On Gunter Grass

OXFORD MODERN LANGUAGESAND LITERATURE MONOGRAPHS

Editorial CommitteeC. H. G R I FFI N A. K A H N

K. M. KO H L M. L. M C L AU G H L I N

I. W. F. M AC L E A N R. A. G. PEA R S O N

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ConstructingAuthorship in the Work

of Günter Grass

REBECCA BRAUN

1

3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Contents

List of Figures viNote on editions used and frequently cited works viiAcknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1. Models of Authorship: Das Treffen in Telgte in Context 12

2. Public Constructions of Authorship in Grass’s PoliticalWritings, 1965–2005 38

3. ‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .] erzählen’ I: Placingthe Author in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke andKopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus 65

4. ‘Aus der Geschichte gefallen’: Displacing the Authorin Der Butt and Die Rättin 96

5. ‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .] erzählen’ II: Reconstructingthe Author in Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 122

6. ‘Er, in dessen Namen ich krebsend vorankam’: Reading theAuthor in Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang 149

Conclusion 176

Select Bibliography 181Index 193

List of Figures

1. ‘Roman-Entwurf (500 Seiten)’, 8 August 1969 72

2. ‘Die Gleitspur’, 22 August 1971 76

Note on editions used and frequently cited works

Unless otherwise stated, I have used the 1997 edition of Grass’s collectedworks throughout this study: Günter Grass, Werkausgabe, 16 vols, ed.Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997). Laterworks such as Mein Jahrhundert and Im Krebsgang have been added indi-vidually to the edition since that date. I reference each volume with anabbreviated form of the title and page numbers after each quotation. Theorder of the volumes, together with the abbreviated titles I use, is asfollows:

I Gedichte und Kurzprosa, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes

II Theaterspiele, ed. Dieter Stolz

III Die Blechtrommel, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referenced as BT )

IV Katz und Maus, ed. Volker Neuhaus

V Hundejahre, ed. Volker Neuhaus

VI örtlich betäubt, ed. Volker Neuhaus

VII Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referencedas TS; this is also referred to in the main body of the text as theTagebuch)

VIII Der Butt, ed. Claudia Mayer-Iswandy (referenced as B)

IX Das Treffen in Telgte, ed. Claudia Mayer-Iswandy (referenced as TT )

X Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, ed. Volker Neuhaus(referenced as K ; this is also referred to in the main body of thetext as Kopfgeburten)

XI Die Rättin, ed. Volker Neuhaus (referenced as R)

XII Unkenrufe, ed. Daniela Hermes (referenced as U )

XIII Ein weites Feld, ed. Daniela Hermes (referenced as WF )

XIV Essays und Reden I: 1955–1969, ed. Daniela Hermes

XV Essays und Reden II: 1970–1979, ed. Daniela Hermes

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

viii Note on editions used and frequently cited works

XVII Mein Jahrhundert [1999], ed. Volker Neuhaus (note that referencesare to the 409-page picture-book edition, as referenced below andin the bibliography)

XVIII Im Krebsgang [2002], ed. Daniela Hermes (referenced as IK )

Books by Grass referred to in this study and not included in the collectededition are:

Zunge zeigen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988) (referenced as Zz)Mein Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999) [409 pp.] (referenced as MJ )Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006) (referenced as HZ )

Further works by Grass not included in the collected edition, as well asinterviews and more recent articles by the author, are indicated separatelyand referenced in the bibliography.

Archival material cited comes from the Günter-Grass-Archiv in theStiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Robert-Koch-Plaz 10, 10115Berlin. This is referenced as SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv.

Acknowledgements

THIS book is the revised version of my doctoral thesis, submitted to theUniversity of Oxford in Trinity Term 2005. Work on my thesis was fundedby a Theodor Heuss / Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship held in Berlinfrom 2001–02, and an Oxford University Scatcherd Scholarship held inOxford from 2002–05. I am grateful to both funding bodies for theirgenerous support.

During the course of my research I had to learn how to navigate myway round several institutions. Special thanks are due to Ms Jill Hughes atthe Taylor Library, Oxford, to Frau Elisabeth Unger at the Günter-Grass-Archiv in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and toFrau Hilke Ohsoling from the Günter-Grass-Sekretariat, Lübeck for theirgood-humoured help and advice. I also gratefully acknowledge permissiongranted by both the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, andGünter Grass to cite and reproduce archival material.

The argument developed in the course of this study has benefitted fromgenerous input from several colleagues. Thanks are due to the examinersof my thesis, Professor Stuart Taberner and Dr Ben Morgan, for support-ing its publication. I gratefully acknowledge the critical engagement andconstructive advice offered to me by the two anonymous readers and theseries editor at Oxford University Press. My biggest single debt of gratitude,however, is to my doctoral supervisor, Dr Karen Leeder, whose ability topull on the weakest threads of one’s argument is truly frightening. For herhonesty, patience, and unfailing support throughout the entire project, mysincere thanks.

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Introduction

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

Commenting on the way in which the contemporary writer is portrayed inthe media, David Lodge notes, ‘whereas post-structuralism has asserted theimpersonality of creative writing in the most extreme theoretical terms—the so-called “death of the author”—literary journalism has never been soobsessed as it is now with the personality and private life of the author’.2

Lodge is writing with particular reference to contemporary Britain, but thebasic paradox he discerns in what amounts to the theory and practice ofauthorship can be applied to contemporary Western society in general.On the one hand, the impact of French-led post-structuralist thoughtfrom the late 1960s onwards has indeed ushered in a style of highly self-aware and textually suspicious literary criticism that has tirelessly chippedaway at the idea of any sort of ultimate authority either within or outsideof the literary text. At the same time, however, the wider public spherethat can be traced in major broadsheets and news magazines has becomeincreasingly fascinated with the author’s public image, whether in the formof a publisher’s marketing campaign that aims to sell the books produced bythe author, biographical sketches that pander to public curiosity about theauthor, or literary scandals that rage from time to time about the author.3 Insocio-economic terms, the successful literary author would appear to have

1 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein’, in Heinz Ludwig Arnold and FranzJosef Görtz, eds, Günter Grass: Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung (Munich: Text + Kritik,1971), 143–50, 143.

2 David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), 101–2.3 An overview of the contemporary public sphere with respect to literature in Germany can

be found in Stuart Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond: Normalization and theBerlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 8–16, and in Martin Hielscher, ‘TheReturn to Narrative and to History: Some Thoughts on Contemporary German-LanguageLiterature’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece, eds, Literature, Markets andMedia in Germany and Austria Today (Oxford: Lang, 2000), 295–309.

2 Introduction

become central to the culture industry at the heart of contemporary West-ern society.

In Germany this has very clearly been the case since the mid-1990s,where a self-conscious concern with image is primarily associated withthe relatively new and more global strands of German literature such asthe so-called ‘Fräuleinwunder’ and the new pop literature.4 Debate aboutauthors and the media, however, goes back much further. Older gener-ations, from the 1960s through to the present, have consistently railedagainst the apparent superficiality of what is often derogatively referred toas the ‘Mediengesellschaft’.5 Consciously organizing themselves into polit-ically active groupings, authors such as Martin Walser and Hans WernerRichter worked collectively with their peers to try to establish the Germanauthor as a serious intellectual figure in the public sphere, countering thedominant media trend towards marginalization throughout the 1950s. Thiscan be seen in their respective edited volumes, Die Alternative oder Brauchenwir eine neue Regierung? (1961) and Plädoyer für eine neue Regierung oderKeine Alternative (1965).

Such a move was not without complications. In 1962 Hans MagnusEnzensberger analysed the development of what he called the ‘conscious-ness industry’, drawing attention to the double-bind faced by those publicfigures who must of necessity use the media in order to try to communicatetheir own alternative image:

Die rapide Entwicklung der Bewußtseins-Industrie, ihr Aufstieg zu einer Schlüs-selinstanz der modernen Gesellschaft, verändert die soziale Rolle des Intellektuellen.Er sieht sich neuen Gefahren und neuen Möglichkeiten ausgesetzt. [. . .] Freiwilligoder unfreiwillig, bewußt oder unbewußt, wird er zum Komplizen einer Industrie,deren Los von ihm abhängt wie er von dem ihren, und deren heutiger Auftrag, dieZementierung der etablierten Herrschaft, mit dem seinen unvereinbar ist.6

Along with Martin Walser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Heinrich Böll,to name but a few, Günter Grass experienced this paradox first-hand.

4 See Taberner, German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond, Andrew Plowman, ‘ “Was willich denn als Westdeutscher erzählen?”: The “Old” West and Globalisation in Recent GermanProse’, in Stuart Taberner, ed., German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham:University of Birmingham Press, 2004), 47–66, and Beth Linklater, ‘Germany as Background:Global Concerns in Recent Women’s Writing in German’, in Taberner, ed., German Literaturein the Age of Globalisation, 67–87.

5 Stuart Parkes, ‘German Authors on the Media’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, andJulian Preece, eds, Literature, Markets and Media (Oxford: Lang, 2000), 1–18, goes into somedetail on older authors’ long-standing dislike of the media sphere.

6 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Bewußtseins-Industrie’, in Einzelheiten (Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp, 1962), 7–15, 15.

Introduction 3

From the 1960s onwards, his high-profile political interventions helped notonly to force the media to engage with authors outside the purely literaryrealm, but also to establish an active political image of authorship thatwas subsequently radicalized by the so-called 1968 generation. In return,however, he quickly found himself reduced to a certain party-political linein the popular press, while the kind of authorial intervention for which hestood landed him the difficult title of ‘praeceptor democratiae germaniae’.7

These are public constructions of his identity which Grass has repeatedlyhad to negotiate.

Indeed, Grass has been aware of the power of his public image fromthe early 1960s onwards. Probably no other author in post-war Germanyhas had his or her literary reputation made overnight in such startling,public fashion. On reading a chapter from his then unpublished novel DieBlechtrommel at a Gruppe 47 meeting in 1958, he was awarded the group’sprestigious prize and immediately surrounded by publishers and journalistswho were convinced that he stood for a new kind of German literature.Subsequent reviews of the novel focused particularly on Grass’s person,merging the author and his main character to create an authorial imagebased on a bold, devil-may-care attitude that shocked conservative literarycircles of the time. Franz Josef Görtz describes Grass’s media branding inthe following terms:

Seit den Tagen der Blechtrommel hat man Grass auf eben solche Qualitäten [e.g.‘überquellende Phantasie’, ‘robuste Genialität’, ‘ekelerregende Details’] und damitzugleich auf eine Rolle festgelegt, mit der dieser Autor dann auf Jahre hinaus stetsidentifiziert wurde: auf die Rolle eines literarischen Holzfällers, der ‘in einer Zeitder Dürre, der Sekundär-Literaturen, der schwachbrüstigen, weltlosen Psychologie-Etüden’ die deutsche Nachkriegsepik ‘von dem Fluch stilisierenden Epigonentumsund modernistischen Kunstgewerbes erlösen’ sollte.8

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

7 Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein’, 148.8 Franz Josef Görtz, Günter Grass: Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds (Meisenheim am Glan:

Hain, 1978), 78.

4 Introduction

partly narrated from an autobiographical standpoint. Der Butt (1977), DieRättin (1986), and Unkenrufe (1992), have fictional first-person narratorsunmistakeably endowed with Grass’s biography, and the loose roman à clefbasis of Das Treffen in Telgte (1979) sees him writing into the text notonly a rather cryptic version of himself, but also all of the major playersfrom his cherished Gruppe 47. Finally, in Ein weites Feld (1995) and ImKrebsgang (2002) the famous author appears in an ironic cameo role andinfluences proceedings from the sidelines of his text respectively, while hisautobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006), entails revelations aboutGrass’s youth that challenge the dominant public understanding of hissocio-political position. Directly thematizing the problems of writing abouthimself, this last piece draws attention to issues of authorship that have infact informed all his writing to date.

From the early 1970s onwards, then, Grass’s authorial person conditionsboth the form and content of his literature. This may in part be seen asa response to his own experience within the public sphere: finding him-self turned into a ‘brand name’—fellow author and cultural commentatorHorst Krüger called him a ‘Markenartikelzeichen’ in an article in Der Spiegelin 1969—Grass begins to explore the literary possibilities of an overtlyconstructed authorial self.9 Such a reaction to the public sphere is onlypartly reflected in the work of other authors of the period. Individualwriters such as Arno Schmidt, Max Frisch, and Christa Wolf share withGrass a broad focus on identity issues, exploring the problematics andpossibilities of manipulating the authorial ‘I’ within literature from thelate 1950s and 1960s onwards. Their reflections, however, do not generallygo beyond the literary, that is to say, their texts deal extensively with theliterary and at times even philosophical aspects of authorial identity, but thisidentity is rarely placed back into the context of the real author’s experienceof the media-led public sphere. Rather, the fiction of these authors fitsbetter with the literature of ‘Neue Innerlichkeit’ or ‘Neue Subjektivität’,which attracted extensive consideration in the 1970s and was generallyconsidered to be the opposite of such socio-politically engaged literature asis widely associated with Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Heinrich Böll.Wolf ’s idea of ‘subjective authenticity’, explored (amongst other places)in Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) and Kindheitsmuster (1976) can belinked to the focus on the subject that gains rather radical expression in thework of Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina, 1971), Max Frisch (Mein Name sei

9 Horst Krüger, ‘Das Wappentier der Republik: Augenblicke mit Günter Grass’, DerSpiegel, 25 April 1969, quoted in Görtz, Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds, 51.

Introduction 5

Gantenbein, 1964) and Peter Handke (Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied,1972; Wunschloses Unglück, 1972; Die linkshändige Frau, 1976), as well asto the idea of a self-consciously anti-political stance propagated in suchintrospective works as Peter Schneider’s Lenz (1973) and Nicholas Born’sDie erdabgewandte Seite der Geschichte (1976) and Die Fälschung (1979).

Grass’s works, on the other hand, place the relationship between theauthor and the public sphere very squarely at their centre. The author isnot just examined as a largely literary construct, but also as a product ofthe media-led public sphere. The result is a much fuller consideration ofall aspects of the author’s existence. By engaging with the socio-politicalcontext of authorship in his writing, Grass both makes space for currentaffairs and identity issues to coexist within his work and operates a model ofself-presentation that can be fruitfully employed in a wide variety of genres.He may not be the only author to deal with such issues in his writing, buthe does stand out for both the explicit manner in which he engages withpopular constructions of his own public persona and the breadth of genresand techniques that he employs in this process.

Given this long-standing interest in ideas of authorship, it comes as nosurprise that Grass has increasingly begun to reflect in more theoreticalterms on the effect that media branding can have on an author. In 1994, hedescribed how the contemporary author encounters a media industry thatactually sets about replacing the author with its own image of him or her:

Die permanente Selbstfeier des Sekundären bestimmt nicht nur den Zeitgeist, sieverkörpert ihn. Das Sekundäre erlaubt sich, als Original aufzutreten. Nicht dasneuerschienene Buch ist Ereignis, sondern der sekundäre Reflex. [. . .] Wie hieß nurder Autor?—Den hat es sowieso nie gegeben.10

These comments add a twist to Lodge’s observation. Grass is pointing outthat the pervasive ‘secondary’ discussion has come to overshadow the authorand his work. The author’s image and the way it is presented in a discussionconstructed by others is important for a public that no longer wants toinvest time in reading ‘primary’ literature. The author as originator of theliterary text dies a second sort of death, killed off this time in the publicrather than literary realm and replaced by his or her own image. Grasshimself is aware of this process, as he elaborates with reference to the publicreception of Thomas Mann’s diaries:

10 Günter Grass, ‘Über das Sekundäre aus primärer Sicht’ (1994), in Werkausgabe, ed.Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XVI, 405–11,406–7.

6 Introduction

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

Here, Grass is arguing against the kind of positivist biographical approachto authorship that conditions much of the contemporary culture industry’sengagement with literature. In his ironic reference to Mann’s supposed‘Wesenskern’, he polemicizes against reductive popular images of both theauthor and his literature, arguing instead for the author’s right ‘to disappearbehind his work’ and live on, as it were, as an ambiguous figure. Bothin his literary work and in his essays Grass celebrates the writer’s abilityto manipulate his authorial position in literature and the world. Thisability is the author’s key to successfully negotiating the contemporarymedia-led sphere: he exploits a culture industry that is itself based onexploiting him.

Curiously, however, this aspect of Grass’s writing has been largely over-looked by literary scholarship. Although there have been local consider-ations of the way Grass manipulates first-person narrators and fictionalcharacters endowed with aspects of his biography in individual texts, theseanalyses are almost universally subsumed by the greater concern to elu-cidate the perceived socio-political message in the works in question.12

This reflects a general positivist biographical weighting in Grass criticism,and it can be seen particularly clearly in those studies that aim to provideoverarching analyses of Grass’s work. Thus Keith Miles, Hanspeter Brode,Michael Hollington, Heinrich Vormweg, and Julian Preece all begin withbiographical information on Grass, then proceed chronologically throughhis works.13 They follow the major phases commonly discerned in the

11 Ibid., 408–9.12 Siegfried Mews, ‘Grass’s “Kopfgeburten”: The Writer in Orwell’s Decade’, German Stud-

ies Review, 6 (1983), 501–17, Elizabeth Dye, ‘ “Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”. GünterGrass’s Im Krebsgang ’, German Life and Letters, 57 (2004), 472–87, and Michael Minden,‘Implications of the Narrative Technique in Der Butt’, in Philip Brady, Timothy McFarland,and John J. White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 187–202, are all examples of this.

13 Keith Miles, Günter Grass (London: Vision, 1975); Hanspeter Brode, Günter Grass(Munich: Beck, 1979); Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society(London: Boyers, 1980); Heinrich Vormweg, Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Reinbek bei Hamburg:Rowohlt, 1996); Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

Introduction 7

author’s life and interpret the main thematic strands of each work inaccordance with their (biographically conditioned) image of the author atthe time. Thus, the ‘Danzig trilogy’ sees Grass working through the Naziperiod and his Danzig beginnings, örtlich betäubt and Aus dem Tagebucheiner Schnecke are products of the political Grass, Der Butt correspondsto a ‘return to fiction’, Die Rättin documents the author’s concern witha nuclear holocaust, and so on. In all of this, Grass’s literary self-projectionis taken to be compatible with his public political persona. There is noallowance made for the idea that he might be playing with his own image,that the image of the author projected into the fictional text is perhapsnot to be directly equated with the real author who has ‘disappeared’behind it.

Against this general background, a small number of works point in adifferent direction. In the first chapter of his 1995 study on Günter Grass’suse of the baroque, Alexander Weber comments that ‘it would be a valuabletask to outline the image of the writer’s self in the novels from örtlichbetäubt onwards’, linking Grass’s literary self-presentation with Stoicismand positing that ‘the Stoic focus on the inner self is bound up withan indirect, allegorical mode of writing’.14 However, Weber has space todevelop these ideas only with reference to Der Butt, and this is done onlyin the wider context of his focus on a baroque concept of literature, sothat his wish largely remains unfulfilled. Stuart Taberner also perceives theoverarching theme of self-presentation in his analysis of some of Grass’swork in the period from 1965 to 1975.15 In a study that sets out to analyse‘the public and private faces of the author’ in work by Uwe Johnson, GünterGrass, and Martin Walser, he first raises the issue of the author’s positionin the media-led public sphere, and then offers readings of these authors’works that interpret their fiction as a reaction to this sphere. Ultimately,however, political impact remains the measure for Grass’s fiction, and self-presentation for its own sake is seen as detrimental to this aim, as thefollowing concluding remarks on Grass show:

Grass’s ability to function within the media-dominated public sphere perhapsreflects the fact that he shares with that domain a certain anti-intellectualism. Thisanti-conceptual approach allows Grass to view his public image as something fluid,and capable of being bent to many purposes, including political ends. [. . .] Yet

14 Alexander Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature (London: Maney, 1995), 36–7.15 Stuart Taberner, Distorted Reflections: The Public and Private Faces of the Author in the

Work of Uwe Johnson, Günter Grass and Martin Walser, 1965–1975 (Amsterdam: Rodopi,1998).

8 Introduction

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

While I agree with much of what Taberner says here about Grass’s particularsuitability for the media-dominated public sphere, I am not convinced thatGrass necessarily exploits his biography specifically ‘in order to exert’ apolitical influence. Instead, when Grass’s tendency to manipulate his imageis traced across his work from the mid-1960s to the present, the idea thatself-presentation might be a consciously developed theme in its own rightbecomes increasingly plausible.

This idea has been presented in strong terms in a recent work by MathiasMertens, Figurationen von Autorschaft in Öffentlichkeit und Werk von GünterGrass (2005), the genesis of which coincides largely with that of thispresent study. Stating ‘die Figurationen von Autorschaft, die er geschaffenhat, dienen nicht nur der Reflexion der Autor-Funktion und sind nichtbloßes autobiographisches Material, sondern sie stellen gleichzeitig aucheine Ermöglichungsbedingung für das Schreiben dar’, Mertens argues thatself-presentation is nothing less than an existential necessity for Grass’sliterary output.17 Offering radically new interpretations of Grass’s earlyplays, Mertens builds up an image of Grass as obsessed with the authorial‘paratext’ even before he became famous. By this, he means the entire publicdiscourse about an author that accompanies his or her actual literary output.The fact that Grass’s later prose works draw on the author’s public appear-ance may then be understood as a logical conclusion to such behaviour.It is probably for this reason that Mertens goes into comparatively littledetail on the prose works, dedicating just a fifth of his study (fifty-threepages) to discussion of Die Blechtrommel, Katz und Maus, Unkenrufe, Ausdem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus,and Die Rättin. While I agree with much of what Mertens says with regardto the way Grass explores the authorial role within fiction, he does notgo anywhere near far enough in explaining the extent to which these con-siderations have conditioned Grass’s output. He also readily acknowledgesthat he has not had the space to discuss Grass’s actual appearance in thepublic sphere, and this naturally limits the extent to which he can consider

16 Ibid., 88.17 Mathias Mertens, Figurationen von Autorschaft in Öffentlichkeit und Werk von Günter

Grass (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005), 10.

Introduction 9

Grass’s literary technique as a matter of play and manipulation of readerexpectations rather than simply a kind of unreflecting self-obsession.

Finally, Timm Pietsch’s study, ‘Wer hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass alspolitischer Redner und Essayist (2006), which appeared just before thispresent volume went to press, makes a very significant contribution to thearea most overtly neglected by Mertens’s work.18 Pietsch’s major achieve-ment is to provide in-depth analysis of the evolving rhetorical techniquesunderpinning Grass’s work in the public sphere. While his emphasis ison examining the political writings as a coherent body of work withinGrass’s wider œuvre, his sensitivity to questions of form and style allowshim to dispute the usefulness of such genre categories as ‘speech’, ‘essay’,and ‘novel’ and look beyond the long-standing literature / politics divide.Arguing chronologically, he makes the case for development across Grass’sliterary and political career as the author repeatedly refines his grasp ondialogic communication structures and alters his rhetorical and stylistictechniques accordingly. Pietsch’s approach goes a long way towards unitinga fundamentally political conception of Grass with a genuine engagementwith his aesthetic techniques.

This study builds on the work of these critics, aiming to offer theoverarching approach to issues of authorial self-presentation found lackingby Weber in Günter Grass scholarship so far. Although it is indebtedto some of Taberner’s subtle readings and very much welcomes Pietsch’sanalytical rhetorical approach, it shifts emphasis away from a primarilypolitical understanding of Grass’s literature and foregrounds instead hisdeveloping manipulation of authorship as a cultural and textual construct.This manipulation is discussed as a masterful rhetorical technique under-pinning Grass’s public position and as a complex literary aesthetic thatpervades his work and accounts for much of his innovation in terms ofstyle and genre. Although this study was largely completed before I hadaccess to either Mertens’s or Pietsch’s work, it can usefully be read as anextension of both. Where Mertens emphasizes Grass’s early understandingof authorship, concentrating particularly on the early work (the plays andthe first two works of the ‘Danzig Trilogy’), my approach is informed by theactual practice of authorship as it affected Grass’s later production. Likewise,while Pietsch and I share a focus on Grass’s practice, our emphases differ.Pietsch is concerned first and foremost with techniques developed in Grass’s

18 Timm Niklas Pietsch, ‘Wer hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist(Essen: Klartext, 2006).

10 Introduction

political writings and then points to structural and stylistic developments inhis literature, whereas my approach prioritizes the idea of literary play as aresponse to public constructions of Grass’s identity and uses this to explainhis various appearances across the literary and political realms.

It is for these reasons that I have not included extensive discussion ofany of Grass’s prose writing before 1965, the date when he may be said tohave first actively begun manipulating his authorial image in the media-ledpublic sphere. Much of Grass’s poetry and drama also falls before this date,although my decision to omit detailed discussion of these works resides lessin chronological than practical considerations. With regard to the poetry,I felt there was not enough space to do justice to Grass’s manipulationof the lyric ‘I’ throughout his poetic œuvre, although I have includeddiscussion of some of the poetry that forms part of his narrative fiction. Asfor the drama, Mertens, as already indicated, goes quite some way towardsaddressing the issue of authorship in this genre. The only major piece heleft unaccounted for, Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (1966), and whichI, on account of my focus on narrative fiction with a clear Günter Grassself-image, have likewise been unable to integrate, is fortunately addressedin quite some depth in Pietsch’s study. The analysis offered here entirelysquares with my own reading of the play and I refer interested readers toit. I have also omitted one well-known prose work from the later period,örtlich betäubt. This is because I did not judge there to be a sufficiently clearGünter Grass authorial figure within the text, although critics have certainlyspilled much ink trying to construct one themselves. It seems to me thatthe questions of authorship it explores—Starusch’s propensity for inventingwild tales with multiple endings—still belong in the ‘Danzig Trilogy’ periodof Grass’s œuvre and do not show any clear reaction to his own experienceof authorship in the German public sphere. It should also go withoutsaying that in the works I do analyse my focus is very specifically onquestions of authorship within them. I take issue with the current dominantpolitical readings of these texts more because they tend to preclude properengagement with the aesthetic and particularly textual aspects of Grass’sself-presentation than because they are intrinsically misguided. Grass’s textsare surely of sufficient complexity to function on several levels.

This study therefore does not aim to be exhaustive either in its inter-pretative scope or its treatment of source material, but rather to offer ashift of emphasis in reading Günter Grass that questions some of thereceived wisdom about politically committed West German writing. Thefirst chapter sets out three main models of authorship that Grass investigatesin his work: the author as a political figure, the author as a textual figure, and

Introduction 11

the author as an ironic construct. Discussion is given a special focus throughthe analysis of Grass’s Das Treffen in Telgte, the only work to deal directlywith authors and authorship and one that is often considered an anomalyin his œuvre. Chapter 2 groups Grass’s political writings from 1965 to2005, taking as its starting point the issue of how Grass created a publicpolitical image for himself in the light of his literary fame with the ‘DanzigTrilogy’, and then following his subtle negotiations of this public imagethrough to the present. It notes an increasingly ironic turn in Grass’s recentself-presentation as he knowingly begins to duplicate patterns followedearlier in his career. Chapter 3 charts Grass’s developing understanding ofauthorship as a textual phenomenon that allows him, in the late 1960sand 1970s, to gain distance from his public political persona. Aus demTagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben ausmay be read as works that celebrate the power of the textual model ofauthorship to construct alternative realms in which the author can exist.In Chapter 4, however, this textual mode of existence comes under threat.Faced with the looming socio-political problems of the late 1970s and1980s traced in Der Butt and Die Rättin, it is no longer able to counterin a fully satisfactory manner the difficulties encountered by the author inthe political sphere. This loss of faith in the textual model paves the way forGrass’s increasingly ironic qualification to authorial construction in bothpolitical and textual realms from the late 1980s onwards. Zunge zeigen andMein Jahrhundert, examined in Chapter 5, thematize overblown images ofauthorship: the author is attempting to expand himself across a numberof literary and artistic genres, yet at the same time the interplay betweenthese genres trivializes authorship, turning it into an incidental by-productof the text. In Chapter 6 the ironic attack on monumentalism becomeseven clearer. First approached through a shift of attention towards thereader in Unkenrufe, a reader-inspired re-evaluation of the famous author’scultural significance becomes a key structural and thematic issue in Einweites Feld and Im Krebsgang. Rather than seeking to work out his ownauthorial positioning, as in previous works, Grass in these texts is contentto analyse with considerable detachment the textual and social relevance ofauthorship. In so doing he openly traces an ironic aesthetics of replacementthat drives both the literary and the political models with which he hasworked.

1Models of Authorship: Das Treffen

in Telgte in Context

INTRODUCTION

In 1979 Grass published an unusually slim volume, Das Treffen in Telgte,that had as its seemingly arcane subject a meeting of baroque poets heldat the end of the Thirty Years War. Although his choice of such a themewas quickly explained—it arose from his desire to honour Hans WernerRichter, initiator of the West German group of authors, the Gruppe 47,with a short prose piece for his seventieth birthday—it has since takena somewhat uncomfortable position in Grass’s work. Many critics, whileadmiring Grass’s mastery of the baroque period, have judged it to belittle more than a slightly tedious roman à clef : the parallels between theGruppe 47 and the baroque poets seem either too smug (Michael Holling-ton and Julian Preece describe the text as being, at least in places, ‘self-congratulatory’)1 or self-obsessed (Marcel Reich-Ranicki deems the tale tobe ‘ein Stück Literatur über Literatur, geschrieben von einem Literaten vorallem für Literaten’).2 Clear parallels to Der Butt on both a structural andthematic level also betray its genesis as something of a spin-off piece. Theprecedent for the bold structural amalgamation of past and present canbe traced to the longer novel, where, in an inverse move, Vasco da Gamais brought forward into the future on a visit to twentieth-century India.3

Likewise, just as Katz und Maus (1961) singled out one thematic strand

1 Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (London: Boyers,1980), 174; Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 150.

2 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ‘Gruppe 1647’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 31 March 1979,quoted in Werner Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter: Günter Grass’s Das Treffen inTelgte’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 100 (1981), 274–87, 280.

3 See for example Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’; also Alexander Weber,Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 41, Bithell Seriesof Dissertations, 20 (London: Maney, 1995), 108–11.

Models of Authorship: Das Treffen in Telgte 13

from the epic novel Hundejahre (1963), Das Treffen in Telgte draws togetherfictionalized past meetings of authors as explored in the Butt chapters‘Von der Last böser Zeit’ (Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius in 1634)and ‘Die andere Wahrheit’ (Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Clemens andBettina Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Philipp Otto Runge in 1807)and uses this concept to capture the essence of the very real meetings of theGruppe 47. Furthermore, the idea of the text as an occasional piece thatdraws on a significant amount of historical source material has led somecommentators to praise the author’s writerly skill in a strikingly derogatorymanner. Alexander Weber draws attention to this phenomenon, quotingthe reviewer Reinhard Baumgart’s conclusion: ‘auch rein handwerklicheQualitäten (selbst Wurmlöcher in Stilmöbel setzen) sind eben Qualitäten’.4

With the exception of Weber’s excellent study, which shows how not onlybaroque motifs but also a baroque approach to literature as a rhetorical artpermeates much of Grass’s work, the result of such a narrow understandingof the text has been a universal reluctance on the part of Grass’s criticsto incorporate Das Treffen in Telgte, either thematically or structurally,into his wider work. Where the other derivative pieces have found widerresonance—Katz und Maus is read as an integral part of Grass’s body ofDanzig fiction and Kopfgeburten, the other short piece linked to Der Butt, isoften interpreted alongside the author’s political activities—Das Treffen inTelgte still stands out on its own.

When read in terms of authorship, however, Das Treffen in Telgte isneither an oddity nor a mere spin-off. In fact, it is eminently suited tointroducing the issue of authorship that runs throughout Grass’s work. Asthe only prose text that deals directly with the topic, it reveals much aboutGrass’s understanding of the authorial role in both its socio-political andtextual contexts. This has been noted by Werner Hoffmeister, who under-stands the text as a direct contribution to the wider 1970s debates aboutliterature and politics and as a counter to the trend of ‘Neue Innerlichkeit’.5

What he does not and cannot do, given the time his piece was written,however, is link this piece to the rest of Grass’s œuvre. In the overarchinginterpretation that I am offering, on the other hand, Das Treffen in Telgte isnot just interesting with reference to its immediate time of writing. It takesa central place in a body of work that repeatedly circles around questions ofauthorship but rarely addresses them directly. The text not only emphasizes

4 Reinhard Baumgart, ‘300 Gramm wohlabgehangene Prosa: Die behäbige Liter-atenkomödie des Günter Grass’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5, 6 October 1979, 132, quoted inWeber, Günter Grass’s Use of Baroque Literature, 149–50.

5 Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’, 282.

14 Models of Authorship: Das Treffen in Telgte

how important the Gruppe 47 community of authors was for Grass’s ownself-understanding, it also highlights the role played by predecessors inearlier centuries, allowing him to relativize the contemporary experienceof authorship and give it historical weight. Furthermore, dealing withquestions of authorship on both a thematic and structural level, Das Treffenin Telgte foreshadows later works by pointing at seemingly timeless issuesof authorship whilst reflecting on its own contingent status as an authorialconstruction. As this study will show, where questions of authorship arethe implicit sine qua non of the rest of Grass’s writing, Das Treffen in Telgteis unique in making that sine qua non into its explicit theme. It providesthree key models of authorship that will inform not only the subject ofthis chapter but also much of what follows in my subsequent discussionof Grass’s œuvre: the author as a political figure, the author as a textualposition, and the author as an ironic construct.

THE AUTHOR AS A POLITICAL FIGURE

The first model of authorship developed during the text is also the mostobvious one. Where critics discerned a roman à clef, they were respondingto the text’s anachronistic representation of a familiar grouping: the baroquepoets meeting at Telgte at the invitation of Simon Dach is explicitly linkedin the first paragraph of the text to the Gruppe 47 gatherings organized byHans Werner Richter. This immediately introduces a political dimension.Although both meetings, the real and the imaginary, were in the firstinstance designed to provide a literary forum for German-language authors,the political circumstances of the time—the end of the Thirty Years Warand the immediate post-Second World War period respectively—invariablyinformed discussion. In the case of the real Gruppe 47, this was not leastbecause those authors who were particularly active at the time of the group’sinception had strong political persuasions and believed that authors andintellectuals should work together to have a direct influence on politicalevents. Such a model of conscious political cohesiveness entailed a breakwith the deep-rooted apolitical construction of authorship in the Germanpublic consciousness. In order to understand the contemporary significanceof this new political model of authorship and Grass’s presentation of it inDas Treffen in Telgte, some background information is required.

Scholars writing on socio-political conceptions of twentieth-centuryGerman authors invariably find themselves compelled to go back to formercenturies to try to anchor the debates in a German context that is quite


distinct from French or Anglo-American parallels. Helmut Müller, forexample, begins his study of West German writers and politics with Schiller,while in the recent Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany,William Niven, Stuart Parkes, and Fritz Wefelmeyer each stress the impor-tance of preceding nineteenth-century traditions, with the failed revolutionsof 1848 marking a clear caesura.6 Before this date, a link between literaryand political activity seemed perfectly legitimate. The failure of the rev-olutions, however, not only saw authors beginning to turn their back onpolitics in favour of a literary sphere that was perceived to be closer to suchoverarching values as truth and beauty; but, even more importantly, thewider middle classes also rejected political engagement:

The post-1848 tendency of intellectuals and the middle classes in general to eschewdirect political engagement in favour of culture and education was to have fatalconsequences, leading initially to political quietism but then, at the outbreak ofwar in 1914, to an aestheticized nationalism which lacked any appreciation of thewar’s political causes or implications, let alone any sense of its potentially disastrouseffects.7

As well as having clear political consequences, this trend towards divorc-ing culture from politics had profound implications for the social positionof authors. This is nowhere more evident than in the development andusage of the terms ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’, literally ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’, on the onehand, and ‘(political) power’, on the other. By the early twentieth century,these terms had come to signify an entrenched opposition, with authorssuch as Heinrich Mann quite convinced that it was the task of authors andother cultured individuals to provide an enlightened counterweight to theevil-doings of power-hungry politicians.8 Not just authors of the time, butalso their wide circle of bourgeois readers believed this German spirit to bethe repository of everything that was good in the German character, whilepolitical developments were either largely ignored, or, as Niven suggests,understood only in aesthetic terms. This division is neatly encapsulated

6 Helmut L. Müller, Die literarische Republik: Westdeutsche Schriftsteller und die Politik(Basel: Beltz 1982); William Niven, ‘Introduction’, in William Niven and James Jordan, eds,Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003),1–22; Stuart Parkes, ‘The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of RedIndians?’, in Niven and Jordan, eds, Politics and Culture, 43–62; Fritz Wefelmeyer, ‘FromNature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in its Development from theNineteenth into the Twentieth Century’, in Niven and Jordan, eds, Politics and Culture, 23–41.

7 Niven, ‘Introduction’, 4.8 See Müller, Die literarische Republik, for a brief but thorough history of the terms Geist

and Macht.


in Karl Mannheim’s description in his Ideologie und Utopie (1927) of theGerman spirit as ‘free-floating’ (‘freischwebend’).9

The belief that German authors, as representatives of the nation’s cul-tural spirit, must not only keep themselves unsullied by political devel-opments but also provide a counter to these developments became mostpronounced under the National Socialist regime from 1933–45, whenmuch of the German cultural elite was forced into exile in order to survivethe machinations of Nazi political ideology. The experience of these authorsdirectly affected post-war understandings of the author’s socio-politicalrole. Helmut Müller discerns two basic readings of Germany’s politicalcollapse that went on to become highly influential in the post-war period.Thomas Mann suggested that the German nation had been brought to itsknees because political power, ‘Macht’, had overpowered ‘Geist’ within theGerman race.10 The solution was that the representatives of the positiveGerman cultural spirit must reassert themselves in the centre of society, andthus help both the nation and its citizens restore a workable balance. Exiledauthors returning to West Germany were cast as the untainted Germanspirit returning to cure a sick people, a concept that was clearly going tomeet with resistance amongst those who had remained in the country.

The second reading is one exemplified by Bertolt Brecht, who saw thesplit more clearly in terms of political allegiances. In line with the foundingideology of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), he believed there wason the one hand a ‘good’ Germany, constituted by those who had sufferedat the hands of the Nazis, and which after the war could reassert itself in thetabula rasa format of the new socialist state. On the other hand, and directlyresponsible for the war and all its accompanying ideology, was a fascistGermany, which subsisted underneath the rather fudged beginnings of theFederal Republic. Making no specific claims to moral superiority by virtuepurely of being an author, Brecht and likeminded authors who were tochoose as their cultural homeland the GDR were able to start out in a newGerman society after the war that at least initially welcomed input from allleft-wing thinkers and cultural practitioners. Indeed, it expressly denied anyongoing schism between political power and intellectual tradition, with theauthor Johannes Becher elected president of the Kulturbund zur demokratis-chen Erneuerung Deutschlands, a mass state-run umbrella organization that

9 Dietz Bering traces this term to Mannheim, via Alfred Weber: see Dietz Bering, DieIntellektuellen: Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 290–303.

10 See for example Thomas Mann, ‘Deutsche Hörer!: 10. Mai 1945’, in Thomas Mann,Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, 13 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), XI,1121–3, esp. final paragraph, 1123.


sought to guide cultural developments.11 However different these twounderstandings of the intellectual’s role in society are, they show the newpossibilities that opened up to authors in the post-war period. In particular,for those authors who had remained in Germany throughout the war butwished to distance themselves from the immediate past, 1945 seemed like areal break that would allow writers to take on a more politically influentialposition. German authorship, so long reduced to the concept of ‘Geist’,could hope to take on a new socio-political relevance.

Referring to the position of authors in the immediate post-war period,Erich Kästner summed up a general feeling that authors might at last havean important role to play in the socio-political sphere. The ironic terms inwhich he did so, however, highlighted the complexities of the ‘Geist undMacht’ tradition that would continue to condition their public reception:‘Den Deutschen fehlt der große, der überlebensgroße Dichter und Denker,der sich schützend, sammelnd und die Welt beschwörend hinstellt und dieArme ausstreckt wie ein zweiter lieber Gott.’12 While the (West German)public was increasingly looking to authors for guidance in a world wherepolitics had failed, the function it was prepared to allow them to take on wasmarkedly lacking in any real socio-political relevance. Consequently, activistleft-wing thinkers such as Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch, whoinitially saw a real possibility of filling the hole left by the discredited Naziregime with their ideas, quickly found themselves stymied by a societythat was not yet prepared to listen to their radical views. Throughout the1950s, the upcoming generation of writers that gathered around Richterwas thus forced back in on itself. These authors sought strength first intheir own numbers before they tried to tackle the difficult issue of widerpublic recognition. Indeed, there was a sense in this period that authorswere in training for the role they could see would be needed in the future.As Richter describes the Gruppe 47 meetings in 1962, even in their literaryactivity authors were aware of the importance of providing an exemplarylead. He lists the ideas on which the group’s activity was based as:

a) demokratische Elitenbildung auf dem Gebiet der Literatur und derPublizistik;

b) die praktisch angewandte Methode der Demokratie in einemKreis von Individualisten immer wieder zu demonstrieren mit der

11 For in-depth analysis of the author’s role in the GDR, see David Bathrick, The Powers ofSpeech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

12 Erich Kästner, ‘Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen’, in Gesammelte Schriften für Erwach-sene, 8 vols (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1969), VIII, 50–4, 53.


Hoffnung der Fernwirkung und der vielleicht sehr viel späterenBreiten-und Massenwirkung;

c) beide Ziele zu erreichen ohne Programm, ohne Verein, ohneOrganisation und ohne irgendeinem kollektiven Denken Vorschubzu leisten.13

It is not until the beginning of the 1960s, however, that there is any realsense of this training bearing fruit. Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eineneue Regierung? (1961), the first major bestseller in the long line of collectedvolumes of political essays published in the 1960s by authors and thinkerslargely associated with the Gruppe 47,14 draws attention to the way writersare now communicating with the wider public:

Der Gedanke zu diesem Buch entstand auf einer Zusammenkunft von Schrift-stellern im Frühsommer dieses Jahres. Niemand dort war sich einig, niemand hatteetwa ein politisches Programm [. . .]. Gemeinsam ist den hier zu Worte kom-menden 20 Schriftstellern das Unbehagen an einer satt gewordenen Demokratie[. . .]. Die Schriftsteller, die hier ihre Stimme erheben—warnend, mahnend undsehr skeptisch—sehen sich in der Tradition Frankreichs, das von Voltaire über Zolabis Jean-Paul Sartre immer seine Männer der Feder auch als Gewissen der Nationwertete.15

It is worth dwelling for a moment on the use of the term ‘Gewissen derNation’. Looking to the so-called French tradition, the authors presentthemselves as determined to be not just ‘men of the quill’ who tendto speak only to their own ranks, but also a much wider and far moresocially inclusive ‘national conscience’. Aware that they will be perceivedin terms of German ‘Geist’ (and the lack of any sort of unilateral politicalplan adds to this), they are at pains to convince their readers that this‘Geist’ can nevertheless also play a very real part in politics. As the nation’sconscience, they can offer the German public the kind of guidance thatKästner had suspected was needed in 1946. Die Alternative thus represents

13 Hans Werner Richter, ‘Fünfzehn Jahre’, in his ed. Almanach der Gruppe 47: 1947–1962(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962), 8–14, 10–11.

14 The most important works are Die Mauer oder Der 13. August, ed. Hans WernerRichter (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961); Die Alternative oder Brauchen wir eine neueRegierung?, ed. Martin Walser (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961); Bestandsaufnahme:Eine deutsche Bilanz 1962, ed. Hans Werner Richter (Munich: Desch, 1962); Was ist heutelinks?, ed. Horst Krüger (Munich: List, 1963); Plädoyer für eine neue Regierung oder KeineAlternative, ed. Hans Werner Richter (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965). WolfgangWeyrauch’s edited collection, Ich lebe in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: List, 1961) predatesDie Alternative, but it was both less widely circulated and less determined in scope.

15 Die Alternative, ed. Walser, 2.


post-war authors’ first collective attempt to take on responsibility for thewell-being of their nation. Having arrived at a working understanding andappreciation of democracy themselves, they now set about trying to guidethe conscience of the reading public.

Much of the activist sentiment evident in the preface to Die Alternative isshared by the baroque poets in Das Treffen in Telgte. Indeed, that such self-conscious cohesion in pursuit of public political enlightenment on the partof West Germany’s leading authors was neither completely unparalleled,nor, in the light of the group’s subsequent infighting and demise in thelate 1960s, a solitary flash in the pan, is one of the major points broughthome by the text. While the actual Telgte meeting itself is a fictional con-struct, the political motivation behind it is not, as Theodor Verweyen andGunther Witting point out in their article ‘Polyhistors neues Glück’. Theymention in particular the founding manifesto of the baroque authorialgrouping, the ‘Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft’ in 1617, which clearly linksliterary and political agendas in its concern publicly to further ‘die deutscheHauptsprache’.16 While neither the baroque poets nor their modern-dayequivalents met specifically in order to influence the political course ofevents, both saw a direct link between their literary work as authors andthe wider political situation in which this work was read, and it is thispoliticized model of authorship as a cohesive public grouping that Grass’stext singles out in the first place for attention.

Reading Das Treffen in Telgte as a celebration of Richter’s rediscovery of amodel of public intellectual involvement provides one way of interpretingthe assertive statement placed in the mouth of Richter’s baroque equivalent,Simon Dach, which is often quoted as the text’s motto:

Schließlich war man wer. Wo alles wüst lag, glänzten einzig die Wörter. Und wosich die Fürsten erniedrigt hatten, fiel den Dichtern Ansehen zu. Ihnen, und nichtden Mächtigen, war Unsterblichkeit sicher. (TT, 24)

Authors are not just a random scattering of humble scribes pursuing theirart individually across the country, but rather a self-aware, privileged group-ing whose social status is fast eclipsing that of ‘the princes’. The later Gruppe47’s achievements in re-establishing German literature against the ruins ofpost-Nazi Germany are implied in such a description, while the authors’claim to moral, if not political, superiority echoes the post-war sense thatthe entrenched positions of ‘Geist’ and ‘Macht’ were to be reconsidered.

16 Theodor Verweyen and Gunther Witting, ‘Polyhistors neues Glück: Zu Günter Grass’sErzählung Das Treffen in Telgte und ihrer Kritik’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 30(1980), 451–65, 452–3.


Likewise, the structure of the meeting itself—literary readings are followedby criticism to which the author may not reply and punctuated by breaks forrefreshment and other more scurrilous activities—is clearly based on Grass’sexperience of the Gruppe 47, presenting its literary achievements in a thor-oughly positive light. Throughout the three days of readings, the authorssuccessfully engage with one another’s work and pursue debates about thestylistic intricacies of literary production. No matter how disparate theirreligious and political convictions, the group, as the outsider HeinrichSchütz comments, is held together by a genuine commitment to literature,which, against the bankruptcy of German politics both in the seventeenthand twentieth centuries, takes on a political dimension. Where politicshas failed to hold the nation together, literature will provide comfort andguidance. Schütz reminds the poets of this when their meeting threatens tolose its way: ‘[Er] beantwortete die Frage nach dem Weshalb [des Treffens]:Der geschriebenen Wörter wegen, welche nach Maßen der Kunst zu setzeneinzig die Dichter begnadet seien. Auch um der Ohnmacht—er kenne siewohl—ein leises “dennoch” abzunötigen’ (TT, 91). The value of the group’sliterary inclinations becomes most apparent, however, in the incident withthe thistle. A stroke of literary inspiration on Gryphius’s part makes himelevate the potted thistle to the status of an emblem for Germany, ‘dasVaterland’, that has been so ravaged by war. Even when he smashes thepot to smithereens the thistle remains unharmed. Zesen is quick to spotthe metaphorical implications of the symbol’s fortuitous escape—nothingcan destroy the true core of Germany—and within minutes the authorshave agreed on a final draft of their political manifesto. The incident showshow literary techniques can counter a stultifying sense of powerlessness andstrengthen public resolve in spite of apparently insurmountable difficulties.

Such heroic authorial defiance, brought to a point by Schütz and strik-ingly enacted by the group, is a stance consciously adopted by Grass himselfon numerous occasions when speaking out on political events; I shall returnto this shortly. For the moment, just pointing to the similarity betweenGrass’s well-known public appearances and the kind of behaviour appar-ently celebrated in Das Treffen in Telgte goes at least some way towardsexplaining the charge mentioned above that the text is to a greater or lesserextent ‘self-congratulatory’. Before the overall tone and import of the workis judged, however, the full implications of Grass’s paralleling techniquemust be considered. Several critics have drawn attention to an underlyingsense of ambiguity in the text. Theodor Verweyen and Gunther Witting,for example, see in Zesen a rather questionable tendency to aestheticizeeverything, to the detriment of both decorum (his fascination with the


dead bodies in the river) and logic (his confused assertion, ‘Nie werdeFrieden werden. Weil man die Sprache nicht rein halte’, TT, 56).17 Referredto as ‘den wirren Zesen’ (TT, 57), and often acting inappropriately, heis largely a figure of ridicule in the text. Given the distance taken in thetext from such an extreme prioritization of literary matters, Verweyen andWitting quite rightly question the apparently self-congratulatory assertionquoted above, ‘Wo alles wüst lag, glänzten einzig die Wörter’. Wordsshining like jewels seem remarkably out of place in a landscape com-pletely devastated by war, and this has repercussions for the meeting asa whole. The poets’ self-conscious gathering is now equated with self-aggrandisement, which rings of misplaced pride and petty opportunism,while the invocation of their own immortality seems a thoroughly unfittingresponse to the suffering of thousands of ordinary mortals. In fact, cut offfrom immediate political upheavals as they are on the island, the poets aredescribed at numerous points in the text as being peculiarly immune tothe human suffering that surrounds them. The second uninvited guest, thestate secretary-cum-commander and undiscovered literary talent, Christof-fel Gelnhausen, brings this to a point: ‘ginge die Welt unter, würden sichdiese Herren, inmitten Gepolter, um falsche oder richtig gesetzte Versfüßestreiten’ (TT, 41). Furthermore, the underlying group dynamics cause thereader constantly to revise his or her understanding of the authors. Theymight have gathered in the noble pursuit of literary excellence, as HeinrichSchütz says, and they may be genuinely attempting to contribute to alaudable collective resolution of major literary and political issues, but theirtendency to get sidetracked by petty argument, their indulgence in food,drink, and sex, and a pattern of distinctly unconsidered herd-like behaviourmake it difficult to see in them any serious image of inspirational leadership,political or otherwise.

