The Life and Work of Günter Grass

Transcription

Literature, History, Politics
Julian Preece
10.1057/9780230286603preview - The Life and Work of Gunter Grass, Julian Preece
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to npg - PalgraveConnect - 2017-01-15
The Life and Work of
Günter Grass
The Life and Work of Günter Grass
Also by Julian Preece
NINE LIVES: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish–Ukrainian Borderlands (co-author)
BRADFORD SERIES OF COLLOQUIA ON CONTEMPORARY GERMAN LITERATURE (co-editor)
The Life and Work of
Günter Grass
Literature, History, Politics
Julian Preece
Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature
University of Kent at Canterbury
© Julian Preece 2001
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
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The author has asserted his right to be identified
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Preece, Julian.
The life and work of Günter Grass : literature, history, politics / Julian
Preece.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–333–79303–X
1. Grass, Günter, 1927– 2. Authors, German—20th century—Biography.
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For my father
Alan Preece, 1931±97
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Plates
ix
Acknowledgements and Note on Translation
Map: The changing shape of Germany, 1937±90
xii
1
Biographies: real and imagined
1
Multi-talented art student
19
Artistic cross-connections
25
Idealists, absolutists and crypto-social democrats: the plays
30
2 Lives in History
34
A world novel: The Tin Drum
34
Oskar's Danzig requiem
37
Scandal
47
Cat and Mouse: is Pilenz guilty?
50
After Kafka ± after Mann
56
Broken biographies: Dog Years
58
3 The Turn to Politics
68
A famous young man
68
A broken critical tradition
74
`I advise you to vote ES-PE-DE'
80
Writers and politicians
89
The student revolt
93
`I meant myself just as much': Bertolt Brecht in the cross®re in
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising
99
On cooking pigs' heads: Exhaustively Questioned
106
`Burn, warehouse, burn!': Local Anaesthetic
107
Sceptics and melancholics: From the Diary of a Snail
118
vii
1 Life and Art
x
4
5
The End of History Man
127
A state of the nation novel: The Flounder
127
`Social-Democratic Rabelais'
134
False Messiah on Father's Day
137
Feminism and The Flounder
141
Writers and the state, 1647±1979: The Meeting in Telgte
145
Orwell's decade
150
A critical intellectual in the post-modern era
153
Exotic encounters
157
Fiction against the bomb: The Rat
161
Wrong Side of the Wende
170
The galloping Weltgeist
170
Grass and the German Question, 1953±89
176
Burying the past or melting-pot utopia: The Call of the Toad
180
Execution of an author
187
Fonty/Fontane: broken biographies in Too Far A®eld
194
Making sense ± ®nding truth
202
Notes
208
Index
217
viii Contents
List of Plates
at the SPD Conference in 1972. (Copyright Visum/Rudi
1 and 2. With Heinrich Boll
Meisel.)
3. With Ute Grunert. (Copyright Visum/Rudi Meisel.)
5. Fonty and Hoftaller from Too Far A®eld. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.)
6. Manuscript page of Too Far A®eld with drawing. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.)
7. The writer at work on his old Olivetti. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.)
8. The artist with pipe and sketchpad. (Copyright Visum/Dirk Reinartz.)
ix
4. Tasting soup for The Flounder. (Copyright Visum/Rudi Meisel.)
Ideas for this book have been germinating since I ®rst started to read German and travel

Grass at grammar
to Germany up to twenty years ago. I ®rst heard the name Gunter
school in Taunton and my thanks go to Michael Robinson for encouraging my
interests in all things German. Denys Dyer took me through Grass's novels at
university; David Constantine, who found he could not approve of my author's ironic
slipperiness, supervised my doctorate: my thanks go to both of them. My greatest
intellectual debt is to Dieter Stolz who will disagree with much of what he reads here
but without whom my arguments would have been much weaker. Others have helped
in other ways: Stuart Taberner, Chloe Paver and Colin Riordan kindly let me see
unpublished research; Sean Allan shared his memories of Ralph Manheim; Susan
Tebbut alerted me to Otto Pankok; John Wieczorek helped with Johannes Brobowski
My colleagues Osman Durrani, Martin Kane and
and J.H. Reid with Heinrich Boll.
Elisabeth Demleitner have been generous with advice and materials. George Stern
demonstrated admirable thoroughness in proof-reading a draft of the manuscript,

