Günter Grass in the Late 1960S: the Writer As Public Intellectual BY

Home , DAS GEDICHT, Gottfried Benn, Group 47, Hellmuth Karasek, Walter Jens, What Must Be Said

Günter Grass in the Late 1960s: The Writer as Public Intellectual

ADRIAN CHUBB BA, University of Lancaster, 1984 MA, University of Lancaster 1986

THESIS

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Germanic Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2021

Chicago, Illinois

Defense Committee Sara Hall, Chair and Advisor John Ireland, French and Francophone Studies Elizabeth Loentz Imke Meyer Heidi Schlipphacke

Dedication

To all those who, no matter how small their contribution, helped make this happen.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the following people who, over the course of the past five and half years, have been part of my journey to achieving a life-long ambition:

My dissertation committee with Dr. Sara Hall as advisor and committee chair, Dr. John Ireland as external member and Germanic Studies faculty members Dr. Elizabeth Loentz, Dr. Imke Meyer, and Dr Heidi Schlipphacke. Other members of faculty in Germanic Studies at UIC that have worked with me during my time here: Dr. Patrick Fortmann, Dr. Dagmar Lorenz, Dr. Robert Ryder, as well as the visiting Max Kade Professors Dr. Christoph Rauen, Dr. Karin Madlener, and Dr. Peter Rehberg. My fellow graduate students in Germanic Studies and other departments in the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies, and Linguistics who have helped make these years so much fun. You are too many to mention by name, but you know who you are. Fruman and Marian Jacobson not only for the research support they provided me but also for all they do for countless graduate students in Germanic Studies.

Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Sarah Smith, for her constant help, support, and encouragement throughout and for always being willing to read, comment on, and proofread endless seminar papers, conference presentations and, of course, this dissertation.

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Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

Grass in the late 1960s ...... 4

Örtlich betäubt and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke ...... 8

Chapter 2: The Public Intellectual in Germany ...... 12

Classifying the Public Intellectual ...... 14

Politics and Culture in the Early Federal Republic ...... 19

Conclusion ...... 28

Chapter 3 Grass as a Public Intellectual ...... 29

Grass as Public and Political Interventionist ...... 30

Grass's Public Interventions: Historical, Literary, Personal ...... 36

Grass as a Public Intellectual in Later Years ...... 48

Conclusion ...... 57

Chapter 4: Passing the Past to the Future...... 59

Time, Consequences, and Responsibility ...... 61

Dealing with the Past - Lost Battles and the New Generation ...... 65

Denying the Past; Trusting in Transfer ...... 77

What Do We Tell the Children? ...... 82

Conclusion ...... 96

Chapter 5: Promoting Progress ...... 98

Revisionism as Progress ...... 99

Education as an Engine of Progress ...... 110

A Worldview against the Weltgeist ...... 114

Problematic Progress ...... 123

Conclusion ...... 131

Chapter 6: Silence – Against and For Progress ...... 134

Örtlich betäubt: Silence – Preventing Dialogue, Preventing Progress ...... 135

Silence, Dialogue, and Action ...... 145

Silence Without Violence ...... 148

Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke: Silence as Melancholy – A Step Forward (?) ...... 153

Lisbeth Stomma: Melancholy as Enlightenment ...... 158

Manfred Augst: Melancholy and Failure ...... 166

Conclusion ...... 173

Chapter 7: Where Progress Stops – Gender and Individual Violence ...... 175

Grass and Gender: Der Butt...... 177

Grass, Gender, and the Late 1960s: Speeches and Essays ...... 188

Grass, Gender, and the Late 1960s: The Literary Works ...... 201

Gender and Individual Violence ...... 216

Conclusion ...... 227

Chapter 8: Conclusion...... 229

Grass in the 1960s – still relevant today? ...... 231

Cited Literature ...... 237

VITA: Adrian Chubb ...... 254

Note on abbreviations for sources and on translations:

Abbreviations used in citations for Grass works in German and the corresponding published English translations are listed in the table below. For individual speeches and some secondary works with a published translation, citations from translations are given using a short form version of the English title as listed in the bibliography. Where no published translation exists, and for translations from secondary sources in German, translations are my own and no source is cited.

German English BT Die Blechtrommel TD The Tin Drum öb örtlich betäubt LA Local Anaesthetic DV Davor MP Max: A Play TS Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke DS From the Dairy of a Snail

DB Der Butt TF The Flounder Essays Speeches Letters Commentaries ER Essays Reden Briefe Kommentare (1987 Collected works edition) Essay Speeches I ERI Essays Reden I 1955-1979 (2007 Collected works edition) GS Gespräche Interviews

HZ Beim Häuten der Zwiebel PO Peeling the Onion (Grimm's Words - no published GW Grimms Wörter translation) Refences to individual volumes of WA Werksausgabe in zehn Bänden collected works without published translations

Note on quotation formats: Günter Grass makes copious use of ellipses in his work, and especially in örtlich betäubt/Local Anaesthetic. To avoid any possible confusion, any ellipses I introduce to mark omitted words will be in square brackets, as will any other changes I make to quotations as needed for sentence structure and grammatical adjustments.

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Abbreviations:

FRG Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)

GDR German Democratic Republic (East Germany)

SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany (Leftist/Labor) Christian Democratic Union / Christian Social Union. (Conservatives) CDU/CSU The CSU is that branch of the conservative party in Bavaria. Throughout the texts, references to the CDU include the CSU unless otherwise stated FDP Free Democratic Party (Liberals)

NPD National Party of Germany (Far right, neo-Nazi party)

SDS Socialist German Student League

APO Extraparliamentary Opposition

NSDAP National Socialist Party

SA NSDAP Paramilitary

HJ Hitler Youth – NSDAP organization for young men

BDM League of German Girls – NSDAP organization for young women

Summary Günter Grass initially achieved fame as a writer with the release of his debut novel The

Tin Drum in 1959. Grass used his renown as a platform to take stances in public discussions on political issues, later involving himself in election campaigns on behalf of Germany's Social

Democratic Party. By tackling subjects beyond the literary world, Grass took on the role of a public intellectual, willing to comment openly on any issue of the day, and the years 1965 to

1972 marked a period of especially intense involvement by Grass in public life through speeches, essays, and election campaigns. Grass insisted that this activity as a "citizen and social democrat" was mostly, although not entirely, separate from his literary writing. This dissertation argues that a close reading of his speeches and essays of the period, alongside two literary works published at the time, Local Anaesthetic (1969) and From the Diary of a Snail (1972), belies the idea of such a separation. It examines the concept of the public intellectual in the German context and the interaction of intellectuals with the political environment in the first two decades of the

Federal Republic, before assessing Grass's own contributions. It shows how major themes in

Grass's literary works also dominate the non-literary works. These themes include the need to continue processing Germany's Nazi past and Grass's understanding of enlightened rationality as the core of societal progress, epitomized by modern democracy. Furthermore, Grass's literary and non-literary writing both exhibit the same blind spots where his progressive stance falls short: his essentialist presentations of women, which also suggest they should not participate in the public sphere; and his portrayal of acts of individual, as opposed to political, violence, almost exclusively depicting male-on-female violence. The dissertation concludes by noting that, fifty years on, the discussions Grass participated in remain largely unresolved.

Chapter 1: Introduction

At the end of his 1972 book Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke Günter Grass recounts an anecdote about two young writers who approach him as he is drinking a beer in a local bar. They commend him on his political engagement, but express concern that his writing may suffer because of it. He responds by picking up two beer mats off the bar:

[ich demonstrierte] meinen Alltag mit zwei Bierdeckeln: "Der hier ist die politische Arbeit, mache ich als Sozialdemokrat und Bürger; der ist mein Manuskript, mein Beruf, mein Weißnichtwas." Ich ließ zwischen den Bierdeckeln Distanz wachsen, näherte beide einander, stellte sie sich stützend gegeneinander, verdeckte mit dem einen den anderen (dann mit dem anderen den einen) und sagte: "Manchmal schwierig, aber es geht." (TS 542)

(I demonstrated my daily life with two beer mats: "This is my political work that I do as a Social Democrat and citizen; this is my manuscript, my profession, my whatchacallit." I let the distance between the beer mats increase, moved them closer together, leaned one against the other, covered one with the other (and then the other with the one) and said "Sometimes it's hard, but it can be done." DS 284)

Grass uses the analogy of two beer mats to explain how the two activities are separate but related and that they can indeed coexist in the same individual; they can work independently but also can and do influence one another. Grass further recounts that the young writers react angrily, insisting that it was not possible to combine the two activities so easily and that they expected him to flip one or the other beer mat off the counter and so concentrate only on one.

In referring to his political commitment, the young writers who approach Grass talk of his image as a public intellectual, defined as someone who engages in public debate outside of their own area of expertise. Volker Neuhaus in Günter Grass. Schriftsteller – Künstler –

Zeitgenosse. Eine Biographie, (Günter Grass – Writer – Artist – Man of the time. A Biography) notes that it was the success of Grass's debut novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) that

allowed him the freedom to immerse himself in the political life of the Federal Republic as someone with only one axe to grind – his own sense of right and wrong:

Bereits mit der Blechtrommel hat sich Günter Grass den Ruhm und die finanzielle Unabhängigkeit erschrieben, die er nie wieder verlieren wird. So kann er fortan ohne jede Rücksichtnahme auf Mehrheiten, Parteidisziplin, Öffentlichkeit oder irgendwelche Opportunitäten jedweder Art, sogar bisweilen unter völliger Missachtung politischer Kautelen im Sinne einer bismarckschen Kunst des Möglichen, schlicht seiner Meinung vertreten. (Neuhaus 27)

(With The Tin Drum Grass had already written his way to the fame and financial independence that he would never again lose. From that point on, he could simply present his opinion, without having to worry about majorities, party discipline, public reaction, or any particular occasions, and even with complete disregard for the political provisos of Bismarck's art of the possible.)

Julian Preece notes that following this breakthrough when Grass was only 31 years old, the image of the writer as a public intellectual accompanied him throughout his entire career (2018

9-10).

As demonstrated in the anecdote above, Grass always took pains publicly to separate his work as a writer from his political activity. Preece suggests that this distinction: "can be easily unpicked: It was only because he was the author of internationally acclaimed fiction that the public gave him a hearing and they were bound to bear in mind his pronouncements of policy when they read his poetry" (2018 91). With this analysis, Preece suggests that the two sides of

Grass are inextricably linked in the mind of the reader. But in doing so, and writing in terms that

Grass himself would use, he implies that there are two separate entities, the writer and the politically active citizen. In this dissertation, I show that a close reading of Grass's literary works in the late 1960s, alongside his interventions in public debates at the time, in the form of speeches, essays, commentaries, and open letters, belies the idea that there is a separation between the two. The topics Grass discusses in his political work and the themes that dominate his literary texts, far from representing separate endeavors, are mutually reinforcing. Not only do

the two types of writing share the same ideas, they even at times share the same words. Grass maintains a consistency in the presentation of his ideas in both the literary and non-literary works regardless of whether the presentation is positive or negative, explicit or implicit.

In the press release announcing that it had awarded Grass the 1999 Noble Prize for

Literature, the Swedish Academy noted Grass's description of himself as a "Spätaufklärer" ("a man of the late enlightenment"). The Academy explained this as a "belated apostle of enlightenment in an era that has grown tired of reason" (Günter Grass), and the idea of using reason to advance society pervades both Grass's literary and not literary work of the period. The topics Grass presents positively support his expressed progressive agenda. These include how understanding the past helps transfer the obtained knowledge to future generations to avoid repeating mistakes and that dialogue is an essential element in helping society move forward through a reformist program of incremental improvements. Grass's reformist view of progress informs also his rejection of utopian visions of improving society, which he criticizes in his arguments against Hegelian thinking and the Marxism of the student movement of the 1960s.

Grass's progressive agenda has its limits as a significant blind spot in his work is his portrayal of women. He suggests both explicitly and implicitly that they do not belong in the public sphere and that they lack the understanding necessary to become involved in political activity. At times he also links women's lack of political acumen to the utopian visions he clearly rejects. The fact that instances of individual violence in the literary works comprise almost exclusively instances of male-on-female violence only compounds the denigrating treatment of women in both the literary and non-literary works that, at least in part, undermines the image of the progressive

"apostle of enlightenment".

In the remainder of this introduction, I examine why Grass's public interventions in the late 1960s and the two prose works he published during this period, 1969's örtlich betäubt (Local

Anaesthetic), and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail), which appeared in 1972, lend themselves particularly well to studying the interaction of Grass's literary works and his public pronouncements. I then provide a brief overview of the main narrative threads and characters in each work and outline how the following chapters will address the various topics listed.

Grass in the late 1960s

As Daniela Hermes comments in her afterword to the volume of essays and speeches in the 1987 edition of Grass's collected works, Grass consciously took advantage of his fame to insert himself into public debates: "Grass verstand es von Beginn an, sein Renommee als

Schriftsteller bewusst einzusetzen, um als Bürger gehört zu werden" (WA IX 939) ("Grass understood right from the start how to deliberately use his renown as a writer to be heard as a citizen"). A significant element in his non-literary public interventions, which also differentiated him from other cultural figures who became involved in political debates, was the extent of his engagement in election campaigns on behalf of one particular political party, the German Social

Democratic Party (SPD) (Mews 2). In the seven-year period from 1965 to 1972, he was almost constantly on the campaign trail, in Bundestag (federal parliament) elections in 1965, 1969, and, to a lesser extent, in 1972, as well as in several Landtag (state parliament) contests throughout the period (WA IX 937). Not only did Grass make campaign speeches on behalf of the SPD, but he also included political materials in speeches and essays that would not normally be considered

likely to have political content. An example is his acceptance speech for one of Germany's most prestigious literary prizes, the Georg Büchner Preis, which he gave just after the 1965 Bundestag election. During this speech, in which he voiced his disappointment over the SPD's failure to win, he apologized to his audience that he was not talking enough about Büchner and too much about politics (ER 142, 145).

Given the intensity of his political activity, this period lends itself to an analysis of

Grass's work as a public intellectual. For the purposes of this dissertation, I consider the "late

1960s" as the period starting with Grass's involvement in the 1965 Bundestag election and continuing through to the Federal elections in 1972. Campaigning and other political activity in the form of speeches and essays cost Grass a great deal of time and effort and often involved considerable travel. After the 1972 election, Grass stepped away from his involvement in direct campaigning to devote more time to his literary work (Neuhaus 226). While I reference earlier and later works by Grass, particularly when looking at longer-term developments in both his literary production and political activity, I focus mostly on this seven-year period. In terms of

Grass's literary production, I consider primarily the two prose works örtlich betäubt and Aus dem

Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The setting for each of these works is contemporary Germany. They thus represent a break from Grass's previous prose works, known as the Danzig trilogy, that had been based in the city of Danzig prior to and during the National Socialist regime and the years of the economic miracle in West Germany immediately following the end of the Second World

War.

Siegfried Mews, in Günter Grass and his Critics, a detailed analysis of the critical and public reception of Grass's works, notes that örtlich betäubt sold well upon its initial publication even though reviewers were less than enthusiastic (104). Mews points out that the novel suffered

in the critics' eyes from comparisons to Die Blechtrommel (105), a point underlined by Noel

Thomas who described it as "a shorter and less satisfactory novel" which "occupies a lowly position in the esteem of the public and the critics." Thomas continues by noting some critics feared it marked "a deterioration in the imaginative and narrative powers of its author" (Thomas

1987 140, 148). The critical reception of Tagebuch einer Schnecke was equally uneven (Mews

122-123) and Preece notes that while the work is "an insightful, multi-stranded narrative essay", it "has little of the wit or invention which drew the world's attention to its author a little over a decade earlier" (99). These two works have also generated less scholarly attention than most other Grass works. Volker Neuhaus, in his biography of Grass dedicates a section to each of

Grass's other novels, using the novel's title as the name for the section, but delegates these two prose works to a catchall section entitled "literarische Werke 1966-1972" (251-259) ("Literary

Works 1966-1972"). Rather than providing a detailed description of each work, Neuhaus describes them in terms of their impact on Grass's career: örtlich betäubt changed the way Grass planned his time between public engagement and writing (256); Aus dem Tagebuch einer

Schnecke represented an experiment in form, without which "wären die komplexen Großwerke

Der Butt, Die Rättin und vor allem Ein weites Feld nicht möglich gewesen" (257) ("the complex masterpieces The Flounder, The Rat, and, above all, Too Far Afield would not have been possible"). Similarly, while overviews of Grass's work often include a chapter on each (O'Neill;

Thesz), neither has been the subject of a dedicated volume, such as those on Die Blechtrommel

(Approaches to teaching the Tin Drum, edited by Monika Shafi) or Der Butt (Adventures of a

Flounder: Critical Essays on Günter Grass's 'Der Butt', edited by Gertrud Bauer Pickar). Some individual works have also garnered published collections of reviews and criticism. Examples include Der Fall Fonty, edited by Oskar Negt and Daniela Hermes, which looks at Grass's 1995

novel Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield) and Martin Kölbel's Ein Buch, Ein Bekenntnis (One

Book, One Confession) which analyzes the media reaction to Grass's 2006 autobiography Beim

Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), which included his admission that he had served in the

Waffen-SS at the end of the Second World War. Another general, albeit not scientific, indicator of the relative volume of scholarship for each work is the number of hits returned by searches for titles of Grass's works in major bibliographical indexes. Four titles (Die Blechtrommel, Der Butt,

Ein weites Feld, Im Krebsgang) (The Tin Drum, The Flounder, Too Far Afield, Crabwalk) account for approximately sixty percent of the research works listed. Adding two further titles

(Die Rättin, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) (The Rat, Peeling the Onion) raises the share of the six works to approximately-three quarters. The two works under consideration here have a combined share of the research of only four percent.1

In addition to the relatively sparse scholarship devoted to the two works, and their less than positive critical reception, their content – based in the immediate political reality of the

Federal Republic – has led to their having a reputation as merely political, which for some critics, detracts from their potential artistic merit (Mews 104; 120). Further, this designation ties in with a debate in Germany about whether writers should even involve themselves in political matters, which is discussed in Chapter 2. Appearing at the time of Grass's most active involvement in electoral politics, they show the influence of his political work on the topics he was writing about, and vice versa. As such, the two books do, as a result of their subject matter, lend themselves to an analysis of how Grass's political activity and literary activity interact with

1 I conducted two sets of on-line searches on April 3, 2019 and July 16, 2020 using the titles of the fourteen Grass prose works from Die Blechtrommel to Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Databases were the MLA International Bibliography (search terms: book title and "Gunter Grass") and the Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (Bibliography of German Linguistics and Literary Studies) (search terms: book title only). Percentage scores as cited were consistent across databases and searches. 7

one another. Moreover, the low level of attention given to the two books also means that direct connections between their content and Grass's public interventions at the time have received correspondingly little attention, making this a topic suitable for investigation.

Örtlich betäubt and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke

The story of örtlich betäubt is told by the narrator and protagonist, Eberhard Starusch, a forty-year-old high school teacher of German and history in 1967 West Berlin. (He does have a

Danzig connection as he is, twenty plus years on, Störtebeker, the leader of the dusters street gang from Danzig in Die Blechtrommel (Hall 76).) He is undergoing extensive dental work, for which he receives both local anesthetic during treatment sessions and, between sessions, the pain killer Arantil. While in the dentist chair, Starusch trades philosophical musings with his dentist and describes in various ways how he connived to murder his former fiancée, Linde Krings, more than a decade earlier. The fiancée is the daughter of Starusch's employer at the time, Field

Marshall Ferdinand Krings, who, having returned from a Soviet POW camp in 1954, now wants to re-enact and win battles others lost during the war – something his daughter is determined to prevent by defeating him in the re-enactments. Starusch narrates his history with Linde, and some other scenes of destruction and mayhem, by projecting them onto the screen of a television the dentist has installed to distract his patients. Indeed, he often mixes his own tales with the programming, and particularly the advertising, being shown on the television.