These all-too-human weaknesses are emphasized in the comparison,apparently by Grass himself, of the writers to children: ‘[Dach] unterwarfendie Dichter ihren oft kindlich betonten Eigenwillen’ (TT, 31) comments amarkedly distanced narrator, and it is hardly surprising that these wilfulchildren cannot sustain either harmony or moral rectitude for long. Notonly do they quickly become enmeshed in religious strife with one another,they treat the dishonest spectacle offered by Gelnhausen when he clearsthe inn as a ‘Satyrspiel’, a piece of comic entertainment laid on just for

17 Verweyen and Witting, ‘Polyhistors neues Glück’. See also Andreas Graf, ‘ “ein leises‘dennoch’ ”: Zum ironischen Wechselbezug von Literatur und Wirklichkeit in Günter Grass’Erzählung Das Treffen in Telgte’, Deutsche Vierteljarhrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft undGeistesgeschichte, 63 (1989), 282–94; Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’.


them. Later on, their personal vanity causes them to fall for another ofGelnhausen’s illegal schemes, and when they realize how they have beenduped, something close to mass hysteria breaks out: ‘Erst nachdem siegenug Zeit lang ihr Elend um den Tisch herum ausgekostet hatten, began-nen die Poeten sich und einander anzuklagen’ (TT, 125). Even when theyreach what is arguably their finest hour where, drawing on their literaryskills, they finally manage to complete their political manifesto, they arequickly distracted by more mundane things:

Es war zum Glockenläuten. Doch jenes Handglöckchen, das in der Tür zur GroßenDiele angeschlagen wurde, hatte minderen Anlaß. [. . .] Als die versammeltenDichter aus der Großen Diele in die Kleine Wirtsstube drängten, achtete niemandmehr der zwischen Scherben heilgebliebenen Distel. Alle waren nur noch auf Fischaus. (TT, 166–7)

These local incidents of ambiguity, themselves important sources ofhumour within the text, are backed up by clear signals of structural ambigu-ity. Introduced with the sentence ‘Gestern wird sein, was morgen gewesenist’, the whole import of the parallel underlying the text is relativized.Grass’s play with tenses emphasizes above all the passing of time and theintangibility of the present. While the sentence refers to the way in whichthe text, from the baroque perspective, maps the future Gruppe 47 onto thepast baroque gathering, more importantly it draws the attention of Grass’scontemporaries to the transitory nature of their own socio-political context.The comparison offers both comfort and a careful warning. Authors cantake heart in the worthiness of their literary and political efforts, paralleledas they are by some of Germany’s finest poets, thinkers, and social historiansfrom centuries past. With various models of involvement offered by thecrafty Weckherlin, the pious Gerhardt, or the realist Gelnhausen, the textdraws together a community of politically aware authors across time, offer-ing both inspiration for and justification of commitment to a public role.However, it equally warns authors against overplaying their own impor-tance. Just as the baroque group never had any measurable effect on the pol-itics of their day and have subsequently faded into relative obscurity, so toowill today’s exponents find themselves cast ever further back into the past bya succession of new tomorrows. This gains a particular poignancy when thetale’s exact time of writing is taken into consideration. By 1979 the Gruppe47 had already been defunct for more than ten years. While prominentparticipants produced numerous short manifestos in the early 1960s thathelped establish authors (notably Grass, Heinrich Böll, Martin Walser, andHans Magnus Enzensberger) individually as political players, by the end of


that decade increasing tensions within the group made authors incapable ofany kind of strong cohesive stance. If all the group’s meetings are telescopedinto one, they do not fare much better than their baroque predecessors:nothing of any lasting political import is produced, only the idealist modelof public intellectual involvement remains. Similarly, although the textas a whole documents the poets’ meeting as an important event for allconcerned, it is dismissive of any tangible results for the wider world: ‘Soblieb ungesagt, was doch nicht gehört worden wäre’ (TT, 173), claims thenarrator when revealing that the authors’ political manifesto was burned.

Those critics who have looked beyond the apparently self-congratulatoryprojection of Gruppe 47 authors onto past literary giants to unearth anunderlying ambiguity have tended to link such ambiguity to Grass’s evalu-ation of the group’s achievements. Weber, for example, argues that the factthat the manifesto is burned at the end of the novel points less to a generaldismissal of the power of literature than to specific criticism of the avoidabledemise of the Gruppe 47. The group failed to act cohesively at the finalPulvermühle meeting, and this was in Grass’s eyes directly linked to the endof the group and the public standing its authors had collectively enjoyed.18

However, Grass’s ambiguity may also be understood in a different light.While he champions Hans Werner Richter’s achievements in bringing tolife, even if only for a time, a model of public intellectual involvement, heis also celebrating a rather different model of authorship which, by its verydefinition, runs counter to the group’s high profile public position and isnot at all at odds with the authors’ collective failure to influence politicaldecision-making. This is an understanding of the author as subject to theplay of the literary text. As the following section will show, the author canbe a dishonest, dissimulating character whose creative drive permits himto overlook moral sticking points and makes him only obliquely suited topolitical comment.

THE AUTHOR AS A TEXTUAL POSITION

If the group represents a collective attempt to provide guidance of both aliterary and political nature, albeit undermined by the human failings of itsindividual members, Schütz and Gelnhausen stand for two different andapparently opposing understandings of the poet’s vocation. Their positionas uninvited guests at the meeting flags up their difference from the start. It

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


also encourages a comparison between the two with respect to the way theyrelate to the main authorial grouping and the model of authorship that itrepresents.

Heinrich Schütz’s unexpected arrival with Dach’s friend Heinrich Albertintimidates the poets not least because he has little time for the more pop-ular aspects of their literary craft. Schütz, a ‘Mann von entrückter Autoritätund strenger Größe, die niemand [. . .] fassen konnte’, has achieved inter-national regard through refusing to make compromises: ‘Niemals, selbstnicht in Nebenprodukten, hatte er das Mittelmaß protestantischer Allt-agserwartungen erfüllt’ (TT, 53–4). Where the poets are gathered in orderto ‘serve the word’, the literature through which they do this is alwaysalso serving their patron.19 Schütz, on the other hand, represents a kindof pure art. His music exists solely in order to honour the word and takeit to its aesthetic and epistemological limits, and this is ultimately linkedto a kind of religious revelation: ‘Die von Albert angesprochene schwierigeVielstimmigkeit tat er mit einem Satz ab: Solche Fertigkeit verlange dieKunst, wenn sie dem reinen Wort Gottes folge’ (TT, 69).

The poets are collectively in awe of both the man and his artistic credo,and the text is designed in such a manner as to heighten this effect. Not onlydoes Schütz’s delayed arrival at the meeting single him out from the rest ofthe group, he is also given a key role at two later points in the proceedings.After the first draft of the manifesto is read out the poets quickly lose sightof their original intentions, both in respect of the manifesto itself and theirmeeting. At this point, Schütz counters their growing sense of powerlessnessby reminding them of the value of valour: they have come together ‘[a]uchum der Ohnmacht—er kenne sie wohl—ein leises “dennoch” abzunötigen’(TT, 91). This finds an immediate echo amongst the poets and quicklyresolves the impending crisis. Significantly, it is also a direct nod to Grasshimself. In his well-known provocative poem ‘Zorn, Ärger, Wut’, publishedin the 1967 collection, Ausgefragt, Grass polemicized against ‘Ohnmacht’,suggesting that following a complicated recipe for brawn might offer a moreconstructive way of venting one’s anger than falling into despair. By the late1970s Grass had retained his distaste of soul-searching despair, but droppedthe sarcasm. In Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus he played withthe image of the writer as Sisyphus, heroic challenger to the gods andchampion of the absurd. While the direct political implications of thiscomparison remain ambiguous in Kopfgeburten—and I will return to this

19 Schütz says of their meeting, ‘Ihre Sache jedoch, die dem Wort diene und dem armenVaterland nütze, bleibe groß und müsse ihren Fortgang finden’ (TT, 122).


in Chapter 3—in later political speeches Grass began to present his identifi-cation with Sisyphus in terms very close to the defiant ‘dennoch’ uttered bySchütz. In 1983, for example, he describes his response to the challenge ofcontemporary politics as follows: ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt verlangt von uns, daßwir nicht wehleidig dem Hang zur Katastrophe nachgeben, sondern unsgegen das Abwärtsgefälle stemmen. [. . .] Erst wenn wir aufgeben, den Steinam Fuße des Berges liegen lassen und nicht mehr Sisyphos sein wollten,erst dann wären wir ganz verloren.’20 Endowing Schütz with such insightincreases this character’s position of authority for those familiar with Grass’swork.

Schütz’s status in the text is further enhanced at the second crisis pointfaced by the poets. Where the group collectively allow vanity to blind theiracumen and fall for Gelnhausen’s flattering explanation of the banquet’sprovenance, Schütz shows himself to be an unrivalled moral authority,immediately seeing through Gelnhausen’s trickery and forcing him to tellthe truth. Even more importantly, his clear understanding of the poets’worthy ideals subsequently saves the meeting for a second time. If earlierhe took on a touch of Grass’s authorial authority, now he seems to beno less than God’s own representative. While the poets stare as brokenmen into the apocalypse of their own making, Schütz provides absolution:‘Ihre Mitschuld an dem Greuel sei vor Gott klein. Ihre Sache jedoch, diedem Wort diene und dem armen Vaterland nütze, bleibe groß und müsseihren Fortgang finden’ (TT, 122). This point, just before his departure,encapsulates everything that Schütz represents in the text: he stands forabsolute art and absolute authority, backing a quasi-religious understand-ing of authorship as answerable only to the word. It is only in doggedlypursuing such a purist notion of their vocation that authors can hope tohave any tangible impact on their wider socio-political surroundings: onlywhen they persist in ‘serving the word’ through thick and thin might theirefforts also be ‘of use’ to the fatherland.

Christoffel Gelnhausen provides a second point of contrast for the group,and he too directly challenges their tendency to be distracted by worldlyconcerns. His standpoint, however, is almost the exact opposite to that ofSchütz. Where Schütz speaks in lofty terms of artistic truth, Gelnhausenbrings to the debate his grounding in reality. The poets have for themost part escaped direct experience of the war; Gelnhausen, on the otherhand, made his way up the ladder of regional bureaucracy, working as a

20 Günter Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’ (1983), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus andDaniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XVI, 71–9, 78–9.


state secretary, charged with a commando of troops. His understandingof political power, together with his ability to manipulate it to the poets’advantage, earns him admiration in the first instance. Harsdörffer recom-mends him to Dach in the following terms: ‘Der lüge bessere Mär, als sicherdichten lasse. [. . .] Dem seien die Kirchenväter, aber auch alle Götter undderen Gestirn zur Hand. Der kenne des Lebens Unterfutter und wisse sichobendrein überall ortskundig [. . .]. Der könne ihnen womöglich helfen’(TT, 12). Where Schütz’s fame and moral rigour endow him with absoluteauthority, here the inverse is the case: it is Gelnhausen’s very ordinariness,his grounding in the political circumstances of the day, that puts himin a position of power over the helpless poets. Furthermore, where thepoets’ less successful attempts to follow literary rules are condemned bySchütz as lamentable art (Gryphius’s opera is a case in point), Gelnhausencriticizes similar failings as ignorance of social practice. He makes a mockeryof Birken’s rigid rules concerning fitting characterization, and launches astaunch attack on linguistic purism that the poets are unable to rebut: ‘Werimmerfort nur reinlich halte und dem Besen zuspreche, der kehre am Endedas Leben aus’ (TT, 38).

Throughout the meeting Gelnhausen is given some of the best quips,which has led critics to speculate that he, the unacknowledged literary talentand political realist, is Grass’s own counterpart in the text.21 Certainly, hislinguistic policy echoes Grass’s calls in the mid-1960s for the preservationof German dialects, and the words in which he expresses his own desireto write just before his dramatic exit from the meeting are reminiscentof both the early enthusiastic reviews of Die Blechtrommel and Grass’slater description of his intentions: ‘[er werde] den großen Sack aufmachen,[. . .] und der Sprache den Freipaß geben, damit sie laufe, wie sie gewach-sen sei: grob und leisgestimmt, heil und verletzt, hier angewelscht, dortmaulhenckolisch, immer aber dem Leben und seinen Fässern abgezapft’(TT, 148).22 Werner Hoffmeister comments on this passage, ‘Diese Worte,denen wir ein Stück Grass’scher Poetik in nuce abhören, sind dem jungenChristoffel Gelnhausen (alias Grimmelshausen) in den Mund gelegt’.23

However, while Grass might indeed make Gelnhausen his mouthpiece on

21 See in particular Klaus Haberkamm, ‘ “Mit allen Weisheiten Saturns geschlagen”: Glossezu einem Aspekt der Gelnhausen-Figur in Günter Grass’ Treffen in Telgte’, Simpliciana, 1(1979), 67–78.

22 See for comparison Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Wilhelm Meister, auf Blech getrom-melt’, in Gert Loschütz, ed., Von Buch zu Buch: Günter Grass in der Kritik (Neuwied: Luchter-hand, 1968), 8–12, and Günter Grass, ‘Rückblick auf die Blechtrommel—oder Der Autor alsfragwürdiger Zeuge. Ein Versuch in eigener Sache’ (1973), in Werkausgabe, XV, 323–32.

23 Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’, 278.


occasion, such authorial affinity with a character is not to be confused withself-dramatization. Rather, the time at which this authorial affinity comesto the fore is significant. As in the case of Schütz, Gelnhausen reaches theheight of his authority just before he leaves the group. His parting shotis to extol the virtues of an authorial vocation that finds its grist in theeveryday, turning this, rather than poetic rules or staid ideas of bienséance,into literature. Once this message has been forcefully imparted, his presenceat the meeting, just like that of Heinrich Schütz, is no longer necessary.24

His function in the text is not to represent the author, but rather a conceptof authorship that only partly corresponds to that of Günter Grass.

Constructed as foils to the main group of writers, both visitors cantherefore be seen as authorial mouthpieces without actually representingGrass directly. This is important, because if they did echo Grass in a similarmanner to Simon Dach and Hans Werner Richter it would be difficult tomove the text’s exploration of authorship beyond the specific context ofthe Gruppe 47. As it is, however, they successfully represent two differentunderstandings of the poet’s vocation. This symbolic role is further enforcedby the way they stand out, for they are both in their own way larger thanlife. Schütz is directly described as being ‘distanced’ and ‘incomprehensible’,while Gelnhausen, as numerous critics have observed, is partly based onthe young Grimmelshausen and partly endowed with the biography of thisauthor’s most famous fictional character, Simplicissimus.25

Perhaps most strikingly, though, however different their understandingof the authorial vocation might be on one level—Schütz propounding totaldedication to pure art, Gelnhausen revelling in the underside of life—the two are pointedly brought together at an important caesura in thetext. The poets, having inadvertently fallen partisan to Gelnhausen’s illegalplundering, find themselves devoid of all moral rectitude. Their self-beliefas a grouping with socio-political weight is severely shaken. Gelnhausenhas sunk to his moral nadir. Yet at precisely this point the authoritativeSchütz reinstates him, not just as a member of society, but as an authorin his own right. Having already taken his leave of the rest of the group,he draws Gelnhausen to one side, refuses to accept the rogue’s piteousrequest for absolution and instead addresses him as an equal. He alone hasrecognized Gelnhausen’s innate suitability for the poet’s vocation, advising

24 In a slightly different argument Ruprecht Wimmer has also picked up on this literarysignificance attributed to Gelnhausen’s character: ‘ “Ich jederzeit”: Zur Gestaltung der Perspek-tiven in Günter Grass’ Treffen in Telgte’, Simpliciana, 6–7 (1985), 139–50.

25 See Hoffmeister, ‘Dach, Distel und die Dichter’ and Weber, Günter Grass’s Use of theBaroque, 135–56, esp. 139–40 for more discussion of this point.


him, ‘Er dürfe seine Lügengeschichten nie wieder mörderisch ausleben,sondern müsse sie beherzt niederschreiben’ (TT, 122). The logic permittingsuch mutual sympathy between two such apparently opposing charactersis as simple as it is surprising: the position that an author takes on mustbe justified first and foremost in textual terms. Total dedication to hisart makes the author answerable to a different kind of moral authoritythan conventional constructions of right and wrong. Literature permits adifferent kind of reality, one that not only tolerates roguishness but alsorecognizes it as an important source of inspiration.

Significantly, just as with Schütz’s ‘dennoch’ and Gelnhausen’s linguisticideals, Grass has spoken elsewhere about ‘Lügengeschichten’ and the ideaof different social and literary realities. In Die Blechtrommel Oskar refersto the act of narrating his life story as a case of ‘etwas vor[lü]gen’ (BT, 9),while in interview in 1971 Grass speaks of art’s challenge to our everydayunderstanding of reality: ‘Alle Künste [. . .] konfrontieren mit der nur engge-faßten, faßbaren Wirklichkeit eine neue Wirklichkeit, eine literarische, einebildhafte, eine musikalische, eine theatermäßige, die aber dann auch als einesolche begriffen werden muß’.26 Schütz’s approval of Gelnhausen’s craftthus carries a triple seal of authorial approval. The role played by bothcharacters, cast as larger than life and endowed with important aspectsof Grass’s own public persona, allows them to transcend the group ofwriters and their contingent concerns. They are brought together by theirunderstanding of authorship, the positioning of which in the text is clearlyintended to provide direct competition to the laudable but ailing notion ofthe writer as self-appointed ‘Gewissen der Nation’. This may be summedup as the second model of authorship evident in Das Treffen in Telgte, andit is exclusively text-centric. Indulging in the liberties of art, the author isby no means necessarily a socially acceptable figure. Rather, at the risk ofbeing distanced and unfathomable like Schütz, or a dissimulating rogue likeGelnhausen, he serves literature first and society second.

The two contrasting models of authorship I have outlined above—apublicly accountable, cohesive grouping on the one hand and an array

26 Günter Grass in interview with Getrude Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Ein Gegner der HegelschenGeschichtsphilosophie’ (1971), in Günter Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, X, ed. KlausStallbaum (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1987), 106–20, 113. In interview in 1999 Grassreferred directly to his ‘Naturell, dem Bedürfnis, Lügengeschichten zu erzählen [. . .]; in etwashineinzuschlüpfen, mich aufzugeben’, but obviously this link comes quite some time afterDas Treffen in Telgte: Günter Grass in interview with Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch:Seminar im Rahmnen der Tübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Günter Grass, Wort und Bild:Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung & Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch,1999), 43–62, 50.


of shady literary loners answerable only to the laws of the text on theother—is a productive tension that not only goes through Das Treffenin Telgte, but also Grass’s writing as a whole. Thematically speaking, thetwo models relativize one another within the text. The charge that themain group of writers, together with their politicized self-understanding, ispresented in a self-congratulatory manner is easily rebutted with referenceto the serious challenge that Schütz and Gelnhausen pose to their liter-ary credentials. At the same time, the laudable intention underlying theirmeeting is never really called into doubt. Meanwhile, the literary lonersdo not offer any practical model for socio-political improvement beyondSchütz’s vague encouragement to the group to continue in their efforts.Their sudden appearance and disappearance underline their one-sidedness,their fundamental unsuitability to uniting the different pulls of literatureand politics. The result is that neither model on its own offers a satisfactoryall-round paradigm of authorship. Likewise, the text does not have anyanswers: whether the manifesto would have had any impact can neverbe known for sure (although the narrator dismisses it), and exactly whythe manifesto never made it into the wider world—who was responsiblefor causing the fire?—remains a mystery. Read with Grass’s explorationof authorship in mind, however, these uncertainties are not necessarilyproblematic. Bringing the writers together allows Grass to explore variouscontrasting understandings of the author’s role without running the risk ofcontradicting himself.

Not only does the text not have any answers, it also actively posesquestions. In particular, the seemingly unidentifiable first-person narratorhas caused considerable speculation amongst Grass scholars.27 Althoughmost commentators are now agreed that any specific identity is probablyuntraceable, Alexander Weber has gone to some lengths to identify thefirst-person narrator as one historical personage. Reading the text extremelyclosely and applying a baroque approach to possible emblems within it,he makes a strong case for identifying the first-person narrator with thelittle-known poet Johann Matthias Schneuber.28 Such an identificationis convincing not only with reference to the inner logic of the text, asWeber argues in intriguing detail, but also with respect to the rest of Grass’swriting. Schneuber is characterized in the text as a troublemaker, enjoying

27 Wimmer argues quite convincingly that the text resists any specific author-characteridentification in Wimmer, ‘Perspektiven in Treffen in Telgte’.

28 Alexander Weber, ‘Johann Matthias Schneuber: Der Ich-Erzähler in Günter Grass’ DasTreffen in Telgte: Entschlüsselungsversuch eines poetisch-emblematischen Rätsels’, Daphnis, 15(1986), 95–122.


spreading unkind rumours, jealous of the success of others and keen tomock. This behaviour both marginalizes him from the main group ofauthors and reflects the first-person narrator’s own marginalization withinthe text (there are comparatively few direct references to him) togetherwith his penchant for literary intrigue. Most importantly, in the contextof the argument in this study, elevating an untrustworthy schemer to theimportant position of first-person narrator introduces on a structural levelthe second model of authorship discussed above. The narrator deliberatelycauses confusion about the course of events and his own relationship tothem, calling his identity into doubt and playing petty power games withthe reader. ‘Ich wußte sogar, was niemand sonst wußte’ (TT, 112), he boldlyclaims with reference to unfolding political events, yet when it comes toexactly who said what at the meeting, he cannot even remember whetherhe or someone else spoke: ‘Jemand (ich?) fragte’ (TT, 29). This sort ofnarrative vagueness is familiar to Grass readers from the ‘Danzig Trilogy’onwards. The text of Das Treffen in Telgte thereby functions as a deliberatelywicked example of the turn that a text-centric model of authorship can take.Answerable only to the word—and the narrator first introduces himselfwith the words ‘schreibe ich auf ’—he manages to absolve himself of allresponsibility for his text by thoroughly obfuscating his identity withinit. The narrator’s blatant disregard for narrative accountability stands instark contrast to the event he narrates—the authors’ collective attemptto take on a position of responsibility vis-à-vis their literature and theircountry.

Not only within the text (the two different conceptions of authorship),but also across the text (form and content) Grass thus plays different modelsof authorship against one another. The open-endedness of the text arisesbecause Grass wants to allow space for both conceptions of authorship, notto pitch one against the other. In so doing, he carefully avoids placing a clearself-image into any one of the characters, the narrator included. Instead,aspects of himself and his authorial credo are scattered across the text. Itis no accident that there are similarities between Gelnhausen’s trumpetedliterary style and that of the author of Die Blechtrommel, that Schütz speakswords of political defiance in the best Grass fashion, or indeed that muchof the author’s personal experience of the Gruppe 47 informs the generallypositive description of the baroque poets while the first-person narratoris unrepentantly untrustworthy in the best Günter Grass fashion. Grassis both everywhere and nowhere in his text, not least because it feeds offa tension that is fundamental not only to contemporary debates about


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

THE AUTHOR AS AN IRONIC CONSTRUCT

The importance for Grass of the ideas that he explores in Das Treffen inTelgte can be seen in his earlier, well-known 1966 essay ‘Vom mangelndenSelbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unter Berücksichtigung nichtvorhandener Höfe’. Referring to his own recent involvement in politics, hestates:

Das aber heißt: Kompromisse anstreben. Seien wir uns dessen bewußt: Das Gedichtkennt keine Kompromisse; wir aber leben von Kompromissen. Wer diese Spannungtätig aushält, ist ein Narr und ändert die Welt.29

Although couched in different terms to the models developed above, thebasic issue at stake—how authors exist in literature and how they exist inthe world—is the same. Grass’s description of the court fool sketches outan ideal model of authorship that unites socio-political efficacy (changingthe world) with utter self-absorption (the image of the fool bound up inhis own impenetrable logic). The very title of Grass’s speech implies thatit is impossible for such literary fools to exist today—the indulgent courtsare missing—but this does not stop him concluding his speech in rousingterms. Likewise, his work embraces two apparently irreconcilable modelsof authorship: the author as a socially responsible figure and the author asa textual position accountable only for the overall aesthetic success of hiswork. Although Grass develops these ideas without any specific reference totheories of authorship, they do at least in part reflect influential theoreticaldebate as led by the French thinkers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault,and it is useful to bring some of the terms they have suggested into mydiscussion of Grass’s techniques.

Foucault’s ideas on authorship form part of his wider reflections onknowledge and society, as developed in The Order of Things. This work setout to describe how certain ways of thinking about the world—epistemes—came to dominate at different historical periods, conditioning scientificoutput (in its widest sense) at the unconscious level. As he points out in

29 Günter Grass, ‘Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unterBerücksichtigung nicht vorhandener Höfe’ (1966), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 167–72, 172.


his foreword to the English edition, this concern is intimately linked to anattempt to move beyond the historical subject, who has been traditionallyheld responsible for developments in knowledge, locating this knowledgeinstead in underlying, discrete epistemological currents. Arguing that thetraditional focus on the individual subject ignores man’s inability to thinkoutside of the system in which he exists and leads to a ‘transcendentalconsciousness’, he posits that ‘the historical analysis of scientific discourseshould, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject,but rather to a theory of discursive practice’.30

Where Foucault’s rejection of the historical human subject as the originof knowledge led him to reconsider the history of science, Roland Barthesalso suggested a radical break with the biographical subject. Barthes’s focus,however, was very specifically the literary text. His dramatically entitledessay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) opens by boldly proclaiming thedeath of the literary subject:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality butintransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the verypractice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, theauthor enters into his own death, writing begins.31

The author’s ‘death’, stated here in an entirely unqualified manner, is pre-sented as the prerequisite for the literary text. As the essay moves fromthis blanket assertion of textual autonomy vis-à-vis the author towardsconsideration of the role of the reader, however, a shift occurs. The finalparagraph builds up to an exhortation to commit the titular murder thatnow seems to lie ahead of us: ‘we know that to give writing its future,it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must beat the cost of the death of the Author’.32 Barthes’s essay is rendered per-plexing by a distinct confusion as to whether or not the death to whichhe refers has actually taken place. Is he describing an important literaryprinciple or exhorting his readers to revolutionize the social practice ofreading? The implications of the paradox within his argument would seemto be that he is trying simultaneously to follow two different strategiesof reading literature, both of which render the author irrelevant. He firstprioritizes writing, but then looks to the reader to solve the rapidly ensuing

30 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London:Routledge, 1991), p. xiv.

31 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath(London: Fontana, 1977), 142–8, 142.

32 Ibid., 148.


problem of textual unity: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quo-tations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them beinglost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’33 WhileBarthes’s ideas are interesting and important in as much as they put forwardan understanding of the authorial subject as a construct rather than abiographical given, he is careless in describing how exactly the subject,whether author or reader, relates to discourse, in this case the literarytext.

In his essay ‘What is an Author?’ (1968), Foucault picks up on this,responding to and developing Barthes’s assertions in line with his owninterest in an autonomous discourse of knowledge. Whilst he subscribesto some of his fellow theoretician’s radical statements pertaining to thenature of writing and death, he is not prepared to discount the non-literarysphere, that is to say the socio-political context in which author, text, andthe literary discourse itself exist. Instead, he sets out how ‘the author’s namemanifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the statusof this discourse within a society and a culture’, that is to say not onlyrepresents much more than simply a biographical person, but also reflectscontemporary social practice.34 Consequently, he replaces the term ‘author’with the concept ‘author function’, defined as ‘the result of a complexoperation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call “author” ’.35

Foucault’s concern is to show how the author is a label that has come tostand for the way we relate to literature in general:

These aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author areonly a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations we forcetexts to undergo, the connections we make, the traits we establish as pertinent, thecontinuities we recognize, or the exclusions we practice.36

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

33 Ibid., 148.34 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed.

Paul Rainbow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 3 vols (London: Penguin, 2000–2002), II, ed. JamesD. Faubion, 205–22, 211.

35 Ibid., 211, 213. 36 Ibid., 213–4.


deviation is to be understood as evolution, maturation, or outside influence.Thirdly, the author confers conceptual or theoretical coherence: the contra-dictions within a series of texts are neutralized by reference to the apparentlyorganic whole of the author’s worldview. Finally, the author is understoodas a particular source of expression, manifested equally in various literaryforms. Across a series of works the author, and what is known about theauthor, condition how each individual text is read historically, stylistically,conceptually, and generically.

Having laid out what the author has come to stand for, Foucault subse-quently sets about creating a bridge between the longstanding constructionsof authorship and more recent radical claims about the author’s textualirrelevance. Carrying out multiple functions within the text, he assesses,necessarily entails a certain instability of location, and this explains why itmight be justifiable to think of the author in terms of absence:

Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator’s account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to themoment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from theauthor varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong toequate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker;the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this divisionand this distance. [. . .] [A]ll discourses endowed with the author function possessthis plurality of self.37

While readers and critics conventionally construct the author in line witha certain unified stance in and towards the text, the author is at the sametime fragmented into multiple functions that render his or her position vis-à-vis the text impossible to locate. In Foucault’s argument such positionalproblems lead not so much to the death of the author within the textas to his or her fragmentation across it. This ‘plurality of self ’ is in turnkept in check by society’s reconstruction of the biographical, pre-existingauthor in order to police textual meaning: ‘The author allows a limitation ofthe cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a worldwhere one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also withone’s discourses and their significations. The author is the principle ofthrift in the proliferation of meaning.’38 This allows Foucault to come to aparadoxical conclusion. While on the one hand the author is presented asa position constructed by the text and its readers (and exactly who or whatconstructs this position when is not entirely clear), he or she at the sametime operates in society as a figure of authority, which Foucault construes

37 Ibid., 215. 38 Ibid., 221.


in terms of ideology: the author is an ‘ideological figure’ briefed to act as‘regulator of the fictive’.39

The above description of the basic tenets of Foucault’s argument shouldmake clear that his understanding of authorship embraces both textual andsocial aspects. An author is a kind of social role, conditioned by socialdiscourse in line with dominant ideology, and a textual role, conditionedat times by the text itself and at times by those readers and critics who usethe author as an interpretative paradigm for this text. Foucault’s argument isinvaluable for pointing out the different ways authorship can be constructedand the different agents that can be involved in this process. It is not withoutits difficulties, however. The very range of his argument is arguably itsbiggest stumbling point, as Adrian Wilson points out in his masterful criti-cal exegesis on the essay.40 Foucault criticizes Barthes for essentially replac-ing the author with écriture, yet in his own attempt to explore authorshipin its various legal, epistemological, and social contexts he can be chargedwith doing the same thing with the terms ‘text’ and ‘discourse’. As Wilsonpoints out, these are used not only interchangeably but also take on quitecontradictory meanings as the argument develops. Furthermore, and I amagain reiterating Wilson’s criticisms, Foucault’s argument, that apparentlysets out to investigate how the authorial subject functions within the worldand the text, ends by erasing the author’s individuality entirely: the authorbecomes a series of textual positions, ‘a plurality of egos’ that the authorfunction is variously claimed to comprise of and to cause. Such a dismissalof the subject is not only inconsistent with its own terms (Wilson deemsthe term ‘author function’ to descend into incoherence), it also goes no waytowards accounting for the fact that, however authors are constructed, theyare always constructed as a personal being.

This latter point is of signal importance in my discussion of Grass’sinvestigation of authorship. While playing with models of social and tex-tual construction on a number of levels, Grass never loses sight of thepower of the individual to shape the public image of authorship. Notonly does Treffen in Telgte reveal his own indebtedness to the mentorfigure of Hans Werner Richter, much of its value as an inspirational piecefor contemporary authors lies in the very specific biographical portraits itdraws of past authorial figureheads. Likewise, even those characters whomight be described as representatives of a particularly textual notion of

39 Ibid., 222.40 Adrian Wilson, ‘Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis’, Modern

Language Review, 99 (2004), 339–63.


authorship, Schütz and Gelnhausen, mediate their message through pow-erful public personae who possess the ability to impress, shock, and pro-voke. If the text undermines the model of publicly accountable authorshipwith its own covert textual construction of authorship, it is at the sametime fundamentally indebted to a construction of the author as a discreteindividual.

Indeed, against the depersonalizing understanding of authorship as adisembodied textual construct Grass sets not just the rather naive imageof authors collectively acting as important moral sentinels, but also whatone might call the overly personalized cult of the author’s image, his con-struction in the media-led public sphere. Engaging with the phenomenonof literary fame, Das Treffen in Telgte plays on the popular image of well-known German authors. Part of the text’s appeal lies in the opportunityit provides the reader to ‘star spot’ as links are implied between famouscontemporary writers and their baroque predecessors. In the awe-inspiringfigure of Schütz it also overtly thematizes the power that an author can enjoywhen his reputation precedes him. Given Grass’s own media-star status,such a presentation can hardly be read naively. In fact, the elaborate lengthsGrass goes to not to insert any one clear self-representation into his textindicates that he is well aware of the power of his own authorial image, andhe constructs his text as a response to this. Deliberately taking distance fromhis own public image, he creates from a position of comparative detachmentrepresentatives of the various different aspects of authorship with which hehas been popularly associated and plays each one off against the others.His refusal to replicate directly popular media constructions of his ownperson and his decision instead to scatter various contrasting aspects ofhis authorial persona throughout the text may consequently be read as anironic debunking of the Günter Grass myth. Even as the text appears topraise the committed image of authorship with which Grass was popularlyassociated in the 1960s and 1970s it undermines such a stance with anotherfamiliar Grass image, namely that of the anarchic artist from his Blechtrom-mel days. This, however, is in turn presented as outlandish and morallyunsatisfactory.

The wider consideration of authorship to which the text gives rise isdeliberately inconclusive, adding a healthy dose of self-deprecating humourto Barthes’s apocalyptic textual model and Foucault’s ultimately rathersinister social model of contemporary authorship. Because Grass is nottrying to produce an explanatory pamphlet on authorship, but rather isengaging with authors’ experience of inhabiting the world, contemporaryliterature and their own texts, he is free to investigate all the paradoxes


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

CONCLUSION

By teasing the reader in such fashion, Grass brings the realities of theGerman public sphere to theoretical questions of authorship, but less with aview to socio-political edification than literary play. The ‘scission’ to whichFoucault refers can be equated with the productive tension between thecompeting models of authorship outlined in this chapter. Caught betweensocio-political considerations and textual and readerly demands, the authorfinds himself constructed within a number of competing discourses. Build-ing on Foucault’s ideas to allow for Grass’s sensitivity to the author’s per-sonality, we can conclude that what is fragmented across the text are aspectsof the author as a textual and social construct. The author is a public figurewith real public responsibilities, yet he is also a literary figure frequentlyundermined by his own text and given to hiding within it. Constructed atevery level, the best way to strive towards the ideal model of authorship—the powerful court fool—is knowingly to play these positions against oneanother, enjoying the manifold contradictions that they raise along the way.The following chapters will show how Grass has done just this throughouthis work, starting with his self-presentation as an author in the politicalarena and working through his negotiation in literature of the strong publicimage that such high-profile socio-political activity has created.

2Public Constructions of Authorship inGrass’s Political Writings, 1965–2005

INTRODUCTION

In 1964 Horst Krüger described Grass’s frequent public appearances in theGerman media in the following terms:

Das Ganze ist eine etwas fatale Selbstinszenierung mit schlechter Regie. Hierproduziert sich ein Prominenter unter seinem Niveau. So offenbar stellt sich derdeutsche Kleinbürger einen freien Schriftsteller vor. Grass spielt genau die Rolle,von der er erwartet, daß die Kleinbürger sie von ihm erwarten. Ein sublimer Fallvon Konformismus.1

The terms in which Krüger discusses Grass’s prominence are designed toridicule the author, yet they also unwittingly explain the situation in whichGrass found himself immediately after the overwhelming literary success ofhis so-called ‘Danzig Trilogy’. Trumpeted as a ‘Wunderkind der deutschenLiteratur’ and a ‘Genie der Fabulierkunst’ after his prose literary debut, DieBlechtrommel, in 1959, he was assigned the status of a ‘Klassiker’ of post-war writing on the publication of Katz und Maus (1961) and elevated to the‘Gipfel des deutschen Parnaß’ when Hundejahre appeared in 1963.2 Thisliterary reputation of superlatives was further communicated to the generalpublic by the controversies that surrounded the conservative reception of hisfirst two prose works. In 1959 the Bremen senate overturned the jury’s deci-sion to award him the city’s literary prize for Die Blechtrommel largely onaccount of ill-informed claims of gratuitous obscenities in the work, while

1 Horst Krüger, ‘Literatur und Prominenz’, Der Literat, 12 September 1964, 97, alsoquoted in Merle Curtis Krueger, Authors and the Opposition: West German Writers and theSocial Democratic Party from 1945 to 1969 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1982), 320.

2 Anon, Herrenjournal, December 1959; Karl August Horst, ‘Ferne Trommelschläge’,Merkur, December 1961; Hans F. Nöhbauer, ‘Die große Danziger Hunde-Sage’, Abendzeitung,10/11 August 1963, all quoted in Franz Josef Görtz, Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds(Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1978), 53, 55.

Public Constructions of Authorship: Grass’s Political Writings 39

Kurt Ziesel, judging Katz und Maus to contain illicit pornographic scenes,began court proceedings against the author in 1962. By 1964 at the verylatest, Grass possessed a strong public image that could count on attractingattention, whether he liked it or not. It was clear that he was going to haveto learn to live with these public constructions of his authorial identity.

Alongside this very specific construction of Grass’s public image came amore general reconfiguration of authorship in line with the turn to politicalinvolvement on the part of Germany’s leading intellectuals. Commentingon this move, Helmut Müller describes Grass as ‘der wichtigste Exponentdieser neuen Orientierung der westdeutschen Autoren’.3 Although it isdebatable who exactly was responsible for giving authors the initial impe-tus to reorientate themselves in the public sphere—Hans Werner Richterwould surely challenge Grass for this position, along with Martin Walser—it is probably true that in terms of media reception and general publicrecognition of a media brand-name, Grass stood head and shoulders abovethe rest of his colleagues. As a result, he found himself fulfilling at least twopublic roles at once: the daring bad boy of post-war writing and a media-friendly figurehead for intellectuals’ collaborative challenge to the reigningpolitical system in West Germany. It is hardly surprising if acting out suchcontrasting roles led, in the first instance, to bad theatre.

That Grass was prepared not only to play his part in this public theatre,but increasingly steer both public debates and perceptions of his own posi-tion within them is the starting point of this chapter. Over the course of hiscareer Grass has had to negotiate various public constructions of his iden-tity, and the way in which he has set about doing this reveals much about hisunderstanding of the social, political, and historical contexts of authorshipin the German public sphere. This opens up the dominant simplified mediaimage of Grass today as a straightforward self-elected ‘national conscience’to the literary play of self-presentation, allowing a much more subtle under-standing of Grass’s public image to emerge. It is also of direct relevancefor Grass’s literary work. Many critics have acknowledged the importanceof Grass’s political actions when evaluating his literature, but, with thepossible exception of Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, to date only one scholarhas analysed Grass’s political writings in depth.4 Timm Pietsch’s book ‘Wer

3 Helmut L. Müller, Die literarische Republik: Westdeutsche Schriftsteller und die Politik(Basel: Beltz, 1982), 67.

4 My approach has some sympathy with that of Cepl-Kaufmann as developed with respectto the early stages of Grass’s career in Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Günter Grass: Eine Analysedes Gesamtwerkes unter dem Aspekt von Literatur und Politik (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1975), andagain in her analysis of Grass’s 1990 publication, Deutscher Lastenausgleich, which contains a

40 Public Constructions of Authorship: Grass’s Political Writings

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

TAKING TO THE POLITICAL STAGE: 1961–5

Grass first began to make public political statements at the same time asnumerous volumes of collected essays by contemporary authors on variouspolitical issues were beginning to appear in bookshops. The idea thatauthors might speak out publicly on important issues gained particularurgency when the Berlin wall was erected in August 1961, which inspiredone of Grass’s earliest political interventions. Asking ‘Was können dieSchriftsteller tun?’ in an open letter to Anna Seghers, president of the EastGerman writers’ association, he explicitly drew on a past model of authorial

collection of his political speeches from the 1960s to unification: Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann,‘Leiden an Deutschland: Günter Grass und die Deutschen’, in Gerd Labroisse and Dickvan Stekelenberg, eds, Günter Grass: Ein europäischer Autor?, Amsterdamer Beiträge zurneueren Germanistik, 35 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 267–89. In both cases, however, Cepl-Kaufmann is more concerned to elucidate the overall political content in Grass’s writings thanthe techniques of self-presentation that underlie his stance and are the focus of my attention.

5 The analysis found in Hanspeter Rode, Günter Grass (Munich: Beck, 1979), Müller,Die literarische Republik, Stuart Parkes, Writers and Politics in West Germany (London: CroomHelm, 1986), Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), and JulianPreece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave,2001), all conform to this trend. Pietsch’s study, on the other hand, yields some very inter-esting literary interpretations, particularly of the post-1990 works, where he shows how adialogic communicative structure is invoked to undercut Grass’s public political persona in anincreasingly ironic manner.


activism. Just as in 1933 Klaus Mann had written in exile to GottfriedBenn imploring him to speak out against National Socialist policies, nowGrass was writing to Seghers to ask her to take a clear stance againsther government’s aggressive isolationism. Although Grass’s attempt was asunsuccessful as Klaus Mann’s before him, it was an important first step inhis self-conception as a politically active author. The idea of acting out rolesthat had either been played by previous authors or showed clear engagementwith them informed many of his subsequent public appearances. Rightfrom the beginning, a certain understanding of authorship conditioned hispolitical self-presentation.

This was particularly the case in the 1965 general election campaign.The campaign tour took place in two stages: the speeches ‘Es steht zurWahl’, ‘Loblied auf Willy’, and ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ formedGrass’s material on the first tour (July 1965), while ‘Des Kaisers neueKleider’ and ‘Ich klage an’ were the backbone of the second (August1965). All five speeches have a distinctly dramatic tone. Grass is keen toemphasize the novelty of his undertaking, both on a historical level (‘dieseWahlreise bricht bewußt mit der Tradition’) and a personal one (‘Ich habenoch nie Wahlreden gehalten und verspüre seit Wochen etwas mir Neues:Lampenfieber’).6 Furthermore, the enthusiasm with which Grass appearsto have taken on the challenge of speaking to the mass public is easilyequated with rather theatrical passions. The flamboyant gesture of pullingthe ‘beautiful’ Basic Law from his pocket and his tendency at times toget carried away by his own rhetoric certainly led to some rather sardonicnewspaper reports.7 Indeed, the general tenor of most press reports was thatGrass’s speeches failed politically, and that it was much more the ‘event’ or‘happening’ quality of his performance that drew in the crowds. This is theconclusion reached by Hans Suttner:

Nach der ersten Viertelstunde Vorlesung frage ich mich, wie viele Menschen wärenin diesen Saal gekommen, wie viele wären begeistert, wenn dieselben Worte voneinem besseren Sprecher verlesen würden. Grass zieht. Nicht das, was er zu sagenhat, und nicht die Art, wie er es vorträgt. (Zwischenrufe zum Beispiel greift er kaum

6 Günter Grass, ‘Es steht zur Wahl’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus andDaniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XIV, 87–98, 87, 88–9.

7 See Dieter Vogel, ‘Grass empfiehlt die SPD als Hotelfrühstücksreformer: Über dieWahlreise des Blechtrommel-Autors durch die Hörsäle der Universitäten’, Frankfurter All-gemeine Zeitung, 10 July 1965, and Hans Bertram Bock, ‘Günter Grass auf “Es-Pe-De-Wahltournee” in Würzburg und Nürnburg trommelte für Willy’, Abendzeitung, 15 July 1965,both reprinted in Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Franz Josef Görtz, eds, Günter Grass: Dokumentezur politischen Wirkung (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1971), 30–2 and 32–5 respectively.


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

Other detractors were a little more generous, conceding Grass his showman-ship but declaring him politically harmless: ‘Eine eindrucksvolle Wahlredewurde hier sicher nicht gehalten. Immerhin aber eine glitzernde Vorlesungmit dem Resultat, daß man sich in Zukunft in Bonn über die politischenAmbitionen enragierter [sic] Schriftsteller weiterhin wenig Sorgen machenwird.’9

However, Grass never aimed to be a political heavyweight. What eventhe most negative of reports grudgingly concedes—that Grass can count ona large audience purely on account of his literary fame and perceived abilityto entertain—was in fact always Grass’s main political card. Throughoutthe 1965 speeches he makes it quite clear that political argument is notand cannot be his aim. Rather, as he states quite explicitly in ‘Es stehtzur Wahl’, he sets out to make people think: ‘Wenn es mir nur gelänge,jeden von Ihnen nachdenklich zu stimmen, wäre meine Aufgabe erfüllt.’10

In order to do this, he casts himself, as well-known literary author, as theexemplary protagonist who is providing a clear and positive lead. Conse-quently, in his speech he repeatedly reflects on the business of speaking,posing the rhetorical question ‘wer spricht hier und zu wem?’ on numerousoccasions. Conventional wisdom declares the ‘Geschichtenerzähler’ to beout of place.11 He has gone beyond the literary remit of his authorialrole (producer of literature) and must now face up to the criticism that hehimself introduces: ‘sollte er nicht bei seinen Geschichten bleiben und denPolitikern die Politik wie den Hühnern das Eierlegen und den Bürgern dasSteuerzahlen überlassen?’12 Presenting himself as a sort of rogue elementin the conventional social order—an image that squares well with his owncontroversial literary beginnings—Grass makes his authorial persona intothat of a rebel who is clearly leading the way for others to follow. In sodoing, he turns to his advantage earlier media constructions of his publicimage.

The full implications of this self-dramatization are perhaps best seen in‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’. Here, the political speaker first introduces him-self in the third person as someone whose actions are markedly reminiscent

8 Hans Suttner, ‘Blechtrommler auf Tournee: Der leider mißlungene Versuch, GünterGrass politisch zu verstehen’, Echo der Zeit, 25 July 1965, reprinted in Arnold and Görtz,Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 36–40, 37.

9 Anon, ‘Der Dichter und die Politik’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 7 July 1965, reprinted inArnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 27–8, 28.

10 Grass, ‘Es steht zur Wahl’, 90. 11 Ibid., 92. 12 Ibid., 93.


of those of the great self-stylist Oskar Matzerath in the ‘Tribüne’ chapterof Die Blechtrommel.13 The speaker’s political motivation is ‘Grund genug[. . .] seinen Koffer zu packen und den Chor der Wahlredner mit einigenZwischentönen aus dem allzu selbstsicheren Konzept zu bringen. Also einStörenfried auf Missionsreise? Nein’.14 Not only is the idea of upsettinga political rally through musical corruption taken directly from DieBlechtrommel, the subsequent denial that he is acting in line with any partic-ular ideology is paralleled in Oskar’s refusal to be linked to any one politicalparty: ‘Nichts liegt ferner, als in mir, wegen der sechs oder sieben zumPlatzen gebrachten Kundgebungen, drei oder vier aus dem Schritt getrom-melten Aufmärsche und Vorbeimärsche, nun einen Widerstandskämpferzu sehen’, Oskar claims.15 Instead, both, in their own ways, claim to bespeaking simple common sense by demystifying the self-aggrandizement ofthe country’s main political players. Where Oskar does this throughout hisnarrative by taking a satirical look at society from below, Grass, as politicalspeaker, creates for himself in his parable of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’a position of innate moral goodness that, as Cepl-Kaufmann points out,would appear to be mysteriously immune to society’s ills:16

Hier, bei uns, heute und angesichts einer bankrotten Wiedervereinigungspolitik giltes, demokratischen Mut zu beweisen und mit unbestechlichem Zeigefinger denderzeitigen Bundeskanzler und seine Minister zu entzaubern: Seht, sie kleiden sichmit Luft! Seht, sie tragen eine Schleppe, die gar nicht da ist! Seht, Ihr Bürger, siesind nackt!17

By standing up and performing first the fairy tale and then his owncontemporary version of it, Grass is not simply making a clear politicalpoint. He also draws attention to the specific role he is playing, whichis itself reminiscent of his most famous literary creation. In these closinglines, being as bold as the little boy is a clearly constructed position whichboth plays off a certain media-led public understanding of the author andforcefully communicates to this public the political necessity for speakingout and taking a stand. This sort of meta-discursive approach characterizesall Grass’s 1965 political speeches.

13 It should be added that throughout the 1965 campaign, the press constantly drewanalogies between Grass and his famous protagonist (see the collection of newspaper reportscollected in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung). It is likely that thereference here is a direct response to this.

14 Günter Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 21–36, 21.15 Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (1959), in Werkausgabe, III, 157.16 Cepl-Kaufmann, Literatur und Politik, 123.17 Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’, 136.


At the same time, however, Grass is careful not to present himselfsolely as a self-conscious innovator. Engaging in role-play as a rather self-indulgent political happening runs the risk of trivializing the message beingcommunicated to a wide public base, as the rather more radical 1968student events demonstrated only three years later.18 To this end, Grass iscareful to temper the novelty of his particular type of political involvementwith clear pointers to a long-standing authorial tradition evoked in hisreferences to ‘the Enlightenment’ and ‘reason’. Well-respected, politicallycommitted predecessors are scattered throughout all his speeches, fromLessing, Klopstock, Herder, and Büchner through to Zola, Whitman,Thomas Mann, and Orwell. Thus while Grass’s major political messageis communicated by manipulating popular conceptions of his public imagein the name of the politically aware citizen, he simultaneously stresses theintellectual pedigree to which he, as an acknowledged author, can now layclaim. Cepl-Kaufmann deems the dual existence as a writer and a citizenthat he thereby takes on to represent a contradiction in Grass’s politicalpositioning.19 However, I would argue that he tactically employs two par-allel stances.20 Whilst on the one hand he wants to show that everybodyis qualified to have a political opinion, on the other he acknowledges thenecessity of justifying his own high-profile intervention as a member of theintellectual elite.

Grass’s needs here are twofold. It should be stressed that in the mid-1960sauthors were still by no means widely accepted as authoritative politicalcommentators. In particular, conservative politicians, notably the ChristianDemocrat (CDU: Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) chan-cellor, Ludwig Erhard, had publicly cast off writers as ‘little pipsqueaks’.21

Authors needed to fight to establish their credibility in the public sphere.Grass does this explicitly in ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’. With statementssuch as ‘bevor es überhaupt eine deutsche Nation gab, gab es, seit Klopstockund Lessing, eine deutsche Literatur’, he clearly demonstrates his political

18 Grass’s own criticism of the student uprising in, for example, ‘Die angelesene Revolution’(1968), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 332–46, shows how easy it was to attack such a position.

19 ‘Charakteristisch für diese Zeit ist die Ambivalenz aus demokratischem Selbstverständ-nis, von dem her er sich als “Bürger” geriert [sic] und der besonderen moralisch begrün-deten Befähigung, als Schriftsteller eine hervorragende Stelle im Bereich der geistigen Eliteeinzunehmen’, Cepl-Kaufmann, Literatur und Politik, 187–8.

20 See also Timm Pietsch, ‘Wer hört noch zu?’ Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist(Essen: Klartext, 2006), 92–100.

21 Grass makes direct reference to this in the opening to ‘Ich klage an’ (1965), in Werkaus-gabe, XIV, 137–46: ‘[der Schriftsteller] also, der Querulant, Intellektuelle und Pinscher—soreich ist unsere Sprache an Schimpfworten!—er kommt daher, klagt einerseits an und rätandererseits, die SPD zu wählen’, 137.


credentials as author. Defining the Enlightenment tradition as a specificallyliterary one, Grass declares the CDU government unfit on the basis of itsintellectual shortcomings: ‘Kleine Geister tragen zu große Verantwortung.Wollte ihnen jemand mit der Sprache Lessings heimleuchten, sie verstün-den ihn nicht.’22 This sort of wrangling for public political influence,however, places Grass’s comments within another discourse, namely that of‘Geist und Macht’, which in turn introduces a second front on which Grassmust fight. The vigour with which the speaker seeks to question politicians’credentials places him firmly in the camp of ‘Geist’. Such a straightforwarddivision, however, would not suit Grass’s overall political message. Wantingto engage a wide public base in political decision-making, he cannot affordto imply too strongly that authors have a special political insight thatdistinguishes them not only from politicians but also from the generalpublic. Consequently, Grass takes on not just the current representatives ofpolitical ‘Macht’, the CDU politicians, but also those of the disinterestedintellectual elite. In a long paragraph that stands out for the impassionedviolence of its metaphors, Grass speaks neither to his general audience norto the political opposition, but to an anonymous, absent ‘Geist’:

Denn der Ort des Schriftstellers ist inmitten der Gesellschaft und nicht überoder abseits der Gesellschaft. Darum fort mit allem geistigen Hochmut unddünkelhaften Elitegeist! Ihr Utopisten und Sektierer in Eurem schönen, windstillenGehäuse: Tretet vor die Tür! Stoßt Euch Knie und Stirn wund an unserer Realität!Genie wohnt nicht mehr im holden Wahnsinn, sondern in unserer nüchternenKonsumgesellschaft. Die Heiligen sind Pragmatiker geworden. Kein Anlaß besteht,den antiquierten Gegensatz zwischen Geist und Macht neu zu konstruieren.23

The way in which Grass draws credibility and a sense of social standingfrom his literary predecessors and at the same time strikes out at conven-tional conceptions of Germany’s cultural tradition shows the complexityof his public self-presentation. Having acknowledged the basic param-eters that will condition his reception, Grass tries to knit them into hisoverall political aim: making the public realize (in both senses) its role as‘der Souverän unserer parlamentarischen Demokratie’.24 Drawing on twodifferent models of authorship—his own roguish reputation and the rathermore respectable political legacy of his literary predecessors—he developscontrasting roles for himself in the same speech. By referring back tothe Enlightenment model and merging it with his own rebellious publicimage, he introduces to the contemporary understanding of authorship

22 Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’, 126. 23 Ibid., 124. 24 Ibid., 124–5.