Grass for
which greatly improved the ®nished version. I am also grateful to Gunter
allowing me to view his correspondence with Helen Wolff prior to its publication.
My research has taken me to a number of libraries in the UK and Germany. In
particular I would like to mention the incomparable facilities at the Freie Universita t
in Berlin, the ever helpful staff at the Institute of Germanic Studies and the German
Historical Institute London and the Literaturarchiv in Sulzbach Rosenberg for

helping me gain access to the correspondence between Grass and Walter Hollerer.
Some material used in this book has been published elsewhere, albeitly usually in
different form. I am grateful to the editors of the following books and journals for
permission to plunder the following chapters and articles: Arthur Williams and

Grass's Die Rattin',
Stuart Parkes for `Literature and the End of the World: Gunter
in
Literature on the Threshold: the German Novel in the 1980s (1990); the editors of Journal
of the Kafka Society of America 17 (1993) for `The Danger of Reaching Thirty for Franz
Kafka, Josef K. and Oskar Matzerath: Kafkaesque Motifs in Die Blechtrommel'; to The
German Monitor 47 (2000) for `Seven Theses on Der Fall Fonty'; and to the Modern
Language Review 90 (1995) for `Sexual-Textual Politics: the Transparency of the Male

Grass'.
Narrative in Der Butt by Gunter
Quotations from primary sources are with the kind permission of the publishers:

Grass, copyright Steidl Verlag; Max Frisch, Die Tagebucher
the works of Gunter
and
Hans Mayer, Ein Deutscher auf Widerruf, copyright Suhrkamp Verlag; Marcel ReichRanicki, Mein Leben, Arnulf Baring, Machtwechsel, copyright Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt;

TABU 1 and Die Jahre die ihr kennt, copyright Rowohlt Verlag;
Peter Ruhmkorf,

Ich habe Lust im weiten Felde . . ., copyright Wallstein Verlag; Peter
Peter Ruhmkorf,
Schneider, Lenz, copyright Europa ische Verlagsanstalt/Rotbuch Verlag; Hans
Werner Richter, Im Etablissement der Schmetterlinge, copyright Hanser Verlag.
x
Acknowledgements and Note on
Translation
Acknowledgements and Note on Translation
xi
Note on translation
Translations from the German are my own.
The volumes are ordered as follows:
I Gedichte und Kurzprosa (Poems and Short Prose)
II Theaterspiele (Plays)
III Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum)
IV Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse)
V Hundejahre (Dog Years)

(Local Anaesthetic)
VI o rtlich betaubt
VII Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail)
VIII Der Butt (The Flounder)
IX Das Treffen in Telgte (The Meeting in Telgte)
X Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (Headbirths or The Germans Are
Dying Out)

XI Die Rattin
(The Rat)
XII Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad)
XIII Ein weites Feld (Too Far A®eld)
XIV Essays und Reden I. 1955±1969 (Essays and Speeches I. 1955±1969)
XV Essays und Reden II. 1970±1979 (Essays and Speeches II. 1970±1979)
XVI Essays und Reden III. 1980±1997 (Essays and Speeches III. 1980±1997)
Books by Grass not included in the collected edition are:
Mein Jahrhundert (1999): My Century ± MC

