so as not to allow their fruits to vanish in a self-imposed ideological delusion of “endless progress” or “racial purity.” Whether that past involves the trauma of living through the rise of Nazism or the pressures of fame and the temptation to abandon political life altogether, the historical and political circumstances that built the world should not be left to professional historians, or even professional writers, but should be practiced as a political concept in everyday life. Although writing itself cannot overcome the conditions of political life, whether they are dismal or halcyon, it can weave a tradition that values life and the continuity of a people. Still, as Grass demonstrates, this tradition can never be fnal or total. It must admit to an ethical and temporal openness that allows for change and correction over the span of time. While writing cannot overcome the world, its concepts may inform political action and reveal its moral and practical limits to its inhabitants.

Class, Politics, and Memory The September 11 attacks, the American invasion of Iraq, the 2008 collapse of international fnance, and now COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have all thoroughly refuted the idea that history has “ended.” In asserting that “democracy is not set in stone,” Grass reestablishes not only history but the idea that it can sweep away decades, if not centuries, of democratic reforms won through political struggle and armed confict. In this same interview Grass inserts a line that appears insignifcant but reveals more when viewed in light of his overall project and conception of history. “[Neoliberalism’s unleashing of the individual’s predatory mentality] is in

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fact a relapse into the nineteenth century.”5 He alludes to the idea that while the nineteenth century produced liberalism which justifed the expansion of capitalism into the domain of “traditional society,” it also produced democratic reforms and rights that could constrain the deleterious effects and uncertainty of capitalism. In Grass’s evocation of this concept in his plea to recall the nineteenth century, nearly all the major concepts of his career coalesce. People cannot afford to forget the past when taking the demands of history and politics seriously. While history has obviously not “ended”, the “goods” of neoliberalism can end and will end if the past is not treated with a certain amount of skeptical reverence. “Reverence” here means respect toward the sacrifce and pain individuals inficted in pursuit of a better world, even if these sufferings failed to produce that better world or resulted in fascism. “Skeptical,” on the other hand, denotes an aversion to interests, ideologies, and pathologies that deny the reality of human suffering or, worse, attempt to convince people that human suffering can be transformed into a universal solution for the exigencies of politics and history. To Grass, literature, poetry, and visual art represent the ultimate human record of humanity’s struggle with and against itself – the catalog of drives, impulses, thoughts, and ideals that motivate human drama resides there, storing the old and inspiring the new. This record of humanity’s self-memorialization itself cannot overcome the forces that seek to undo its remembrance; all art can do in this context is reveal the limits of human action given our status as fallen, interdependent moral creatures. However, this moral knowledge can turn deadly in the hands of extremists, or this knowledge could fall into a fashionable and empty set of platitudes or truisms if not acknowledged at all. Ultimately, the forces of extremism and indifference wage war over the past in this schema; the victor decides how the past will be interpreted and remembered in the future. Thus, Grass’s notion of a “pre-sent past” (Vergegenkunft) is not simply a more intellectualized account of the cliché that “one must remember history in order not to repeat it.” It heaves closer to George Orwell’s warning that “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”6 For Grass, history cannot be “repeated” so much as evoked and “communed with” through remembrance. Writing serves as a more humane vehicle than political violence for Grass. Still, writing cannot prevent the place of action in terms of producing political outcomes. The temptation to either consciously repeat history through “political atrophy” or erase it entirely through extremist political action without regard to the past’s value remains strong throughout Grass’s writing. For example, Too Far Afeld’s Theo “Fonty” Wuttke illustrates his aversion to history’s “repetition” or “erasure” quite well. Fonty bases most of his entire life on his historical doppelgänger, Theodor Fontane. While Grass shares his admiration for Fontane, Fonty’s obsession serves as a cautionary tale about ideology more than a wistful desire to

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relive yesteryear. For Fonty, Fontane’s visage serves the ends of Fonty’s own commitments to East German Communism rather than provoking Fonty to approach history and politics differently. Only when Fonty reconnects with his lost French granddaughter, Madeleine, who symbolizes both his past and society’s future, can he accept the reality of German reunifcation as well as Theodor Fontane’s own radical skepticism of 1871’s German unifcation under Bismarck. Note well that Fonty’s acceptance of political reality does not remove the need for change in one’s personal and political life, but it allows one to move beyond treating literature and history as a personal affectation and toward a continuing presence that undergirds one’s sense of being in the world. As established in Chapter 3’s discussion of Too Far Afeld, Madeleine represents Fonty’s linkage to the future through the image of the child: natality. Here, Grass connects time and space. France and Madeleine do not merely serve as allegories for the post-unifcation European geopolitical landscape but of one’s relationship with future generations and the possibility of love in a seemingly loveless world. Too Far Afeld ends with Fonty leaving Germany and visiting France, seemingly to investigate Fontane’s Huguenot heritage. By visiting France, he is also experiencing his granddaughter’s lived world – and by extension, his future. So too does Grass invite his presumably German readers to think beyond Germany and “German problems.” To extend this metaphor connecting the world and time, Grass also invites his readers from abroad into “German problems” and “German questions” since, as he writes in Too Far Afeld, “Germany is no longer a mere concept, but a powerful fact.”7 This is to say, German problems are no longer merely German – her privileged place in questions of international fnance and politics necessitates that those interested in important contemporary questions take its past and self-conception seriously, and vice versa. Likewise, Grass hoped his writing could further international solidarity. While the last two decades of his life may have undermined his moral authority as an author, they have not diminished his insight as a political thinker and chronicler of Nazism and its consequences on Europe and the world at large. As discussed in the previous chapter, Grass’s SS revelations represent the culmination of his writing on class and politics. In his Danzig novels, Grass created a sort of “literary reconstruction” whereby the data of stored memory dramatically enters the quotidian present. In his model of prewar Danzig, Grass challenges ideological attempts to excuse the German people for their complicity in Nazi crimes by evoking tropes of ignorance. By the same token, Grass grants the German people a measure of pity in his account of Nazism’s rise – that while they did desire a political solution to the “Jewish question,” this desire was, in part, motivated by class resentment and a long history of oppression. German manufacturing sectors sided with Hitler and “seduced” the petite bourgeoisie into fascist ideology by offering them a future where they would fnally prevail over the entitled proletariat and the “Jewish” bourgeoisie. However, from his early writings