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

BELONGING TO THE ESTABLISHMENT AS‘A MATTER OF COURSE’ : 1966–76

Following Grass’s self-presentation throughout the 1965 election campaign,it would appear that heeding the calls of his specific socio-political cir-cumstances and yet retaining artistic integrity and autonomy is the line apolitically conscious writer must tread if he wishes to maintain authorityin both literary and political spheres. After his careful dual positioningin the 1965 election campaign, however, subsequent developments in thepolitical sphere seemed to point towards such a breakdown in democracythat Grass felt it necessary to stress his political standpoint in no uncertainterms. His decision to continue supporting the Social Democratic Party(SPD: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) after the Grand Coalitionof 1966, coupled with the defensive stance he adopted towards increas-ing student radicalism and the rise of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposi-tion (APO: Außerparlamentarische Opposition), saw him adopting a moresober, representative role, with literary playfulness pushed into the wings.25

If he polemicized, it was now generally for rather than against the state,and by the end of the turbulent year of 1968 the self-styled ‘Störenfried’of 1965 was already prepared to describe himself as a member of the oldguard, albeit in a qualified way:

Wollte ich jetzt persönlich Bilanz ziehen, also mich darauf abklopfen, inwieweitder Studentenprotest und die Reaktion der Öffentlichkeit auf ihn mich veränderthat, ließe sich sagen, daß die vereinfachende Fragestellung—wer gehört zum Estab-lishment, wer nicht?—mich dem Establishment zugerechnet hat, eine Einstufung,

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


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

The identification with the state that Grass’s critics and commentators sawin this kind of pronouncement quickly pushed him into the fixed role ofstate representative. This contrasts with the behaviour of other high-profilewriters, many of whom were alienated by the Grand Coalition. BothMartin Walser and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, joined rankswith left-wing student radicals. Grass’s decision to support governmentpolicy at a time when many of his natural intellectual allies felt let down bythat policy meant that he, on the other hand, was inevitably placed into afar more overtly party-political context. In the eyes of many contemporarycommentators, Grass lost his public authorial role altogether in the late1960s and effectively became a political figurehead. It is for this reason thatin early 1969 the young student activist Rudi Dutschke deemed what hetermed ‘the struggle against Grass’ to be more important than anything elseon his political agenda.27 For the young generation of left-wing radicals‘Grass’ was already a fixed political monument that needed to be pulleddown.

Other very different commentators painted a similar picture. In a con-troversial article that was initially not published on the grounds that Grassshould not be attacked to such an extent in the left-wing / liberal press(interestingly, Grass himself finally authorized the article), Heinz LudwigArnold criticized Grass’s growing ranks of biographers because he felt thatthey ‘völlig unkritisch an einem Piedestal für den übergroß scheinendenAutor Grass basteln, das ihm entweder selbst ungelegen kommt oder vondem man ihn, zu seinem Nutzen, herunterholen muß’.28 This was some-thing which he then went on to do:

mich [verstört] der im nachhinein praktizierte Hochmut [. . .], der Mief seinwill und doch beim Mief der Spießer die Nase rümpft, der moralisch auftrittund anderen die mangelnde politische Wirksamkeit ihrer Moralität ankreidet, derschließlich, großzügig die Lage zu beurteilen vermeint und sich doch keine lautenGedanken darüber macht, wie sehr er selbst in sie verstrickt ist.29

26 Günter Grass, ‘Was unterm Strich steht’ (1968), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 384–8, 388.27 ‘Die politische Bekämpfung von Günter Grass ist wichtiger als alle andere’, quoted in

Brode, Günter Grass, 115.28 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein: Fragen zur politischen Wirkung des

Günter Grass’, in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 144.29 Ibid., 148.


Indeed, an increasing consensus amongst Grass’s numerous critics and com-mentators, from student radicals to critical fellow left-wing Publizisten andauthors, that Grass had grown into something of a caricature of himself wasclearly formulated by Horst Krüger, in Der Spiegel :

Grass—das ist die perfekte Identität von Individualität und Image. EinReklamebild, das immer stimmt. Er sieht tatsächlich so aus, wie ihn die Massen-medien reproduzieren. Sehr individuell, etwas fremdartig, und in beiden ungemeineinprägsam, wie ein Wappentier. Fast hat er etwas von der Ausgereiftheit eineshervorragenden Markenartikelzeichens. Nationale Repräsentanz schwingt da mit,etwa wie bei dem Mercedesstern. Den kennt man auch überall in der Welt undweiß, was man daran hat.30

Where in 1964 this same commentator had described Grass’s public appear-ances as ‘eine etwas fatale Selbstinszenierung mit schlechter Regie’, by 1969he had come to echo what was now a widespread belief.31 Grass was nolonger simply engaging his authorial person in exemplary public role-play;his constant political profiling had caused his public image to be redefinedin purely political terms.

The newspaper headline from the 1965 election campaign that suggesteda move from the theatrical ‘Bürgerschreck’ to a sober ‘Staatsbürger’ is thusin actual fact more applicable to the change that took place between 1965and 1969.32 It was during this later period that critics and commentatorsreally began to feel they had the measure of Grass. The author, in the termsof his own polemicizing speech ‘Rede über das Selbstverständliche’, hadbecome a political player as a ‘matter of course’ and, like him or not, peopleat least now knew what to expect.33 These changes account for the differentapproach Grass took to campaigning in the 1969 general election. Notonly was he now supported by the Social Democratic Voters’ Initiative,a pro-SPD grouping that he founded largely on his own initiative; he alsoenjoyed a well-defined and readily recognized socio-political position fromwhich to speak. In 1965, one of Grass’s main slogans, ‘Wahlen sind Appellean die Vernunft!’, had betrayed his sense that he needed to cry out to attractattention to his political cause.34 In 1969 the emphasis in his election

30 Horst Krüger, ‘Das Wappentier der Republik: Augenblicke mit Günter Grass’, DerSpiegel, 25 April 1969, quoted in Görtz, Zur Pathogenese eines Markenbilds, 51.

31 Krüger, ‘Literatur und Prominenz’, 97.32 Kai Hermann, ‘Wahlhelfer Grass: Der Bürgerschreck als Staatsbürger’, Die Zeit, 8 July

1965 in Arnold and Görtz, Dokumente zur politischen Wirkung, 28–9, 28.33 Günter Grass, ‘Rede über das Selbstverständliche’ (1965), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 147–63.34 See for example, Grass, ‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’, 123.


speeches had subtly shifted, as the introduction to ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’demonstrates:

1965 sagte ich: Wahlen sind Appelle an die Vernunft. Dieses Wort bleibt bestehen.Ich will nicht Stimmungen fördern, viel eher möchte ich versuchen, ernüchterndzu wirken. Denn während der letzten Jahre ließen sich überall Einbrüche desIrrationalismus in die deutsche Politik verzeichnen. (my emphasis)35

Reacting to radical left- and right-wing attacks on the government in theintervening years, Grass now perceived his role as neither to heckle norto incite, but rather to propound the virtues of quiet, sober argument:‘Zwischen einer Unmenge vollaufgedrehter Lautsprecher lohnt es sich, hal-blaut zu sprechen und notfalls auch leise, damit man verstanden wird.’36

The ensuing speeches, ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ (May 1969), ‘Rede überdie Parteien’ (June 1969), ‘VW-Bus-Rede’, ‘Die runde Zahl zwanzig’, ‘Redevon den begrenzten Möglichkeiten’ (August 1969), and ‘Rede über denunbekannten Wähler’ (September 1969) are all characterized by a distinctlack of showmanship in comparison to their 1965 predecessors. Brode putsit thus:

Die Wahlkampfreden von Grass hatten jetzt ihren rhetorischen Schwung, ihrefrühere Freude am Zitat, an der Parabel, am “Es-war-einmal”-Einschub, am lässigenRückgriff auf die Literatenrolle, verloren: Pragmatisch (um nicht zu sagen knochen-trocken) ging es um die politische Alltagsrealität in ihrer ganzen Dürftigkeit.37

References to the literary aspect of Grass’s authorial role are entirely lacking,and although he still stresses the value of the Enlightenment tradition, thishas lost all its literary overtones, being largely reduced to the reference to‘reason’. Furthermore, when Grass invokes his private person, he describeshimself as somewhat decrepit. Aged just forty-one, he refers to himself—in his son’s term—as an ‘altes Eisen’, although he qualifies this to becomea ‘mittelalterliches, halbwegs rostfreies altes Eisen’.38 In fact, it quite suitsGrass to cast himself as a little weathered. Having omitted all those claimsto a superior, enlightened authorial position that characterized his 1965speeches, he now seeks to convey a level of practical political experience thataccords him authority within the political sphere: ‘Nur wer die Verlockungder Resignation kennt, nur wer mit Skepsis gerüstet der Realität und ihren

35 Günter Grass, ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ (1969), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 436–47, 436. Thisintroduction is also repeated almost word for word in Günter Grass, ‘Die runde Zahl zwanzig’(1969), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 483–98, 483.

36 Ibid., 437, and also word for word in Grass, ‘Die runde Zahl Zwanzig’, 483.37 Brode, Günter Grass, 117. 38 Grass, ‘Rede vom alten Eisen’, 437.


Widersprüchen begegnet, kann den fordernden, zerrenden Ansprüchen derPolitik genügen.’39

This new, sober image of Grass the political campaigner demonstratesa large degree of independence from the more playful, literary aspects ofhis famous authorial self. Having made his political name and set outhis political beliefs, Grass is no longer reliant on either literary methodsor the literary tradition to boost his cause. It is probably for this reasonthat his public image became, as Krüger’s comment shows, ever moreone-dimensional. The drama of Grass’s self-conscious role-play disappearedbehind the steadiness of measured social comment, as exemplified by hisown political column that ran in the Berlin newspaper Abend and theSüddeutsche Zeitung from 1970–2, and then in the speeches aimed at SPDpoliticians in 1974 and 1976.40 Outwardly supporting the governmentwhilst inwardly trying to strengthen it with politically focused criticism,the kind of authorship Grass represented had become synonymous with afixed political position. The emphasis was no longer on using his authorialstanding in an exemplary manner to encourage political participation, butrather on actively developing a specific political agenda.

OLD DEBATES FOR NEW TIMES: 1977–89

Grass’s comparative lack of large-scale public political activity in the mid-1970s corresponds to the respite taken by his generation from high-profilepublic intervention in the nation’s affairs, often discussed under the term‘Neue Subjektivität’. When Der Butt was published in 1977, it seemed toconfirm a general feeling that established writers were returning to a literarysphere that was particularly suited to subjective self-reflection.41 Just asGrass’s narrator tries to hide within the epic folds of his narrative from thechallenge of feminist emancipation, so too did the author appear to havewithdrawn to what was unquestionably his terrain: the literary text. As hasbeen amply pointed out with reference to West German writing in general,however, focusing on the self in literature does not necessarily correspondto absolute silence on the political front.42 Rather, as the scope of politics

39 Günter Grass, ‘VW-Bus-Rede’ (1969), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 475–82, 478.40 See Günter Grass, ‘Rede vor der Fraktion der SPD’ (1974), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 344–8,

and ‘Einige Denkzettel nach der Wahl’ (1976), in Werkausgabe, XIV, 434–42.41 For a discussion of the so-called phenomenon of ‘Neue Subjektivität’, see Moray

McGowan, ‘Neue Subjektivität’, in Keith Bullivant, ed., After the ‘Death’ of Literature, 53–68.42 See McGowan, ‘Neue Subjektivität’, and Keith Bullivant, Realism Today: Aspects of the

Contemporary West German Novel (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), esp. ch. 8.


changed, Grass, as ‘jemand, der sich immer wieder und nahezu zwanghaftneu definieren muß’, made a corresponding change to the way he presentedhis public person within it.43

Speaking at a one-day colloquium, ‘Was ist heute links?’, run by L ’76,the magazine that he, Heinrich Böll, and Carola Stern had founded asan intellectual forum for left-wing / liberal ideas, Grass outlined the newpolitical agenda:

Ich möchte dazu auffordern, hier nicht die ideologischen Gefechte der zurückliegen-den Jahre zu führen, sondern zu begreifen, daß wir in einer Welt des schnellen, desbeinah überstürzten Wandels leben. Zu begreifen, was in den nächsten fünfzehn,zwanzig Jahren auf uns zukommt: bei nicht gelöstem West-Ost-Konflikt der immerstärker dominierende Nord-Süd-Konflikt; die schon stattfindende Bevölkerungs-explosion; die permanente Tatsache, die genauso permanent ignoriert wird, daßin dieser Welt voller Reserven, hochentwickelter Transportmittel, eines funktion-ierenden Nachrichtensystems dennoch die Hälfte der Weltbevölkerung permanentunterernährt ist.44

Although by the late 1960s Grass had established an acknowledged rolefor himself as commentator on German affairs (Arnold referred to himas ‘Praeceptor democratiae germaniae’, a rather extreme formulation thatunderlines just how fixed his political positioning had by then become),a similar degree of authority on international matters was not necessarilyso self-evident.45 Grass’s solution, it would appear, was to reassert him-self specifically as an author operating with specifically authorial talentsin the political sphere. Where only a little over a decade previously hehad explicitly polemicized against the ‘Geist’ / ‘Macht’ opposition that washistorically so dominant in German cultural discourse, by the late 1970she subtly started reintroducing a revised version of this polarity. In a 1979speech on the position of literature in the two Germanys, ‘Die deutschenLiteraturen’, Grass emphasizes the fundamental split between literature andpolitics. Politics is seen as restrictive, ‘smothering’ literature’s life-blood:‘Der politische Wirklichkeitsbegriff faßt zu eng. Sein Pragmatismus ersticktdie Phantasie.’46 Furthermore, such behaviour is presented as thoroughlyunjustified, as Grass asserts ‘Hingegen sind die Schriftsteller, von Logauund Lessing über Herder und Heine bis zu Böll und Biermann stets die

43 Günter Grass, ‘Der Schriftsteller als Bürger: eine Siebenjahresbilanz’ (1973), in Werkaus-gabe, XV, 265–82, 265.

44 Günter Grass, ‘Ein neuer Begriff von Arbeit’ (1977), in Werkausgabe, XV, 449–54, 454.45 Arnold, ‘Großes Ja und kleines Nein’, 148.46 Günter Grass, ‘Die deutschen Literaturen’ (1979), in Werkausgabe, XV, 518–27, 519.


besseren Patrioten gewesen’.47 Drawing once again on previous modelsof authorship, this sort of oppositional polemics leads Grass to redefineliterature (and with it, authors) as above politics. Although he is speakingin the first instance about East and West Germany, the terms he uses alongwith the context in which he is speaking (a tour through South-East Asia,during which Grass engages with, for example, the status of writers inChina) lend his argument a universal application:

Diese [Ost-West literarischen] Treffen machten uns deutlich, daß sich die Literaturdem Zugriff der Ideologien entziehen muß, daß sich Literatur an kein Staatsver-ständnis binden läßt, daß Literatur grenzüberschreitend ist. Nicht nur wir saßendort und redeten uns die Köpfe heiß, unsere Zunft war gegenwärtig. Büchner undKleist wurden zitiert; von Lessing und Heine war die Rede. Unsere literarischenZiehväter ließen sich nicht nach Himmelsrichtungen einteilen. Ost und West mitihrem jeweils ideologischen Anspruch gaben keinen ästhetischen Maßstab her.Unversehens wurde uns Deutschland zum literarischen Begriff.48

This sort of argument is striking in the contrast it provides with Grass’searlier, vigorous dismissal of what he considered the ‘floating’ intellect,‘über oder abseits der Gesellschaft’. Now, Grass’s own ‘guild’ of authors isitself defined by its very lack of specific political allegiance. Instead, theseauthors are presented as the representatives of a transnational literature thatis united by its common roots in the imagination (‘die Phantasie’) and theaesthetic (‘ästhetischer Maßstab’), not divided by contemporary politicalsplits. Moreover, their methods are not just better than those of politicians,they take place within an entirely different space which must be kept clear ofall ideological political influence. Accordingly, literature becomes a kind ofantidote to everyday politics, ‘ihre Macht bedrückt nicht, sondern vermit-telt Erkenntnisse und setzt Phantasie frei’.49 Grass is arguing that literature’sgreater insight into the human condition makes it a better tool than thepolitics of reason for helping us deal with the world in which we live. Thiscorresponds to more general trends discerned by critics in literature of thisperiod. Moray McGowan, for example, refers to ‘the neo-Romantic returnin the 1980s of attempts to transcend reality by aestheticising it, seen in theinfluence of Novalis on Strauß and Handke, and the return of the author(or the text) as a visionary force with the power to create counter-worlds’.50

Similarly, Stephen Brockmann presents East and West German literature ofthe 1980s as converging in the idea of Germany as a primarily cultural

47 Ibid., 520. 48 Ibid., 527. 49 Ibid., 527.50 McGowan, ‘Neue Subjektivität’, 67.


entity (‘Kulturnation’).51 If Grass’s terms are taken at face value, then,authors would seem to be very close to the ‘Hohenpriester’ against whomhe had polemicized in the strongest of terms fourteen years previously. Inlooking at authors in the bigger picture, Grass, in step with other authors ofthe time, develops a markedly different understanding of the author’s publicrole from that of his establishment phase: the author is now a speciallytalented ‘seer’ who communicates his mythical visions in order to bringhelp and guidance to ordinary mortals in the socio-political sphere.

The idea that authors are visionaries is clearly developed from thespeeches in the late 1970s onwards. In particular, much of Grass’s politicalactivity at the beginning of the 1980s came increasingly under the influenceof Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not only does the concept of ‘Orwell’sdecade’ sum up the sense of angst felt by all the characters in Grass’s 1979fictional piece, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, it also becomesa leading slogan in his 1980 and 1983 election campaigns. The 1980election speech begins with a direct reference, in semi-Foucaultian terms,to the socio-political aspect of authorship: ‘Wie Markenzeichen geistern derName des Autors und der Titel seines Buches durch unser schreckenbereitesBewußtsein.’52 Orwell has gained meaning within the contemporary publicsphere on account of his vision of the world, so that his name has come tostand not just for a style of writing, but for a whole way of living thatseems increasingly plausible. Consequently, Orwell is now relevant not as a‘literarische Wiederentdeckung’, rather ‘es ist die düstere Hellsichtigkeit desAutors, die uns immer noch oder mehr als vor drei Jahrzehnten betrifft’.53

These introductory remarks to Grass’s speech set up the context in whichGrass himself is speaking. Literature has thrown down the gauntlet topolitics and Grass can warn his audience to ignore his authorial adviceat their peril. Accordingly, having endorsed the SPD as politics’ strongestresponse to Orwell, Grass carries on to formulate ‘in eigener Sache [. . .]und als Schriftsteller’ his own ideas concerning German cultural unificationand the foundation of a so-called ‘Kulturnation’, which is not otherwiseon any party political agenda for the 1980 election campaign.54 Whilediversion from official party policy is certainly not new to Grass’s speeches(he embarrassed the party on a number of occasions in the first half of the1960s), it does highlight the extent to which he has returned to the tradi-tional division of authors and politics. The success of his speech depends

51 Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Unification (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999), esp. ch.1.

52 Günter Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt I’ (1980), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 5–18, 5.53 Ibid., 5. 54 Ibid., 6.


entirely on convincing the voting public that the endorsement of a partyby a representative of the literary tradition is enough to make them voteSPD. This is the sort of condescending intellectual stance that Grass, incontradistinction to some of his colleagues in Walser’s Die Alternative, socarefully avoided in the early 1960s.55

Literature’s continued superiority to politics is further developed in the1981 speech, ‘Literatur und Mythos’. Where Enlightenment reason, inits own drive towards technological progress, is categorically presented ashaving succumbed to the mythologizing tendencies it initially set out tocounter, this same contradiction is described as the very stuff of literature:

Könnten nicht sie, die Literaten, ihr, der Vernunft, die immerhin vernünftigeEinsicht beibringen, daß Märchen, Mythen und Sagen nicht außerhalb unsererWirklichkeit entstanden sind, [. . .] sondern Teil unserer Realität und kräftig genuggeblieben sind, um uns klarer, wenn auch mit gesteigertem Ausdruck in unsererexistentiellen Not und Wirrnis darzustellen, als es die überdies wortarm gewordene,nur noch im Fachjargon nuschelnde Vernunft vermag?56

In this rhetorical questioning, it becomes the author’s mission to openup reality through the power of his or her imagination. By embracing adifferent kind of reality, literature throws new light on the world as it isseen through rational eyes. Grass then illustrates this with reference to hisown adaptation of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus:

Heute, gebeutelt von Erfahrungen und auch gezeichnet von der produktivenVergeblichkeit des politischen Steinewälzens, ist mir Camus wieder nah, ist die Märvom rastlosen Stein, der, Mal um Mal bergauf gewälzt, nicht liegenbleiben will, istmir die heroische Absurdität des die Götter spottenden und den Stein bejahendenSisyphos gegenwärtig. Sie beweist sich alltäglich. Dieses den Mythos in wenige Sätzefassende Bild vom heiteren Steinewälzer weist die menschliche Existenz komplexerund obendrein sinnlicher nach, als es der Informationswust unserer Tage oder gardie soziologische Überproduktion vermag.57

Literature here is described as re-enacting reality in its fullest scope (‘weist[. . .] nach’). The absurd is not just part of the everyday, but the very essenceof human existence, and literature, in Grass’s eyes, has become the lastbastion of the myth that best represents it: ‘Die Literatur lebt vom Mythos.

55 Compare Grass’s meta-discursive piece, ‘Wer wird dieses Bändchen kaufen?’ with theother essays by Axel Eggebrecht, Gerhard Szczesny, Hans Josef Mundt, Wolfdietrich Schnurre,Heinz von Cramer, Hans Werner Richter, Gerhard Schoenberner and Erich Kuby, all inWalser, ed., Die Alternative.

56 Günter Grass, ‘Literatur und Mythos’ (1981), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 19–23, 21.57 Ibid., 21–2.


[. . .] Ihr Gedächtnis speichert, was wir erinnern sollten’.58 Consequently, inthe 1983 election speech, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’, literature, now explicitlyused to explain political reality, is described as taking politics to another,more profound level:

Literarisch begründet, ließe sich sagen: Es geht in diesem Wahlkampf nicht nurum Bafög, Mieterschutz und Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramme, sondern auch—undso wichtig die genannten Probleme sind—um die Frage, ob George OrwellsSchreckenvision, der Roman “1984”, von der Wirklichkeit eingeholt oder sogarüberboten wird. Zuallererst deshalb mische ich mich in diesen Wahlkampf. Dennnoch—so hoffe ich—haben wir es in der Hand, Orwells Vision zu widerlegen.59

Grass then sets out his own qualifications to engage in this effort aspurely literary in nature: they are based on a long-standing familiaritywith the work of Orwell, Camus, and Miłosz.60 Just as the earlier novel,Kopfgeburten, makes Camus respond to Orwell, so Grass uses here Camus’sSisyphus to face the challenges posed by Orwell’s decade. In so doing, theauthor merges with the literary position he is propounding: the author aspolitical speaker actually becomes Sisyphus:

Wie sagte Sisyphos, als er den Stein bergauf gewälzt hatte, doch der Stein sogleichwieder bergab rollte? Er rief: Keine Angst, Stein! Bald bin auch ich wieder unten.Du gehörst zu mir. Gleich geht es wieder bergauf! Jede politische Anstrengung, diedas Unrecht schmälern, den Frieden sicherer machen, die Freiheit erhalten oder garerweitern und die Natur vor der zerstörenden Anmaßung der Menschen schützenwill, ich sage, jede dieser Anstrengungen ist immer auch ein Stück Sisyphosarbeit.61

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

58 Ibid., 23.59 Günter Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’ (1983), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 71–9, 72.60 The relevance of Miłosz is described as the inverse of Camus—where Camus provides

a mythical example of how man overcomes adverse circumstances, Miłosz’s work showshistorically how intellectuals failed under the dual pressures of fascism and Stalinism. It seemssignificant that in both the contemporary literary work, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen ster-ben aus, and this political speech, Camus and the force of myth are favoured over Miłosz andthe grim realities of history. See my own article, Rebecca Beard, ‘The Art of Self-Construction:Günter Grass’s Use of Camus and Orwell in “Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out” ’,Comparative Critical Studies, 1 (2004), 323–36, for a fuller investigation of how Grass employsOrwell and Camus in his literary consideration of the threats posed by the 1980s.

61 Grass, ‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’, 78–9.


figure, shown comforting his stone with direct reference to continuedsocial relevance. The continuous uphill / downhill cycle is now loaded withemotional significance: ‘bergauf gehen’ has become positive and reassuringwhile ‘bergab rollen’ encapsulates fear and hopelessness. Furthermore, thisemotional roller coaster is explicitly linked to political purpose: the stone isrolled up the hill in order to further one of the worthy causes mentionedby the speaker. This sort of socially determined, meaningful behaviour goesagainst the version of the Sisyphus myth formulated not only by Camusbut also by Grass himself, first in Kopfgeburten (this will be discussed indetail in Chapter 3) and then in ‘Literatur und Mythos’. Grass thus againendows his authorial role with a degree of intellectual condescension thathe so carefully avoided in the 1960s: he has become literature’s messenger,bringing comfort to the masses from on high. In the process, the mythsthat Grass described as constituting our literary heritage are recast by theself-elected authorial visionary in such a manner as to change their overallsignificance.

Consequently, while literature and literary methods set the tone forGrass’s political self-presentation in the 1980s, they by no means escapedunscathed from the prolonged comparison. Indeed, the popularity ofGrass’s literary output reached an all-time low in the latter half of the 1980s,when Die Rättin (1986) and Zunge zeigen (1988) both met with widespreadrejection in the press. It seems likely that at least some of the hostilityGrass provoked was a reaction to the kind of authorship he had come torepresent as someone who believed himself specially mandated to speak onmatters of both national and international import, as Rolf Michaelis impliesin the late 1980s: ‘Stärker als bei jedem andern Autor seiner Generationschiebt sich der in der Öffentlichkeit wirkende Grass vor den in der Stilleder Schreibstube erzählenden Fabulierer.’62 This can certainly be seen inthe reviewer Helmut Ziegler’s response to Die Rättin: ‘[Die Rättin] ist dieBibel für die letzten Jahre liberaler Dummheit, moraltriefend und vonpastoraler Bescheuertheit [. . .]. Gebt dem Mann den Literaturnobelpreis,damit er endlich den Mund hält!’63 That Grass was widely perceived to haveoverplayed to political ends the specifically literary aspect of his authorial

62 Rolf Michaelis, ‘ “Brauchen täten wir ihn schon, aber wollen tun wir ihn nicht”: GünterGrass und die Aufnahme seiner Werke vor allem bei Kritikern der Bundesrepublik’, in GünterGrass, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 6th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1988), 120–7, 121.

63 Helmut Ziegler, ‘Wort zum Sonntag’, Tempo, March 1986, 102, quoted in ManfredDurzak, ‘Grass Parodied: Notes on the Reception of “Die Rättin” ’, in The Challenge ofGerman Culture: Essays Presented to Wilfried van der Will, ed. Michael Butler and Robert Evans(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 122–33, 123.


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

PLAYING WITH POLITICAL LEGACIES: 1990–2005

When the wall came down in October 1989, not only the political agendabut also Grass’s public position changed once more. Where in the early1960s he had tapped into the general move towards political campaigning,allied himself with the government in the late 1960s and early 1970s, andin the late 1970s and early 1980s operated in line with new concerns thatwere shared by left-wing thinkers on an international scale, in the early1990s he found himself alone. Numerous critical studies have examinedthe so-called failure of German intellectuals to provide a united left-wingposition on the issue of unification.65 Whatever the historical reasons forthis, the consequences for those few authors who did try to take a stancewere clear: they did so alone. Furthermore, unlike Martin Walser, Grassdid not even enjoy the support of any influential political commentatorsor newspapers.66 At the same time, he clearly felt that he, of all authorsand intellectuals, was particularly qualified to guide public opinion. Thepublication in January 1990 of Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfeEinheitsgebot, a collection of Grass’s writings and statements on the twoGermanys from 1960 to the present, underlined his political consistencyand asserted his authority as a long-standing commentator on Germanaffairs.67 Indeed, Grass even drew attention to his own qualifications quite

64 Günter Ratte, Der Grass (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1986). Manfred Durzak writesthat the book sold 20,000 copies, Durzak, ‘Grass Parodied’, 123.

65 See Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and NationalIdentity (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000), and Karoline von Oppen, The Role of theWriter and the Press in the Unification of Germany, 1989–1990 (New York: Lang, 2000).

66 The PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus) and the Greens (Die Grünen) arethe notable exceptions. However, these parties did not enjoy the support of any of the majornewspapers, which were so important in influencing general public opinion.

67 Günter Grass, Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot (Frankfurt amMain: Luchterhand, 1990). Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Leiden an Deutschland’, discusses how Grass’s


explicitly, when in a speech in February of the same year he set out histhoughts concerning a German confederation: ‘In Reden und Aufsätzenhabe ich mich seit Mitte der sechziger Jahre gegen die Wiedervereinigungund für eine Koföderation ausgesprochen. Hier gebe ich abermals Antwortauf die deutsche Frage.’68

The self-confidence with which Grass began to develop his own, unpop-ular position sees him drawing much more strongly on his own biographicalcircumstances than in preceding decades. In the 1960s he drew on authors’general qualifications to leave behind their literary work and take on apolitical standpoint; in the 1970s he made comparatively little reference tohis literary background; and in the 1980s he developed a universal conceptof literature’s superiority to politics that saw his own work and person swal-lowed up in a far greater, international grouping of authors. Now, however,he pushed his own public image and literary writings back into the centre ofdebate. In the high-profile Frankfurt literature lecture series, which he wasinvited to give in February 1990, for example, he painstakingly set out howhis own literary work had always responded to what he believed was the keydetermining factor for post-war German identity: the Holocaust. Deliveredunder the title ‘Schreiben nach Auschwitz’, he presented his contemporaryauthorial role as the product of a long line of increasingly self-consciousand morally aware literary works that gradually attempted to atone for theimmediate post-war failings of the young writer and his contemporaries.Contrary to Cepl-Kaufmann, who deems this 1990 speech to be Grass’s‘Abgesang auf seine Vorstellung von der Vorherrschaft der Intellektuellenin Deutschland’, I read it as a positive avowal of his political credibilitythat shows little intention of acknowledging any sense of socio-politicalirrelevance.69 In fact, Grass is effectively claiming for himself a position ofnational importance.

Certainly, this sort of self-understanding conditions his political writ-ings and speeches from early 1990 onwards. In his ‘Kurze Rede einesvaterlandslosen Gesellen’ he equates attacks on his own person with theearlier National Socialist attacks on exile writers. Relaying how he wasrecently branded a ‘Vaterlandsverräter’ by a passer-by, he describes it as

understanding of German identity, national and cultural, is developed in this collection. Herreading of the pieces that stretch from the early 1960s through to unification traces a similardevelopment to the one I have outlined in some detail here, seeing Grass’s stance in 1990 asthe culmination of an increasingly polemical prioritization of literature over politics.

68 Günter Grass, ‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’ (1990), in Werkausgabe, XVI,230–4, 232.

69 Cepl-Kaufmann, ‘Leiden an Deutschland’, 279.


‘ein Wort, das gepaart mit den “vaterlandslosen Gesellen” zum Sprach-schatz deutscher Geschichte gehört’, before claiming this latter term forhimself: ‘Man zähle mich gegebenenfalls zu den vaterlandslosen Gesellen’.70

In subsequent speeches a personal slant on the exile debates of the late1940s and early 1950s provides an increasingly audible sub-discourse tocontemporary events. In ‘Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ (October 1990),for example, Grass develops the themes of intolerance and hatred, first asa personal issue (‘[ich wurde] zum Schwarzseher, Miesmacher ernannt undunter dem Rubrik “vaterlandslosen Gesellen” abgebucht’)71 and then as acontemporary political one with strong historical roots:

Wem wird noch immer nicht bange, wenn täglich deutsche Rückfälligkeitendemonstriert werden, wenn mühsam erlernte demokratische Tugenden über Nachtihren Kurswert verlieren, wenn Vereinigung auch im Staatssicherheitsbereich vol-lzogen wird, wenn sich—schon wieder einmal—die größte Oppositionsparteiwegduckt, weil sie befürchten muß, nach leisestem Widerspruch ‘vaterlandslos’gescholten zu werden?72

He closes with a strong implication that he is taking his leave of this newlyresurfaced ‘monster’ (‘Ein Monstrum will Großmacht sein. Dem sei meinNein vor die Schwelle gelegt’).73 In so doing, Grass presents his situation interms that echo National Socialist indifference to the exodus of respectedpublic intellectual figures in the 1930s: ‘In seiner Machtfülle wird der neueStaat einen solchen Patrioten kaum vermissen.’74

It is in the 1992 speech, ‘Rede vom Verlust: Über den Niedergang derpolitischen Kultur im geeinten Deutschland’, however, that Grass’s self-stylization as state-enforced exile most clearly coincides with his politicalmessage. Here, he explicitly presents himself as trying, in vain, to shelterhimself on Møn island from political developments in his ‘schwierige[s]Vaterland’.75 Commenting on the series of attacks on homes for asylumseekers that shocked both Germany and the rest of the world in 1992, itis easy for Grass to sketch out the links between the kind of intolerancethat saw him outlawed as ‘der “notorische Feind der deutschen Einheit” ’and the activity now undertaken by Neo-Nazi groups.76 This kind ofidentification with the exile period, however, goes beyond mere parallel.With polemical references to politicians as ‘Saubermänner[. . .]’ and current

70 Grass, ‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’, 230, 234.71 Günter Grass, ‘Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ (1990), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 286–98,

288.72 Ibid., 295. 73 Ibid., 298. 74 Ibid., 298.75 Günter Grass, ‘Rede vom Verlust’ (1992), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 360–72, 360.76 Ibid., 364.


political practice as a ‘Säuberungsprozeß’ that has reduced the democraticleft to the pathetic form of ‘einige zum Fossil degradierte Einzelgänger’,Grass develops his own position clearly.77 Declaring ‘eines dieser restlichenExemplare spricht heute zu Ihnen’, he merges his contemporary publicpersona with that of left-wing thinkers in the 1930s.78 This is reminiscentof his first incursion into political debate, when, writing to Anna Seghersin 1961, he characterized himself as Klaus Mann writing to GottfriedBenn in 1933. This time, however, he is much more an immediate victimthan a warning voice writing from a position of relative safety. Claiming astrong position of moral rectitude, Grass presents the way in which he wassubsequently sidelined from post-1989 political debate as resulting from apatriotism deemed ‘undesirable’ by a public majority that was overtaken byfeelings of nationalist fervour:

Zwar war ich es gewohnt, mit meinem geschriebenen und gesprochenen Wortumstritten zu sein, doch habe ich während der letzten drei Jahre, daß heißt,solange ich mich zum von Anbeginn mißglückten Prozeß der deutschen Einheitkritisch geäußert und Warnungen vor diesem gedankenlosen Ruckzuck-Verfahrenzur Litanei geknüpft habe, schließlich erkennen müssen, daß ich ins Leere sprachund schrieb. Mein Patriotismus, dem nicht der Staat, vielmehr der Verfassungwichtig ist, war unerwünscht.79

Where in early 1990 Grass failed to take on the leading political positionhe felt was rightfully his, by 1992 he has thus turned this personal failureinto a matter of national scandal by directly equating widespread politicalhostility to his ideas with a concerted programme of expulsion as sufferedby hundreds of writers during the Third Reich.

Such an inflated rhetoric (incidentally, at a time when emotions wererunning high right across the German public sphere this was by no meansrestricted to Grass) may appear problematic. What it did achieve, however,was to help Grass, now entirely lacking any wider backing, to remain inthe spotlight when the immediate unification period had passed. By overtlyembracing what he presented as a concerted political attempt to silence himand making this the theme of numerous political speeches and writings, hemerged his own biography with recent national history. First asserting hisown political consistency across the decades and then drawing attention tothe way in which the new state was silencing its older, established writersby portraying himself as ‘zum Fossil degradiert’, Grass set about creatinghis own legacy not only as a morally credible voice, but as the only credible

77 Ibid., 371. 78 Ibid., 371. 79 Ibid., 374.


voice given the recent misdemeanours of the state. By the end of the 1990s,he thus began presenting himself as one of the few remaining members ofthe Gruppe 47 generation of writers who had stayed true to his roots. Healone had kept intact the socio-political ideology underpinning the group’scollective political recasting of authorship. The result was that he began toposition himself back in the socio-political sphere, but now speaking withall the authority of a sole survivor of exile.

The increased confidence that this new position gave him allowed Grassto emphasize again his public relevance and consciously play to an audience.This is particularly evident in the 1997 address ‘Rede über den Standort’.Although Grass begins by pointing out similarities with the position hehad taken in the speech ‘Rede vom Verlust’ of five years before, the way hepresents himself now is quite different. Where the earlier speech, revolvingaround the theme of exile, was itself written from what appeared to be asemi-enforced state of exile on the Danish island, ‘Rede über den Standort’begins with a positive decision to gain some self-imposed distance fromGermany by travelling to Hong Kong. Furthermore, while it was the neg-atively connoted term of loss that Grass presented as the crucial experienceon which his authorial role was predicated in 1992, by 1997 this sameauthor opens his speech with a distinct sense of chutzpah: ‘Ein Schriftsteller,also jemand ohne Mandat, maßt sich an, über etwas zu sprechen, das droht,ihm abhanden zu kommen.’80 Where just five years earlier political failureand exile determined the author’s self-conception, now it is a differentmatter: ‘Vor Beginn der Niederschrift dieser Rede sagte ich mir: [. . .]Beweise dich professionell! Als Schriftsteller, der die Wirklichkeit im Pluralerlebt, verstehst du es allemal, dich in Fiktionen zu retten’.81 This sort ofemphasis on the author’s flexibility and autonomy with regard to socio-political positioning, something invoked by the very title of the speech, waslast acted out on a political stage at the very beginning of Grass’s publicinterventions in the 1960s. In many ways, the self-righteous returning exileand the novice author-turned-political campaigner have much in common.

The 1997 speech shows a renewed meta-discursive tendency that isimplied, at least in part, by its own title and reinforced by Grass’s inclusionof dialogues with himself, anticipated hostile reactions from his critics anda repeated third-person take on ‘der Schriftsteller ohne Mandat’. It also forthe first time since 1965, employs the theatrical mode. Having drawn ampleattention to his own maverick position, the speaker then turns his attention

80 Günter Grass, ‘Rede über den Standort’ (1997), in Werkausgabe, XVI, 464–82, 464.81 Ibid., 464.


to the standing of a lone capitalist, now suffering the loss of his communistbrother, and a tax evader easily recognizable as Steffi Graf ’s father. Bothpositions, taken as exemplary for the state of contemporary Germany, aredeveloped into one-act plays for the theatre, which the speaker describes atsome length to his audience. Using his powers as a writer of fiction, Grassthen goes one step further, and details the impact his theatre might have onan ideal audience. The existential stagnation that his one-act plays conveyinspires counter-action:

Und schon beginnt das Wunschdenken und mit ihm die wunschgerechteSpekulation. [. . .] Wie anderswo auf der Welt, erwacht bei uns Bürgersinn.Weckrufe werden laut, vernehmlich sogar jenen Parteien, die wie alteingesessenauf der Oppositionsbank dahindämmern und ihr Ego nuckeln. [. . .] Sogar diejunge Generation, die sich bis dahin cool gegeben hatte, stünde hitzig in vordersterReihe. Den mittlerweile betagten Achtundsechzigern fiele ein, sich aus ihren Befind-lichkeiten zu lösen, und auch alte Knacker wie ich wären dabei. Nicht mit der Mao-Fibel in hochgereckter Hand, nur mit dem Grundgesetz bestückt, einer, zugegeben,lädierten Waffe, käme es darauf an, den alles nivellierenden Begriff ‘Standort’ zulöschen und wiederum die Bundesrepublik ins Recht zu setzen.82

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

CONCLUSION

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

82 Ibid., 477–8. 83 Ibid., 478. 84 Ibid., 482.


underlying Grass’s self-presentation in the public political sphere. Grasshas reconfigured his public image at least four times over the course ofhis career to date. In the mid-1960s he set about qualifying his bad-boypublic image by straddling the divide between literature and politics in anexemplary fashion. Over the course of subsequent years, he was increasinglyassociated with a quasi-establishment public image. During the 1970s,however, he began to distance himself from the political sphere, re-emergingin the 1980s as an intellectual driven by the power of specifically literaryinsight. When this insight was classed as unwelcome in the early 1990s, heembraced a further reconfiguration of his public image. First casting himselfas marginalized in a manner similar to writers in the Third Reich and thenfast-forwarding through the 1940s and 1950s, he returned in the mid-1990s to a public role of bold literary agitator that can be understood as arepeat of his initial incursions into the public sphere in the early 1960s. Thispoint is particularly borne out by the appearance in 1994 of a collectionof his political writings from 1961 to 1993, entitled Angestiftet, Partei zuergreifen and accompanied by a foreword that ends by directly quotingthe concluding sentences of his famous 1966 piece, ‘Vom mangelndenSelbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unter Berücksichtigung nichtvorhandener Höfe’.85

Such repetition has continued to the present day. Rewarded in 1999 withthe Nobel prize for literature and in 2002 with widespread media praise forhis political acuity on the point of German suffering, Grass would nowappear to be enjoying his second establishment phase, firmly positionedas an author of unshakeable and inimitable national standing. Indeed, ashe settles into his second cycle of positions in the public sphere, the veryfamiliarity to him of his own variously connoted public image seems to haveconditioned both absolute identification with and humorous distance fromhis public political self. Although he is Germany’s foremost representative ofa politicized kind of authorship, at least some of his speeches reveal a degreeof ironic distance taken from this public persona. Furthermore, whilst hehas certainly not been shy in exploiting his newfound respectability, as histrenchant essay on the current state of democracy in Germany published inthe Guardian in May 2005 testifies, this weighty, at times even dogmatic,political self does not give the whole picture.86 This became particularlyclear in late 2006, when Grass revealed in his autobiography, Beim Häutender Zwiebel, that he had served for a short period in the Waffen-SS and

85 Günter Grass, Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1994). The foreword isreprinted under the title ‘Der Versuch öffentlicher Dreinrede’, in Werkausgabe, XVI, 393–4.

86 Günter Grass, ‘The high price of freedom’, Guardian, 7 May 2005, Review section, 4–5.


had categorically failed throughout his career to admit to this dark spot inhis past. The revelation led to heated debate not just in the German mediabut across the world, with calls for both Grass’s political standing and hisliterary achievements to be radically re-evaluated.87 Even if Grass were notprepared to take a little distance from the political model of authorshipwith which he has become associated, his own biography has necessitatedsome kind of qualification to the dominant political understanding of hisauthorial role to date.

For those who are prepared to read carefully, this qualification was infact always forthcoming. A close reading of his various contrasting stylesof self-presentation over the past forty years reveals that, throughout hispublic political career, Grass has combined various strong, biographicallydetermined standpoints with a certain authorial slipperiness. Setting out bydefining himself in line with some of his illustrious literary predecessors,he has worked with various models of authorship, both past and present,discreetly manipulating public understanding of his own authorial role ashe does so. This engagement with public constructions of authorship hasproven his strongest single political weapon, as it is in repeatedly reinventinghimself whilst giving the appearance of staying the same that Grass hasmanaged to remain so dominant in a media landscape that has made severalconcerted efforts to dislodge him. His ability to manipulate the authorialrole has, however, played an equally important role in conditioning hisauthorial self-understanding in literature. It is to this second conceptionof the publicly accountable author that I will now turn.

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

3‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .]

erzählen’ I: Placing the Author inAus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke

and Kopfgeburten oder DieDeutschen sterben aus

INTRODUCTION

In 1981, in an interview with Siegfried Lenz, Grass pointed to the similaritybetween the two situations in which he found himself when he wrote Ausdem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschensterben aus (1980), two works which draw on a great deal of autobio-graphical material. He suggested that there is a certain overall pattern inhis writing life, involving a recurrent need (termed a ‘Notwendigkeit’) forself-examination, one that can be directly linked to the genesis of thesepieces:

Da gibt es bei mir so eine Art Kontertanz, eine Annäherung und dann wiedereine Entfernung von der gegenwärtigen Wirklichkeit. Das ist eine Notwendigkeit,nach so viel Wegtauchen in Vergangenheit, mich plötzlich der Realität zu stellen,z.B. einem Bundestagswahlkampf, einer vor der Tür lärmenden Realität. Dabeizu sein, Zeitgenosse zu sein, mitzusprechen, mich einzumischen und mich dabeizu beobachten, mich dabei zu sehen und gleichzeitig mich mit meinem Wirk-lichkeitsbegriff, diesem reduzierten Wirklichkeitsbegriff zu konfrontieren. Ich habedas zum ersten Mal in Tagebuch einer Schnecke gemacht. Das war zu Beginn dersiebziger Jahre, und dieses Jahrzehnt hörte auf mit einem abermaligen Aufnehmendes Themas und dieser Möglichkeiten in Kopfgeburten.1

1 Günter Grass in interview with Siegfried Lenz, ‘Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit’(1981), in Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, ed. Volker Neuhaus, 10 vols (Darmstadt:Luchterhand, 1987), X, ed. Klaus Stallbaum, 255–81, 268.

66 Placing the Author: Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten

The way in which Grass develops his thoughts here is revealing. He beginsby presenting past and present realities as clear opposites. While the literaryauthor spends his time ‘hiding away’ in the ‘reduced’ reality represented byhis grip on the past, the politically active citizen finds himself brutally con-fronted with present-day events. In the third sentence, however, this oppo-sition begins to break down. Participating in present-day politics becomesa self-reflexive process, as ‘mich einzumischen’ turns into ‘mich dabei zubeobachten’. Finding oneself confronted with the strains of contemporaryreality thereby becomes instead, and much more pressingly, a matter of self-confrontation: ‘mich mit meinem Wirklichkeitsbegriff, diesem reduziertenWirklichkeitsbegriff zu konfrontieren’. The literary man’s understandingis challenged and extended by that of the politician, and it is only inbringing the contrasting spheres of literature and politics together thatGrass’s own self-understanding becomes complete. Tellingly, however, thisfinal synthesis takes place not during the process of political action, butrather by engaging in the genre of autobiographical writing, as the finaltwo sentences make clear. In this description of the Tagebuch and Kopfge-burten Grass makes his autobiographical fiction into a journey of self-discovery. Although these comments, echoing the general tenor of ‘NeueInnerlichkeit’, are very much of their time, they are surprising in as muchas Grass is not generally associated with writing of a solipsist nature.

Such an interpretation of these two works has been further encouragedby Grass’s own statement concerning the narrative structure of the Tage-buch, the first work in which he employs an autobiographical narrator:‘Im “Tagebuch einer Schnecke” ist das Autor-Ich und das Erzähler-Ichweitgehend identisch’, he states.2 This claimed identification between theauthor and the narrator invokes Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’,and heavily implies that the book is to be read in the genre of autobiographyproper. Outlining his idea of a special autobiographical pact between authorand reader, Lejeune argued in 1975 that if the names of the narrator andprotagonist refer to the same person as the name of the author on thetitle page, then a text will be read by the reader as autobiographical. Thismakes clear the importance of the author (through his or her name) inconditioning not just how the text is constructed, but also how the readerreacts to it:

The problematic of autobiography [. . .] is [. . .] grounded on [. . .] analysis, on theglobal level of publication, of the implicit or explicit contract proposed by the

2 Günter Grass in interview with Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Heute lüge ich lieber gedruckt’, in FritzJ. Raddatz, ZEIT-Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 7–18, 10.

Placing the Author: Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten 67

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

Although Lejeune carries on to describe autobiography as more a mode ofreading than of writing, it is nevertheless evident that the author initiatesa contract which effectively obliges the reader to direct his or her energiesinto projecting the author into existence through the act of reading.

This has certainly been the way most Grass critics so far have behaved.Hanspeter Brode, for example, extrapolates from Grass’s statement quotedabove, ‘zum ersten Mal bietet Grass autobiographischen Stoff fast unver-hüllt dar’, while Cepl-Kaufmann sees the author-narrator identification asbreaking down the barriers between literature and politics.4 In comment-ing, ‘mit der Identität von Autor und Erzähler kommen sich literarischesund politisches Werk sehr nahe’, she is proposing that the Tagebuch shareswith Grass’s political speeches a discrete autobiographical subject who canbe clearly located at the heart of his text.5 This sort of reading of Grass’spresence in his own literature is representative of the majority of literarycritical approaches to the Tagebuch. These judge the work to be a sortof refined authorial statement that simply exploits the metaphor of thesnail and the tale of Dr Zweifel in order to make Grass’s overall stand-point all the more readily comprehensible.6 Volker Neuhaus sums it up:‘der Schriftsteller Grass erzählt mit den Mitteln seines Handwerks vomPolitiker Grass’.7 The central focus of such readings is on how the publicsubject of traditional autobiography is elucidated in the literary form. Ina similar vein, much of the literary critical discussion of Kopfgeburten hasbeen concerned to explain Grass’s supposed political standpoint with regardto the threat of an ‘Orwellian decade’.8 Underlying these readings is an

3 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1989), 29.

4 Hanspeter Brode, Günter Grass (Munich: Beck, 1979), 165.5 Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Günter Grass: Eine Analyse des Gesamtwerkes unter dem Aspekt

von Literatur und Politik (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1975), 164. The way she goes on to read theTagebuch as a straightforward kind of source material illustrating Grass’s understanding ofliterary and political activity makes this clear.

6 A representative sample of predominantly autobiographical readings can be found in:Brode, Günter Grass; Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society(London: Boyers, 1980); Julian Preece, The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History,Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

7 Volker Neuhaus, Günter Grass (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 122.8 Mark Cory, ‘Sisyphus and the Snail: Metaphors for the Political Process in Günter Grass’

Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke and Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus’, GermanStudies Review, 6 (1983), 519–33; Heinz D. Osterle, ‘An Orwellian Decade? Günter Grass


assumption that the autobiographical narrator within the text is the samekind of apparently straightforward authorial voice as has been widely (and,as I argued in the previous chapter, erroneously) located in Grass’s politicalspeeches.

