Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

GÜNTER GRASS

In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.

So wrote Thomas Mann.

When Günter Grass and I were talking together last year, he said, ‘My professional life, my writing, all the things that interest me, have taught me that I cannot freely choose my subjects. For the most part, my subjects were assigned to me by German history, by the war that was criminally started and conducted, and by the never-ending consequences of that era. Thus my books are fatally linked to these subjects, and I am not the only one who has had this experience.’

The destiny of the man or the woman as a writer is to open up, explore, illuminate the inescapable destiny of our time of which Thomas Mann wrote. No writer of the twentieth century who has come after Mann’s generation has fulfilled this destiny better than Günter Grass. Not only in Germany, but in the world.

While the television pictures of war in the streets and celebrations in the palaces flash by and the newspaper headlines are pulped for recycling, the dog Prinz, the Flounder, and the Toad — they are seers of the consequences of events, the past that is never over.

The Snail is the ikon of our slow and painful trail when, as Günter’s companion in great achievement, Bertolt Brecht, says: ‘The travails of the mountains lie behind us./Before us lie the travails of the plains.’ Oskar, from under the skirts of the past, misses nothing of what the world is making of itself for the future.

Genius is always controversial, no matter in what context it occurs. The iconoclasm of painters who rearrange the perceptions of the eye is attacked from whatever is the current conservatism — abstraction, conceptualism, neo-expressionism, whatever. In literature, for the writer as for the painter, there is the same basic imperative: we have to find the way to ‘say’ in our medium, what can deal with, express our time in its particularity and in its place fatally roped to human history.

Günter Grass not only has brought a formidable intellect to the political meaning of human destiny — his own life shaped by it in the dire twentieth-century manifestations of war and social engineering. He has found, for himself, in his writing the richly discursive, expansive mode, the ironic humour, the inverse tenderness, the chaos become a kind of order, the fantastic character of ordinary life in times when brutality is everyday and lies are retold often enough to become that apparently outdated definition, truth.

He is one of those rare writers who have changed the possibilities of fiction. Made it perform anew. While many literary critics credit Gabriel García Márquez with this, it was and is Günter Grass who exploded contemporary fiction and discovered new spaces, new freedom for the imagination as it transforms the thin representation of life that is fact.

It is not his stylistic innovation in the imaginative re-creation of reality that has made him controversial, however; indeed, that has inspired a number of writers, widely dispersed, who derive from him. He has been and remains controversial because he has not and never will accept substitute definitions of the truth — for then, and now; for what was East, and what still is West, at home in Germany, and in the world. In his latest writings, as in the work he has splendidly achieved during the whole of his three-score-and-ten-years, his genius is still going out after the truth, he is in pursuit. And that is what is noble, in the life of a writer and a human being; that quest is his reputation, which cannot be soiled by the slavering and yelping of any media-man.

Günter Grass is a modern Renaissance phenomenon. Even if he had not been a writer, his paintings and sculpture would have distinguished him with high originality, passion, and wit. While exploring the political destiny of our century he has a loving awareness of the natural world in whose context all destinies are played. There’s a consequent wholeness to his vision; I was enchanted to find it symbolised in a small incident when, showing me water-colours of the countryside into which he had painted poetry, he called this his aquadichte, translated for me into English as ‘aquarhyme’.

I have been lucky enough to get to know Günter personally, but even if I had never met him I would have come, as I have now, thousands of kilometres to celebrate him, because his writings have roused in me fresh responses and understanding of this strange century, now passing into history with all its ugly sins, he and I have inhabited.

— Günter Grass seventieth-birthday celebration

Hamburg, 1997