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until his 2006 memoir, Peeling the Onion, Grass always maintained the centrality of the German petite bourgeoisie, as well as the German people writ large, for allowing the Holocaust to occur. These writings far eclipsed Grass’s lived memory, allowing his acts of writing as a remembrance to resonate with the lives of others, building a larger understanding of the experience of loss and the desire for a better world. What changes throughout Grass’s career, however, is his scope, or what political scientists would call his “unit of analysis.” As Grass’s focus on systems and countries increases, his focus on himself decreases. In one of his fnal interviews, Grass tells Heinrich Detering of the amount of research he conducted into his early Danzig novels: going so far as to seek travel permission to venture into Northern Poland in the early days of the Cold War in preparation for The Tin Drum.8 Grass explains that part of his intention in creating the Danzig Trilogy involved challenging the stories of Danzig’s destructions “sanctioned” by the German government, from Nazism to the postwar era.9 As a result, Grass combines a fctionalized account of his adolescence with a counter history, drawn from both personal and anecdotal experience as well as from new historical research. In his early fction, especially Dog Years, Grass bases his characters, especially Oskar Mazerath, Tulla Pokriefke, Harry Liebenau, Jan Bronski, and Agnes Mazerath, on family and friends from childhood, yet grants them fctionalized personae.10 It is not until Grass enters his “memory phase” late in life that he places himself side by side his characters. In 2002’s Crabwalk, Grass himself appears in the narrative, corresponding with Paul Pokriefke (the novel’s narrator and protagonist) about the “historical research” Grass conducted while writing Dog Years.11 Four years later, Grass began his so-called “Trilogy of Remembrance” (“Trilogie der Erinnerung”) with Peeling the Onion, a novel recounting Grass’s adolescence and early adulthood, including his membership in the Waffen-SS. Thus, two trilogies, each of which recounts Grass’s childhood, bookend his literary career. The frst trilogy is rich in historical detail, pregnant with references to discreet events and places in the life of Danzig and postwar Germany. It includes references to German philosophers and “forgotten battles.” And it created something of a political controversy upon its publication in West Germany throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s on questions of pornography, decency, and – most importantly – Germany’s culpability regarding World War II and the Holocaust. The Danzig Trilogy engages in a very similar type of discourse as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem; the difference being that Grass’s work and audience use German words and continue to live in Germany in the aftermath of the deadliest confict in human history. On the other hand, the latter Trilogy of Remembrance begins with a work that overshadows the other two works, Peeling the Onion. It brushes over historical details in service of a story ultimately about an individual. That individual just so happens to have also written the story itself, constantly

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casting aspersions on the moral authority of the author of the text, who is also the text’s narrator: Gunter Grass himself. While the Danzig Trilogy established Oskar Mazerath’s unreliable narration in the frst line of its frst book, outside the reality of the text, the author was separate from the narrator. In the much later Remembrance Trilogy, those two personae are united, linking the distance between Grass’s own convention established in his “political novel” From the Diary of a Snail. The latter trilogy’s Peeling the Onion not only serves as the culmination of Grass’s own idiosyncrasies and insecurities as an author but forms the core of his moral and political writings: that one must consciously avoid ideological seduction through involvement in civic life. The two share an aversion to ideology, but they go about expressing this theme in vastly different ways. The Danzig Trilogy is an act of authorial distancing: using fctional personages to describe real situations, making the complicated and tragic history of Danzig more palatable and accessible to readers. The second trilogy “zeroes in” on Grass himself but widens the emotional resonance and self-consciousness to near-universal levels, focusing less on the “history” of Danzig and more on the sensation of willingly acquiescing to evil and experiencing the tragic consequences of such an action. Grass’s left-wing politics link his frst trilogy with his fnal one, but readers should not dismiss Grass’s middle “Kulturnation” period. While some of Grass’s less signifcant artistic endeavors came about during this political period, including a decade of writer’s block, it is in this era when Grass’s struggles in accepting the world and his place in it as a victim of displacement, an accessory to Nazi crimes, and a “moral authority” and political activist come to the forefront. Grass’s “political period” presents an image of politics seldom seen in the polished media landscape of contemporary politics. For instance, in From the Diary of a Snail, Grass bifurcates himself into author-celebrity and citizen-father, exposing the dual commitments public life sometimes involves – and the personal and professional sacrifces needed in order to build a better future. Underpinning this link between memory and politics is an outlook motivated by skepticism toward successful political movements. For Grass, the ecstasy of political and moral victory can easily short-circuit the human conscience’s ability to detect moral error, suspending one’s faculty of judgment and enabling one to slide into the politics of absolutism. While he agreed that Soviet East German communism’s motto, “The party is always right” [“die Partei hat immer Recht”], represented a form of totalitarianism previously seen in Nazism, Grass also maintained that the early days of the Federal Republic did not adequately address the Nazi past, especially during the Adenauer regime. Likewise, his willingness to criticize his left-wing political mentors and, as he would later put it, “moral betters”12 demonstrated the seriousness with which he took his commitment to political and moral skepticism.