The complex form of both works, however, makes such directly auto-biographical readings problematic. Grass certainly did not believe thatwith either piece he had actually written an autobiography. Asked in2003 whether he might write one, he replied entirely in the subjunctive:‘Wenn ich eine Möglichkeit sähe, mich gewissermaßen in Variationen zuerzählen—das wäre vielleicht reizvoll. Aber eigentlich mag ich Autobi-ografisches in der verschlüsselten Form der Fiktion, des Romans, lieber.’9

Throughout his career Grass has clearly favoured mixing autobiographicalmaterial with a fictional framework. The challenge that his work poses tothe autobiographical mode thereby echoes that of the French sub-genreof autofiction, designed as it was both to question and further Lejeune’sideas on autobiographical writing. Rejecting conventional autobiography asa genre only available to important public personages writing towards theend of their lives, Serge Doubrovsky described autofiction as an approachto writing that mixes a fictional framework with autobiographical contentin an attempt to capture the reader’s interest and yet allow the author toretain ultimate control of the text. Himself an author, he described inthe following terms his reasons for employing this mode in his novel Fils(1977):

So fiction here would be a narrative ruse; not being an eligible party for autobiogra-phy on his own merit, the ‘Mr so-and-so’ that I am must, in order to win over thestubborn reader, pass off his real life in the more prestigious forms of an imaginaryexistence.10

Doubrovsky’s comment is important not only for its interesting considera-tion of the respective prestige of the fictional and autobiographical modes,but also for the way in which it shows how the author of autofiction not

between Despair and Hope’, German Studies Review, 8 (1985), 481–507; Mark Martin Gruet-tner, Intertextualität und Zeitkritik in Günter Grass’ ‘Kopfgeburten’ und ‘Die Rättin’ (Tübin-gen: Stauffenburg, 1997). For a considerably more differentiated approach that neverthelessremains true to an autobiographical political reading of the text, see Stuart Taberner, ‘ “Sowasläuft nur im Dritten Programm”: Winning Over the Audience for Political Engagement inGünter Grass’s Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus’, Monatshefte für deutschsprachigeLiteratur und Kultur, 91 (1999), 84–100.

9 Grass, ‘Siegen macht dumm’, Der Spiegel, 25 August 2003, 140.10 Serge Doubrovsky, Autobiographiques: de Corneille à Sartre (Paris: Presses universitaires

de France, 1988), 69, my translation.


only writes towards the reader but also sets about manipulating him orher in order to subvert readerly expectations. A similar kind of duplicity isexactly what appealed to Grass in his later reference to the ‘verschlüsselteForm der Fiktion’ and the scope it offers for ‘lying’. In both cases, thisacknowledgement of the author’s calculation with the reader adds a play-ful, performance quality to Lejeune’s legalistic-sounding ‘pact’. WolfgangIser’s considerations about the reading process are instructive here, as theyhighlight the possibilities open to the author keen to influence his or herown reception by the reader. Where Lejeune merely gestures towards thereader’s role, Iser proposes that ‘in reading the reader becomes the subjectthat does the thinking’. Building on this, he defines identification betweenthe reader and what he or she reads as a matter of taking on an attitudeto the experience the text conveys, and this is an attitude which the authorwill hope to influence as much as possible: ‘The author’s aim [. . .] is toconvey the experience and, above all, an attitude towards that experience.Consequently “identification” is not an end in itself, but a stratagem bymeans of which an author stimulates attitudes in the reader.’11 The subtlenegotiations that exist between author and reader are described by Iser interms of a carefully staged performance inherent in the text:

Literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulatingmeanings themselves. Their aesthetic quality lies in this ‘performing’ structure,which clearly cannot be identical to the final product, because without the par-ticipation of the individual reader there can be no performance.12

These considerations give a very different twist to the idea of self-revelation in Grass’s autobiographically informed writing, situating it nowprecisely in the scission between the political and textual models of author-ship. While Grass, by the early 1970s, has had plenty of experience ofnegotiating his public–political authorial image, he is only beginning toexplore a textual understanding of authorship as it applies to his ownpositioning within the text and his readers’ reception of it. The particularlyself-conscious form of autofiction not only allows Grass to experiment withboth this textual position and his readers, but also renders problematicreadings that seek to explain the texts solely through their wider socio-political circumstances. As I will argue below, a far subtler textual politicsmust also be accounted for.

11 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, New LiteraryHistory, 3 (1972), 279–99, 296.

12 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge;Henley: Kegan Paul, 1976), 27.


AUS DEM TAGEBUCH EINER SCHNECKE

Framing the self: the author at work

The way in which Grass sets about creating his first piece of autofictionis a logical place to begin when reconsidering his authorial role withinthe finished text. The archive material for Grass’s written work at presentincludes everything from the earliest beginnings in the 1950s through to1989, along with some pieces from 1990 to the present.13 Material relevantto Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke is mostly gathered in fifteen folders andtwo Arbeitstagebücher—real writing diaries that Grass kept from 1959 to1967 and from 1969 to 1973. Unfortunately, access to the Arbeitstagebücheris currently denied.14 The earliest accessible plan for the Tagebuch (Plurien,am 8.8.69) consists of two pages (see Figure 1).15 The first page, entitled‘Roman-Entwurf (500 Seiten)’, is predominantly visual: the novel is rep-resented in pie-chart form, with a smaller sketch of a snail and imaginaryquotations from the snail underneath. On the second page, many of thesnail quotations from the previous page are worked into an early version ofthe poem, here entitled ‘Schneckenhaus’, that is published on pages 48–9of the finished work. The first part of the Plurien plan—the pie chart—presents primarily factual plot lines: ‘Die Söhne, Kirchentag + Wahlkampf ’are allotted 100 pages, 50 pages each go to ‘Danzig-Gdansk’ and ‘Mond’(presumably the 1969 moon landing, to which reference is made in the pub-lished text, pages 165–74), and then 250 pages collectively to the individualchunks, ‘SS-Mann’ (based on the real Wolfgang Scheub, who becomesAugst in the published version), ‘Ranicki-G[eschichte]’ (Dr Zweifel’s tale isbased on the life of the Polish-German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki,during the war years), ‘Mauritius’ (the story of the Danzig Jews), ‘Kiesinger’and ‘Die Belag[er]ung’ (in some early plans Grass intended to include theNapoleonic siege of Danzig). In the middle of the pie-chart, however, is

13 I refer to the collection at the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Robert-Koch-Platz 10, 10115 Berlin. A selection of material has been published in Günter Grass,Fundsachen für Grass-Leser, ed. Karin Kiwus and Wolfgang Trautwein (Berlin: Günter-Grass-Archiv, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste; Göttingen: Steidl, 2002). There are furthercollections in Bremen (sound archive), Lübeck (graphic works), Sulzbach-Rosenberg (corre-spondence with Walter Höllerer and typed draft chapters of Die Blechtrommel), and Marbach(newspaper articles).

14 I asked Grass for permission to access this material, but was told that the diariescontained far too much personal material for anyone to use them at present. This responseis of course in itself interesting when considered in the frame of my argument.

15 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.169.


an intriguing and easily overlooked addition: ‘Ich’ is pencilled in right atthe centre of the chart, a tiny circle from which the novel’s various strandsradiate. The pie-chart is thus not only a simple breakdown of the major(factual) strands that will make up the work’s subject matter; it also activelyillustrates the relationship between the author and/or first-person narrator(it is impossible at this point to differentiate) and these historical plotlines.

At this point, the bottom half of the page becomes interesting. Positionedalmost directly underneath the pie-chart, the snail’s shell can easily have thepie-chart visually mapped onto it. The ‘ich’ of the pie-chart corresponds tothe clear dot at the centre of the shell, while the segment lines have beenswapped for whorls. Meanwhile, the imagined comments dotted aroundthe drawing assert an ‘ich’ that has become synonymous with the snail, asis then developed in lyrical form on the second page. The fact that Grasswrites the potential title for his ‘Roman-Entwurf ’, ‘(Im) Schneckenhaus’,between these two visual representations seems to make even clearer hisown position with regard to the subject matter: his ‘I’ is buried deep withinthe shell of the snail, at the centre of all the various different plot lines thatwill first and foremost make up the subject matter (‘shell’) of his text. Inwriting his ‘I’ both visually and literally into the snail, Grass would seem tobe envisaging his own authorial voice as synonymous with the core structureof his work. This concept of the self as the centre of the novel suggests aclear narrative position for his authorial persona: he is the position fromwhich all plot lines are narrated, the author who stands at the very core ofhis work as an autobiographical first-person narrator.

The second accessible plan, written in Dubrovnik on the 22 October1969, shows Grass even more consciously considering his authorial posi-tion.16 Taking the working title ‘Im Schneckenhaus’, he apparentlydescribes to himself, as author sitting down to try to write, just what itis he is trying to achieve:

Am Tag nach der Wahl Willy Brandts zum Bundeskanzler, also nach dem ‘Sieg’ undim Zustand unausrottbarer Resignation, versuche ich ein Ich-Buch zu entwerfen,für das während des Wahlkampfes erste Stichworte zu Papier kamen.

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



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


the neologism ‘Ich-Buch’ drawing particular attention to the author’s ownself-objectification and the reference to his own state of mind increasingthis sense of introspection. Perhaps the most obvious reading of this privatemeditation is that Grass, in weaving the various strands of the Plurien planinto a coherent work, believes he is simultaneously weaving his own story:his ‘ich’ will emerge as the sum of his text’s parts. In the early plans, however,there is little further indication that Grass is trying to do this. Instead, as ismade visually clear in the Plurien plan, his ‘ich’ is conceived as the tiny speckfrom which these greater considerations grow. He is a vehicle to pedagog-ical discoveries (learning about Germany’s recent history), anchoring thevarious historical strands to a clear narrative position that will help makethem comprehensible for the next generation. Consequently, his ‘ich’ seemsto be first and foremost a narrative means, part of the structure, ratherthan an ultimate narrative object. It is far less a book about the author-ial ‘I’ than a book that is simply written from the authorial first-personperspective with the clear aim of communicating important historicallessons.

This notion of perspective, however, encourages a second reading ofGrass’s private meditation quoted above. Instead of simply remarking on hisown emotions (‘im Zustand unausrottbarer Resignation’), Grass is outliningthe kind of tone that must permeate his work. As author, he decides thathis autobiographical narrator will narrate at a certain time, and in a certaintone, and the way in which this narrator goes about his project therebybecomes part of the book’s subject matter. Grass is not so much beingself-reflexive as creating for himself a separate narrator who will providea constant point of reference within the text, even as the author movesand changes throughout the period of textual production. His narratoris defined by the immediate post-election period and its accompanyingsense of ‘ineradicable resignation’ that will cause him repeatedly to questionhimself. The author’s feelings, on the other hand, are sure to vacillateenormously over the course of his writing project.

It is surely in this vein—of fixing the textual conditions for his auto-biographical narrator—that Grass carries on in the Dubrovnik plan of22 October 1969. He envisages a textual framework of long and shortletters, and develops twelve separate ‘durchlaufende Handlungen’, all basedon real-life people or events, and twenty ‘thematische Briefe’ that coverall the main topics Grass wishes to explain to his children. Perhaps themost interesting aspect of this detailed plan as far as narrative perspectiveis concerned is the way in which the various plot lines are to be integratedinto a basic framework of pedagogical letters. Grass writes, ‘Diese zwölf


durchlaufenden Geschichten sollen in jedem Brief entweder hauptsächlichoder am Rande entwickelt werden.’ This kind of construction would veryclearly mark out the narrator within the work as the medium for allhistorical information. As letter writer, he has a definite structural function,namely to convey the material that makes up the Tagebuch. His ‘ich’ is there-fore, as he writes on 24 October 1969, an ‘Erzählhaltung’, albeit a flexibleone that is given to plurality, spontaneity, and humour: ‘diese Erzählhaltun-gen müssen nicht streng durchgehalten werden. Sie können eingeschoben,nachgestellt, ironisiert werden’ he comments of a list of various differentnarrative scenarios.17 Whether this narrator communicates through morallecture or entertaining diversion, however, his role throughout is clear. Heis to give one consistent and unifying line for his children, with the resultthat they consider their father’s particular mind-frame only in as much as itpoints to a greater historical context. The whole text is, in these early plans,constructed by the author to lead away from his autobiographical narratorand into the wider world.

The work’s projected content in all these early plans thus renders mar-ginal any scheme for autobiographical self-presentation. Apart from thecursory reference to ‘die Geschichte des Günter Grass’ in the Dubrovnikplan quoted above, Grass is markedly absent as subject. On the plan from28 November 1969, the six major parts of the work are listed as ‘Der Wegnach Mauritius (80 pages)’, ‘Dr Zweifel’ (150 pages), ‘Der Selbstmörder’(60 pages), ‘Sieben Essays’ (100 pages), ‘Der Wahlkampf ’ (90 pages), and‘Die Schnecke’ (50 pages). A roughly similar overview is presented onthe 8 March 1970, as Grass toys with the size of his overall project: ‘DrZweifel’, ‘Mauritius’, ‘Scheub’, ‘Kinder und Wahlkampf ’, and ‘Schneckeund Melancholie’ are the five major categories to be considered.18 It there-fore comes as something of a surprise when, for work scheduled for theperiod ‘ab.16.7.1970’, Grass suddenly pencils himself in as an entire sepa-rate section: ‘Zweifel’, ‘Der Auszug’, ‘Ich’, ‘Melancolia’, ‘Scheub’, ‘Schneck-ensprache’, and ‘Wahlkampf ’ are the seven sub-sections he is now workingwith.19 Other plans from this point onwards confirm this new conception.‘Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke: Stand am 1. August 1970’ works withthe sub-headings ‘Zweifel’, ‘Scheub’, ‘Wahlkampf ’, ‘Kinder’, ‘Melancholie’,‘Schnecken’, and ‘Über mich’, where ‘Über mich’ represents the fifth longestof the seven sections (longer than ‘Melancholie’ and ‘Schnecken’).20 ‘Die

17 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170.18 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.172.19 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.173.20 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.2081.


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

‘I’ve been framed’: manipulating the narrator

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



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


this narrative is real or only seemingly real, is subsequently portrayed assuccessful with the children, who constantly interject with requests for moredetails on either the narrator’s life (chapter 8) or Zweifel’s fate. Indeed,they even request personal stories that draw explicitly on the model ofAnne Frank, as Franz says in chapter 13: ‘Erzähl mal was, wo sich einerversteckt hat, richtig, weil er gemußt hat, versteckt hat, wie bei Anne Frank:das war spannend und komisch und traurig und stimmte auch und warlangweilig überhaupt nich . . . ’ (TS, 121). This links with similar considera-tions in Grass’s 1970 speech, ‘Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen KindernAuschwitz zu erklären’, where he recognizes the need to make historicalfacts more readily accessible and exciting through reference to the tales ofindividuals.22 By contrast, the factual aspect of the election campaign andthe history of the SPD elicit little more than yawns (‘Wissen wir schon.Wissen wir schon’, TS, 77). The message is clear: weaving the self intoa clearly constructed story is a necessary ruse to communicate importantpedagogical facts.

However, if the author were himself trying to draw the full benefits fromhis ruse, it is unlikely that he would draw the reader’s attention to suchtrickery. The narrator is overt about the way in which he merges fact andfiction, not only in the way he structures his narrative—the real electioncampaign in which Grass took part, the fictional story of Zweifel, and thevarious everyday household scenes constantly interrupt and undercut oneanother—but also in the way he programmatically draws attention to thisright at the beginning of the text:

Ich will auf Umwegen (Abwegen) zu euch sprechen: manchmal außer mir und ver-letzt, oft zurückgenommen und nicht zu belangen, zwischendurch reich an Lügen,bis alles wahrscheinlich wird. Manches möchte ich umständlich verschweigen.Einen Teil vom Teil nehme ich vorweg, während ein anderer Teil erst später undauch nur teilweise vorkommen wird. (TS, 13)

The narrator draws attention to the particular way in which he creates alink between himself and recent history that is not necessarily factuallycorrect, but that will win an audience for the basic subject matter hewishes to communicate. His children take the pedagogical bait, as theirongoing interest throughout the narrative documents. However, the veryfact that the narrator comments on his own literary activity also turns himinto the object of his own narrative: he is constructing his own story in

22 Günter Grass, ‘Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen Kindern Auschwitz zu erklären’(1970), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl,1997–2002), XV, 49–51.


semi-fictional terms, with the result that he is both inside and outside histext at the same time, both at work as an author and being worked by theauthor.

This tension is most clear in the scenes that relay short exchanges betweenthe father and his children. The very fact that these scenes are played outwithin the Tagebuch points to an extra-textual author at work deliberatelysetting up a teacher–pupil scenario in which both parties represent certainpositions. Indeed, the sense that these scenes have been inserted by theauthor precisely for this purpose is supported by the archival material.While in earlier drafts for the novel Grass toyed with including a numberof scenes in the narrator’s autofictional text that established an overt rela-tionship of pedagogue and pupil between Zweifel and Stomma, in the finalversion this is played out by the father and children (any sort of plan forwhich is notably absent in the earlier drafts).23 Although this relationshipbetween pedagogue and pupil is in itself a well-known device, familiar fromPlato’s Socratic dialogues onwards but more recently used to great effectby Bertolt Brecht, the twist on it here is the way in which Grass visiblyplaces it within his own text and in a manner that frequently shows up theconstructed nature of the position occupied by his narrator. The overtlypedagogical dialogues are played out by the narrator and children whothemselves function as author and readers of a text (the narrator’s autofic-tional narrative is the subject of their discussion). This has an importantresult on the overall effect made by the Tagebuch on its extra-textual reader.Seeing the narrator construct his autofictional narrative with the expressintention of captivating his children’s interest to a pedagogical end makesthe reader focus not so much on the didactic message as on the way in whichit is conveyed: how the narrator sets about turning history into his story.Effectively, it renders visible the issue of narration and textual construction,and thereby makes these otherwise rather academic textual features into aconscious theme of Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The very transparencyof the narrator undermines his position, pointing beyond him to the elusiveand manipulating author.

23 There are two early drafts for a stylite (‘Säulenheilige’) text in which Zweifel teachesStomma about the multiplicity of viewpoints—a sort of lesson in tolerance: SAdK, Berlin,Günter-Grass-Archiv, nos.168 and 172 (no.168 is clearly misfiled). In both cases, the con-versation between the two takes the form of a question and answer process, where Zweifel isclearly in control. Grass also toys with the idea of giving Lisbeth a fourteen-year-old son whomZweifel could teach, ‘Zur Figur Dr. Zweifel’, SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170. Forearly plans of the novel which do not include any sort of encounters between the narrator andhis children (rather, the whole text is conceived of as a series of letters from the father to thechildren) see ‘Dubrovnik, am 22.10.69’, SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.170.


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

‘Ich schreibe [. . .] auf ein Förderband: Ich, Ich, Ich’:reading the first-person singular

The framework devised by the author has so far taken two forms. Whenplanning the work, Grass first of all plotted a textual frame in which hewould occupy the first-person narrator position, explaining recent histor-ical events to his children. As the work developed, however, this textualframework gave rise to a second ‘shell’. The cumulative effect of scenesthat document the narrator at work is to form a sort of meta-textual com-mentary to the initial autofictional text. These reflections on the writingprocess undermine the apparently straightforward position of the text’sauthor persona. Instead, the narrator is seen as at least in part the product,and not the source, of the creative process. Furthermore, in constantlymeditating upon his own activity, he becomes engaged in a conversationwith himself, which to a certain extent overshadows his original intentionof ‘speaking out’ to the children. As a result, the reader is led into a quasi-philosophical meditation on the narrator’s identity as author of his ownautofictional text.

This can be seen in particular in the way in which the notion of ‘Mief ’,initially coined as a way of describing the author’s (any author’s) motivation,comes to dominate the narrator’s thoughts. Chapters 23 and 25 makeextensive use of the concept, and in chapter 23 it is directly linked to anauthor’s very existence:

Die Leiche im eigenen Keller suchen, benennen. Ein Schriftsteller, Kinder, istjemand, der den Mief liebt, um ihn benennen zu können, der von Mief lebt, indemer ihn benennt; eine Existenzbedingung, die der Nase Schwielen einträgt. (TS, 236)


While this statement links up with the usual interpretation of ‘schreibengegen die verstreichende Zeit’, that is, writing as stalling the passage of timeand—here—exposing the ‘stench’ of history, it also points to the way inwhich the writing subject relates to discourses of fact and fiction.24 The useof ‘Mief ’ throughout the text to signify not just history but also present-day politics (the ‘Mief ’ of local politics TS, 253 and 255, as well as thenarrator’s own ‘miefgesättigte Hemde’ when he returns from the rigorsof electioneering, TS, 32), makes the writer’s response to, indeed relianceupon ‘Mief ’ (‘Existenzbedingung’) at least in part a response to the factualdiscourse of the present. Writing becomes the activity undertaken as aresponse to the constant confrontation with this ‘everyday stench’, as thenarrator states:

Ich schreibe, während ich irgendein Schnitzel zerkaue, über Kies laufe, schwitzendeingekeilt bin, gegen Sprechchöre anschweige, Saubohnen mit geräuchertemSchweinekamm koche, mich woanders erfinde . . . (TS, 240)

The movement within this quotation is away from the everyday into theimaginary (‘sich woanders erfinden’), and indicates the merging of fictionwith fact in the writing subject’s reaction to this ‘Mief ’ of present existence.Just several paragraphs further on, the idea of the ‘Mief ’ as an author’s‘existential condition’ has been replaced by writing itself, as the narratorstates: ‘oft schreibe ich nur, um mir zu beweisen, daß ich bin’ (TS, 240).Several lines later again, this assurance of the self ’s existence through writinghas mutated once more, this time into the very production of its existence,as the act of writing is equated with factory-line production of the ‘I’: ‘Ichschreibe auf regennasse Schieferdächer, in Bierpfützen, auf ein Förderband:Ich, Ich, Ich’ (TS, 241).

These are strong statements concerning the creative power of writing.Descartes’s ‘I think therefore I am’ has become ‘I write therefore I am’,and this existence is presented in terms of an endless self-reproduction thatseems as much a sort of obsessive mania as existential reassurance. Whatthe narrator appears to be stressing here is how writing—and thereby thetext he is producing—is an existential necessity for the authorial subject:through this activity the (non-fictional) writer can reproduce (fictional)images of himself that constantly remind him of his own existence. Fictionthereby becomes nothing less than the guarantor of the author’s existence,

24 See Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 118, for an example of the usual interpretations of themetaphors, writing ‘gegen die verstreichende Zeit’ and ‘gegen den Sog’.


and autofiction, as the mode in which this process can be self-consciouslyre-enacted, is the most suitable form for the author actively seeking textualaffirmation of his authorial position. This is the kind of ‘need’ referred toin the introduction to this chapter. The reader initially lured into the textby the apparent promise of a privileged insight into Grass’s private thoughtsand feelings has by now certainly got rather more than he or she bargainedfor. The author presented within the text is the product, not the source, ofhis various literary and political activities. There is no private, inner self tobe revealed, only multiple images of authorship to construct, and this as asort of writerly existential necessity.

This sort of reflection on the writing process, however, does not merelygive rise to an abstract, quasi-philosophical consideration of authorship. Italso accounts for a distinct sense of irony as the author engages with andultimately distances himself from the various well-known public imagesof his person. This is particularly clear in the case of the ‘Begrüßgus-tav’, where the narrator himself actively satirizes Grass’s famous publicimage:

Nur weil er so faul und meinen Schreibtisch belagernd unnütz ist, habe ich ihn in diePolitik mitgenommen und als Begrüßgustav beschäftigt: das kann er. Überall wirder ernst genommen, auch von meinen Gegnern und Feinden. Dick ist er geworden.Schon beginnt er sich selbst zu zitieren. (TS, 82)

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


text that delights in constantly flitting from one authorial variation toanother.

The idea that textual identity is inherently unstable is further developedin the narrator’s comparison between his behaviour and that of his textualcharacters with reference to collecting things. He states:

Das Sammeln ist eine Antwort auf den Zustand der Zerstreuung, gleich ob [. . .]meine Muscheln, Augsts Mitgliedschaften oder Zweifels Schnecken gesammelt wer-den. Fast jeder sammelt irgendwas und nennt andere Sammler tickhaft. Gleichzeitigzerstreut das Sammeln die in Sekunden versammelte Zeit: als Zweifel seiner Lisbethund seinem Gastgeber Stomma durch erfundene Geschichten die kompakt lastendeZeit zerstreute; wenn ich Geschichten, wo sie zerstreut liegen, auflese und eucherzähle. (TS, 226)

This passage takes up the motif of ‘Zerstreuung’, linking it to the activityof collecting things. Collecting both counters a sort of mental distraction(‘der Zustand der Zerstreuung’) by imposing order, and offers a way ofpassing time (‘zerstreut die in Sekunden versammelte Zeit’). It is then linkedto collecting fiction: the narrator picks up ‘scattered’ stories and re-tellsthem, while Zweifel passes time with his. The wording of the final phraseitself strongly echoes an earlier passage in the text, where the narratorrefers not to picking up stories but, rather, picking up himself: ‘Ihr sehtmich oft zerstreut: immer bin ich zerstreut, so sehr ich mich seitenlangauflese, sortiere und als Summe, samt Außenständen, aufrechne’ (TS, 78).The textual resonances of ‘seitenlang auflesen’ when applied to the subjectof a text that is written in some kind of autobiographical mode mustsurely be more than an inadvertent pun. The implication seems to be thatexisting in a ‘scattered’ form throughout his own text, and at the sametime constantly trying to counter this, are the defining literary charac-teristics of authorship. Indeed, it is tempting to compare this descriptionof authorship to post-structuralist definitions of the author. Certainly, theanalogy bears traces of Foucault’s essay ‘What is an author?’, where, as setout in chapter 1, the author is ascribed amongst other things a classifica-tory function—the ability to order texts in the sense both of defining abody of work, and, in the later addition to the essay, limiting its possiblemeanings.

The idea of collecting is thereby strongly linked to playful textualconsiderations, both with respect to the function of the author and theconstruction of various characters, who may or may not be extensions ofthe author. In a final twist and following Walter Benjamin, the ‘need’ to


collect is associated with melancholia, linking up with one of the mostobvious themes of the work and returning us to Grass’s own referenceto his ‘Zustand unausrottbarer Resignation’.25 In the paragraph followingthe narrator’s musings on the universal nature of collecting, he states: ‘Dasich den Schwermütigen die Welt zu etwas verengt hat, das nur geordnet(als Ganzes) ertragen werden kann, ist das Sammeln tätiger Ausdruck derMelancholie’ (TS, 226). Collecting represents a need to make sense of theworld, a world that has ‘narrowed’ or become limited. However, collectinghas also been directly linked to writing, and indeed autobiographical writ-ing, as laid out in the introduction to this chapter, was described by Grass asthe place where one’s own limitations can be confronted and countered.26

Writing, just like collecting, is a response to the limitations of contemporaryreality. Engaging in it in order to pass the time or escape the stagnancy ofthe everyday represents a turn to fiction in the effort to re-present reality.The result is that reality becomes a fluid concept, and the writing subjectreproducing it finds his or her own identity beginning to dissolve duringthe process.

Instead of fusing narrator and author to allow unmediated access to theprivate man behind the creative process, Grass thus drives a wedge betweenthe two to show up each one as a product of the other. Even as the narratoris constructed by the author to communicate important moral lessons, anabstract concept of the author (authorship) is increasingly formulated bythe narrator as he meditates on his own writerly activity. Meanwhile, theoverall structure of the book encourages ironic distance from both. Thisis the true success of the Tagebuch’s invocation of the hybrid autofictionalform: while the narrator renders his pedagogical message for the childrenmore attractive by mixing the real with the seemingly real, the authorGünter Grass introduces both humour and subtlety into his text by teasingand undermining the genre-conditioned expectations extant in his widerreadership.

25 Walter Benjamin, ‘Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus: eine Rede über das Sammeln’, inWalter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-penhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), IV, ed. Tillman Rexroth, 388–96; andWalter Benjamin, ‘Edward Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker’, in Benjamin, GesammelteSchriften, II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 465–505. For furtherdiscussion of Benjamin on collecting and melancholy, see Beata Frydryczak, ‘Walter Benjamin’sIdea of Collecting as a Postmodern Way of Participation in Culture’, Información Filosófica, 2(2003), 180–7.

26 Elsewhere the author figure refers to his authorial self as a ‘Sammelstelle für Zerstreutes’(TS, 82).


KOPFGEBURTEN ODER DIE DEUTSCHENSTERBEN AUS

Reproducing the narrator in textual time: ‘die Vergegenkunft’

Amongst the various definitions of the authorial role put forward bythe narrator in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke is the statement, ‘einSchriftsteller, Kinder, ist jemand, der gegen die verstreichende Zeit schreibt’(TS, 148). While the definition itself is formulated within a clear socio-historical framework (the narrator is commenting on political develop-ments in Czechoslovakia), there are, as should be clear by now, also goodgrounds for applying it to Grass’s aesthetics both within the Tagebuch andin his work as a whole. Indeed, just several pages earlier a very similar phraseis invoked with reference to diary-writing: ‘Das wastebook englischer Kau-fleute hieß bei Lichtenberg Sudelbuch; Zweifel empfahl mir diese Methode,mit leichter Hand gegen die Zeit zu schreiben’ (TS, 135). The idea thatsuspending the passage of time might be a quality of writing itself andquite divorced from any specific socio-political reality was also expressed byGrass in the remarks quoted earlier concerning the genesis of the Tagebuchand Kopfgeburten. Here, writing fiction was directly equated with hidingaway in the past, while autofiction was quickly turned into an introspectivemode specifically designed to allow the author to take a step back fromcontemporary socio-political events. A need to engage with contemporarysociety went hand in hand with a need to take stock and gain distancefrom the authorial self. In this sense, for all their socio-political relevance,both the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten involve Grass effectively placing hisautobiographical narrator out of time (the author’s life and times), andrepositioning him instead within the very separate chronology of his text.27

Grass first formulates his idiosyncratic idea of textual time in Kopfge-burten. Whilst this short piece, like the Tagebuch, draws on recent auto-biographical experiences (Grass’s visit to South-East Asia) and employsa narrator-cum-protagonist who implies on the surface at least Lejeune’sautobiographical pact, the experiences now are self-consciously adaptedto fictional characters located not in the past (like Zweifel) but in thenear future of the 1980 general election campaign. The narrator’s ownexperiences from the recent past, his present time of writing (late 1979),

27 See Rebecca Beard, ‘The Art of Self-Construction: Günter Grass’s Use of Camus andOrwell in “Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out” ’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1(2004).


and the future experiences of his fictional characters are thus all intertwined.This locates the narrator within a strange textual ‘tense’ as he writes, one forwhich he coins the neologism of ‘die Vergegenkunft’:

Wir haben das so in der Schule gelernt: nach der Vergangenheit kommt die Gegen-wart, der die Zukunft folgt. Mir aber ist eine vierte Zeit, die Vergegenkunft geläufig.Deshalb halte ich auch die Form nicht mehr reinlich. Auf meinem Papier ist mehrmöglich. Hier stiftet einzig das Chaos Ordnung. Sogar Löcher sind Inhalt hier. Undnicht verzurrte Fäden sind Fäden, die gründlich nicht verzurrt werden. Hier mußnicht alles auf den Punkt gebracht werden. (K , 127)

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

Reproducing the narrator in person: fictional counterparts

Form and tense are thus both crucial to the interpretation of the text, forthey work together to foreground the textual activity of the narrator—where he is situated in relation to his text. Effectively, he is foregrounded

28 Siegfried Mews, ‘Grass’s Kopfgeburten: The Writer in Orwell’s Decade’, German StudiesReview, 6 (1983), 501–17, 505.


as an author at work, and the text becomes a sort of hall of mirrors asthe narrator sees a past image of himself (talking on German politics andliterature in China) refracted through his future ‘headbirth’ reproductions,Harm and Dörte:

Ist meine Behauptung, die ich in Peking und Shanghai, danach anderenorts wieein närrischer Wanderprediger vortrug [. . .] nur eine Trotzgebärde? Mit Beweisenvon Logau und Lessing bis zu Biermann und Böll zur Hand, setzte ich einfältig(womöglich rührend in meiner Einfalt) Kenntnis der deutschen Kultur und ihrerEntwicklung voraus. (Selbst meine beiden Lehrer, die nun Harm und Dörte Petersheißen, winken ab und sind überfordert. ‘Mann’, sagt Harm, ‘sowas läuft nur imDritten Programm.’) (K , 20)

Just as Zweifel worked as the narrator’s self-extension in the Tagebuch, Harmand Dörte, who are explicitly presented as the narrator’s cerebral offspring,are both extensions of the narrator and offer (critical) reflections on him.Here they directly reject the narrator’s attempt at preaching politics throughliterature. Given that they are at all times presented as clearly constructedby the narrator, this sort of rejection of their author may be understoodas a concrete example of self-confrontation within the autobiographicalwork. In other instances, they demonstrate a certain mode of behaviourgenerally associated with the famous public author that seems deliberatelyexaggerated to the point of provocative cliché, thereby making it all themore easy to single out for criticism. The wording of Harm’s reportedreaction to his time in India, for example, shows up to comical effectthe kind of naivety often associated with amateur political commitment,a naivety with which Grass himself has frequently been charged:

Harm hingegen machte sich mit der Absicht auf die Reise, ‘den bundesdeutschenPolit-Streß’ zu Hause zu lassen. Doch ob bei seinen Strandgängen oder beimEinkauf der letzten Reiseandenken [. . .], es pfuscht ihm immer die Politik dazwis-chen: ‘Mir ist hier ne Menge aufgegangen. Schon in Bombay fing das an. Wennwir zurück sind, bring ich das alles auf paar Thesen. Anmerkungen zum Nord-Südgefälle. Das muß man klar aussprechen. Und zwar im Wahlkampf.’

(K , 103–4)

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


gains in momentum throughout the text. In chapter 5 the narrator’s idlefantasies about being a dictator and completely overhauling the politicalscene are projected onto Harm, who, taking on some of these suggestionsand rejecting others, then goes on to radicalize even further by planning theself-sacrificial death of the German race to save the environment and pre-empt the complete failure of German democracy. While this passage is firstand foremost humorous, it also serves an important textual purpose: Harm,deliberately described as ‘der Musterdemokrat’ (K , 89) just beforehand,turns from purely fictional figure into a sort of exaggerated political selffor the narrator. Parody thereby becomes a deliberate sort of self-parody,introducing a clear sense of distance between the narrator and the variousself-images that he confronts.

This becomes particularly evident in the introduction and developmentof one of the text’s main metaphors, namely that of the mythical Sisyphusfigure. The parallel between this figure’s actions and political commitmentis first introduced by Harm, acting as the narrator’s exaggerated amateurpolitical self, when he directly equates himself with Sisyphus, the (as hedescribes him) tireless political campaigner:

So seh ich mich, Dörte. Genau so. Raufgewucht den Stein, plumps liegt er wiederunten. Wieder rauf, nochmal runter. Immerzu. Lebenslang. Ich meine, kaum hatman irgendeine Reform über die Runden gebracht und denkt, Donnerwetter, istdoch ne Sache, da ist schon das nächste Reförmchen fällig. Das hört nicht auf. Nie,sag ich dir, nie wird das aufhören. Immer wartet unten der Stein. (K , 99)

The situation of this comparison within the text, however, should be clear.Not only does Harm’s language here again reveal the comical simplicity ofthe amateur enthusiast (‘raufgewucht’, ‘plumps’, ‘Donnerwetter ist doch neSache’), the narrator also clarifies his own position with respect to sucha claim by immediately satirizing it. He turns Harm’s metaphor into aprojected film clip:

Womöglich ließe sich Harm sogar als Sisyphos ins bewegte Bild bringen, indemer seinen existentialistischen Reformismus mit einem ziemlich großen Broken aufjenem bergigen Lavafeld bergauf demonstriert, das ihn zuvor als Diktator erlebt hat.(‘Hier, Dörte’, stöhnt der schuftende Harm, ‘das ist die Rentenreform im siebtenAnlauf ’.) (K , 99)

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


politician as Sisyphus looks. This fictional naively political self is therebyridiculed even as the narrator loudly and conspicuously sings his praises:‘Und Harm hört auf Dörte und auf Camus. Ihn kann Orwell nichtschrecken. Harm ist der absurde Held wider das Absurde, er ist der Heldder Geschichte’ (K , 100). Admiration and identification are feigned by thenarrator in such ironic terms as to underline immediately his own distanceto such a position. The initial similarities established between the two,however, mean that the presentation of Harm amounts to exaggerated self-parody, or, put another way, parody of a self with whom the narrator nolonger identifies.

Reproducing authorship

Stuart Taberner has suggested that the general motif of self-detraction evi-dent in the work is Grass’s attempt to ‘win back his (political) audience’, anaudience embodied in the liberal German teacher couple.29 Such passagesas the one quoted above, however, make it difficult to read such a clearprogrammatic intention into the work, where the emphasis is at least asmuch on the play of self-representation as on any overall political message.Rather, the distance taken from the various political selves, whether it isthe past self speaking in China or the fictional projection of self playingSisyphus in the Far East, implies that Grass is here standing back frompolitical involvement to such an extent that it is in fact gently mocked ashopelessly idealistic. Instead, the narrator, who is self-consciously involvedin the construction of his fictional work, sets himself up against all thepolitical self-images, past and future, embodied within the text. His mainconcern within the text is not with political but literary activity: the positiveself-image that he brings to the fore—as opposed to the pilloried politicalpersona—is one engaged in the present-continuous of the creative process.Taberner picks up on this, diagnosing the failure of Kopfgeburten to stemfrom an overly determined image of Grass the author:

Grass’s appeal [as he presents himself in the novel] certainly entails both dramaticexaggeration and a compelling spectacularity: he condenses, embodies, and man-ifests the public in a theatrical instance of courtly ‘representativeness’ rather thanconveying its democratic will: the writer’s aura, then, implies authority rather thanaccessibility. As such, it might be argued that Grass dampens rather than encouragesdemocratic participation.30

29 Taberner, ‘Winning Over the Audience’. 30 Ibid., 97.


Where Taberner judges Grass’s fictional image to have undermined his owntext’s attempt to extol democratic principles, however, I argue that master-fully controlling multiple variations on the authorial self is in fact entirelyin keeping with Grass’s wider project of self-confrontation within his newlyfashioned autofictional form. In order to elucidate this, I would like to side-step briefly into a consideration of Kopfgeburten’s major intertext, Camus’sThe Myth of Sisyphus (1942), explicitly mentioned within the text on anumber of occasions. Camus’s essay deals with man’s ‘absurd sensitivity’,his ability suddenly to perceive the world as a place lacking in any tangiblemeaning or order.31 This is linked to Camus’s ideas about religion—man,as mortal, cannot ultimately know whether or not there is a god, and thislack of knowledge defines man’s mortal condition. His experience of beingalive is to live in a world lacking any divine authority or meaning. Becauseman is inherently curious for knowledge—to understand the meaning ofhis existence—this situation strikes him as absurd and triggers a sense ofdespair or crisis. Camus’s argument, however, is that this very realizationabout one’s mortal condition is in fact a liberation, for once man realizesthat he cannot know his world and accepts the ensuing rejection of hopefor the future, he is freed from both the search for meaning and the sort ofenslavement to the future that tends to dictate everyday activity. The resultis that man becomes his own god for the time he remains alive, and the onlycurb to this freedom is death. Living the absurd amounts to defying death,and taking on this challenge entails developing a passion for life itself, thepresent.

In his essay, Camus goes on in the second and third sections to show howthis lifestyle is enacted by various different figures, grouped together underthe title ‘the absurd man’, and then by the creative process itself, ‘absurdcreation’, before he actually reinterprets the myth of Sisyphus. The thirdsection of his essay, ‘absurd creation’, is of particular interest and relevance tothe discussion of the narrator’s relationship, as author, to his text. Accordingto Camus, the creative process shapes the artist: ‘For the same reason as thethinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work.’32

However, the absurd artist—the artist who has come to know and acceptthe absurd—must also remain divorced from his work; it cannot becomesomething that gives him meaning:

The absurd work illustrates thought’s renouncing of its prestige and its resig-nation to being no more than the intelligence that works up appearances and

31 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 2005), 1.32 Ibid., 94.


covers with images what has no reason. If the world were clear, art would notexist.33

Art, Camus argues, describes rather than explains the world, and thusthe creative artist can ‘create without appeal ’.34 However, this is not todeny the fact that the creative act is inherently opposed to a worldview thatchampions the absurd. The absurd artist in fact engages in two diametricallyopposed activities: ‘Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating onthe one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurdcreator.’35 This tension, Camus argues, is what forms the grandeur of thecreative process. He then goes on to suggest that the very test that thecreative process places on the artist defines art’s value:

But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal itdemands of a man and the opportunity with which it provides him of overcominghis phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.36

Art is a vehicle of self-discovery for the artist; through the creative processhe is confronted with himself. This is not to say that man can find himselfin the creative process, he only comes ‘a little closer’ to himself. In fact, the‘naked reality’ is that there is no integral, meaningful self, for this would runcounter to the whole idea of the absurd. It is the act of creation (in whichthe artist is continuously engaged), rather than the created product, whichbecomes the artist’s calling: ‘To create is likewise to give a shape to one’sfate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as itis defined by them.’37

Returning to Kopfgeburten, the idea of the text as a hall of mirrors inwhich the narrator sees himself refracted into multiple selves correspondsto Camus’s argument. Grass’s historical self outside the text (fifty-two yearsold at the time of composition) is suspended within the special tense ofthe literary work, ‘die Vergegenkunft’. Compared to conventional narrativetense, the concept of ‘die Vergegenkunft’ is summing up the continuous-present process of reading and writing, where past words and future wordsare turned into continuous-present text as the text moves through time.This tense of writing therefore merges all images together, past, present, andfuture as well as fictional and non-fictional. Similarly, for a narrator castinghim or herself as author in the text, past selves and future selves are turnedinto the continuous-present authorial persona who is caught within the

33 Ibid., 95. 34 Ibid., 98. 35 Ibid., 111.36 Ibid., 112. 37 Ibid., 114.


text always in the process of creating. The result is an image of authorshipcomposed of fragments of all of these textual selves: the author is the sumof the narrator’s parts. Where previous critics have seen in Kopfgeburten’sintertexts with The Myth of Sisyphus a strong political statement on the partof Grass, I therefore bring to the link a slightly different perspective.38 Grasssets up the link precisely to draw attention to the way the narrator’s creativeconstruction of authorship takes place beyond any wider socio-politicaltimeframe. This is entirely in keeping with his statements throughoutthe 1970s and early 1980s concerning different kinds of realities. LikeSisyphus, his narrator is given to the task of continuous self-reproductionin a textual world that is utterly delimited by these creative actions. Liter-ature consequently functions as a kind of time-out from its socio-politicalcontext.

This last point is made explicit when the narrator, having presentedas parody the overly enthusiastic political interpretation of Sisyphus pro-pounded by Harm, considers in what way he might himself identify withthe mythical figure. In Camus’s essay, all the figures of the absurd precedingSisyphus himself are portrayed as concerned with the act of self-creation,whether it is the actor blurring the boundary between ‘being’ and ‘appear-ing’ (‘être’ and ‘paraître’) or Don Juan living out a life of procreation.39

His Sisyphus, too, shuns worldly concerns. The final figure in Camus’sconsideration, he represents the ultimate metaphor for the self-absorbedindividual, defined through the trials and tribulations of the activity inwhich he is engaged. In Kopfgeburten the narrator finds a parallel in thisnotion of the self as a discreet and closed individual. Sisyphus’ identity isdefined through his relationship to his stone, the continuous spur to self-absorption that defines his existence and which has no wider significancefor the world around him. This leads the narrator to question ‘was aberist mein Stein?’ (K , 100). Both literary and political pursuits are suggestedas suitable stones, but ultimately it is not what the stone actually repre-sents but rather the relationship to this stone that captures the narrator’sattention:

38 As well as the dominant socio-political readings referenced earlier (n. 8), see FrankBrunssen, Das Absurde in Günter Grass’ Literatur der achtziger Jahre (Würzburg: Königshausenand Neumann, 1997) for a detailed consideration of the Camus intertext. In his understandingof Camus, Brunssen weights the political context in which the text was first written, and sosees in the Grass–Sisyphus link a determination to rebel against the absurd. On the wider issueof Grass and Camus, see Dieter Stolz’s study, ‘Der frühe Grass und die Literatur des Absurden(1954–1959)’, Germanica Wratislaviensia, 82 (1988), 229–378.

39 Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 114.


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

Unlike his fictional self-parody, Harm, the narrator has no interest inbecoming a hero through his perceived dedication to his stone (‘Aber auchden Stein [. . .] lache ich aus’). He does not seek meaning in his stone:for all the possible activities that the stone may represent, whilst on theone hand claimed as an integral part of the narrator, are at the same timedismissed as ‘brand names’ or advertising slogans. The stone, in effect, canconjure up a variety of selves and is thus the ideal ‘travelling companion’: itis the constructed authorial role, modified as needs be to the necessary dis-course. This is, in fact, a reformulation of the ‘Begrüßgustav’, humorouslydescribed in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The narrator’s relationshipto this apparent core of authorial selfhood is therefore one of humorousdistance. Like Sisyphus, he has abandoned the search for meaning or futurerelease from his condition, and is content to see himself as sovereign ofhis destiny, constantly engaged in rolling his stone, whatever it represents.Indeed, in a 1981 interview with Siegfried Lenz, Grass goes beyond Camus’spresentation of Sisyphus’ sovereignty at the moment when the stone beginsto roll downhill, conceiving of him instead as sovereign throughout thewhole process:

Ich erkenne mich am Fuß des Berges, der Stein ist da, ich wälze ihn, ich nehmedie Strafe der Götter nicht nur an, ich höhne weiter den Göttern. Ich sage: bitteschön, der Stein gehört zu mir—im Camusschen Sinn. Ich weiß, daß er oben nichtliegenbleibt. Und deshalb akzeptiere ich in der Tat die Formulierung von Camus:‘Wir dürfen uns Sisyphus als einen glücklichen Menschen vorstellen.’ Ich habe denStein angenommen.40

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

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


‘Aber die Gewißheit, daß der Stein da ist . . . ’41 After further argument fromLenz, Grass still insists: ‘Sicher richtig. Aber, diese wenigen Momente derDistanz zum Stein, wenn der Stein ihm vorausgeeilt ist, zeigen ja doch auchan, daß er genau weiß: der Stein wartet auf ihn, auf den kann er sich ver-lassen, der wird wieder da sein. Er ist zum Stein verdonnert. Der Stein wirdoben nicht liegenbleiben.’42 Similarly, in Kopfgeburten the autobiographicalnarrator who exists only within the continuous present of the text shows adegree of self-absorption that quite transcends the particular political situ-ation. He is ‘zum Text verdonnert’. By very conspicuously placing himselfbetween past and future, fiction and non-fiction, the narrator highlights theproduction of self inherent to the creative process, and is thus absurd heroonly in as much as he is strictly taking on the role of Camus’s creative artist.It is his very refusal to try to counter the absurd (through social action orpolitical commitment) and his insistence on living it, ‘covering with imagesthat which has no meaning’, that characterize his authorial position withinthe text.43

The extent to which the narrator is so caught up in the creative process ofhis text as to be divorced from his socio-political surroundings is made clearat the end of the novel. While Harm and Dörte are overpowered by theimage of the immigrant children—a clear symbol of their fear and failureon both a personal and a socio-political level—the narrator remains to theend blissfully unconcerned by any threat to his future well-being. He isdescribed immediately before this closing scene happily celebrating the NewYear with a dish of flounder, the eponymous protagonist of Günter Grass’sprevious novel. The scene is one of optimism and contented self-absorptionas he sits down with his wife to carve up the literary fish—a mood thatcould not be further from the speechless fear expressed with reference toHarm and Dörte in the closing line of the work. The message is clear:political considerations are far away from the narrator, who has projectedall such worries on to his fictional scapegoat selves. Instead, as author, he isbound up in a textual chronology that will never have to face up to the nextdecade but can populate both the future and the past with as many literarycreations as he chooses.

41 Ibid., 279. 42 Ibid., 279.43 On this, see also Mertens, Figurationen von Autorschaft in Öffentlichkeit und Werk von

Günter Grass (Weimar: Verlag und Daten bank für Geistwisenschaften, 2005): ‘Der Inhaltseiner Arbeit ist er selbst in seinem Verhältnis zu seiner Arbeit. Der endlose Kreislauf [. . .]wird ihm zur Grundbedingung seiner Existenz’, 235.


CONCLUSION

The narrator of Kopfgeburten is absolved of all need to engage with politics:it is always just after he has returned from his tour of South-East Asiaand just before he gets involved in the 1980 general election. While allreaders know that the author Grass will be back in political mode just afew weeks after the book is finished, his narrator is frozen in that shortperiod of stocktaking between the author’s rounds of political campaigning.The position between these past and future political selves is a profoundlyapolitical one, in line with Camus’s absurd artist who is caught up in thecontinuous-present of the creative act. The result is that in manipulatingan autobiographical narrator suspended outside real political action andtransfixed by his own literary creations, Grass manages to fashion a situationin which a textual understanding of authorship imposes its own time andspace on contemporary socio-political discourse. The literary text is made toplay host to an extended performance of authorship, partly for the author’sown entertainment, but partly also as a challenge to the reader to experiencethe full range of Grass’s creative persona.

This is one of the main attributes of both the autofictional texts discussedhere and surely constitutes the attraction for Grass of this form of auto-biographical writing. He is able to move from negotiating constructionsof his authorial identity in the public sphere to negotiating them in theliterary text, and this necessitates a different kind of performance aimed at,and finally realized by, a different kind of reader audience. Exploiting theparticularly self-conscious form of the autofictional mode, he introducesinto both works a space for self-invention in which the author’s biographicalself is suspended, as the special textual reality of the creative process, withits own logic, time, and tense, takes over. Indeed, the narrator of Aus demTagebuch einer Schnecke had foregrounded his apparently impossible wish ofexchanging present political reality for a private, ‘encapsulated’ dimension(‘ “Und was möchten Sie, wenn Sie könnten?”, “Mich verkapseln . . .” ’, TS,284) and achieved it textually. Kopfgeburten, on the other hand, openlypresents its narrator as encapsulated within his own particular ‘Verge-genkunft’ tense. Both autofictional texts allow the author as biographicallyspecific individual to escape into fiction even as he appears to be offering toa curious readership genuine autobiographical material, with the result thatan often humorous distance is taken from any one particular self-image and


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

4‘Aus der Geschichte gefallen’: Displacingthe Author in Der Butt and Die Rättin

INTRODUCTION

The issue of how the author relates to the first-person narrator in largelyautobiographical works has been discussed in Chapter 3. In this chapter, theexact workings of such a relationship continue to be an important feature.Although it would be going too far to term Der Butt (1977) and Die Rättin(1986) works of autofiction, their structures do thematize issues of narrativestandpoint in a manner similar to Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke andKopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus. Indeed, in the case of Der Buttand Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass himself makes the link explicit:

Daß mit dem ‘Tagebuch einer Schnecke’, und nun mit dem ‘Butt’ konsequentvorangetrieben, ich zum ersten Mal das Autoren-Ich als Erzähler-Ich einführe unddas sonst, wie bei der ‘Blechtrommel’ oder bei den ‘Hundejahren’, von vornhereingesetzte fiktive Erzähler-Ich ablöse, und daß ich dann beim ‘Butt’ dieses Autoren-Ichnach einer gewissen Zeit in ein fiktives Ich verwandle, aber immer in Korrespondenzzum Autoren-Ich—das ist meiner Meinung nach für mich ein neuer Vorgang, dernatürlich auch andere Prosa-Formen und andere Lyrik-Formen gebiert.1

In the case of both Der Butt and Die Rättin the first-person narrator isendowed with much of Grass’s private and professional biography, andin both cases the narrator, just as in the two previous works, is also veryactively involved in constructing the story that forms his narrative. He isthus not only at times identical with the famous author, he is also oftenexplicitly acting out the authorial role within his own narrative. At thesame time, however, the fictional situations in which this narrator findshimself—reporting on the trial of a magical fish and orbiting around apost-nuclear world—mean that both works are first and foremost works

1 Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ‘Gespräche mit Günter Grass’, in Günter Grass, ed. Heinz LudwigArnold, 5th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1978), 1–39, 28.

