Günter Grass since the Danzig Trilogy

LEONARD FORSTER Gunter Grass since the Danzig Trilogy For most readers Gunter Grass's work is so dominated by the Danzig trilogy that it is difficult to see what he wrote after it in the proper perspective.' Die Blechtrommel, once his launching pad, is now more of a ball and chain. Each time Grass publishes a new book his critics are resentful that he has not written The Tin Drum allover again; that is familiar, it is nailed down, we know what to think about it, and (of course) it is a masterpiece. It would be nice if the other books were like that too. But they are not; each one has been different, each one exploring different ways of how to tell a narrative in the round, from more points of view than one, because no point of view can be completely correct or reliable. We all of us carry about with us our own prejudices and hangups as readers; the narrator- any narrator-does the same. In each of his books Grass forces us to distrust the narrator or narrators and to make up our own minds. Critics don't like that, any more than the ordinary reader does. Grass is a great avoider of pigeon-holes and ready-made labels; he loves to slip between the fingers of critics. Yet in many ways he stands in a recognizable tradition, with respectable antecedents; John Reddick, one of his most perceptive critics and interpreters, has pointed out that Grass's sense of the importance of wholeness, integrated identity, and organic development allies him to Goethe and the classics of German literature.2 True it is that Grass is one of the greatest masters of that device which the later Goethe invented and which has proved to be one of hismajor bequests to the literature of our century: the unreliable or even untrustworthy narrator persona, first used, it would seem, in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The Danzig trilogy is an attempt on a grand scale to explore how things came to be the way they are now - an exploration of 'unbewaItigte Vergangenheit.' This is a subject which is easy to treat in general terms and in so doing to allow it to escape into vagueness, leaving unexplained precisely those things which need explaining. Grass insists on the concrete , the detail, the apparently unimportant trifles which are the stuff of life for most of us and which gradually add up to something more impressive than mere abstract generalities. A visual impression of these concrete things, these apparently unimportant trifles, with which he surrounds himself and which people his inner life, can be obtained from UTQ, VOLUME XLVII, NUMBER 1, FALL 1977 GUNTER GRASS 57 the volume Mariazuehren (1972), which contains very effective colourphotographs by Maria Rama of Grass and his surroundings, and an interpretative poem by Grass himself with English and French parallel versions (the English by Christopher Middleton). The sense of localityhere Wevelsfleth on the Elbe estuary - is strong. And so he takes care to situate his books in carefully documented places, where they have roots. Grass's Danzig, it has often been said, is as minutely observed as Dickens's London, Thomas Mann's Liibeck, Kafka's Prague, or joyce's Dublin. Dickens, Mann, and Kafka lived in the places they described. joyce's Dublin as created for us in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is a romantic nostalgic re-creation by an exile, and it has the intensity of homesickness about it. Grass left Danzig when he was still a boy of seventeen and did not return to visit it until after his major work of re-creation in the Blechtromme! was nearly completed, yet the city and its surroundings live in this book and in others with a strange intensity, an almost surreal clarity. This is where his own roots are; how deep they go can be seen in sudden flashes like that in Aus dem Tagebllch einer Schnecke' where he is talking about one of his electioneering trips in 1961 when he went to sleep in the bus in the Rhineland: Fiinfundsechzig Kilometer lang5chlale ich mich zuriick in die WeicltselniedenmgI querfeldein iiberWeizenboden und Entwasserungsgraben, an denen Weiden stehen und...