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This moral skepticism fnds its origins in Grass’s artistic and literary infuences. Grass maintained a lifelong admiration of Albert Camus, especially the latter’s treatment of the Sisyphus fgure. To Grass, Camus’s Sisyphus represents the human condition of attempting to accomplish an endeavor, always failing, but always returning to the task at hand. However, Grass’s veneration of Camus and his focus on human frailty and moral fnitude13 likely owes to his own experiences before and during World War II. The uniqueness of Grass’s voice emanates from the fact that he does not need to open a book to understand the maxim attributed to Benjamin that “Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.” He knows from experience. The political solution for Grass was to cease having revolutions, to go about the diffcult work of maintaining some sense of continuity and order in politics while defending the rights of vulnerable peoples through a liberal system of rights and duties. He writes of Sisyphus, “Mistrusting all ideologies and rejecting all faiths, I made stone rolling my discipline.”14 But, one must remember too: Camus’s Sisyphus’s “crime” was loving life too much. Without respect for moral limits and the desire to live in this world as one subjected to those limits, remembrance is a fool’s endeavor. Thus, something of a paradox emerges in regard to Grass’s literary and political project: politics raises memory beyond the level of solipsistic nostalgia and memory grounds politics in empirical and moral reality. Forgetting, as Grass writes in “I Remember Myself,” seals death.15 Some things do need to die though. The class resentments and envy of the petite bourgeoisie that contributed to the “fnal solution” to the Jewish question, the condition of entitlement and blasé acceptance of the status quo in early West Germany, the impotent rage of the new left, the deep desire for revenge at the historical wrongs inficted upon the German people during the Allied occupation of Germany, all serve as worthy candidates for erasure from time in Grass’s view. Yet, these items cannot be forgotten if their causes are not remembered in a way that makes them more resonant, and therefore potent, than as rendered in offcial “state-sponsored” histories and memorials. Only by frst wrestling away reality from the state and the offcial “vanguards” of history can the process of healing begin. Grass’s ultimate political goal is not necessarily “friendship,” “harmony,” or even “justice” or “righteousness,” but forgiveness. Here, Grass approaches an Arendtian understanding of politics as being tied to the contingency of history and necessarily involving uncertainty and danger. Like Arendt, Grass seems to suggest that a kind of love of the world, or Amor Mundi, is necessary in maintaining the continuity of a given political order, whether national or international. 16 However, in the case of historical injustices, wronged people cannot always appear face to face in the present time, making “true” forgiveness between peoples of varying times impossible. Yet, through writing, one can place themselves in the place of another and “re-live” the past, paving a path toward forgiveness. In the most extreme of cases, the Holocaust, this

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inability to forgive can produce an inability to mourn, on both individual and national levels. This moral and temporal paradox leaves a country bifurcated between those who desire to sprint ever further to the future, emancipating themselves from the past entirely, or cling to it in some misguided attempt to preserve a fctional “golden age” guarded by images of a so-called “master race.” In either case, the sovereignty the public attempts to place upon the past cannot be relinquished, either resulting in self-indulgent guilt or a “scuttling back” into the past via unhealthy nostalgia and obsession. According to Grass, this bifurcation is where much of the world, but especially Germany, fnds itself after the Holocaust. In the poet’s ability to reinterpret the present as past or future, the victims of history may not be fully comprehensible to their oppressor, but their concerns, their status as moral persons, and co-citizens of time may appear less opaque. This reconceptualization does not mean that suddenly the German can understand “the drowned” victims of the gas chamber but can appreciate better their place in the present and how their presence in time can continue to motivate the politics of the present. While the reality of forgiveness, of a face-to-face absolution from past voices, may continue to elude those in the present, its absence forms a kind of presence that may quicken those in the present to extend their hopes of forgiveness into the future. The ability to commune with the living and the dead in memory stimulates a desire to recommit oneself to the world and its people. The politics of the world must guide the form this commitment takes. And, for Grass, when this politics (inevitably) fails, it requires an even greater commitment to the world’s renewal to promote alternatives to a broken status quo.