A second narrative revolves around the plan of seventeen-year-old Phillip Scherbaum, one of Starusch's students, who wants to protest the use of Napalm in Vietnam by publicly burning his pet dachshund in front of Berlin's prestigious Kempinski hotel. Starusch tries to persuade Scherbaum not to go ahead, and even enlists his dentist to help come up with the

necessary strategies. Scherbaum's girlfriend, Vero Lewand, eggs on her fellow student with the help of radical political slogans and complains to Starusch about his interference with

Scherbaum's plan (she even offers to sleep with him if he will leave Scherbaum alone). Parallel to the two narratives outlined above, a third narrative concerns Starusch's friend and teaching colleague Irmgard Seifert. She and Starusch are the same age - both grew up under the National

Socialist regime and were adolescents during the last years of the Second World War. Siefert has found a bundle of letters she wrote during her time as a member of the Bund deutscher Mädel

(The League of German Girls) and as the assistant leader of a camp for evacuees. In one letter, she denounced a local farmer for not letting her use his land for building tank defenses. She is now filled with horror at the prospect that through her blind obedience to the state, she might have caused the man's arrest and death (although she knows he survived and died later of natural causes). In her guilt, she considers revealing her history to her class, but looks to Scherbaum's protest act to gain the necessary courage.

While Grass provided a genre for örtlich betäubt, calling it a novel, he did not do the same for Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The book is a mix of autobiography, historical reporting, philosophical musing, and fiction. Narrative threads meander through the work like the eponymous snail, each taking over for a few paragraphs before pausing and yielding to the next thread. The diary element of the title is a fictionalized autobiographical retelling of Grass's journey on the campaign trail for the Social Democratic party in the 1969 Federal elections, told as a conversation with his children explaining his extended absence. Other threads include a historical account of the fate of the Jews of Grass's home town of Danzig and the fictional story of Herman Ott, a school teacher who lived in Danzig in the 1930s and fled the Nazis, spending the war hiding out in the basement of a bicycle store. Two further narrative threads round out the

book: the first of these is the account of Manfred Augst, a former SS officer who committed suicide at a Church Congress where Grass was giving a reading; the second thread is Grass's thoughts on melancholy, also considering it as a necessary component of progress, as he prepared a speech based on the etching Melancholia I by Albrecht Dürer, which Grass gave as part of the celebrations marking the 500th anniversary of the artist's birth in 1971.

To put into context Grass's non-literary work, including his political campaigning on behalf of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland (SPD, German Social Democratic Party), the next two chapters explore the role of the public intellectual in Germany, and how Grass fits into this picture. Chapter 2 defines a public intellectual as a non-politician who inserts him or herself into public debates and traces the activities of public intellectuals in the first two decades of the Federal Republic. Chapter 3 looks at how this definition of a public intellectual applies to

Grass, particularly in the late 1960s, in terms of both the history of his involvement in political debates and the strategies he used in his speeches, essays, and election campaigning. It also looks at how the perception of Grass as a public intellectual changed in later years, as the political and media landscape changed from the 1980s onward and also in the light of his admission in his

2006 autobiographical work Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) that he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS, rather than the regular army, at the end of the Second World War.

Chapters 4 through 6 address major themes that are part of Grass's view of progress, both in terms of how he incorporated them into his public interventions and reflected them in his literary work. Chapter 4 takes on the theme of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) and specifically how the task of remembering history is moving from Grass's generation to

next generation.2 Chapter 5 addresses Grass's vision of progress, including his rejection of

Hegel's view of the end of history. Chapter 6 examines how images of silence in each literary work reflect different views of how to achieve progress. Örtlich betäubt presents a negative image of silence as a hinderance to progress: whether it is a consequence of an act of political or individual violence or an inability to hear the utterances of others, the lack of dialogue represents a breakdown in the path of progress that only dialogue can alleviate. By contrast, Tagebuch einer

Schnecke takes a different perspective and paints silence as a component of a positive understanding of the role of melancholy in progress. Chapter 7 discusses how Grass's presentation of gender in both his literary works and his public interventions shows the limits of his view of progress. The world of making progress happen, as well as enjoying the benefits that accrue from it, is the world of men, with no place for women. Exacerbating this one-sided presentation is the fact that acts of individual violence in the two works are almost exclusively committed by men against women. The presentation of women in Grass's next novel, Der Butt

(The Flounder), published in 1977, both confirms and continues this theme such that it helps provide additional context for this discussion. In conclusion, Chapter 8 examines how the literary and non-literary texts, as contributions to debates in the 1960s, can still find relevance today some fifty years after their initial publication.

2 In keeping with the usage of Grass scholarship, I will stay with the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) rather than the alternative Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working through the past). The latter implies more of a continuous and ongoing process rather than the former which suggests the possibility of drawing a line (Sabrow). 11

Chapter 2: The Public Intellectual in Germany

The anecdote Grass tells of his encounter with two young writers echoes ideas that lie at the core of a discussion of a writer as a public intellectual: namely to what extent can and should a writer be also politically committed and engaged in public discussions beyond their writing. A common element in the definition of a public intellectual is a non-politician who explains and supports a position while intervening in a matter of public policy or political action. For example, in their essay Intellectuals as Cultural Agenda Setters in the Federal Republic Rob

Burns and Wilfred van der Will define intellectuals as: "those who, while enjoying a prominent reputation in their own areas of specialization, have demonstrated the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it, usually by dissenting or provocative intervention in matters of public concern" (292).

In Germany, a distinction drawn between the concepts of Geist (translated as spirit or mind) and Macht (power) often accompanies discussions of such interventions by writers and artists. Geist is the arena of the abstract, of pure thought, of aesthetics and invention, whereas

Macht, meaning literally power or might, connotes a very practical application of power, often in the sense of political power, in everyday situations. For some, the two worlds do not mix, and this idea explains the attitude expressed by the young writers who approach Grass in the bar and, as he explains, want him to toss one of his beermats away. The distinction between Geist and

Macht has long been an integral part of Germany's intellectual history, as expressed for example by the legal scholar Wolfgang Graf Vitzthum. Participating in a series of 1991 seminars with the critic Walter Jens at the University of Tübingen under the heading under the heading "Dichter und Staat" ("The writer and the state"), Vitzthum summed up the antagonism between the two:

Von Ausnahmen abgesehen: in Deutschland lassen sich Dichter weniger intensiv auf die staatliche Wirklichkeit ein als anderswo. Nirgendwo sonst ist die Kluft zwischen "Geist" und "Macht" so tief, die Antinomie von Literatur und Politik so scharf. Nicht das unvermeidlich glanzlose "Ach und Krach" der Einrichtungen und Verfahren des Staates ist schriftstellerische Agende bei uns, sondern sein Gegenbild, das stets glanzvollere "Ganz Andere", die Poetik der Fremde, der Staatsferne" (Walter and Vitzthum 7)

(Apart from sone exceptions, writers in Germany involve themselves less intensively in the realities of the state than elsewhere. Nowhere else is the chasm between "Geist" and "Macht" so deep, the hostility of literature and politics so keen. The inevitably dull busy work of the institutions and processes of state is not on the writer's agenda here, but rather its opposite - the always exciting "something different", the poetics of the strange, the poetics of that which is far from the state.)

On the other hand. Lynn Abrams, writing on the German novel in the twentieth century, suggests that even though "mutual distrust" has often characterized the relationship between the worlds of Geist and Macht and the intellectuals may have preferred Geist, they certainly have not ignored questions of Macht: "German culture, and not least literary output, has rarely remained indifferent to, and has often existed in a state of tension with, the prevailing political authority"

(15). Similarly, Wolfgang Emmerich contends that Germany has a long history of writers becoming involved in public and political debates and cites, for example, Georg Büchner and the

Vormärz period around 1830 as an epoch "in which writers programmatically understood themselves as political, operationally active publicists" (37-38).

This chapter examines the concept of a public intellectual, with a focus on the German context and with particular reference to a classification model developed by sociologist Ralf

Dahrendorf. It also provides some historical background on the interaction between the worlds of politics and culture in the post-war period in West Germany in which Grass was writing.

Classifying the Public Intellectual

The starting point of Burns and Van der Will's definition of a public intellectual is someone having prominence in their own field. For writers and other cultural contributors, this means establishing their credentials in an activity driven by intellectual effort. In his 1965 study

Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland (Society and Democracy in Germany), German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf proposed a four-fold classification of intellectuals – classic, romantic, tragic, and critical -- within the field of West German cultural production which will serve as a basis for further discussion of the interaction of intellectuals with society.

Dahrendorf's concept of the critical intellectual most closely matches the idea of the public intellectual as I use the term: beginning from a position of being a culturally or creatively active individual, an intellectual becomes a public intellectual by taking a stance on an issue of public interest, often directing criticism at those in a position of political power, that is, those in possession of Macht.

The ability to use words is a significant element in Dahrendorf's definition of the German intellectual. He describes the role as characterized "vor allem durch den selbständigen und bewussten Umgang mit dem Wort" (297) ("above all by the independent and conscious use of words"). In Dahrendorf's thinking, independent use of words also requires a certain distance from the context of their use, and while many occupations may offer the opportunity to find the necessary distance, they do not necessarily bestow on an individual the role of an intellectual.

Instead, such a role is something that an individual can play, often temporarily, by establishing the necessary distance via the use of words (297-298). Having described the general characteristics of German intellectuals, Dahrendorf further categorizes them according to their type of occupation and their attitude to their society. As far as occupations are concerned, he

distinguishes between those working in education, artistic institutions, and the mass media. He points out that educational and artistic institutions in the Federal Republic, such as museums and theaters, are broadly integrated into the fabric of the civil service, making intellectuals a part of society's elite based on their position as well as their function (308). As a result, they may often have difficulty achieving the required distance that will allow both the free use of words as well as a critical view of the reality they live in. Their position is thus reminiscent of enlightened individuals in Kant's Was ist Aufklärung (What is Enlightenment), who can escape their own immaturity by gaining the ability to speak out, but then should speak out as private individuals rather than as representatives of their professions; in this latter case, they would have to adhere to the corresponding rules and regulations (Kant).

Dahrendorf further classifies German intellectuals using the German word Haltung, which refers to a person's stance – either a physical posture or an approach to a problem, also in the sense of staking out a position – and for which I use the English term attitude. The first of four attitudes he discusses is what he terms the classical attitude, where the intellectual has fully bought into the prevailing political and social environment. A classical intellectual does maintain some distance but is always looking to use that distance to find a way back to the existing structures via an "elegante Schleife" (299) ("elegant loop"). The romantic intellectual, on the other hand, represents an inward-looking attitude that eschews all contact with the mundane world of politics and business to concentrate on purely intellectual activity. For

Dahrendorf, this group also includes those German intellectuals who retreated into "inner emigration" during the Third Reich (301). Those who by contrast went into physical rather than inner exile make up his third type, namely the tragic intellectual. He does not, however, limit this chronologically to the exiles of the 1930s and 1940s, tracing the trend back to Heinrich

Heine and Karl Marx in the 1840s (302-303). The fourth intellectual attitude proposed by

Dahrendorf is that of the critical intellectual (305), who achieves distance by breaking associations with social groupings, such as class, religion, or occupation, to become

"freischwebend" (305) ("free floating"), in the manner of the free-floating intelligentsia proposed in the 1920s by Austrian sociologist Karl Mannheim (Heeren 1, 5-6). Dahrendorf refers further to Mannheim's thinking when he explains that such critical intellectuals should be in a position to develop the "dynamische Synthese" (305) ("dynamic synthesis") that determines the critical individual's role in society. This paradoxical synthesis comprises "Distanz und Zugehörigkeit,

Entfremdung und Teilnahme, Kritik und Zustimmung" (306) ("distance and belonging, alienation and participation, critique and agreement").

Dahrendorf also posits that intellectuals need a community, even an abstract one, where they can enjoy the exchange of information and ideas, including mutual criticism, and also achieve a sense of their own coherence. He bemoans the lack of such a community, which he suggests is missing in part because German intellectuals did not have a single geographic center to use as a point of reference and assembly, except for Berlin in the 1920s. This lack of community also exists because intellectuals in Germany have generally oriented themselves more towards the organizations giving them their livelihood and status, for example, universities and cultural institutions, rather than their status as intellectuals per se (311). Unlike Dahrendorf,

Georg Jäger, in Der Schriftsteller als Intellektueller: Ein Problemaufriß (The Writer as

Intellectual: An Outline), suggests that writers find their intellectual community in the world of the mass media: "die öffentliche Diskurse und die sie tragenden Institutionen wie Verlage,

Zeitschriften, Zeitungen, audiovisuelle Medien, etc." (3) (public discourse, and the institutions that support it, like publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, audio-visual media, etc."). These

are the areas that Dahrendorf indicated as being least tied to civil service-like career paths in

West Germany, and so are most open to a diversity of critical voices.

The step to becoming a public intellectual comes when the intellectual, as outlined by

Dahrendorf, moves beyond their own realm and addresses issues of more general concern or even specific policies and events. P. David Marshall and Cassandra Atherton, in their essay

Situating Public Intellectuals note the phrase "public intellectual" has no formal definition, and even academic discourse has not been able to coalesce around a consistent definition: "it is a slippery term that continues to change over time and yet, interestingly, it is a term that scholars are keen to pin down. Indeed, defining the words ‘public’ and ‘intellectual’ and combining them to form some kind of explication of ‘public intellectual’ is fraught with difficulties" (70).3 In an introduction to a special issue of The International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society devoted to the topic of public intellectuals, Patrick Baert and Barbara Misztal adopt a definition that echoes much of the one provided by Burns and Van der Will, but they specifically add the dimension of moral authority: "the authoritative public intellectual -- that is a generalist who speaks out with moral vigor about a wide range of disciplines and who is steeped in a high profile discipline like philosophy." (91) This moral dimension has its roots in what Jäger describes as the historical starting point for this definition of the modern writer as a public intellectual (14) -- the Dreyfus affair in France, and within that the actions of the novelist Emile

Zola. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely accused of spying for the

Germans and quickly convicted and sentenced to exile (Arendt 89). As part of a campaign to prove his innocence, the novelist Emile Zola published an open letter titled J'accuse in the

3 In the discussion that follows, I use the term "intellectual" rather than "public intellectual" if that is how the source uses the term. In all cases, I am referring to the idea of a public intellectual as outlined in the initial citation from Burns and Van der Will at the start of this chapter. 17

French newspaper L'Aurore in 1898, which helped foment further protests and raised awareness of an antisemitic injustice (Jäger 14-15). Jäger underlines that Zola's intervention was a case where all the characteristics that are the hallmarks of a critical intellectual came into play: Zola, famous because of his writing, uses his fame to publicize and argue a concrete political issue; he argues the case on the basis of a moralistic interpretation of a universal value; he does so via publicly accessible media – in this case an open letter in a newspaper; and he is prepared to accept negative consequences as a reaction to his intervention (15). Patrick Baert and Josh Booth maintain that the Dreyfus affair also gave birth to the use of the term "intellectual" to denote "a diverse group of people that included journalists, novelists and university professors, who intervened publicly in the name of abstract principles such as justice and equality" and that the term was initially used by anti-Dreyfusards as an insult, before being appropriated as a positive designation by Dreyfus's supporters. (113).

In his 1965 lecture entitled A Plea for Intellectuals, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre refers to the implied insult in the term when he suggests criticisms of the work of intellectuals

"are all inspired by one fundamental reproach: 'the intellectual is someone who meddles in what is not his business'" (230). Burns and Van der Will note a similar sentiment also in post-war

German politics. Konrad Adenauer used the phrase "most intellectual of all intellectuals" as an insult (294, 317n11) and conservative politicians could be particularly vituperative towards intellectuals, using phrases such as: "'knockers of their country', 'unpatriotic vagabonds', 'rats and blowflies', 'self-important little pipsqueaks'" (294), "'gadflies' and 'fowlers [sic] of the nest'"

(298). Many of these terms suggest that the intellectuals, being unpatriotic, are not worthy of enjoying the privileges of being considered a part of their own county. Anyone who has such privileges taken from them would, of course, no longer be a "Bürger" (citizen), and so would be

deprived of a status that was crucial to Grass's interpretation of his political contributions. In delivering his speeches and essays, Grass would often describe himself as a "Sozialdemokrat und

Bürger" ("Social Democrat and citizen") and regarded his political activity as his duty as a citizen, as he explained in his speech Über die erste Bürgerpflicht (The Citizen's First Duty) discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

Within Ralf Dahrendorf's four attitudes of intellectuals as a paradigm, Günter Grass during the 1960s presents as a hybrid of the classical and critical intellectual. His overall support for the institutions of parliamentary democracy and his acceptance of many of the associated social structures shows him to be an example of Dahrendorf's classical intellectual; as a critical intellectual, he targeted those in positions of political power, especially the conservative CDU which held power throughout the first two decades of the Federal Republic. Taking such a stance requires that the intellectual who will go public also has an awareness and understanding of the political environment they are living and working in. The next section provides an assessment of the relationship between cultural practitioners and the politics that surrounded them in the first two decades of the Federal Republic, which would provide the backdrop for Grass's work as a public intellectual throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s.

Politics and Culture in the Early Federal Republic

The dichotomy of Geist and Macht discussed earlier always plays out against the background of a specific political and social environment. The intellectual who intervenes does so in reaction to something happening in the existing political and cultural sphere and the environment has a role to play in determining the extent to which a writer may want to intervene.

This section will address three phases that mark the interactions of the political, social, and

cultural environments of the first two decades of the Federal Republic. In the initial post-war period, many writers and intellectuals took a rather more apolitical stance. As the fifties moved into the sixties, critical voices began to make themselves heard, and by the late 1960s, protest movements led mostly by students looking to overhaul social structures were advocating a very different view of the role of art within society.

In the immediate aftermath of the destruction wrought by the war, the first priority for many in defeated Germany was initially raw survival. As the Federal Republic was formed out of the Western zones of occupation and then during the economic miracle in the 1950s, a large percentage of the population wanted to turn their attention away from the disaster of a lost war.

As part of this process, they also chose not to acknowledge their contributions as ordinary

Germans to the activities of the National Socialist regime. Alexander and Margarethe

Mitscherlich described this attitude to the past in Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauen (The Inability to

Mourn), their 1967 analysis of the psychological state of the Germans in the post-war period, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 4. Stuart Taberner contends that this retrospective desire for a Germany not stained by the crimes of National Socialism not only allowed for certain writers to reestablish themselves, but also for them to keep their activities in the Third

Reich out of sight:

Partly as a consequence of the uninspirational quality of post-1945 production, and partly reflecting a widespread desire not to confront the past, older, typically conservative authors were able to reassert their pre-war popularity. Instead of the oft-invoked literary rebirth, established figures such as Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn were once again much in demand. Regarding Jünger and Benn most readers overlooked their complicity in the Third Reich. (Taberner 1994, 4)

In a similar vein, Jäger notes that most older generation writers in the new Federal Republic had little interest in creating a critical intellectual discourse, and points to the lack of critical

engagement in the early days of the West German PEN-Zentrum: "Der durch Autoren wie

Kasimir Edschmid und Erich Kästner geprägte Klub führte in den 50er Jahren die Existenz eines auf geselligen und freundschaftlichen Verkehr ausgerichteten 'Wohnzimmervereins', der sich politisch kaum engagierte" (22) ("In the 1950s, the club, influenced by writers like Kasimir

Edschmid and Erich Kästner, led the existence of a 'living room association' that hardly got politically involved."). By avoiding any interaction with the political world around them, these writers to all intents and purposes undertook a second "inner emigration," in the sense of

Dahrendorf's "romantic" intellectuals, which, as David Roberts suggests in his essay Narratives of Modernization, "cemented the divorce between Geist and Macht" (42).

Some German intellectuals did attempt to deal with the legacy of the previous twelve years during the period immediately following defeat in the Second World War and the collapse of the National Socialist regime. For example, the philosopher Karl Jaspers tried to do so on a metaphysical level in his 1946 work Die Schuldfrage (The Question of Guilt) which looked to provide Germans with a means of assessing their own actions as individuals and as members of the German nation that had been responsible for the attempted genocide of the Jews during the

National Socialist era. Other writers and artists during this period, even when taking a critical stance, focused on presenting the experience of the war and the difficulties of those returning from it. Works that fall into this category include Wolfgang Borchert's play Draußen vor der Tür

(1947) (The Man Outside), Heinrich Böll's 1951 novel Wo warst du Adam? (Where were you

Adam?) and rubble films such as Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers are Among Us), directed by Wolfgang Staudte in 1946.

