The Cambridge Companion to Günter Grass (review)

Intended "primarily for university undergraduates and graduate students" (2), the present volume seeks to make Grass accessible to an English-speaking reading public (Grass's works are cited in English translation) that is not confined to the literati and cognoscenti. Given both the volume and the often daunting complexity of Grass's fiction, which has generated a substantial amount of criticism, there can be little doubt about the appropriateness of a publication that tends to reinforce the perception of the writer's international standing—a standing that presumably has not been seriously affected, editor Stuart Taberner plausibly surmises (1), by the 2006 Waffen SS éclat.

Even a perfunctory glance at the table of contents reveals that virtually Grass's entire œuvre—both literary and extraliterary—has been covered by the contributors who, for the most part, are established Grass scholars and hail predominantly from institutions in the UK. Unsurprisingly, analyses of works of fiction—chiefly among them The Tin Drum—tend to predominate; however, other aspects of Grass's wide range of artistic and other pursuits have by no means been neglected. Customary space restrictions permit only exceedingly brief summaries of the fifteen contributions, which will be referred to consecutively.

In the initial essay, Julian Preece explores "Biography as politics" and views Grass's prose works in terms of "autobiographical fiction" (10) that reflects the writer's both personal and generational experiences. Grass's frequent political interventions as well as his role as a public intellectual are addressed by Frank Finlay, who examines the writer's "political rhetoric." In what must count as a paean to Grass's craft, Patrick O'Neill provides a spirited "condensed summary" (45) of the author's "exploratory fictions" in which he dispenses with references to secondary literature but predicts that Grass "will long be remembered" for his "revolutionary freshness of vision" (51) in the postwar era.

Grass's novels in general, but notably The Tin Drum, The Flounder, and The Rat, serve Peter Arnds to explore elements of "magical realism," a mode of presentation that relies on "[m]yth, legend, and fairy tale" (52) in the vein of Michel Tournier and Salman Rushdie. Katharina Hall proposes to expand John Reddick's concept of the Danzig Trilogy (1975) by including Local Anaesthetic and Crabwalk to form the " 'Danzig Quintet' "—five texts that despite their having been written over a period of forty years display "a number of structural and thematic continuities" (67). (See also the review of Hall's The "Danzig Quintet" by Thomas W. Kniesche in Monatshefte 100.4 [2008]: 646–47.) Helen Finch investigates the role of gender—notably in The Flounder—and concludes not entirely convincingly that despite apparent challenges to gender norms, especially in the infamous "Father's Day" chapter, Grass "ultimately relapses into tired gender stereotypes" (95). As in her more inclusive Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass (2008) (see my review in Monatshefte 101.2 [2009]: 295–97), Rebecca Braun discusses "Authorial construction" in From the Diary of a Snail and The Meeting at Telgte; she posits that the author's "manipulation of unreliable narrators" can be traced to his concept "of the author as a deliberately elusive and unstable construct" (110).

In a different vein, Monika Shafi discusses the writer's "apocalyptic visions" in texts of the 1980s—"Orwell's Decade," in Grass's terminology—and, implicitly contradicting Braun, observes that these works are "informed by a strong moral and didactic impetus" (123). Stephen Brockmann, in his essay on "Grass and German unification," emphasizes the significance of cemeteries and graves in the writer's post-unification works and adopts Grass's pessimistic outlook: "in a sense, [Germany has become] a massive graveyard and monument to its own past" (137). In his revised version of a previously published article, Stuart Taberner discerns in Peeling the Onion elements of the Künstlerroman as well as the historical novel; he suggests that the writer's authorial intent was to offer...