Nicht-Leser (1997): Findings for Non-Readers ± FNR
Fundsachen fur
Vier Jahrzehnte. Ein Werkstattbericht, ed. G. Fritze Margull (1991): Four Decades. A
Report from the Workshop ± FD
Totes Holz (1990): Dead Wood. An Obituary ± DW.
Zunge Zeigen. Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen, Prosa und einem Gedicht (1988): Show Your
Tongue. A Diary in Drawings, Prose and a Poem ± SYT
Note: the books above are published by Steidl, except for Zunge Zeigen, which is
published by Luchterhand.
Correspondence, interviews, and more recent articles by Grass are indicated
separately.
I have used the 1997 Steidl edition of Grass's works, edited by Volker Neuhaus and
Daniela Hermes, and individual volumes, edited by Dieter Stolz and Claudia MayerIswandy. I give volume and page numbers after each quotation.
SWEDEN
BALTIC SEA
Polish Corridor
(1919-39)
Mon
Hiddensee
Wewelsfleth
Rugen
Koningsberg
(Kaliningrad)
Usedom
Hamburg
Lubeck
Pom
Behlendorf
era
nia
Danzig
(Gdansk)
EAST PRUSSIA
Bremen
Berlin
Hildesheim
Dusseldorf
GDR
(1949-1990)
BELGIUM
Cologne
tenla
de
Su
LUX.
Wurzburg
P O L A N D
Silesia
Breslau
(Wroclaw)
(Wroctaw)
n
FRANCE
R. Elbe
Warsaw
Oder - Ne
Telgte
iße Line
Neuruppin
HOLLAND
d
Marienbad
Prague
Territory of the former GDR
Territory lost by Germany in 1945
Annexed by Germany in 1938
Dachau
GDR border
Munich
Pre-1939 German border
Map: The changing shape of Germany, 1937±90
R. Vistula
xii
DENMARK
1
Biographies: real and imagined
Anyone born, like me, in the third decade of this century, cannot deny his
share of guilt for the great crime, even if he was very young at the time.
Anyone who survived the end of the war by chance, as I did, knows from
experience of Germany that, however entertaining the present may be, it
can never distract attention from the past. For these reasons I ®nd that the
threads of my tales are woven together for me in advance, that I am not free
in my choice of material: there are too many dead looking over my shoulder
while I write.
XVI:446±7
It is enough for a German born before 1945 to give his year of birth in order for his
listeners to place him in a likely historical context, even to purport to know his
fundamental experiences. While most men born ®ve years either side of 1920 had
not much better than an evens chance of reaching 30, those who did so were
inevitably deeply marked by the war and Nazism. They had passed crucial phases of
their adult careers under Adolf Hitler, whether or not they signed up to his creed and

Grass, belongs to the so-called
party. But anyone born in the mid-1920s, like Gunter

weiûe Jahrgange (the `white years'), old enough to have played some role in what
happened, but young enough not to be seriously implicated in the Nazi
extermination machine. `I too, born halfway too late, count as unincriminated'
(VII:17), Grass explained in From the Diary of a Snail (1972). He never needed, unlike
so many other Germans just a few years older, to hide, explain away, or falsify what
he did as a young man.

Gunter
Grass was born on 16 October 1927 to mixed German-Slavic parentage in
where Poland's
the recently created city state of Danzig, today Polish Gdansk,
mighty river, the Vistula, disgorges into the Baltic. This made him ®ve years old
when the Nazis came to power in Germany, eleven at the outbreak of World War
Two, and 17 at the end of it. After four years making his way in the devastated
western zones of occupation, he was 21 when the Federal Republic of Germany (the
FRG) came into being in May 1949, 40 at the time of the student revolt, and in his
1
Life and Art

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

Klaus Rainer Rohl,
the future leftwing journalist and husband to Ulrike Meinhof,
was Grass's near contemporary in the Conradinum, the Danzig grammar school also

attended by several characters from Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years. Rohl
2
Life and Art 3
From my fourteenth year my whole life took place within the con®nes of barracks
in various camps. Military preparation camp. Shovel camp digging anti-tank
ditches. Harvest camp bringing in potatoes or turnips, Flak camp, Work-Service
camp. The time I spent at home in the last two years of the war, 44 and 45, took
on the character of brief holidays.
Younger people nowadays might ®nd our incredible physical and mental
hardness hard to imagine. We all had hard pre-military training from the age of
ten. Route marches for hours and hours with full kit in the hot sun [. . .] until one
or two collapsed because their hearts gave out, cross-country marches, dirt, mud,
night marches, tests of courage, all at jogging pace. From the age of fourteen we
did nothing but weapons training.2
and Grass meant that the younger boy
The two-year age difference between Rohl
escaped getting a call-up himself. But in the games the boys played in the
schoolyard, they already mimicked the military heroics they saw on the newsreels.
The siege of the Alcazar, which marked the ®nest hour of Franco's Falangists in the
Spanish Civil War, was a favourite. Nobody wanted to play the Reds, of course. The
~
courage of the Falangist leader, who told his son to cry `Viva Espana!'
if his captors

