The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass: Stages of Speech, 1959–2015 by Nicole A. Thesz (review)

This study examines communication and its absence as represented in fifteen prose works by Günter Grass (1927–2015). Though some of the voluminous scholarship on this author has inevitably touched on this theme, The Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass is the first sustained exploration of the representation of dialogue and communication across his career. Nicole Thesz posits that his oeuvre generally treats communication as an antidote to violence, which silences its victims. Though essential to Grass, words are ultimately not ends unto themselves but rather a pragmatic vehicle for human coexistence. His work also reflects his growing preoccupation with how his words would remain after him. Thesz discerns four periods in Grass's representation of communication: in the Danzig trilogy (1959–1963) the power to manipulate others and elide truths is at stake in Nazi-era characters' highly performative speech acts and dearth of intersubjective exchange; a pedagogical impulse and more hopeful attitude toward dialogue as a foundation for democracy characterize the following works (1969–1986); Grass's postunification novels (1992–2002) evince a concern with communication across national and generational lines while exploring the phenomenon of memorialization; and his final texts (2006–2015) present their autobiographical narrators' imaginary dialogues with past people and objects to draw readers into a comparatively more introspective, personal realm.

The book's short introduction positions Thesz's study in relation to prior scholarship on Grass and presents her main ideas about his treatment of communication. It also mentions relevant theoretical work by Barbara Johnstone, Mikhail Bakhtin, J.L. Austin, and Jürgen Habermas before proceeding to characterize Grass's four periods of literary production. Each of the subsequent fifteen chapters examines a particular prose work, and a short epilogue discusses the posthumous Vonne Endlichkait (2015), an illustrated collection of poetry and prose, as a further elaboration on the author's final period. Though the focus is on various representations of dialogue and other communication, the topics of memory and identity come up frequently as well. Thesz shows a good familiarity with Grass scholarship in German and English and reacts to other studies or integrates them to advance her own arguments. A noteworthy example is the attention drawn to differences between her focus on existential concerns in the late autobiographical work and Stuart Taberner's treatment of Grass's self-aggrandizing performance of his public identity in Aging and Old-Age Style in Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, and Martin Walser: The Mannerism of a Late Period (2013). Thesz also discusses archived, early drafts of the texts under study to suggest at various points that Grass either built in a particular emphasis while revising or had one in mind initially.

Readers might disagree with certain conclusions. For instance, Thesz's characterization of the second half of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006) as "light-hearted" appears to overlook the centrality of Grass's mother's death by cancer in the memoir's penultimate chapter, which explicitly contrasts her suffering with the young author's self-absorption (173). Nonetheless, Thesz's interpretations contain novel insights. For instance, interpreting Die Blechtrommel (1959), she demonstrates that the oft-cited Oedipal impulse underlying the narrator Oskar's sense of responsibility for the deaths of his presumptive fathers is also at work in his account of his maternal grandfather's possible death. Elsewhere, Thesz points out that the subject of German suffering, which scholars associate with Im Krebsgang (2002) especially, is central in the earlier Unkenrufe (1992). A further example is the convincing discussion of Grass's imposition of a post-Freudian understanding of erotic sublimation onto Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in Grimms Wörter. Eine Liebeserklärung (2010).

The focus on communication helps Thesz interrogate the hierarchies and power imbalances implicit in Grass's work, including gender dynamics. Moreover, this focus [End...