The Future of the Past: After Social Democracy American author John Irving called Grass a “slow processer” after his SS confession.17 In terms of Grass’s abandonment of social democracy, he may have been well ahead of his left-wing German peers. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Grass held that the SPD’s rightward stance on fnance and asylum policy was unacceptable. The latter led Grass to leave the party in 1992,18 only a decade after formally joining the party upon Helmut Schmidt’s ascension to the chancellorship. Grass held that the future of leftism lay in confronting the future ecological crises facing Europe in addition to its classical focus on labor and economic issues. This concern of Grass’s proved to be prescient, considering the electoral collapse of the SPD in the 2010s and the success of left-wing ecological parties in Germany. As of this writing, the center-left SPD has not held the chancellorship since 2005 and in 2017 suffered its worst election results since 1949. On the other hand, two solidly left-wing parties, The Left (Die Linke) and the Greens (Die Grüne), together comprised 18.1 percent of the vote total in the 2017 Bundestag election,

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approximately 2.4 percent less than the once-powerful SPD.19 The latter of these two left-wing parties, the Greens, formed in the early 1980s specifcally to address environmental issues facing West Germany at the time. While the SPD did retake the chancellorship in 2021, it did so with a threeparty coalition with the Greens and the economically liberal FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei; Free Democratic Party). The SPD’s historical losses come at a disconcerting time as the populist right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)), made unprecedented gains – winning 12.6 percent of the German electorate in 2017.20 The AfD runs on an explicitly anti-immigration platform, reacting against the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition government’s decision to accept around 1.5 million Syrian refugees into Germany since Summer 2015. Likewise, a number of high-profle bouts of violence involving immigrants from Syria and North Africa, notably the 2015 New Year’s Eve knife attacks in Köln, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg, contributed to an increase in the AfD’s political success. The nationalist AfD also holds an aversion to the European Union as well as to modern trends like feminism and alternative sexualities and advocates a return to Völkisch German nationalism, emphasizing the ethnic elements of German nationalism over its civic tendencies.21 According to the German political scientist Kai Arzheimer, the AfD has moved rightward since 2015 and holds ties to other, more extreme rightwing Neo-Nazi militias.22 The rise of the AfD parallels the emergence of the German National Party (National Partei Deutschlands (NPD)) in the 1960s as a possible coalition partner to the emerging CDU led by Kurt Georg Kiesinger. In his early campaigning for Willy Brandt and the SPD, Grass spoke publicly against the NPD. In a 1966 interview with Erwin Leiser for Die Weltwoche, Grass bemoans the NPD’s success with young voters, calling for a youth boycott of the nationalist political party, yet refusing to support banning the NPD outright as a “dangerous attraction” for young voters.23 In going about his opposition, Grass invoked his own youthful Nazi experience that would mark his subsequent literary career. Without revealing the extent of his involvement with the Waffen-SS at this time, Grass discussed his time in the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht, citing his young age and willingness to die for the Third Reich in detail with Irmgard Bach of Radio Bremen in May 1968. In this interview, he speaks of time in the Hitler Youth: “There were obligatory events on Sundays, terribly boring, where our only topic was girls, but only as abstract themes. This all belonged to everyday life, to this narrow world without alternatives.”24 Here Grass not only evokes his past but connects it with social democracy’s promise of a better world. In emphasizing the boredom of National Socialism, he constructs a narrative whereby the desire to escape the narrowness of empty time snowballs into a further level of induction into Nazism’s cult of death in the name of the Aryan race. Later in the same interview, Grass describes his life in his Panzer division in greater detail. “There was

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no place in this time for heroism. […] I was then transferred into the infantry – everything looked quite different after that.”25 After discussing this “different world,” Grass blatantly links this past to contemporary West German politics. “I have attempted to accept that this social Democratic tradition, which I do not see as limited to the party, as the only secure democratic tradition in this country with such a limited tradition of democracy.”26 Further, Grass’s past experience with antidemocratic politics connects with Germany’s past writ large – in order to move beyond this “limited” tradition, the current moment requires a political commitment that can produce political alternatives beyond the extreme ideologies of Germany’s past. It would be specious and pretentious to say Grass’s involvement with the SPD successfully mobilized youth turnout to secure Brandt’s victory in 1969. However, his appeal to Germany’s youth foreshadows Grass’s later move toward “memory politics” as opposed to traditional “class politics.” What, then, happens when the traditional base of German social democracy collapses? The answer Grass gave after reunifcation suggested that a return to extremist parties like the NPD was likely. The uptick in racial violence and the success of the AfD in former East Germany partially bears witness to Grass’s foresight on these matters.27 Still, Grass’s writings alone cannot prevent these disconcerting trends. Even if Crabwalk remains widely assigned in German secondary schools, the rise of the populist right still continues largely unabated. Grass is not an obscure author. The failure of his message to connect to readers did not arise from a lack of exposure. Rather, the problem lies in the medium itself: literature is the result of politics, not vice versa. While Grass is correct about a plethora of topics, possessing the correct outlook is merely one part of the question, the explicitly political task requires infuencing society toward a more ethical and ideal position, something neither Grass, nor anyone else, could not achieve through writing alone. Nevertheless, Grass’s political thinking, especially on the topics of class, politics, and memory, remains a vital source of insight, vision, and hope, often lacking in even the most sophisticated of political analyses.

