A NOTE ON GUNTER GRASS
A NOTE ON
GUNTER GRASS
Gunter Grass
is an industry: 300,000 copies of “The Tin Drum” sold in Germany; more than
60,000 in France; the American edition passed 90,000 in hardcover, well over
100,000 in paperback. In England, the vignette of the little man with the
daemonic drum has become a publisher's symbol. Now there is hardly a bookstore window
in Europe from which the black dog of Grass's second major novel, Hundejahre,
does not stick out his red, phallic tongue. But it is not Grass’s enormous
Success that matters most, nor the fact that he has put German literature back
on the market. It is the power of that bawling voice to drown the siren-song of
smooth oblivion to make the Germans-as no writer did before-face up to their
monstrous past.
A grim
fantasy lurks at the heart of Hundejahre. The fable turns on the love-hate
and blood brotherhood of Nazi and Jew. Walter Matern, the S.A. man - Eduard
Amsel, the Jew; brothers under skin and soul, twin shadows in a weird,
ferocious parable of how Germany turned to night.
The neurotic
conjecture of some secret, foredoomed relationship between Nazi and Jew, of a
hidden fraternity or mutual fascination deeper than the outward show of
loathing and destruction, crops up tenaciously. We find it in the suspicion,
argued with varying degrees of historical finesse, that Nazism derived from
Judaism its own dogma of a “chosen race" and of a millennial, messianic
nationalism. It emerges in Hannah Arendt's macabre reading of Eichmann's
“Zionism”, and in the persistent belief or allegation that certain eminent Nazi
- Heydrich, Rosenberg, Hitler himself-had traces of Jewish descent.
This
intimation feeds on two deep-buried sources. Jewish masochism at times inclines
to the notion that there was an occult rationale for the catastrophe, a savage
yet somehow natural rebuke to the proud hopes fostered by Jewish assimilation
into German culture.
The German
or the outsider, on the other hand, yields to the obscure imagining that German
Jewry in some way brought the whirlwind on itself, that the temptations it
offered to bestiality were too subtle, too intimate to be resisted. So utter a
process of recognition and extermination must have involved some hidden
complicity between torturer and victim. For all men kill the Jew they love.
Two boys
play and dream by the sedge and mud-banks of the Vistula, in the flat marshes
on the Polish frontier and around Danzig which Grass has made uniquely his own.
Matern, the teeth-gnasher and miller's son; Amsel, the half-Jew (or is it more,
who knows?). The schoolboy pack yelps at Amsel; he is a butterball with a
jackdaw tongue, and their fists hammer at him. Matern becomes his strong
shield. When he's about, no one clobbers Amsel or screams ‘kike!’
Butterball
gives Matern a penknife. But the river has a strange drag, and one day, finding
no stone at hand, Matern throws in the knife. So what? It was only a dime-store
penknife, and Edi Amsel is a smart kid. Give him a bundle of rags, a few
wood-shavings and scraps of wire. Before you know it, there's a scarecrow (in
German, “Vogelscheuche” has lewd undertones). These are no ordinary scarecrows.
They look like people in the neighborhood, and the birds spin above them in
affrighted swarms. Put a few gears in their straw gut, and they start moving.
Matern isn't
so dumb either. He tries the Communists and finds the beer thin. Down at the
club, all the boys are turning brown. And they're nice about it: "We'd
rather have one repentant Red than a dozen farting bourgeois." Matern
joins. What the hell. And there's that screwball Amsel begging for all the
cast-off S.A. uniforms Matern can scrounge, for the greasy caps and brown
shirts tom in the latest street brawl. He drapes them on his scarecrows, and
the hollow men, the stuffed men, start strutting. Goose-strutting, eyes right,
arms outflung. As if they were legion.
There's snow
in Amsel's yard. One day something queer happens. A covey of S.A. boys, their
faces masked, comes soft over the fence. The kike is pounded to bloody shreds.
Then they roll him in the snow; Amsel the snowman with no teeth left in his
mouth. Not one. Who were the hooligans? Jochen Sawatzki, Paul Hoppe, Willy
Eggers ... Names that stretch from Pomerania to the Rhineland and Bavaria.
