Räume in Günter Grass' Prosa by Nathalie Kónya-Jobs (review)

Raüme in Günter Grass' Prosa is Nathalie Kónya-Jobs's dissertation and it bears many of the genre's hallmarks. It is thorough, detailed, and thoughtful, but also long-winded, and it deals with two vast topics: Günter Grass and space. As Kónya-Jobs states in her introductory sentence, the dissertation's intentions are twofold: "Erstens soll sie einen Beitrag zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Erforschung ausgewählter Texte des Autors Günter Grass leisten. Zweitens soll sie exemplarisch das heuristische Potenzial des Raumkonzeptes für die Literaturwissenschaft aufzeigen" (9). She notes that Grass's œuvre is replete with spaces such as landscapes, cities, and rooms and she wants to explore how Grass achieves their narrative construction. To this end, the introduction's long final paragraph lists more than a dozen "Leitfragen" (18) to ascertain, for example, the specific qualities of spaces, the correlation between figures and spaces, the link between memory and space as well as the role of narrators. Given this spectrum of issues and the theoretical approaches they necessitate, the author sees her study as presenting "die Verbindung einer interkulturellen und einer raumphilologischen Studie" (11), requiring her to also address topics such as the politics of memory, bicultural identity, perception of self and other, and changing border regimes. This is, by all accounts, a far-reaching, expansive agenda not only in terms of subject matters and theoretical discourses but also regarding the number of Grass texts examined. In addition to the Danzig trilogy, Kónya-Jobs includes all of Grass's major novels and novellas as well as the first two volumes of his autobiographical project.

This extensive material is organized in four main chapters and framed by the introduction, a brief conclusion, and a 15-page bibliography. Chapter II entails a broad overview of theories of space, drawing on publications from 1934 until 2009—in itself an admirable feat of scholarly diligence—and it concludes with Kónya-Jobs's argument that in analyzing a text's spatial configuration, one must distinguish between "Erzählte Raüme, Raüme des Erzählens und Raummetaphorik" (51). This three-fold distinction is key to her interpretation and each is investigated extensively in the following three chapters. "Erzählte Räume" are defined as concrete locations: Chapter III delineates buildings, interior spaces, subterranean locations, but also Foucault's heterotopias (such as the onion cellar in Die Blechtrommel), Marc Augé's "non-spaces" (encountered in Walter Matern's voyages in Hundejahre), as well as memory locations such as Danzig. One problem with this approach are the lengthy introductions to Augé and Foucault as well as key memory theorists (Maurice Halbwachs, Aleida and Jan Assmann), which interrupt flow and focus. Brief summaries at the end of each subchapter would have helped retain some focus; without such guides one struggles to identify key interpretive points. The shorter Chapter IV centers on "Räume des Erzählens: Zur Interdependenz von Raum- und Erzählsituation" and Kónya-Jobs defines the former as,,grundsätzlich fiktiv" (53) and as addressing explicitly how spaces are narrated (54). This discursive focus continues in Chapter V "Raummetaphorik," which includes not only "raumsemantische Aspekte" but also "metaphorisch-räumliche und metonymisch-räumliche Strukturen der fiktionalen Rede" (54). Kónya-Jobs's argument is that Grass's well-known focus on objects can be correlated to the prominent role spatial metaphors play in his œuvre and that his poetic language can be characterized by an "inherente Räumlichkeit" (388). At the end of this chapter, she lists numerous textual instances in order to show how Grass used the language of space to very different ends. Space metaphors, for example, can denote sexuality, express effects of light, anthropomorphize nature, or describe the human body. This is an appealing and interesting approach and the list of quotations and examples shows the author's impressive familiarity with Grass's œuvre.

Kónya-Jobs set out to demonstrate that the configurations of...