and his
carried out their threat to shoot him, was self-evident to young Gunter
schoolmates. Curiously, however, he recalls more than 60 years later in My Century
(1999), they did not act out the bombing of Guernica when planes from the German
Condor Legion dropped their bombs in broad daylight on the defenceless Basque
town: `you could not get anything heroic out of that' (MC:136). This is an insight,
however, which came much later.
As the war neared its end, the victors of 1939±41 began to learn the taste of defeat
and with defeat came suffering. Like Oskar in The Tin Drum (1959), Grass saw the
corpses of executed deserters hanging from lampposts and telegraph masts: `older
soldiers from the Front and young chaps of my age [. . .] each with a cardboard sign
hanging around his neck with the words ``I am a coward''':3
wherever you went ± this is for me, along with two or three other formative
experiences, an image which will not go away; wherever you went, in every little
place [. . .] mainly fairly old men [. . .] or my age, 16, 17 years old, 18 perhaps.4
Like Lina Greff in The Tin Drum and Sibylle Miehlau in The Flounder (1977), the
women left behind in Danzig, including his own mother, were raped by Soviet
soldiers. Other civilians Grass knew lost their lives on the overland trek or maritime
evacuation to the west, an event also re¯ected in his ®ction: Starusch's mother in
Local Anaesthetic (1969), the clockmaker Laubschad and Herr and Frau Schef¯er from
Oskar's tenement in the Labesweg, and Matern's family from Dog Years are all
drowned when their evacuation ships are sunk by Soviet U-boats.
remembers the teenage Grass running wild with the rest of the boys and the
adolescent world he depicts is familiar to Grass's readers:

Gunter
Grass's own immediate family, his mother and father and younger sister, survived,
but he did not catch up with them again until December 1946. After military
hospital in American-occupied Marienbad, soon to be incorporated into the Soviet
bloc as part of a reconstituted Czechoslovakia, he found himself in the summer of
1945 in an American POW-camp in Bavaria. Here he was forced, like millions of
other Germans, to confront for the ®rst time the reality of what had been National
Socialism. The Americans took him to the concentration camp at Dachau. Grass
recalls in From the Diary of a Snail: `we did not want to understand; we saw the
showers and the ovens and did not believe' (VII:154). Like the majority of the rest,
he at ®rst refused to accept that what he was shown was true and assumed it was just
Allied propaganda. Gradually, once the Nuremberg Trials got under way in the
autumn of 1945, he came to realise the monumentality of his error, a mental
turnabout which would begin to power his creative work more than a decade later.
This is a key event in his intellectual and emotional biography. Its importance
cannot be overestimated in any assessment of his work or in¯uence on German
public life. It was above all an emotional event and emotions are never far below the
surface in many of his public interventions.
Seventeen is also the key age for many of his ®ctional ®gures. Two events in fact
occurred between Grass's own seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays, both of which
drove his creative energies once he began to write. The ®rst was the realisation that
everything he had accepted as true and just in fact underpinned the most evil regime
the world had ever seen. The second was the loss of his beloved Baltic homeland, the
medieval towers and granaries of Hanseatic Danzig, the expanses of the Vistula Delta

and the sandy wastes of the Prussian coastline which stretched as far as Konigsberg
(now Russian Kaliningrad), Lithuania and Latvia in the east. This is the terrain he reinvented in his ®ction and made known to generations in the west who could not
see it easily for themselves during the years of the Cold War. According to his friend
and fellow migrant, Salman Rushdie, Grass suffered a triple dislocation as a result of
the wrench to the west. The ®rst was the loss of `roots', `the sense of home as a
``good'' safe place'. The second, the loss of language, as even though he continued to
be surrounded by German speakers, the German language had to be `rebuilt, pebble
by pebble, from the wreckage: because a language in which evil ®nds so expressive a
voice is a dangerous tongue'.5 Third, according to Rushdie, his loss of ideological
orientation was a form of migration into a new unknown land. The 17-year-old
Grass had enlisted as a convinced believer in the Nazi cause, con®dent he was

