THEY WENT AHEAD and did it anyway, the two Germanys—as if the Berlin Wall had been a chastity belt. They are in bed together again, a single two-backed beast, under the sign of the Deutschmark, in spite of Günter Grass, who told them not to. He has been telling them not to for thirty years. He agrees with the Frenchman who said he loved Germany so much, he was glad there were two of them. Which is why Grass has been called—to his face—“a traitor to the fatherland.” He hates the very idea of a German fatherland. Look what the fatherland does when the lights are out all over Europe.
This is more than oedipal rage. These fugitive pieces dating back to 1961 all say the same thing. You may feel the war’s over; let bygones be bygones, aren’t some of our best friends Germans? But Grass began to write because of Auschwitz. Time passes, and Auschwitz hasn’t gone away. Writing after Auschwitz, “against passing time,” means using “damaged language in all the shades of gray”: no more “black and white of ideology,” “blues of introspection,” “polished literary chamber music,” “detergents of all-purpose poetry,” but “shame on every page.” Maybe another nation could have committed Auschwitz, but only one did. Unless we stuffed our ears with lottery tickets, we must have heard the screaming. “One of the preconditions for the terrible thing that happened was a strong, unified Germany…. We have every reason to fear ourselves as a unit.” If to say this is to be a traitor to the fatherland, maybe even a “rootless cosmopolitan,” well, tell it to the Scarecrow.
According to Grass, nationalism itself is a “bacillus.” He’d rather see a confederation, “a linkage of provinces” sort of like Switzerland: “Germany in the singular is a calculation that will never balance; as a sum, it is a communicating plural.” Such a plural could communicate in a mother tongue instead of a fatherland, as German-language writers—citizens of a state of mind—have communicated as far back as Grimmelshausen, who made fun of the Thirty Years’ War, and as recently as Group 47.
In his fiction and nonfiction, he’s often obsessed about Group 47, the German writers East and West who met sadly and briefly after the war. Some would try again, with beer and potato salad, between 1973 and 1977. They show up in Headbirths and he’s even projected them backward, into the seventeenth century, in The Meeting at Telgte. At Telgte, we also met the first German novelist, Grimmelshausen, who gave Brecht the idea for Mother Courage and Grass the idea for a Tin Drum, a modern Simplicissimus. So has the notion of a commonwealth of writers, “a cultural nation” in the no-man’s-land of Potsdamer Platz, been kicking about for years in his pages,
But oedipal rage there certainly is—in splendid excess. The Bad Boy of German Letters has been father-bashing, grandfather-bashing, and godfather-bashing since he left Danzig. At the gates of Buchenwald, listening to Bach, Nazis wept like wounded bulls. So much for the civilizing surplus value of High Culture. So much for Werther, Brahms, and Buddenbrooks, for geopolitical fairy tales and Black Forest Unsterblichkeitsbedürfnis. There’s no forgiving the Mandarins, the ideologues, the lyric poets. He quotes in Two States from one of his Dog Years fairy tales. Nothing is pure: not snow, virgins, salt, nor Christ, nor Marx. If anything were pure, then the bones,
white mounds that were recently heaped up, would grow immaculately without crows: pyramids of glory. But the crows, which are not pure, were creaking unoiled, even yesterday: nothing is pure, no circle, no bone. And piles of bones, heaped up for the sake of purity, will melt cook boil in order that soap, pure and cheap; but even soap cannot wash pure.
Against this shameful fatherland of the white mounds and the cheap soap, Günter Grass—pariah, traitor, Dennis the Menace—sticks out his Tin Drum. He will wash the taste of shame out of the mouth of the German language. This seems to me exemplary. We need more such brilliant Bad Boys, even if we lose a few great novels.
Grass grew up in a hurry: at fourteen, a Hitler Youth; at sixteen, a soldier in the Panzers; at seventeen, an American POW; at nineteen, an apprentice stonecutter, conscience stricken by “photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, bones”; at twenty-five, a poet and sculptor; at twenty-eight, off to Paris where—under the lash of Paul Celan—he wrote most of his amazing Danzig Trilogy.