Penelope and Sisyphus True to his patron, “St. Sisyphus,” Grass set an impossible task for himself. It is doubtful that even Goethe’s spirit can exorcize postwar German society of its residual fascism and restore its language and culture to a place of universal respect through writing alone. Likewise, if speech had the same impact, the mere presence of great orators like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Rosa Luxemburg, Angela Davis, Willy Brandt, and Vaclav Havel could drive out the demons of racism and oppression from the West. As Grass himself contends, “There’s always some residue.”28 With the Sisyphean nature of Grass’s self-imposed mission in mind, it paradoxically becomes easier to judge his work on the basis of its truth and

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ability to resonate with a global audience. On this count, Grass’s record appears much more impressive. The “pre-sent past” (Vergegenkunft), Grass’s rhetoric and analysis of power and time, symbolizes his attempt to call upon alternative democratic traditions to social democracy and its attendant institutions from the welfare state and trade unions. By probing the past, one can intellectually and mentally connect a nation, a class, a group, an institution, etc. to a wider swath of political sources. The nation and its past may be connected and bent toward traditions that move beyond its borders without obviating concepts like shared identity and solidarity. Grass’s most ambitious attempt at such a project is the Kulturnation, which failed to produce a German confederation. However, his most successful attempts involve his analysis of Nazi Germany in the Danzig Trilogy, his campaigning for Willy Brandt, and, ironically, his SS confession. While none but perhaps this second attempt succeeded in electing politicians or securing power for a class, they did serve as an important literary record of those dispossessed and forgotten by the processes of history. And Grass’s works represent a powerful call to those living in the present to treat the past and its problems with more reverence and commitment to correct its errors. While the utility of these concepts in terms of their ability to translate ideas into action remains doubtful, the works containing them are defnitively worthy of study. The Grass scholar Nicole Thesz considers that his emphasis on speech and publicity forms the core of Grass’s project – that writing and speech form powerful “answers” to political violence.29 Thesz is correct, but I caution that to Grass, this process must be political even if it involves the “personal” and it must always focus on the moral limits of action. And, for Grass, one of the noblest forms of political action is remembrance. However, this remembrance should disrupt the temporal and political status quo and transmute the pain of the past, the stifed voice of the other, into a future world respectful and conscious of moral limits. This language allows Benjamin’s notion of “the Penelope work of remembrance”30 to emerge more clearly. The citizen takes the place of Penelope, tying and untying the bonds of time and space, wounding oneself in order to heal another. The major lacuna here lies in the fgure of Odysseus. Grass remains silent in terms of who can return home and rescue Penelope from her suitors. Instead, Grass replaces Odysseus with Sisyphus; the epic hero of Homer becomes the tragic hero of Camus. In constantly contending against the suitors of ideology, the citizen transforms the tapestry of memory into the perpetual stone of Sisyphus, endlessly engaging in a war of attrition against those who would keep the stone in place permanently. The stone daunts, frustrates, and exhausts, but it also protects. Hopefully, Sisyphus’s stone can roll over the suitors from time to time or, at the very least, distract them from their designs. While the anger and resentment and anxiety of Penelope or Sisyphus should be forgotten, the hope and the love of life should outlive us all.

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Underlying this discussion lies the question of immortality and continuity. Who rolls the stone when the Sisyphuses of today die or become too bored or weary to continue? To Grass, immortality resides in writing and mythmaking as opposed to religion or ideology. As Grass writes in his posthumously published work, Of All That Ends (vonne Endlichkait), “the book will outlive you … you will never – and you know it – have the last word.”31 To this end, Grass’s literary life provides an example of citizenship. That is, in his transformation from class historian and memoirist to political activist to memoirist and poet, Grass shows a model for citizenship. This model would inspire us to accept the burdens of democratic citizenship and the wounds it entails and to not allow one’s humanity and love of the world to die in a slough of unexamined melancholia.

Notes 1 Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006, p. 17. 2 Tooze, Adam. “The German National Economy in an Era of Crisis and War, 1917-1945.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, 400–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 400. 3 Hays, Jude. Globalization and the New Politics of Embedded Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 5. 4 Grass, Günter. From the Diary of the Snail. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 128. 5 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” Interview by MarcChristoph Wagner. Video. Translated by Martin Kogi, August 2013. http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/gunter-grass-writing-against-wall. 6 Orwell, George. 1984. New York: Berkley Books, 2017, p. 33. 7 Ibid, p. 385. 8 Grass, Günter, and Heinrich Detering. In letzter Zeit: Ein Gespräch im Herbst (Lately: A Conversation in Autumn). Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2017, p. 67. 9 Ibid, p. 67. 10 Ibid, pp. 71–2. 11 Grass, Günter. Crabwalk. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2003, p. 79. 12 Grass, Günter. “Günter Grass: Writing Against the Wall.” 13 Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009, p. 81. 14 Grass, Günter. Peeling the Onion. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2007, p. 337. 15 Grass, Günter. “Ich erinne mich.” In Die Zukunft Der Erinnerung, by Günter Grass, Miłosz Czesław, Wisława Szymborska, and Tomas Venclova, edited by Martin Wälde. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2001, p. 34. 16 It is also important to mention that Grass’s literary agent, Helen Wolff, introduced Grass to Arendt and discussed her ideas with him often. See, Grass, Günter, and Helen Wolff. Briefe 1959–1994 (Letters 1959–1994). Göttingen: Steidl, 2003. p, 104. 17 Irving, Jonathan. “Günter Grass Is My Hero, as a Writer and a Moral Compass.” The Guardian, August 18, 2006, sec. Opinion. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2006/aug/19/comment.germany. 18 Preece, Julian. The Life and Work of Günter Grass. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004, p. xvi.