needed by Volk, Fuhrer
and Vaterland, and that the Germans stood on the side of
right. These thoughts and feelings were all the stronger for being unexplored yet allpervasive and largely unquestioned in the environment in which he had grown up.
When Joseph Goebbels shrieked `Do you want total war?' in the wake of the defeat at
Stalingrad, the 15-year-old schoolboy had felt instinctively ready to make the
ultimate sacri®ce, as he recalled in the mid-1960s in a speech directed at young
voters `tempted' to vote for the neo-Nazi German National Party, the NDP. His father
had joined the NSDAP in 1936, before it became something that was expected, like
Oskar Matzerath's father, because, as he explained to his grown-up son after the war,
his `business competitors joined [. . .] and he had the feeling that he was living in
4
historic times and you simply had to be part of it'.6 How could it have occurred to
the young schoolboy to question what his father did when nearly all the other adults
he knew behaved in the same way?
In his novels, Grass fails to draw a clear dividing line between guilt and innocence,
hero and villain. His ®gures either know, like him, what it is like to have believed in
the cause and feel a great emptiness at the heart of their existence once that cause
has been taken away, or they have made compromises, run with the tide, and acted
opportunistically. If they committed acts of opposition, they did so for the wrong
reason. After 1990, Grass was better equipped than most other West Germans to
empathise with ex-GDR citizens accused of collaboration with the East German
regime and the dreaded Stasi. He recognised how easy it would have been for him to
have changed the `Hitlerjugend brown shirt' for `the blue shirt of the Communist
youth movement', the FDJ (XVI:436). In Too Far A®eld (1995) he reconstructs lived
experience in the ex-GDR, articulating the nuances of ordinary people's feeling in
the face of the juggernaut of Western conformism.
Thirty-®ve years after the war in Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out? (1980),
he wondered what would have happened to him had he been a little older. First he
divulged that he too has one or two teenage skeletons in his cupboard:
A questionable stroke of luck, my year of birth, 1927, forbids me from
condemning others. I was too young to be tested. And yet I could still be blamed
for one thing: as a 13-year-old I took part in a story competition organised by the
Hitlerjugend magazine, Hilf-Mit! I started writing early and was dying to get
noticed. But because I obviously had misjudged my audience and written some
melodramatic fragment about the Cassubians, my luck held and I had no chance
of getting a Hitlerjugend or a Hilf-Mit! prize.
X:24
Like other family memorabilia, this story, written in his neatest Gothic hand
he grew to hate so viscerally, was lost during the evacuation.
writing, the Sutterlinschrift
He remembers it was set in the thirteenth century during a war-torn `interregnum' in
the history of the Holy Roman Empire. But the problem was that the 13-year-old
would-be historical novelist crammed so much action into the ®rst 20 pages that soon
none of his characters was left alive. This taught him one invaluable lesson: `if you're
going to have deaths, then have them towards the end.' (XVI:426). But what is rather
more remarkable than that lesson in narrative technique is how closely he stuck to his
adolescent theme. All his ®ction up to the age of 50 is centred on his homeland and its
past: The Flounder reconstructs Danzig's history from the stone age to the bloodily
Lenin Shipyards in 1970.
repressed strike in Gdansk's
Having revealed these precocious ambitions, Grass then imagines what he might
have done had he entered the world in 1917 instead of 1927:
In 1933 I would have been sixteen and not six years old, at the beginning of the
war, twenty-two and not twelve. As I would have been old enough to be called up
straight away, it is unlikely that I would have survived the war, like most born in
Life and Art 5
6

Gunter
His early literary career would have been sponsored by the Nazis. He would have
encountered no dif®culties in ®nding a publisher for either his patriotic odes to the
Fatherland or his introspective nature poems. Not until the Reich began to suffer defeats
and an Allied victory began to seem possible, would he have expressed second thoughts:
Probably after Stalingrad ± now twenty-six years old and a ®rst lieutenant or a
lance corporal ± I would have begun to see the light. Involved in the shootings of
partisans, reprisal raids, and clean-up operations, as a witness of Jewish
deportations which no-one could not notice, I would have added some new
tones to my late-Expressionist versifying [. . .] ± sadness unconnected to any
speci®ed locality, expressions of despair, dark and ambiguous thoughts. Probably
(in comparison to my creative period during the time of the great victories) I
would have produced some so-called `eternally lasting verse' on the retreat.
And using this style, which in `44 would have been acceptable to my publisher
and the censor (providing that I had survived), I would have effortlessly bridged
the unconditional surrender, the so-called Year Zero, possibly one or two years in
a POW-camp and then been able to adopt the new, bare, low-calorie themes from
a paci®st or anti-Fascist perspective: as happened in a hundred or more cases.
X:26±7
Grass's ®ctional reconstruction of his childhood landscapes would run the risk of
nostalgia were it not for the knowledge, which permeates its every narrative pore,
that he is evoking a landscape where evil ¯ourished. The places and place names of
his childhood, the streets of suburban Danzig and the villages along the coast and
the banks of the Vistula, were robbed of all the innocence that childhood would
otherwise have bestowed on them in the ®ve and a half years which began on