If you know The Tin Drum (1959) just from Volker Schlöndorff’s pious movie you’ll have missed the gusto and maybe the point of this Danzig according to Breughel and Bosch, this rhapsodizing and guffaw, the punning and screaming. Nor am I about to belabor it here. But a brief visit in book two to the western front, where Oskar and Bebra look at the turtle-shaped pillbox Dora Seven, a compound of concrete and puppy-dog bones, gives you the flavor. A proud Corporal Lankes explains:
The centuries start coming and going, one after another like nothing at all. But the pillboxes stay put just like the Pyramids stayed put. And one fine day one of those archeologist fellows comes along. And he says to himself: what an artistic void between the First and the Seventh World Wars… Then he discovers Dora Five, Six, Seven; he sees my Structural Oblique Formations, and he says to himself, Say, take a look at that. Very, very interesting, magic, menacing, and yet shot through with spirituality. In these works a genius, perhaps the only genius of the twentieth century, has expressed himself clearly, resolutely, and for all time. I wonder, says our archeologist to himself, I wonder if it’s got a name? A signature to tell us who the master was? Well, if you look closely, sir, and hold your head on a slant, you’ll see, between those Oblique Formations…. All right, here’s what it says. Herbert Lankes, anno nineteen hundred and forty-four. Title: BARBARIC, MYSTICAL, BORED.
And Bebra says, “You have given our century its name.”
There’s a disdain here for a lot of poetry, philosophy, psychology, and the nineteenth century’s notorious Wagnerian bond with night and death. Oskar, a self-made dwarf whose voice shatters plate glass, isn’t symbolic of Nazi culture; nor is he symbolic of what became of the Germans, poor puppy dogs, inside Hitler’s thousand-year pillbox. Oskar instead symbolizes the German artist, who should have been the German conscience but who chose instead to stay three years old forever. Not by accident, as Oskar scrambles with his books up the railroad embankment to look at Dora Seven, does he admit to “losing a little Goethe” in the process. Goethe! The Tin Drum is the first of Grass’s very Grimm fairy tales. As it ends, the Black Witch is gaining on the three-year-old times ten, in a loony bin: “Black words, black coat, black money.”
Likewise I know what to make of Mahlke’s grotesque Adam’s apple in Cat and Mouse (1961). Mahlke’s been asked to swallow too much, including the philosopher Fichte. He has swallowed so much, he needs an Iron Cross to cover it up. Nor, for all the time he spent in church and his fixating on the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, is Mahlke any sort of Christ figure, a Teutonic Billy Budd. As old and as useful to myth as a Son of God is the Scapegoat, someone who is blamed and punished and expelled from the social order. Scapegoats are usually Jewish.
After the Scapegoat in this fairy tale of history comes the Scarecrow. Amsel the half Jew constructs these scarerows in Dog Years (1963). They are mechanical marching men: the SA. Amsel will be betrayed by his “bloodbrother” Matern, “the bounceback man.” Tulla, the satanic pubescent from Cat and Mouse, shows up again; and Dr. Brunies, the first in a long line of luckless Grass pedagogues; and many black German shepherds, leading to Hitler’s favorite Prinz, and to the equally black Pluto, hiding underground after the war in Brauxel’s mine, with an army of scarecrows, all of them waiting for emancipation and a reckoning.
Unfriendly references abound in Dog Years to Kant and Hegel, old Celtic Druids, Prussian oak-tree gods, “the goateed Husserl,” and the Hoard of the Nibelungs. Besides, “Schopenhauer glowered between book-shelves.” But listen to this:
Has a thousand words for Being, for time, for essence, for world and ground, for the with and the now, for the Nothing, and for the scarecrow as existential frame. Accordingly: Scareness, being-scared, scare-structure, scare-vulnerable, scare-principle, scare-situation, unscared, final scare, scare-born time, scare-totality, foundation-scare, the law of scare. “For the essence of the scarecrow is the transcendental three-fold dispersal of scarecrow suchness in the world project. Projecting itself into the Nothing, the scarecrow physis, or burgeoning, is at all times beyond the scarecrow such and the scarecrow at-hand….” Transcendence drips from stockingcaps in the eighteenth stall. A hundred caustic-degraded philosophers are of one and the same opinion: “Scarecrow Being means: to be held-out-into Nothing.”
And so the Danzig Trilogy ends with a wicked parody of… Martin Heidegger! Is this any way to talk to your Higher Culture? With a slingshot?
It’s generally felt that Grass won’t write another novel as completely satisfying as The Tin Drum. This is because, after the Trilogy, instead of staying put inside his characters, he was loose on the streets, agitating for social justice and Willy Brandt, animadverting Kiesingers and Globkes, off to Tel Aviv or Managua. John Updike tells us: “Those who urge upon American writers more social commitment and a more public role should ponder the cautionary case of Günter Grass. Here is a novelist who has gone so public he can’t be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches to his readers from the front lines of his engagement.”
