In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Günter Grass im Visier – Die Stasie-Akte. Eine Dokumentation mit Kommentaren von Günter Grass und Zeitzeugen by Kai Schlüter
  • Julian Preece
Kai Schlüter. Günter Grass im Visier – Die Stasie-Akte. Eine Dokumentation mit Kommentaren von Günter Grass und Zeitzeugen. Berlin: Christopher Links Verlag, 2010. 384 pp. €25.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-3-86153-567-6.

Günter Grass was both the Federal Republic’s most prominent writer and one of the most energetic critics of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) regime, in particular of its literary and cultural policies, its treatment of writers, and its suppression of free speech. This may surprise anyone who remembers his rejection of a reunified German state in 1990 in favour of a confederation between the West and a reformed (and refinanced) East. But Grass was not the only German writer to find himself suddenly on the opposite side of the argument after 9 November 1989: GDR dissidents, such as Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf, found themselves now defending a state whose regime they had spent decades opposing. Grass identified with dissident fellow writers from across the Soviet bloc, nowhere more than in Czechoslovakia, which was the first communist country to licence a translation of Die Blechtrommel in 1968 during the brief period of liberalisation known as “the Prague Spring.” Reviving those heady days of hope seems to have been Grass’s ambition for the following twenty-two years.

He had already come to the attention of the GDR authorities when, in March 1961 at Leipzig University at a reading from Die Blechtrommel (he chose the chapter “Fernwirkender Gesang vom Stockturm aus gesungen”), he conveyed the best wishes of a recent alumnus, Uwe Johnson, who had fled the country to publish his first novel, Mutmaßungen über Jakob. In May the same year, at a Writers’ Congress in East Berlin, his critical intervention came to the attention of Willy Brandt, the Social Democrats’ Kanzlerkandidat at the elections in September 1961, who invited Grass to work with him and the SPD. Grass’s first public cause was thus freedom of expression in the GDR; Brandt and the SPD, the second.

Kai Schlüter’s meticulously researched volume divides Grass’s engagement with the GDR into five phases between 1961, when the erection of the Berlin Wall occasioned his first public intervention (an open letter to the chairman of the Writer’s Association, Anna Seghers), and 1988, when he was allowed for the third year in succession to give public readings from his recently published works (Das Treffen in Telgte and Katz und Maus came out in 1984; Die Blechtrommel,in 1986). The first phase continues to January 1966 and the West Berlin premiere of Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand, which the GDR took to be a smear on the state’s leading literary light up to his death in 1956, Bertolt Brecht. Grass had offended against a greater taboo by presenting in dramatic form a discussion of the events of 17 June 1953, which he always insisted was a workers’ revolt rather than a general uprising, which was the West’s version of events, or the work of [End Page 490] agents provocateurs, as the East insisted. From this point, Grass was viewed in East Berlin as a leading anticommunist and proponent of the Cold War.

The second phase, which is rightly at the heart of Schlüter’s attention, is centred on a series of fifteen private meetings that took place in East Berlin between May 1974 and November 1977 involving writers from both sides of the city. The Westerners came over on day visas, having to return before midnight, and the Easterners took turns to host. The format was simple and borrowed from the Gruppe 47: readers were chosen by lot and read for fifteen minutes from a work in progress, which was followed by fifteen minutes of discussion by the listeners. Politics was off-limits, and at the end, there was food and drink. Grass is the only participant to have attended each time and gives brief accounts of the meetings in both Kopfgeburten (1980) and Mein Jahrhundert (1999). He was surprised to discover that...

pdf

Share