spent this day collecting bits of
1 September 1939. The 11-year-old Gunter
shrapnel to swap with schoolfriends. Until that day, Stutthof, for instance, was the
name of a small village on a coastal spit to the east of Danzig, separated from the
city by the mouth of the Vistula, on either side of which perched the villages of
Schwienenhorst and Nickelswalde, where the blood brothers Matern and Amsel
grow up in Dog Years. On the second day of the war work started on the Danzig side
of Stutthof to build a concentration camp, the plans for which had evidently been
laid carefully in advance. It was an ideal location, concealed by woodland and
that year. Yet despite this probability there is no reason to think (except wishful
thinking) that I would not have willingly turned into a convinced National
Socialist. Suppressing my half-Cassubian background, from a petty-bourgeois
family, educated to see Germany as my ideal, and sworn to the principle of purity,
I would have let myself be carried away by the extensive war aims and have been
happy to accept (in the name of the community of the Volk) that what was
subjectively wrong was objectively right. (The Danzig SS-Home Defence could
have relied on me in the late summer of 39, even though my uncle Franz worked
for the Polish Post Of®ce.)
X:25
surrounded on all sides by water, making escape especially dif®cult. Along with
Grass's own `uncle Franz' (actually his mother's cousin) 40 000 Poles were shot in
Danzig±Westprussia in the ®rst four months of the war, some of them in these
woods. The camp itself was integrated in numerous ways into the local
community: prisoners were sent out to the ®elds and to nearby factories to work;
locals, Polish or German, who fell foul of the authorities, by trading in ration
coupons, for instance, were sent there for `re-education'. This is what happens to
Oswald Brunies in Dog Years. Like all the Nazi camps, Stutthof was supplied by local
businesses. Grass's paternal grandfather, who ran a small timber yard and
carpentry workshop, like Harry Liebenau's father, was no exception, as Grass
recalls in a poignant verse:
My grandfather's circular saws
could cut up a long bright morning
into roof slats.
Parts of barracks for transit camps.
I:139±40
Stutthof was intended initially for Poles, who were `collected' at the Viktoriaschule
in Neufahrwasser, another favourite haunt for characters from Grass's ®ction. By
January 1940 it was large enough to contain 4500 inmates. Heinrich Himmler
visited in November 1941 by which time it took prisoners from all over Germanoccupied Europe. A crematorium, which could dispose of ten corpses per hour, was
built in September 1942, a gas chamber was added at the beginning of 1944, and the
camp was still being extended at the time of the Soviet liberation. Liebenau says that
he does not know how many died there. The ®gures are estimates and vary from
65 000 to 85 000, including up to 18 000 who perished on the evacuation march
which started on 25 January 1945.7 In Dog Years the bones pile up into the sky,
visible to all who want to see them.
Another of Grass's great teenage traumas, which feeds directly into Cat and Mouse
and Dog Years, is his failure to do anything or ask any questions when a teacher from
school, Professor Oswald, a model for Dog Years' Oswald Brunies and Hermann Ott
in From the Diary of a Snail, disappeared. Pilenz in Cat and Mouse can only comment
in respect of Brunies that `I hope not to have given evidence against him' (IV:48±9),
but he is not sure. Tulla Pokriefke certainly did, however. Fifty years after the war,
during a public correspondence with a Japanese contemporary, the Nobel Laureate
^ Grass contrasts his own behaviour with that of a contemporary,
Ã Oe,
Kenzaburo
presumably a Jehovah's Witness, he encountered in the Arbeitsdienst who refused
steadfastly to use or even to touch a ri¯e:
I remember a young, gentle man whose friendliness bordered on the ridiculous
who accepted even the harshest punishments without complaint, who was not
capable of explaining his actions, and demonstrated his strength simply in
refusal, and who in the end was sent away, I fear, to a concentration camp
because his attitude evidently disconcerted us, recruits of the same age.8
Life and Art 7