Alfons Bublitz, Otto Warnke ... Keep counting. Eight names. But there were nine
men. It's all so complicated and long ago. Like in a foul dream or attack of
nausea. You can't expect a man to remember everything. The snow lay deep and
there were thirty-two teeth in it. And eighteen fists pounding Amsel into a
bloody pulp. Eight fine German names. There's one missing. Still.
So Matern
decides to find out. War is over and the thousand-year Reich lies in a stinking
heap. But amid the graffiti in the men's urinal at the Cologne railway station,
Matern sees the name and address of friend Sawatzki. He finds other names.
Roaming north and south through the moon landscape of rubble and defeat, he
tracks them down one by one. He asks for truth and justice. Where were you when
the mad carpet-eater led us into the great brown sea? Where were you when they
rolled my friend Edi Arnsel into a bloody snowball and cleaned their boots on
his face?
Matern is
not alone. He travels with a large German shepherd. Prinz is Hitler's dog. He
has escaped from the Fuhrer's last redoubt, in the Berlin death-bunker.
Straying westward, he meets Matern coming out of a P.O.W. camp. Now they're
inseparable. While Matern infects the wives and daughters of his old cronies
with venereal disease-it's odd how little things get into the German blood-stream
and make it all hot and wild-Prinz fattens. But he's now called Pluto. Nice
dog; have a biscuit; be a Disney dog.
Matern
becomes a radio idol. One day he consents to be interviewed by a chorus of
eager, well-scrubbed young folk. But some lunatic firm has been selling them
glasses. Put them on and you see mom and dad in a queer brown light. You see
them doing all sorts of surprising things-smashing shop windows, yelling like
apes in heat, making old, frightened men wipe latrines with their beards. Is
that you, dad? So the bright young things ask Matern: who are those nine masked
thugs climbing over the garden fence? Herr Walter Matern, friend of the Jews,
anti-Nazi first class, will broadcast their names to the repentant nation.
Eight names.
Then he
starts running. Eastward. To the other Germany beyond the silent wall. He
leaves Pluto safely tied up at the Cologne station. The train is smooth and
swift. The Germans are expert at making trains race across Europe. But there's
a dog bounding along the track, quicker than a diesel. And just at the border,
a shadow steps out of the shadows. An old friend. He has a pen-knife. And when
Matern throws it into the Berlin canal, he doesn't even mind. Canals can be dredged.
But certain things can never be lost, never thrown away. Knives, for instance.
The tale
ends in a grotesque “Walpurgisnacht”, a descent into a potash mine which is
also the forecourt of damnation. Now we know what we have known all along. That
Walter Matern loved Eduard Amsel so well that he had to get his hands on the
very heart of him, and see his thirty-two teeth in the snow. That when the
right man whistles, German shepherds are the hounds of hell.
Such a
summary is not only inadequate (there are half a dozen novels crowded into this
one baggy monster), but it makes the book sound tighter, more persuasive than
it is. Before reaching the “Materniade”-the mock-epic of Matern's vengeful
wanderings-the reader has to slog through a morass of allegory and digression.
The middle section, some three hundred pages, is cast in the form of letters
(at moments a parody of Goethe's “Wahlverwandschaften”). Through them, we
glimpse the chaotic destinies of Matern, of Amsel, who survives the Nazi period
under a false name, and numerous minor characters.
There are
various welds. Prinz-Pluto is descended from a long pedigree beginning with
Perkum the wolfhound. The story of his forebears interweaves with that of the
Materns. The two boys played with the dog Senta on the low banks of the river.
The birch copse in which the children moiled and listened for owls seems to
melt and darken into other groves (“Birken-Buchen”-put an extra syllable on a
German tree and what do you have?). But although Grass plots and ravels with
crazy gusto, the book tends to fall apart. What sticks in one's mind is the
general statement of chaos and the brilliance of discrete episodes.