I’d be more comfortable agreeing for once with Updike if he hadn’t missed the point of three of Grass’s books. But yes, Grass has been on the barricades, and barricades get in the way of the lapidary. Personally, I’d blame movies almost as much as politics for the, ah, dishevelment of his subsequent fiction: the impatient cuts, irresolute fades, camera angles wider than subcontinents; a sacrifice of introspection.
But I also see a career in which novels and politics are twinned. He would democratize the language and the social order. He not only answers all the fire alarms in the culture, he often sounds them himself. And the vernacular in which he sounds them—vulgar, sarcastic, satiric, cajoling, blasphemous, absurd, iridescent; seaport street talk and Magic Realism on the Vistula—has about it the acid vehemence of another great German scourge. Think of him as Martin Luther with a sense of humor. Yes, of course, salvation for Grass is all works, and he’d probably rather sit down for beer and potato salad with Erasmus, but I can’t help recalling the Ninety-five Theses nailed to the door of the Wittenberg church, the tract on Babylonian Captivity, and the famous farting contest between Luther and Lucifer. At least in part, the Reformation was all about metaphors. And I do believe we’re talking about a second Reformation in a West where every possible indulgence is for sale, plastic accepted.
In his own words, he is one of those writers who “bolt from their desks to busy themselves with the trivia of democracy. Which implies a readiness to compromise. Something we must get through our heads is this: A poem knows no compromise but men live by compromise. The individual who can stand up under this contradiction and act is a fool and will change the world.” This almost mandates in his prose something messy, voracious, indulgent, hybrid, partisan, ad hoc, avuncular, treasonable and… well, heroic. How many Calvinos do we need, anyway? Or Robbe-Grillets and Tourniers? Enough, already, of this cult of the petty-bourgeois genius.
He wouldn’t publish another novel for seven years. The political speeches were collected as Speak Out! (1968), and there’s an important play to mention, The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising (1966), his account of the workers’ insurrection in East Berlin, Leipzig, and Magdeburg. Plebians was disapproved of in the West because it hadn’t followed our line of a popular revolt against Communism. It was despised in the East because it was anti-Stalinist, and asked the embarrassing question, Where was Brecht? Grass had to go all the way to India to see it performed again, twenty years later, in Bengali.
In Local Anaesthetic (1969), Eberhard Starusch, a fortysomething professor of “German and history,” goes to a dentist. There’s a TV set to distract the patients. On its screen, Starusch projects his life, his violent fantasies, and not a little German history and literature—Goethe again; Kleist and Buchner; “Hegel and Marxengels”; “the late Rilke—the early Schiller”; even Herbert Marcuse—between commercials. Sometimes, this private videotape is the only scheduled program. Sometimes the commercial products (deep freezers, hair rinse) represent abstract problems (memory, disguise). Sometimes the screen writhes in “live” coverage of antiwar demonstrators, including Starusch’s brainy, disillusioned student, Scherbaum, who wants to burn his long-haired dachshund, in public, to protest against American napalm in Vietnam.
Surrogate fathers and prodigal sons: Starusch and Scherbaum educate each other into the basis for action and the requirements of decency. Being rational “doesn’t prevent you from being stupid,” but neither does being passionate and sincere. If, as we are led to believe, “humanity is terrorized by overproduction and forced consumption,” the answer may not be the professor’s “pedagogical prophylaxis” (because the modern eats history for breakfast), or the dentist’s utopian/anesthetic “Sickcare” (because there will always be pain), but neither is the answer burning dachshunds, nor the mindless violence of the Maoist teenybopper Vero.
A passionate youth, a kindly elder, an accommodation. Imagine that, in the sixties. Not exactly, to pick at random, Irving Howe and the New Left; not even, to go all the way back to the fifties, Lionel Trilling and Allen Ginsberg. Pay attention in Local Anaesthetic to the counterpoint of quotations from Seneca and Nietzsche. Grass has his problems with Seneca, who was to blame, after all, for Nero. But he hates Nietzsche.