A group of socially critical writers gathered in September 1947 at the invitation of the publicist and critic Hans Werner Richter in Bannwaldsee in Bavaria to read from and critically

discuss their latest works. This became the basis of the Gruppe 47 (Group 47) which would meet at least once a year for the next twenty years and would become an institution in the development of West German literature over that period. Initially intended merely as a forum for writers to read aloud from their latest work, the Gruppe 47 not only hosted, at one time or another, almost all of the most widely published and read authors of the period, but quickly turned into a gathering that attracted representatives from the business side of writing, such as publishers, critics, and representatives of the media that wrote about them. By the end of the fifties, the annual gathering of the Gruppe 47 had grown to more than a hundred writers, publicists, and publishing representatives and an accompanying entourage of newspaper, magazine, and television reporters. As a result. some members who had been a part of the early meetings were starting to stay away, including, as noted by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, such established literary notables as Heinrich Böll (96). Both in their literary works and through the increased media spotlight provided to the writers at the center of the Gruppe 47 meetings, many were able to take advantage of the attention they were receiving to speak out on a variety of social and cultural issues. They did so, however, in ways that emphasized the moral outrage they felt rather than the search for political solutions (Taberner 1994, 4). The Gruppe 47 was also instrumental in promoting the early career of Günter Grass. He first attended in 1955, when he read some of his poems. In the meeting in October 1958, he read two chapters from the novel he was working on, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and was awarded the Gruppe 47 prize.

Amounting that year to DM 4,500 (Neuhaus 152), the prize provided Grass the opportunity to finish writing the book (Mayer-Iswandy 2002 75) that, a year later, was to launch his career as a publicly recognized persona.

The end of the 1950s marked a watershed also in terms of how the literary world interacted with the world of everyday politics and the Gruppe 47 was as the center of this activity. As Helmut Böttiger notes in Die Gruppe 47: Als die deutsche Literatur Geschichte schrieb (The Group 47: When German Literature Made History): "1959 war das Jahr, in dem auf der Buchmesse mit Grass' Blechtrommel, Bölls Billiard um halb Zehn und Johnsons

Mutmaßungen über Jakob drei zentrale Werke der Literaturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik auf einen Schlag erschienen; alle drei Autoren waren eng mit der Gruppe 47 verbunden." (240)

("1959 was the year that three central works in the literary history of the Federal Republic,

Grass's Tin Drum, Böll's Billiards at Half-Nine and Johnson's Suspicions about Jakob all appeared at the same time at the [Frankfurt] Book Fair; all three authors were closely connected with the Group 47"). The three books represented a breakthrough in literature's treatment of

Germany's recent past. The Grass and Böll works look at continuity in German society from before the Second World War through the war years to the emerging Federal Republic. Johnson's novel, on the other hand, addresses issues of a divided Germany and the GDR regime. Johnson moved from the GDR to the Federal Republic just before the book's publication in the west in

1959 (Preece 2018 88). Böttiger emphasizes, however, that it was Grass's appearance and reading a year earlier at the annual Gruppe 47 meeting that cemented the position of the group in public life in a way that would remain without parallel in the literary history of the country even after the group disbanded: "[es] war sofort klar, dass die Gruppe 47 nach dem Blechtrommel-

Spektakel 1958 ihren Durchbruch in der Öffentlichkeit erlebte und einen Einfluss ausübte, der keinen Vergleich kannte und den es nach ihrem Ende so im Literaturbetrieb nie mehr geben würde" (244) ("it was immediately clear that with the Tin Drum spectacle in 1958, the Group 47 achieved its breakthrough into the public sphere and was able to exert an influence that was

without comparison and which, after its end, would not exist again.") In this way, both the success of Die Blechtrommel as a novel within its own right, and Grass's position as a central author within the Gruppe 47, provided him with the public platform he would exploit in the years to come.

The 1960s brought about a sea change in the Federal Republic, as above all young people began to question the post-war social consensus around the economic miracle and to ask what part their parents had played in the Third Reich. As the decade progressed, the political situation in the Federal Republic underwent a fundamental shift that also led to the emergence of a much larger movement challenging the social and political status quo. Throughout the 1950s, in keeping with the generally conservative tone of the country, the conservative party CDU had led the government, most often in coalition with the small liberal party FDP, while the other large party, the SPD, took on task of parliamentary opposition. At the end of 1966, however, the CDU and SPD joined together to form a Grand Coalition, leaving the FDP as the only non-governing party in the Bundestag, which effectively eliminated parliamentary opposition. A movement that had started with students questioning the situation at the universities, in particular the continuing authoritarian structures around the professor as chair of a faculty, became the focal point of protests against a society seen increasingly at risk of backsliding into authoritarianism, as explained by Timothy Brown in West Germany in the Global Sixties: "Rebelling against a stifling atmosphere of cultural conformity, challenging anti-communist Cold War hysteria, and demanding an accounting with the crimes of the Nazi era, young West Germans demanded nothing less than a democratic renewal of society from the ground up" (4). The protesting groups, with radical left-wing student groups to the fore, adopted the moniker of APO (from the

German Außerparlamentarische Opposition, extraparliamentary opposition) and took to the

streets to demonstrate against specific elements of government structure and policy. Two major areas of concern were the German government's continued support for the American involvement in the Vietnam War and the proposed State of Emergency legislation. This last issue had particular relevance for those concerned about a potential resurgence of an authoritarian regime as it recalled the type of legislation that had led to Chancellors governing by decree in the final years of the Weimar Republic and ultimately to Hindenburg appointing Hitler as Chancellor

(Herbert 295, 298).

As the street protests became increasingly confrontational, creating ever greater disruption for the general population, they elicited a correspondingly more severe reaction from the police, with the result that clashes between the two became more and more violent. One of the first major incidents in this escalation occurred on June 2, 1967. As protesters against a state visit by the Shah of Iran gathered outside the Berlin opera house, where the Shah was attending a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute, supporters of the Shah began attacking the protesters.

When the police entered the fray, they did so on the side of the Shah's supporters and joined in the attacks against the protesters. In the ensuing street battles, a plainclothes police officer shot and killed the 26-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg (Herbert 856-857). Another incident that sparked a widespread wave of violent protest was the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke, a leader of the student movement, by a young worker radicalized by extremely defamatory and inflammatory coverage of the protesters by right-wing media (857-858).

Parallel to the increasing radicalization of the protest movement, a politicization of literature and other cultural output was taking place. As early as 1961, a group of writers, many of them members of the Gruppe 47, contributed short essays for a pamphlet issued under the editorship of Martin Walser entitled Die Alternative, oder brauchen wir eine neue Regierung

(The Alternative, or do we need a new Government). The collection criticized the conservative restoration under the CDU government since 1949 and suggested that the time had come for a change (Lenz 131). As the 1960s progressed, cultural output became more critical of the status quo and underwent changes that reflected a different approach. One phenomenon was the rise of documentary literature, where – to a greater or lesser extent -- the use of authentic materials replaced the imagination of the writer as the source for the content of a piece. Examples from theater include Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung (The investigation), based on the transcripts from the 1963 Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, and Heinar Kipphardt's 1964 stage play In der Sache J

Robert Oppenheimer (The matter of J Robert Oppenheimer). This latter work used the protocols from Oppenheimer's McCarthy-era security hearing to examine issues of scientists' moral responsibility, not only in light of the destructive power of the atomic bomb, but also with regard to the abuse of science by the National Socialist regime. With the increasing politicization of the protesting students, and in line with demands for a more fundamental overhaul of society, students began to call for greater political involvement by writers in their literary works and some began to question the value of a literature without political content as a good in its own right. As H.J. Reid argues, the end result of these developments was a call for writers to abandon all pretense of writing literature for the sake of literature and free up their creative energy for the political battle:

The student movement had sought to enlist all aspects of social life in the cause of global revolution. In September 1968 the influential journal Kursbuch contained no fewer than three articles which proclaimed that literature was ‘dead’: in the current world-political situation, belles lettres had no discernible function; rather it was the duty of writers to document exploitation and oppression, whether of the South Vietnamese peasants or of the foreign workers in West Germany, and to engage themselves directly in combatting the concentration of the mass media in the hands of a few reactionary figures, such as Axel Springer (187).

Thomas Ernst notes that one impact of this was that authors who had taken on themselves the mantle of coming to terms with Germany's National Socialist past had now become the targets of the protest movement:

"In the late 1960s [...] the student protest movement turned against many of the key figures associated with what the younger generation saw as an inadequate confrontation with the past. Here, we might point, for example, to Peter Handke and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and their attacks on the authors of the Gruppe 47 and other writers that came to prominence in the late 1950s – e.g., Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and Martin Walser" (171).

The degree of antagonism towards Grass, Böll, and Walser as cultural icons of left-wing political criticism of the previous decade was highlighted by a group of protesters disrupting what turned out to be the final meeting of the Gruppe 47. As the members arrived at the inn Pulvermühle in

Erlangen in Bavaria in October 1967 (Böttiger 408), protesters from the local student organization harangued them, emphasizing in no uncertain terms their disdain for purely literary work by taunting the writers with their own self-image:

Hier wurde sinnfällig, wie die Selbstwahrnehmung der Schriftsteller als einer außerparlamentarischen Opposition mit der Deutung in Konflikt trat, die APO-Aktivisten von der Gruppe 47 vornahmen: Studenten des Erlanger SDS besetzten das Wort 'Dichter' als Schimpfwort und warfen den Schriftstellern politische Wirkungslosigkeit vor.“ (Marmulla 44)

(It became clear that the writers' perception of themselves as an extraparliamentary opposition was now in conflict with the image the APO activists had of the Group 47: Students from the Erlangen SDS accused the writers of political ineffectiveness and threw at them the insult "Poet".)

While the Gruppe 47 had already scheduled its next get-together, an international meeting proposed for 1968 in Czechoslovakia, it cancelled the gathering following the Soviet repression of the Prague Spring, and the meeting in Erlangen turned out to be the last. However, Arnold notes the importance of the events at the Pulvermühle for the demise of Gruppe 47 as the writers did not have any response to the protesters, let alone one that would satisfy them (129-130).

Conclusion

The 1960s saw political protest in the Federal Republic explode from a small number of critical intellectuals to mass movements on the streets, which had some support from the older cultural elites and also criticized these elites for not being radical enough. Throughout this period, Grass was a constant presence in the public sphere. The following chapter traces the development of his political activity in this period, with a focus on his involvement in electoral politics on behalf of the SPD. It also looks at how Grass and his contributions as a public intellectual fared in the decades after the 1960s as the media and political landscape underwent significant changes.

Chapter 3 Grass as a Public Intellectual

As discussed earlier, Günter Grass during the 1960s offered a mix of the critical and classical attitudes of an intellectual as proposed by Ralf Dahrendorf. As a writer who maintained independence from organizations and used the mass media to distribute his words, he fit into the critical category, especially with his constant attacks on the conservative establishment. Even with his electoral support for the SPD and specifically for Willy Brandt, he was still able to maintain a critical distance when necessary. He did not join the party during this period,4 and his exchange of open letters with Willy Brandt over the decision to take the SPD into the Grand

Coalition proves that he was still capable of criticizing an organization he was working hard to promote. At the same time, in the mode of Dahrendorf's classical attitude, Grass in this period had made his peace with the overarching prevailing structure in that he spoke in favor of parliamentary democracy as the preferred form of government. In addition, he repeatedly presented himself as a revisionist, advocating gradual reform of existing systems and arguing as much against the revolutionary ideas of the radical left wing as against the resurgence of Nazism in the form of the NPD.

In this chapter, I examine how Grass parlayed his fame as a writer through this combination of critical and classical intellectual attitudes into more than a decade of support for the SPD. I show how Grass added to the persuasiveness of his speeches and essays by freely mixing literary and historical allusions with references to individuals. The discussions of

4 Grass finally joined the SPD as a regular member in September 1982 on the day that the parliament voted out Helmut Schmidt, Brandt's successor as Chancellor, and replaced his government with a new center right coalition under Helmut Kohl as Chancellor (Mayer-Iswandy 2002 163). Grass publicly tore up his membership card in 1992 in protest over the SPD's adoption of a new restrictive policy on asylum (Preece 2001 19). 29

individuals included praise for his political friends and excerpts from his own life story as well as direct personal criticisms, mostly of politicians, but also at times aimed at fellow writers.

Moreover, some of these criticisms from his speeches reappear within his literary work, helping to blur the lines between Grass speeches and essays on the one hand and the literary works on the other. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Grass's standing as a public intellectual in the period after his most intensive engagement with day to day politics in the late 1960s.

Grass as Public and Political Interventionist

Grass’s first forays into taking a stance on a public issue began in 1961. The initial step was in reaction to the building of the Berlin Wall when he wrote an open letter to Anna Seghers, then the president of the East German Writers Association, asking her to speak out against the wall. The letter, which appeared in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit five days after construction of the wall began, sparked a month's worth of correspondence in various newspapers, even if

Seghers herself did not participate directly (Arnold and Görtz 6-20). The second occasion that helped persuade Grass to become involved in politics also occurred a few days after the wall was built, and was a key point in his long friendship with Willy Brandt, which itself was to become a hallmark of his involvement for the next decade and a half. In an election campaign speech, the current Chancellor Konrad Adenauer referred to his challenger as "Brandt Alias Frahm". In doing so, he used not only Brandt's current, adopted name, but also his birth name – Frahm – with the intent that this would be a double insult. Firstly, by using the surname of his unwed mother, it cast aspersions on Brandt’s status as illegitimate; secondly, it emphasized that the name Brandt was itself the alias. In doing so, Adenauer drew attention to the fact Brandt has taken on this name while in exile in Norway during the National Socialist Period, suggesting that

Brandt lacked the patriotism suitable for a national leader (Preece 2018, 86). A similar lack of

patriotism was, as previously mentioned, cause enough to insult intellectuals that intervened in public matters.

Grass had always supported the SPD, partly because of his early political education during his brief stint working in a mine in the immediate post-war period (see Chapter 5). He had contributed an essay which bore the title Wer wird dieses Bändchen kaufen (Who will Buy this

Little Book) to Walser’s Die Alternative oder brauchen wir eine neue Regierung. In this essay, he lays out the reasons that many types of people would have to vote for the SPD in the upcoming elections (Wer Wird 76-77). The third event that prompted Grass to enter into the realm of election campaigning was connected with this book. Timm Niklas Pietsch, in his analysis of the rhetoric in Grass's speeches and essays Wer hört noch zu? Günter Grass als politischer Redner und Essayist (Who is still Listening? Günter Grass as Political Speechmaker and Essayist), relates that, in the late summer of 1961, Hans Werner Richter and other writers held a series of occasional meetings with Brandt to coordinate the efforts on Die Alternative (57).

Richter was initially unwilling to invite Grass, thinking the writer of the controversial Tin Drum might be too outré for such a gathering, but then suggested Brandt have a word with Grass to ask him along (58). Preece provides a different account, based on correspondence between Brandt and Grass which references the fact they had already met several years earlier (Kölbel 2014 675).

Preece maintains that it was Brandt who was the instigator of Grass's invitation, in large part because of Grass's intervention on behalf of Uwe Johnson and others at a May 1961 meeting of the East German Writers Association (2018 88). Grass received an invitation to the writers' meeting with Brandt and recounts that, as it was winding down, the candidate asked if anyone could offer practical help with speechwriting. Grass was the only one present who volunteered

(Grass and Zimmermann 102). From that point on, he worked as an occasional speechwriter for

Brandt's campaigns and Pietsch maintains that this meeting was the turning point that "markiert den Anfang des SPD-Engagement von Grass" (58) ("marks the beginning of Grass's engagement for the SPD").

Frank Finlay, in his essay Günter Grass's Political Rhetoric, notes that much of Grass’s speechmaking is at one-off events, such as an award ceremony or as an invited speaker for a particular event, which also provides opportunities for broader distribution via the media. While many of Grass’s interventions in public debates over the next few years occurred on such occasions (24-25), it was during the Federal elections in 1965 that Grass next actively supported an SPD election campaign. Although he was still working with Brandt on speeches, his involvement in this election campaign was more as a private individual than as part of the official SPD campaign machinery. He joined together with a group of similar minded writers and intellectuals to form the Wahlkontor Deutscher Schriftsteller (German Writers' Election Office).

In addition to the co-founder of the Group 47, Hans Werner Richter, the publisher Klaus

Wagenbach, and the established writer Siegfried Lenz, the group included upcoming writers such as Hubert Fichte and Peter Schneider. Two further members were a young couple that would later make their mark as activists within the student movement, the publicist Bernward Vesper and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (Zimmermann 122), who would also go on to become a leading member of the Red Army Faction terrorist group. The Wahlkontor aimed to help the SPD by bringing the social democratic message to a broader audience by means of public appearances. (In what was a very unusual move for election meetings, Grass charged an entry fee for these appearances and donated all proceeds to a fund to set up libraries in the bases of the armed forces (Neuhaus 220).) Grass was severely disappointed by the failure of this effort to achieve greater resonance, both among the voting population, who again voted for a CDU/FDP

coalition, and, more importantly, among some of his fellow writers who declined to join him on the road. He made his views clear in some of his speeches, most notably in Rede über das

Selbstverständliche (On the self-evident), discussed in more detail below.

Grass continued his campaign work for the SPD throughout the following years, with notable contributions to Landtag (state parliament) elections in Bavaria in 1966 and Schleswig

Holstein in 1967. For the 1969 Federal election, he adopted a different approach which he started planning already in 1968. The first difference was that, rather than being an independent voice speaking on behalf of the SPD, as he had in earlier campaigns, he would work with the blessing of the party hierarchy (Neuhaus 223). Secondly, instead of running a traditional national campaign with speeches, as he had tried in 1965, he and the small group working with him planned to establish a series of local voter initiatives that would take on the work of spreading the social democratic message (TS 290-292; DS 29-30). To this end, they began a full six months ahead of the election and set up a central organization, the Sozialdemokratische Wählerinitiative,

(Social Democratic Voters Initiative). They arranged for visits in almost a hundred election districts, working with the local party and other interested groupings to create local organizations that worked on behalf of the party's election effort (Neuhaus 222-223). A speech by Grass was part of each visit to a district and his presence was certainly a draw for people who might not otherwise have attended an election meeting, especially for a party still considered to be a voice for organized labor (even though the party had renounced any formal ties to Marxist ideology at the Bad Godesberg party conference ten years earlier). Moreover, the speaking tour Grass and the others undertook deliberately targeted electoral districts that were not necessarily friendly territory, where Grass's celebrity could help mobilize SPD voters, and also districts where only a small shift to the SPD could help at the national level (Schlüter, 18).

Working out of an office in Bonn, Grass and his group of volunteers travelled the length and breadth of the Republic; between March and September, Grass spoke at over 190 campaign events (Neuhaus, 223) and travelled over 32,000 km in the VW bus that became the group's home away from home during the campaign (Drautzberg, 88). Neuhaus points out that Grass especially wanted to help the SPD extend its reach from its typical base in the labor movement to the educated middle class (218-219). In this context, Zimmermann reports on his success: "Rund zwei Drittel der Teilnehmer kommen bei den SPD-Veranstaltungen mit Grass eher seinetwegen als der Partei zu Liebe [...] es sind hauptsächlich Schüler und Studenten, Angestellte und

Beamte, selten Arbeiter" (134) ("About two thirds of those attending events with Grass are coming more because of him than out of love for the party […] It is mainly school and university students, white collar workers and civil servants, rarely workers"). Grass's personal appearance at so many events underlines the importance still attached to the stump speech as a means of reaching out to the general population during an election cycle in a way that people could see and hear the speaker's words directly. The other major means to do so, television, was still completing its takeover of the nation's living rooms at the end of the 1960s. Michael Schmidtke points out in his essay '1968' und die Massenmedien -— Momente europäischer Öffentlichkeit

('1968' and the Mass Media – Moments of a European Public Sphere) that while there were only three million registered television sets in the Federal Republic at the end of the 1950s, this number had increased to about eight million by 1963 and in 1970 had reached 16 million (273) in a country with 20 million households (Krejci 91).

