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  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?”)r />
  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.