Gunter
Even though these lines were written half a lifetime after The Tin Drum, Grass's
feelings are as raw as ever. Theo Wuttke, alias Fonty, the septuagenarian hero of Too
Far A®eld, is haunted by even more ghosts from his past, which spans both
authoritarian German regimes in the twentieth century.
Grass's adolescence was not just shaped by war and Nazism, however. He was
brought up a Catholic, which set him apart from the majority of German-speaking
Danzigers. In a famous line, he later wrote that he `grew up between the Holy Ghost
and Hitler's picture' (I:198). The Bible, the theology of sin and redemption, leave
their mark on everything he has written. Even his all-pervading scepticism has clear
theological overtones, as the Catholic cleric Matull in Too Far A®eld explains to the
guests at Martha Wuttke's wedding. The Catholic Church's failure to stand up to
Hitler must have contributed to his loss of faith after the war. But there is no sign
that his religious upbringing damaged him in any way. On the contrary, he has
never ceased to be fascinated by Catholics' love of ritual, performance and liturgy.
Catholicism is an ideology, a system of belief with adherents and renegades,
absolute values and dogmatic certainty. For Grass it is an alternative to either Nazism
or Communism, both of which ful®l the same basic human need for explanations,
purpose and the sense of allegiance. The free-market economy, the foundations of
which he began to question seriously in the 1980s, emerges as just another ideology

Grass it is imperative
in the wake of German reuni®cation. For the sceptic Gunter
never again to fall into the embrace of any belief system. In his chronicles of German
ideological history, individual ®gures' ¯irtation with religious or, more usually,
secular creeds is a primary theme. He speaks not with the zeal of a convert, that
would risk sounding doctrinaire, but with the anxiety of a `burnt child'.
Danzig, which had been a predominantly German city for more than six
centuries, lay on the fault-line between the Germanic and Slavic worlds. This ®ssure
ran right through the Grass family which:
like many families in Danzig contained quite a colourful mixture: on my father's
side we were, as they say, German stock and my mother's family was of Cassubian
origin and the Cassubians were an old Slavic tribe.9
They were peasants who supplemented the living they made from the land by
working in local industry. Both his grandfathers were skilled artisans, however ± his
mother's father a plumber in an arms factory, his father's father a master carpenter.
When his mother's family moved from the country to the city they started to speak
German, which indicates nicely the relative status of the two languages and the
communities who spoke them.
Allegiance to the Nazis within the wider Grass clan had not been universal, which
meant that once the Nazis had been defeated, Grass could re¯ect on courses of action
different to those he and his immediate family had taken. Like Jan Bronski, Oskar's
uncle and `putative father' in The Tin Drum, ùncle Franz' had been executed by the
Germans for his role in defending the Polish Post Of®ce in September 1939. When
in the spring of 1958 to research details for his ®rst novel,
Grass returned to Gdansk
he checked the facts concerning the ®ghting over the Post Of®ce, which had been a
8
Polish enclave within the independent but predominantly German-speaking city.
He was amazed to discover that, contrary to the of®cial versions published by both
sides, there had been three survivors. He records their escape, which he `could not
have invented' (XV:331), after talking to two of the men, who had since found work
in the Lenin Shipyards. This is his ®rst poetic correction to recorded historical truth,
a procedure of `gap-®lling' he will come to regard as one of literature's primary
functions. Oskar feels acute responsibility for Jan's death because Jan would not
have gone to work that day had his little nephew not needed his drum mended. Yet
Oskar's sense of guilt is out of all proportion to his actual role in the events. He feels
cultural rather than personal shame. For the Grass family, once ùncle Franz' had
been shot, `contact with the Cassubian relations was only in fact maintained by my
mother, and something which was previously normal became suddenly something
suspect.'10
Grass told Heinrich Vormweg in 1985 that the Slavic element in his own family
àlways fascinated me, embarrassed and fascinated me at the same time'. The lack of
contact with the relations on this side of the family was one of many `things which
made me think, they disturbed me, but I didn't draw any real conclusions.'11 Once
the war was ®nished, his mixed background enabled him to look at his fellow
Germans from the outside as well as from within: he both belonged and did not
belong. In this he resembles both Thomas Mann, who had a half-Brazilian mother,
and Theodor Fontane, the inspiration for Too Far A®eld, who was descended from
seventeenth-century Huguenot refugees. Grass's empathy with other immigrants,
be they new arrivals to Danzig in past centuries or Turks in contemporary Germany,
is founded on a genuine sense of af®nity. At the height of his political campaigning
for the Social Democrats in 1969, he expressed the fear to Helen Wolff that he was in
danger of becoming too serious, which means `too German'. He promised her, as he
had promised his wife Anna, that once the election was over `there will be more
laughing ± and we will live more like Cassubians than Germans'.12 His legendary zest
for life, his love of good food and wine, of dancing and partying, of joking and
telling stories, align him with this supposedly non-Germanic tradition.
A negative ethnic dynamic is replicated in the web of Oskar's extended family
relations in The Tin Drum. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Koljaiczek, had been a
terrorist in the cause of Polish nationalism; his grandmother loses no time declaring
for the Poles once the Polish state is resurrected in 1918. Jan Bronksi does the same,
though he is warned repeatedly not to throw his lot in with Poland by his rival for
Agnes's affection, Alfred Matzerath: as a German speaker Jan could claim either
German or Danzig status. Agnes, Oskar's mother, is warned off Jan by the converted
Jew, Sigismund Markus, who wants to elope with her to London to escape the
gathering storm in the mid-1930s. After her death in May 1937 relations between
Alfred and Jan are forced underground. Neither Greff nor Schef¯er, neighbours from
the Labesweg, the cramped, terraced street where Oskar grows up, are at ease in his
presence. Once Jan's widow, however, the Cassubian Hedwig, who had adopted
Polish nationality on marrying Jan, marries the Baltic German Ehlers, another smalltime Nazi, she becomes a Volksdeutsche, that is she assumes a German identity. Other
members of this branch of the family also take this step. The ®rst Matzerath/Bronksi
Life and Art 9
family reunion is placed under a double strain as Polish ghosts haunt Kurt's
christening in August 1941. Oskar's grandmother defuses the tension in her down-toearth manner. Presenting Alfred with a fat goose, she pats it with the palm of her hand
and wants to know what it is worth: `that isn't no Cassubian goose, that isn't, that's an
ethnic German goose now and tastes just the same as it did before the war!' (III:394).
The German city of Danzig had an above average number of Nazi voters, resentful
that they had been separated from the rest of Germany by the humiliation of the
Versailles Treaty. The NSDAP ran the city from as early as 1932. Its hinterland and
the stretch of Pomerania known as the Polish Corridor to its south, which divided
Germany from East Prussia in order to give the newly recreated Polish state access to
the sea, contained a rich and potentially explosive mixture of ethnic, religious and
linguistic communities. In Pomerania, the Germans outnumbered the Poles by
nearly two to one and the Cassubians by approaching ten to one. In Danzig itself
under 5 per cent of the population was not German: `The situation was further
complicated by religion. Most Poles were Catholic, but not all Germans were
Protestant and there were also German Jews and an increasing number of Polish
Jews.'13 The mixture of Catholic and Protestant, German and Slav in the Grass
family thus re¯ected the historic hybridity of the people in the region. This explains
why both Oskar and Starusch are half-German, half-Cassubian, Mahlke and his
family have Polish sympathies, Eddi Amsel is half-Jewish, and Hermann Ott in From
the Diary of a Snail is descended from Dutch Mennonite immigrants. Ethnic identity
is sometimes in the eye of the beholder: Ott's Cassubian protector, Anton Stomma,
who like all Cassubians in Grass's ®ction changes his allegiance from Germany to
Poland and back again repeatedly depending on which is in the ascendancy, treats
him as a Jew because he has helped the Danzig Jews.