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19 BBC News. “German Election: Merkel Wins Fourth Term, AfD Nationalists Rise,” September 25, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe -41376577. 20 Ibid. 21 Taub, Amanda, and Max Fisher. “Germany’s Extreme Right Challenges Guilt Over Nazi Past.” The New York Times. January 18, 2017, sec. Europe. https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/world/europe/germany-afd-alternative-bjorn -hocke.html. 22 Arzheimer, Kai. “‘Don’t Mention the War!’ How Populist Right-Wing Radicalism Became (Almost) Normal in Germany.” Journal of Common Market Studies 57, no. Annual Review (2019): 90–102. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10 .1111/jcms.12920. 23 “Ein Boykott würde auch der Jugend Anreiz geben. Heute reagiert man kaum meher darauf, daß Hakenkreuze an Haustüren und auf Grabsteine geschmiert werden. Es geschieht, weil es verboten ist. Eine vebotene und verfolgte NPD würde auf gewisse junge Menschen eine gefährlich Anziehungskraft ausüben.” Grass, Günter. Gespräch über Deutschland (Conversation about Germany). Interview by Erwin Leiser, December 1966. In Gespräche, 1958-2015 (Conversations, 1958-2015), edited by Timm Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 2019, p. 60. 24 “Es gab diese obligaten Sonntagsveranstalungen, Morgenfeiren, schreklich langweilige Angelegenheiten, bei denen unser Hauptthema Mädchen waren, aber eigentlich nur als abstrakes Thema. Das alles gehörte zum Allag, gehörte zu dieser egen Welt ohne Alternativen.” Grass, Günter. Als ich siebzehn war (When I was Seventeen). Interview by Irmgard Bach, May 1968. In Gespräche, 1958– 2015 (Conversations, 1958–2015), edited by Timm Niklas Pietsch. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 2019, p. 72; Translation mine. 25 “Für Heroismus war all dieser Zeit kein Platz. Der Panzer, an dem ich ausgebildet wurde, der in der Ausbildung noch etwas Imponierendes hatte, fuhr schon am zweiten Tag auf eine Mine und kampfunfähig. Ich wurde anschließend zur Infanterie versetz – das sah dann wieder ganz anders aus.” Ibid, p. 76; Translation mine. 26 “Ich versucht habe aufzunehmen, meine, daß soziale Demokratie, die ich nich nur auf de Partei beschränkt sehen will, in disem unglücklichen, mit so wenig demokratischer Tradition versehenen Land der einzige demokratische Sicherheitsfaktor ist” Ibid, p. 80; Translation mine. 27 Weisskircher, Manès. “The Strength of Far-Right AfD in Eastern Germany: The East-West Divide and the Multiple Causes behind ‘Populism.’” The Political Quarterly, 2020. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12859. 28 Grass, Günter. Too Far Afeld. Paperback First Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 2000, p. 72. 29 Thesz, Nicole A. The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass: Stages of Speech, 1959-2015. Rochester: Camden House, 2018, p. 3. 30 Benjamin, Walter. “The Image of Proust.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 201–17. New York: Schocken Books, 1988, p. 202. 31 Grass, Günter. Of All That Ends. Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin Harcourt, 2016, p. 18.

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Index

45 generation (Flakhelfer Generation) 55 68 generation 55 abdicating literary papacy, Peeling the Onion 104–109 abortion 37–38, 68 absolute busyness 77 Alternative for Germany/Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) 124–125 “anti-air” (Flakhelfer generation) 5 anti-air generation 55, 107 anti-immigration 124 anti-Semitism 99 antisemitism, Dog Years 36 archival memory 86 Arendt, Hannah 2, 42–43, 45, 122 Arnds, Peter 43 art 69–70, 95 artifcial fuck see Kunstfck Arzheimer, Kai 124 Ascherson, Neal 64 Assmann, Aleida 9, 12, 22 Assmann, Jan 9, 13 Auschwitz 43, 93 authorial construction 52, 56 authorial distancing, Danzig Trilogy 120 autobiography, Peeling the Onion 104–109 Baker, Donna 24 “banality of evil” 2 Baroque period 13, 52, 66, 69–70, 73–74 being 37–38 Benjamin, Walter 18, 95 Berman, Sheri 53, 65–66 Bernstein, Eduard 53, 61

Bildungsroman (formation novel) 27, 32 blasphemy 51 Böll, Heinrich 6 Brandt, Willy 4, 7, 16, 51, 54–58, 66, 77 Braun, Rebecca 52, 56 Brockmann, Stephan 89, 92 Brophy, James 23 Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) 51 Burke, Peter 10 Call of the Toad (1992) 92, 96 camaraderie see Kameradschaft Camus, Albert 60, 122 canon 52 capitalism 118; neoliberal capitalism 93 Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus) (1959) 4, 30–34, 44, 107–108 CDU see Christian Democratic Union Celan, Paul 6 chauvinism 91 childhood Nazism, Cat and Mouse 33 Chile, military fascism 64 Christian Democratic Union (CDU) 45, 56, 124 Christian Democrats 104 civil society 77 class compromise 54 class struggle 70, 119–120, 122 clothing, The Tin Drum 28 coherence 43, 45 common good 110 common hero 32 communitarianism 66 confederated German state 78 consciousness 78 continuity 78, 89, 122 cooking, as metaphor 109