Grass found another opportunity to contribute to public debates in the early 1970s. In addition to continuing his campaign-specific appearances, his speeches given in response to invitations, and articles, essays, and open letters he published as the need arose, he began to write

a regular newspaper column. The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung started a column called Politisches

Tagebuch (Political Diary) where each week a celebrity would provide a short commentary on events of the day. From March 1970 to July 1972, Grass contributed essays on an almost bi- weekly basis with his pieces usually reprinted a couple of days later in the Berlin newspaper

Abend. (ER 1001). Grass continued his electioneering through the Federal elections that took place in 1972, but then withdrew from such an active role. While he continued to make campaign appearances in both Federal and regional elections, according to Mayer-Iswandy, he never did so again "so systematisch wie zwischen 1965 und 1972" (2002 127) ("as systematically as between

1965 and 1972"). Mayer-Iswandy also records that the Social Democratic Voters Initiative wound up shortly after Grass stopped working with it in April 1973, but she offers a postscript to this form of campaign organization in the growth of citizen initiatives through the seventies and eighties, and the associated birth of a new political party, The Greens (127).

Grass began publishing collections of his speeches and essays in 1968 with the anthology

Über das Selbstverständliche, picking up on the title of his 1965 acceptance speech for the

Büchner Prize (see below). The English translation for the title of the speech itself is On the Self

Evident, while the collection appeared in English translation in 1969 with the title Speak Out! – itself a recognition of Grass's position as an outspoken contributor to public debates. A second edition of Über das Selbstverständliche appeared already in 1969, without the last entry from the first edition, Zwischenbilanz (Provisional Balance), which Grass had originally written as an afterword for that edition. The new collection had an additional four speeches, which Grass had given between May of 1968 and February 1969. Two of these speeches deal specifically with the issue of the street violence that had accompanied student protests and which, in Grass's view, was a result of the heightened rhetoric prevalent in public political discourse at the time. The first

of these was his speech at the traditional May Day celebration of the German Labor Day holiday in Hildesheim; this was published in Der Spiegel a week later under the title Die Gewalt ist wieder gesellschaftsfähig and included in Speak Out as Violence Rehabilitated. The second bore the title Radikalismus in Deutschland (Radicalism in Germany), based on a campaign speech in municipal elections in the state of Hesse in October 1968. (Radikalismus). Chapter 6 includes a more detailed discussion of these two speeches in the context of Grass's literary response to student protest violence.

Grass's Public Interventions: Historical, Literary, Personal

Pietsch draws a distinction between Grass's speeches, intended to be presented to a live audience, and texts destined first for publication as essays or opinion pieces (31). At the same time, he notes that the speeches underwent the same process of drafting and editing that Grass uses for essays (31-32). Grass himself echoed this point during his 1965 election campaign tour noting that speeches are just as much part of his literary work as a writer: "Wahlreden sind für mich schriftstellerische Arbeit. Das wird alles mit derselben Tinte geschrieben" (Arnold and

Görtz 34) ("Election speeches are for me literary writing. It is all written with the same ink").

Preece emphasizes the variety of styles that Grass uses, describing the speeches as "containing a mixture of policy ideas, anecdotes, ad hominem polemics, and history lessons" (2018 89). Grass included intertextual references to an array of German and foreign historical, literary, and cultural texts to improve the persuasiveness of his speeches. Moreover, many speeches included arguments based on individual people, allowing Grass to praise his political friends, to heap scorn on his political foes and those he felt had acted incorrectly, and to explain his political positions with reference to his own biography.

The speech Über die erste Bürgerpflicht, (The Citizen's First Duty), delivered at the opening of a community education center in January 1967, provides an example of how Grass uses references from history to make his point. In this case, it provided a justification for the idea of speaking up and becoming involved in public affairs. The historical detail he picks on is the message to the local population from the commander of Berlin, Graf Wilhelm von der

Schulenburg, that peace and order should be the first duty of citizens following Germany's defeat by Napoleonic forces at Jena in 1806 (ER 182-183; Citizen 73). Grass continues by pointing out that the citizens of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and then the Federal Republic had all indeed kept their peace when their governments, in turn, had passed the enabling legislation, lost battles on the Volga, or decided to rearm the country in 1955 (ER 183; Citizen 73).

Grass follows this discussion with three historical instances from the Federal Republic where the citizenry had not stayed peaceful but had shown some inclination to speak out against events happening around them; in all three cases, however, the effect did not last. (This speech was given before the growth of the broader protest and APO movement which began later in

1967.) The first example is the emergence of the Ohne Mich (Count me out) movement, a pacifist protest movement that arose as a reaction to the decision to rearm, but with little effect as the rearmament was followed by an absolute majority for the CDU at the next election (ER 184;

Citizen 74). Secondly, in 1962, the then Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauß had been forced to resign for his involvement in the Spiegel affair, and for the fact that he had lied to the Bundestag about it. After the news magazine Der Spiegel had published critical articles about the armed forces' readiness, Strauß had the magazine's editorial offices raided and the publisher, Rudolf

Augstein, and leading editors arrested. (Herbert 758). But Strauß was able to return to government as part of the Grand Coalition (ER 184-185; Citizen 74-75). The final case was the

establishment of the Grand Coalition itself, where the initial outrage dissipated quite quickly, and the SPD was even able to record an increase in membership (ER 185; Citizen 75). Grass concludes by encouraging his audience to be unruly, especially as it concerns their representatives in organizations such as the labor unions and SPD members of parliament:

Nehmen Sie bitte alle -- und jeder für sich -- diese beiden demokratischen und staatstragenden Organisationen in die Pflicht. Verlangen Sie beharrlich die Einlösung Ihres Wählerwillens. Geben Sie acht, daß der amorphe Zustand anderer Parteien sich nicht in der SPD auswächst. Ermahnen Sie die von Ihnen gewählten Kandidaten, dem eigenen Gewissen vor dem Fraktionszwang zu gehorchen, Bleiben Sie unruhig, unbequem. Denn Unruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht (ER 190).

(I suggest that all of you – each for himself – call on those democratic organizations which share responsibility for the government to do their duty. Demand, and keep demanding, that they respect the will expressed by your vote. Take care that the amorphous conditions of other parties do not spread to the Socialist party. Appeal to the candidates you have elected to follow their own conscience rather than party pressures. Continue to be restless and difficult. The citizen's first duty is unrest. Citizen 80).

In this case, Grass used a series of historical examples from recent times and an historical analogy to demonstrate how he felt the model citizen should act.

That Grass takes inspiration for his speeches from literary sources is not a surprise, and the speeches during the 1965 campaign provide ample evidence of this aspect of his public interventions. For example, Des Kaisers neue Kleider (The Emperor's New Clothes) details the hollowness and the empty promises of the current Chancellor and CDU candidate Ludwig

Erhard. As a "potent parable on the importance of truth-telling and taboo-breaking" (Finlay 35), the speech not only makes constant reference to the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale that provides its title, but uses other tales by Anderson (ER 118) and also the Grimm brothers (ER

115) to help drive home its points. Grass makes intertextual references to the American poet

Walt Whitman in the speech Es steht zur Wahl (The Issue), which quotes from the poem "For you O Democracy" (ER 78, Issue 6), and also in Loblied auf Willy (Song in Praise of Willy)

where Grass justifies his upcoming paean to Brandt with Whitman's tribute to Lincoln: "O starker gefallener Stern im Westen!" (ER 88) ("O powerful western fallen star!" Song 16). Finlay contends that this last reference has a two-fold purpose for Grass. It suggests firstly that Grass's own intervention on behalf of Brandt reflects the best tradition of cooperation between artists and politicians. Secondly, it helps place Grass among those "few intellectuals who had publicly supported the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic, most notably Thomas Mann, who himself had quoted Whitman in his speech defending the Weimar Republic and espousing democratic principles 'About the German Republic' (1922)" (34). Another literary reference in a speech title does not cite a specific story, but ties Grass into the world of the public intellectual by borrowing the title of Emile Zola's open letter J'accuse. In Ich klage an (I accuse), another speech from the 1965 campaign, Grass further emphasizes his credibility by reminding his listeners that he is making his accusations as "Schriftsteller und Bürger" (ER 134) ("writer and citizen"). Grass points his accusatory finger not only at members of the current administration, but also at the former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for his appointment of Hans Globke, who in

1935 had authored a commentary on the Nuremberg Race Laws (ER 960), as Chief of Staff in the Chancellor's Office.

Grass uses autobiographical elements to add to his explanations of specific political issues. Willy Brandt's policy in the late 1960s of rapprochement with Eastern Europe and particularly East Germany and Poland had many detractors because it involved accepting the status quo since the Second World War, including the redrawing of borders that resulted in

Germany losing significant territory compared to the prewar period. Grass supported Brandt's strategy even though to him it meant the permanent loss of his hometown of Danzig, now the

Polish city of Gdansk. as a German city, In the1969 election campaign speech Die runde Zahl

zwanzig (Twenty is a round number) Grass stresses that the Germans are ultimately responsible for what is for him a personal loss: "Ich bin in Danzig geboren und aufgewachsen. Sie dürfen annehmen, dass jemand, der den Verlust seiner Heimatstadt ausspricht, nicht leichtfertig verzichtet. […] Aber seien wir bitte genau: Mit dem Überfall auf Polen haben wir Deutsche ein

Unrecht in die Welt gesetzt, das rückläufig wurde und uns, die Urheber des Unrechts traf." (ERI runde Zahl). ("I was born and raised in Danzig. You can assume that when someone talks about giving up their hometown, they do not do so easily. […] But let's be clear: with the attack on

Poland, we Germans unleashed an injustice that turned around and hit us, the ones who caused the injustice").

In the speech given by Grass in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in 1967, Rede von der

Gewöhnung (literally Speech about the Force of Habit translated in a shortened form as Ben and

Dieter: A Speech to the Israelis), Grass uses his personal biography both to make clear how easily people could become captivated by a regime such as National Socialism and to set himself up as an example of someone who has understood and overcome his own upbringing:

Im Jahre 1927 wurde ich in Danzig geboren. Als 14jähriger war ich ein Hitlerjunge; als 16jähriger wurde ich Soldat, und mit 17 war ich ein amerikanischer Kriegsgefangener. […] Mein Geburtsjahr sagt: Ich war zu jung, um ein Nazi gewesen zu sein, aber alt genug, um von einem System, das von 1933 bis 1945 die Welt zuerst in Staunen, dann in Schrecken versetzte, mitgeprägt zu werden. Es spricht also zu Ihnen weder ein bewährter Antifaschist noch ein ehemaliger Nationalsozialist, eher ein Zufallsprodukt eines halbwegs zu früh geborenen und zu spät infizierten Jahrgangs. (ER 204-205)

(I was born in Danzig in 1927. At fourteen I was a Hitler Youth; at sixteen a soldier, and at seventeen an American prisoner of war. […] You can tell by the date of my birth that I was too young to have been a Nazi but old enough to have been molded by a system that, from 1933 to 1945, at first surprised, then horrified, the world. The man who is talking to you, then, is neither a proven antifascist nor an ex-National Socialist, but rather the accidental product of a crop of young men who were either born too early or infected too late. Ben and Dieter, 89-90)

By giving such prominence to his personal biography, he emphasizes its importance in forming his political positions.

In the same way that Grass is prepared to use his individual history to underline what he is saying, he also uses other individuals to make points in his speeches, especially when on the campaign trail. Pietsch points out that a simple Manichean view of "SPD equals good" and

"CDU equals bad" dominates Grass's campaign speeches and this carries forward to his treatment of political personalities (124). He is fulsome in his praise of politicians he supports, for example describing Willy Brandt as having a "reichgefächertes Programm" and "realistisches außenpolitisches Konzept" (ER 79) ("wide-ranging domestic program" and "realistic foreign policy", Issue 7). By contrast, Erhard has nothing to offer the German people: "Keine Planung, keine Vernunft, nichts […] als […] Angst vor dem Verlust des Bundeskanzleramtes (ER 120)

("No planning, no reason, nothing […] but fear of losing the Chancellorship"). Pietsch also notes how, running through various speeches, Brandt is portrayed as a great statesman who has lessened the unease and mistrust of neighbors contrasted against an Erhard who is pitiful and ungifted, earning ridicule on the world stage (126).

Grass reserved particular opprobrium for Kurt Georg Kiesinger, a former NSDAP official who became Chancellor in the Grand Coalition, as well as for Franz Josef Strauß, the leader of the CSU (the Bavarian sister party to the CDU) who had been forced to resign as Defense

Minister in 1962 after lying to parliament about his involvement in the Spiegel affair. Stuart

Parkes, discussing Grass as a campaigner within his book Writers and Politics in West Germany, comments on this aspect of the speechwriting and notes that Grass has a "tendency to dwell too exclusively on personalities." (136). As a result, Parkes concludes: "one impression of the […] election speeches of 1965 is that they are often stronger on polemics and rhetoric than on

argument and policy" (136). This focus on specific politicians also finds its way into Grass's narrative works of the period. In Örtlich betäubt, both Starusch as the teacher and Scherbaum his pupil criticize Kiesinger on several occasions, and Scherbaum wants to use the article he is writing for the school newspaper to draw a comparison between Kiesinger and his role model, the executed resistance activist Helmut Hübener (öb 229; LA 221). Many members of the election team traveling with Grass to set up the Voters Initiative, along with various SPD politicians that meet and work with them, receive sympathetic portrayals throughout Tagebuch einer Schnecke. For example, Grass gives a long positive description of the life of Leo Bauer (TS

566-567, DS 308-309), and his account of a meeting with Brandt as he is waiting to take a train in the last days of the campaign is almost reverential (TS 512-515; DS 253-256). Conservative politicians, on the other hand, naturally do not fare as well, such as "the CDU leader of the time

Barzel, [Grass's] adversary in a television debate, whom he bitterly combines with the bête noire

Strauß into a single name 'Strauzel'" (Parkes 146).

If Grass's electioneering speeches, particularly in the 1965 campaign, were vitriolic against his political foes, they were mild compared to the invective he unleashed upon his fellow writers and intellectuals after the SPD did not win the election. Grass considered that this failure was in part due to the unwillingness of some of his fellow writers to actively campaign in the same way he did on behalf of the party; in making this criticism he again underlined his understanding of how the intellectual can and should intervene in day-to-day politics. His

October 1965 speech, Rede über das Selbstverständliche (On the Self-Evident) was his acceptance speech for the prestigious Büchner Prize, one of the most important literary awards in

Germany. The awarding of the prize had itself generated quite a controversy as many still considered his work blasphemous, pornographic, or both (Arnold and Görtz 285-302). Grass

used the speech to give full vent to his frustration and anger that the CDU had once again emerged victorious from the election. Grass left no uncertainty about the level of disappointment he felt at the lack of action during the campaign by writers who otherwise were willing to pass judgement on any issue while making full use of their creative talents. Ironically using the moniker "Gewissen der Nation" ("conscience of the nation"), a term that he and many other writers and intellectuals specifically rejected (Burns and Van der Will 295), Grass makes a thinly veiled reference to the weekly left-liberal newspaper Die Zeit, which appeared every Thursday and whose comprehensive Feuilleton (arts and culture section) was often the preferred location for carrying out literary debates:

[ich] klage an unsere Hohepriester der knitterfreien Biographie, die sich das possierliche Vorrecht, Gewissen der Nation spielen zu dürfen, jeweils im Feuilleton irgendeiner halbliberalen Zeitung abverdienen. Wer kennt sie nicht, ihre feinziselierten Entrüstungsschreie? Wer genösse nicht, prompt jeden Donnerstag, ihre einerseits- andererseits-Springprozession? Dem einen fällt zu jeder Affäre ein manierlich Bonmot ein. Dem anderen versagt geistreich und zeilenschindend die Sprache. 'Peinlich, peinlich ...', murmelt erschüttert der dritte. So klopfen sie ihre tollkühnen Sprüche und besingen in windstillen Reservaten, jeweils nach Anfrage: die Freiheit des Geistes, die Unabhängigkeit der Intellektuellen und die Schwierigkeit beim Schreiben der Wahrheit. (ER 144)

([…] I condemn our high priests of blameless biography, who earn the ludicrous privilege of impersonating the conscience of the nation by writing articles for some semiliberal newspaper. Who has not heard their finely chiseled cries of indignation? Who has not, promptly every Thursday, enjoyed the spectacle of their concerted leaps from the one hand to the other hand? One has a polite bon mot for every political issue. Speech fails another, wittily and for several paragraphs. “Deplorable, deplorable,” mutters a third in dismay. And so they grind out their daring aphorisms and in their sheltered preserves expatiate, as the demand arises, on freedom of thought, the problem of independence among intellectuals, and the difficulty of writing the truth. Self-Evident 38)

Further, Grass criticized the preference he saw among some writers to demonstrate their international and political credibility by praising left-wing and communist leaders in other countries rather than taking part in the mundane reformism propagated by the SPD:

Eher gelänge ihrer Tinte ein hymnisch langes Heldenepos auf Fidel Castro und die Zuckerrohrinsel, als daß ihnen einfiele, mit einem schlichten Plädoyer für Willy Brandt der Lüge im eigenen Land die Beine zu verkürzen. Wer wollte auch verlangen, daß sich diese kleidsam weltbürgerliche Elite mit unseren kleinbürgerlichen Sozialdemokraten und ihren mühseligen Reformbestrebungen einließe? (ER 144)

(They will turn out an interminable epic hymn to Fidel Castro and his sugar-cane island long before it would ever occur to them to shorten the legs of falsehood in their own country with a simple plea for Willy Brandt. And who indeed would expect this fashionably cosmopolitan elite to rub shoulders with our petit-bourgeois Social Democrats and their laborious reformist efforts? Self-Evident 38).

Six months later, in April 1966, the Gruppe 47 took its yearly meeting to Princeton, New

Jersey, and afterwards Grass attended a congress of writers and academics on the topic of the writer in the affluent society (ER 962). He took this as an opportunity to emphasize once again the need for writers to stop thinking in terms of utopias and to stay in the real world. His speech,

Vom mangelnden Selbstvertrauen der schreibenden Hofnarren unter Berücksichtigung nicht vorhandener Höfe (On Writers as Court Jesters and on Non-Existent Courts) did not contain the kind of attack he had unleashed in Über das Selbstverständliche, but he did once again use irony to pour scorn on the idea that writers could influence events by simply describing themselves as committed: "Ist ein Schimmel mehr Schimmel, wenn wir ihn 'weiß' nennen? Und ist ein

Schriftsteller, der sich 'engagiert' nennt, ein weißer Schimmel? […] Er […] nennt und lässt sich

'engagierter' Schriftsteller nennen, was mich immer – man verzeihe mir – an Hofkonditor oder katholischer Radfahrer erinnert." (ER 155) ("Is a horse whiter because we call it white? And is a writer who says he is 'committed' a white horse? [… He calls] himself and encourage[s] others to call him a 'committed' writer, which always – forgive me – reminds me of titles such as 'court pastry cook' or 'Catholic bicycle rider.'" On Writers 49-50).

To satirize the idea of the court jester of his title, Grass suggests that writers could act as personal advisors to government leaders and uses two of his fellow writers as examples. He

paints the scene where the Federal Chancellor Erhard invites Heinrich Böll to advise him and, lo and behold, the next day Erhard recognizes both the GDR as a state and the Oder Neisse line as

Poland's western border (both elements of the Ostpolitik that would mark Brandt's first government), then he disbands the army and expropriates all capitalists (ER 156; On Writers 51).