So much for Goethe, Heidegger, Nietzsche. Now for the Brothers Grimm. In The Flounder (1977), a swamp-monster history of nationalism, religion, nutrition, art, sex, and the author, Grass unbuttons himself, and it’s quite a sight, like Rabelais and Levi-Strauss doing the dirty. His nine chapters are the months of pregnancy and the Ages of Man. They give birth, out of the sea and the amniotic soup, to the New Woman who may be almost as revolutionary as the potato.
Our flounder’s borrowed from an old Grimm typically punitive and typically misogynistic folktale. He pops out of the Baltic, near (of course) Danzig, the first male chauvinist fish: immortal. In Grimm, the fisherman who caught this talking turbot was so impressed with its gift of speech he set it free. In gratitude, the fish promised to fulfill the fisherman’s wishes. This good fortune was subverted by the greed of the fisherman’s wife, Ilsebill, who asked for control of the moon and the sun.
According to Grass, the flounder, back in Neolithic times, hated matriarchy, and signed on as a kind of Kissinger to the fisherman, teaching him power politics, leaking the secrets of metallurgy and the Minoans, stirring up a stew of war and wanderlust—of restless Goths and final solutions. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, a masculine principle mindlessly replicating itself, and sexually allied down through the eons with successive Ilsebills: invariably cooks, invariably pregnant, invariably symbolic of the status of women from the Stone Age to 1970 in society, fantasy, and other metaphysisms. Thus a three-breasted Awa, who suckles man to happy stupor; Iron Age Wigga, who invents fish soup; Mestwina, reconciling paganism and Christianity; ascetic Dorothea, who bakes a Sacred Heart into High Gothic bread dough; Fat Gret, a goose-plucking nun, for whom “young sons of patrician families were an appetizer: tender asparagus tips”; Agnes the kindhearted, Amanda the potato-faced, Sophie the Virgin, Lena the Socialist, Billy the Lesbian, and Maria of the buttermilk.
We meet Opitz and Gryphius, the seventeenth-century poets who will reappear in The Meeting at Telgte. There are broad burlesques of the Teutonic epic: more godfather-bashing. And, before the talking turbot is tried by feminists for crimes against the distaff, there will be many odd recipes, including one for toads’ eggs fried in the fat of stillborn baby boys. But we know now that what’s really cooking is an entire culture, masculine and capitalist, ballsy and greedy. We eat our role models, those mushrooms, and that excrement. It makes a writer want to puke.
The Meeting at Telgte (1979), written as a seventieth birthday present for his old friend Hans Werner Richter, is more oedipal mayhem, anticipating much of what Grass says later on about mother tongues and fatherlands. In fact these poets never made it to Telgte in 1647 to talk about language and peace as the Thirty Years’ War was winding down. Still, a novelist dreams: What if, like German writers in 1947, they’d met and drafted a statement? After all, poets alone “knew what deserved the name of German. With many ‘ardent sighs and tears,’ they had knitted the German language as the last bond; they were the other, the true Germany.”
Meet Birken (“one wondered why so much beauty should have a need of theory”); Buchner (“so ponderously silent that his mute periods have been cited as figures of speech”); Gryphius (“thunder, even when he lacked lightning”); Rist (“Logau’s wit was corrosive because it lacked wholesome humor… because it lacked wholesome humor it was no better than irony… because it was ironical it was not German… because it was not German, it was intrinsically ‘un-German and anti-German’”). According to Grass, even the composer Schutz could have been there where he wouldn’t have heard much music: “To set such a drama to music, one would have to unleash a war of flies.” Eavesdropping—naturally—is Grimmelshausen. Grass identifies with Grimmelshausen as Mann identified with Goethe. This is because Grass and Grimmelshausen are both funny. (Goethe told us: “How dare a man have a sense of humor, when he considers his immense burden of responsibilities toward himself and others? However. I have no wish to pass censure on the humorists. After all, does one have to have a conscience? Who says so?”)
Thirty years is a long war. These poets would actually prolong this war, in order to refine the German language and its “rhymed yearning for death.” Instead of soup they “sank their teeth into phrases and sentences, easily satisfied word-ruminants, finding, if need be, satiety in self-quotation.” Besides: “No one was willing to give up merely because reality had once again put in an objection and cast mud at art.” Finally, of course: “This verdict of universal guilt amounted to a universal acquittal.”
They perfect a petition, but as the inn burns down the petition burns up: “And so what would in any case not have been heard, remained unsaid.” No great loss: less “soul-mush.” But something in Grass is tickled by these poets’ clubs: Fruit-bearers, Sweet-smellers and the German-minded, the Upright Cucumber Lodge, an Order of the Elbe Swans. Something in him looks among the beer kegs and milking stools and wanton wenches for a saving “thistle.” Honor? Comrades?