Volker
Schlondorff,
who worked closely with Grass to make his ®lm of The Tin
Drum, was astounded to ®nd how close to his material the author still felt 20 years

whose polemical tract, The Lost Honour of
after the novel was published. Boll,

had recently ®nished, was much cooler in comparison:
Katharina Blum, Schlondorff
for or against something, then it is much easier
If you have the same views as Boll,
to take over his personnel and put them on to the screen ± it is rarely directly
autobiographical: with Grass, despite all the exaggerations, everything always is.
The ¯at in Labesweg, the petrol stain on the wall, the people, everything is quite
concrete, undoubtedly the four or ®ve skirts of the Cassubian grandmother,
whose mouth (`healthy, strong teeth with wide gaps between them') he describes
as if it were his own.14
Grass's best ®ction has come from his heart. Its autobiographical basis remains even
after he has worked through his childhood experiences. In From the Diary of a Snail
he develops a semi-authorial narrative persona, which he adapts for The Flounder,
Headbirths and The Rat (1986). He can even at times be recognised in Theo Wuttke
from Too Far A®eld despite the difference in their backgrounds. In My Century, which
contains one hundred brief chapters dedicated to each year from 1900 to 1999,
®ctional memoirs sit side by side with autobiographical recollections.

10 Gunter
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The Life and Work of Günter Grass

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