Index

137

Cory, Mark 61, 65 Costabile-Heming, Carol 108 Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang) 7, 95–105, 110, 120, 125 creature comforts 25 criminal police see Kriminalpolizei cultural decline, The Tin Drum 29 cultural memory 9, 13 cultural nation see Kulturnation

forgiveness 10–11, 14, 122–123 forgotten face 44 forgotten past 15 formation novel (Bildungsroman) 27 From the Diary of the Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke) (1972) 7, 16, 52, 59–66, 77, 105, 109, 121 Fuchs, Anne 108 Fukuyama, Francis 116

Danzig Rebellion (1575) 68 Danzig Trilogy (Danziger Trilogie) 4, 22, 120–121 Daum, Andreas W. 54 De Warren, Nicholas 11 democratic socialism 51, 85, 110 detachment 91 Di Napoli, Thomas 44 dialectical materialism 58 divorce 60 Dog Years (Hundejahre) 4, 6, 34–40, 98 doubt 59, 70 Douglas, R.M. 104 drums, Cat and Mouse 33 Dürer, Albrecht 62–63

GDR (German Democratic Republic) 54 Gedächtnis 10, 14, 94 gender norms 72 gender relations 71–72 generation unable to mourn 95–96 German Autumn 66 German communism 93 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 54 German fascism 93 German guilt 1–2; see also guilt German identity 93, 96; see also identity German language 75 German National Party/National Partei Deutschlands (NPD) 124–125 German nationalism 96, 124 German Socialist Student Association (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) 55 Germanness 76 globalization backlash 116 good-versus-evil morality 32 Grimmelshausen, Jakob Christoffel von 73, 75 Group 47 (Gruppe 47) 6, 59, 74, 104 Gryphius, Andreas 73 guilt 1–2, 44, 96, 108; see also German guilt Gustloff 96–103, 107, 109

Eagleton, Terry 42 East politics (Ostpolitik) 54 Ehrzälung (narrative poem) 74 Eichmann, Adolf 2 Eichmann trial 1 Emergency Laws 55 end of history 116 English hero 32 Erinnerung (remembrance) 9–10, 13–14, 17, 94 fame, From the Diary of the Snail 59 family portraiture 22 fascism 122; military fascism, Chile 64; nostalgic fascism 96 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 55 “Faustian bargain” 22 fear of lost status 24 femininity 67 feminism 67–72 fnancial markets, Dog Years 34–35 Finch, Helen 72 feeting nownownow 13 The Flounder (Der Butt) 7, 16, 52, 66–73 forgetting 10, 122; Crabwalk 95–104; The Meeting at Telgte 76; “right to forget” 94

Habermas, Jürgen 39 Hall, Katharina 22 Hegel, G.W.F. 61–62 Hegelianism 77 Heidegger, Martin 61 Heideggerian philosophy 37–38 Herf, Jeffrey 2 heroes 32 High German 75 Hilberg, Raul 2, 22 historical memory 52 Hitler Youth 56, 124

138

Index

Holocaust 2, 10, 43, 60 homeland (Heimat) 97, 110 “Homeland flms” 2 hope 68, 89 “I Remember Myself” (“Ich erinne mich”) 7, 10, 93 identity 74, 91, 93, 96; see also German identity immigration 85; anti-immigration 124 In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu) 90 internationalism 55 Irving, John 123 Jaspers, Karl 1 Jewish question 39, 119 Judt, Tony 55 Junger, F.G. 9, 10 Kafka, Vladimir 60 Kameradschaft (camaraderie) 102 Kautsky, Karl 53 Kautsky-Bernstein debate 53 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 57, 124 Klüger, Ruth 13 Knobloch, Charlotte 104 Koopmann, Helmut 71 Kriminalpolizei (criminal police) 66 Kultur 59 Kulturnation (cultural nation) 4, 13, 16, 51–52, 93, 121, 126; The Meeting at Telgte 73–77; Too Far Afeld 90 Kundera, Milan 11 Kunstfck (artifcial fuck) 71–72 late liberalism 15 Lauremberg, Johann 75 Lebensraum 25 left-fascism (Linksfascismus) 66 lesbians: The Flounder 67–68; rape 71 lies, men 72 Local Anesthetic (Örtlich betäubt) 6 loss 8–9 love 70 Lübeck Artisan Uprising (1408) 68 Lucky Strikes, The Tin Drum 40 Malchow, Timothy 72 Manchester liberalism 96 Mann, Thomas 22 Mannheim, Ralph 12 Marx, Karl 23–24, 53, 62, 78 Marxism 53