Zeus had the first “headbirth,” springing Athene. It’s “a paradox that has impregnated male minds to this day.” It’s also a parable of art. Grass Zeusifies. His Headbirths (1980) is a lively mess, placenta and all. In no special order, though often in circles, Headbirths contemplates the 1980 elections in the German Federal Republic: a dead friend; movies, children; Asia, balls of thread; liver sausage; and a fictitious pair of civil servants, Harm and Dorte, who can’t decide if they want a child and can’t imagine what history will do to them and their Volkswagen.
Grass approves of children, having sired lots, but he isn’t sure the world needs any more Germans, no matter how much authorities deplore a declining birth rate that makes necessary so many Turks to do the coolie work of the republic. After being a nuisance on the Tin Drum set, Grass went off with Schlöndorff to the Orient, thinking cinematic. Maybe they’d make a movie on overpopulation. Like nuclear reactors, overpopulation’s bad for the ecology. Grass took these notes; we don’t know what Schlöndorff did. The dead friend is Nicolas Born, from Group 47.
Meanwhile Zeus looks over his shoulder at critics who ask him to butt out of contemporary politics, as if this morning’s news weren’t a headbirth of history. At one point he makes himself ten years older than he really is in order to imagine the compromises writers of that age—Eich, Koeppeman, Kästner—must have made with Hitler. To the dead Born, he speaks out loud: “Now that you are dead I am aging more perceptibly. My courage, which was doing fine only yesterday, has furled several sails.” (Don’t believe him.) And: “I’m ashamed.” (He’s the only one.)
Mobius on a bender gets looped. In Shanghai, among eleven million bicycles, he wonders, What if the populations of China and the two Germanys were reversed? If there were only eighty million Chinese… and a billion Germans in “the alarming process of self-discovery”? But the Germans, unlike the Chinese, are dying out. Will they end up stuffed in their own museums? On your left, Hittites, Sumerians, Aztecs; to the right, Germans who were “not mere warlike barbarians concerned only with sordid gain, mere function without spirit,” but victims of an industrial society that depended parasitically for its extravagant standard of living on a South (oil; Turks) which it exhausted. Ought those Germans to have denied themselves anything?
Grass imagines Harm and Dorte as teachers who met at a sixties rally against the war: liberal puppy love. Harm will quote Marx on the capitalist law of accumulation through redundancy, and deplore “the lack of long-range views.” Dorte frisks among computer projections, and deplores “the lack of meaning in general.” Both feel bad about their civil-servant privileges, and vote against Franz Josef Strauss. Since Grass needs them to go to overpopulated Asia to “tabulate and classify” the squalor, he will also invent a Sisyphus Travel Agency, to arrange “destitution as a course of study.” Harm and Dorte will be booked into slums from Bangkok to Bombay.
Grass directs: “Long shot of the Indian subcontinent. She, cut off at the waist, covering half the Bay of Bengal, all Calcutta and Bangladesh, casually takes the pill: ‘It’s safe to say that birth control… has been a failure in India.’” It’s also safe to say that Grass has more fun with his impossible screenplay than he does with Harm and Dorte, who will weary any reader. When Dorte, inside a Cave of Bats, undergoes a mystical conversion to the cult of the Mother Goddess and withholds her sexual favors from Harm till he agrees to procreate, even Grass is exasperated. With her ball of thread, can’t she knit herself a child? Only a movie could make us care about these two. And movies, Grass suggests, are a substitute for the imagination. Take that, Schlöndorff.
But so, Grass implies, are card files and data sheets a substitute for the imagination. They furnish a “vacuum.” And the worst possible substitute for the imagination is a politics-as-usual of neglect, a headbirth metastasized. Grass fumes: What nonsense to seek disarmament through rearmament, to combat an energy shortage by stepping up production, to breed reactors instead of Germans, to pile up pork and butter mountains in a world where fifteen million children starve to death each year. If he were in charge he would abolish compulsory education and “emancipate” all civil servants by firing them. To raise the birth rate he would cut off the electric current at night and reintroduce as bedware the traditional German nightcap, to save the heat that escapes through the holes in our heads. He would mandate a switch of political systems every ten years between Germanys East and West, giving the German Democratic Republic “an opportunity to relax under capitalism,” while, under Communism, the FRG would drain off its cholesterol. More radically, he’d deal with property “as my spiritual property and that of others have been dealt with: 70 years after the author’s (that’s me) death, his (my) rights enter the public domain. I (as dictator) would extend this benefit by law to all earned or acquired possessions—house, factory, field—so that only the children and some of the grandchildren will be obliged to inherit it or hold it in usufruct. Ones born later will be exempt from this hereditary burden… they will be free to make a fresh start.”