Displacing the Author: Butt and Rättin 97

of fiction, and the narrator within them can only ever be understood as adecidedly fictional self-projection on the part of Günter Grass. This generictension between a highly fictional plot and a markedly autobiographicalnarrator is described by Grass as a creative tension that opens up the formsof prose and poetry to new possibilities. In this sense, it is an extensionof what he had already begun with the autofictional form of Aus demTagebuch einer Schnecke. The new-found structural freedom, however, alsoentails a heightened degree of complexity, for the very way in which twovery similar but fundamentally different narrative positions, those of authorand narrator, overlap and then move apart only to overlap again has nowbecome a central concern within these works. In the following, I aim totrace these movements in order the better to understand just what impactGrass’s increasing interest in narrative position has had not only on thetwo specific works in question but also on his overall understanding of thetextual and political models of authorship against the backdrop of a rapidlychanging world.

DER BUTT

‘Ich, das bin ich jederzeit’: locating author and narrator

The claim made in the second paragraph of the novel Der Butt, ‘ich, dasbin ich jederzeit’ (B , 9), introduces the issue of both time and narrativestandpoint right from the first page. As even the briefest perusal of theliterary critics will reveal, this riddle is conventionally understood within itsliterary context as a narrative device, a ruse used to endow the narrator withthe necessary degree of omniscience for the vast chronology in hand.2 Thenarrator and his own particular subjectivity are extended into the fictionalas a means of giving historical depth to the narration of the age-old story ofsexual relations. This, certainly, is how Michael Minden, writing in 1990,sums up literary critical reaction to the narrator’s bold claim, adding to ithis own emphasis:

2 See the following for a representative sample of discussion on narrative perspective:Gertrud Bauer Pickar, ‘The Prismatic Narrator: Postulate and Practice’, in “The Fishermanand His Wife” : Günter Grass’s “The Flounder” in Critical Perspective, ed. Siegfried Mews (NewYork: AMS Press, 1983), 55–74; Osman Durrani, ‘ “Here Comes Everybody”: An Appraisalof Narrative Technique in Günter Grass’s Der Butt’, Modern Language Review, 75 (1980),810–22; Ruprecht Wimmer, ‘ “I, Down Through the Ages”: Reflections on the Poetics ofGünter Grass’, in Mews, ed., “The Fisherman and His Wife”, 25–38.

98 Displacing the Author: Butt and Rättin

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

Minden disposes of the idea of multiple selves as a way of achieving effectiveomniscience, stressing instead the authorial intention behind endowingeach of the created narrative standpoints with subjectivity; he then linksthis back not to the narrator who is acting as an author framed within thetext, but rather the real author Günter Grass. His argument, in short, isthat Grass structures his novel through a sequence of obviously constructedsubjective positions in order to highlight his own fallibility in the faceof the material he is presenting. The narrative technique of what BauerPickar terms a ‘prismatic narrator’ arises, according to Minden, as muchout of moral concerns as aesthetic ones: ‘Grass writes to deconstruct theliterary realism which was predicated upon the authority of the author; anauthority which merely masked profound spiritual uncertainty.’4 Followingthis line of argument, the narrator’s claim of eternal presence becomes,rather surprisingly, a concealed metaphor for the author’s awareness of hisown limitations.

Minden is correct to draw attention to the way in which the authorGünter Grass relates to his work, and his sense that the authorial role per seis undermined during this process provides a more accurate evaluation ofnarrative standpoint than is offered by most other critics. However, thechapter within which he presents his ideas is short and does not sufficientlyexplain the full implications of these various contrasting narrative stand-points. Above all, the issue of self-presentation that is central to the narrativeis here flattened into a simple question of authorial intention. The moralmessage of authorial fallibility is invoked as a reductive interpretative modelthat overrides the elaborate posing and evident pleasure inherent to thenarrator’s attention-seeking claims. It is my contention, by contrast, that inDer Butt Grass has in fact created a case study of how a male narrator, whocarries only echoes of his famous author creator, turns to rewriting historyalong with his own story precisely in order to shirk his responsibilitiestowards the opposite sex and in so doing to throw the implied female readeroff his scent. This is certainly not an exemplary moral tale on the part of

3 Michael Minden, ‘Implications of the Narrative Technique in Der Butt’, in Philip Brady,Timothy McFarland, and John J. White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’: Sexual Politics and theMale Myth of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 187–202, 188.

4 Ibid., 201.


either Grass or his fictional persona, and the authorial figure who acts asthe ultimate frame of reference when interpreting this text is not GünterGrass but his fictional first-person self—the narrator—who pointedly showshimself spinning his own tale within it.

This complex narrative structure is central to understanding the authorialmotivation that the narrator represents. The statement ‘ich, das bin ichjederzeit’ amounts to a challenge to the reader on the part of this narra-tor. His tangled chronology and multiple contemporaneous, first-personnarrator identities make further demands which must, at least initially,frustrate the reader. In a similar vein, even before the female jury has beenassembled and his partner has begun to listen, he ostentatiously claims arepresentative moral burden for himself, which in the first instance disarmsthe unsuspecting reader. In fact, he starts in medias res from an entirelyunexplained position of guilt, and this, tellingly (and characteristically forGrass), is linked to his desire to tell a story. Immediately after the childhas been conceived, the narrator tries to sneak away in parenthesis—‘(ichlief, die Zeit treppab, davon)’ (B , 10). His intention is to forestall Ilsebill’sgrumbling with the father-to-be through the introduction of his fantasticalnarrative: ‘bevor sie über umgekehrte Rollenverteilung weitere Spekulatio-nen anstellen konnte [. . .], erzählte ich ihr von Aua und ihren drei Brüsten’(B , 10). Right from the start, the narrator seems rather shifty, a characterwith something to hide, responsible for the complex way in which the detailof his narrative (the story of both the fish and his own former existences)is relayed. For the reader struggling to follow the twists and turns of thenarrative, the emphasis thus falls on how the narrator manipulates his ownstory, how he presents himself within it. Whether or not he has the supportof Günter Grass, the extra-textual author is in the first instance entirelyirrelevant, for he represents what amounts to an uncommented case studyin authorial motivation: his narrative is complex, and he, for some reason,is deliberately making it so.

This narrator’s overt insistence on his guilt (which is as yet still unde-fined) should arouse the suspicions of the reader acquainted with Grass’sliterary fiction, for it is highly reminiscent of the original overly guiltynarrators, Oskar and Pilenz. In both cases, the display of guilt is ostentatiousand ultimately serves to divert a suspicious reader’s attention away fromthe actual claim being made and onto the pathology of the claimant.5 In

5 This is why critics stress the importance of recognizing an unreliable narrator as aparticular narrative technique. As Beyersdorf, summing up his list of ways in which Oskardeviates from a conventional, reliable author-narrator figure, says, ‘it is only when all ofthese factors are taken into account that a truly reliable interpretation of the novel can even


Der Butt, too, the presentation of how exactly the narrator comes to benarrating his guilty tale to Ilsebill should send out warning signals. In theopening lines of the work she purportedly asks him when he wants to startnarrating, implying he has asked her to listen. When he does actually start,however, it is in order to escape her demands—something rather differentto any implied desire to enlighten. Later on again, the narrator claims thatit is because the fish was caught by women that he is compelled both to tellhis tale to Ilsebill and to write it down:

weil aber der Butt [von den Frauen] nicht freigesetzt [. . .] wurde, kam alles raus,[. . .] wurde ich beispielhaft, muß ich mich häuten, beichte ich Ilsebill, schreibe ichauf, steht hier geschrieben. (B , 52)

This presents the decision to narrate as having been taken out of thenarrator’s hands altogether, putting quite a different light on the importanceof the domestic set-up and the specific circumstances that lead him to con-struct his narrative. The reader is now no longer confronted with the tran-script of an oral tale designed for personal entertainment and edification,but with a written testimony occasioned by much wider social conditionsand which is distinctly reminiscent of the court room. Consequently, thereader is directed away from the specific domestic situation relayed in thenarrative and out towards the extra-textual 1970s feminist movement withall its social ramifications. The narrator has accordingly become a passiveand unwillingly representative narrating subject (‘wurde ich beispielhaft’),forced by circumstances beyond his control to ‘shed his skin’ and deliverup a confession in writing that will count for the entire male gender. Agrave moral sense of responsibility certainly informs the way he presentshis narrative project to Sieglinde Huntscha, the feminist prosecutor, a littlelater on in the work:

Auf Sieglindes Frage [. . .] gab ich vorsichtig Auskunft: Das Tribunal an sich, dasganze Thema überhaupt interessiere mich. Ich sei nicht nur als Autor, sondern auchals Mann betroffen. Und zwar irgendwie schuldhaft. (B , 186–7)

The association that is drawn early on between the narrator’s awareness ofhis own specific flaws and the tale of general male guilt which he, in his

begin’: H. E. Beyersdorf, ‘The Narrator as Artful Deceiver: Aspects of Narrative Perspectivein Die Blechtrommel ’, Germanic Review, 55 (1980), 129–38, 138. McElroy expands on this,explaining how Oskar’s pathology becomes representative for a whole generation’s ‘way ofseeing’: Bernard McElroy, ‘Lunatic, Child, Artist, Hero: Grass’s Oskar as a Way of Seeing’,Forum for Modern Language Studies, 22 (1986), 308–22. Reddick shows how similar concernspermeate Katz und Maus, John Reddick, The ‘Danzig Trilogy’ of Günter Grass: A Study of ‘TheTin Drum’, ‘Cat and Mouse’, and ‘Dog Years’ (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975).


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

‘Was mir (ihm) trotz bester Absicht alles danebengegangensei’: narrating under the shadow of the author

A sense that what the narrator claims to be doing and what he is actuallydoing may diverge is not just triggered by shifty behaviour from the culprithimself. His female ‘readers’, both Ilsebill and the female jury assembledto try the flounder, the Feminal, give quite a different account of hisappearance within the narrative. For the feminists, he is far from centralto events in the courtroom. In their eyes it is the fish who represents malemegalomania, while the male narrator is simply an uninteresting exampleof the degenerate state to which modern man has sunk. Consequently, his

6 The relevant passage can be found in TS, 78. See Taberner’s discussion of this, StuartTaberner, Distorted Reflections: The Public and Private Faces of the Author in the Work of UweJohnson, Günter Grass and Martin Walser, 1965–1975 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 85–6.


claims to be a key witness, if not actual defendant, are openly laughed at bythe female jury. Instead, they fix his identity firmly to that of the famouscontemporary West German author and political activist Günter Grass:

Mein mit schriftlichen Angaben gestützter Einspruch, ich sei es gewesen, der vomNeolithikum bis in die Gegenwart jeweils im Verhältnis zu Aua, Wigga, Mestwina[. . .] und so weiter gelebt habe, wurde [. . .] von den Beisitzerinnen des Tribunalsverlacht: Da könne ja jeder kommen. Der Herr Schriftsteller suche wohl Stoff, wollesich anbiedern, mal wieder schmarotzen, seine Komplexe in Literatur ummünzen,uns womöglich die Hausfrauenrente aufschwatzen und ähnliche Beschwichtigun-gen. (B , 94)

Such direct comment on the narrator’s role as author functions as a referencewithin the text to the idea that his appropriation of past male identitiesmight indeed be understood, as earlier literary critics have implied, simplyas narrative technique. It is part of Grass the famous author’s supposedgeneral obsession with looking for material, trying to find an outlet forhis personal complexes and sneaking political messages into his fiction. Itis crucial, however, to consider the way in which this image of connivingself-presentation is itself presented within the narrative. The fact that it isrelayed in reported speech highlights the specific words chosen by the speak-ers and raises the issue of standpoint. The use of such sneering terms as ‘sichanbiedern’, ‘mal wieder schmarotzen’, and ‘ummünzen’ to describe the waythe narrator, as author, transforms life into art shows the extent to whichsuch activities are viewed by the feminist jury—and, by extension, a wideraudience hostile to the narrator’s public image as author—as dissemblingor somehow dishonest. This sort of specific and largely dismissive image ofwhat the narrator, as author, represents is repeated throughout the work inboth throw-away remarks and lengthier scenes, all of which lend weight tosuch hostile opinion, helping to build it up as a counter standpoint withinthe text. The hallucinatory scene in the section ‘wir aßen zu dritt’, triggeredwhen Griselde Dubertin, one of the feminist jury, comes to dinner with thenarrator and his partner, is a good case in point.

This section places the narrator in an uncomfortable position betweenIlsebill and Griselde. They join critical forces against him, dissecting hischaracter as if he were not even present. He narrates this experience of beingpartly, if not wholly, treated as an absent object by referring to himself withboth first- and third-person pronouns:

Dann wurde meine politische Arbeit verhandelt: Was mir (ihm) trotz bester Absichtalles danebengegangen sei. Und zwar folgerichtig, weil ich (er) mich (sich) nichteindeutig entscheiden könne: immer einerseits andererseits. Meine (seine) absurdeIdeologiefeindlichkeit sei ja bereits schon wieder meine (seine) Ideologie. (B , 492)


This dual use of pronouns to refer to the narrator (rather humorously just atthe point when his inability to make decisions is being criticized) indicatesthe way in which he relates to his authorial role within the text. It may beinterpreted as the narrator exploiting the potential for distancing himselffrom his narrative that the conscious foregrounding of self-constructionaffords (as indeed Oskar in Die Blechtrommel most famously demonstrates).Using a first-person narrator, his narrative makes famous public authorand narrator one and the same; when this narrator refers to himself inthe third person, however, he can quickly disappear behind the opinionsof other characters, leaving them to discuss a famous author figure withwhom the narrator need not in any way be linked. The way in which boththis passage of reported speech and that of the feminist jury quoted abovehighlight the narrator’s dual narrative standpoint as both manipulatingauthor and manipulated narrator has wider consequences for the work asa whole, for the reader is encouraged to question the narrator’s own self-presentation as overly contrite. Where he initially presented his narrativeas an attempt to pre-empt the present charge of guilty, making sure thathe could hold centre stage as a key narrative witness and inventing amultitude of past first-person selves in order to do so, the existence of otheropinions within his own narrative undermines these multiple standpoints.The women insist on seeing in the narrator’s ‘I’ nothing more than thewell-known image of that West German public intellectual commonlyknown as Günter Grass. This counter standpoint, built into the narrator’snarrative, limits his importance both textually and socio-politically. He is‘just’ a male author who is bound to have a hidden political agenda up hissleeve.

This is a serious blow to the narrator’s attempt to expand into all cornersof the narrative. In fact, none of his claimed former identities provokesany reaction from those listening to his tale; instead, the women—ratherlike many of the novel’s subsequent critics—continuously reduce him toone narrative standpoint alone, fixing him undeniably in the present andin the shoes of Günter Grass, the famous public author and intellectual.Thus in the section ‘wir aßen zu dritt’, his musings about the return toAua are interrupted by the women as they refer to the famous author’ssupposedly infamous oedipal complex (something which his counterpartin Kopfgeburten offloads onto his scapegoat, Harm), while his attemptsto narrate Sophie’s unerring love for Fritz are robbed of their romanticimplications and reduced by his female (non-)listeners to his own particularpsychosis: ‘Daß er sich dauernd was vormache, daß er konfliktscheu aufseinen Konflikten sitzenbleibe, daß deshalb sein Magenblubbern wiederzunehme’ (B , 495). Only under the influence of magic mushrooms do


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

‘Nur rückbezüglich noch da’: the narrativefate of authorship

The narrative may thus be understood as built upon an underlying tension,a tension between what the narrator is claiming about himself and hiswriterly motivation, and what he is actually doing, as betrayed by his owntext and sharply observed by his female ‘readers’ (Ilsebill and the Feminal).These opposing positions are summed up in the contradictory roles ofunspecified narrator(s) and specific famous author which he simultaneouslyfills. While supposedly forced to justify himself as both specific man andgeneral male representative who is easily linked to Grass’s own public image,he in fact delights in abandoning his rather unglamorous present identityfor the greater, and as he presents it eminently more enjoyable, issue ofnarrating relations between the sexes down through the ages. However, ifthe narrator manages to shift the emphasis from his failure as one manin the 1970s whose glory-days have passed to his pleasure as omnipresentnarrator in the frame of his narrative, this underhand celebration of hisauthorial abilities is threatened as the Feminal trial draws to a close andhe finds himself running out of material: his textual existence as eternalnarrator is now also facing its own demise. His reaction to this is to makehis own death as narrator into the thematic centre of his narrative by givingeven greater weight to the sense of self-sacrifice present within it from thestart (one man becomes the scapegoat for all mankind). The result, to bedetailed below, is that selflessness is thereby turned from laudable moralaction into a selfish mode of survival as the final pretence of high-minded


intentions is shed. Indeed, it becomes synonymous with this narrator’s ownunderstanding of authorship.

As set out above, the narrative itself is first introduced by the narratoras a means of diverting his partner’s attention away from both his presentfailings and his underlying narrative motivation. His real compulsion towrite and be central to his narrative is covered over by a feigned com-pulsion to tell the truth. Thus he introduces into his narrative a tone ofself-sacrifice which he hopes will render Ilsebill sympathetic to him andblind to his narrative manipulations. This role, with the premeditationand manipulation it implies, naturally entails a great deal of demonstrativeself-flagellation. Consequently, the narrative is peppered with outbursts ofmisery and ostentatious guilt as the narrator bewails the end of the linefor the male gender, with himself included as the last isolated specimen:miserable sinner, callous judge, and honourable repentant all in one. Hesuffers increased isolation, as he is excluded first from the social institutionof the feminist court (‘Mir wurden runde viertausend Jahre Vergangenheitabgesprochen. [. . .] Nicht mal als Publikum sollte ich geduldet werden’, B ,94), then from the private family idyll (Ilsebill rejects his wish to createdomestic harmony as ‘der alte Männertrick’, B , 120), and finally fromhistory in general as the flounder himself turns his back on his formerally. His isolation is therefore presented as harsh but ultimately justified,a moral burden which the selfless scapegoat agrees to shoulder. The poemsscattered throughout the narrative add a further twist to this. They appearat poignant moments, when the narrator seems to be calling for recognitionand acceptance from his partner, and frequently bring to a head a specificemotion or uncomfortable situation that he has experienced. It is surelyno accident that, as Fritz J. Raddatz has noted, when taken on theirown they seem to tell a particularly heart-wrenching tale of relationshipbreakdown.7

This sense of suffering increases as the novel draws to an end. Superfi-cially this might be interpreted as a reaction to the judgement spoken by

7 Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘ “Wirklicher bin ich in meinen Geschichten”: Der Butt des GünterGrass—erste Annäherung’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, Günter Grass: Unerbittliche Freunde: EinKritiker, ein Autor (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 43–63, 59. He describes the work as builtaround ‘ “Rippen”, die von puristischer Haltbarkeit sind—Gedichte. [. . .] Es sind Ruhepunkteder Fabel, weil Besinnungsmomente des Erzählers. Es sind auch die unverhohlenstenSelbstaussagen’, 58. However, it is also entirely possible to see the same structure as evidenceof just how calculating the narrator is being in the way he structures his narrative. For furtherdiscussion of the poems as literary compositions in their own right, see also Philip Brady, ‘ “Auseiner Kürbishütte gesehen”: The Poems’, in Brady, McFarland, and White, eds, Günter Grass’s‘Der Butt’, 203–25.


the women on the fish’s patronage of male-driven history. At the end ofthe seventh month, the fish disowns twentieth-century history, declaring‘der Mann ist am Ende’ (B , 574). Consequently, he advises the narratorto exit gracefully, ‘Feierabend, mein Sohn. Es gilt abzudanken. Mach esmit Anstand’ (B , 574). For the narrator, relinquishing his place in history,however, amounts to relinquishing his place in his story, as recreating thepast four thousand years within his narrative was what allowed him to retainauthority and centrality as author within the textual realm. His authorialrole is at stake. Now faced with the imminent end of his narrative, heis left to comment on his own end in textual terms, linking the generalfate of man to the specific fate of this male author-narrator: ‘Ich saß weitweg und abgeschrieben. Nur rückbezüglich noch da. Ein Mann mit seinergelebten Geschichte: Es war einmal . . . ’ (B , 575). His departure is twofold:the ‘ein Mann mit seiner gelebten Geschichte’ is prepared to be ‘writtenoff ’ both as one specific man and as a generally representative male. Bothare possible now only when exiled either to the past or a system of textualrelations. Just as, in line with 1970s gender politics, men are beginning tosee their historical hold on the socio-political sphere slipping away, herethe narrator sees his textual realm fast disappearing as his story draws to aclose. His authorial role, both within the text and within the socio-politicalrealm, is being denied. Consequently, the term ‘nur rückbezüglich nochda’ invokes both the ‘zurück’ movement back through time and, morespecifically, the author-reader-text triangle: the narrator exists only in asmuch as he relates back to the real author, forwards to the reader, andacross the text to the characters he narrates; outside this system he has noidentity.

By the ninth month, the narrator’s symbolic position as self-sacrificialonlooker, sidelined both from history and his own story, is clear. Where atthe beginning of the text he constantly stresses his guilt and complicity, nowthe emphasis falls on his exclusion, condemned as an innocent bystanderto play the role of scapegoat and thereby remove himself from the world.In a scene full of overt symbolism as the fish is carried back to the sea,the narrator paints himself as Jesus carrying the cross: ‘So trug ich ihn,als müßte ich mit seiner Last mich und meine geschichtliche Zeitweil, dieMännersache zu Grabe tragen’ (B , 677). With ‘seine Last’ implying thatthe crime is not his, he presents himself as a paragon of selfless virtue, ashe recognizes that the burden he carries is the making of the gender hehas come to represent within his narrative. Certainly the narrator’s sense ofabandonment by the fish in his hour of need echoes Jesus’ unanswered pleasto His Father, encouraging the reader to interpret the representatively guilty


narrator’s isolation along similar lines as the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Hedies for man; but because his existence was only ever textual, his death is tobe a narrative one, as it is subsequently duly reported: ‘Ich saß neben demleeren Henkelmann. Aus der Geschichte gefallen’ (B , 697).

At this point it becomes clear that the narrator’s self-presentation as acommanding textual author in fact sought to cover up the exact inverse stateof affairs. The initial claim of ‘ich, das bin ich jederzeit’ has ended not inuniversal presence but rather absence, with even the pronoun ‘ich’ missingfrom the clause describing its fate (‘aus der Geschichte gefallen’). Is thenarrative then to be read as a sort of enactment of Barthes’s pronouncementon the death of the writing subject (‘Writing is that neutral, composite,oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identityis lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’)?8 I suggestedearlier that dissolving his own guilty present identity in the greater sinsof the past was the narrator’s motivation for his narrative, that he waspurposefully trying to ‘slip away’ into a narrative role in order to avoidbeing confronted with his diminishing importance in the socio-politicalsphere of 1970s Germany. The high-profile position which the narrative‘ich’ at all times enjoys within his narrative, however, makes it difficult tospeak of a true disappearance; rather, it is a case of shifting identities and ofconstantly drawing attention to this process of constructed slippage. Thisis humorously captured in the description of the narrative ‘I’ as an insectcaught in amber that triggers a whole host of images of the self as somehowoutside the narrator, preserved in order to plague him and upset his ownchronology:

Mir hat [Maria] nur einen Bernstein geschenkt. Mit einem Insekt als Einschluß. Ichbin der Einschluß. Im Zweifelsfall ich: spätversessen und aufgehoben. Neben mir:ich. Außer mir: ich. Mir (als Bär) aufgebunden: das folgsam brummende Ich. Immerentlaufen, zeitflüchtig, hinterrücks. [. . .] Mich hat die große, alles verrührendeKöchin gegen die Zeit gerührt. Wie sie mich (immer noch) mit der Schaumkelleklärt. Wie sie mich austeilt gerecht. [. . .] Abgeschmeckt ich. Jan, das bin ich, Maria,nach deinem Rezept. (B , 643–4)

Such a description of the self as a tedious joke that plagues the narrator,something that will not go away (it is caught in amber for all time) andwhich sticks to him just like the mud slung by Strauß with his defamation ofauthors as ‘Ratten und Schmeißfliegen’ (surely intentionally invoked here)points to the way in which the narrator’s high-profile textual position is a

8 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath(London: Fontana, 1977), 142.


burden to him.9 Lacking the courage to stand up to his wife, he appar-ently desires anonymity by losing himself in fictitious former existences.At the same time, however, the very space he gives within his narrative toforegrounding his own construction of these escapist bit-parts keeps his selffirmly in the reader’s and Ilsebill’s mind. The final ironic twist to this dis-cussion of self-presentation in the novel is that while the narrative so overtlyundermines the idea of a universal historic presence with an unavoidable,socio-politically and textually conditioned ‘death’ of the authorial narrativeself, at the same time the narrator quietly reasserts his textual authorialrole as an eternal narrative principle. He is socio-politically on the wayout, yes, but clearly still at the centre of his story all the time it is beingread. In the battle of the sexes, he is still the author’s most powerful artisticcounterpart to his partner’s biological re-creative faculty. This final twist canbe elucidated by brief reference to the final poem included in the narrative,‘Mannomann’.

This poem employs a hostile female voice, which echoes the generalgender tension that has structured the entire narrative. The speaker takesa quasi-sadistic delight in presenting man with his final reckoning, cul-minating in the final strophe. The ambiguity of lines 29–30 should bynow be clear: ‘Du bist nach deinen Gesetzen verbraucht, / entlassen ausdeiner Geschichte’ refers both to man’s socio-political standing and hisplace within the narrative. The closing question, however, provides both thepoem and the novel with a final twist: ‘Was, Mannomann, wird deine Fraudazu sagen?’ asks the sarcastic speaker. Man as narrator has been declared‘fertig’ by the unnamed speaker in this poem, and the reference to a powerreversal in gender relations as the woman is now called upon to speak theverdict is a calculated blow to this former omnipresent and omnipotentmale. At the same time, however, it is in fact clear that this poem, likeeverything else of which the text comprises, including the Feminal and allnine / eleven female cooks, comes from the first-person male narrator. Thewoman’s judgement may be asked for, it may even hang over the narrator,but it will never actually eject him from his central position within the text.Even as the narrative ‘I’ describes himself as pushed out of his-story, he findshis way back into the narrative by appropriating the castigatory female voicefor himself. It is from this new-found standpoint that he transforms his ‘ich’into a ‘du’ and declares his own socio-political and narrative demise. Having

9 See Ronald Speirs, ‘The Dualistic Unity of Der Butt’, in Brady, McFarland, and White,eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’, 11–32, 18, and Joyce Crick, ‘Future Imperfect: Time and theFlounder’, in Brady, McFarland, and White, eds, Günter Grass’s ‘Der Butt’, 33–49, 44–5, forexamples of how critics have overlooked the clear humour in this passage.


the confidence to speak one’s own death is surely a final display of completeconfidence in the power of the male authorial role within the confines ofhis text.

The stance that the attentive reader can infer from such self-presentationon the part of the narrator is an entirely self-centred one, for the wholenarrative stems from, and is conditioned by, his present existence as it isframed within the text. Invoking the idea of self-sacrifice is a cunning trickthat in actual fact shores up the position of the authorial self within his ownnarrative: he cannot exist without his narrative, but then neither can hisnarrative exist without him. Slipping from one specific present identity intomultiple imagined past identities, he makes himself literally selfless in orderto keep himself central as author to textual proceedings. Within the text,he thus lives on as Foucault’s historical, stylistic, conceptual, and genericreference point by virtue of his specifically fractured identity. Consequently,the whole text may be understood as the narrator’s response to his fear oflosing centrality within the public realm. Assuring himself of an ongoingtextual authorial role is his solution: he manifestly takes on the role ofauthor and locates himself in the temporal and spatial paradox of ‘ich, dasbin ich jederzeit’ precisely because he fears banishment from his own socio-political time. In the case study that Der Butt represents, Grass shows anarrator playing at authorial temporal relocation in the folds of his text inorder to defer impending dislocation in contemporary society. His-storyis the last bastion of unrepentant male centrality, as a textual model ofauthorship tries to counter the crumbling political one.

DIE RÄTTIN

‘Schluß! sagt sie. Euch gab es mal’: narrator andauthor under threat

Where Der Butt investigates how the (male) narrator, as author, relatestemporally and spatially to the entire span of human history up to thewriting present, Die Rättin moves in the other direction, looking backon the present from a standpoint in the future. In fact, the novel’s majorinnovation is to break with the flow of time, linear or circular, in orderto investigate instead the possibility of being literally ‘out of time’; humanhistory is brought to an end and the narrator is thrown out into orbit. Asin Der Butt, however, this narrator not only carries echoes of the famousauthor Günter Grass, but is also framed within the text busily constructing


his own various narrative strands. The plight suffered by this narratorfigure is therefore also directly endured by an author figure. Furthermore,although the post-apocalypse scenario officially applies both to the narratorand mankind in general, because the narrator is the sole human survivorof the nuclear explosion, it is in effect experienced by him alone. This hasrepercussions for the role his first-person position comes to adopt: he isboth the specific Günter Grass, famous author, responsible for the fictionalstrands of his text, and the general representative of humankind responsiblefor the nuclear fallout and its own demise. If, as critics so far have tended toimply, Die Rättin is to be understood as a satirical warning to contemporaryreaders, then an examination of just how this collective and yet highly spe-cific narrator-cum-author positions himself with respect to the text and itsreaders should be central to understanding how this warning is conveyed.10

Right from the very beginning of the novel, the narrator is located intwo different places and at two different times; on the one hand, he relayshow he came to acquire his ‘Weihnachtsratte’ just in time for 1984, theChinese year of the rat. The rat is described as a muse, sitting next tohim and provoking him into planning and telling stories: ‘sie mir danebengesetzt. [. . .] Sie spielt mit meinen Ängsten, die ihr handlich sind. Alsorede ich gegenan’ (R , 9). Indeed, in this role she is clearly instrumentalto the entire construction of the novel. Not only does her post-apocalypsespeech trigger the narrator’s counter pre-apocalypse narratives (see below),the final sentence of the novel, ‘Ein schöner Traum, sagte die Rättin, bevorsie verging’ (R , 487), is reminiscent of Grass’s 1956 essay ‘Die Ballerina’,where the poet rubs his eyes and sits down seriously to write just after

10 Grass himself certainly encourages a reading of the text as a warning; Volker Neuhausquotes his comment in Vier Jahrzehnte, ‘Es sollte ein Buch werden, das alte Geschichten auf-nahm, um sie den allerneuesten Katastrophen auszuliefern’: Günter Grass, 2nd edn (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1993), 162, quoting from Günter Grass, Vier Jahrzehnte: ein Werkstattbericht, ed.G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Steidl, 1991), 269. For further consideration of Die Rättin as asatirical warning, see Julian Preece, ‘Literature and the End of the World: Günter Grass’s “DieRättin” ’, in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Roland Smith, Literature on the Threshold: TheGerman Novel in the 1980s (Oxford: Berg, 1990); and Klaus-Jürgen Roehm, Polyphonie undImprovisation: zur offenen Form in Günter Grass’s ‘Die Rättin’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).Roehm’s detailed study may be read as a kind of response to Preece’s piece, as he outlineshow Grass combines a playful, ironic form with a serious overall message. Frank Brunssenalso engages with the idea of the text as both an aesthetic and a thematic response to socio-political developments, grouped together in his analysis under the term of ‘the absurd’: FrankBrunssen, Das Absurde in Günter Grass’ Literatur der achtziger Jahre (Würzburg: Königshausenand Neumann, 1997). Although both Roehm and Brunssen show some sensitivity to the ideaof authorial positioning and develop interesting arguments, neither goes so far as to examine itexplicitly as a major thematic and structural aspect of the novel, nor do they clearly differentiatebetween author and narrator.


the ballerina vanishes out the window.11 This ‘Weihnachtsratte’, however,does more than simply inspire the narrator. By quickly mutating into anactive counter-narrator, she threatens his position within the text. Thepassive construction ‘neuerdings träumt sie mir’ (R, 9), with its grammaticalemphasis on how the rat brings about the dream rather than the dreambringing about the rat, reflects the position of control that she asserts overhim. Furthermore, the rat is then given implicitly human qualities in theneologism of ‘Rättin’ (R , 10), introduced into the text when she first makesuse of authoritative direct speech. Just as the narrator in Kopfgeburten assertshimself through the godlike act of self-reproduction within his text, the ratis similarly described as wise to the powers contained in the position ofnarrating subject: ‘schon vermehrt sich die Rättin erzählend, indem sie vonunserem Ausgang berichtet’ (R , 10).

At this early stage it is already clear that her narrative carries at least asmuch authority as that of the author-narrator, for she has in part usurpedhis position, raising serious questions about his own location within thenarrative. Her story interrupts his comfortable autobiographical descriptionof the 1983 Christmas period, catapulting him simultaneously into andout of post-apocalypse times: ‘Schluß! sagt sie. Euch gab es mal’ (R, 10).This dislodging of the first-person narrator from prime subject positionto incidental object of narration is underscored by the way in which therat’s narrative is relayed to him: in a dream-form that escapes his rationalcontrol and is addressed to a helpless vision of himself, locked in thefuture, first strapped into a wheelchair and then, from the second chapteronwards, orbiting the earth after the nuclear fallout.12 Ostensibly, as in the‘Ballerina’ essay, the rat’s narrative takes the form of a vision or daydream,with the implication that the narrator remains behind in the festive periodof 1983/84, able at the end of the work to wake up, sit down, and write.The fact that the various narrative strands all simultaneously draw uponthe same time and space of the text, however, means that for the reader thenarrator is impossibly placed in two mutually exclusive locations: on theone hand, as dreamer, he is sitting in the eighties dreaming up the variousnarrative strands; yet on the other, as the dreamed, he is catapulted intothe future and off the face of a burnt-out world where human existence

11 Günter Grass, ‘Die Ballerina’ (1956), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and DanielaHermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XIV, 7–15.

12 There are clear Orwellian parallels here which have already been commented upon.See Neuhaus, Günter Grass, 164–5 and Stolz, Vom privaten Motivkomplex zum poetischenWeltentwurf: Konstanten und Entwicklungen im literarischen Werk von Günter Grass (1956–1986) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994), 92.


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

‘Erde! rief ich. Antworten Erde! Aber es kam nur Piepen’:the death of the narrator in post-apocalypse times

In his post-apocalypse location, a narrative strand that acts as a catalystfor all other narrative strands, the narrator has suffered a double dis-placement: the rat has taken over the role of chief narrator, challenginghis previous existence within and through literature—his authorial role.Mankind in general, of whom the narrator is the last survivor, has, in thewords of Günter Grass’s 1982 speech ‘Die Vernichtung der Menschheithat begonnen’, ‘fallen out of nature’.14 Both displacements are representedwithin the text spatially by the narrator’s sudden and unwilled relocation tothe space capsule, but they are also overtly thematized by the way in whichfor much of the novel he is determined to rail against them. The recurrent‘nein, Rättin, nein!’ cried by the dreamer obtrusively displays his refusal tobelieve the rat’s tale of how mankind, together with all he holds dear, wasobliterated from the earth. With such counterclaims as ‘immer noch sindwir zahlreich’ (R , 10), he underscores his role as representative of the humanrace in general, asserting it against the collective of rats and the ‘now’ againsta dystopian future. In a more discreet manner, however, he also repeat-edly highlights his own personal discomfort with his secondary narrativeposition. Although he sometimes depicts his reliance on the rat in termsreminiscent of the intimate creative relationship between the author andhis muse (as implied by the possessive tone of ‘meine Weihnachtsratte weiß,

13 Only two critics so far have made the idea of dream into the centre of their approach;Thomas Kniesche uses it to develop a psychoanalytical reading, which I find difficult to squarewith the text (Die Genealogie der Post-Apokalypse. Günter Grass’ ‘Die Rättin’ [Vienna: Passagen,1991]); Brunssen, Das Absurde in Günter Grass’ Literatur der achtziger Jahre, takes a moreconvincing line, linking dreams to his overarching theme of the absurd in Grass’s writing.

14 Günter Grass, ‘Die Vernichtung der Menschheit hat begonnen’ (1982), in Werkausgabe,XVI, 57–60, 60.


daß ich ihr zuhören muß, sobald sie mir träumt’, R , 260), at times of greaterwakefulness he makes obvious efforts to stifle the voice of the competingrat narrator: ‘weil ich nicht will, daß jetzt wieder die Rättin spricht, bleibtder Käfig meiner Weihnachtsratte verhängt’ (R , 212). On other occasions,the dreaming narrator makes his dislike of an enforced secondary positionquite overt (‘als Space-Observer in eine Raumkapsel gezwängt’, R , 136, myemphasis), comparing it for example to compulsory attendance at school(‘Schulzwang beherrschte den Traum’, R , 180, my emphasis), where therat’s message is conveyed to him in the dreaded ‘Sütterlinschrift’—‘mitSpitzen und Schleifen die Pein meiner Jugend, die mir vorgeschrieben blieb’(R , 180; another telling use of the indirect personal pronoun). Resentmentis thus amply in evidence, and the narrator, both as author denied controlof his narrative and as human being pushed spatially and temporally outof world history, feels the loss of control over both history and his storyto be a double denigration. The self-deprecatory description of ‘ich, eineFehlbesetzung’ (R , 136) gives voice to this frustrated sense of passivityand offers a means of uniting the narrator’s specifically textual feelings ofinadequacy (his narrative is constantly overridden by the rat’s, as madeclear by the plea ‘[w]ie soll ich von meiner Damroka berichten, wenn mirdie Rättin dazwischenspricht?’, R , 155) with the wider sense of mankind’sgeneral failure to manage his own technical inventions.

The idea that the narrator becomes a sort of signifier for two quitedifferent issues (narrative control of the text, human control of the worldand world history) is taken up again in the rat’s explanation of the collectivesense of self which is common to all rats. She compares this to the humanfixation on individuality which, as we have seen in the case of Der Buttand the representative male ‘Versager’, allows one person to become thescapegoat or, as it is put here, ‘Fehlerquelle’. In this case, the rat proposesthat the narrator in his space capsule inadvertently caused the nuclearfallout. This prompts a poetic response from the latter that plays on theissue of individual versus collective responsibility:

[. . .]Jetzt suchen wir die Fehlerquelle.Wir suchen sie außer uns wie verrückt,bis plötzlich jemand wir sagt,wir alle könnten, mal angenommen zum Spaß,die Fehlerquelle oder du oder dukönntest sie sein.Wir meinen das nicht persönlich.[. . .] (R , 222)


The poem clearly employs a humorous tone as it paints a picture of thehuman collective heading blindly and yet knowingly to its own mass grave,yet it obviously also points directly to matters of serious concern for the nar-rator. His helpless pleas scattered throughout the text of ‘Erde! AntwortenErde!’ show a belief in an earthly collective that can fix a technologicalproblem and thereby save him. Yet even as he shouts he is aware that he hasbecome the sole survivor of this earth and is therefore himself the remainsof this collective to whom these entreaties are addressed. He, as a humanbeing, necessarily carries the fatal flaw within him, in spite of himself, or,as the poem states ‘[w]ir meinen das nicht persönlich’. The individual isthe collective, no matter how he may endeavour, as author, to separatehimself off from an uninformed general audience and speak warningly tothem. This point is driven home immediately after the humorous poem ina series of paratactical clauses that emphasize the question of the narrator’srelationship to his general audience down below:

Ich bin die Fehlerquelle! [. . .] Nein! schrie ich. Das kommt nicht auf meine Kappe.[. . .] Ich als Orbit-Observer! Ich als Space-Turner. Ich, ohne Ahnung, was Chipsund Klips sind. Ich, der das Kosmonautengequatsche nur aus Filmen kennt. Ich,der vorhin verzweifelt versuchte, aufzuhalten, was sich vollzieht, indem ich nachunten Aufhören! Falscher Alarm! rief. Vergeblich natürlich. Ich kann das ja nicht.Bin zu dumm dafür. Erde! rief ich. Antworten Erde! Aber es kam nur Piepen. Stilledanach. Eigengeräusch. (R , 223–4)

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


self it entails renders his relationship both to his text (characters and readers)and his fellow human beings non-existent, facing him with the prospect ofbeing left entirely by himself. The closing image of the narrator in Der Buttas ‘aus der Geschichte gefallen’ (B , 697) is here from the start quite literallyapplicable: he is condemned to the eternal prospect of what is in effect asurplus of self in a sort of atextual temporal and spatial vacuum. There isnothing left for the narrator to narrate, except his own existential misery.Furthermore, with nobody left to hear it, the narrator has entered into akind of living death: even the ‘Rückbezug’ of Der Butt has been deniedhim. He represents a kind of authorship in a world that no longer has eitherbooks or readers left to give such a position meaning.

‘Was ich erzählen will, / weil ich durch Wörter das Endeaufschieben möchte’: reasserting the author

in pre-apocalypse times

Where the post-apocalypse location of the narrator is built on the suppo-sition that his grip on both world history and his own story has come toan end, in the pre-apocalypse sections of the text he is still for the mostpart in control of his narrative, with the different narrative strands toldin straightforward linear fashion (Oskar and his grandmother, the fairytalecharacters and Bonn politicians, the five women on the ‘Neue Ilsebill’, thechildren of Hamlin, Malskat the bogus art restorer). Although it may beargued that these tales are located within the narrator’s own mind, in whichany sense of an external timescale has been suspended (and the narrativesuggestion that perhaps this figure, too, is dreamed up supports such a senseof temporal destabilization), the (dreamed) dreamer narrating his dreamhas not yet actually ‘fallen out’ of time and nature. Instead, he occupiesa position quite similar to that of the narrator in Kopfgeburten oder DieDeutschen sterben aus, who within the confines of his ‘Vergegenkunft’ textpulls together the various narrative strands as they present themselves tohim. Just as this figure in Kopfgeburten expressly refers to his location in theclosing months of 1979 and the ‘Buch oder Film’ on which he is working,here the reader is referred to the Christmas / New Year period of 1983 to1984 and informed of the narrator’s literary project of a poem ‘das vonder Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts handelt’ (R , 7). In both cases,the narrator’s claim to an authorial role is overt. The narrator’s locationin the pre-apocalypse strands of the narrative might thus, as in the case ofKopfgeburten, be considered in terms of actually asserting an existence as


specifically textual author who facilitates or gives birth to his text withinthe suspended time of his narrative. Certainly the occasional dialogues thatoccur between the narrator and his fictional creations in Die Rättin arereminiscent of those between the Peters and their author, although here,as in the following conversation with Oskar, the narrator is often markedlymore dictatorial:

Ich deute auf den Produktionsvertrag: ‘Hier, genau hier fehlt IhreUnterschrift, bitte.’

Er bedauert, daß für Videokassetten der Markt zur Zeit verstopft ist.Ich will aber keine Kassette: ‘Einen Stummfilm als Kinofilm will ich, mit

Untertiteln.’Er sagt: ‘Sobald ich aus Polen gesund zurück bin vielleicht . . . ’ Ichsage: ‘Es könnte mir im Nebensatz einfallen, Ihr Visum einfach

verfallen zu lassen.’‘Erpressung!’ nennt er das, ‘Autorenhochmut!’

(R , 121)

Such banter between the pre-apocalypse characters and their author notonly provides moments of humour; more importantly, it establishes thenarrator as clearly in control of his text and provides a striking contrast tothe post-apocalypse sections of the work. At repeated intervals throughoutthe text the narrator conspicuously controls his characters: Oskar travelsto Poland on a Friday ‘weil ich so will’ (R , 141), while of the five seafar-ing women the narrator comments, ‘nur meine Willkür hat sie auf Deck[. . .] versammelt’ (R , 213). Even at the moment of the nuclear explosion,arguably part of the rat’s narrative, the narrator claims complete controlover his own characters: ‘ausgespart durch meinen Willen, den ich gegendie Rättin und ihr Diktat setze, bleiben die beiden [Oskar and AnnaKoljaiczek] übrig’ (R , 317). Indeed, at this moment of high tension whenthe narrator himself is about to be propelled off the earth, it would seemthat he compensates for his imminent death by lording it over his mostfamous textual creation, Oskar Matzerath: ‘weg ist er, und ich bin ihn los.Nie wieder soll er. Keine Einsprüche seinerseits mehr’ (R , 319).

The assertiveness that shines through at such instances is significantwhen evaluating the narrator’s relationship to the text in which he islocated.15 His exchanges with the rat counter-narrator highlight his own

15 See also Roehm, Polyphonie und Improvisation, for further consideration of the relation-ship between the first-person narrator and competing narrator-characters, esp. ch. 3. Roehmworks out the narrative logic at play behind the relationships differently from me, placingthe idea of a self-conscious text at the heart of his argument rather than the position of theauthor-narrator. This is an interesting complement to the reading I offer.


mental and emotional well-being, with him frequently railing in strongemotional terms against her version of his fate. Set in such a context, thepre-apocalypse narrative strands appear psychologically motivated, as thenarrator presents them as his counter-narrative that specifically reassertsexisting time and place. When in the first poem of the work the narrator,now a poetic voice, speaks of ‘was ich erzählen will, / weil ich durch Wörterdas Ende aufschieben möchte’ (R , 16), then this would seem to be a clearindication of how the pre-apocalypse narrative strands that follow are tobe understood. Der Butt shows a narrator as author slowly working hisway through four thousand years of history in an attempt to avert or avoidthe reality of his writing present, while in Kopfgeburten the narrator keepsthe airplane circling so as to allow himself time to reach a decision about theprojected future of his characters.16 Here, too, the reader is presented withan author-narrator holding up present narrative time, this time in order toavoid the onset of the future and the beginning of the rat’s horrible sci-fitale that entails his own demise. This psychological motivation could betermed ‘schreiben gegen die verstreichende Zeit’, with quite a different andmuch more personal implication than the original political understandingof the phrase in the late 1960s. Certainly, the rat herself reacts to his variousnarratives as if they are to be understood as the expression of a particu-lar psychosis: ‘Ist ja gut. Mach nur weiter. Träume, Freundchen, was dirnoch einfällt, Frauen, so viele dir guttun, Malskatsche Gotik, deines HerrnMatzerath Golddukaten. Wir mögen deine Ausflüchte. Unser Wissen mußdich nicht kümmern’ (R , 157). The clearly patronizing tone underscoresthe narrator’s vulnerability and ultimate inability to face up to the personalchallenge of the rat’s future narrative as instead he spinelessly holes himselfup as author in his own.

If the narrator, reacting to the rat’s shocking mutation into narrator ofan unpleasant future, is therefore always under the sway of her terrifyingnarrative, then it is hardly surprising to note that the pre-apocalypse nar-rative strands, however different they may superficially appear, all in factrevolve around one major idea: the demise of the self. The various retellingsof the tale of the children of Hamlin, for example, all build up to themoment when the children realize that they are trapped inside the cavenever to escape, while the fairytale characters spend the entire time trying toavert the decay of the forests, which signals the end of their own existence.Similarly, both the ‘Neue Ilsebill’ and Oskar’s visit to his grandmother aresteered towards the ‘großer Knall’ which will make all characters involved

16 See K , 43.


confront their own inevitable demise. This is particularly emphasized in thecase of Anna Koljaiczek’s birthday party, as Oskar’s video replays the finalmoments of their lives just before the nuclear explosion. These characters,like the narrator himself, have their dying hours stretched by narrative time:they are sucked into a video time-loop which suspends the passage of time(they are literally prevented from progressing to other activities as they sitdown to watch it) and, through tortuous reconstruction of the apparentlyinsignificant activities engaged in during the day, replays the hours in which,as it turns out, death approaches.

All the above examples emphasize how the characters are forced toconfront their own end. The narrative strands in which they exist mayconsequently be understood as shot through with the narrator’s own par-ticular psychosis, triggered by the rat. However, the final narrative strand,that of Malskat and ‘die falschen Fuffziger’, differs in a number of ways.It is narrated at Oskar’s request. Indeed, initially the narrator resorts tointroducing it in order to get him to partake in the text in the first place, andOskar continues to show an especial interest in the historical account rightthrough to the end of the work, where he is reported to have abandoned thefilm on the Brothers Grimm in favour of Malskat’s story. This story, unlikethe others, is firmly rooted in the recent historical past as experienced byboth the narrator and Oskar. Furthermore, where all other narrative strandsinevitably end with the characters helplessly and unexpectedly facing theirown death, in this instance Malskat survives as a figure living in lonely butapparently untouchable isolation on one of the Baltic islands. The anom-alous nature of this continued existence is highlighted by Oskar’s visit to theisland shortly before his defiant sixtieth birthday, a date which, accordingto the rat’s narrative, he should never live to see. For Oskar, Malskat’s talenot only survives into the apocalypse-denying narrative present, it is alsoof direct significance for the future which he asserts is still worth fightingfor; he is ‘überzeugt, daß man den Schlüssel für unsere Zukunft unter denAblagerungen der fünfziger Jahre suchen müsse’ (R , 476). This is at leastin part due to the position the artist represents in relation to the demise ofthe self. Not only does he covertly remove the final traces of the biblicalcharacters in the frescoes in order to forge a pseudo-past, echoing thegeneral dishonesty of a decade that is in Grass’s fiction generally presented asobsessed with keeping up appearances, he also then turns himself in to theauthorities, boldly facing up to his ‘inauthentic’ artistic identity in a mannerthat is entirely at odds with the decade he apparently represents. The wayin which Malskat simultaneously exploits and condemns the superficialityof his decade takes on an exemplary role. This surely appeals to the Oskar


from Die Blechtrommel who presented his own character as someone whosubverts the social system only to turn himself in and thereby physically andmentally remove himself to the lunatic asylum of his present-day narrative.Where the characters in all the other narrative strands of Die Rättin areeither unaware of their end until they are faced with its imminent approachor resist its onset vigorously, Malskat represents a position of knowingself-demise. He is an artist who removes first existential authenticity fromothers and then his own identity from the rest of the world; it is clearthat this is of direct relevance to both Oskar and the narrator as theycontemplate how their own artistic roles are conditioned by the time andspace represented within the text. Both are struggling, sometimes againsteach other, sometimes against the rat, for a similar degree of sovereignty.

