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  • Illusions of Return: City and Memory in Günter Grass’s Danzig Novels
  • Nicole A. Thesz

If there is a geographic centre in Günter Grass’s fiction, a location in which memories and myths converge, it is the city of Danzig, where the author was born in 1927. Expelled from what was to become Gdańsk in 1945, Grass returns to the city in memory in his first three novels, Die Blechtrommel (1959), Katz und Maus (1961), and Hundejahre (1963), where he depicts the prewar and war years in the petit-bourgeois milieu of his youth. How do the places that Grass portrays incite and store memories and, in turn, how are remembered spaces modified as subjects revisit them in memory? What do his characters recall about Danzig, and how do they negotiate the realities of Gdańsk in relationship to their childhood memories? After all, as a result of intensive reconstruction, Gdańsk in many ways resembles its prewar appearance, but few traces of German culture remain (Jerzak 85). Memories of Danzig the are complicated by fact that, while Grass’s characters (and German expellees like himself) seek a connection to their childhood selves, the left-liberal author focusses on the dangers of such nostalgia. The memory sites of Danzig’s city-, sea-, and landscapes in the “Danzig Trilogy” (1959–63), Der Butt (1977), Die Rättin (1986), and Unkenrufe (1992), both evoke and critique the past. The literary Danzig is a place in which the young characters of the “Trilogy” are socialized under National Socialism, whose calls for more Lebensraum play so insidiously into the tight living quarters of the petit-bourgeois neighbourhood. The aging Danzig Germans of Grass’s later works – Der Butt, Die Rättin, and Unkenrufe – attempt to revisit their origins, but as return merges with regression, the city of memory comes to stand for the ultimate site of protective, familiar Heimat: the womb. Recalling Danzig and overlooking Gdańsk, these figures engage in imagined memories, an elusive hybrid of recollections, desire, and possessive fantasy.

Both literary city and memories are shaped by retrospective interpretation. This highly constructed zone of past cities reflects “the modern imagining and, consequently, remaking of the hometown, not the hometown’s own deeply rooted historical reality” (Applegate 8). The loss of the native city stimulates efforts to rebuild it in recollections, and Grass’s writing has been characterized as a conjuration of the lost milieu. Readers are drawn into the city of memory through emblematic allusions to the “Backsteingotik” of Danzig, whose facades merge the brick’s comfortable stability with the neogothic style’s [End Page 64] nostalgic gesture toward tradition (e.g. Werkausgabe XV, 331; Blechtrommel 175, 467, 512; Katz und Maus 18; Der Butt 694; Die Rättin 164, 371; and Unkenrufe 15). Grass’s narrators remain essentially unclear about details of the city, subsuming the atmosphere under the emblematic reference to Backstein. This vagueness evokes the impossibility of return: memory approximates and stylizes, just as a textual memory distills leading images out of the plethora of sensory detail that remains after much is forgotten. After all, Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire are precisely the “remains” (12) – selected items that are resurrected from the past when illuminated by an “Aufmerksamkeitsstrahl” or a sudden focus of attention (Assmann 310). The architectural site becomes the foundation for mnemonic activity, serving as a repository for human emotion and identity. Such aesthetically transformed memory is visible in Die Rättin, where the narrator envisions Saint Mary’s Church as a “Backsteinglucke” (35) that hovers maternally over the brick cityscape, embodying the conceptual link between memories of cities and images of womb-like protection.

From Grass’s perspective of exile, the loss of home propels Danzig onto the centre stage of the imagination. In a sense, the native city provides a metaphor for memory, since it lies irretrievably in the past. Like the restorative efforts of memory, Danzig’s reconstruction gives rise to the illusion that the past can be regained through proliferating, painstaking detail.

Although critics have linked the Nobel Prize laureate to his native city, most treat it as a mere backdrop for his novels: “ein umfassendes Panorama...

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