In turn, Peter Weiss, who made no bones about his adherence to Marxism and had recently, according to Grass, taken to describing himself as a "humanist writer" (ER 155; On Writers 50) calls on and advises the East German head of state, Walter Ulbricht. The next day, lo and behold,

Ulbricht announces the end of the "shoot on sight" policy at the inner German border, converts political prisons into kindergartens, and issues an apology to the persecuted singer songwriter

Wolf Bierman (ER 156; On Writers 51). Having presented these ideas as utopias, Grass brings his audience back down to earth:

Diese kurzatmigen Utopien finden nicht statt, die Realität spricht anders. Es gibt keine persönlichen Berater, es gibt keine Hofnarren. Ich sehe nur – und mich eingeschlossen – verwirrte, am eigenen Handwerk zweifelnde Schriftsteller und Dichter, welche die winzigen Möglichkeiten, zwar nicht beratend, aber handelnd auf die uns anvertraute Gegenwart einzuwirken, wahrnehmen oder nicht wahrnehmen oder halbwegs wahrnehmen. (ER 157)

(These short-winded utopias remain – utopias. Reality speaks a different language. We have no special advisers or court jesters. All I see – and here I am including myself – is bewildered writers and poets who doubt the value of their own trade and avail themselves fully, partially or not at all, of their infinitesimal possibilities of playing a part in the events of our time – not with advice but with action. On Writers, 52)

Not only does Grass bring his audience back down to earth, he once again reminds them that practical action, which entails a willingness to deal with nitty gritty details of political work, is the antidote to utopian thinking about being committed writers:

Und es gibt auch die Menge Schriftsteller, bekannte und unbekannte, die weit entfernt von der Anmaßung, 'Gewissen der Nation' sein zu wollen, gelegentlich ihren Schreibtisch umwerfen – und demokratischen Kleinkram betreiben. Das aber heißt: Kompromisse anstreben. Seien wir uns dessen bewusst: Das Gedicht kennt keine Kompromisse; wir

aber leben von Kompromissen. Wer diese Spannung tätig aushält, ist ein Narr und ändert die Welt. (ER 158)

(But there are also a great many writers, known and unknown, who, far from presuming to be the “conscience of the nation,” occasionally bolt from their desks and busy themselves with the trivia of democracy. Which implies a readiness to compromise. Something we must get through our heads is this: a poem knows no compromise, but men live by compromise. The individual who can stand up under this contradiction and act is a fool and will change the world. On Writers, 53)

In the same way that criticisms of particular individual politicians find their way into

Grass's literary works as outlined above, the criticisms of individual writers also make an appearance. The comment in Über das Selbstverständliche on writing poems about Fidel Castro and his sugar cane island is picked up in Tagebuch einer Schnecke in two references to the writer and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In the first of these, Grass recounts that from his point of view, Enzensberger preferred in 1968 to go to Cuba to celebrate the revolutionary government there rather than stay at home to help achieve long-overdue reforms: "Guck mal der lustige Enzensberger: hüpft bubenhaft einfach nach Kuba und ist fein raus, während du hier

Schönwetter zu machen versuchst für die Dynamisierung der Kriegsopferrente und für die

Anerkennung von Tatsachen, die schon vor Jahrzehnten Moos angesetzt haben." (TS 335)

("Look at what fun Enzensberger is having: hops off to Cuba without a care in the world while you knock yourself out trying to drum up enthusiasm for the activation of pensions for war victims or to get people to recognize facts that had whiskers fifty years ago" DS 73). The second reference to Enzensberger's time in Cuba is during a conversation between Grass and his character Herman Ott in which Grass, in 1969, notes that a disillusioned Enzensberger has already returned to Germany (TS 390; DS 130).

In his 1962 essay, Engagement (Commitment), the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno pointed out that writers who want to include their political beliefs in their writings need to walk a

fine line: "Engagement als solches, sei's auch politisch gemeint, bleibt politisch vieldeutig, solange es nicht auf eine Propaganda sich reduziert, deren willfährige Gestalt alles Engagement des Subjekts verhöhnt" (Adorno 410) ("Even if politically motivated, commitment in itself remains politically polyvalent so long as it is not reduced to propaganda, whose pliancy mocks any commitment by the subject." Commitment 76). His concern is reflected in the word propaganda, and he emphasized the risk of debasing arguments by turning them into something replaceable: "Sobald jedoch die engagierten Kunstwerke Entscheidungen veranstalten, und zu ihrem Maß erheben, geraten diese auswechselbar" (Adorno 413) ("In fact, as soon as the committed works of art do instigate decisions at their own level, the decisions themselves become interchangeable" Commitment 78). Grass's own take on this issue has an additional nuance. In a 1969 interview with Jack Zipes, Grass distinguishes between writing a speech where he is "attacking or defending something" or "praising something", that is producing what is "in a way, propaganda" and writing a novel which involves more introspection: "I am not sure of myself, I have doubts […] I am curious and wondering […] how the novel will change and will change me" (qtd in Cepl-Kaufmann, 199). Taberner also suggests that an assessment of Grass's works based on their political content alone could devalue their aesthetic merit and argues that literary works should be seen as more than just politics: "Grass's essays […] were written as direct interventions in current political issues; his aesthetic texts […] are surely intended to be more complex and indeed more ambivalent, (art is supposed to provoke discussion rather than make a particular case)" (Taberner 2009 8).

Grass's inclusion of his political preferences, and their philosophical underpinnings, in his literary works goes beyond simply repeating lines from his speeches, although, as discussed earlier, he also does this on occasion when he includes criticisms of specific living individuals.

Interweaving the themes that he has raised in his speeches and essays into the fabric of his narratives, he walks the thin line that prevents the descent into Adorno's idea of pure propaganda within literature. At the same time, the degree of content overlap between his speeches and his literary works, to be discussed in the following chapters, suggest that Grass was more certain of where his prose works would take him than he admits to himself. Most importantly, Grass uses his speeches to a large extent as proving grounds for ideas and as testing sites for developing the means to discuss such ideas. Pietsch underlines this when he points out that public speaking is one of the places where Grass tries out his ideas first: "Das öffentliche Reden bleibt für Grass ein wichtiges Medium, neue Themen vor der literarischen Adoption zunächst essayistisch-rednerisch

'vorzuformen' und zu 'proben' (47) ("For Grass, public speaking remains an important medium for 'pre-shaping' and 'rehearsing' his ideas in an essayistic or public-speaking form before adopting them in his literature"). Many significant themes that permeate Grass's novels and other literary works had previously occupied a dominant position in his speeches, experiencing a more propagandistic presentation in a medium designed first and foremost to persuade, prior to more extensive treatment in their literary appearances.

Grass as a Public Intellectual in Later Years

Even if Grass stepped away from intensive campaign appearances after the 1972 Federal election (Mayer-Iswandy 2002 128), he continued his speech making (to a lesser degree in election campaign appearances) and essay writing. He remained constantly involved in the public debates of the day. With the three works of the Danzig Trilogy, Grass was among the first

West German cultural producers to broach the questions of personal complicity and responsibility. His message of progress based in the application of reason and enlightened thinking found its echoes in a society that was looking for a greater degree of liberalization,

while his support of parliamentary democracy as the system to deliver such progress was at odds with more radical critics of society. He was, however, able to maintain a profile that suggested he was ahead of the curve of public opinion throughout the sixties and into the seventies, as the themes he discussed garnered a positive response. Evidence for this includes the large number of people that attended his election rallies, many of whom would not otherwise have attended such an event (Zimmermann 134). His immensely popular 1977 novel Der Butt was part of the debate on the position of women in society occurring at the time, however his essentially regressive message meant that, despite the novel's success, he was trailing behind the women's movement on the street (see Chapter 7). Moving into the 1980s, his concern for overpopulation and environmental degradation, contained in his novels Kopfgeburten (1980) and Die Rättin (1986), showed that he was still contributing to public discussions that dominated the time.

He found himself completely out of step with public opinion for the first time when he rejected the idea of German reunification. His argument in favor of a confederation of two independent nations, echoing earlier engagement on behalf of a Kulturnation (Nation of Culture), did not fit the prevailing mood in either West or East Germany, where large majorities were in favor of rapid unification (Zimmermann 197). Not only was Grass fighting against political and social headwinds at this time, he was operating in a different political and media environment.

The social democratic liberal coalition government of the SPD and FDP, which Grass had expended so much effort to help put into power, broke apart in 1982, and a new conservative liberal government took over. As Thomas Hecken points out in his analysis of the phenomenon of pop literature in the 1990s, the 1980s were already marked by a turn towards neoliberal thinking (19). Moreover, the media landscape went through major upheavals as the arrival of cable and satellite television systems established what James Carey described as “multichannel

systems [that] fragment the audience into narrow niches based upon taste, hobbies, avocations, race, ethnicity – indeed, a potentially limitless world of work and leisure [where] even politics is turned into a hobby.” (396). In this new world, the expectation that a cultural producer could maintain a dominant position in public discussions the way that Grass and some of his contemporaries had done during the 1960s was no longer tenable. As Preece explains:

"Committed writers were associated with the era of the social liberal coalition between 1969 and

1982, first under Brandt, then Helmut Schmidt," and so "To some degree, Grass outlived his times" (2018 14). In his assessment of German intellectuals in the FRG and the GDR, Wolfgang

Emmerich, writing in 2003, notes that the generation of writers which followed Grass did not even consider the idea of being a public intellectual themselves, and he uses Grass as an example for their disparaging attitude to towards the stereotype: "most of the young authors from the East and West are in agreement that they no longer want to be representative or particularist- ideological intellectuals. A figure such as Günter Grass is a fossil from a dead, disavowed era"

(53). An early and more direct criticism of the position of the public intellectual came from the writer Rainald Goetz in his public reading at a literary competition, ironically using the kind of public platform that Grass often used to make his point. In front of the Jury at the 1983 Ingeborg

Bachman competition in Klagenfurt, Austria, Goetz read a text entitled Subito which included an anti-establishment invective against the hallowed greats of Germany's cultural and intellectual elite and their position in the cultural world:

[Den Sinn] sollen die professionellen Politflaschen, die Staatsidioten, diese ganze fetten dummdreisten Kohls vertreten; den sollen die Peinsackschriftsteller vertreten, die in der Painsackparade, angeführt von den präsenilen Chefpeinsäcken Böll und Grass, von Friedenskongress zu Friedenskongress, durch die Zeitungsfeuilletons und über unsere Bildschirme in der unaufhörlichen Peinsackpolonaise ziehen [...], dieses Nullenpack soll ruhig noch jahrelang den BIG SINN vertreten. (19)

(The loser politicians should represent [meaning], the state idiots, these stupid fat Chancellor Kohls; the tosser writers should represent it. Those who appear in the tosser parade, led by the pre-senile chief tossers Böll and Grass, going from peace conference to peace conference, through the culture section of the newspapers and on our television screens in the tosser polonaise [...] this bunch of slackers should represent BIG MEANING for years and years.)5

Even if the cultural and media environment was no longer in favor of the image of the public intellectual that Grass had embodied in the late 1960s, the fact that his name is among those cited by scholars such as Emmerich and critical young writers alike testifies to the reputation that Grass continued to enjoy as a public intellectual.

Grass's reputation as a public intellectual was based on the acknowledgement that he took moral stances, attempting to point out to or correct things he saw as wrong. This reputation was called into question following his account in the autobiographical work Beim Häuten der

Zwiebel in August 2006, in which he gave details of his service in the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the NSDAP, rather than in the regular army during the last months of the war. The outcry began when the fact was published in a pre-publication interview with the Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung (Kölbel 2007 27-36). For many, the fact that he had remained silent for sixty years about his service in an organization classified as responsible for war crimes was an act of hypocrisy that undermined his position. No longer could he lecture the Germans on the need to recognize and accept responsibility for their own actions during the National Socialist regime.

For these critics, Grass had failed to follow his own dictates to others and not been fully open with the German people about his own involvement in the war.

5 This translation from Subito is my own but I have borrowed some terms from Insane, Adrian Nathan West's translation of Goetz's novel Irre, from which the author derived the Subito text. 51

Bernhard Schaeder provides an overview of the different reactions to Grass's revelation in his assessment of the revelation itself and its aftermath entitled Es musste raus, endlich (It had to come out, finally). He lists those who stood behind Grass but at the same time questioned why it had taken so long for him to offer up the details as well as those who considered it scandalous that he had held back at all, especially given his criticism of the 1985 visit by German Chancellor

Helmut Kohl and US President Ronald Reagan to the Bitburg military cemetery where soldiers of the Waffen-SS were buried. Others wondered if Grass had not wanted to say anything earlier as he did not want to damage his prospects for winning a Nobel Prize. He did win the prize in

1999, but his admission seven years later led to calls that he return it or that it be taken away from him by The Swedish Academy. A further reaction was that his "confession" was just a marketing ploy. a move to increase sales for a book that may otherwise not been a blockbuster

(366-367). The potential impact on Grass' reputation is, however, made clear by Schaeder:

Schwer wiegt der Vorwurf, dass Grass mit diesem Geständnis seinen Rang als moralische Instanz eingebüßt habe. Jemand, der von anderen stets die Aufarbeitung ihrer braunen Vergangenheit gefordert hatte, hielt mit dem eignen hinterem Berg. Man könnte meinen, der moralisch Eifer, den Grass an den Tag legte, stellte eine Kompensation seiner Schuld dar (366)

(The charge weighs heavily that with this confession Grass has lost standing as a moral authority. Someone who demanded from others that they deal with their brown past has hidden his own. One could believe that the moralistic zeal he displayed was simply compensation for his own guilt").

Schaeder ponders the authenticity of the recollections that Grass presents, noting that Grass often refers to himself in the third person using the term "der Rekrut meines Namens"(HZ 126) ("the recruit with my name" PO 110), has lapses in memory, and uses one of the most common literary tropes of the soldier, the private first class, who has seen everything and helps the raw recruit to safety (369-70). He accuses Grass of being tone deaf towards the suffering of all the victims of the Waffen-SS (381). As a conclusion, Schaeder notes that Grass gives his own reasons for

writing the book, partly that "dies und das nachgetragen werden muss" (HZ 8) ("this as well as that deserves to be part of the record" PO 2), but most importantly that he wants "das letzte Wort haben" (HZ 8) ("to have the last word" PO 2). Schaeder expects that Grass will not succeed in having the last word as someone else will want to add, and will add this and that to the record

(Schaeder 382).

In his essay Günter Grass und die Waffen-SS (Günter Grass and the Waffen-SS), Romey

Sabalius argues that, in fact, the omission on the part of Grass of this aspect of his biography should not be allowed to dominate over everything else, using language that echoes Grass's own criticisms of writers who prefer to stay out of daily political work:

Hier ist ein Autor, der sich nicht hinter seiner kreativen Arbeit zurückgezogen hat, der nicht über die Jahre genüsslich oder selbstquälerisch im Elfenbeinturm gesessen hat, sondern jemand, der sich engagiert hat, der Kritik geübt und gescholten hat. Einer, der sich über Jahrzehnte hinaus um eine bessere Gesellschaft bemüht hat, und nicht zwar nur theoretisch oder philosophisch, sondern auch ganz konkret, mit seinem Einsatz im tagespolitischen Geschäft. Ein engagierter Bürger, der Stellung bezogen hat, für eine gute Sache nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen. Und diese halbjahrhundertlange Leistung soll nun durch eine Unterlassung relativiert werden? Nein, das kann doch nicht sein [...] Da gilt es abzuwägen, und bei einer so deutlichen Gewichtung kann es nicht anders sein, als dass die Seite, auf der der lebenslange Verdienst liegt, die schwerere ist. (386-387)

(Here is an author who has never hidden behind his creative work, who did not sit for years with relish or in self-torment in an ivory tower. Rather, this is someone who took part, who criticized and pointed fingers. Someone who for decades tried to achieve a better society, not only theoretically or philosophically, but also concretely, with his involvement in the daily business of politics. A committed citizen who argued for what was right, according to the best of his knowledge and beliefs. And this half a century's worth of effort should now be discounted because of an omission? No, that cannot be. […] We have to weigh things, one against the other, and after such careful consideration, we cannot but come down on the side where a lifelong effort sits.)

The only person who could truly say why Grass chose to talk about his time in the

Waffen-SS at the time and in the manner that he did is Grass himself. It is possible that, as he

claimed in the interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that it was something that simply "musste raus. Endlich" (Kölbel 2007 28) ("had to come out, finally"). Grass had let large parts of his biography flow into his literary works, but his wartime service was not the only incident in his life that had fed into creative works but only came to light for the first time as an event in his own life in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. For example, it was a commonplace that

Soviet soldiers moving westwards would rape women, and Grass shows this in Die

Blechtrommel with the rape of Frau Greff (BT 483; TD 385) but it was only in this autobiographical work that Germans learned that Grass's own mother had been a victim (HZ

271; PO 240) (although Grass had revealed this fact previously to a French writer during a series of interviews in 1977 (Preece 2018, 176)).

Grass never hid his commitment to the National Socialist vision as a child and an adolescent, and in descriptions of his own biography as part of his political speeches, he also often spoke of the fact that he had been a soldier and once referred to himself as a tank gunner

(ER 163; Speech 55). When he was taken as a prisoner of war, he did not try to hide his service giving his unit as the SS tank division Frundsberg, as recorded in archive documents obtained by various media outlets after the details of Grass's service became known (Zimmermann 299-300;

Kölbel 2007 224-227, 234). Preece notes that Grass's admission of his service in the Waffen-SS distinguishes itself from other late-in-the-day exposés concerning other prominent people's connections to National Socialism in two important ways: "Grass never lied, he just avoided spelling out one small part of the truth; and he also revealed the key information himself, rather than being confronted with it." (2018 178). It is this second aspect of the admission that I think provides the most plausible explanation of Grass's choice to reveal his past and the timing of it.

He wanted to control the manner of the revelation to have, in his own phrase mentioned earlier

"das letzte Wort" ("the last word"). Also, as Taberner suggests, he was aware his advancing age would limit his opportunities (2014 166). As it was, Grass had significant problems controlling the narrative after the revelation and even felt himself lured into a trap by the Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung (Neuhaus 430-431). One example of a reaction that shows how others would use the story for their own ends comes from Neuhaus. He recounts a conversation with the journalist and critic Hellmuth Karasek: "Gelesen habe er das Buch natürlich nicht, so etwas tue er sich doch nicht an, aber jetzt könne er Grass endlich das alles heimzahlen, worüber er sich seit

Jahren bei ihm geärgert habe." (431) ("[Kasarek said that] of course he had not read the book, he wouldn't do that to himself, but now he could finally pay Grass back for everything that had annoyed him over the years"). Given this kind of response, it would likely have been much worse if someone else had unearthed the archive documents from the POW camps and published the information about Grass, not to mention the potential damage to Grass's legacy had such information come to light after his death (Schaeder 372).

The question remains to what extent, if at all, Grass's admission of having served in the

Waffen-SS impacts our interpretation of his literary and political work in the period under consideration. Firstly, if we consider that Grass's account of his time actually spent in barracks and on the front lines is as accurate a rendition as we are going to have, then we have to give

Grass the benefit of the doubt that he was a simple soldier and not involved in any of the war crimes of the Waffen-SS as an organization (Zimmermann 300). In this context, it is important to note that nothing in the account given in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel contradicts or gives the lie to any of the earlier accounts of his biography included in his speeches and essays or in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. The second issue to take into account is whether it is reasonable to expect that, if he had revealed the full details of his wartime service, his writing career and political activity

would have looked any different, or if they would have been received differently. If anything, both his literary works and his speeches and essays could have carried greater moral weight if he had told the full story of his wartime activity, both the unit he was attached to and the relatively small part he ended up playing. As it was, the details he gave were enough to raise him to a position of influence, even if he, as Neuhaus points out, had never considered himself in that role: "[er] hatte nie, wie ihm fast ausnahmslos unterstellt wurde, für sich beansprucht, das

'Gewissen der Nation' oder gar eine unfehlbare moralische Instanz zu sein" (431) ("Even though he was almost without exception accused of doing so, [he] had never claimed for himself the mantle of 'the conscience of the nation', or let alone some infallible moral authority"). Moreover,

Taberner, while acknowledging that some Grass scholars may take a different view, suggests that the "disclosure [...] will have little lasting or substantial impact on the way in which his work is read or, indeed, on the way in which the author's lifetime as a social, political, and cultural intellectual is evaluated (2009 1).

Grass's wartime Waffen-SS service resurfaced in the discussion of his 2012 poem Was gesagt werden muss (What must be said), one of the last public scandals surrounding the writer just a few years before his death in 2015. The poem. published simultaneously in the

Süddeutsche Zeitung, Italy's La Repubblica and Spain's El País (Taberner 2012 519) criticized

Israel for its policies of maintaining its own nuclear weapons while threatening Iran's nuclear program, suggesting Israel was a danger to regional peace (Was gesagt). In the debate that followed its publication, some critics accused Grass of anti-Semitism, using his time in the

Waffen-SS as corroborating evidence (Neuhaus 455). Taberner suggests the poem is evidence of

Grass's continuing insistence on the idea of political commitment in writing: "After almost five decades of producing engaged literature, and after half a century of criticism and censure for the

same, Grass still clearly believes in its value, therefore – and unapologetically so" (2012 525).

