Authors: Günter Grass

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Local Anesthetic tells the story of Eberhard Starusch, a history teacher who is undergoing dental work throughout the course of the novel, and Philipp Scherbaum, a radical high school student of the late 1960s. The book represents Grass’s appeal for moderation with respect to the situation of radical politics at that time. It is at once a critique of German society and a rejection of the then-common leftist call for violence—such as with the notorious Baader-Meinhof group—as the only means of unmasking the oppressive nature of capitalist social conditions. During this time, Grass, like other writers such as Heinrich Böll, was becoming more actively involved in the contemporary German political scene. From the Diary of a Snail documents, in the form of a fictionalized journal, Grass’s thoughts and activities during the various German political campaigns of 1969. Progress in social and political terms seems to move at the pace of a snail, Grass suggests, but this is better than the fruitless outbursts of random revolutionary actions.

The Flounder is a meandering novel built upon the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife” and presents in part Grass’s reactions to the burgeoning feminist movement of the 1970s. Its various chapters chronicle the interactions between men and women throughout the course of history. Its humor—a feature of all Grass’s writing—is ironic and, at times, scatological, with ongoing references to food, digestion, and elimination. The Flounder provided Grass’s feminist critics an easy target for their attacks of his work. The Meeting at Telgte is a fanciful historical reconstruction of a fictitious meeting of German writers in 1647, near the end of the devastating Thirty Years’ War. This novel is intended as an allusion to the well-known Gruppe 47 literary group that began at the end of World War II. The issue is of the pen versus the sword—that is, the role that art and literature actually play within society, and their seeming impotence before the violence of history.

In the novel Headbirths: Or, The Germans Are Dying Out, Grass again fictionalizes some of his own diary material. Like many modern authors, including Peter Handke and Christa Wolf, Grass also reflects at times upon the composition of his narrative as he composes it. The work narrates the journey of two Germans, the liberal and socially committed Harm and Dörte Peters, as they travel to Asia in the summer of 1980. It contrasts the political and economic issue of modern, affluent society to the problems and concerns of the Third World. The novel was written to be published at the time of the German parliamentary elections involving the archconservative Franz Josef Strauss and reflects Grass’s concerns about the slow nature of social and political progress within democracies. The Rat, another long, meandering novel, projects a postnuclear holocaust world in which rats are the sole survivors, and it reflects Grass’s pessimism in the 1980s concerning the future of human civilization. Too Far Afield addressed the question of German reunification and, again, was deemed by many critics to be too meandering, including too much exposition and not enough plot. My Century, however, was more favorably received. Structured as one hundred short chapters, each dedicated to a year in the twentieth century, the novel presents a German point of view (a Grassian German point of view) on the history of that calamitous century, from the German view of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion through Kristallnacht and, inevitably, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of East and West Germany. The title of Crabwalk refers to the sideways, back-and-forth course of the narrative, which focuses on three generations of a German family: Paul, a middle-aged journalist who was born on a lifeboat during the sinking of the refugee carrier Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945; his mother, unwed at the time of his birth; and his teenage, right-wing son. This historical incident figures in very different ways in their three lives and their attitudes toward German history and society.

Grass was a liberal and socially committed individual who was highly critical of modern materialistic society. He was active in German politics on behalf of liberal candidates. However, beginning in 1987 Grass encountered increasing criticism from some of his former allies on the political left for two unrelated reasons: his perceived antagonism toward radical feminism and his opposition to German reunification. During the period from 1989 to 1995, several dissertations and theses from American universities criticized Grass’s novels and poetry for the attitudes he expressed in them toward women and feminism. These criticisms eventually led to a symposium on the subject. Concurrently, Germans of all political persuasions criticized Grass in the popular press and intellectual journals for his outspoken denunciation of German unification. Nevertheless, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, in recognition of his portrayal of “the forgotten face of history.”

Although Günter Grass was primarily a narrative artist, he composed a number of plays and poems, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. These present themes similar to those developed in his novels. He also wrote a number of political essays, and these also inform much of his fictional writing of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s Grass’s attention primarily focused on political issues. His output of fictional works and poetry gave way to politically oriented essays for journals and newsmagazines, one of the most important and controversial being “Don’t Reunify Germany.” In 2012, he published a poem titled “What Must Be Said,” in which he criticized German military support for Israel. Also published in 2012, his poem “Europe’s Disgrace” expressed his abhorrence for the European Union’s treatment of Greece during the sovereign-debt crisis. Grass remained deeply concerned with the social and political issues of modern society throughout his career. He finished writing his final book, Vonne Endlichkait, shortly before his death on April 13, 2015, at the age of eighty-seven.