Ridiculous of course. Without surplus there can be no value. This is the sort of irresponsible antinovelistic “dispatch” digressiveness that so dismays an Updike he neglected to mention any of it in his review of Headbirths.
Finally, Grass would ordain a National Endowment, a Museum without Walls in the psychic space between the two Berlins, promoting the history and, much more important, the literature—the mother tongue—of all the Germanys. Writers, he says, are the best patriots; even a “wounded” language might somehow heal the body politic. “What’s wrong with us is neither material nor social, but an emergency of the spirit.” Dorte in her sarong confesses: “I’m afraid, Harm. Of us, of everything.” Grimmelshausen would advise her: Read Holderlin. Or Trakl.
Having kissed off the Brothers Grimm in The Flounder, in The Rat (1987) Grass kisses off fairy tales period. No more ruined towers, magic mirrors, hungry ravens, dead trees, a comb, a belt, a cherry torte and those little bones left over after Adolf ate the sleeping princess. “All hope is gone,” he says in one of the little poems that pepper the text, “for fairy tales / it shall be written here, / are dying with the forests.” The forests are dying from industrial overdevelopment and acid rain. Without forests, of course, “children can no longer get lost.”
In one of Rat’s subplots, fairy-tale characters seize power and demand a regreening of Middle Europe. They are exterminated. In another subplot, five feminists, on a barge in the Baltic, search for a vanished matriarchal city; they’ll be vaporized. In a third subplot, Oskar the dwarf returns as a middle-aged producer of video cassettes on his way to Danzig-Gda´nsk, where he will show films he has already made about the apocalyptic future; he, too, will be vaporized. In yet a fourth subplot, an artist who counterfeits Authentic Gothic for needy cathedrals is tried and convicted… of treason!
Where’s the Social-Democratic novelist while all of this goes on? Either dreaming or marooned in a space capsule orbiting an Earth on which everything has been obliterated except rats, wood lice, a stinging bluebottle, and a flying snail. In either case, a scholarly She-Rat explains the future and disdains the past. We are also told of new punk religions, hybrid rat-men with blue eyes and blond hair, and the posthistorical significance of Solidarity, the then-outlawed Polish labor movement. (Who knew?) An alarmist Grass is having his black fun with movies as fairy tales, with literature as lies, with art and politics as forgeries, and with rats as symbolic of all the herrenvolk wants to get rid of, from scruples to children to, of course, the Jews. This is his own sort of poisoned apple: Wake up, before all of us turn into big, bad Germans!
Fed up with “frozen cheerfulness,” “stylized warmth behind burglarproof glass,” “Social Democratic neither/nor,” not to mention people who obsess about the “half-life of their vegetables” and take courses in How to Cope with Grief, Grass sent himself for six months in 1987 to Calcutta, where he found more shame. In Show Your Tongue (1988), he measures everything, including himself, by Calcutta: “a city damned to offer lodgings to every human misery”; a city he loves, in spite of itself, for the Bengali lyrics, sitar melancholy, moonlit courtyards; a city that plummets “as if an Expressionist had invented this rush of streets for a woodcut of epileptic collapse. Only the sleepers remain real. “In a diary, in anguished little poems and violent smudgy drawings, he limns an “acrid smoke of open fires fed with cakes of dried cow dung”; vultures, crows and “child-bundles” living in a garbage dump: old women on funeral pyres at the crematorium, “sticking out from under the shrouds.”
Even at the crematorium: “Only the rich can afford sufficient wood. The free-market economy, death as an overhead expense, like everything else.” Temple-hopping with his sick wife; reading Lichtenburg, Schopenhauer, and Elias Canetti; among Bengali poets who can’t understand a word of Tamil or Urdu, Grass is beside himself:
If you lent (for a fee) one of these slum hovels, created from bare necessity, to the city of Frankfurt am Main and had it set down next to the Deutsche Bank highrise where the hewn granite sculpture by the artist Bill says yes, always yes to the towering bank, because as an endless loop it loves only itself, is incontrovertibly beautiful and immaculately endorses the circulation of money stamped valid for eternity—if, I say, you replaced that granite celebrating its flawless self, and set down instead one single slum hovel as authentic as want had made it right next to the glassy arrogance of the Deutsche Bank, beauty would at once be on the side of the hovel and truth, too, even the future. The mirrored art of all those palaces consecrated to money would fall to its knees, because the slum hovel belongs to tomorrow.