Taberner, however, notes that Grass is continuing his committed stances in the pages of the world's newspapers (525), not the social media that now have much greater impact in forming public opinion. Taberner ultimately faults Grass not for what he is saying, but rather more for his lack in his later years of any reflection on why he imagines himself to have the authority that would make people want to listen to him (529-30).

Conclusion

Throughout the 1960s, Grass augmented his role of writer with that of a public intellectual in the sense of Burns and Van der Will's definition. At the same time, he always took pains to describe his work in the public arena, both as a critical commentator and an election campaigner, first and foremost as that of a citizen and, as Pietsch notes, Grass avoided using the more appropriate term "intellectual": "[Grass verzichtet] in sämtlichen seiner Wahlreden auf den näher liegenden Begriff des "Intellektuellen", der in seinem Identifikationspotenzial höchst ambivalent ist, obwohl er die Doppelfunktion aus geistig-künstlerischer Tätigkeit und

öffentliche-gesellschaftlichem Engagement terminologisch exakter beschriebt" (99) ("In all of his election speeches, [Grass does not use] the more apt term 'intellectual', which is highly ambivalent in terms of its potential identification, although it does terminologically more accurately describe the dual function of creative artistic activity and public-societal engagement").

The 1960s debates on the value of literature and the need for political commitment, together with the question of whether a literary person can be politically engaged and still

produce literature, explain the reaction of the young writers who approached Grass in the bar as he recounts in the anecdote in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. They expect Grass to take a clear stance towards one side of his work – to toss one of the beer mats. In this chapter I have outlined

Grass's work as an interventionist and public intellectual. The following chapters will look at how Grass as a writer did not maintain separation from his public interventions and examine how the ideas of his speeches and essays re-emerged in his literary output.

Chapter 4: Passing the Past to the Future

Günter Grass achieved his initial fame by writing about the past, and more specifically by creating fictionalized accounts of the history he lived through. (Preece 2009 10). The Danzig trilogy represents a significant contribution to the attempts to start the conversation about the recent past, subsumed into the German expression Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the idea of coming to terms with the National Socialist past (Taberner 2014 166). This process began with admitting to what had happened as well as the part individuals had played, more or less actively, in the activities of the regime. The novels Die Blechtrommel and Hundejahre (The Tin Drum and

Dog Years), published first and third, exposed the contribution the lower middle classes in

Germany made towards the rise of Nazism and how easily the West German population adapted to a life after the Holocaust within the economic miracle. Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse), the novella that completes the trilogy, tells of how German youth succumbed to the ideals of glory and heroism in the war.

The two prose works that followed this trilogy shifted the focus away from the period prior to, during, and immediately after the Nazi regime. örtlich betäubt, published in 1969, is set primarily in contemporary times (1967). Only Starusch's recounting of his post-war past up to and including his reported engagement with Linde Krings, along with her father's attempts to refight his battles, take place prior to the main action. Similarly. Tagebuch einer Schnecke deals mostly with the Federal election of 1969, which took place three years before the book was published, and the only narrative threads dealing with the National Socialist period are those covering the history of the final years of the Jewish community in Danzig and the fictitious story

of Hermann Ott, also set in Danzig and its environs. However, in these works, Grass did not ignore the National Socialist past and its reach into the present. He underlined this fact in a note to readers published in the house journal of his publishing house on the release of örtlich betäubt: "In dem Roman örtlich betäubt führe ich, bei veränderter Perspektive, die Prosaarbeit fort, die ich mit Abschluss des Romans Hundejahre unterbrochen hatte" (ER 410) ("In the novel

Local Anaesthetic I continued, from a different perspective, the prose work I had interrupted with the completion of Dog Years").

In this chapter, I will look at how Grass's work in the late 1960s, both his political speeches and essays and his literary work, reflect his desire to continue the critical look at the past that was part of the Danzig trilogy. The works of the late 1960s, however, add a further layer in that Grass is not only talking about what happened in the past, he is also pointing out the need to convey this knowledge to a new generation, and to make sure that the past is passed on to the future, along with an understanding of the mistakes made and their consequences. That three different literary genres – a poem, a stage play, and a novel – use the same words to describe an understanding of how the consequences of actions and the responsibility for them persist across time emphasizes the importance for Grass of this theme. Grass also addressed communication between the generations and the idea of generational transfer of knowledge about the past in a speech and an essay related to events that memorialized the Holocaust. In örtlich betäubt, the younger generation, rather than the generation that came of age at the end of the war, takes on the mantle of examining the past against the backdrop of Grass's criticism of the Grand

Coalition, although the necessary generational transfer does not always materialize. The theme of transfer to the next generation continues into Tagebuch einer Schnecke as Grass relates his conversations with his children about what happened during the Holocaust, as well as providing

his children with both historical and fictional accounts of what happened in Danzig. The result is that he passes his own past and that of his home city directly on to his own next generation.

Time, Consequences, and Responsibility

In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, during one of his conversations with his children, Grass offers a definition of himself as a writer: "Ein Schriftsteller, Kinder, ist jemand, der gegen die verstreichende Zeit schreibt" (TS 400) ("A writer, children, is someone who writes against the passage of time" DS 141). This concept suggests writing about the past to keep memory from fading over time. Another possible interpretation is that a writer has an obligation to maintain the link across time from the past to the present and to trace how the present is a consequence of past actions. Understanding causal relationships over time also entails recognizing the consequences of one's own actions in history and seeing how the present situation has been determined by actions in the past, even if the current consequences of those actions were not intended. I contend that this time-based view of action and, often dialectical, reaction contributes to Grass's assessment of efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It stresses how important it is to look for the root causes of any given situation in the prior actions of its protagonists. Moreover, Grass believed that progress, understood as a series of incremental improvements, could bring about a better life for people. He was concerned, however, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, that the search for improvements should not devolve into a teleological search for utopia. In this context, he was concerned that people recognize actions have consequences, whether intended or not, and so encouraged the act of deliberation rather than precipitate action, of making sure that one has fully assessed the results of a given course of action before embarking on it.

As a writer, Grass was not only a successful novelist, but also an accomplished and published poet and playwright. He presented his perspective on the passage of time, the

consequences of past actions, and the need for people to recognize the continuity of their own responsibility, across three genres. Elements that appear in örtlich betäubt also occur in a poem and a stage play, both of which appeared in the months leading up to the publication of the novel.

Grass's focus on actions and their consequences is clear in the time-related titles of the non-prose works. The stage play, which presents, almost word for word, the debates from the novel around

Scherbaum's planned dog burning, has the German title Davor which translates literally into

English as Beforehand. (The published translation by A Leslie Wilson and Ralph Mannheim carries the title Max: A Play – a reference to the name of Scherbaum's dachshund which is to be burned.). While the play's title looks backwards to what has happened, the poem, entitled

Danach (Afterwards) emphasizes consequences. Of the three, the novel appeared last, being published in August of 1969, while Davor premiered in February 1969, with the text published in April that year (WA VIII 594). Danach was not included in any volume of poetry but rather was published as a single submission in Luchterhands Loseblatt Lyrik, Nr 14, which was released in 1968 (WA I, 380). It was subsequently included in editions of Grass's collected works.

The action of the stage play Davor includes only Scherbaum's plan to protest the Vietnam war by burning his pet dog. Starusch's stories about Linde Krings as his fiancée and her challenge to her father's idea of refighting lost battles are missing. The generational comparisons remain: Starusch sells the idea of himself as an activist in his youth based on his participation in the Dusters street gang in Danzig at the end of the war and Irmgard Seifert sees Scherbaum's plan as the opportunity for redemption for her own sins in denouncing the local farmer as a seventeen-year-old BDM girl (DV 542; MP 101). As a result, the play has a much more direct focus on Scherbaum's plan and the issue of protest action, and more specifically on the dialogues

between the participants. Aiding in this focus are the very stripped-down staging instructions

Grass provides, as he insists, for example, that directors do not use any elements of staging beyond what he, Grass, has provided. Moreover, while the actions take place in various locations, such as the schoolyard, the dentist's office, Starusch's home, etc., all locations are permanently present on the stage, and characters move interchangeably across the supposed boundaries. In an analysis of Grass's dramatic works, David Barnett describes how these staging concepts create "a play of ideas [...] a talk shop [where] ideas are set beside each other and tweaked over the course of the performance" (189)

The third section of the novel, örtlich betäubt, opens with a paragraph that summarizes and quotes from the poem Danach:

Danach blieb vom Fisch nur die Gräte. Luftige Zwischenräume, leicht zu besiedeln. Danach wurden Andenken verkauft. Etwas sollte geschehen und hat später, wenn auch an anderem Ort, teilweise stattgefunden. Danach kamen Rechnungen ins Haus. Keiner will es gewesen sein. Danach wurde die Prophylaxe fortgesetzt. Schon im Davor beginnt das Danach. (öb 234)

(Afterward the fish was gone and only the bones remained, Airy spaces easy to populate. Afterward souvenirs were sold. Something was supposed to happen and to an extent happened later, though somewhere else. Afterward bills poured in. No one admits he did it. Afterward the prophylaxis was continued. Afterward begins beforehand. LA 226)

Of particular note here is the last sentence "Schon im Davor beginnt das Danach"

("Afterward begins beforehand"), which appears here as well as in Davor (DV 553)6 and Danach

(263). This line binds the present – that which is "afterward" – to the past that went

"beforehand", where the actions took place that led to the consequences seen in the present. A further phrase that appears in both the novel and the play emphasizes continuity of action along a

6 This phrase is missing from Leslie Wilson and Ralph Mannheim's translation Max. A Play 63

timeline - the idea that we do not have disruptive breaks in time. This occurs when Starusch says

"Vorgeschmack überlappt den Nachgeschmack. Alles schmeckt gleichzeitig und widerspricht sich" (öb 225; DV 551) ("Foretaste overlaps with aftertaste. Simultaneous tastes contradict one another" LA 217; " Foretaste overlaps with aftertaste. Simultaneous tasting cancels itself out"

MP 114). The idea here, once again, is that the earlier action still influences and impacts the later one, possibly contradicting or cancelling it out. The later action must recognize its origin in the earlier action and accept the earlier action is part of itself. The concept that no-one will accept responsibility also appears in all three works: "Keiner will es gewesen sein" (öb 234; DV 537;

Danach 263), which is translated in Local Anaesthetic as "No one admits he did it" (226) and in

Max. A Play as "Nobody takes the blame" (91).

Danach focuses more on recognizing consequences and, more importantly, understanding that consequences may not always be what was originally intended or expected, as outlined in the following stanza:

Als wir anfingen, dachten wir: erst mal anfangen. Es war nicht so gemeint. Eigentlich wollten wir das und nicht das. Aber das kam nicht. Das kam. Das konnten wir nicht wissen. Das gibt es nicht. Das liegt hinter uns. (262)

(As we started, we thought, just get started We didn't mean it to be that way Actually, we wanted this and not that But this didn't happen That happened We could not know that That does not exist That is behind us.)

In this last example, the idea of "this" and "that" happening, and the potentially unintended consequences of "this did not happen, but that happened" finds an echo in the language Grass uses in Tagebuch einer Schnecke as he tries to answer his children's questions about the

Holocaust: "Weil das und zuvor das, weil gleichzeitig das, nachdem auch noch das …" (TS 273)

("Because this, but first that, and meanwhile the other, but only after … DS 11)

Taken together, the novel, the play, and the poem show the importance of the theme of continuity of consequences over time, as well as the need to recognize the actions that were the source of those consequences and to take responsibility for those actions and consequences. The responsibility to recognize those consequences does not rest solely with those who undertook the initial actions, but also with members of successor generations. They must understand what happened, how it happened, and why it cannot be allowed to happen again. Also, each successive generation bears the burden of passing on their knowledge and experience to the next to help it acquire the necessary understanding.

Dealing with the Past - Lost Battles and the New Generation

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Grass regarded the novel örtlich betäubt as a continuation of the work he had begun in the Danzig trilogy. The original title for the work was

Verlorene Schlachten (Lost Battles), and the story of Field Marshall Ferdinand Krings formed the original core of the novel (Neuhaus, 255). Krings does not want to admit that he and others lost battles in the war, and he wants to refight them in a sandbox so that he can now win them all.

The arrival of street protests in the late sixties led Grass to add in the idea of Philipp Scherbaum wanting to burn his dachshund in protest of the use of Napalm in Vietnam, which also became a substantial enough narrative that Grass felt he could extract it out of the novel and turn it into the play Davor (256), as discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. Within the novel itself, each narrative

strand presents the younger generation taking on the burden of the past: Scherbaum learns from

Starusch to use rationality rather than violent protest, and Linde Krings is determined to prevent her father from winning the reenactments of his lost battles. Underlying these narratives is

Grass's concern, expressed in speeches and open letters, about the impact of the Grand Coalition, with Kurt Georg Kiesinger as its Chancellor, and its implications in terms of a failure to recognize and accept the consequences of past actions. In his speeches and essays, Grass criticized both Kiesinger as an individual ex-Nazi official who has been able to become

Chancellor and the coalition as a whole as it could be seen as legitimizing the continued presence of former Nazis in the political and business elite, such as a character like Ferdinand Krings.

When the two largest parliamentary parties the – conservative CDU and the social democratic SPD – formed the Grand Coalition government in December 1966, they together accounted for ninety percent of the parliamentary seats (Stahl) and so essentially ended effective opposition within parliament. Grass was very critical of the choice by the SPD under the leadership of his personal friend Willy Brandt to join the coalition with the CDU, and he made his concerns public in an open correspondence with Willy Brandt conducted in the pages of the national newspapers Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He warned first of the possible consequences for the SPD within the party system, and, in particular, the possible strengthening of the extreme right-wing NPD:

Die Entscheidung [für die Große Koalition] wird mich und viele meine Freunde […] in eine linke Ecke drängen und zum bloßem, obendrein politisch machtlosen Widerpart der NPD degradieren. Wie sollen wir weiterhin die SPD als Alternative verteidigen, wenn das Profil eines Willy Brandt im Proporz-Einerlei der Großen Koalition nicht mehr zu erkennen sein wird?" (ER 168)

(It is a decision that will force me and many of my friends into a left-hand corner against our will, degrading us to a mere counterpart to the NPD and a politically impotent one at that. How are we to go on recommending the Socialist Party [sic] as an alternative when the profile of a Willy Brandt is reduced to an unrecognizable blur by the proportional uniformity of the Grand Coalition? Exchange 61) 66

Grass was especially worried about the impact of the personnel decisions that went along with joining the Grand Coalition. The return to the cabinet of Franz Josef Strauß, who had resigned as

Defense Minister because he had lied to the Bundestag during the Spiegel Affair in 1962, set alarm bells ringing for Grass (ER 169, Exchange 64). However, in Grass's view, the prospect of

Kurt Georg Kiesinger becoming Chancellor was the most egregious move. Grass wrote an open letter directly to Kiesinger on the eve of the confirmation of the coalition to plead that he,

Kiesinger, should recognize the potential damage to Germany's international reputation should a formerly committed member of the Nazi Party take on the Chancellorship: "Sie, Herr Kiesinger, sind 1933 als erwachsener Mann in die NSDAP eingetreten, erst die Kapitulation vermochte Sie von Ihrer Mitgliedschaft zu entbinden" (ER 171) ("You, Herr Kiesinger, joined the National

Socialist Party as an adult in 1933 and it took the surrender to dissolve your ties with the Party"

Open 65). To represent the next generation taking on the role of criticizing the developments,

Grass in his letter puts himself in the shoes of an imagined son of Kiesinger, and describes a hypothetical conversation between the two as the son tells his father:

Denn eigentlich müsstest du wissen, dass im diesem Land mit seiner immer noch nicht abgetragenen Hypothek, in diesem geteilten Land ohne Friedensvertrag das Amt des Bundeskanzlers niemals von einem Mann wahrgenommen werden darf, der schon einmal wider alle Vernunft handelte und dem Verbrechen diente, während andere daran zugrunde gingen, weil sie der Vernunft folgten und dem Verbrechen Widerstand boten. (ER 171)

(For you must be aware that this country with its still undigested past, this divided country without a peace treaty, ought not to entrust the Chancellorship to a man who was combatting reason and abetting crime at a time when others were dying because they had served reason and resisted the crime. Open 66)

Kiesinger's candidacy for the chancellorship also featured prominently in a campaign speech Grass gave in November 1966 during the state elections in Bavaria. Grass not only questioned whether Kiesinger should even be considering the Chancellorship, but also attempted to enlist the younger generation in the process of recognizing and dealing with the past. In the

speech entitled Rede an einen jungen Wähler, der sich versucht fühlt, die NPD zu wählen

(Speech to a Young Voter Who Feels Tempted to Vote for the NPD), Grass uses his own past as an example and a warning of how easily idealistic movements can lead young people astray.

After listing the various party organizations which he belonged to as a young boy and teenager, he gives the details of his time with the military. He uses the speech as an opportunity to pass on the lessons he learned following his release from an American POW camp when he was eighteen.:

Und als Achtzehnjähriger wurde ich aus amerikanischer Kriegsgefangenschaft entlassen. Jetzt erst […] wurde mir deutlich, was man, überdeckt von Fanfarenruf und Ostlandgeschwafel, mit meiner Jugend angestellt hatte. Jetzt erst […] begriff ich, welch unfassliche Verbrechen im Namen der Zukunft meiner Generation begangen worden waren. (ER 163)

(At the age of eighteen I was discharged from an American POW camp: it was only then […] that I gradually began to realize what, behind a smokescreen of martial music and irredentist bilge, they had done to my youth. It was only then that I began to find out […] what unthinkable crimes had been committed in the name of a future generation. Speech 55)

When it comes to Kiesinger's candidacy, Grass lays out his opposition also in terms of how the perception of Kiesinger as Chancellor could affect young voters, as it could undermine the arguments that Grass and others were making and so suggest the NPD could be a credible political alternative despite the presence of so many former Nazis in the party's upper ranks:

Von den achtzehn Mitgliedern des Vorstandes dieser Partei waren zwölf aktive Nationalsozialisten. Ist das schlimm? Ja. Aber bedenklicher ist es, wenn ein Parteimitglied von 1933 bis zum Ende, also Herr Kiesinger, sich heute als Bundeskanzlerkandidat der CDU/CSU präsentiert (ER 166)

(Of the eighteen members of this party's executive committee, twelve were active National Socialists. Is that bad? Yes, but it is more alarming that a man who was a party member from 1933 to the end, Herr Kiesinger, should today be the candidate of the CDU/CSU for the Chancellorship. Speech 59).

Grass's unwillingness to accept Kiesinger as a normal Chancellor finds its clearest expression in örtlich betäubt in the words of Scherbaum, who sees Kiesinger's appointment as the clinching reason to go ahead with his act of protest:

Scherbaum begann leise zu explodieren. Zuerst saß er, dann sprang er auf, aber seine Stimme nahm nicht zu: 'Den will ich nicht. Der stinkt doch. Wenn ich den sehe, im Fernsehen und so, könnte ich kotzen wie vor dem Kempinski. Der, genau der, hat den Hübener umgebracht, auch wenn der anders hieß, der ihn umgebracht hat. Ich mach es. Benzin hab ich schon. Und ein Sturmfeuerzeug. Hörst du, Max! Wir müssen...' (öb 209).