I have described the position occupied by the narrator in both the post-and pre-apocalypse parts of the work in some detail because it is thefundamental impossibility of these two mutually exclusive locations withinthe one present-tense text that determines not only the work’s complexitybut also the radical development in Grass’s conception and presentation ofthe author figure. Locating oneself as both a dreamer still ‘in der Natur’and the dreamed just fallen ‘aus der Natur’ entails some serious division ofself into roles that can be equated with those of author, text, and reader.As pre-apocalypse dreamer, the narrator clearly retains the role of authorwithin his text; once the rat’s narrative takes over, however, he becomesboth the subject of narration (the text, as his story is related) and the readerwho is forced to listen to the rat counter-narrator. While these multiplenarrative positions may appear overly complex, they in fact merely representan inversion of a genre known only too well to readers of both generalliterature and Günter Grass’s works in particular: that of autobiography.The strictest form of autobiography, the diary, entails an author narratinghis past self (which becomes the text) to his present self (thereby alsothe reader). Here, we are faced with an author being confronted with afuture vision of himself, one that entails not re-creation on the part of thepresent narrator as in autobiography, but rather destruction as he envisageshis removal from his own story. Because it is impossible consciously toexperience one’s own end, it is the unconscious, dictated to by the rat, thattakes over, dispenses with authorial control and thereby pushes the narratorinto the position of textual object and reader of his own fate. Death ofthe autobiographical subject is equated with death of the author figure.The paradox of simultaneously locating the self both inside and outsidethe text and time thus underscores the impossibility of writing your own


end, something which is inevitable if, instead of writing your autobiographyretrospectively, you attempt, like Oskar’s ‘Post-Futurum’ video productions,to project it forwards into the future. The result of this is that the generalthematic fear that Die Rättin could be said to be investigating—impendingecological disaster—is rendered acute through the personal plight of thenarrator as he battles for existence within the text. In this latest twist on self-presentation, facing up to the inevitable temporal and spatial limitationsof the authorial self is paradoxically equated with writing the self (itselfinherently creative) as an act of enforced self-destruction: the author’s futuredeath overrides his present control of the text. It is this existential plight thatdrives the narrative forward and ultimately endows the work with a senseof philosophical depth and urgency.

CONCLUSION

In both works, the relationship between author and narrator is deliberatelycomplex. This is not least because Grass on both occasions uses the worksto explore the limits of the author figure and takes the narrator as his primeexperimental object. Placing a largely non-fictional self-projection into ahighly fictional scenario, he is able to experiment with the textual limitsof authorship in a way that would not be possible in any predominantlyautobiographical mode. This is the kind of freedom to which he wasreferring when linking the oscillating overlap and divergence of author andnarrator in Der Butt and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. While the wayin which the Tagebuch and its later Kopfgeburten counterpart deal with theauthor-narrator relationship may be read as a precursor to the innovationsof Der Butt and Die Rättin, the greater fictional content of these latterworks sees Grass’s exploration of a particularly textual kind of authorshiptaken to another level. Here, the narrator represents authorship against theodds, struggling to retain his position within the text and at the same timeimplicitly defining the authorial role as the only way in which he might beable to ensure his survival.

Given that this struggle is triggered by two issues that were highly topicalin the 1970s and 1980s—the rise of feminism and the threat of a nuclearholocaust—the male narrator’s attempts to hide as author within his text(Der Butt) or narrative strands (Die Rättin) also take on a political signif-icance. Unlike the predominantly self-reflexive mode of Aus dem Tagebucheiner Schnecke and Kopfgeburten, which allows the author to take a breakfrom politics and reflect on the literary process and his role within it, here


his far more problematic exploration of authorship may be understood as adirect response to the times in which he lives. Narrative control is invokedin an effort to compensate a loss of influence in the socio-political sphere,and the texts are consequently instrumentalized to try to salvage the author’ssense of self. Politics impinges in an increasingly threatening manner on thesphere of literature. Der Butt explicitly shows an author on the run withinhis own narrative, desperately trying to maintain his status in the literaryrealm precisely because his socio-political position has lost authority. ByDie Rättin, political erosion of the literary sphere is complete: the author’sposition in the text implodes along with his position in the world—andindeed the whole world itself.

The image of authorship that arises from Der Butt and Die Rättin isconsequently hardly heroic. In fact, it highlights the egotism that underliesthe act of asserting authorship, and this in itself can be understood asauthorial comment (although not necessarily apology or condemnation)on the part of Grass. While the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten both showeda certain unquestioned belief in the author’s centrality to his text as first-person narrator, from Die Rättin onwards this belief can no longer beupheld. Instead, as will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, the author’s desireto be the central creative power in his text is constantly destroyed by the textitself. From the late 1980s onwards, a dominant narrative position as first-person narrator is, in Grass’s own eyes, no longer tenable without some kindof qualification, and it is with this new decree in mind that the author mustwork.

5‘Mich [. . .] in Variationen [. . .]

erzählen’ II: Reconstructing the Authorin Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert

INTRODUCTION

For almost as long as Grass has been in the public eye, he has insisted thatthere is more to his creative abilities than simply literary talent. Displaysof sculptures, drawings, watercolours, and etchings frequently accompanyeach new literary work, and he has always stressed the importance of thesealternative artistic disciplines for helping him conceptualize and develop hisliterary ideas.1 Furthermore, he has often described the role that paintingand sculpting can play upon completion of a particular literary project,claiming that he turns to non-literary art forms as a kind of private retreatto help take stock of the past years’ work and to avoid falling into theinfamous hole suffered by many writers when a project has come to anend: ‘Etwas ist weg, ein Loch entsteht; und ich bin in der glücklichenLage, dieses Loch mit einer anderen Disziplin ausfüllen zu können’, heexplained to Jürgen Wertheimer in interview in 1999.2 In addition, how-ever, one increasingly suspects that exulting in further creative talents hasbeen at least as important in helping the author to shrug off what areoften very personalized media attacks: by temporarily redefining himselfas a painter or sculptor, Grass has found a way of distancing himselffrom his difficult public authorial image. He describes in Fünf Jahrzehnte(2001), for example, how in the wake of the Ein weites Feld controversy herediscovered his watercolours and set off to escape the literary scene: ‘Ich

1 See for example Günter Grass, Fünf Jahrzehnte: Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull(Göttingen: Welttag, 2001).

2 Interview with Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmen derTübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Günter Grass, Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung &Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999), 45.

Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert 123

aquarellierte glattstämmige Buchen, ohne nach den Ansprüchen gegenwär-tiger Kunsterwartung zu fragen, und erlebte mich, den jeweils individuellauftretenden Bäumen gegenüber, annähernd glücklich, weil allen auf Liter-atur abonnierten Kopfgeldjägern zumindest zeitweilig entkommen.’3 Twoworks immediately followed this period of retreat, Fundsachen für Nichtleserin 1997, and Mein Jahrhundert in 1999, and both overtly mixed artisticdisciplines. There are predecessors for these pieces, both of which likewisefollowed periods of high public exposure: Mariazuehren (1973) followedthe intensive political campaigning of the late 1960s and early 1970s, whileZunge zeigen (1988) was the first piece published after Die Rättin’s negativereception in the mid-1980s. Mariazuehren, a little-known collaborativework, first took illustrated poetry to another level with its insertion of linesfrom the title poem into photographs of Grass shot by Maria Rama and full-page spreads of his artistic work arranged by P. J. Wilhelm. Zunge zeigen(1988) very overtly brings prose, pictures, and poetry into dialogue withone another.4 Given that these works draw on different artistic disciplinesin the same manner as a work of art may avail itself of numerous differentmaterials, the term ‘mixed-media’ seems a fitting label for this new genre.

This chapter looks at how this mixing of disciplines has accompanieda further change in Grass’s understanding of authorship, with particularreference to Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert. Given that both worksin their full-scale picture-book versions are physically very imposing, on asuperficial level at least Grass’s recent tendency to present his creative abili-ties not just in black type but also colour brushstrokes has seen him ratherself-consciously expanding the remit of the authorial role. Now the authorexists in image as well as word, and in large format as well as small (thepicture-book and text-only versions of Mein Jahrhundert, for example). Thisbrings to the idea of ‘variations on the self ’ a new dimension, as the dualartistic disciplines introduce a new kind of dialogue to the author’s text thatgoes beyond the construction of an introspective, ‘encapsulated’ narrativeself of his earlier autofictional pieces. This certainly is how Grass himselfcharacterizes the relationship when, referring to Zunge zeigen, he impliesthat the way in which the work provides an insight into recent events of hislife is heightened by the interplay between the two different media:

3 Grass, Fünf Jahrzehnte, 114.4 One could argue that Totes Holz (1990) also experiments with a mixed-media form.

However, I do not consider it to be a proper work of literature. Rather, it is a glorified piece ofecological campaigning. Documentation of the publishing controversy surrounding Ein weitesFeld can be found in Oskar Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty: ‘Ein weites Feld’ von Günter Grass imSpiegel der Kritik (Göttingen: Steidl, 1996).

124 Reconstructing the Author: Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert

Die Wörter—verfügbare und nicht vorhandene—gehörten dem Tagebuch alsMöglichkeit an, sich selbst in extrem veränderter Lebenssituation zu begreifen, daseigene Unverständnis aufzuschreiben und notfalls Distanz, Ausflucht zu suchen. Oftgenug spielten sich Skizzen- und Tagebuch als vom Autor unabhängige Dialogpart-ner auf, die einander ins zu vage Wort fielen, dem Bild, weil es vorschnell Bildwurde, widersprachen.5

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

ZUNGE ZEIGEN

Authorial abandon in the Far East

In the introduction to Chapter 3, I discussed how Grass linked the ideasof self-confrontation and self-discovery with the autofictional mode. Dis-cussing Zunge zeigen, Grass has similarly linked compositional elements tohis own need for a diary form:

Ich führte—was mir zuletzt im Schneckenjahr ’69 notwendig gewesen war—Tagebuch, diesmal von Zeichnungen durchsetzt, die vom bengalischen Alltagerzählen. Und im fortwährend geführten Tagebuch entstand, mit Löchern

5 Günter Grass, foreword to the Skizzenbuch (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989), [n.p.]. TheSkizzenbuch, published shortly after Zunge zeigen, consists of a brief three-page descriptionof Grass’s time in Calcutta and the ensuing development of his artistic project Zunge zeigen,followed by simple sketches completed on site in India. Unlike the pictures published in Zungezeigen, there is no written element (apart from the artist’s signature) in these sketches.


dazwischen, in erster Fassung das zwölfteilige Stadtgedicht ‘Zunge zeigen’, daseinem Buch den Titel gegeben hat, in dem sich, zwischen einem knapp gehaltenenProsablock und der Schlußfassung des in Calcutta konzipierten Gedichtes, doppel-seitige, von Schrift durchsetzte Zeichnungen reihen, die aus den Skizzen entwickeltwurden.6

The way in which Grass renders the genesis of his text accords the worka strong level of textual autonomy. All the verbs pertaining to the text’sgenesis are either attributed directly to the various elements of the text orindirectly through the use of the passive. The effect of this is twofold: itsidelines the impact of the author on his text, and it draws attention tohow the various elements of the text work together to create some sort ofmeaningful whole. The idea, expressed particularly well in the metaphorof the ‘Dialogpartner’ quoted earlier, is eminently reminiscent of Hegel’sdialectic: an argument that moves forward, through objection and recastingin an eternal dialectic. The way in which this process is described, however,would appear to have the text taking over the authorial role. The idea thatGrass ‘needs’ to write such a text suggests aligning autobiographical writingwith a conscious move away from the authorial self and its conventionaltextual responsibilities. The self-confrontation that Grass described in rela-tion to the Tagebuch and Kopfgeburten has here given way to the evasive playof textual substitution. Following on from Die Rättin, it would appear thatGrass’s ruminations on authorship within fiction now see him re-conceivingthe autobiographical mode too as a means with which to investigate theauthor’s loss of textual centrality and, with this, political significance.

The way in which the creative process is overtly thematized in theprose section supports this interpretation. The work opens with the ideaof abandoning the famous authorial self. Grass’s autobiographical narrator,who is first a straightforward first-person prose narrator, then an artist, andfinally a poetic voice, initially describes his journey to India as an attemptto abandon German society and his own part in this society:

Wovon ich wegfliege: [. . .] weg vom Gequatsche, von den Verlautbarungen weg,raus aus der Ausgewogenheit, den Befindlichkeiten, den ellenbogenspitzen Selb-stverwirklichungsspielen, Tausende Kilometer weit weg vom subtilen Flachsinneinst linker, jetzt nur noch smarter Feuilletonisten, und weg, weg von mir als Teiloder Gegenstand dieser Öffentlichkeit. (Zz, 17)

It is interesting to note that in the original Calcutta diary in the Berlin Grassarchive, Grass expresses a very similar idea, using the same phrase, ‘weg

6 Quoted here from Grass, Fünf Jahrzehnte, 90–1, but originally published in GünterGrass, Vier Jahrzehnte, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Steidl, 1991).


von mir als Teil oder Gegenstand dieser Öffentlichkeit’, but follows itwith a rather cynical comment: ‘Natürlich weiß ich, daß mich in Indiennichts anderes erwartet (Der Film [on the plane], zeigt sich, ist eineindische Spielart von “Schwarzwaldklinik”). Also verschiedene Spielartendes gleichen Irrsinns bei extrem anderem Klima.’7 In the later publishedversion the rather more naive narrator does not keep his feet so firmlyon the ground. Abandoning his Western public persona is instead clearlylinked to the notion of finding or rediscovering a creative one in the East,just as, before him, Harm and Dörte undertook a similar journey in thehope of unearthing their true stance on the issue of procreation. As thetext progresses, the emergence of a creative self is chronicled with evidentsatisfaction. The time spent drawing and writing poetry is noted, and itsimplication is directly stated where the narrator’s positive reaction to hissurroundings is contrasted, through a distancing use of the third-person,with the rather more negative one of his wife: ‘Er zeichnet, schreibt auf; siezählt die Tage lautlos. [. . .] Er lebt ein; sie hält durch’ (Zz, 60). As the endof the prose section approaches, the narrator clearly feels entirely at homein his Eastern surroundings. This is symbolically presented in his suddendesire to disappear in the crowds of the Bara-Bazar area after his status as(Western) writer has caused him unexpectedly to be refused entry to Burma:‘ich [hatte plötzlich Lust], in jenem blasenwerfenden menschlichen Brei,der gegen Mittag immer dickflüssiger einkocht, unterzutauchen, verrührtzu werden, verlorenzugehen’ (Zz, 90). The movement throughout the prosesection is thus towards assimilation of the new environment, as the narra-tor’s experiences of the new milieu lead to artistic inspiration and creativeoutput, and this in turn leads to loss of the original distance to the Indiansurroundings.8

In contradistinction to Harm and Dörte, the narrator actively beginsto seek out the experience of being overwhelmed by a foreign culture assomething positive. Where the Peters are left undecided and dumbstruckat the end of Kopfgeburten by the foreign children’s indirect questioning oftheir ability to procreate, here the challenge of appropriating the foreigninto the narrator’s own creative output leads to a rediscovery of his innatecreative self, as expressed in his desire to stay on in India:

7 SAdK, Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv, no.394, 2.8 For a description of the gradual loss of distance to the new surroundings see Sigrid Mayer,

‘Günter Grass in Calcutta: Der intertextuelle Diskurs in Zunge zeigen’, in Gerd Labroisseand Dick van Stekelenburg, Günter Grass: Ein europäischer Autor?, Amsterdamer Beiträge zurneueren Germanistik, 35 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 245–66.


Jetzt hierbleiben. Geborstenes Pflaster porträtieren. Dicht herangehen an Slumhüt-ten, Materialien notieren. Wie Fremdes vertraut wird und fremd bleibt. Das Kun-stgeschwätz vergessen. Mit breitem Pinsel, mit dünn auszeichnender Feder, mitbröckelnder Kohle Verfall verdichten. Unsere verrückte schwarze Mutter, wie sie gibtund nimmt. Ein Pulk Hocker—ein Pulk Krähen. Geköpfte, aufgehackte, gehäufteKokusnüsse. Noch einmal von vorn beginnen: den Müll umschichten. (Zz, 103)

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

Artistic construction: the role of the pictures

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


seems noteworthy.9 Instead of focusing directly on himself as artist, theapparently self-effacing author employs one of two basic tactics: either thepictures are arranged so that the viewer’s gaze is channelled into a particularpoint in the picture (e.g. Zz, 119, 127, 161, 177, etc.), or there is a figurewithin the picture that reflects the viewer’s gaze back out onto him or herself(e.g. Kali in Zz, 111, 117, the man in Zz, 133, the cows in Zz, 151, etc.).This use of perspective is striking, because, in as much as the first viewer ofthe picture is the artist himself, alternating between the two constructionsallows Grass to combine the two opposing positions (the artist sees himselfseeing), without ever actually including an image of this figure in thepicture. Either the perspective takes the gaze away from the artist onto theimages he has recorded as they meet at a point to which his eyes are drawn,or it rebounds upon the artist and makes him into a sort of absent presencewithin the picture. In both cases he is the perceiving consciousness behindthe picture, and thus the picture points out from itself to him. The artist’sstandpoint forms a sort of unidentifiable gap within the pictures.

While issues of perspective may be applied to any art criticism, theseparticular drawings include one element that is rare in conventional artand which strengthens my argument here: the interface between word andimage. The way in which the two disciplines are brought into contact withone another in Zunge zeigen contrasts in both style and effect with bothof the other places where Grass’s Calcutta sketches can be seen. In theSkizzenbuch, a collection of Grass’s sketches from India are reproduced withno written element beyond the artist’s signature, with the result that theyappear much less crafted and complete. In the original diary that Grasstook with him to Calcutta, on the other hand, the pictures are given theirown space on the page, but in such a manner that the images and the textflow into one another very naturally—unlike the rigid genre divisions ofthe published version, where the main body of text is entirely blocked offfrom the pictorial representations.10 Within the pictorial section of thepublished text, however, all the drawings are accompanied by fragmentsof handwritten text, to the point where this writing is frequently a keycompositional element within the picture. The visual effect of the writing

9 Grass’s self-portraits can be found in several of his collections of graphic works, notablyGünter Grass, In Kupfer, auf Stein (Göttingen: Steidl, 1986), Günter Grass, Ohne die Feder zuwechseln: Zeichnungen, Druckgraphiken, Aquarelle, Skulpturen, (Göttingen, Steidl, 1997), andGünter Grass, Ausstellung anläßlich des 60. Geburtstages von Günter Grass, Hundert Zeichnun-gen: 1955 bis 1987: Katalog der Kunsthalle zu Kiel der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, ed. JensChristian Jensen (Kiel, Kunsthalle zu Kiel und Schleswig-Holsteiner Kunstverein, 1987).



on Zz, 121, for example, is to sketch in the sense of scattered rubbish andfilth strewn across the pavement and almost literally ‘bracket off ’ the spacearound the body. Frequently the writing forms part of the sky, creating theeffect of clouds (or smog) hanging over the scene below (e.g. Zz, 117, 127,131, 177), or is ‘strewn’ along the ground, like litter or clutter (Zz, 145, 149,155, 159, 167, 177, 199). Some pictures almost seem to be entirely writtenover by text (e.g. Zz, 141, 151, 179, 205), while in others the images appearto emerge from the flow of text around them (e.g. Zz, 119, 137). Theeffect of this interface is to break down any clear-cut distinction betweenpictorial and written representation. The immediate impression is one ofblack ink on a white page, with the cumulative effect of stark contrasts andseemingly chaotic lines conveying a certain impression of India. It is largelyimmaterial whether the lines are forming words or pictures, and sometimesthe writing is in any case largely illegible. One’s natural impulse to readthe words from left to right across the page is frustrated, and frequentlyit is easier for the viewer to rest his or her eyes on the scenes of povertyrather than the words that describe them, allowing these words simply toform part of the overall effect. In some cases it is not even clear whetherwe are looking at bits of rubbish or bits of words (e.g. Zz, 153, 197).In this sense, the dense, ‘scribbled style’ of the pictures contrasts starklywith the neat block of prose text that precedes it. Moving into the pictorialsection of the work is rather like unpicking the careful type of the ‘diary’:the pictures highlight how the preceding section is carefully constructedand cleaned of all unwanted litter or clutter. This certainly undermines anynotion of the prose text consisting of thoughts scribbled down in real time.Interestingly, the short ‘epilogue’ of pictures after the poem (also a neatblock of careful type) begins with four straw brooms sweeping away scrapsof words and letters (Zz, 233), something that might refer directly back toGrass’s comments on the advantages of combining the two disciplines: thepictures are sweeping away the ‘vague’ words that do not properly belong inthe finished work. The disciplines within the work are thus shown activelytaking on an authorial role with regard to stylistic unity.

Furthermore, the specific way word and image are combined leads to anunderstanding of the author himself as a product of his work. Even as thewords of his diary prose are broken down and replaced or succeeded bypictures, the visual object produced builds up the notion of a reflecting,reasoning human consciousness at work. This acts in the first instance likea kind of imprint left by the author on the forms which have gone on tobecome his legacy. The clear-cut Western literary standpoint establishedin the prose section has been removed, along with all representations of,


or direct references to, the autobiographical narrator. Replacing it is anunidentified human consciousness made tangible by the play between wordand image on the page (although one may argue that it is clearly a well-educated one whose pen can turn itself to either drawing or writing andis fluent in the German language).11 In effect, the picture section ‘reads’like someone’s remembering mind, with scraps of commentary and phrasesaccompanying particular lingering imagery, like a diary or photo-album.The viewer of this section thus has the impression of entering into theauthor’s mind either before the process of rationalization and order—whichis then evident in the neatly typed-up and chronologically ordered prosesection—or into a rather different kind of authorial mind. The insistencewith which the words are penned into the pictures, however, makes itdifficult simply to cast this persona as an artistic as opposed to literaryself, for the words constantly echo the position taken up by the narra-tor in the preceding section. This makes of the apparent realist diary amuch more ordered, artistic product than one may originally suspect (avisual effect, incidentally, which is also achieved by the initial move fromthe brief ‘prologue’ of pictures into the main body of the prose section).Furthermore, reading the prose diary section not as a limpid chronicleof the time spent in India but rather as a consciously constructed textnecessarily weakens the sense of authenticity generally associated with theautobiographical diary form. Effectively, the pictures, and later again thepoem, emphasize the artificiality of the prose section in which the narratoris of necessity constructed in order to communicate the verbal side of theauthor. Chronicling the emergence of a creative self thereby becomes arather artificial sort of self-discovery, with the text constructed by the authorin such a manner as to produce this apparently Ur-creative self in his wake.

The result of the interplay between the two disciplines, writing anddrawing, is not so much to multiply the author’s positions within thework and thereby strengthen his hold over his text as to achieve the exactopposite: the creative persona behind the work is sidelined as the play of thetext takes over his authorial role. Not only do the different disciplines holdone another in check, as Grass described earlier; they also directly conditionthe way in which the author exists within his work. What this means isthat within Zunge zeigen there is a double sense of distancing from theauthorial self: the famous public author is apparently abandoned early on

11 See Thomas W. Kniesche, ‘ “Calcutta” oder Die Dialektik der Kolonialisierung’, inSchriftsteller und ‘Dritte Welt’: Studien zum postkolonialen Blick, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler(Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998), 263–90, for an interesting discussion of Grass’s standpointin terms of postcolonial theory.


in the work in order to allow the innate creative artist to gain expression ina new and challenging cultural environment. But this creative artist himselfis revealed by the various different media through which he is expressedto be a construct of each specific creative discipline, and in this sense is asmuch their product as producer. This happens despite the fact that eachparticular discipline—the prose, pictures, or poem—is constructed by anauthor or artist who predates their existence, and it corresponds to thetruth of the autofictional text as suggested in my reading of the Tagebuchand Kopfgeburten: representing the authorial self in literature amounts tosuspending it within textual considerations; authorship is re-presented bythe text.

However, if the author’s existential dependence on his own literature isalready implicit in Grass’s earlier works, the twist on this underlying truth ofliterary self-presentation here is the way in which Grass carries on to makeit thematically explicit throughout the work. The paradox of a creator whois both created and destroyed within his own work is personified directlyin Zunge zeigen through the Hindu goddess Kali. Kali is the goddess ofdestruction in Hindu culture, yet, like many Hindu gods and goddesses,she is also linked to the binary opposite of this—creation—through herrelation to the supreme goddess, Sakti. This understanding of the gods andgoddesses is itself linked to the Hindu doctrine of the atman-brahman,a sort of life force which is the self of all things and is eternally presentthrough a cycle of creation, preservation, transformation, and reabsorption,or, put another way, a cycle of life, death, and rebirth in which creationand destruction are inextricably linked. That the discovery of a creativeself is here automatically linked to the dual symbolism of Kali is evidentfrom the prose section onwards, where, as already quoted, the narrator refersto ‘unsere verrückte schwarze Mutter, wie sie gibt und nimmt’ (Zz, 103).However, while Kali is certainly referred to throughout both the prose textand the pictures, it is not really until the poem that the importance of herparadoxical position becomes evident.

Creation and destruction as both structure and theme

Positioned after the prose text and the pictures, the poem carries on themovement away from the Western enlightened self supposedly left behindby the narrator in Germany. Notions of disappearance and being over-whelmed, which I have already mentioned in relation to the first two partsof the work, gain expression in the first section of the poem when the crushon the commuter train is described: ‘Einander / abhanden gekommen,


greifen wir über uns / und ins Leere’ (Zz, 210). Where the prose and thepictures first and foremost record the details of everyday experience withsome reference to the emotions it stirs up, the poem makes the idea ofbeing (willingly) overwhelmed by a foreign culture into its main theme.The early sections emphasize the poet’s impotence when faced with scenesof poverty. In the following example, the poetic voice even splits into twoso that the poet can distance himself from his evidently misguided Westernrational self:

Was suchst du?Dich hier—woanders verloren—zu finden,hieße dich aufzurufen, als Bündeldazwischengelegt: dir hat esdie Sprache verschlagen.

Und brabbelst dennoch: Vom Nutzender Landreform, wenn sie nur käme.Läßt dir (wie Sündennachlaß) mehr Wasserhähneund Rikschalizenzen, Wörter aufschwatzenwie Slumsanierung und Trockenmilch.

(Zz, 212–13)

Linguistic impotence, symbolized here through the lyric subject’s initialspeechlessness (‘dir hat es die Sprache verschlagen’), followed by ‘brabbeln’and then ‘Wörter aufschwatzen’, becomes a recurrent theme in the latersections. In section 10, language is accused of having tricked the poetinto incorrect representation of a young boy, as his attempts to recreatethe child resulted in destruction of his proper character: ‘später beim Teetrieb die Sprache / Verrat, mißriet mir der Knabe zum schrecklichen Engel’(Zz, 227), while in the ensuing section language is presented as particularlyout of place in the context of the Indian cycle of life and death—funeralplatitudes are ‘nicht im Handel’, for they count for nothing against the factof death: ‘die Toten hier / sind besonders tot’ (Zz, 228). Kali, on the otherhand, represents not only death and destruction, but also an answer to itssupposed finality. In section 9, the real floods that partly submerged thecity during the poet’s visit (also described in the prose section) are conflatedwith a description of India’s history of violence and famine still blockingthe drains of the city today. Of all resurgent historical figures, the mytho-logical Kali is placed at the head of history: ‘Kali endlich, die unsere Zeitmißt: / Jetztzeit Letztzeit . . . ’ (Zz, 225). This use of the possessive ‘unsere’ is,as in the prose section (‘unsere verrückte schwarze Mutter’), significant, asit indicates the extent to which the poet is associating with Eastern culture.


The description of her in charge of time indicates an almost religioussubmission to her authority, and it is in this respect that she is associated notonly with a cyclical type of violent (mortal) history (‘Jetztzeit’)—a feature ofmany of Grass’s works—but with a general immortal ability to overwhelm(‘Letztzeit’).12 In this sense, she creates the past and ensures its perpetuationthroughout the mortal human generations, as well as standing for the utterdestruction of civilization. Her role as immortal goddess is to perpetuatethe mortal universe by tactically destroying it.

Certainly this would seem to be the poet’s motivation for invoking herin the final section of his poem. As the closing lines of section 11 indicate,he demands to be overwhelmed by a new social order: ‘käme doch Zornauf / und hielte an’ (Zz, 229), a demand that seems to be his response to thepoverty and hardship that the narrator has been recording throughout thework as a whole. The introduction of Kali in the third strophe of section12 deliberately echoes this reference to anger: ‘Geduld am Ende, außer sichWut’ (Zz, 230), and the poet speaks in almost mystical terms of the notionof being finally overwhelmed when he states, ‘Ich sah / Calcutta über unskommen’ (Zz, 231). It is now that Kali emerges, in one swift strophe, andto all intents and purposes terminates the poem:

In Mundhöhlen ungezählt sah ichder schwarzen Kali lackierte Zungerot flattern. Hörte sie schmatzen: Ich,ungezählt ich, aus allen Gullysund abgesoffenen Kellern, überdie Gleise: freigesetzt, sichelscharf ich.Zunge zeigen: ich bin.Ich trete über die Ufer.Ich hebe die Grenze auf.Ich macheein Ende.

(Zz, 231)

The construction of this particular strophe, however, intriguingly managesto conflate the poet with the goddess of destruction even as he is in theprocess of being destroyed (subsequently recorded as, ‘da vergingen wir (duund ich)’, Zz, 231). The pronoun ‘ich’ slips from the poet onto Kali asthe sound of her voice takes over. It is then repeated almost compulsivelythroughout the strophe, as Kali becomes the ‘I’ of the poem. The result

12 See also Kniesche ‘ “Calcutta” oder die Dialektik der Kolonialisierung’, 276 for a discus-sion of the significance of the terms ‘Jetztzeit’ and ‘Letztzeit’.


of this for the reader or listener is that the poet becomes Kali even as he isoverwhelmed by her. It was his idea to create the destruction of Calcuttawithin his poem, and thus he takes on the voice of Kali in order to doso. Moving into her persona, he imbues himself with immortality and isconsequently able to report on his own death as authorial subject.

This is an intriguing end to a work that deals with the search for creativeinspiration through abandonment of the public Western self. While thedifferent elements of the work all individually testify to a unifying, all-roundauthor, they also work collectively to destroy any sense of integrity or pre-existence to which this authorial self may try to lay claim. Rather, like theHindu doctrine of the atman-brahman, the self of the work is continuouslyreborn within each of its different sections, and a necessary and inherentpart of this self ’s rebirth is its own destruction. Where in the Tagebuch andKopfgeburten the author was clearly in control of his various narrative egos,here the text has displaced him. It is as if Grass has drawn his lessons fromDie Rättin: the author must of necessity hand over the authorial role to histext if he is to continue to exist in any sort of recognizable form within hisown literature.

MEIN JAHRHUNDERT

‘[Sich] aufspalten können in die verschiedensten Perspektiven’:the relationship between author and narrator

The idea that creation and destruction represent two fundamental aspects ofthe creative process is also born out in Grass’s later work Mein Jahrhundert(1999). The image of the century that Grass presents in this text is oneof repeated war and destruction, as is emphasized in both the opening andclosing years of the narrative. In order to convey this picture, however, Grasscreates the voices of purportedly ordinary people, the vast majority of whomare born into the narrative for the single year that they narrate. As the taleof destruction unfolds a multitude of voices is brought to life by the text,and the overall work is as much a celebration of these individual voices as itis a solemn monument to the ravages of war.

This dual sense of creation and destruction is also borne out in thework’s representation of authorship. Speaking on his decision to employmultiple narrators in Mein Jahrhundert, Grass explains that he had orig-inally attempted to construct the book with an old woman as its solenarrator, but rejected this strategy for the following reason: ‘Die alte Frau


hätte ich nicht ganz und gar aufspalten können in die verschiedenstenPerspektiven. Mit mir konnte ich das schon machen.’13 The major distinc-tion upheld here is one between author and narrator: while a constructednarrator does not tolerate being ‘split’ into further contrasting narrativepositions, the author, as Grass demonstrated amply in Der Butt and DieRättin, can. He believed that in order for this project to work, the ‘mein’of ‘Mein Jahrhundert’ must be understood to relate to Grass, the famouspublic author, and the strong implication is that this is because only a trulycreative force (the author) can endure necessary destruction (the differentvoices within the text usurp his authorial position) and still maintain arecognizable textual position.

This two-pronged approach to authorship entails further paradoxicalsimultaneities. As the titular promise of autobiography is combined withthe narrative tricks of fiction, a chronicle of the author’s life and timesemerges that is as literary as it is historical and as universal as it is specific. Inher overview of reviewers’ reaction to the work, Monika Shafi observes thatit was this very way in which Grass sat on the fence between conventionalgenre categories that saw the text rejected as ‘neither (literary) fish nor(historic) fowl’.14 She sees the main interest in the work residing in sucha defiance of genre: ‘Grass turns his attention from the bios of the selfto the bios of the collective, requiring him to perform multiple balanc-ing acts between fact and fiction, literature and history, autobiographyand biography.’15 In her view, however, the apparently polyvalent text isultimately in thrall only to its author, as she observes ‘it is precisely theneed to perform so many metamorphoses, to change identity and speechso many times, that underscores the author’s command over the text’.16

This then leads into a negative aspect of the text, since an overabundance ofGrass’s own perspective, albeit fictionalized through his various narrators,leads to a clear under-representation of women and foreign migrants. Ina considerably shorter space, Amir Eshel comes to a similar conclusion.For him, the structure of Mein Jahrhundert is metonymic, with each yearneatly encapsulated by one short symbolic event; the whole that keepsall these parts together and gives them moral direction is Grass himself:‘All secondary referents, all the events that took place during each andevery year, are set in relation to the rest through the book’s focal centre,

13 Günter Grass in interview with Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Ich bin ein lebenslustiger Pessimist’,Die Zeit, 1 July 1999, reprinted in Raddatz, Günter Grass: Unerbittliche Freunde, 86–98, 90.

14 Monika Shafi, ‘ “Gezz will ich ma erzählen”: Narrative and History in Günter Grass’sMein Jahrhundert’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 1 (2002), 39–62, 40.

15 Ibid., 45. 16 Ibid., 47.


the narrating “I”.’17 Beyond this assertion, Eshel does not explain howthis central narrative ‘I’ relates either to the individual narratives or theauthor. However, the structural conclusion shared by Shafi and Eshel—that the commanding author-narrator lies at the centre of his text—is itselfinstructive. It implies that the multiple narrative positions are at all timesclearly subordinate to the author of the text. Fritz Raddatz, however, offersa slightly different angle when in his review he considers the exact nature ofthe relationship between work and author. He describes Grass’s project inthe following terms:

[Grass ist] bitter verliebt in seine Rolle der recht habenden, rechthaberischenKassandra; die jedoch ist persona im Sinne von Maske, nicht Persönlichkeit. Setzt erdie Maske auf, wird sein Strich fahl. Läßt er die Masken tanzen, dräuend lugen undlügen, bekommt seine Sprache Rhythmus und Eleganz.18

By emphasizing the theatrical posture in Grass’s fictional writing, Raddatzmakes a clear distinction between Grass’s public image (here equated witha Cassandra role) and his authorial role within the text, which is hiddenbehind many masks. The well-known warning position is just one maskthat the author can wear, and he is defined not through this, or indeed anyother single mask, but rather through his ability to manage the whole lot.Although this argument is not dissimilar to that of Shafi’s, it is differentin one important respect: whereas Shafi deems the various narrative posesultimately to point back to a fixed and commanding author, for Raddatzthese ‘masks’ bring the text as linguistic construct to life. In this respect, theyactually point away from the author as a clear ‘personality’ who infuses themultiple roles with his own ideas and opinions. Instead, they work togetherto help manifest an authorial role on their own terms within the text: it isonly through the play of the masks that the author’s linguistic and stylisticcompetence becomes evident.

Indeed, the elusiveness of the author’s position within Mein Jahrhundertis expressed very early on in the work itself. After the self-importance ofthe title and the physical format of the book that is, in Raddatz’s words, ‘inseiner aufgeblasenen Aufmachung wohl eher etwas zu bedeutsam daherk-ommend’, Grass immediately sets about downsizing his author withinthe text.19 The opening sentences of the first year make this clear: ‘Ich,

17 Amir Eshel, ‘The Past Recaptured? Günter Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert and AlexanderKluge’s Chronik der Gefühle’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 1 (2002), 63–86, 69.

18 Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Über das Buch Mein Jahrhundert’, in Günter Grass: UnerbittlicheFreunde: Ein Kritiker, Ein Autor (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 82–5, 83–4.

19 Ibid., 83.


ausgetauscht gegen mich, bin Jahr für Jahr dabeigewesen. Nicht immer invorderster Linie, denn da alleweil Krieg war, zog sich unsereins gerne in dieEtappe zurück’ (MJ, 6). While the claim to universal presence, reminiscentof the opening to Der Butt, is in itself far from modest, the emphasis onthe supplementarity of the authorial ‘I’, existing now as narrator, not onlycounters this but in fact undermines it. The grand ‘I’ implied by the work’stitle has been substituted by a string of easily replaceable, timorous andlargely forgotten ‘I’s, which take over the narrative. Instead of shaping theevents of history, a claim implied for the author in the work’s title, theyare merely witness to them (‘dabeigewesen’). Their lives follow the timelineof history, and the significance of events is determined not by reference tothe persons narrating them, but rather by history’s own unrelenting marchthrough the years. The author consequently disappears amongst a string oflargely anonymous and undeveloped narrators.

The predominantly negative criticism of the work judges these individualnarratives simply to represent Grass’s views—Ulrich Baron writing in DieWelt, for example, deems Grass to have ‘zunehmend vom Epiker zumKommentator mutiert, dessen Gestalten nur noch Sprachrohre sind’.20

This in itself, however, can be interpreted as a reaction to the lack of anobvious unifying author figure in a text that purports to come from oneclear authorial standpoint (‘Mein Jahrhundert’). As Foucault argues, whenreaders are faced with textual contradictions the author function is generallyinvoked to neutralize them and make an overall significance clear: ‘Theauthor also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in aseries of texts: there must be—at a certain level of his thought or desire,of his consciousness or unconscious—a point where contradictions areresolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organizedaround a fundamental or originating contradiction.’21 The multiple narra-tives of Mein Jahrhundert themselves constitute this series of texts. What Iam suggesting, then, is that all the readings of Mein Jahrhundert to date,from those of newspaper reviewers through to Shafi and Eshel’s academicarticles, have reacted to Grass’s performance of multiple narrative positionsby inflicting their own image of the author back onto a text which otherwiseand in spite of its own promising title threatens to yield no overall unity.

20 Ulrich Baron, Die Welt, 1 September 1999, quoted in Fachdienst Germanistik, 9(1999), 16.

21 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984,ed. Paul Rainbow, trans. Robert Hurley et al., 3 vols (London: Penguin, 2000–2002), II, ed.James D. Faubion, 215.


In fact, as the following will show, Grass repeatedly undermines authorshipthroughout the work.

‘Is bitzeli fossil’: undermining authorship as theme

Throughout the course of the work, authors are the subject of a considerablenumber of the individual narratives. The most memorable of these concernElse Lasker-Schüler (1901), Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque (1914to 1918), the fictitious meeting between Gottfried Benn and Bertolt Brechtin the year of their death (1956), and the East–West Berlin meetings ofthe mid-1970s (1975 to 1977). Only the 1970s meetings actually havea famous author as their narrator, Grass himself. In the other narratives,the authors’ voices are filtered through anonymous and largely undevel-oped first-person narrators. The result of this kind of explicit narrativeframework, however, is that the kinds of authorship these famous authorsrepresent are turned into a clear subject of the text. Furthermore, thethematic examination of authorship is accompanied towards the end of thework by an increased sense of introspection, as Grass overtly introduceshis own authorial personage, as both narrating subject and object, into thework. Such a personal turn on the part of the work’s author encouragesa detailed examination of how exactly the author is thematized within histext with a view to the consequences for Grass’s own stance on the issue ofauthorship at the end of the twentieth century.

Consideration of the authorial role begins in the second narrative, inwhich an anonymous admirer of Lasker-Schüler’s work reports how heor she found and bought three postcards at a flea market on which theauthor had given full vent to her imaginative powers. Her text is repeatedin the narrative, and the way in which Lasker-Schüler fictionalizes in heroverblown signature style an account of riding on the first monorail in 1901in order to send signs of life to Gottfried Benn in 1945 seems calculated toshow both her ingenuity and lasting appeal. In her own literary world, she isa past master at creating exotic images of herself and casting further roles sothat all her friends and acquaintances can join her.22 Although the author,as the narrator points out, does not actually manage to outlive the difficultpolitical times in which she is writing, her authorial image thus does liveon as footloose and fancy-free: this is what the narrator, smitten with thecards, is prepared to pay a ‘Liebhaberpreis’ (MJ, 11) for. The author’s very

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


delight in representing herself in fictional roles thus leads directly to herown textual objectification by subsequent readers.

In the case of Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarque, the meetingbetween the two is presented as painstakingly arranged by a young Swissresearcher in the 1960s. This immediately casts the two authors in a certainlight, as they are seen not just as an oppositional pairing, but are also retro-spectively held by a subsequent generation of scholars to be representativeof the entirety of the First World War period. Indeed, both authors arepresented not only as representing political positions (one right-wing, oneleft-wing), but also as little more than extensions of their books (Jünger’sIn Stahlgewittern and Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues respectively). Justas on her postcard Lasker-Schüler executes private, non-fictional corre-spondence in the same voice as her literary writing, in this conversationRemarque and Jünger also speak like their own works. Remarque refersto himself as a ‘lebendigen Toten’ (MJ, 62), describes the young soldiersas facing the front ‘in den zu großen Stiefeln und mit den zugeschüttetenHerzen’ (MJ, 70) and finally signs the narrator’s copy of his book ‘unterdem recht eindeutigen Bekenntnis: “Wie aus Soldaten Mörder wurden” ’(MJ, 79). Speaking in the 1960s in the same tone as their 1920s literaryworks, both authors have in fact become monumental relics from the past,as the Swiss narrator remarks upon on several occasions with reference totheir rather outdated manners. However, any blame for the fossilization (‘isbitzeli fossil’, MJ, 60) which seems to have taken place can be pinned asmuch on the narrator and the institution she represents as on the authorsthemselves. Although she appears to be relatively self-effacing throughoutthe talk, she is the one who is in fact stage-managing their face-to-faceappearance, and she is the one who on two separate occasions produces thebooks through which their opposing authorial positions are brought mostsharply into focus. Just as in the case of Lasker-Schüler, the way in whichauthors are appropriated by their readers and turned into textual objects isdirectly thematized within the narrative: the image of authorship that theyrepresent is shown to be almost exclusively conditioned by the expectationsof the reader.

This last point is made all the more explicit in the 1956 meeting betweenBertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn. Like the meeting between Jünger andRemarque, this is also structured around an oppositional pairing who rep-resent certain fixed positions. Significantly, however, the account of theirconversation is given by an anonymous student of German literature whohappens to overhear it. His account delights in pointing out the scurrilousway in which both authors, for the duration of their conversation at


least, entirely overturn conventional literary and political understanding oftheir respective authorial standpoints: ‘Es gefiel wohl meinen Idolen, ihrenRollen auf ein Stündchen zu entkommen’ (MJ, 227), he remarks. The utterirreverence that both show for what one might call the official canon ofGerman literary studies—from the terminology employed by literary criti-cism through to the way in which the merits of literary works and authors’perceived political standpoints are conventionally discussed—emphasizesto just what extent authors are forced into representative positions by theirreaders, whether literary or political in nature, with which they may notnecessarily fully identify. Their illicit meeting is thus presented as a self-conscious attempt to undermine the roles that have become so engrained asto dictate even how they stand: ‘Mal standen sie dicht beieinander, wie aufgemeinsamem Sockel, dann wieder auf jene ihnen vorgeschriebene Lückebedacht’ (MJ, 227). Certainly, the way in which they question the domi-nant socio-political face of authorship leads the eavesdropping narrator toquestion what he expects from literature, with the result that he ultimatelydecides to burn his own attempts at poetry and sign up for an engineeringcourse instead. The way these authors question the received understandingof their authorial role thus acts as a sort of epiphany for the studentnarrator. Realizing the potential gulf of understanding that can open upbetween authors and their readers, he sees the whole literary discipline soundermined as to want to have nothing more to do with it.

By the mid-1970s, this gulf has widened further, with authors abandonedby their wayward readers and now apparently writing only for themselves.After the burning socio-political issues of the early 1970s—Willy Brandt’svisit to the Warsaw ghetto in 1970, abortion in 1971, RAF terrorists in1972, the oil crisis in 1973, and the first football match between the twoGermanys in 1974—the text’s turn back to authors and their literary activ-ities is announced almost apologetically by the author-narrator: ‘War keinbesonderes Jahr’ (MJ, 304). This sets the tone for contemporary authorialself-understanding in the latter half of the twentieth century. On a personallevel, the narrator, here Grass himself, presents his own authorial activitiesas cowardly escapism (in contrast to Lasker-Schüler’s earlier courageous self-invention). His own inability to face up to present-day reality is, how-ever, echoed on a wider scale by the group of authors who meet in EastBerlin, to whom the author-narrator collectively refers as ‘uns versammelteSchreibfederhalter’ (MJ, 306). The self-consciousness of such a metaphorunderlines to what extent these writers are out of touch with contemporarysocio-political issues. Indeed, in 1976 it is revealed that they completelyoverestimated their public importance, expecting the rooms in which their


‘konspirative [. . .] Treffen’ (MJ, 310) took place to be bugged and membersof their own group to be informers. Years later, however, the narrator dis-covers that the authorities made no attempt to tap their meetings, makingall the more laughable the way in which they studiously overacted for thesupposed hidden spies. Their fruitless attempts to subvert the state contrastsharply with the practised public performer Wolf Biermann, who rehearseshis bad-boy political image to perfection, provoking the state authoritiesto expel him in 1976. The respected literary authors fall far short of suchnotoriety, and as their self-consciously illicit meetings fizzle out as a result offalling numbers rather than direct state intervention, their literature contin-ues to appear at reliable intervals, apparently entirely independently of anyexternal socio-political factors—and also of any obvious public response.Where Benn and Brecht had to go to a considerable effort to escape theirpublicly assigned roles, their successors find that socio-political relevanceis something that contemporary German authors can only wish for withintheir private circles in terms of a postmodern joke.

Each in their own way, these four presentations of authorship emphasizehow an image comes to fix an author in the public imagination. Where inthe first part of the century authors found themselves forced into a prede-termined role by their readers, in the second they have been abandoned bytheir readers, with the result that their function within the world loses allmeaning. Authorship goes from being an artificially constructed position toa socially irrelevant one. If these four narrative strands collectively detail thefalling significance of the author and his or her works for society over thecourse of the twentieth century, then a fifth and final strand, Grass’s ownself-presentation via first-person narrators in the final decade, can be readas the logical culmination to such a downward spiral. From 1987 onwards,Grass’s presence as both narrator and authorial subject in Mein Jahrhundertincreases dramatically: 1987, 1988, 1990, 1996, and 1998 are all narratedby him in the autobiographical mode, while 1994, 1997, and 1999 use dif-ferent narrators who make clear reference to Grass as author. It is this latterfacet of the text, narrators who make Grass as author into the subject of theirnarrative, which is of particular relevance to the argument I have developedso far. In all three cases, the narrators demonstrate a considerable distancefrom the author, with their tone ranging from hostility (Birgit Breuel, theinfamous Treuhand replacement, 1994), through smug superiority (Huber-tus Vonderbrügge, an eminent specialist in cloning, 1997) to good-natured,albeit somewhat sceptical, submission (Helene Grass, the author’s mother,1999). Birgit Breuel’s piece is written defiantly against the author who isboth writing her own narrative now in 1994—‘der mich hier niederschreibt


und meint, mir ein Zeugnis ausstellen zu dürfen’ (MJ, 385)—and whowill go on to write up an (unfavourable) account of her in Ein weites Feld.With the narrative conflict this clearly entails—Breuel is cast as both self-determining narrating subject and author-determined narrative object—her piece involves paradoxically distancing herself from the author’s viewof her (‘beinhart sei ich’, MJ, 385) and at the same time trying to assertthese self-same characteristics as the basis of her own self-assured counter-attack (‘weil ich jedes Ding beinhart durchstehe’, MJ, 386). The result is anextravagantly vituperative narrative, in which Grass is countered by Grassand Grass is cleared by Grass at one and the same time: while the moralcharacter of Breuel is, as critics have pointed out, presented as negative tothe point of grotesque, she is nevertheless given ample space in which tocriticize the domineering author and his literary project.23

In 1997 the author comes under fire for a second time, this time not fromhard market forces, but, rather, the scientific community. Having voicedhis fears about the future of the male gender following the breakthroughin cloning sheep, he now finds himself confronted with the patroniz-ing response of a man of science whose aim is ‘Ihre gewiß nicht halt-losen, jedoch ins Fabelhafte übersteigerten Befürchtungen zu entkräften’(MJ, 396). However, with his very next sentence, this narrator’s transmis-sion begins to suffer from authorial interference. The way in which hestresses the value of sobriety in his exhortation, ‘Sie neigen dazu, IhrerPhantasie auf unterhaltsame Weise ungehemmt freien Lauf zu lassen, dabeisollte, zum Wohle aller, Nüchternheit angezeigt sein’ (MJ, 396), indicatesa kind of rhetoric that could be plucked straight from one of Grass’s ownpublic political speeches from almost any decade. Thus even as the narratoroutwardly continues establishing his authority in a condescending tone, theauthor is undermining him from within. The culmination of this can beseen in his description of ‘ “de[n] emanzipierte[n] Mann” ’ who is ‘sozusagenein Luxusgeschöpf, das sich die kommende Gesellschaft gönnen wird’ andis presented as particularly attractive for such an author as Grass who willsurely benefit from ‘diese demnächst offenen Freiräume [. . .], damit sich inihnen [. . .] auch Ihre Kopfgeburten auf schier unbegrenzter Weide Auflauffinden’ (MJ, 399). The joke is that such a ridiculous suggestion properlybelongs in one of Grass’s novels, either Kopfgeburten or Die Rättin, and isclearly the ironic fabrication of this self-same author. Even as the narratorridicules Grass, the author uses his own work to ridicule the narrator, whois hardly a convincing man of science by the end of his piece.

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


The relationship between author and narrator in the final year, 1999, isconsiderably less strained than these two previous examples. Here, HeleneGrass starts out by stating straightforwardly how she has come to act asnarrator in her son’s work: ‘Gezwungen hat er mich nicht, aber überredet,der Bengel’ (MJ, 405). Coaxed back from the dead, she accepts both hisrequest for one final overview of the twentieth century and the life heimagines for her beyond her biological death in 1953. The tone in whichshe does so is one of amused parental capitulation, and her memoriesare peppered with the kind of vaguely embarrassing revelations parentsare apt to make about their grown-up offspring’s early years. Referringto the latest literary project of her ‘Bengel’, her verdict is as frank as it isproud: ‘So ist er nun mal. Denkt sich die unmöglichsten Sachen aus. Mußimmer übertreiben. Mag man gar nicht glauben, wenn man das liest . . . ’(MJ, 409). However, although this sort of praise may sound distinctly likeGrass patting himself on the back at the end of a long project, it is notentirely free from the sort of irony evident in the two earlier pieces. Evenas Grass invokes his mother to praise him, she is also subtly undermininghim: the author is merely a boy, and his grand literary-historical projectis referred to in terms of childhood tricks that, by their very nature, lacka certain finesse. This image of the author hardly squares with the grandself-image that the title’s claim to ‘Mein Jahrhundert’ implies. Instead,running through all three narratives is an image of the author as devi-ous little scamp, tripping up his own narrators even as they try to tripup him.

Thematically, then, the author as concept is very much present through-out the text of Mein Jahrhundert. Not only are numerous authors namedand invoked throughout the narratives, a certain progression throughoutthe text as a whole encourages a reconsideration of authorship as it hasevolved across the twentieth century. While Lasker-Schüler, Jünger, andRemarque not only represent certain fixed positions but actually seem toadvocate this kind of self-stylization in reaction to socio-political events,Benn and Brecht begin a process of questioning the popular reception ofauthors that is echoed on a wider scale by Grass’s 1970s contemporaries.This in turn leads to Grass’s own ironic self-dismissal via his fictionalizednarrators in the final decade. The author has mutated from fine repre-sentative of the power of imagination to a self-conscious liar whose graspof reality is questionable. Collectively, the individual narratives under-mine overblown notions of authorship, with Grass himself humorouslypresented as its most degenerate specimen at the end of the twentiethcentury.