The early
chapters of boyhood and river, with their meandering, heavy cadence, are an
extraordinary feat. Grass wraps himself inside the visceral totality of
children. He sees as they do, in slow wakings and abrupt flashes. Like “The Tin
Drum”, “Hundejahre” conveys the impression that there is in Grass's power a
deliberate streak of infantilism, a child's uninhibited, brutal directness of
feeling.
The
narrative of an S.A. gang-up in a beer hall is unforgettable. Grass brings to
light the banal roots of Nazi bestiality. We see the steamy, cozy vulgarity of
German lower-middle-class manners, the wet cigar ash, and the slap on the
buttocks, twist, by a sudden jerk of hysteria, into the sweating fury of the
killers. One comes to understand how the sheer grossness of German
pleasures-the bursting sausages and the flowered chamber-pots, the beer-warmers
and the fat men in tight leather shorts-was the ideal terrain for the sadistic-sentimental
brew of Nazism. Again, one feels that Grass has allowed a certain freedom of
vulgarity in himself, in his own talent. That is what gives his plunge into the
mind and voice of Sawatzki and his boys its nauseating truth. Only in Rudolf
Nassauer's neglected novel, “The Hooligan”, is there anything that cuts as
deep.
Grass is
merciless on post-war Germany, on the miracle of amnesia and cunning whereby
the West Germans shuffled off the past and drove their Volkswagens into the new
dawn. He reproduces, with murderous exactitude, the turns of phrase and
gesture, the private silences and the public clichés, through which Adenauer
Germany persuaded itself, its children, and much of the outside world, that all
those frightful things hadn't really happened, that "figures are grossly
exaggerated," or that no one in red-roofed Bad Pumpleheim really knew “anything”
of what was going on in the woods three miles away. Quite a few fine houses and
villas “did” come on the market in those years (Lieschen and I and little
Wolfram are living in one right now, as a matter of fact). But you know how
Jews are-always off to Sorrento or South America. The Fuhrer? Now that you
mention it, I never saw him. But I did see his dog once. “Nice dog”. Biscuit,
please.
Grass
singles out the moment of untruth. In the three years of desolation from 1945
to 1948, there was a real chance that the Germans might come to grips with what
they had wrought. "Germany had never been as beautiful. Never as healthy.
There had never been more expressive human faces in Germany than in the time of
the thousand and thirty-two calories. But as the little Mulheim ferry accosted,
Inge Sawatzki said: 'Now we'll soon be getting our new money.'"
With the
currency reform of 1948, and the brilliant recovery of German economic strength
(in the very combines and steel mills where slave labor had been ground to
death only a little while earlier), the past was declared irrelevant.
Prosperity is an irresistible detergent: it scours the old darkness and the old
smells out of the house. Grass has captured the whole ambience: the evasions
and the outright lies, the cynicism of the little men grown fat on the manure
of the dead, and the nervous queries of the young. The shadow of Amsel (or is
it the man himself?) is full of genuine admiration for the German genius. Look
at all these good folk "cooking their little peasoup over a blue gas-flame
and thinking nothing of it." Why shouldthey? What's wrong with gas ovens?
On May 8,
1945, Prinz comes to the banks of the Elbe. Should he head east or west? After
mature sniffing, Hitler's dog decides that the West is the right place for him.
In that central fable, Adenauer Germany has its mocking epitaph.
“Hundejahre”
confirms what was already apparent in “The Tin Drum” and “Cat and Mouse”. Grass
is the strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in Germany since 1945.
He stomps like a boisterous giant through a literature often marked by slim
volumes of whispered lyricism. The energy of his devices, the scale on which he
works are fantastic. He suggests an action painter wrestling, dancing across' a
huge canvas, then rolling himself in the paint in a final logic of design.