(Slowly Scherbaum started to explode. At first he was seated, then he jumped up, but his voice did not rise: 'I don't want him. He stinks. When I see him on TV, I could throw up like outside Kempinski's. He, he and nobody else, killed Hübener, even if the man who killed him had a different name. I'm going to do it. I've got the gas already. And a storm lighter. Hear that, Max? We've got to … LA 202)

Another view of the idea of the younger generation taking on the task of maintaining awareness of the past comes through in the relationship between Starusch as teacher and

Scherbaum as his pupil. In addition to Starusch trying to dissuade Scherbaum from his plan to protest the use of Napalm in Vietnam by burning his pet dog, the two discuss the idea of resistance to the National Socialist Regime. Starusch wants to present his past as the leader of a youth gang during the final months of the Nazi regime as a form of protest, something

Scherbaum does not accept: "Zum Beispiel, Herr Starusch. Wenn ich ihm erkläre, was in

Vietnam los ist, spricht er von seiner Jugendbande und hält mir Vorträge über den

Frühanarchismus der Siebzehnjährigen. Ich will aber keine Jugendbande" (öb 199) ("Herr

Starusch, for instance. When I tell him what's going on in Vietnam, he talks about his teen-age gang and lectures me about the Early Anarchism of the seventeen-year-old. But I'm not interested in having a teen-age gang" LA 192). Scherbaum counters with someone he can idolize, Helmut Hübener, a wartime resistance activist who as a seventeen-year-old disseminated the content of BBC radio broadcasts during the war and who was executed in 1942. When he

compares Hübener's actions with the then 38-year-old Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Scherbaum expresses his disgust with the fact that people have accepted that Kiesinger, who was in the Nazi

Party from early on, is now able to accede to power:

'Und der ist jetzt Kanzler.' 'Man sagt, er habe eingesehen, inzwischen ...' 'Und der darf jetzt wieder ...' 'Man hatte keine Bedenken ...' 'Der, genau der ... (öb 209)

('And now he's Chancellor' 'They say he's come to realize …' 'And now they let him …' 'They saw no objection …' 'Him of all people …' LA201-202)

Starusch's statement that people no longer had concerns is ironic in that Kiesinger's appointment, and the Grand Coalition that he headed, was one of the main reasons behind the emergence of the extra-parliamentary opposition (Passmore ix).

After he has given up on his plan to burn his dog, Scherbaum wants to use Hübener as a point of comparison with Kiesinger in an article for the student newspaper to show what was possible in terms of resistance. He has taken on the mantle of understanding and communicating the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes. In a conversation with Gertrude Cepl-

Kaufmann, Grass explicitly addresses his purpose in trying to pass on the knowledge and the experience of the past to the next generation:

Ich sehe keine andere Möglichkeit, als so viel wie möglich an Erfahrung an die jeweils herangewachsene Generation zu übertragen, denn sonst, wenn wir das nicht tun, unterliegen wir einem Mechanismus, der zerstörerisch ist: dass jede Generation von sich aus nahezu manisch darauf besteht, die gleichen Fehler in genauso schrecklicher oder noch schrecklicherer Form noch einmal zu machen, die schon andere Generationen vorher gemacht haben. (Cepl-Kaufmann 296-297)

(I see no other possibility than passing on as much experience as possible to the up-and- coming generation. If we don't, we will be defeated by a destructive system, one in which

every generation tries almost manically by itself to make the exact same mistakes that other generations have made, in just as terrifying or in an even more terrifying way).

While Scherbaum's protest is against a real historical character, the generational battle between Linde and Ferdinand Krings shows how Grass draws characters as fictionalized versions of real-life people and events. Ferdinand Krings's life and career, including the names, places, and dates of battles he participated in and his postwar imprisonment by the Soviets, to a large extent reflect that of Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner. Starusch, as a teacher of history

– that is someone whose job is to pass on the past to the upcoming generation – is preparing a monograph on Schörner and he gives us a first hint as to the identity of the inspiration for the character Krings. He refers to his still incomplete project as "Das Angefangene" (öb 211) ("my beginning" LA 204) and outlines Schöner's return from a Soviet POW camp in 1955, his subsequent trial and imprisonment in the Federal Republic for mistreatment of soldiers during the war, and the fact that he now lives in Munich. Starusch describes these as the facts of the case, but with a proviso: "Soweit die Tatsachen. (Oder was man Tatsachen nennt.)" (öb 212)

("So much for the facts. (Or what people call facts)" LA 204). At the end of the novel Starusch draws attention to the fact that, like other aspects of his life, this project is not something he can regard as a success: "Auf meinem Schreibtisch fand ich das Angefangene: Die Geste des

Durchhaltens -- oder der Fall Schörner" (öb 263) ("On my desk I found my beginning: the gesture of fighting to the finish – or the Schörner case" LA 255). Thus, the fictional Starusch is writing about the historical figure Schörner and then, in his visions in the dentist's television screen, creates the fictional Krings to represent those who could not accept the defeat of

Germany in the Second World War in either military or ideological terms. These individuals unabashedly wanted to continue with the regime that had been defeated and the concept of defeat was so foreign to them that they felt the need to rewrite the history books by refighting the

battles of the war. At one point, Starusch even suggests that Krings should simply write his memoirs, as he can easily present his own rewritten version of history: "Soll er doch seine

Memoiren schreiben. Jetzt endlich weiss ich, was das ist, ein General: Jemand, der nach einem wechselvollen todbringenden Leben seine Memoiren schreibt. Schön. Lassen wir ihn siegen -- in seinen Memoiren..." (öb 106) ("Let him write his memoirs. Now at last I know what a general is: someone who after a life full of death-dealing vicissitudes writes his memoirs. All right, we'll let him win battles – in his memoirs" LA 104).

In the real world of the Federal Republic, it was primarily the children of the wartime generation who, through the student and other protest movements took on the work of saying what their parents would not admit to. In the novel, Linde Krings leads the fight against her father's attempt to ignore history. Her ally in this is the works electrician Schlottau from the

Krings family cement factory, where the young Starusch also works. Schlottau introduces us to

Ferdinand Krings as he attempts to ingratiate himself with Linde by telling her stories about her father, whom she hardly knows and who is shortly to return home from a Soviet POW camp.

Schlottau bears his own grudge against Krings, who had him demoted from corporal to private, and is one among a large crowd that gathers at the train station to greet the returning officer with protests about his treatment of them in the battles. In contrast to Krings, who wants to recreate the military record he believes he is entitled to, the crowd represents the face of an anti- militarism prevalent in the population of the Federal Republic in the mid-fifties. The protesters chant "Nie wieder Heldenklau!" (öb 41) ("No more Herosnatching!" LA 40), referring to the forced conscription of all able-bodied men in the last months of the war, and "Ohne uns!" (öb

41), ("Count us out" LA 40). This latter chant references the name of the movement, also known as Ohne mich (Count me out), which opposed the rearmament of Germany being considered by

the Adenauer government at the time. In The Code of Protest: Images of Peace in the West

German Peace Movements, 1945-1990, Benjamin Ziemann discusses how the Ohne mich movement "stressed the unwillingness of men to be called up for a future army of the FRG"

(244) and how it grew into a campaign against the rearmament of West Germany and the reintroduction of the standing army. In his essay Keine Waffen für unsere Henker (No Weapons for our Executioners), Maximillian Becker notes that, in January and February 1955, the campaign organized ten mass demonstrations and presented its Deutsches Manifest (German

Manifesto) with 100,000 signatures (111). In the case of the protest that Schlottau attends in

örtlich betäubt, it quite literally misses its mark. Its target, Krings, simply sidesteps the crowd by getting off the train at an earlier stop, as the real-life Schörner had done on the advice of the

Munich police (öb 225, LA 217).

While Schlottau represents one part of the early reaction to the continued desire for military success in the ranks of former Nazis, it is the next generation that leads the battle against the latter. Krings's primary opponent is his daughter Linde, who is engaged to Starusch, at this time an up-and-coming cement engineer at the Krings' family cement works. Linde soon realizes that it will be her task to stop her father from rewriting history. When Starusch tries to impress

Linde and her friends by impersonating Krings talking about battles he could have won, Linde explains that she must do more than simply treat her father as a historical artefact:

Was gibt's da zu staunen? Mein Vater will Schlachten gewinnen, die anderen verloren haben. Weil unserer kunstsinniger Freund Eberhard sich entschieden hat, ihn wie ein Geschichtsfossil zu bewundern, fällt mir die Aufgabe zu, meinen Vater zu schlagen, und zwar an allen Fronten, die ihm einfallen. (öb 68)

(What's so surprising? My father wants to win battles that other people have lost. Since our aesthete friend Eberhard has decided to admire him like a historic fossil, it's up to me to defeat my father – on every front he can think of. LA 67)

Krings has Schlottau build a sandbox large enough to portray the moving battle lines of the eastern front, with rows of switchable colored lights to represent the various armies in motion so that Krings can replay the battles and be able to change their progress and outcomes. In keeping with the idea that all is fair in love and war, both Krings and Linde enlist all other members of the household to obtain information about what the other is planning. Krings asks

Starusch, both as his employee and Linde's fiancée, what she is thinking (öb 105; LA 103), while

Linde offers sexual favors to both Starusch and Schlottau in exchange for information about

Krings's intentions (öb 80; LA 78-79). Linde studies the war intently and makes regular visits to local military archives (öb 105-106; LA 103-104). However, her lack of knowledge about Soviet minefields leads to her initial defeat in the reenactment of the tank battle at Kursk, which Krings had rechristened from its original name of "Zitadelle" ("Citadel") to "Sieglindezug" ("Sieglinde

March") (öb 106; LA 104).

In Starusch's next vision of the fight between father and daughter, again played out on the

TV screen in the dentist's office, it has become a battle of wits with Linde enlisting the help of

Starusch's two students Philipp (Flip) Scherbaum and Vero Lewand (Starusch's imagination allowing the pair from the next generation to appear in 1954). They form one team in a televised quiz show titled "Wissen wir noch Bescheid?" (öb 110) ("Do we still remember" LA 108), taking on Krings as the lone contestant on the other side with Linde as quizmaster. Krings leads the scoring heading into the final rounds, but things change when Scherbaum criticizes Krings's handling of the withdrawal from Rzhev. Krings tries to deny history and insists the battle could be winnable:

Krings verletzte die Spielregeln, sprang auf und teilweise aus dem Bild: 'Dieser verfluchte Drückerberger- und Etappengeist! Zeitzler, Model, alles Verräter! Degradieren und an die Front schicken! Niemals hätten wir den Brückenkopf an der Wolga räumen dürfen. Mit allen verfügbaren Reserven hätte ich ... (öb 112-113).

(Breaking the rules of the contest, Krings jumped up and partly out of the picture: 'That damn slacker, that rear echelon lounge lizard! Zeitzler, Model – traitors, the whole lot of them! Break 'em to captain and ship 'em to the front! We never should have evacuated our Volga bridgehead. I'd have thrown in all available reserves and …' LA 110)

The two students then deliver the final blows, pointing out Krings is maneuvering troops that are no longer available to him:

[Vero Lewand wies nach], dass Krings vorhatte, mit Divisionen zu operieren, die auf Batallionstärke zusammengeschmolzen oder zum Zeitpunkt der Kringsche Offensive nicht greifbar waren. [...] Und Scherbaum sagte: 'Sie haben das schon Mitte Februar einsetzende Tauwetter nicht berücksichtigt und außerdem eine Luftwaffendivision an die Front gebracht, die in den Waldgebieten westlich Sytschewka zur Partisanenbekämpfung eingesetzt ist (öb 113).

([Vero Lewand proved] that Krings was planning to commit divisions that had shrunk to battalion strength or were unavailable at the time of his planned offensive […] And Scherbaum said: "You've forgotten the thaw which set in in mid-February that year, and moreover, you've committed a division of Air Force ground troops that was already engaged in antipartisan operations in the forests south of Systchevka." LA 110-111)

Krings's final defeat at the hands of Linde comes at his reenactment of Stalingrad in

Schlottau's sand box, in front of Schlottau, Starusch, and a host of other family members and local dignitaries. Again, Krings's downfall after initial successes is his attempt to rewrite history, disposing of forces that are no longer available to him. Even when this is pointed out to him, he does not want to accept his defeat: "Linde wies Krings nach, dass er Verbände als Angriffspitze einsetzen wollte, die schon seit 'Donnerschlag' aufgerieben war: 'Kapitulierst du nun?' [...]

'Niemals!' [...] Krings wiederholte das Wort: 'Niemals!'" (öb 248). ("Linde proved to Krings that he intended to mount an offensive spearhead with units that had been decimated in 'Operation

Thunderclap'. 'Do you capitulate?' […] 'Never!' […] Krings repeated the word: 'Never!'" LA

240). Linde departs, leaving an army pistol for Krings to take the honorable way out (which he does not do). The generation of the children, Linde as Krings's daughter and Scherbaum and

Vero Lewand as Starusch's surrogate children, has taken on the mantle of maintaining the historical record.

Even when the dentist ultimately debunks Starusch's tale by pointing out that Krings and

Linde never existed, that Starusch had never even been engaged, and had never been a cement engineer, he does point out that Krings is a stereotype. He explains that many who fought in the war have had problems adjusting to civilian life:

Ihr Krings – oder wie er auch immer geheißen haben mag – ist, dem Typ nach, ein zu kurz gekommene Oberst, der, wie viele Militärs ohne rechte Berufsausbildung, in der Industrie Fuß zu fassen versuchte. Wir kennen vergleichbare Fälle. Überall kringst es. […] Und Ihren Krings wollte die wirtschaftlichen Erfolge nicht genug sein, deshalb liebte er es, im Kreis seiner Familie auf der Tischplatte Schlachten zu gewinnen, die seine Vorgesetzten verloren hatten. (Mein Friseur, ein ehemaliger Hauptmann, phantasiert ähnlich siegreich gegen den Spiegel.) " (öb 234-235)

(Your Krings – or whatever he may have been called – is a typical frustrated Colonel who, like many soldiers without real professional training, tried to get a foothold in industry. Comparable cases are known to us. Kringsing is going on all over. Your Krings wasn't satisfied with economic success, so he amused himself on the family tabletop winning battles that his superiors had lost. (My barber, a former captain, delivers himself of similar victorious fantasies into the mirror) LA 227).

At the same time, the dentist points out that it is again the younger generation that is at the forefront in criticizing such thinking: "Und solcher Großsprechereien wegen kam es gelegentlich zum Wortwechsel zwischen dem Oberst und seiner Tochter" (öb 235) ("This swagger of his led to occasional altercations between the Colonel and his daughter" LA 227).

In the conversation with Cepl-Kaufmann cited earlier, Grass comments that it is no contradiction for him to keep trying to pass on knowledge and experience, even if he doubts that it always succeeds (Cepl-Kaufmann 296). In the story of Starusch and Scherbaum, much like in the case of Linde Krings and her father, Grass presents a narrative where the generational transfer of dealing with the past does succeed. As a counterweight to these two examples, he also presents in örtlich betäubt the narrative of Irmgard Seifert who fails to pass on her knowledge and experience of the past to the next generation.

Denying the Past; Trusting in Transfer

Linde Krings, in her battle with her father, acquires knowledge of the past to be able to demonstrate to her father that he cannot forget the past and rewrite history. Starusch is the example par excellence of a teacher who both is willing to try and does pass his experience and knowledge of the past to the youth in his charge. Irmgard Seifert, by contrast, fails to pass her own past to the next generation, but rather expects that generation to absolve her of her past failings. She has suppressed her memories of the past, but they are made real to her again by her discovery of letters she wrote as a seventeen-year-old in the last months of the war. As a member of the Nazi young girls' organization Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), she was responsible for looking after teenage boys at a camp for children evacuated from the front. She was also in charge of teaching the boys to use anti-tank grenade launchers. At this time, she wrote to the local Nazi leadership denouncing a farmer for refusing to allow tank defenses on his land. Having recently found these letters, she is having to face up to what she did (although she is aware that her letters had no consequences for the farmer) and the fact that she had ignored it for so long. While she professes to want to come clean about her past in front of her class, she is ultimately unable or unwilling to do so, and her secret stays with her and Starusch (See also

Chapter 6).

In this sense, Seifert is the character who most closely embodies the ideas put forward by

Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich in their 1967 book The Inability to Mourn (Reid 194), which had considerable impact on the protesting younger generation (Kohut 231-232). The

Mitscherlichs argued that following the collapse of National Socialism and Germany's war effort, many ordinary Germans who had enthusiastically believed in and participated in the regime had derealized the past in the face of the destruction and atrocities wrought in their name. As part of

this process, they suppressed all memory of their attachment to Hitler as an individual national leader and the regime itself. Instead, the Mitscherlich's argue, because the loss of the Führer in particular was so devastating to the collective psyche, the generation as a whole derealized the past – simply erasing the period of the Third Reich and the war from their collective memory while rechanneling their energies into "unmaking the past" by reconstructing their country via the economic miracle of the fifties.

[D]ie Vergangenheit wird im Sinne eines Rückzugs alles lust- oder unlustvollen Beteiligtseins an ihr entwirklicht, sie versinkt traumartig. Diese quasi-stoische Haltung, dieser schlagartig einsetzende Mechanismus der Derealisierung des soeben noch wirklich gewesenen Dritten Reiches, ermöglicht es dann auch im zweiten Schritt, sich ohne Anzeichen gekränkten Stolzes leicht mit den Siegern zu identifizieren. Solcher Identitätswechsel hilft mit, die Gefühle des Betroffenseins anzuwenden, und breitet auch die dritte Phase, das manische Ungeschehenmachen, die gewaltigen kollektiven Anstrengungen des Wiederaufbaus, vor (Mitscherlich 40).

(The past is de-realized, all pleasurable or unpleasurable involvement is withdrawn from it, it fades like a dream, This quasi-stoical attitude, this sudden activation of the mechanism whereby the Third Reich, real only yesterday, was de-realized, also made it possible, in the second step, for the Germans to identify themselves with the victors easily and without any sign of wounded pride. The shift of identification also helped ward off the sense of being implicated, and prepared the way for the third phase: the manic undoing of the past, the huge collective effort of reconstruction. Inability 28)

While Seifert, like Starusch and Grass himself, who are all seventeen at the end of the war, is a member of the successor generation that cannot be held directly responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust, she could act as a role model for the next generation by acknowledging her guilt.

She promises to do so on several occasions, but lacks the necessary confidence: "Wie oft habe ich mir vorgenommen, vor die Klasse zu treten, Zeugnis abzulegen: So war ich, als ich siebzehn war. Das tat ich, als ich siebzehn war. (öb 198) ("How often I've wanted to stand up in front of the class and bear witness: That's what I was like when I was seventeen. That's what I did when I was seventeen." LA 191).

Seifert's inability to break out of her shell reflects the conformism that engulfed the successor generation after the war. Starusch recognizes this in a conversation with Seifert, where he bemoans the fact that they have not achieved anything since the war:

Was wurde aus uns? Wie nüchtern und skeptisch entließ uns der Krieg? Wie wollten wir aufpassen und dem Wort der Erwachsenen, dem Erwachsenenwort misstrauen? -- Wenig blieb davon. Gesetzte Mittdreißiger bis Vierziger finden kaum Zeit, sich ihrer Niederlagen zu erinnern. Wir haben gelernt […] Notfalls an[zu]passen. (öb 133).

(What has become of us? How sobered and skeptical the war left us! How determined we were to be on our guard, to distrust the word of adults, the adult word! – How little of that is left! Settled citizens in their middle thirties and forties find little time to remember their defeats. We have learned to […] adapt ourselves when necessary. LA 129).