Drawing out narrative strands: the author as artist

Although the text of Mein Jahrhundert not only reveals no authoritativeauthor figure but actually undermines the very concept, this does not meanthat the work in its entirety lacks an inherent author. My comments sofar have been based on a reading only of the written form, as this hasbeen the sole focus of critical and academic debate to date. However,while there is a text-only version of the work, the picture-book edition isgenerally acknowledged to correspond to Grass’s original concept. Indeed,Monika Shafi not only points this out in her article, but adds that ‘Grasshas repeatedly insisted on the importance of the pictorial in his works’. Ittherefore seems quite astounding that she then simply asserts, ‘Yet, in thecase of Mein Jahrhundert the drawings are a major, but not a crucial part ofthe text. Texts and images complement, but do not depend on each other.’24

Quite to the contrary, I will argue here that unlike the text-only version, theso-called ‘Prachtausgabe’ very visibly asserts an overall author who literallydraws the deliberately fragmented narrative strands together.

Whereas the textual narratives are characterized by contrasting styles,events, and genres, the artwork throughout Mein Jahrhundert is unchang-ing: each piece is executed in Grass’s signature watercolour style. Writing onGrass’s artwork in general, Peter Joch establishes that a focus on objects anda studied avoidance of any self-conscious artistic mannerisms defines muchof his work:

Der Bildraum, der ‘realistisch’ bleibt oder gänzlich ausgespart ist, nicht als Bedeu-tungsträger fungiert und nicht als Artefakt entlarvt wird, zeigt einfach ein ‘Ding’ alsseinen Gegenstand. Dieses ‘Ding’ muß für sich Bestand haben, ohne Weltfiguren,ohne Formeln für die Makrozusammenhänge in der Natur.25

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

24 Shafi, ‘Narrative and History in Günter Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert’, 59.25 Peter Joch, ‘Ohne die Feder zu wechseln: Deutungen zum bildnerischen Werk von

Günter Grass’, in Grass, Ohne die Feder zu wechseln, 15–42.


on how the pictorial side of the work often helped him decide which storiesshould be chosen from the wealth of historical material available: ‘oft wardas Malen, das Aquarellieren [. . .] behilflich. Also, die Geschichte, die ichvom Stoff her für mich reizvoll, die sich auch auf eine Bildmetapher, einegemalte Bildmetapher bringen ließ, die bekam dann den Vorrang’.26

Indeed, the organizational role of the pictures is precisely what makesthem so significant for the overall work. Most obviously, the pictures conveythe timeline underlying the project: the numerals for each relevant year areincorporated into the accompanying picture, while the work itself is period-ically punctuated by double-page spreads of ‘date heaps’ at the historicallysignificant moments of 1918 to 1919, 1932 to 1933, 1945 to 1946, 1961to 1962, 1968 to 1969, 1977 to 1978, 1990 to 1991, and 1999 to 2000.27

The apparently autonomous march of time is thereby given a distinctlysubjective twist, indicating an ordering, interpreting force behind the wayin which it is invoked here. In addition to this, the artwork provides a visualrepresentation of some of the thematic links that underlie the apparentlydisparate narrative pieces. This is well illustrated by a particular visualemphasis on headgear in the early part of the work.

While in the period up to 1918, only 1902, 1915, and, briefly, 1905 the-matize headgear in the narrative text, hats and helmets are a major if not themain visual feature of the artwork in 1902, 1905, 1911, 1914, 1915, and1917. This visual emphasis seems particularly gratuitous in 1911, where thepage is dominated by a Prussian Pickelhaube in deep blue and yellow whilethe narrative text makes no reference to headgear of any sort. The narratorof this year is Wilhelm II, writing to his trusted Prince Eulenburg, andexpounding at some length on his pet project of naval expansion. Althoughthis narrative is in itself comprehensible enough as part of the build-upto the First World War, the artistic focus on the Pickelhaube, symbol ofPrussian militarism, helps bind this voice into the series of events precedingand succeeding this particular story. Thus the overwhelmingly bright yellowof the straw boaters set against a blue sky in 1902 and the arresting blue andyellow Pickelhaube perched over the suggestion of a blue-coated general infront of yellow city spires in 1905 evoke the glory of Germany’s new-found

26 Interview with Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch, 51.27 The significance of 1977 to 1978 is debatable, but given that it follows a series of

autobiographical pieces from 1975 to 1977, each accompanied by a pictorial variation on theflounder, it is probably meant as the caesura felt in the author’s own life on the publication ofDer Butt. Politically, it corresponds to increased state vigilance in both Germanys, linked in the1977 narrative to the triple RAF suicides (Baader, Raspe, Ensslin) and the difficult situation inwhich East German writers found themselves following Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976.


wealth and colonial status in the first decade of the twentieth century.By 1911, however, its proud and colourful form is floating precariouslyover grey smoking ships of war, and by 1914 the colours have darkeneddramatically. Now, grey spiked helmets march out against a blood-redsunset, leading into the upturned khaki-brown steel helmet complete withbullet-hole in 1915, and the row of grey-green helmets and gas masks in1917.

Indeed, while the individual narratives between 1900 and 1914 flitbetween a variety of seemingly unlinked topics and voices, the artworkthroughout marks a very coherent and consistent darkening of colour. Withthe exception of 1904, all years in the first decade are painted in richcolours. In 1910, however, the grey-brown double-page spread of a lonewoman against an industrial landscape conveys a striking change. Fromthis point on, the artist’s palette is increasingly washed through with blacks,browns, and greys. By the time the narrative settles into its first sequence ofconsistent narrative voice (1914 to 1918 are all narrated retrospectively bythe same Swiss girl interviewing Ernst Jünger and Erich Maria Remarquein the late 1960s), the artwork has already long prepared the reader for thesludge and muck of trench warfare that is now described verbally. Thus,when, in 1915, Jünger alights on the ‘Stichwort [. . .], von dem nicht mehrrecht loszukommen war: “Diese elende Pickelhaube [. . .] wurde [. . .] vomStahlhelm abeglöst” ’ (MJ, 66), the text is able to trigger off within thereader’s consciousness a string of associations that have hitherto remainedat the level of the subconscious. While only two of the individual narrativesbetween 1900 and 1918 make hats into their overriding theme, the artworkhas not only focused repeatedly on headgear but even allowed its colours tocondition the palette applied to the first nineteen years of the century. Thuseven though the individual narratives collectively seemed to fall short of anykind of conventional unifying author on all four of Foucault’s counts, theartwork shows very clearly how they fit into an overall project that displayshistorical, stylistic, conceptual, and generic unity.

The frame I have discerned in the artwork is of course entirely absentfrom the text-only version of Mein Jahrhundert, an absence that has clearrepercussions. This can be seen in the case of 1957. Here, a GDR citizenwho has just been decorated by the state for developing the GDR people’sarmy helmet, writes to his design collaborator from the Second World War,now resident in West Germany. In so doing, he reminds both of them oftheir debt to the inventor of the steel helmet in the First World War. Withthe wealth of associations that this narrative triggers, readers of the picture-book edition can read 1957 as an agreeable reminder that the project is


safely progressing in the hands of its author, whose picture for this yearpointedly collects together all the different models of helmet from thePickelhaube onwards. Their text-only peers, on the other hand, are muchmore likely to understand this seemingly odd choice of topic (for withoutthe artwork the whole theme of hats and their significance is far less evident)as a prime example of just how bewilderingly fragmented a text that lacksall clear signs of authorship can be.

The specific combination of word and image in Mein Jahrhundert thusachieves the opposite to that of Zunge zeigen. In the case of this latterwork, the pictorial section was pitched against the written sections, man-ifesting its own implicit authorial role that clashed with and underminedthe image conveyed by the text. In Mein Jahrhundert, however, word andimage are placed side by side within any one narrative, with the writtensection providing the verbal detail that is then interpreted by the author inthe pictorial section. The two different disciplines correspond to the twodifferent positions inherent to any work, those of author and narrator, withthe unusual twist simply being that Grass chooses to locate his work’s authorfigure within the visual rather than the verbal. The advantage of this is thatit allows him thematically to undermine the very concept of authorship, adevelopment that he places within the historical context of the twentiethcentury. At the same time, however, he manages to endow the overall workwith its own very clear author figure by relocating himself to the pictorialrealm. The result is a work in which the author is free to play out both hisown death and that of his authorial contemporaries, without, as in the caseof Die Rättin, placing the existence of his own text in danger.

CONCLUSION

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


praising their creator. Both constructed as monuments to the author andactively asserting their own narrative independence, they yield an imageof authorship that is both monumental (the all-round artistic genius) andutterly inconsequential (belittled and derided by his own text).

Interestingly, this dual self-conception on the part of the author corre-sponds to a period in Grass’s public political life in which he also foundhimself acting on two opposing levels. On the one hand, by the endof the 1980s he was popularly accused of having grown far too big forhis boots, as the aforementioned spoof on Die Rättin, Der Grass by oneGünter Ratte, made abundantly clear. On the other hand, this perceivedmonumentality made it increasingly difficult for the author to be heard,as Grass was to find out during the unification period when he did nothave the influence he might have liked. Throughout the 1990s, his politicalinterventions saw him actively engaging with both popular reactions to hispublic image. In fact, openly stylizing himself as monumentally out of datewas, as argued in Chapter 2, an important key in helping Grass stay inthe public limelight throughout this decade. It is perhaps not surprising,then, that the attack on authorship written into both Zunge zeigen and MeinJahrhundert with a confidently controlling authorial flourish is continuedin Grass’s post-unification works, Unkenrufe (1992), Ein weites Feld (1995),and Im Krebsgang (2002), the subject of the final chapter in this study.

6‘Er, in dessen Namen ich krebsendvorankam’: Reading the Author inEin weites Feld and Im Krebsgang

INTRODUCTION

In all Grass’s fiction discussed so far the author figure presented within thetext has narrated his own story, motivated for better or for worse by hisown personal circumstances. With the advent of Unkenrufe in 1992 thischanges. For the first time in Grass’s literary œuvre his authorial personais coerced into narrating somebody else’s story to which he has only thevaguest of links (Reschke claims to be an old school friend, but Grass’s alterego within the text appears to have considerable difficulty rememberinghim). The packet of primary materials that arrives unexpectedly on hisdesk demands Grass’s authorship on the grounds that the story it tells hasa distinctly Grassian touch to it: ‘Im Grunde könnte das alles von Direrfunden sein, aber gelebt, erlebt haben wir [. . .]’ (U , 14), claims Reschkein his covering letter. Although Reschke is himself of course constructedby Grass, within the fiction he represents a new approach to authorship inGrass’s work. Chasing down the author and instructing him to narrate hisstory, he represents a first attempt to make a space for the reader in Grass’sself-presentation on something approaching equal terms.

This change is instructive, as it allows Grass to move beyond his usualstrategies of authorial self-presentation and engage directly with popularpublic constructions of his authorial persona. Although some earlier workswithout doubt illustrated an awareness of Grass’s impact on his readers, suchreaction was in the main restricted to political evaluations and never threat-ened the narrative centrality of Grass’s authorial position.1 From the early

1 See Taberner’s reading of Kopfgeburten on this point, ‘ “Sowas läuft nur im Dritten Pro-gramm”: Winning over the Audience for Political Engagement in Günter Grass’s Kopfgeburtenoder Die Deutschen sterben aus’, Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur, 91

150 Reading the Author: weites Feld and Krebsgang

1990s onwards, however, Grass’s literary legacy as evaluated by his readersbegins to loom ever larger in his texts, threatening to marginalize the authorentirely as he is replaced by his own public image. ‘Du wirst bestimmtirgendwas damit anfangen können, gerade weil alles ans Unglaublichegrenzt’ (U , 14) Reschke explains to his famous peer, adding a healthy doseof flattery: ‘Nur Du kannst das. Dir hat es schon immer Spaß bereitet,tatsächlicher als alle Tatsachen zu sein . . . ’ (U , 241). Reschke’s enthusiasticclaim that his own life story imitates Grass’s literary fiction could be readas the ultimate accolade for Grass, apparently confirming the author’s fineunderstanding of both the human condition and contemporary politicalcircumstances. However, Grass’s alter ego is markedly uncomfortable withsuch adulation. Unconvinced of his ability to collate information either tohistorical or political ends, he grumbles about the task forced upon him‘all das wäre besser bei einem Archivar abzulagern gewesen als bei mir. Erhätte wissen müssen, wie leicht ich ins Erzählen gerate. Wenn kein Archiv,warum hat er nicht einen eilfertigen Journalisten beliefert?’ (U , 13).

While the successful completion of Unkenrufe keeps such claimed reti-cence within bounds, the limits Grass places on his authorial abilities hereare significant when considered in the light of his future literary output—along pseudo-historical text entirely narrated by archivists (Ein weites Feld,1995), and a story with a markedly political point researched and writtenby a journalist (Im Krebsgang, 2002). Grass’s familiar authorial persona nowappears only on the margins, as a kind of textual memory. Furthermore,these texts turn into a key thematic and structural element the reader-inspired evaluation of authorship that exists only in Unkenrufe as falsemodesty on the part of an author given to paying himself backhandedcompliments. In terms of authorship, Unkenrufe may thus be seen as atransitional text: although Grass retains his authorial importance, the termsof the narrative are changing. Bowing to the reader, he begins to take hisleave of the kind of overt authorial centrality that dominated his earlierworks. He no longer has any claim to control the narrative, and is forcedinstead to observe from afar (he describes himself at one point in Unkenrufeas ‘ungeladen und ein halbes Dutzend Barhocker entfernt’, U , 42) andto keep his thoughts largely to himself: ‘Nach meiner Meinung, die—ichweiß—nicht zählt’ (U , 150), he ruefully concedes. In subsequent works,the author is largely deposed from his text, appearing only as a brief andunwelcome cameo in Ein weites Feld and continuously cast off in Im

(1999), 84–100. Even Taberner’s title, however, indicates that the author remains firmly incontrol in this text.

Reading the Author: weites Feld and Krebsgang 151

Krebsgang as an irritating old man whose writing days are over. At the sametime, however, all three works display a public celebration of authorship:Reschke celebrates his old school friend as the only person who could dohis story justice, the archivists spend their entire time documenting theactivities of both Fontane and his contemporary extension, Fonty; while ImKrebsgang can be read as the gradual accession to authorship of its reluctantjournalist narrator, Paul Pokriefke.

This chapter investigates the full implications of introducing readerlyreactions to the question of authorship in Grass’s texts, with particularreference to Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang. It would certainly be wrongto assume that allowing other voices into the narrative necessarily amountsto dismissing the models of authorship Grass has come to represent. As thefollowing will argue, by removing his own public persona from the frontline of the narrative, Grass is in fact able to develop further his idiosyncraticconsideration of authorship. Making space for third-person narrators whomake no claims to authorship allows him to stand back from the process ofauthorial construction and deal instead with its effect on the text, the readerand the author’s own legacy. Furthermore, in grasping the bigger picture ofauthorship Grass provides an ironic qualification to his consideration of theauthor’s significance in textual, social, and political terms that ultimatelygives a much more complete sense of the challenges facing an author suchas Grass in contemporary German society.

EIN WEITES FELD

Intertextuality and authorship

Ever since the controversial debates surrounding its publication, Ein weitesFeld has widely been read as Grass’s literary response to German unification.These kinds of readings were provided first by contemporaneous newspaperreviews, and then, in a more differentiated manner, by subsequent literarycritical analysis.2 In particular, as I will discuss in relation to ChristineIvanovic and Morwenna Symons below, some of the most convincingliterary analyses have detailed how the novel’s aesthetic qualities support theauthor’s overall moral message concerning unification, focusing particularlyon the effect of the work’s intertextual structure. This is certainly one way

2 For the journalistic reception of Ein weites Feld, see the collection of newspaper reviewsin Oskar Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty: ‘Ein weites feld’ im Spiegel der Kritik (Gottingen: Steidl,1996).


of looking at the basic pattern of linkage that permeates the narrative.The anonymous archivist narrators desperately try to note down all thewords and actions of Theo Wuttke / Fonty as he walks around Berlin andits environs over a two-year period between 1989 and 1991. This periodof recent history is then in turn stretched back to 1871, as Fonty narratesand reinterprets his own existence through the words and deeds of TheodorFontane. Thus Christine Ivanovic, for example, analyses in detail Fonty’sand the writer Uwe Johnson’s respective readings of Fontane’s works at theNeuruppin monument, and uses this to argue that the focus on reapplyingpast works of literature to the present becomes part of the work’s overallmessage concerning the nature and value of literature.3 Morwenna Symonselaborates on these ideas, expressly invoking the term intertextuality, andargues that the self-conscious appropriation of earlier literary works formspart of a process within the text whereby fiction and reality are mergedin order to engage the reader’s critical faculties vis-à-vis history. By seeingin Fonty’s actions how a standpoint can be so overtly constructed, thereader becomes suspicious of any narrative, factual or fictional, that does notquestion the standpoint from which it is written.4 These critics therefore seein the intertextual narrative structure the major pedagogical achievement ofthe work.

While this approach convincingly covers both the issue of how factand fiction merge within the novel and this latter’s status as politicallysubversive literature, in focusing on the importance of underlying textualstructures it does not take sufficient note of individual personalities withinthe work.5 I contend, on the other hand, that the personality cult on whichEin weites Feld is predicated raises the importance of individual authorsand with that the idea of authorship in general, a facet of the text thathas been acknowledged by Frauke Meyer-Gosau.6 The most fundamental

3 She describes the whole narrative as a ‘Plädoyer für das Erzählen als Prozeß einer rela-tiven Wahrheitsfindung’: Christine Ivanovic, ‘Fonty trifft Johnson: Zur Fiktionalisierung UweJohnsons als Paradigma der Erzählstrategie in Günter Grass’ Ein weites Feld ’, Johnson-Jahrbuch,3 (1996), 173–99, 195.

4 Morwenna Symons, Room for Manoeuvre: The Role of Intertext in Elfriede Jelinek’s ‘DieKlavierspielerin’, Günter Grass’s ‘Ein weites Feld ’ and Herta Müller’s ‘Niederungen’ and ‘Reisendeauf einem Bein’, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 64; Bithell Series of Dissertations, 28(London: Maney, 2005).

5 Symons, for example, comes to the conclusion that Fonty is ‘not so much a character as a“term” in the text’, Symons, Room for Manoeuvre, 77.

6 Frauke Meyer-Gosau, ‘Ende der Geschichte: Günter Grass’ Roman “Ein weites Feld”—drei Lehrstücke’, in Heinz Ludwig Arnold, ed., Günter Grass, 7th edn (Munich: Text +Kritik, 1997), 3–18. Arguing that in the Fonty–Hoftaller pairing Grass is pitching theauthor’s abilities against those of the state, Meyer-Gosau posits that Grass in all earnestnesscontinues to present the author as a privileged socio-political commentator. I find this reading


thematic and structural precondition for the text is that Fonty is obsessedwith the author Fontane, to the point of re-living his life and interpretinghis present-day surroundings through this figure. Indeed, he is presented bythe archivists as Fontane’s ‘bedeutendes Nachleben’ (WF, 9). This obsessionconsequently turns him into an author figure, as he not only identifies bothwith Fontane’s presentation of the writer’s plight and his keen socio-politicalobservational skills, but increasingly takes up the pen himself.7 At criticalmoments in the text, other authors intrude on the archivist’s narrative:first Grass himself, and then Uwe Johnson. The result is that the focusof the intertextual narrative is as much on these authors as on the texts theyrepresent, and the narrators, hitherto so prominent in Grass’s fiction, retreatinto the background.8

If Ein weites Feld offers strikingly dominant multiple authorial positions,it also displays at least two clear narrative standpoints. Most obviously,there is the anonymous collective from the archive, who, as in Hundejahre,Grass’s only other novel containing an anonymous narrative collective,immediately draw attention to themselves as the main narrating instance:‘wir, die im Archiv übriggebliebenen Fußnotensklaven, ermahnen uns,nicht vorschnell den Siebzigsten abzufeiern, sondern von jenem SpaziergangBericht zu geben’ (WF, 12). Expressly conceiving of their narrative as afactual ‘report’, rather than, say, literary biography, they are determined todeflect all attention onto their narrative subject. Their constant attempt,therefore, to keep up with Fonty provides much of the overall structureof the text, and is certainly responsible for its length. A second narrator,however, can also be discerned in Fonty himself. Even as he is narrated, he isat the same time narrating: he ceaselessly repeats and reworks Fontane’s lifeand works for all who care to listen. Both narrator positions—the archivalscribes vis-à-vis Fonty and Wuttke vis-à-vis Fontane—thus make the manbehind the story they are relaying into the focal point of their narratives. Hebecomes an ultimate authority figure, and their own raison d’être is purelyto relay to a wider audience his unique words and actions.

The position of the narrators in this textual pattern is therefore charac-terized by a lack of autonomy. Theo Wuttke, reinterpreting Fontane’s life

unconvincing, as it does not at any level account for the irony of both Grass’s self-presentationand his presentation of authorship in general throughout the work.

7 On Fonty’s accession to authorship, see Jutta Heinz, ‘Günter Grass: Ein weites Feld undOral History’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 1 (2002), 21–38, 25–6 for a brief discussion.

8 The same can be said of Mein Jahrhundert, which, although employing multiple narrators,keeps them all largely anonymous. Authors and authorship, as discussed in Chapter 5, on theother hand, are a clear theme in the work.


and works, significantly surrenders his proper name. Widely known onlyby the diminutive ‘Fonty’, his whole ‘Nachleben’ existence is conceivedand presented as dependent upon the great man. Similarly, the archivistnarrators manage to remain anonymous throughout the text (somethingwhich their Hundejahre equivalents could only maintain for a paragraph).Their position is defined solely by the service they are rendering theirgreat author figure, Fonty, which is clearly set out in the quotation above.The idea in ‘Bericht geben’ of bearing witness to something and faithfullyreporting upon it is constantly invoked throughout the narrative and makesthe hierarchy within this narrative clear. While the archivists are constantlytrying to pin down and catalogue Fonty’s movements and activities, heapparently moves through the text untroubled by such narrative concerns.What he says and does functions for them like the word of God, andtheir narrative religiously tries to record it, just as, for Fonty, Fontanehas become the oracle of all knowledge. The result is that the whole textbecomes a sort of scriptural record of Fonty’s life amongst the archivists,which itself draws on the monumental image of a creative genius. Fontyand Fontane might not be the actual authors of Ein weites Feld, but theyare certainly the two major points of authority on which the entire textrests.

Although the archivist-narrators, beholden as they are to their author-subject, believe everything Fonty says ‘aufs Wort’ (WF, 10) just as Fontydoes in Fontane’s case, the authority of both figures is not entirely unques-tioned in the text. Hoftaller, an archivist of a rather different sort, iscoupled to Wuttke / Fonty rather like a hostile critic to an author, as Fonty(speaking for authors in general) himself exclaims in an unusual outburst:‘ “Jadoch!” rief er. “Was wären wir ohne Zensur, ohne Aufsicht? Sie, meinauffällig unauffälliger Herr, sind schlechterdings unser gutes Gewissen!” ’(WF, 596). Just like his literary predecessor, Hans Joachim Schädlich’sTallhover, Hoftaller embodies the eternal principle of loyalty to the regime,shadowing Wuttke / Fonty as his ‘Tagundnachtschatten’.9 His priority atevery stage is to read Fonty for information, to second guess his actions andmotivations, and to intercept any politically subversive behaviour in such a

9 Hans Joachim Schädlich, Tallhover (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986) tells the taleof a state agent, impossibly active through various German regimes, from 1842 to 1955, andprovides a clear basis for Hoftaller. The links between the two novels have been well docu-mented. See Dieter Stolz, ‘Nomen est omen: Ein weites Feld von Günter Grass’, Zeitschrift fürGermanistik, 7 (1997), 321–35, 324; Rolf Geißler, ‘Ein Ende des “weiten Feldes”?’, WeimarerBeiträge, 45 (1999), 65–81, 65; Jörg Magenau, ‘Geheimdienstdossier oder Doktorarbeit?’,Freitag, 25 August 1995, reprinted in Negt, ed., Der Fall Fonty, 115–21, 119.


manner that the authority of the state will always prevail.10 This is certainlythe role he plays with Fonty, and it is particularly clear in the scene fromwhich the above quotation is taken: Hoftaller orders Fonty to take his placenext to Fontane at the Neuruppin monument.

The difference between Fonty’s relationship to Hoftaller and his relation-ship to the archivists is made clear early on in the scene. As the pair standlooking up at the monument, Fonty no longer enjoys the position conferredupon him by the archivists as authoritative focus of their narrative; rather,as Hoftaller’s ‘object’, he speaks only when this shadowing figure is silent:‘Weil sein Tagundnachtschatten nichts sagte, sprach das Objekt’ (WF,583). This new position is stressed again by the archivists as they ponderHoftaller’s motivation for ordering the physical comparison between Fontyand the statue: ‘Könnte es sein, daß Hoftaller sein Objekt aus verehrenderZuneigung so prominent erhöht sehen wollte?’ (WF, 589). Furthermore,the question itself shows the difference between the archivists and Hoftalleras they implicitly project their own feelings onto Fonty’s shadow. Thespeculation is clearly inappropriate. While their concern throughout isto put Fonty on show, Hoftaller’s concerns are to block Wuttke / Fonty’sactions and undermine his authority whenever his behaviour betrays anydegree of autonomy that might not immediately serve state interests.11

Fonty’s attempts to leave the country are the most obvious examples of this.However, the way in which Hoftaller repeatedly threatens him with archivalmaterial on both his and his predecessor’s illegitimate and legitimate chil-dren in order to make him cooperate with his designs shows a generalparadigm in which Hoftaller has his ‘object’ firmly under his thumb. Itis thus entirely in character that, in the scene at the Neuruppin monument,Hoftaller blackmails Fonty (as Theo Wuttke) into taking his place next tothe statue, and continues to dominate throughout, ordering exactly howto sit and where to look. Once Fonty has followed these instructions, theoutcome undeniably detracts from the proud image of Fonty ‘in seiner

10 Rolf Geißler, ‘Ein Ende des “weiten Feldes”?’ makes reference to this idea of Hoftaller asa reader, who misses the point in his attempts to read Fonty’s intertextual behaviour as a wayof explaining how the world works. Instead, Geißler argues, Fonty offers to the more careful orsensitive reader a template for how to escape this objective and objectifying world of restrictivesocial norms by fleeing into the subjective realm of poetry. Fonty’s narrative is one that fracturesthe conventional social field (presumably with reference here to Bourdieu’s theories), leadingup to the moment in which Fonty finally manages to break out of it altogether.

11 Critics have rightly pointed out the humane side to Hoftaller, see e.g. Magenau,‘Geheimdienstdossier oder Doktorarbeit?’: ‘die Unzertrennlichkeit Fontys und Hoftallers[changiert] zwischen Zuneigung und Überdruß, Gängelung und Gewohnheit, Erpressung undFreundschaft’, 120. The humane side, however, only comes to the fore when Fonty is clearlysubservient to Hoftaller as Theo Wuttke (e.g. when he is ill in bed).


greisenhaften Schönheit’ (WF, 586) which the archivists had so pointedlyinserted only several pages earlier. Now the picture is quite a differentone: ‘Neben [Fonty] dominierte das Original. Zwar mangelte es nicht anÄhnlichkeit, doch wirkte die verkleinerte Ausgabe wie ein geschrumpftesModell’ (WF, 590).

By literally making Fonty try to measure up to the great author, Hoftallerthus undermines both Fonty’s and the archivists’ claims. Fonty providesa pitiful physical comparison to the real ‘Urheber’ (WF, 9), appearinginstead as a small-scale fraudster with big pretensions. Far from elevatingthe grey GDR citizen to the glorious ranks of the immortal Fontane ‘ausverehrender Zuneigung’, as the archivists had initially hoped, Hoftaller isin fact intentionally demoting him back to his existence as Theo Wuttke,an old man dependent on the clemency of his important ‘friend’. Calmlysmoking a Cuban cigar and ordering his ‘object’ into the most ridiculous ofposes, Hoftaller robs Fonty of all claims to authorship. Furthermore, as anarchivist quietly working away behind the scenes, he acts as an unfavourablefoil to the narrators. Where they deflect all attention onto Fonty in such amanner as to turn him into the central author figure of their narrative,Hoftaller makes Fonty reveal the ridiculous pretensions that underlie hisintertextual behaviour. Even as the narrator archivists transfer all authorityfrom themselves onto their autonomous narrative subject, Hoftaller, actingas Fonty’s careful reader, turns him back into an object who cannot evencontrol his own actions, never mind somebody else’s narrative. By pointingout the process by which one individual can play with the gap between thereal and the ideal and consequently attain a fraudulent position of authority,he undermines in one fell swoop the intertextual narrative technique onwhich Fonty’s authorial position within the archivists’ text is based.

‘Die Lücke lud dazu ein’: gaps and authorship

On the one hand, then, the appropriation of Fontane’s life and worksthat conditions Fonty’s authorial role within the text is paraded by thearchivists as the work of a quasi-genius. His bold personality becomes thefocus of their text, and, because their narrative is entirely conditioned byhis words and actions he takes on an ultimate position of authority. Hebecomes an author not merely because he emulates Fontane, but, moreimportantly, because he is the figure who delimits their narrative. Ratherlike the narrator’s autofictional explanation of himself to his children in Ausdem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, reading and recording what Fonty says, does,and means is the whole point of the archivists’ careful documentation; when


Fonty disappears, the narrative also comes to an end. If the text representsa sort of intertextual field, then Fonty is always present as a Foucaultianauthor figure, marking out its boundaries. Hoftaller, on the other hand,challenges Fonty’s stature, both literally and metaphorically. ShadowingFonty, he throws his intertextual authorial behaviour into sharp relief byconstantly reminding him of his civilian existence and limitations. As Fontyhimself exclaims, he takes on the role of his conscience, always keeping hisflights of fancy in check. In this way, Hoftaller comes to represent Fonty’slimitations, the Wuttke-pull on Fonty that makes him into just an old manserving a crumbling state.

Fonty therefore exists in two forms in the narrative: the idealized image ofthe strident author that emerges from the archivists’ report, and the rathermore realist figure of the plodding old man subject to Hoftaller’s eternalsupervision. The tension between fiction and reality is not merely anotherfacet of intertextuality, as it has so far been discussed by critics. It is also, veryconcretely, characteristic of the relationship between the two protagonistswhose respective standpoints are inextricably bound up with questions ofauthorship. While Hoftaller constantly reminds Fonty of his position in thereal world as Theo Wuttke, Fonty represents the textual pull on Wuttke torewrite his world in line with literature. The result is that Wuttke / Fonty issplit down the middle. He is partly real within the fiction (Wuttke), partlyfictional (Fonty); partly located in the present, partly in the past; partlya frail and doddering old man (Wuttke / Fonty as textual object), partly afigure of idealized authority (Fonty as authorial subject). Both strands ofinterpretation are simultaneously present in the narrative. What is missingis the link between the two. The archivists’ daily activity, however, consistsin supplying links to fill gaps, and this is one of the main reasons that theirnarrative report on Fonty is spun out at such length. The fact that there isa short circuit in Fonty’s own symbolism is eminently well suited to suchan aesthetic. Fonty represents a logical gap, and not only do the archivistsconstantly (and hopelessly) seek to fill this gap, it is also manipulated bythe text’s real author, Grass, to investigate further the place of authorshipwithin both literature and society. This should become clear with furtherreference to the scene at the Neuruppin monument.

Hoftaller’s order to Fonty to climb the monument is described by thearchivists as initially inspired by the spatial gap next to the bronze figure:‘die Lücke lud dazu ein’ (WF, 586). Once Fonty has managed the climb,Hoftaller makes it clear that he must also fill the gap, ordering ‘genau indie Lücke dazwischen setzen!’ (WF, 589). Although on the surface of itthe ensuing comparison is merely one of physical proportions, it is hard


not to see in it a further symbolic element. While Fonty and Hoftallerboth stood under the monument, the archivists stressed Fonty’s substitutivenature as a living version of the great author: ‘Fonty, der uns in solchenMomenten näher als der sitzende Unsterbliche stand, weil er samt Hut undShawl, im Mantel und mit Stock nach Neuruppin angereist war, um sichin Vergleich zu bringen’ (WF, 583, my emphasis). He brings Fontane intothe present world, giving the immortal author an additional, contemporaryface. Because these comments have already drawn attention to how Fontybridges the gap between the past and the present, physically filling the gapnext to the bronze figure takes on a further symbolic meaning: this is thephysical manifestation of Fonty’s substitutive behaviour.

Certainly, this would seem to be the case when the whole narrative itselfis subjected to a gap, or ‘Intermezzo’ (WF, 591), as the easily recognizable(although never actually named) figures of Günter and Ute Grass intrudeon the ‘gestellte Szene’ (WF, 591). These ‘tourist’ (WF, 593) figures lookstraight at the Fontane monument on which Fonty sits, and yet do notperceive him: he has become the gap he sought to fill, or, in filling thegap, he has been subsumed by the greater entity which the monument nowrepresents. Only when the Grass couple return and Fonty has meanwhilevacated his position is there a sense of something lacking, as Grass criesout ‘ “Irgendwas fehlt!” ’ (WF, 600), while his wife contradicts him: ‘ “Sehich nicht. Du bildest dir wieder was ein” ’ (WF, 600). The fact that Grass,himself an author figure, perceives a gap next to the statue highlights acertain process of replacement implicit to the Fontane statue: authors arenaturally drawn to the image of authorship represented in the statue, andfind themselves trying to fill the gap it implies almost in spite of themselves.The immortal image needs an accompanying mortal face to carry it throughto the present day. In the wider context of chapters 28 to 30, this is exactlywhat a succession of contemporary authors, Fonty, Günter Grass, and UweJohnson, each individually try to provide, as one after another they traipsepast the larger-than-life monument, like apostles gathering around a greatmaster in the hope that one day they might step into his shoes. The scenethus functions as a point in the text where authors’ understanding of theirown authorial role within the wider socio-political context is examined.

Not only Fonty, then, acts out the process of replacement: the structure ofthe narrative sees one author after the next placed into direct physical com-parison with Fontane. This is done through a rather unconvincing series ofreferences to chance. The appearances of the Grass couple are introducedwith ‘wenn nicht [. . .] der Zufall mitgespielt hätte’ (WF, 591), and ‘dannwollte es der Zufall oder die Laune höherer Regie’ (WF, 600), while the


exact course taken by Johnson’s visit is also conditioned by supposed chanceevents: ‘der Zufall—so es ihn gibt—wollte es’ (WF, 607). The unsatisfac-tory nature of these vague references in an otherwise thoroughly footnotedreport makes one suspect that the ‘höhere Regie’ is a direct invocation ofthe text’s real author, Günter Grass. The fact that an explicit Grass figurethen intrudes on the narrative adds weight to this, so that there are surelystrong grounds for reading Fonty’s replacement role as representative of awider message on authorship that is now being deliberately and unmistake-ably profiled by the text’s real author with reference to two further cases,Grass himself and Uwe Johnson. In all three cases, ‘das Überlebensgroße’(WF, 590) of the monument is stressed, and, as the initial descriptionmakes clear, this larger-than-life authorial image is itself based on a gapor short-circuit between the real and the ideal: ‘Wenngleich überlebensgroßabgebildet, stellte sich dennoch die Frage: Ist er das wirklich?’ (WF, 583).Even Fontane himself might not measure up to his own monument, and isthus implicitly brought into this authorial chain of replacement where theidealized image of the author towers over its real-life counterparts. Fonty,as described above, is rendered ridiculous, while Grass shuffles around atthe feet of the monument looking ‘ein wenig vorgestrig’ (WF, 591), andUwe Johnson ‘vornüber gebeugt und heftig schwitzend’ (WF, 604) meetsup with Fonty to sit on a nearby bench and discuss the great author’s workand influence. Physically, all three real-life authors unquestionably lose outin comparison with the ‘toller Guß!’ (WF, 591). The difference between theidealized immortal bronze statue and the all-too-real, ageing mortal fleshcould not be made more evident.

Such a cleft between the real and ideal state of authorship is also madeevident in the subsequent actions of the mortal authors, as all three self-consciously act out their role in line with a certain image of authorship.Forced into a direct position of replacement by Hoftaller, Fonty actuallybegins to merge with his literary forefather: ‘Mehrmals dazu aufgefordert,nun endlich vom Denkmal zu lassen und treppab zu steigen, klebte erdennoch an der Bronze. [. . .] Fonty ließ sich nicht kommandieren, warseßhaft. Und dann sprach er vom Denkmal herab’ (WF, 593). All of asudden the comparison between mortal author and his immortal ideal isturned to Fonty’s advantage, as he makes use of his lofty position andphysical proximity to the great author in order to appropriate for himselfFontane’s voice and authority. To a spectator down below, it must appear asif the great Fontane himself is speaking. Significantly, however, Fonty useshis position first to attack this very figure, questioning the authenticity ofthe statue to which he has just been unfavourably compared: ‘der ganze Kerl


stecke im Leihkostüm’ (WF, 594). By merging his own biography with thatof Fontane, he sets against the immutable statue an understanding of theordinary mortal author that stresses and celebrates the writer’s inauspiciousbeginnings as a mere ‘Tintensklave’ (WF, 595). However, even as Fonty isreasserting the achievements of the mortal man against his immortal literaryimage, he is also unwittingly reaffirming the predominance of this idealizedauthorial image. His reworking of Fontane’s essay on ‘die gesellschaftlicheStellung der Schriftsteller’ (WF, 596–9) draws on a traditional image ofauthorship—that of the poverty-stricken poet toiling away in his attic inspite of cruel social circumstances.12 Furthermore, Fontane’s essay itself,albeit ironically, argues that the author’s role is a fundamentally replaceableposition in society:

man [läßt] die Schriftstellerei als Kunst nicht gelten [. . .] und [geht] davon aus[. . .],all das am Ende ebensogut oder auch noch ein bißchen besser machen zu können.Schreiben kann jeder. Und außerdem ist das Schriftstellern so nutzlos, es ist daseinzige Metier, das ganz überflüssig dasteht und mit einem ernsten Bedürfnis derMenschen nicht recht zusammenhängt.13

Even as Fonty tries to assert the real author over his or her overbearingpublic image, he finds himself thrown back to other, equally dominantclichés of authorship that have come to constitute the very experience ofbeing an ‘authentic’ writer. Fonty thus shows how the modern-day authoris at every point touched by a pre-existing image of authorship.

As if to underline to what extent Fonty is himself dependent on thisimage, he collapses once he has finished his speech, leaving his ‘footnoteslaves’ to fill in the exact nature of his references and exiting the scenevery much back in Hoftaller’s hands. Indeed, one might go so far as tosay that the speech is spoken through Fonty, who is merely a medium forthe lessons of the idealized Fontane monument. Once the various imagesof authorship that this monument represents have been imparted, themortal man is accordingly thrown to one side. Furthermore, the fact thatthe whole speech is framed by the two appearances of the Grass coupleseems a very explicit way of signalling its importance in setting up a widertextual consideration of the relationship between an author and his or herimage. Where the implicit author of the ‘höhere[. . .] Regie’ is a figure ofcontrol, however, his human equivalent within the text is much less so.

12 See Theodor Fontane, ‘Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller’, in Kurt Schrein-ert, ed., Aufsätze zur Literatur (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1963), 491–5.

13 Ibid., 492.


Largely subservient to his wife, Grass’s appearance is ironically constructedout of physical Grass stereotypes, complete with ‘leicht schiefsitzende Brille’(WF, 591) and ‘hängenden Schnauz’ (WF, 591). Indeed, should the readernot recognize the clichés him or herself, the narrative deliberately drawsattention to them as such: ‘So betont er mit Baskenmütze und in gebeugterHaltung den Pfeife rauchenden Künstler auf Motivsuche abgab, war sie esdoch, die den Photoapparat in Anschlag brachte’ (WF, 591). Once again,then, the author (both Grass and Fontane) has become subservient to hispublic image, for while Grass is observed straining (‘betont’) to act outhis own artistic existence in line with public expectation, Fontane has,in the eyes of subsequent generations (represented here by Ute’s camera),been replaced by the larger-than-life monument. There is again a gap, hererather humorously presented, between the real author and his clichéd publicrepresentation. This appearance of Grass the author only has any authorityin as much as the ‘postmodern wink’, as Symons puts it, of his entrancepoints back to the ‘höhere[. . .] Regie’ controlling the text.14

In many respects the appearance of Uwe Johnson echoes (and therebyconfirms) the pattern set up by Fonty and Grass. He too wants to try outmeasuring up to the Fontane ideal, and he too comes out of the physicalcomparison poorly: not only does he approach both Fonty and the Fontanemonument ‘mit hochgerötetem Schädel und in erbärmlichem Zustand’(WF, 604), he also has all the signs of a serious alcoholic. Like Fonty, hequickly takes to the authorial moral high ground, but this time—and thisin distinction to Fonty—arguing against Fontane. This is presumably atleast in part caused by the failure of his own marriage, referred to as anafterthought by Fonty (WF, 608). Convinced that his wife was spying onhim, he cannot tolerate the happy ending Fontane writes for the adulterousMelanie in L’Adultera, which he rates as an ‘aus seiner Sicht unverdienteIdylle’ (WF, 606). Disappointed by life, Johnson has reacted by fixating onthe ideal, which he now demands to see realized in both life and literature.Consequently, he forces his own real character into an idealized mode ofbehaviour, whatever the cost to his mental and physical well-being. Fontypicks up on this:

Ach, meine Mete, wie ausgestoßen er dasaß, wie sehr um Haltung bemüht.Schwitzend der massige Schädel, dem kein Haar mehr erlaubt war. Ach hätte ichdoch einen Lorbeer zur Hand gehabt! [. . .] wie er, in seiner Strenge gefangen, nebenmir saß, war er nur zu bedauern. (WF, 608)

14 Symons, Room for Manoeuvre, 69.


For Johnson, his existence, both literary and private, is to be defined by‘Haltung’ of the moral kind, and yet the direct result is that his physical‘Haltung’ is sagging under the strain. His moral rigour transforms intoa head on which no more hair is ‘allowed’; only a laurel wreath wouldprove acceptable. The real physical image of the man has been sacrificedto the lofty ideals he propounds, so that the author himself has become‘caught’ in his own authorial role, described by Christine Ivanovic withreference to his literature as ‘die richtige ästhetische Position, die richtigemoralische Haltung’.15 The result is grotesque: an oversensitive and overlypunctilious man whose own body cannot live up to his authorial idealsof complete aesthetic and moral clarity. Johnson’s inability to perceive thegap in his own behaviour is mirrored by his readership’s reaction to hiswork, as described by Fonty: the literary critical establishment ‘[hat ihn]abgestempelt und in ein Kästchen namens “Dichter der deutschen Teilung”gezwängt’ (WF, 608), while Hoftaller notes that the East German censorsshowed a knee-jerk response that amounted to ‘behördliches Fehlverhaltenaus ideologischem Übereifer’ (WF, 609). Where the fate of Fontane showshow a great author can be turned by his readers into a larger-than-lifefigure, Johnson actually sets up this process himself, acting in extremes thatelevate the author to a position that ultimately distances him from both hisreadership and, indeed, his own body.

What all three authors, Fontane, Grass, and Johnson, thus demonstrate,is how the authorial role can become so overburdened as to splinter awayentirely from the real-life man or woman behind the public image. Fonty’srole is to make this explicit. Himself humiliated into action by Hoftaller inchapter 28 and then given an important slot in the narrative by the ‘Launehöherer Regie’ in chapter 29, he pointedly discourses on the social position-ing of authors past and present before giving a memorable concrete examplefrom the recent past (Uwe Johnson) in his letter to Martha Grundmann inchapter 30. This latter episode is the culmination of his argument, for itis precisely the problem of social standing that wreaks such devastation onJohnson’s life. His case is the most extreme formulation of a pattern sharedby all three: the author becomes so aware of his representative social positionthat he cannot live up to it. An unbridgeable gap opens up between the realman and his literary ideal. Just as I argued in the case of Zunge zeigen andMein Jahrhundert, authorship carries the impossible burden of being bothmonumental (in image) and inconsequential (in reality).

15 Ivanovic, ‘Fonty trifft Johnson’, 194.


If Fonty himself symbolizes this gap and thematizes it with respect toother authors, he also shows how the author can respond to it. In hisown tendency to blur fact and fiction, he shows how the gap can be,if not overcome, at least ignored. Authorial invention becomes a way ofturning a blind eye to one’s own insufficiencies. The archivists (themselvesrepresenting self-effacement) pick up on this facet of Fonty’s character.When, at the height of his authorial performance, he is ignored by theintruding image of Grass, they comment: ‘Fonty, der beispielhaft stillge-halten hatte, wird sich seinen Teil gedacht haben; auch er neigte dazu, wasihm nicht paßte, zu übersehen und tatsächliche Lücken mit den Kindernseiner Laune aufzufüllen’ (WF, 592). Indeed, throughout the text Fontyhas been the champion of the imaginary and the greater freedom it allows.His own tendency to slip into the gap between fact and fiction is in facthighly reminiscent of many of Grass’s own comments on the value of the‘Lügengeschichte’.16 In many ways, then, Fonty’s ignominious disappear-ance at the end of the text may be read in line with Grass’s own developingaesthetic of authorship. Consciously thematizing the way in which Fontysets about disappearing from the archivists’ narrative, Grass, himself alreadyovertly displaced from his text, experiments further with the concept andconsequences of displacing the text’s author figure.

‘Nur, indem wir Blatt auf Blatt füllten [. . .] war er [. . .] nahgerückt’: the author as absentee

There has been some literary-critical discussion of how Fonty accedesto authorship throughout the text, gradually emancipating himself fromFontane to the point where the great author is relegated to the status ofcharacter within Fonty’s own counter-narrative.17 It is certainly true thatthe archivists’ narrative builds up to Fonty’s speech in the Kulturbrauerei,which itself shows Fonty perfectly controlling and manipulating both hisaudience and Fontane’s life and works. It is questionable, however, to whatextent this really represents a significant change in Fonty’s character. It ismade clear right from the start that Fonty’s public reputation was built onhis skill in recasting Fontane and his characters in contemporary society,and there are certainly earlier points in the text when Fonty writes inde-pendently of his literary mentor, whether in his private correspondence or

16 Interview with Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmen derTübinger Poetik-Dozentur’, in Günter Grass, Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung &Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999), 50.

17 See Heinz, ‘Ein weites Feld und Oral History’, 33–4 on this point.


in the commissioned historical narrative of the Haus der Ministerien. Hisillness, furthermore, is cured by constructing a type of Fonty biographythat exists in parallel to Fontane’s childhood memoirs, and this is effectivelong before its actual public performance. Fonty’s strategy in each case is toobjectify the original Fontane texts, incorporating their basic structures andideas into his own, adapted narrative. His own text expands on the originalmaterial, so that each authorial act—and not merely the final Kulturbrauereiperformance—shows him both taking on Fontane and emancipating him-self from him. Fontane is ever-present in the works of Fonty, but he is alsoalways continuously being replaced. In many respects, the relationship canbe summed up right from the start as ‘Fontane is dead. Long live Fonty!’

Fonty is thus always acting out the role of replacement in the archivists’narrative. Stepping into Fontane’s shoes, he fulfils their need, as self-defined‘Fußnotensklaven’, for an author who carries responsibility for their narra-tive. The role of replacement author, however, is, as should be evident bynow, a high-profile one, and it is not necessarily one that Fonty wants toplay on a long-term basis. Where an author such as Uwe Johnson takes itupon himself to create an idealized image to which he will try to conformat all costs, Fonty, always also the simple Theo Wuttke, feels the strain ofconstant public exposure. As Symons points out, he is himself a somewhatdisreputable figure who is in no rush either to face up to his own moralfailings or to expose the collective guilt of the regimes he has served.18

Perhaps not least because of this, he makes several attempts to escape theintertextual field that his archivist narrators have him ceaselessly pacing.Two attempts are foiled by his conscience, or shadow, Hoftaller, who sees itas Fonty’s duty to stay within the regime, continuing to supplement (add to,support) both family life and state activities. The third and final attempt,however, succeeds, as Fonty manages to make his way out of the archivists’and Hoftaller’s field of vision and ‘escape’ with Madeleine to France. Theway in which this is described is highly symbolic, for leaving both Germanyand the narrative amounts to leaving his mortal, everyday existence behind.This is well documented by the intermediary stages of his journey.

In the scene at the funfair, Fonty slips into several different positions(a place on the roller-coaster, a place on the Ferris wheel), each of whichmaintain the circular metaphors of the text so far (the pater-noster lift,rowing round the lake, the circular diving and resurfacing of the great

18 Symons discusses this in quite some detail, commenting acerbically, ‘His own way ofcoming to terms with his own and his country’s past is to disappear with his granddaughterto France, which as a personal redemption leaves much to be resolved’, Symons, Room forManoeuvre, 92.


crested grebe).19 We see his body once more filling in a space on a cir-cular template of replacement. This time, however, the grandiose moralelement has been replaced by unadulterated pleasure, and Fonty’s body is,in contradistinction to the scene at the Neuruppin monument, admirablyup to the task (Hoftaller specifically notes how he and Madeleine ‘seienaber nicht torkelig ausgestiegen’, WF, 774). The next report from Fontyfinds him physically removed to the same kind of fixed point as that fromwhich the Fontane monument surveyed the surrounding countryside. Ithas been updated, however, to the television tower in Berlin, a modern-dayEast German cultural monument that reaches out to a far greater audience.Fonty has not just an ageing spy and a couple of authors at his feet, but thewhole of Germany. With the third postcard, he sends a picture of HenriIV’s death mask, along with what the archivists’ themselves describe as a‘vieldeutige[n] Satz’: ‘Zweifelsohne werde ich mir selbst nun zum jüngstenKind meiner Laune’ (WF, 779). Not only does the reference to whimsyindicate both release from former socio-political constraints and a moveinto dotage (death of the mortal man), it may also be read on a meta-textuallevel, for it strongly echoes the earlier prominent statement ‘auch [Fonty]neigte dazu, was ihm nicht paßte, zu übersehen und tatsächliche Lückenmit den Kindern seiner Laune aufzufüllen’ (WF, 592). Read in this context,the statement becomes highly self-reflexive, as Fonty, increasingly removedfrom the socio-political contingencies of his existence, begins to make him-self, the quirky emulator of authors with aspirations to immortality, into hisown favourite narrative subject. Effectively, his long-distance textual visionshrinks back in on himself as he, like the Fontane monument, becomesmore and more distanced from the world in which the real-life authorlived. In his final communication, his location is almost impossible to makeout. The green hills merge into the kind of eternal blue landscape withwhich Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig ends, while the postage markis unreadable (although the stamp gives it away). Fonty sends his wordsfrom a ‘kolossal menschenleere Gegend’ (WF, 781) where the favouredGünter-Grass mushrooms and his Sophie-like granddaughter are his onlycompany, bringing to the narrative a final promise of closure: ‘ich jedenfallssehe dem Feld ein Ende ab . . . ’ (WF, 781). ‘Weitsicht’ is now nothing morethan a matter of meteorological visibility (‘bei stabilem Wetter ist Weitsichtmöglich’, WF, 781), for the infinity offered by intertextual vision has, with

19 Literary critical discussion of these and similar images is both summarized and developedin Gerd Labroisse, ‘Zur Sprach-Bildlichkeit in Günter Grass’ Ein weites Feld ’, in Das Sprach-Bild als textuelle Interaktion, ed. Gerd Labroisse and Dick van Stekelenberg, AmsterdamerBeiträge zur neueren Germanistik, 45 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 347–79.


this final sentence, been firmly countered. Now that he has finally removedhimself from the process of substitution, he can stop his eternal pacingthrough the narrative. Instead, he can rest in peace as an authorial absentpresence, a gap which is not a gap and which others will exhaust themselvesimpossibly trying to fill. This, indeed, is what the archivists, faced with theirloss, begin to do. The end of the narrative, the closure of the field, becomesits beginning:

Wir [waren] sicher, ins Bodenlose gefallen zu sein, weil uns mit Fonty derUnsterbliche verlassen hatte. Alle Papiere wie tot. [. . .] Nur Fußnoten noch undÖdnis unbelebt. Leere, wohin man griff, allenfalls sekundäres Geräusch. Es war, alssei uns jeglicher Sinn abhanden gekommen. Fonty, der gute Geist, fehlte. Und nur,indem wir Blatt auf Blatt füllten, ihn allein oder samt Schatten beschworen, bis erwiederum zu Umrissen kam, wurde er kenntlich, besuchte er uns mit Blumen undZitaten, war er, ganz gestrig, der von Liebermanns Hand gezeichnete Greis, nahgerückt, doch mit Fernblick schon, um uns abermals zu entschwinden. (WF, 780)

The metaphorical ‘death’ of the visible figure of textual authority is thecrisis that, as in Die Rättin, propels the narrative. The narrators, just likeDie Rättin’s autobiographical narrator who finds himself abandoned tothe sound of his ‘Eigengeräusch’, feel that they too are losing their mindsas they are doomed to the empty echoes of their ‘sekundäres Geräusch’.Both respond by writing to evoke the past, by teasing out the gaps intheir textual archive and trying to counter the disengaged ‘Fernblick’ ofthe absent author, whose concerns no longer seem to be with their earthlyexistence. Indeed, a shift on the part of the author from a kind of tex-tual ‘Weitsicht’, as witnessed in both Fontane and Fonty’s writings, to adisengaged ‘Fernblick’—the gaze of the bronze statue and, now, of thearchivists’ monumentalized image of Fonty—is the slippage in perspectivethat actually justifies the anonymous narrators in the first place. Theirattempt at writing is a last-ditch attempt to save the absent author fromoblivion. The lack of a controlling author figure within their uncheckedtext is both the structural trauma and overriding theme that conditionstheir narrative. Writing is thus presented here as a process of replacement,an attempt to cover up the loss of authorship by continuously gesturingtowards the author, and it is for this reason that the archivists’ narrativetechnique consists solely in reworking, doubling-up, and reporting. Allgenuine creative power has been lost.