materialism 24 matriarchy 71 The Meeting at Telgte (Das Treffen in Telgte) 16, 52, 56, 59, 73–77 melancholia 62–65 memorialization, Too Far Afeld 90–92 memory 9, 15, 17, 94; archival memory 86; cultural memory 9; historical memory 52; places of memory 106; politics 78; public memory 9, 86; social memory 9; stored memory 119 memory politics 17, 125 memory work 43 men, lies 72 Mergel, Thomas 25, 28 metaphors 110 Mews, Siegfried 64, 87 middle estate 24 middle voice 97, 102 military fascism, Chile 64 Mittelstand 24 modernity 58 Moretti, Franco 27, 32 Müller, Jan-Werner 59, 74, 77, 96 My Century (Mein Jahrhundert) 7 “Myth of Sisyphus” (Camus) 18 narrative poem see Ehrzälung narratorial remembrance 35 natality 70, 119 National Democratic Party of Germany/Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) 16, 45; see also German National Party national identity, The Meeting at Telgte 74 National Socialism 3, 21, 86, 96, 105 nationalism 96 nationalist anti-nationalism 51 Nazism 2–3, 6, 22, 24–25, 93 neoliberal capitalism 93 neoliberalism 65, 86, 91, 93, 96, 116–118 Neo-Nazi party 55–56 Neo-Nazism 45, 55–56 New Left 58 nineteenth century 118 nostalgia 42 nostalgic fascism 96 NPD see German National Party/National Partei Deutschlands Nuremburg trials 1–2, 6 objects 106

Index obscenity 44 Odysseus 126 Of All That Ends (vonne Endlichkait) 127 Ohrgaard, Per 12 Ohsoling, Hilke 12 O’Neill, Patrick 28 opposition to reunifcation 16 Optiz, Martin 73 orienting of thrownness 102 orthodox Marxism 53 Orwell, George 118 “Orwell’s decade” 7 paspresenture 12 paternoster 92 pathos, The Tin Drum 41 peace 76–77 Peeling the Onion (Beim häuten der Zwiebel) 7, 14, 73, 104–109, 120 “Penelope work” 18, 126 “perpetrators and bystanders” 22 petite bourgeoisie 21–22, 43, 119–120, 122; Cat and Mouse 30–34; Dog Years 34–40; history of 23–26; The Tin Drum 26–30, 40–42 Pinochet, Augusto 64 places of memory 106 political activity 109 political atrophy 118 political criticism 16 political moderation 62 political theory 53 Preece, Julian 87, 92 present 12 pre-sent past see Vergegenkunft “preservative forgetting” 10, 13 primacy of politics 53, 58 progress 54, 61 Przeworski, Adam 54 public life of Günter Grass 5–8 public memory 9, 86 public places 106 public speech 110 purposive activity 18 radical courses (Radikalkuren) 55 rape, lesbians 71 The Rat (Die Rattin) (1986) 7 Reddick, John 30–31, 34 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel 6, 7, 86 remembrance 4, 9–10, 94, 95, 126 reunifcation 51, 77, 78; see also unifed Germany reverence 118 revisionism, social democracy 53

139

revolution 51, 122 Richter, Hans-Werner 6 “right to forget” (das Recht, vergessen, ja) 94 “Roll Your Own” (1974) 110 romanticism of lost opportunities 40–41 Rushdie, Salman 109 Sandford, John 72 Schiller, Karl 56, 62 Schopenhauer, Arthur 61 schuld (guilt) 96 Schwartz, Anna 7, 60 Schwermut (heavy-heartedness) 62–63 scientifc socialism 58 Scott, James C. 23, 25 self-deconstruction 105 self-doubt 105 self-identity 91 self-image 51 self-overcoming 27 self-repudiation 10–11 Shirach, Baldur von 6 Simplicissimus (Grimmelshausen) 73 Sisyphus 60–61, 109, 122, 126–127 skeptical reverence 118 Smith, Helmut Walser 24 Snyder, Timothy 24–25 social democracy 51, 53–59, 78, 91, 125 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) 7, 54, 57, 123–124 social memory 9 socialism 99 Sonderweg 59 Soviet Communism 86 Soviet Union, collapse of 85 SPD see Social Democratic Party of Germany Spiers, Ronald 71 SS see Waffen-SS Stand 24 stasis 52, 63–64 Stone, Katherine 9 stored memory 119 Strauss, Franz Josef 62 student protests 55 suicide 29 Sutherland, John 11 terrorism 51 Thesz, Nicole 106, 110, 126 “third” 68, 72 third hunger (Der dritte Hunger) 106 Thirty Years’ War 2, 73–74

140

Index

“thrownness” (“Geworfenheit”) 7, 102 time 53, 61, 110, 117; Dog Years 35–36; Peeling the Onion 108 The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) 3–4, 6, 13, 21–22, 24–30, 40–42, 44, 65, 98, 103, 105–106, 110 “To Be Continued…” 43 Too Far Afeld (Ein weites Feld) 7, 17, 86–93, 118–119 Tooze, Adam 116 totalitarianism 121 totalizing doctrinaires 61 Treuhand 116 Treuhandanstalt building 89 “Trilogy of Remembrance” (“Trilogie der Erinnerung”) 120 unifed Germany 75; see also reunifcation Updike, John 64 user reviews, The Flounder 52

Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) 10 Vergegenkunft 4, 11–12, 14–15, 68, 76, 105, 118, 126 Voegelin, Eric 2 von Schirach, Baldur 2 “VW Bus Speech” 55–56 Waffen-SS 3, 5, 119, 124; Peeling the Onion 104–109 Wehrmacht 5, 56, 124 Weltschmerz (pain with the world) 62–63 Wende 87 West Germany 1, 3; social democracy 53–59 Wilhelm Gustloff 96–103, 107, 109 Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) 104 Workers’ and Peasants’ State 91, 99 worm’s eye view 76