Günter Grass and His Critics. From The Tin Drum to Crabwalk (review)

This is a valuable addition to international scholarship on the writings of Günter Grass (though it covers only his prose works, leaving aside poetry, drama, and essays) and to Camden House's long-running series tracing the critical fortunes of key authors or individual works. As befits such a towering contemporary figure as Grass, often feted and analyzed more abroad than in Germany itself, it is one of the longest such volumes, especially on a living author, and will be an essential research tool for all future Grass critics, having something to teach even his most experienced readers.

Siegfried Mews, who has been writing on Grass for more than a quarter of a century, has fifteen chapters, one for each of the prose works from The Tin Drum (1959) to Crabwalk (2002), though counting The Danzig Trilogy as a separate entity, and an epilogue devoted to Peeling the Onion (2006). Mews is scrupulously thorough and fair-minded, only occasionally allowing his own views to show through, as when he loses patience with charges of anti-Semitism against his author or blanket attacks on the Germans as a whole, such as that contained in Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). His method is to highlight and summarize the most significant reviews, both of the German original and the English translation (only once casting his view wider to account for French reactions to Too far Afield [272–80] in which France and French history do loom large). Each chapter is subdivided into sections which cover the main thematic aspects of the reception and critical interest. Thus for Dog Years, we have "A Literary Sensation," "A Writer of International Repute," "Weininger, Heidegger, Wagner," "Fantastic Realism, Mythmaking, Intertextuality," and "Artists, Children, Dogs, and 'Magic Spectacles"'; for My Century "A Media Event," '"Germany's Many Faces,"' '"Narrative(s) and History,"' and "Heidegger and Celan; the Student Movement," which, chosen here at random from near the beginning and near the end of Grass's writing career, reveals several continuities. Mews, however, is reluctant to draw attention to them and holds back for page after page from making judgements or evaluations of any kind. When he does so, they are lapidary and pregnant, such as: "Literary critics writing in scholarly journals tend to be less inclined than reviewers in the Feuilleton to give Ein weites Feld poor marks" (284). This observation could have led to a discussion of the media's relationship to Grass—which basically likes to praise him to the skies only to shoot him out of them again—and contrast it to the academic industry which grows around any major author. There are so many missed opportunities of this type that it is evidently not Mews's intention to criticize the critics or even to identify trends or clusters. Instead, he describes and précises, showing a remarkable knowledge of the material and turning up important but little-known reviews, in the English and German-speaking press. It is the best bibliography of secondary writing on Grass that exists, which makes it indispensable for researchers. His accounts of the novels will also alert undergraduates to the salient features in the criticism and to further reading. This is a reference work, to be consulted or dipped into, not read at one sitting for its own narrative or insights.