Who’ll make the revolution that saves Calcutta? Not Marx, says Grass, nor Mao. He looks to Kali, goddess of destruction, “the terrible black mother” with ten arms and a sword, a spear, a shield, and a strangling noose, a necklace of skulls, and a girdle of severed hands. This is the Kali we see in the temples under layers of black enamel, palms red, eyes ringed, surrounded by women “equipped with Dracula teeth, holding child-sized men in their talons, biting off heads, hands, and cocks.” In blood-drunk ecstasy, Kali cast down her consort, Siva, and danced on his stomach. And then, because she was ashamed of herself, she stuck out her tongue. So does Grass.
This is the good liberal, having met despair. V. S. Naipaul went to Calcutta once upon a time, and stayed a minute, holding his nose. Allen Ginsberg went there, too, for a year, and became a nurse. Supposing a Norman Mailer went to Israel? Isn’t this the sort of thing a serious writer ought to do—book himself into the nightmares of the century, the unconscious of history, after too many tours of the self? When Grass left town for Calcutta in August 1987, he was flying away
from Germany and Germany, the way two deadly foes, armed to the teeth, grow ever more alike; from insights achieved from too close up; from my own perplexity, admitted only sotto voce, flying with me. And from the gobbledygook, the where-I’m-coming-froms, the balanced reporting, the current situations, the razor-elbowed games of self-realization. I am flying thousands of miles away from the superficial subtleties of former leftists now merely chic feuilletonists, and far, far away from myself as part or object of this public exposure.
And now look what they’ve done: Left and Right, do-si-do, buck and wing, danse macabre. He should be embarrassed. Instead he allows to be published these unrepentant fugitives—as if a lost cause mattered. As Martin Luther may or may not have told the Diet at Worms: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”…A rhymed yearning for death.
Now that writers can talk, what shall they say to one another: Show me the way to the next BMW? We are advised by publicists for corporate capitalism that if the nonprofit police state is now bankrupt, so too, somehow, is social democracy. To be a good liberal, a practical radical, a ferocious democrat, a self-made orphan, a citizen without portfolio, and a prophet without honor; a Bad Boy and skeptic; a holy fool instead of a court jester; incapable of simplifying yourself in the gridwork of profit-taking and self-congratulation, ashamed of your very own white-male perks—well, it’s very thick sausage. And certainly not advisable if you want a Nobel Prize.
In some ways it would be easier to write in opposition, from a prison or a psycho ward, in one of the Koreas or Latin Americas or the new black fascisms of emergent and depressing Africa—to have been, before everything changed utterly in 1989, a Konrad or Kundera or Sinyavsky. They’d forgive you then your urgency—review your courage instead of your cleverness. You’d not be asked for more than one masterwork. Fly the black flag, and everyone salutes. But in our postindustrialized, postmodernized, post-semioticized, Post-Toastied fairy-tale West, a Grass is needed more than ever, and more than masterworks. From men of color in white societies, and from women everywhere, we expect dissent, abrasions of race and sex and class on a dominant culture, the music and sinew of the Other. But how many white male writers of the first rank are Citizens before they are Author-Gods? How many put down the pen, pick up a sword, cut through the fat, gather unto them the children and say: There are wounds that will not heal?
Grass would hate this comparison, but look at France since the death of Sartre. Primo Levi fell down a stairwell. Amoz Oz also comes to mind, in Slopes of Lebanon: “What began with the biblical words ‘Zion shall be redeemed by law’ has come to ‘Nobody’s better than we are, so they should all shut up.’” Quoting Isaiah (“Your hands are covered with blood”) and Jeremiah (“For they had eyes but they did not see”), Oz grins: “Veteran defeatists, both of them. Troublers of Israel. Self-hating Jews.”
Citizen Grass is stuck in both his Germanys, but he can look at himself. Now that the Wall isn’t there, I see him jumping over it with Christa Wolf to hold hands and to ban nuclear reactors. The talking turbot and Cassandra. This picture makes me smile.