The specific
source of energy lies in the language. “Hunderjahre” will prove formidably difficult
to translate (even the title has no just equivalent). In these seven hundred
pages, Grass plays on a verbal instrument of uncanny virtuosity. Long stretches
of Baltic dialect alternate with parodies of Hitlerite jargon. Grass piles
words into solemn gibberish or splinters them into unsuspected Innuendo and
obscenity. He has a compulsive taste for word-lists, for catalogues of rare or
technical terms (it is here that he most resembles Rabelais). There are whole
pages out of dictionaries of geology, agriculture, mechanical engineering,
ballet. The language itself, with its powers of hysteria and secrecy, with its
private parts and official countenance, becomes the main presence, the living
core of this black fairy tale.
I asked in
the previous essay whether the German language had survived the Hitler era,
whether words poisoned by Goebbels and used to regulate and justify Belsen, could
ever again serve the needs of moral truth and poetic perception. “The Tin Drum”
appeared in 1959 and there are many to proclaim that German literature has
risen from the ashes, that the language is intact. I am not so sure.
Grass has
understood that no German writer after the holocaust could take the language at
face value. It had been the parlance of hell. So he began tearing and melting;
he poured words, dialects, phrases, clichés, slogans, puns, quotations, into
the crucible. They came out in a hot lava. Grass's prose has a torrential,
viscous energy; it is full of rubble and acrid shards. It scars and bruises the
landscape into bizarre, eloquent forms. Often the language itself is the
subject of his abrasive fantasy.
Thus one of
the most astounding sections in “Hundejahre” is a deadly pastiche of the
metaphysical jargon of Heidegger. Grass knows how much damage the arrogant
obscurities of German philosophic speech have done to the German mind, to its
ability to think or speak clearly. It is as if Grass had taken the German
dictionary by the throat and was trying to throttle the falsehood and cant out
of the old words, trying to cleanse them with laughter and impropriety so as to
make them new. Often, therefore, his uncontrolled prolixity, his leviathan
sentences and word inventories, do not convey confidence in the medium; they
speak of anger and disgust, of a mason hewing stone that is treacherous or
veined with grit. In the end, moreover, his obsessed exuberance undermines the
shape and reality of the work.
Grass is
nearly always too long; nearly always too loud. The raucous brutalities which
he satirizes infect his own art. That art is, itself, curiously old-fashioned.
The formal design of the book, its constant reliance on montage, on fade-outs,
and on simultaneities of public and private events, are closely modeled on
U.S.A. The case of Grass is one of many to suggest that it is not Hemingway,
but Dos Passos who has been the principal American literary influence of the
twentieth century. “Hundejahre” is also Joycean. One can hardly imagine the
continuous interior monologue and the use of verbal association to keep the
narrative moving, without the pattern of Ulysses. Finally, there is the near
voice of Thomas Wolfe. Grass's novels have Wolfe's bulk and disordered vehemence.
Of Time and the River prefigures, by its title and resort to the flow of lyric
remembrance, the whole opening section of Hundejahre, Where Grass knits on to
the tradition of German fiction, it is not, the modernism and originality of
Broch and Musil that count, but the "Dos Passes-expressionism" of the
late 1920's. Technically, “Hundejahre” and “The Tin Drum” take up where
Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) left off.
This is, in
part, because Grass is resolutely "non-literary," because he handles literary
conventions with the unworried naiveté of an artisan. He came to language from
painting and sculpture. He is indifferent to the fine-spun arguments and
expectations of modern literary theory. His whole approach is essentially
manual. But there is a second reason. Totalitarianism makes provincial. The
Nazis cut the German sensibility off from nearly all that was alive and radical
in modern art. Grass takes up where German literature fell silent in the 1930's
(even as young Soviet poets are now "discovering" surrealism or
Cocteau). His ponderous gait, the outmoded flavor of his audacities, are part
of the price German literature has to pay for its years in isolation. But no matter.
In his two major novels Grass has had the nerve, the indispensable tactlessness
to evoke the past. By force of his macabre, often obscene wit, he has rubbed
the noses of his readers in the great filth, in the vomit of their time. Like
no other writer, he has mocked and subverted the bland oblivion, the
self-acquittal which underlie Germany's material resurgence. Much of what is
active conscience in the Germany of Krupp and the Munich beer halls lies in
this man's ribald keeping.
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