Such a textual aesthetics as described above may be construed in termsof a kind of textual ‘death of the author’, but it also has a clear socio-political relevance. Ein weites Feld was written at a time when the role


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

IM KREBSGANG

In the 1956 meeting between Benn and Brecht depicted in Mein Jahrhun-dert, both authors come to discuss their own deaths. Brecht describes howhe has written into his will the manner in which he wishes his funeral to beconducted, causing Benn to comment ‘Vorsorge ist gut. Wer aber schütztuns vor unseren Epigonen?’ (MJ, 229). I have already discussed in relationto Die Rättin and to a certain extent Zunge zeigen how Grass has on previousoccasions attempted to take control of his own textual death and consideran absolute loss of textual authority. The additional concern about not justlife after the author, but other authors after the author is a later one thatgains expression in the Novelle Im Krebsgang. The relationship between the

20 Particularly illustrative of this point is Grass’s decision in 1994 to publish a vol-ume of his collected political speeches ranging from 1961 to 1993, Angestiftet, Partei zuergreifen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1994). While the speeches themselves point to his unfailingcommitment to political activism, his foreword comments glumly on the present situation:‘Schweigend wird Politik hingenommen; die Bürger suchen Distanz. Und viele Schriftstellerhaben sich einen feuilletongerechten Maulkorb verpassen lassen’, 8 (reprinted as ‘Der Versuchöffentlicher Dreinrede’ (1994), in Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes,18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997–2002), XVI, 393–4, 394).


clear Grass author figure21 and his narrator, Paul Pokriefke, within this textis something that has hitherto received almost no serious literary criticalattention, with the overwhelming focus being instead on the socio-politicalsignificance of the novel and its reception.22 Elizabeth Dye is so far theonly critic to my knowledge who has paused at all over the relationship,considering the particular importance that Grass attached to it in interviewwhen he stated:

Reizvoll war für mich der im Buch mitschwingende Streit zwischen dem fiktivenErzähler und dem Autor, meiner Person. Ich halte das Ganze für eine Novelle, erbesteht darauf, einen Bericht zu schreiben.23

Dye follows the immediate context of Grass’s statement, where he is dis-cussing the tension between the factual and the fictitious strands of thenarrative, and suggests that the relationship between narrator and authorbecomes strained not least because Grass gives conflicting messages as to

21 Some critics have been more careful in linking the narrator’s ‘Arbeitgeber’ directly toGrass. However, rather as in Der Butt or Die Rättin, the figure is given so many clear Grassattributes (including authorship of some of his most famous novels) that I see no point insplitting hairs: the figure is supposed to be interpreted as an image of Grass. My approachwould seem to be backed up by the progression in Stuart Taberner’s article, ‘ “Normalization”and the New Consensus on the Nazi Past: Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang and the Problem ofWartime Suffering’, Oxford German Studies, 31 (2002), 161–86. Taberner starts off keepingGrass and the ‘Arbeitgeber’ separate (e.g. 171), but soon enough elides the two, calling the‘Arbeitgeber’ ‘the fictional Günter Grass’, 176.

22 Taberner, for example, places the novel into the context of the debates about Germannormalization: Taberner, ‘ “Normalization” and the New Consensus’. Stephan Braese, ‘ “Totezahlen keine Steuern”: Flucht und Vertreibung in Günter Grass’ Im Krebsgang und Hans-Ulrich Treichels’ Der Verlorene’, Gegenwartsliteratur, 2 (2003), 171–96, and Nicholas Martin,‘Rocking the Boat—Victims, Perpetrators and Günter Grass’, Forum for Modern LanguageStudies, 41 (2005), 187–99, also seek to evaluate the political significance of the work, whileAleida Assmann considers the import of its subject matter in terms of cultural memory: AleidaAssmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past’,in David Midgley and Christian J. Emden, eds, Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousnessin the German-Speaking World Since 1500 (Oxford: Lang, 2004), 19–37. More recently, somecritics have attempted to distance themselves from the novel’s political significance, expresslyexamining it instead as an aesthetic construct: Jill E. Twark, ‘Landscape, Seascape, Cyberspace:Narrative Strategies to Dredge up the Past in Günter Grass’s Novella Im Krebsgang ’, Gegenwart-sliteratur, 3 (2004), 143–68; Dye, ‘ “Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört”: Gunter Grass’s ImKrebsgang ’, German Life and Letters, 57 (2004), 472–87. In both cases, however, these criticsoffer their literary analysis still very much under the influence of the socio-political debatesthat have so far dominated the work’s reception: Dye’s considerations are woven into an overallargument that returns us to the ‘perpetrator / victim’ dialectic, while Twark tries to make allher various literary observations fit with a curiously over-determined political understandingof ‘Vergegenkunft’ that to my mind misunderstands both the term and the text.

23 Grass in interview with Steidl-Verlag, ‘In meiner Geschichte findet der immerwährendeUntergang der “Gustloff ” im Internet statt’ (2002), www.steidl.de/grass/a2_3_gespraech.html,last accessed 22 June 2005.

www.steidl.de/grass/a2_3_gespraech.html


the exact style in which Paul should present his material.24 This, however,only touches the surface of the complex relations between author andnarrator as presented within the text. When placed in the greater context ofGrass’s work, the way in which Grass manipulates this relationship providesa fascinating conclusion to the investigation of authorship that I havediscerned in his work so far. Here, in contrast to Die Rättin, the Grass figurewillingly declares himself dead to literature (he is described as someonewho has ‘sich leergeschrieben’, IK, 30 and ‘sich müdegeschrieben’, IK, 99).Overtly displacing himself from the text, he actively seeks out a substituteautobiographical narrator to take his place, as Paul Pokriefke reports: ‘Nunsei es zu spät für ihn. Ersatzweise habe er mich zwar nicht erfunden, abernach langer Sucherei auf den Listen der Überlebenden wie eine Fundsacheentdeckt’ (IK, 77–8).25 Where the autobiographical narrator in Die Rättinwas constantly trying to assert his life and works against the rat counter-narrator, in Im Krebsgang he not only willingly reaches out to a youngersuccessor, but actually needs Paul to help him fill in the gap in his ownliterary legacy:

Das nagt an dem Alten: Eigentlich, sagt er, wäre es Aufgabe seiner Generationgewesen, dem Elend der ostpreußischen Flüchtlinge Ausdruck zu geben [. . .] Dochnun glaubt der alte Mann, der sich müdegeschrieben hat, in mir jemanden gefundenzu haben, der an seiner Stelle—‘stellvertretend’, sagt er—gefordert sei, über denEinfall der sowjetischen Armeen ins Reich, über Nemmersdorf und die Folgen zuberichten. (IK, 99)

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

24 Dye, ‘Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört’.25 The idea that the narrator was not ‘erfunden’ but ‘gefunden’ links back to Pilenz’s

statement in Katz und Maus, ‘Ich [. . .] muß nun schreiben. Selbst wären wir beide erfunden,ich müßte dennoch. Der uns erfand, von berufswegen, zwingt mich’: Günter Grass, Katz undMaus, in Werkausgabe, IV, 6. This comparison highlights well the difference in the authorialand narrative positions staked out by the two texts. While in Katz und Maus the authoris explicitly described as engaged in his career (‘von berufswegen’) and therefore creatingcharacters at whim to populate his text, in Im Krebsgang this career is over and ownershipof the text left open.


and Brecht in Mein Jahrhundert: in an effort to pre-empt history, he createshis own literary epigone.

The successor on whom he settles, Paul Pokriefke, certainly providesmalleable material. He, in line with the overwhelming majority of Grass’sfirst-person narrators, willingly describes himself as a failure, and his lackof desire to write is directly linked to his negative self-image. Againstthis, Grass the author sets about encouraging him. He posits that Paul’sbackground is precisely what qualifies him to take on an authorial role:‘das Herkommen meiner verkorksten Existenz sei ein einmaliges Ereignis,exemplarisch und deshalb erzählenswert’ (IK, 30). Placing a moral burdenon his shoulders, the author hopes to inspire Paul to use his personalcircumstances, à la Günter Grass, as a kind of springboard to help hisown and subsequent generations engage properly with recent history.26

Paul’s mother, Tulla, had in fact been trying a similar approach throughoutPaul’s life, but to no avail. For years he feared that telling the harsh cir-cumstances of his birth aboard the sinking Wilhelm Gustloff as his motherfled from the Soviet Army in 1945 would see him branded a right-wingsympathizer. In 1996, however, the time is finally ripe. Now in his fifties,Paul comes across the Neo-Nazi propaganda website, www.blutzeuge.de,and, more bemused than shocked by its extreme right-wing account of theGustloff tragedy, he feels the first stirrings of responsibility for the material.When he subsequently discovers that the mind behind ‘diese[. . .] kackbraunaufgehende[. . .] Saat’ (IK, 32) is in fact that of his own son, his personalimplication in historical events becomes undeniable. Not only has he failedto deal with his own difficult beginnings, he has also failed to pass on aproper account of them to his son. Although he certainly does not relishdelving into his past, he can finally see the relevance of it. Fortuitouslyenough, it is at this very same point in time that Grass the author begins tocast around for a suitable, morally responsible successor.

Paul, a typical failed 1968er, thus begins to rethink his own position asfigure of authority both within a text and within his own life. In order tobecome the author of his own life, he must first acknowledge his failings:‘Wenn ich jetzt beginnen muß, mich selber abzuwickeln, wird alles, wasmir schiefgegangen ist, dem Untergang eines Schiffes eingeschrieben sein’(IK, 7). Not only did his failure to take on the apparently male responsibilityof narrating Tulla’s story cause relations with his mother to be strained,

26 See Assmann, ‘Four Formats of Memory’, for a very convincing account of how thedifferent generations in Im Krebsgang are engaged in communicating different responses to thehistorical material which equate to different kinds of memory.

www.blutzeuge.de


his subsequent negative self-image as a ‘Versager’ (IK, 43) meant that therelationship to his wife and son soon became practically non-existent. Notjust the author, but also the man has so far been lacking all practicalauthority to take up what would appear to be his rightful place vis-à-vis thehistorical material that forms both his text and his life. With the beginningof his narrative, however, he comes to represent the Günter Grass view thatit is the responsibility of those who were involved in the war to continueto communicate its lessons to subsequent generations. As the text proceeds,working its way in an interlocking, crablike motion through the nationaland personal strands of his story, Paul is shown gradually acceding to a typeof responsible authorship particularly associated with Grass, the politicalmodel developed in my analysis of Das Treffen in Telgte and further exploredwith reference to Grass’s public speeches throughout his career. The way inwhich he sets about making good his previous failures, as both father andauthor, is thereby elevated into one of the central strands of the text.

Indeed, Paul’s authorial apprenticeship carries a number of definingcharacteristics which are made all the more clear by his two foils in thetext, the Grass author and his son Konny. At the outset, he is keen to divertattention away from his ‘bißchen Ich’ (IK, 7) at any opportunity, equatingautobiographical narration with a destructive kind of self-revelation (‘michselber abwickeln’ is reminiscent of Fonty’s search in Ein weites Feld for aword with less negative connotations than ‘abwickeln’ to describe the workcarried out by the Treuhand organization). Putting his journalistic skillsto good use, he focuses for as long as possible on the historical facts andfigures of the Wilhelm Gustloff, so that eventually Grass has to interveneand force him to proceed to his own implication in events: ‘ich darf keineweiteren Stories erzählen. Jetzt wird mir geraten, mich kurz zu fassen.[. . .] ich [solle] mich bescheiden, zur Sache kommen. Er meint, zu meinerGeburt.’ (IK, 139). However reluctant he may be, though, Paul offers afull and balanced account of the recent history that is directly relevantto his story. This contrasts with his son Konny’s presentation of the samematerial, which amounts to the kind of irresponsible authorship that onemight more generally associate, as Dye suggests, with tabloid journalism,and which was the direct inspiration for his father’s counter-narrative.27 InKonny’s Internet pages, facts are manipulated into propaganda and postedin an untraceable manner, claiming to be from a large collective.28 Where

27 ‘Whereas Paul, and also Grass through strict use of the pared-down novella form,attempt to adhere to the detailing of concrete facts, Konny favours tabloid-style sensation-alism’: Dye, ‘Weil die Geschichte nicht aufhört’, 481.

28 Twark goes into some detail on this point: ‘Landscape, Seascape, Cyberscape’, 158–60.


the father fills in the entire picture, his son cuts and pastes what suits him,and where the father, albeit grudgingly, draws attention to his own flawedplace in history, his son dissembles his own identity behind collective Neo-Nazi ideals and heroes. Konny might be an enthusiastic author, but Paul isa far more responsible one, prepared at all times to be kept on the straightand narrow by his Grassian conscience.

Indeed, Paul’s absolute subservience to his nagging authorial ‘old man’(‘Alter’) provides a surprising contrast to his repeated wish to have beenborn either without parents or with a father, Heinz Schön, who wouldhave done all the narrating for him. He not only allows the author to‘nail’ him to a position of authority that he has hitherto put much effortinto avoiding (‘Jemand, der keine Ausreden mag, nagelt mich auf meinenBeruf fest’, IK, 7), he also unquestioningly accepts all the author’s literaryadvice, periodically repeating it to his readers in quite some detail. Indeed,although relations between the two are hardly warm, Paul, unlike Harmand Dörte Peters in Kopfgeburten or Oskar in Die Rättin, never complainsabout or rebels against the rather dictatorial interventions on the part ofhis ‘Arbeitgeber’. Instead, he complies with all the stern pedagogue’s wishes,to the point of becoming a ‘Ghostwriter’ (IK, 30). In the context of Paul’svery personal narrative, such a term may initially seem a little odd, giventhat Paul’s own character, both as narrative subject and object, is very muchon display within the text. As author, however, it is in fact quite fitting.Unlike Grass, Paul sees his literary activity as simple paid employmentrather than an all-consuming existential calling. He consequently has nodesire to write in his own style and take on a fully developed authorialrole within the text, a position which would be sealed by placing his nameon the book’s cover. In fact, Paul is so in thrall to his authorial ‘employer’throughout that in many ways his own text is nothing but a derivative formof his master’s previous works. The fact that Paul’s very story draws directlyon Grass’s former characters (Tulla Pokriefke, and also, fleetingly, HarryLiebenau from Katz und Maus and Hundejahre) thereby turns the wholenarrative of Im Krebsgang into something of a Grass pastiche. Tellingly, theonly other text where former protagonists are written back into the narrativewith major roles is Die Rättin, a text that experimented with the death ofGrass’s autobiographical narrator, just one step short of the experimentationhere with the author’s public persona.

The idea that Paul’s authorial role is itself derivative, however, is madeparticularly clear at the end of the Novelle. Overwhelmed by the show-down with his son in prison, Paul is directed by ‘jemand—er, in dessenNamen ich krebsend vorankam’ (IK, 216) to look online for the ending to


his story. When he comes across a new Neo-Nazi website that now idolizesnot Wilhelm Gustloff but Konrad Pokriefke, the apprentice epigone isquick to draw his Grass-style conclusion: ‘Das hört nicht auf. Nie hörtdas auf ’ (IK, 216). In the context of my argument, this line, given suchprominence as to be placed at the very end of the Novelle, is strongly remi-niscent of the moment of high kitsch in Kopfgeburten, when Harm, anotherderivative figure, cries out, ‘Das hört nicht auf. Nie, sag ich dir, nie wird dasaufhören’ (K , 99). Harm’s reference is to the fate of Sisyphus, a fate withwhich he, as a self-styled political reformer, is at that moment identifying.This is immediately ridiculed by the autobiographical narrator as a matterof naive self-aggrandisement. Such self-aggrandisement is, however, equallysomething that Grass himself has been charged with, particularly on thepolitical stage of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a Günter Grass epigonePaul is thereby enacting Grass’s public image, the supposed essence to whichGrass has been popularly shrunk: a strong moral stance on the past and arather unappealing tendency to play Cassandra in the present. By the endof the text he has certainly earned the Grass name in which his narrativewas constructed.

This last point concerning authorship and individuality leads towardsthe more general consideration of authorship that underlies Grass’s ownself-presentation in Im Krebsgang. The final reference to the Grass author,who started out on the first page of the Novelle as ‘jemand, der nicht ichbin’ (IK, 7) only to end on its last as ‘jemand—er, in dessen Namen ichkrebsend vorankam’, stresses the reduction of the author to his most famousattribute—his name. The kind of public display of the author’s all-roundcreative abilities as embodied by Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert hashere been swapped for a drastically reduced image of the author in linewith Foucault’s discussion of the author function as a construct designedfor classificatory purposes. If the epigone can get his simulation right, hewill be able to pass himself off as the famous author. Of course, in thecase of Im Krebsgang it is ultimately Grass who has achieved this literarypastiche of himself, and so his name quite rightly sells the book. In so doing,however, he has highlighted the innate reproducibility of his own authorialimage, and thereby consciously set out the blueprint for others to follow.In developing the position of somebody trying, albeit in a rather workadaymanner, to write like him, he not only pushes his own literary authorialrole into the margins of the text, but also consciously thematizes the wayin which this image of authorship is perceived in its wider socio-politicalcontext. Constructing a text in the manner of Grass is presented nowheremore clearly than in Im Krebsgang as a conscious political act. It would thus


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

CONCLUSION

In both the texts that formed the main subject of this chapter, Grass has setabout mediating his public image through the observations and interpreta-tions of others. In Ein weites Feld, the description of his appearance at themonument was in itself only a very brief intermezzo in the narrative proper.It fitted into a much greater overall consideration of how authors relate togrand authorial images, however, and is given a key position within thechain of replacement developed within the archivists’ report. In this, Grassmay be seen to be abstracting from his own personal situation to that offamous authors in general. Indeed, this corresponds to the underlying para-dox I have discerned in a number of Grass’s more recent works. While theworks themselves have demonstrated an increasing tendency to underminethe authorial role within them, when considered in their entirety, physicalas well as textual, they appear to signify a rather monumental conceptionof the author as proud master of not only all disciplines but also much ofrecent German history. On one level, then, Grass is writing himself into theauthorial hall of fame, allying himself with such authors as Fontane. Onanother, however, he is acutely aware of the various contrasting readingsand appropriations to which authors are subjected both within and aftertheir lifetime. These readings can ultimately turn the author into little morethan a textual object. In the later works there is an increased sensitivity tothe role of both contemporaneous and successive generations in shapingnot just the author’s image, but the author himself. In contrast to the earlierworks, the reader is no longer a mute aspect of literary production withwhich the author calculates when trying to condition his text’s performanceof meaning, but also a co-author of sorts who may or may not do as theauthor desires. This point is brought out by Im Krebsgang, where Grasseffectively tries to create the first epigone who writes in what he perceives tobe the Günter Grass mould. For Paul, his image of the author comes first,and this conditions his own authorial role within the text.

Displacing the authorial position within the text, whether it is hisown author figure or a thematized authorial role in general, allows Grassto introduce new voices that reinterpret the author’s literary and socio-political achievements. This introduces to Grass’s writing a real sense ofthe reader and the role he or she can play in constructing authorship. The


unflattering way in which these new critical voices present the old master—the archivists note his physical decrepitude while Paul repeatedly portrayshim as a nagging old man—introduces a considerable deal of humourinto the texts. This is itself, of course, manipulated by the author to hisadvantage. Creating his apprentice epigone, Paul, and endowing him witha rather ambiguous attitude towards the famous old man is a rhetorical trickby means of which Grass manages to convey his own socio-political stand-point. By mixing his strong political views with apparent self-detraction, hehopes to appease his long-standing critics. However, Ein weites Feld and ImKrebsgang also provide a further twist in Grass’s consideration of authorshipwithin literature. By focusing on how others, readers and budding authorsalike, construct the author in line with their image of him, he places atthe heart of authorship an ironic aesthetics of replacement. Authors areeffectively reduced to their great name, and this name, which symbolizesin a highly reduced form the essence of their written output and publicreception, ultimately comes to represent simply a position that others cansubsequently fill. The great author is thus a style and a stance that canbe emulated, and if he or she is an author of any consequence, then theywill be emulated. This is what being an author means: taking on a role,on both the micro-level of the text and the macro-level of society. Rightfrom the beginning then, authorship is predicated on its own image. Thereal challenge of being an author is not simply slotting in with this image,which would produce only epigones, but rather learning to negotiate it inorder to produce texts of genuine literary merit and fire debates of realsocio-political import.

Conclusion

This study has shown in detail how Grass has repeatedly addressed issuesof authorship throughout his career. Propelled into the media limelight byhis initial literary success, he quickly gained practical experience not onlyof how his own authorial identity was constructed in the media-led publicsphere, but also of the way he could manipulate this public image to hisadvantage. Profiling himself in the political sphere, he drew on popularconceptions of his person and mixed them with past models of authorialengagement which have lived on in public memory. The glamour of his ownperson coupled with the intellectual weight of these predecessors allowedGrass to develop a political model of authorship that was unprecedentedin recent German history both in terms of flamboyancy and long-termcommitment. Over the course of the past forty years, he has repeatedlyreconfigured this model, manipulating his public image in order to respondto the changing demands of the public sphere and the role that authors areexpected to play within it.

This practical experience of negotiating public constructions of his iden-tity has fed directly into Grass’s writing. Starting with the ‘Danzig Trilogy’,Grass has always cultivated a particularly self-aware style of prose writing,with narrators apt to draw attention to their fictional constructions andown constructed nature within the text. From Aus dem Tagebuch einerSchnecke onwards, however, he begins to place himself in the position offirst-person narrator, merging issues of identity construction with regard tohis own person with those pertaining to the literary text. The self-reflexiveform of his writing enables Grass to re-enact in literature the process ofidentity construction that he experienced first hand in the public sphere.This re-enactment encourages reflection on underlying existential questionsof authorship—who or what ultimately controls authorial production /production of the author, where are the limits of the biographical subject?—which Grass explores in the textual aesthetics of Aus dem Tagebuch einerSchnecke, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus, Der Butt, and Die

Conclusion 177

Rättin. Negotiating his public authorial image in literature thereby offersGrass the space to reflect on the aesthetic strategies underpinning his nego-tiation of the wider public sphere. This textual model of authorship entersinto dialogue with the political model, providing Grass with two opposingideals that mutually hold each other in check.

As Grass’s literary career has developed, however, he has increasinglybegun to distance himself from over-identification with either model. Inthe later works Zunge zeigen, Mein Jahrhundert, Ein weites Feld, and ImKrebsgang he relinquishes absolute control of the authorial position, show-ing instead, in Zunge zeigen and Mein Jahrhundert, how the text can bothcreate and destroy the author and, in Ein weites Feld and Im Krebsgang,investigating the role of the reader in conditioning the author’s publicimage. In these last three works Grass removes himself from the first-personnarrator position, opening up the texts to a thematic analysis of authors intheir wider socio-cultural context. Such a move allows ironic distance to betaken from the existential issues discerned in the earlier texts. Analysing theactual impact of his textual and political models on both authors’ socio-cultural standing in the world and their position within the text brings toGrass’s understanding of authorship an increasing sense of the author as anironic construct.

Recognizing the author’s lack of absolute integrity, both in the sense ofdiscrete individuality (the author is constructed in all discourses) and moralinfallibility (the very constructed nature of the author means that he willecho the blind spots of the discourses in which he is constructed), accountsfor the humour that pervades much of Grass’s exploration of authorship andeases his own negotiation of the public sphere. This ease has grown withage and experience, although Grass’s masterful presentation of authorshipin Das Treffen in Telgte shows that the key ideas displayed in his œuvrewere familiar to the author from a comparatively early date. Likewise,although his humour may now be more deliberately self-deprecatory, ageneral levity has always informed his public self-presentation, both inhis political interventions and his literary work. When analysing Grass’sresponse to questions of authorship throughout his career it is thereforeperhaps better to speak less of a clear development across his œuvre thanof different priorities at different times. His particularly personal takeon authorship—however his ideas are formulated, they are almost alwaysmediated through the experiences of his own person—means that the wideraesthetic considerations to which his texts give rise are always also locatedin the socio-political context in which he operates. This is nowhere better

178 Conclusion

demonstrated than in his recent autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel(2006).1

Although the work does not actually take as its subject Grass’s adultwriting life, his lengthy attempt to reconstruct the actions and mentalityof his young self between the ages of twelve and thirty-two is indebted tohis politically conditioned self-understanding as one of Germany’s leadingauthors. His motivation in writing the autobiography would appear toreside in trying to locate, understand, and atone for the moral failings ofhis younger self by making them public. This is to be done through apainstakingly careful process of remembering, acted out in the literary textand summed up in the metaphor of peeling an onion: ‘Die Zwiebel hat vieleHäute. Es gibt sie in Mehrzahl. Kaum gehäutet, erneuert sie sich. Gehackttreibt sie Tränen. Erst beim Häuten spricht sie wahr’ (HZ, 10). This rathergrand notion of reconstructing the self in such a manner as to lead to apublic display of remorse and uncover personal (and possibly even wider,public) truths is undermined, however, by the author’s younger self. Heimmediately protests against both the crude literary methods and underly-ing self-satisfaction of an author who is trying to lord it over his helplesscharacter. According to the writer, the young boy ‘verweigert Auskünfte,will sich nicht als mein frühes Selbstbild ausbeuten lassen. Er spricht mir dasRecht ab, ihn, wie er sagt, “fertigzumachen”, und zwar “von oben herab”’(HZ, 37). If the contemporary author embodies a politically informedimage of authorship, the troublesome young boy may be understood asa figure of textual play in the work. Not only does he refuse to cooperatewith the older author figure and resist all moral judgement (‘[e]r weicht miraus, will nicht beurteilt, verurteilt werden’, HZ, 37), he also comes to standfor everything that is unknowable and elusive about the authorial self asit is reproduced in literature. In this, he functions less like a younger selfthan as a foil for the literary author. The writing subject draws picture afterpicture of his younger counterpart, yet he fails to root his contemporaryself in any one clear image. Instead, towards the end of his account, he isforced to acknowledge the limitations of his public project: ‘Die Zwiebelverweigert sich. [ . . . ] Und auch mich selbst sehe ich nur als eine vonvielen Skizzen, entfernt ähnlich dem Original’ (HZ, 340). His youngerself is ‘nicht einzuholen’ (HZ, 37), and although this does not prevent theautobiographical subject from cataloguing what he can remember of hisyouth and lamenting the young boy’s failure to take a stance that would

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

Conclusion 179

be much more befitting of him now, the degree of understanding reachedbetween the two remains distinctly unsatisfactory.

Such a sense of dissatisfaction is in fact inherent to Grass’s autobiograph-ical project. Trying to do the correct political thing and square his formerbehaviour with the expectations placed on a national figurehead amountsto bringing Grass’s public political model of authorship to a thoroughlytextual understanding of the author. Autobiography studies have taughtus that all reconstructions of the self are fictional, while the reading ofGrass offered in this study has made clear that the fictional realm, at leastas far as Grass is concerned, is dominated by the ‘Lügengeschichte’ wherereality, just like the skin of an onion, exists in the plural and refuses toyield any one definitive self-image of the author. Consequently, while theonion in Grass’s autobiography started as a metaphor for the composition ofmemory and the process of remembering, it quickly shifts into a metaphorfor the author himself. Often called ‘Peer Gynt’ by his mother, Grasstransposes his unsuccessful experience of trying to get to the bottom ofhis character onto the famous scene of the onion in Peer Gynt, referringto this character’s ‘Lebenszwiebel[, die] am Ende, nachdem Haut auf Hautgeschält war, keinen sinnstiftenden Kern barg’ (HZ, 433). Aus dem Tagebucheiner Schnecke and Der Butt both dealt in ironic terms with this idea of theskin being shed, presenting it as a misleading masquerade on the part ofthe author who was, in fact, nothing but skin, a self-styled constructionwithin the text. His different self-images corresponded to skins that hemanipulated accordingly, just as here the different and not necessarilyinterconnected periods of his life correspond to layers of onion peel. Thecomparison emphasizes above all the coincidental nature of Grass’s person,formed entirely from sub-strata upon sub-strata of lived experience that canonly be re-imagined within the plurality of fiction and never exhaustivelyverified in fact. Furthermore, peeling back the layers may reveal muchabout the author’s life and times, but this only confirms the suspicionthat the author, like any other individual, is nothing but the untraceableproduct of chance circumstances. For Grass, trying to get to the core ofhis identity, even within clear political parameters, is first and foremostan aesthetic process of self-construction that feeds directly into both lit-erary constructions of authorship and the media-led construction of theauthor’s public image. Not even he can circumvent the dictates of textualplay here.

Grass’s autobiography thus brings home in its own metaphorical termsthe main point made throughout this study: while Grass is perhaps bestknown for a political understanding of authorship, his real accomplishment

180 Conclusion

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

Select Bibliography

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

Works by Günter GrassMariazuehren (Munich: Bruckmann, 1973).In Kupfer, auf Stein (Göttingen: Steidl, 1986).Ausstellung anläßlich des 60. Geburtstages von Günter Grass, Hundert Zeichnungen:

1955 bis 1987: Katalog der Kunsthalle zu Kiel der Christian-Albrechts-Universität,ed. Jens Christian Jensen (Kiel, Kunsthalle zu Kiel und Schleswig-HolsteinerKunstverein, 1987).

Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden, ed. Volker Neuhas, 10 vols (Darmstadt: Luchterhand,1987).

Zunge zeigen (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1988).Skizzenbuch (Göttingen: Steidl, 1989).Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot (Frankfurt am Main:

Luchterhand, 1990).Totes Holz: Ein Nachruf (Göttingen: Steidl, 1990).Gegen die verstreichende Zeit: Reden, Aufsätze und Gespräche 1989–1991 (Hamburg:

Luchterhand, 1991).Vier Jahrzehnte: Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Steidl,

1991).Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1994).Werkausgabe, ed. Volker Neuhaus and Daniela Hermes, 18 vols (Göttingen: Steidl,

1997–2002).Fundsachen f ür Nichtleser (Göttingen: Steidl, 1997).Ohne die Feder zu wechseln: Zeichnungen, Druckgraphiken, Aquarelle, Skulpturen

(Göttingen: Steidl, 1997).Wort und Bild: Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung and Materialien, ed. Jürgen Wertheimer

(Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1999).Mein Jahrhundert [409 pp.] (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999).Fünf Jahrzehnte: Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (Göttingen: Welttag,

2001).

182 Bibliography

Fundsachen für Grass-Leser, ed. Karin Kiwus and Wolfgang Trautwein (Berlin:Günter-Grass-Archiv, Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste; Göttingen:Steidl, 2002).

‘The high price of freedom’, Guardian, 7 May 2005, Review section, 4–5.Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006).

Interviews with Günter Grass

ARNOLD, HEINZ LUDWIG, ‘Gespräche mit Günter Grass’, in Günter Grass, ed.Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 5th edn (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1978), 1–39.

CEPL-KAUFMANN, GETRUDE, ‘Ein Gegner der Hegelschen Geschichtsphiloso-phie’, in Grass, Werkausgabe in zehn Bänden (1987), X, ed. Klaus Stallbaum,106–20.

LENZ, SIEGFRIED, ‘Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit’, in Grass, Werkausgabe inzehn Bänden (1987), X, 255–81.

RADDATZ, FRITZ J., ‘Heute lüge ich lieber gedruckt’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, ZEIT-Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 7–18.

, ‘Ich bin ein lebenslustiger Pessimist’, in Fritz J. Raddatz, Günter Grass:Unerbittliche Freunde: Ein Kritiker, Ein Autor (Zürich: Arche, 2002), 86–98.

SPIEGEL, DER, ‘SIEGEN MACHT DUMM’, Der Spiegel, 25 August 2003, 140.,‘IN MEINER GESCHICHTE findet der immerwährende Untergang der

“Gustloff ” im Internet statt’, www.steidl.de/grass/a2_3_gespraech.html, lastaccessed 22 June 2005.

WERTHEIMER, JÜRGEN, ‘Werkstattgespräch: Seminar im Rahmen der TübingerPoetik-Dozentur’, in Grass, Wort und Bild (1999), 43–62.

Archive material

Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste [SAdK], Berlin, Günter-Grass-Archiv,no.168

SAdK, Berlin, no.169SAdK, Berlin, no.170SAdK, Berlin, no.171SAdK, Berlin, no.172SAdK, Berlin, no.173SAdK, Berlin, no.174SAdK, Berlin, no.375SAdK, Berlin, no.394SAdK, Berlin, no.407SAdK, Berlin, no.1758 [access currently denied]SAdK, Berlin, no.2081SAdK, Berlin, no.3613SAdK, Berlin, no.4280

www.steidl.de/grass/a2_3_gespraech.html

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Index

Abend 50absurd 24, 54–6, 89–94 passim, 94, 110,

112aesthetics 24, 31, 52, 84, 98, 151, 177,

179Albert, Heinrich 24Andersch, Alfred 17Angestiftet, Partei zu ergreifen 63angst 53, 110APO 46Arnim, Achim von 13Arnold, Heinz Ludwig 47art, artwork 115, 122–48 passim, 144–7

passimAsia 52, 84, 88, 94audience 41–2, 45, 61–2, 94, 114, 153,

163Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke 3, 7, 8,

65–7, 70–83 passim, 84, 94–5, 96, 97,101, 120, 121, 125, 131, 134, 156,176, 179

Ausgefragt 24Auschwitz 58, 77; see also Holocaustauthority 25–7, 34, 49, 51, 88, 106, 111,

121, 153–7, 167, 170–1, 172autobiography:

autobiographical material 65, 67, 74, 84autobiographical narrator 66, 71–4, 84,

93, 94, 125, 130, 169, 171literary genre 3–4, 66–8, 83, 119–20,

125, 130, 135, 178–9way of reading 68, 79see also diary

autofiction 68–70, 75, 79, 81, 83, 94,96–7, 131

Bachmann, Ingeborg 4‘Die Ballerina’ 110, 111Baltic 118; see also Mønbaroque 12, 13, 19, 29Baron, Ulrich 137Barthes, Roland 31–3, 36, 107Bauer Pickar, Gertrud 98Baumgart, Reinhard 13Becher, Johannes 16Beim Häuten der Zwiebel 4, 63, 178

Bengal 124Benjamin, Walter 82Benn, Gottfried 41, 60, 138, 139, 141,

143, 167, 169Berlin 40, 50, 57, 140, 152, 165Biermann, Wolf 51, 86, 141biography:

analytical approach 1, 6, 32, 33–4individual’s life 4, 6, 8, 58, 60, 64, 94,

96, 164, 176literary genre 1, 35, 47, 135, 153, 164

Birken, Sigmund von 26Die Blechtrommel 3, 8, 28, 30, 36, 38, 43,

96, 103, 119Böll, Heinrich 2, 4, 22, 51, 86Bombay 86Bonn 42Born, Nicholas 5branding, brand-name 3, 4, 5, 39, 48, 92Brandt, Willy 71, 140Brecht, Bertolt 16, 78, 138, 139, 141, 143,

167, 170Bremen 38Brentano, Clemens and Bettina 13Breuel, Birgit 141, 142Britain 1Brode, Hanspeter 6, 67Brockmann, Stephen 52Büchner, Georg 44, 52Burma 126Der Butt 4, 7, 12, 13, 50, 93, 95, 96–109

passim, 113, 115, 117, 120–1, 135,137, 176, 179

Calcutta 125, 128, 133, 134campaigning:

actual activity 3, 41–64 passim, 123, 173,176–7

literary theme 73, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87,94

Camus, Albert 55, 56, 89–91, 92, 93, 94capitalism 62Cassandra 136, 173Cepl-Kaufmann, Gertrude 39, 43, 44, 58,

67China 52, 86, 88

194 Index

CDU 44, 45cliché 86, 161; see also parodycoincidence, chance 158–9, 179communism 62correspondence, see letterscreative process 79, 85, 89–91, 93, 112,

125, 126–7, 131, 154Cuba 156Czechoslovakia 84

Dach, Simon 14, 19, 21, 24, 26, 27Danzig 7, 70‘Danzig Trilogy’ 7, 9, 10, 30, 38, 176death, see mortalitydemocracy 8, 17–18, 19, 45–6, 87, 88–9‘Die deutschen Literaturen’ 51Deutscher Lastenausgleich 57diary (genre) 70, 84, 85, 119, 124, 128,

129, 130Doubrovsky, Serge 68, 75drama (genre) 10, 61; see also performance;

role-playdreams 110–13, 115, 119Dubrovnik 71, 73, 74Dutschke, Rudi 47Dye, Elizabeth 168, 171

East Germany, see GermanyEnlightenment 44, 45, 49, 54, 100Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 2, 22, 47Erhard, Ludwig 44‘Es steht zur Wahl’ 41, 42Eshel, Amir 135, 136, 137Eulenburg, Philip, Prince of 145exile 59–60, 61existence:

existentialism 54, 89, 114–15and writing 8, 54, 79, 80–1, 89, 119,

131, 176, 177

fairy tales 43, 54, 115; see also mythfame:

as legacy 62, 151, 169as public standing 36, 42, 125, 152, 174,

176see also monumentalism

feminism 50, 100, 101, 102, 120; see alsogender

fiction:as escape 7, 61, 68, 83, 84, 94, 99, 108,

117, 124, 140as genre 75, 80, 82, 85, 96–7, 179as lying 69, 77, 79, 102, 143, 163, 179

and reality 25, 28, 32, 54, 62, 65–6, 83,124, 143, 152, 157, 163, 179

as report 150, 153, 168see also imagination

film 87, 114, 115, 116, 118, 126Fontane, Theodor 152–67 passimfood and drink 21, 22, 24, 93Foucault, Michel 31–7, 53, 82, 109, 137,

146, 157, 173France 18, 164Frank, Anne 77Frankfurt 58Frisch, Max 4Fundsachen für Nichtleser 123Fünf Jahrzehnte 122

Gama, Vasco da 12Gdañsk, see Danzig‘Geist und Macht’ 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 45,

51gender 97–109 passim, 135, 142generation 62, 73, 133, 139, 169, 170,

174genre 9, 75, 85, 97, 122–3, 128–30, 135Gerhardt, Paul 22Germany 2, 14–20, 46–7, 51–2, 57–62,

125, 145–6, 164, 165East (GDR) 16, 40, 146, 156, 162,

165‘Gewissen der Nation’ 28, 39gods 17, 24, 25, 54, 89, 92, 106, 127,

131–4, 154Görtz, Franz Josef 3Graf, Steffi 62Grand Coalition 46–7Grass, Helene 141, 143Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm 13, 118Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel

von 26, 27Gruppe 47: 3, 4, 12–30 passim, 61; see also

intellectualsGryphius, Andreas 13, 20, 26Guardian 63guilt 99–101, 103, 105, 106–7, 164

Handke, Peter 5, 52Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp 26Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 125Heine, Heinrich 51, 52Herder, Johann Gottfried 44, 51history:

as direct theme 60, 105–6, 113, 132–3,137, 152, 170

Index 195

as intellectual approach 31–2, 41, 109,146

as material in text 13, 70–4, 77–8,171

Hoffmeister, Werner 13, 26Hollington, Michael 6, 12Holocaust 58Hong Kong 61humour:

as narrative strategy 74, 81self-detraction 36, 63, 92, 94, 107–8,

143, 161, 177within text 22, 83, 86–7, 114, 116, 175see also irony; parody; satire

Hundejahre 13, 38, 96, 153, 154, 172

‘Ich klage an’ 41identity:

innate personal attribute 30, 81, 91, 106,107, 119, 172, 179

multiple 37, 99, 102national 58public constructions of 3, 39, 94, 176subject to textual play 4–5, 79, 82–3, 90,

94, 109, 176ideology 35, 43, 51, 52, 102, 162, 165Im Krebsgang 4, 148, 150–1, 167–75

passim, 177image:

as ideal model 23, 31, 37, 157, 158–62,177

within literary text 7–8, 80, 81, 88–9,124, 138

within public sphere 1–5, 35–7, 44–5,50, 63, 141, 160–2

see also branding; identityimagination 52, 54, 68, 75, 80, 138, 143,

163India 12, 86, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130,

132Intellectuals 2, 15, 17, 39, 45, 57, 58, 59,

103; see also Gruppe 47; Geist undMacht

intellectualism 7, 44, 54internationalism 51, 52, 56, 57, 64intertextuality 42–4, 55, 89–93, 151–3,

164, 167; see also repetitionintrospection 31, 50, 65–6, 73, 84, 93,

123, 138; see also Neue Innerlichkeitirony:

narrative attitude 36–7, 63, 74, 81, 88,142, 160, 161

situtational 108, 143, 175

Iser, Wolfgang 69Ivanovic, Christine 151, 152, 162

Joch, Peter 144Johnson, Uwe 7, 152, 153, 158, 159, 161,

162, 164journalism 125, 150, 171; see also mediaJünger, Ernst 138, 139, 143, 146‘Des Kaisers neue Kleider’ 41, 42–3,

44–5

Kästner, Erich 17, 18Katz und Maus 8, 12, 13, 38, 39, 85, Katz

und Maus 169 n.25, 172Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 70Kleist, Heinrich von 52Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 44Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben

aus 3, 8, 13, 24, 53, 55, 56,65–7, 84–95 passim, 96, 103,111, 115, 117, 120, 121, 125,126, 131, 134, 142, 172, 173,176

Krüger, Horst 4, 38, 48, 50Kulturnation 52–3‘Kurze Rede eines vaterlandslosen Gesellen’

58

Lasker-Schüler, Else 138, 139, 143Lejeune, Philippe 66–7, 68, 69, 84Lenz, Siegfried 65, 92, 93Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 44, 45, 51, 52,

86letters 73–4, 163, 164‘Literatur und Mythos’ 54, 55, 56‘Loblied auf Willy’ 41Lodge, David 1, 5Logau, Friedrich, Freiherr von 51, 86

McGowan, Moray 52Mann, Heinrich 15Mann, Klaus 41, 60Mann, Thomas 5–6, 16, 44, 165Mannheim, Karl 16Mariazuehren 123Mauritius 70, 74media, 1–9 passim, 38, 63–4, 122–3; see also

public sphereMein Jahrhundert 3, 123–4, 134–48 passim,

162, 170, 173, 177melancholia 73, 74, 83; see also

introspectionmemory 55, 150, 176, 178, 179

196 Index

Mertens, Mathias 8, 9, 10metaphor and symbol:

individual words 45, 125, 127, 140wider paralleling technique 20, 27, 67,

79, 87, 91, 98, 106, 145, 157, 164,178–9

Mews, Siegfried 85Meyer-Gosau, Frauke 152Michaelis, Rolf 56‘Mief ’ 47, 79, 80Miles, Keith 6Miłosz, Czesłow 55Minden, Michael 97, 98, 104Møn island 59Montau, Dorothea von 101monumentalism 81, 139, 144, 148,

155–62 passim, 165, 166, 174morality:

informing literary composition 151informing personal behaviour 21, 25–6,

27, 36, 43, 47, 99–101, 104–5, 162,170, 177, 178

moral debates 23subject in literature 28, 58, 83, 98, 135,

178see also ‘Gewissen der Nation’

mortality:ageing 49, 60, 157, 159, 165, 177death 32, 89, 104–9, 112–20, 132, 143,

147, 166, 167, 169immortality 21, 133, 158–60mortal condition 89

Müller, Helmut 15, 16, 39music 24, 43, 81myth 53–6, 87–93 passim, 132

narrator:first-person 29–30, 78–9, 81, 83, 84–7,

96–121 passim, 134–7, 141–4, 153–4,166, 168–9

third-person 151see also autobiography

National Socialism, (Neo-) 7, 16, 41,58–60, 63, 170, 172, 173

Neue Innerlichkeit 4, 13, 50, 66‘Ein neuer Begriff von Arbeit’ 51Neuhaus, Volker 67Neuruppin 152, 155, 157–8, 1651968: 3, 44, 46, 62, 170Niven, William 15Nobel prize for literature 56, 63Novalis (Georg Friedrich Freiherr von

Hardenberg) 52

Opitz, Martin 13Orwell, George 25, 44, 53, 55, 67, 88‘Orwells Jahrzehnt I’ 53‘Orwells Jahrzehnt II’ 55örtlich betäubt 3, 7, 10

Parkes, Stuart 15parody 87, 91, 172, 173pastiche, see parodypaternity 74, 77–8, 86–8, 91, 99, 116, 155,

171, 172pedagogy 73, 77, 78, 79, 83, 86, 88, 172performance 41–2, 62, 69, 91, 94, 98–9,

141; see also role-playPeking 86Pietsch, Timm 9, 39Plato 78Plebejer proben den Aufstand 10Plurien 70, 73poetry 10, 24, 71, 97, 105, 108, 112,

113–14, 123, 125–34 passimPoland 116politics, see campaigningpornography 38, 39postmodernism 141post-structuralism 1, 82Preece, Julian 6, 12Prussia 145public sphere 1–9 passim, 36, 37, 39, 44,

60, 63, 176, 177

Raddatz, Fritz J 105, 136radicalism 44, 46–7, 49, 87, 119Rama, Maria 123Ratte, Günter 57, 148Die Rättin 4, 7, 8, 56, 95, 96–7, 109–21

passim, 123, 125, 134, 135, 142, 147,166, 169, 172, 177

reader:fictional 75–9, 98, 104relation to text 32–5, 66–9, 75–9, 81,

99, 101, 108, 110, 115, 119, 139–41,149–51, 174–5

see also audience; viewer‘Rede über das Selbstverständliche’ 48‘Rede über den Standort’ 61–2‘Rede über den unbekannten Wähler’ 49‘Rede über die Parteien’ 49‘Rede vom alten Eisen’ 49‘Rede vom Verlust’ 59, 61‘Rede von den begrenzten

Möglichkeiten’ 49Reich-Ranicki, Marcel 12, 70

Index 197

religion 21, 89, 101; see also godsRemarque, Erich Maria 138, 139, 143,

146repetition:

emulation (epigone) 170, 173, 174, 175enacted in literature 80, 91, 153, 164–5pertaining to politics, history 54–6, 87,

131, 132–3, 134rhetoric 9, 13, 40, 41, 42, 142Richter, Hans Werner 2, 12, 14, 17, 19, 23,

26, 35, 39role-play 38, 41, 42–6, 92, 138–40,

159–62, 175‘Die runde Zahl Zwanzig’ 49Runge, Philipp Otto 13

sarcasm 24satire 21, 43, 81, 87, 110, 174, 176Schädlich, Hans Joachim 154Scheub, Wolfgang 70, 74‘Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ 59science 114, 140, 142Schiller, Friedrich 15Schmidt, Arno 4Schneider, Peter 5Schneuber, Johann Matthias 29, 37Schütz, Heinrich 20–30 passim, 36‘Schreiben nach Auschwitz’ 58‘Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen

Kindern Auschwitz zu erklären’ 77Seghers, Anna 40–1, 60self-absorption, see introspectionShafi, Monika 135, 136, 137, 144Shanghai 86Sisyphus 24, 25, 54–6, 87–93 passim, 173Skizzenbuch 124 n.5, 128socialism 16SPD 46, 48, 50, 53, 54, 77Spiegel 4, 48Stern, Carola 51Strauß, Botho 52Strauß, Franz Josef 107subconscious, see unconsciousSüddeutsche Zeitung 50Suttner, Hans 41Switzerland 139Symons, Morwenna 151, 152, 161, 164

Taberner, Stuart 7–8, 9, 88, 89teachers, see pedagogyTelgte 14, 19theatre, see drama; performance

time:passage of 22, 80, 82, 84, 117, 133, 137tenses 22, 85, 90tetxual chronology 12, 84–5, 93–4, 97,

99, 109, 111, 115, 117, 145Totes Holz 123 n.4Das Treffen in Telgte 4, 12–37 passim, 171,

177Treuhand 141, 171truth 25, 105, 130, 178

unconscious 103, 119, 146unification 57–61, 151Unkenrufe 4, 8, 148, 149‘Die Vernichtung der Menschheit hat

begonnen’ 112

Verweyen, Theodor 19, 20viewer 128, 130‘Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der

schreibenden Hofnarren’ 31, 63Vormweg, Heinrich 6‘VW-Bus-Rede’ 49–50

Waffen-SS 63, 70Walser, Martin 2, 4, 7, 22, 39, 47, 54,

57war:

general 21, 134Thirty Years 12, 14, 21, 25First World 15, 139, 145–6Second World 14, 146, 171Cold 167

‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ 41Weber, Alexander 7, 9, 13, 23, 29Weckherlin, Georg Rodolf 22Wefelmeyer, Fritz 15Ein weites Feld 4, 122, 142, 148, 149–67

passim, 171, 174–5, 177Whitman, Walt 44Wilhelm, P. J. 123Wilhelm II, Kaiser 145Wilson, Adrian 35Witting, Gunther, see Verweyen, TheodorWolf, Christa 4, 167

Zesen, Philipp von 20, 21Ziegler, Helmut 56Ziesel, Kurt 39Zola, Émile 44Zunge zeigen 3, 56, 123–34 passim, 147–8,

162, 167, 173, 177

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