The conformism that Starusch laments in himself and in Seifert echoes the attitude of those who conformed during the war and afterward; Scherbaum, as a member of the next generation, satirizes this attitude in a school essay about his father:

Mein Vater war natürlich kein Nazi. Mein Vater war nur Luftschutzwart. Ein Luftschutzwart ist natürlich kein Antifaschist. Ein Luftschutzwart ist nichts. Ich bin der Sohn eines Luftschutzwartes, also bin ich der Sohn von einem Nichts. Jetzt ist mein Vater Demokrat, wie er früher Luftschutzwart gewesen ist. Er macht alles richtig. Auch wenn er manchmal sagt: 'Meine Generation hat vieles falsch gemacht', sagt er das immer an den richtigen Stellen. (157)

(My father, of course, was not a Nazi. My father was an air-raid warden. An air-raid warden, of course, is not an antifascist. An air-raid warden is nothing. I am the son of an air-raid warden; consequently, I am the son of a nothing. Today my father is a democrat just as he was formerly an air-raid warden. He always does the right thing. Occasionally he says: 'My generation made many mistakes,' but he always says it at the right places. LA 152)

Starusch points out to Seifet that she has taken actions -- she goes to protest marches and resigned from the protestant church given its support for rearmament and creation of an army – but this does not satisfy her desire for some kind of salvation and deliverance, and instead she now simply waits for something to happen: "manchmal hoffe ich, daß etwas Reinigendes passiert; aber es passiert ja nichts." (133). ("Sometimes I hope that something will happen that

will purify us; but nothing ever happens." LA 128). In a similar way, instead of acting herself and passing on her knowledge or lessons learned, she puts her faith in the up-and-coming generation, transferring only her hope:

Diese neue, unbelastete Generation -- glauben Sie mir, Eberhard -- wird dem überjährigen Spuk ein Ende bereiten. Diese Jungs und Mädchen wollen frisch beginnen und nicht mehr, wie wir, rückwärts schielen, hinter sich bleiben müssen. [...] Wir dürfen unsere Hoffnung in den ungebrochenen, dabei so wohltuend sachlichen Wagemut der neuen Generation setzen. (öb 133)

(This new generation, free from the burden of guilt – believe me, Eberhard – will put an end to the moth-eaten nightmare. These boys and girls want to start afresh; they refuse to go on squinting backwards and lagging behind their potentialities like us […] We must set our hopes in the fresh and yet so gratifyingly practical courage of the younger generation. LA 129)

She describes the new generation as having the "sachlichen Wagemut" (öb 133) ("practical courage" LA 129) to start things anew without looking back, and that is how she expects to obtain her salvation. Starusch, on the other hand, describes her faith in the younger generation as something unthinking: "Blindlings baute sie auf ihre […] Schülerinnen und Schüler" (öb 133)

("She trusted blindly in her […] students" LA 128-129). Seifert encourages Scherbaum in his plan to set fire to his dog as she believes that his completing his protest will be the inspiring example that will give her the final push to make her own confession: "Helfen Sie mir, Philipp.

Seien Sie Beispiel. Gehen Sie mir, gehen Sie uns voran, damit unser Versagen nicht allgemein wird." (öb 198) ("Help me Philipp. Set an example. Lead me, lead us, lest our failure become universal" LA 191).

Her language when talking about Scherbaum takes on a religious tone, one that she is very conscious of, as she hopes that he can be her savior: "'Wirklich, Eberhard, seitdem es den jungen Scherbaum gibt, hoffe ich wieder. Er hat die Kraft und die Reinheit, uns -- ja, ich spreche es aus! -- zu erlösen. Wir sollten ihm Mut machen.'" (öb 199). ("Really, Eberhard, since young

Scherbaum came into the picture, I've begun to hope again. He has the strength and purity – yes,

I'm not afraid to say it – to redeem us. We ought to encourage him." LA 192). Her desire for salvation through Scherbaum is so strong that it even turns into erotic obsession with him, where she can encourage him with her body (although she is aware of her social standing as a teacher and the difference in their ages):

Wenn ich jünger wäre und wenn ich als Pädagogin nichts von dieser Sperre wüsste, wenn ich frei und erheblich jünger wäre, glauben Sie mir, Eberhard, ich würde mir den Philipp nehmen, würde ihm in der Umarmung Mut machen, würde ihn lieben, heiß lieben! -- Ach hätte ich seinen unverbogenen Glauben, wie wollte ich dann die Wahrheit nackt und laut umhergehen lassen. (224)

(If I were younger, and if as a teacher I did not have to recognize this barrier, if I were free and considerably younger, believe me, Eberhard, I'd take Philipp, I'd hold him in my arms to give him courage, I'd love him, love him passionately! – Oh, if I had his unperverted faith, how loudly and nakedly I should publish the truth. LA 216)

Unlike Starusch, who works with Scherbaum to transfer his knowledge and experiences, that is, to effect an intellectual transfer, Seifert can only hope to influence Scherbaum emotionally, even if physically, and spiritually. In this way, Seifert does double duty, offering us a character who clearly suffers from the unwillingness to face up to the past yet looks to a potential savior to inspire her to take the step of opening up publicly to her class. Much like her professed faith in Scherbaum, her willingness to express it the way she would like is destined to failure. She cannot love him as she wants and so cannot give him the courage to go ahead with his protest. She therefore condemns herself to not being able to deal with and talk about the past.

Her only possibility is to destroy the past, to make it unreal, by destroying the letters that are its witness.

What Do We Tell the Children?

The younger individuals involved in generational transfer in örtlich betäubt are themselves either fully grown, such as Linde who is in her early twenties (öb 27, LA 27), or on the threshold of adulthood like the seventeen-year-old Scherbaum. In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, by contrast, Grass considers the question of how to transfer knowledge to a much younger audience. Indeed, he twice pondered, in a speech or essay, how to broach the topic of the

Holocaust with children. The speech Schwierigkeiten eines Vaters, seinen Kindern Auschwitz zu erklären (A father's difficulties in explaining Auschwitz to his children), written in 1970, outlines the thoughts Grass had on the subject while traveling on the election campaign trail in 1969. He would find himself peppered with questions by his children when he returned home at the weekend. His eldest sons, twins who were twelve years old at the time, were starting to ask questions about the war years. These questions form part of the conversations with his children that feature in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. In 1979, Grass returned to the subject of how to bring up this topic with children in the essay Wie erzählen wir es den Kindern? (What shall we tell our children?). In this essay, he acknowledges the conversations starting within families as a result of the television screening of the US series Holocaust, even if he felt that the mass media presentation was not able to do justice to the multifaceted, multilayered responsibility for the events portrayed (ER 767; Children 88). The speech and the essay also have something else in common. Both were written to accompany exhibitions dealing with aspects of the Holocaust.

The first was given as a speech at the opening of the exhibition "Menschen in Auschwitz"

("People in Auschwitz") in Berlin (ER 1000), while the second was published in English in the program for the New York Jewish Museum's "The Glory of Danzig: Treasures from a Destroyed

Community" (ER 1029). This latter exhibition featured artefacts that the Danzig Jewish

community had shipped to New York before its departure from the city, as related by Grass in

Tagebuch einer Schnecke (TS 358; DS 95).

In the 1970 speech, Grass points out how his children, like other German children, are growing up in an environment of relative affluence which distracts them from absorbing the lessons of history:

Die Kinder in Deutschland werden in Frieden erwachsen. Zwischen Spiel, Schularbeit und Aussicht auf Ferien werden sie mehr vom Konsumangebot und seinem modischem Wechselspiel geprägt als von ihren traumatisch gezeichneten Eltern: Welche Chance habe ich, wenn ich […] mit der […] abstrakt bleibenden Zahl […] sechs Millionen etwas zu erklären versuche, das Kindern allenfalls im privatisierten Einzelfall, etwa auf den Namen Anne Frank gebracht, deutlich oder, trivial gesagt, spannend zu werden beginnt? (ER 459)

(Children in Germany are growing up in peace. Between play, homework, and the prospect of vacations, they are formed more by fashionable variations in consumer goods than by parents marked by trauma. What chance do I have, when I try to explain, with the still abstract number of six million, something that for children only really becomes clear, or to put it trivially, exciting, when reduced to an individualized case, such as the name of Anne Frank.)

In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass recounts how it is television news that triggers the curiosity of his children as the twins react to news of the humanitarian crisis in Biafra following the civil war in Nigeria, which cost up to three million lives over a two-year period (Heerten and

Moses 169). In the conversations that result, the children bring up Germany's past, which causes

Grass some consternation. He recognizes that, as he attempts to explain actions and their causes, expressed in a manner similar to the poem Danach, he has difficulty finding the right words:

Denn manchmal, Kinder, beim Essen, oder wenn das Fernsehen ein Wort (über Biafra) abwirft, höre ich Franz oder Raoul nach den Juden fragen. 'Was war denn los mit denen?' Ihr merkt, daß ich stocke, sobald ich verkürze. Ich finde das Nadelöhr nicht und beginne zu plaudern: Weil das und zuvor das, weil gleichzeitig das, nachdem auch noch das … (TS 273)

(Because, sometimes, children, at table, or when the TV throws out a word (about Biafra), I hear Franz or Raoul asking about the Jews: 'What about them? What's the story?' You notice that I falter whenever I abbreviate. I can't find the needle's eye and I start babbling. Because this, but first that, and meanwhile the other, but only after… DS 11)

As the children ask more and more questions, they start to focus in on technical details:

'Wie viele waren das denn genau?' 'Und wie hat man die gezählt'? […] 'Hat das denn immer geklappt? 'Und was war das für ein Gas?' (TS 274)

('Exactly how many were they? ' 'How did they count them? ' […] 'Did it always work?' 'What kind of gas was it?' DS 11-12)

Grass initially tries to provide answers based on the standard numbers and on mechanical explanations of what happened. He also points out the large amount of memory culture including documentaries, memorials, and commemorations that is available. Such artefacts, however, cannot always provide satisfactory responses for the children. As he explains in the essay for the

New York exhibition some years later, he has to turn the story into a personalized account of an individual fate: "Nur wenn ich ein Einzelschicksal oder Flucht einer Familie – hier in den Tod, dort bis zum Ziel Palästina – erzählte, fand ich das Ohr der Kinder, ohne gewiss zu sein, ob sie mehr hörten als das Abenteuer der Flucht" (ER 756) ("Only when I told the story of a single person or a family that was fleeing – here to their death, there to the their goal of reaching

Palestine – did I get the attention of my children, without knowing if they were listening to anything more than the adventure of escape").

Grass promises his children that part of his storytelling for them during the election campaign will be an accounting of what happened in Danzig. "Jetzt erzähle ich euch (solange der

Wahlkampf dauert und Kiesinger Kanzler ist), wie es bei mir zu Hause langsam und umständlich am hellen Tag dazu kam." (TS 274) ("Now I will tell you, (and go on telling you as long as the election campaign goes on and Kiesinger is Chancellor) how it happened where I come from – slowly, deliberately, and in broad daylight" DS 12). So, Grass tells his children the fictional account of Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt, who lived in and then fled Danzig and who is someone his children can use as a point of reference and identification. Juxtaposed to this story,

Grass recounts the historical narrative of the Danzig Jewish community, including its decision to leave Danzig en masse. Much of the information presented is tied to the research by the former

Danzig lawyer Erwin Lichtenstein for his 1973 book Die Juden der Freien Stadt Danzig unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus (The Jews of the Free City of Danzig under the National

Socialist Regime). Having met with Lichtenstein on a trip to Israel in 1967, Grass had access to

Lichtenstein's research (TS 370; DS 108-109); he also later met with and interviewed some of the survivors who were able to emigrate and whose story forms part of this narrative in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. By including this material – with Lichtenstein’s permission and a year before

Lichtenstein’s own book was issued – Grass provides a factual account of the end of Danzig’s

Jewish community. He sometimes weaves elements from the Lichtenstein history into the fictional story of Ott, for example in the person of Ruth Rosenbaum who established the Jewish high school after Jewish students were excluded from the regular school. However, Grass mostly presents the factual account based on the material exactly as researched by Lichtenstein. More importantly, Grass can present this history to his children also as part of his reminiscences of his own childhood.

In much the same way Grass focused on the actions of the petit-bourgeois in his novels about Danzig, such as Die Blechtrommel and Hundejahre, it was important for him to explain to

his children that it was ordinary people who were involved in persecuting the Jews, up to and including the abuse directed at the last Jewish refugees leaving the city in 1940. Throughout

Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass devotes significant space to telling the history of the Danzig

Jews, also because, as Lichtenstein’s account details, Danzig's separate legal status as a Free City meant that, even though it had a National Socialist government, that government put into place only some of the legislation passed in Germany from 1933 onwards. The High Commissioner and the League of Nations worked hard to protect the constitution of the Free City, adopted in the early 1920s, and keep it in place and functioning. It was only in the mid- to late 1930s when events in Austria and the Sudetenland distracted the attention of international diplomats and other governments that the government of Danzig started enforcing race laws over the now muted objections of the High Commissioner. Also, the unwillingness of three countries responsible for Danzig (England, France, and Sweden) to intervene in what they considered

Danzig's "internal affairs" increasingly tied the Commissioner's hands. (Lichtenstein 82)

The character of the individual High Commissioner also made a difference. During the mid-1930s, the Briton Sean Lester, as High Commissioner, strove to maintain the separation of government from the Nazi Party. For example, Arthur Greiser, the Danzig Gauleiter (regional

National Socialist party leader) was stirring up racial hatred against the Jews while denying any party involvement in the activities. At that point, Lester was able to persuade the government to hold off on passing laws that could count, in terms of explicit discrimination against the Jews, as contrary to Danzig's constitution. At the same time, Lichtenstein's account does make clear the degree to which Jewish life was being separated off from the life of other Danzig citizens, for example, by creating a separate school and cultural life. The city government, however, still had

to provide some services and support for the Jewish inhabitants. For example, it had to certify the

Rosenbaum High School so that it could conduct the Abitur school final exams (25).

According to Lichtenstein, the turning point which saw the attitude towards the Jews move from exclusion to expulsion came in the fall of 1937. Prior to this, individual attacks on

Jews by members of the SA and HJ were not uncommon; at one point the National Socialist city government had to ask the Party to tone down attacks and anti-Semitic actions because they were having a detrimental effect on the tourist trade at the beach resorts (45). In October 1937, the city separated the Jewish market traders off into their own area and some stands were interfered with. Shoppers that wanted to go to their regular vendors were hounded out of the market. (Grass includes this in Ott's story as he is chased from the market after asking about the whereabouts of his favorite greengrocer, who was no longer allowed to use his usual spot (TS 344-345; DS 83)).

The move was followed by a spate of attacks on Jewish stores and official harassment of the

Jewish community increased with additional ordinances, such as restricted times for Jews only at city swimming baths (Lichtenstein 58). Authorities would arrest Jewish business owners on suspicion of tax evasion, begin an audit (after the arrest), and find substantial tax liabilities -- even up to the value of the business, which the owners would have to agree to pay to be released from prison. To encourage Jewish business owners to leave Danzig, those buying their way out of prison were often then given an emigration visa as part of the process (65). On Jan 1, 1938, a decree ordered that Jewish doctors were to cease exercising their profession, with the exception of two doctors who were allowed to treat the Jewish community itself. At the same time, doctors would lose their accreditation if the country which had originally issued it chose to revoke it. As most Jewish doctors in Danzig had originally obtained their accreditation in Germany, and the state had revoked those accreditations because of race laws, Jewish doctors in the city state lost

their credentials without the authorities having had to use the word 'Jewish', which could have caused a reaction from the League of Nations (72-73). While such actions led some of the community to emigrate, the events following the Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in

Germany on Nov 9, 1938 represented a sea change for the community. Several nights of attacks on Jewish businesses and other properties, including attempts to burn down one of the synagogues, led the Danzig Jews to decide, at a mass meeting in December 1938, to emigrate as an entire community. The leaders were tasked with selling community property (including the land the synagogues were built on) to raise the necessary money to allow everyone to leave, and

Lichtenstein was one of the community leaders charged with negotiating with the city government (ER 763).

Grass details each of the various groups and individuals that were able to make their way out of Danzig, some of them to board ships bound for Palestine. One group ended up meandering through Southern Europe by rail, boat, and, at times, marching on foot, before being held in a camp at Sabac in Yugoslavia. In that camp in October 1941, occupying National Socialist forces executed them. (Lichtenstein 129; TS 382; DS 122). The description of this incident provides an example of how Grass weaves the historical account from Lichtenstein both with his fictional account of Hermann Ott and with the conversations he is having with his children. To make the connection with the story of Ott, he first points out the events that happened long after Ott has fled Danzig, but then recounts how one of the group, an engineer by the name of Israel

Herszmann who "wie Hermann Ott in der Danziger Niederstadt seine Wohnung gehabt hatte"

(TS 382) ("like Hermann Ott had lived in the Danzig Lower City" DS 122) managed to escape and made his way to Marseilles, where he obtained passage to Haifa. Immediately after detailing the fate of the Jews from Danzig and elsewhere in the camp at Sabac, Grass finds himself

confronted with another slew of questions from his children as they look to understand the details: "Laura will alles wissen: 'Die da erschossen wurden, waren die richtig tot hinterher?' […]

'Ja, Laura. Über tausend. Die waren alle tot hinterher.'" (TS 382-383) ("Laura wants to know all about it: 'Those people that were shot, were they really dead afterward? […] 'Yes, Laura. More than a thousand. They were all dead afterward.'" DS 122-123)

Only after the outbreak of the war and the subsequent inclusion of the previously independent city state of Danzig into the German Reich did the laws applied to Jews in the rest of Germany apply to the Jews in Danzig, a community reduced from around ten thousand in

1929 (Lichtenstein 10) to approximately 200 by the middle of 1942 (141). Those who remained had to take on responsibility for managing the collective lives and living of the remaining members of the community. Because many were forced from their homes and, through ever- greater restrictions, denied the ability to work or own a business, most individuals had scant opportunity to manage their own circumstances, which resulted in centralized living arrangements and community kitchens. Many took up residence in the Speicher an der

Mausegasse (The Warehouse on the Mausegasse) which became a Danzig Ghetto (Lichtenstein

135). Deportations from Danzig continued throughout the war and at the end only 22 people remained in the Speicher. The building itself was destroyed by a direct hit by a bomb in March

1945, although Lichtenstein reports that some people survived, including Arnold Fürstenberg, who acted as the head of the community during the time in Speicher and then lived in Hamburg until 1969 (Lichtenstein 146-147). Grass refers also to Fürstenberg's name coming up in his discussions with Lichtenstein when they met in Israel in 1971 (TS 538; DS 280).

Because Grass used Lichtenstein's historical text as his source, he could not fictionalize the stories of the Danzig Jewish community too much. Items such as the number of people who

managed to emigrate on a given day, what means of transport they were using, and where they were headed were documented by Lichtenstein. In some cases, however, Grass added a literary turn to these events. An example is the account of the death of Walter Gerson, a lawyer who had been a leading member of the Danzig community, and his son Fritz while trying to escape across the Carpathian Mountains. Lichtenstein provides his evidence in the form of two letters, one from Walter's wife to a friend that states: "Unsere Lieben wurden uns schon am 11. September entrissen. Aber erst vier Wochen später, gerade einen Tag vor Fritz’s Geburtstag, erfuhren wir durch einen Zufall, daß es für ewig war." (Lichtenstein 122) ("Our loved ones were torn from us already on September 11. But it wasn't until four weeks later, just a day before Fritz's birthday, that we learned it was forever"). A second letter, written after the war and sent to the Gerson's daughter Eva, who had emigrated to Palestine, confirmed the details: "Sie wurden am 12.9.1939 ermordet und mit noch 6 Juden in einem Gemeinschaftsgrab in Malawa Dolnaz. pow. Limanowa beerdigt" (123) ("On September 12, 1939, they were murdered and buried together with six other

Jews in a communal grave in Malawa Dolnaz in Limanowa Province"). Grass weaves these two documentary accounts into a single, more literary rendering: "Am Fuß der Karpaten, in der Nähe von Zakopane, verhinderte am 11. September deutsches Militär weitere Flucht: der Rechtsanwalt

Walter Gerson, dessen Sohn Fritz und Walter Gersons Schwager wurden mit sechs anderen

Juden in einem Wald (bei Rabka) erschossen und begraben." (TS 372-373) ("On September 11, near Zakopane in the foothills of the Carpathians, further flight was blocked by the German armed forces. Along with six other Jews, the lawyer Walter Gerson, his son Fritz, and Walter

Gerson's brother-in-law were shot and buried in a forest (near Rabka)" DS 111).

The story of the Gerson family illustrates not just how Grass retells the historical account, but also shows how he intertwines such accounts with the fiction he is telling as he tries to keep

his children entertained as well as interested. It also shows the limits of that process. The real-life

Fritz Gerson is the fictional Hermann Ott's favorite student at the Rosenbaum school, who helps search for snails and with whom he has heated discussions about Zionism. But before Grass can even begin to tell Fritz's story, he has to admit that he is also inventing the character as he needs to find someone to play the foil to Ott himself:

Der Schüler Fritz Gerson war .... - Schon muss ich mich, bevor ich ihn zur Figur mache und zu Zweifels Lieblingsschüler ernenne, grundsätzlich korrigieren: Im November einundsiebzig sprach ich in Jerusalem mit seiner Schwester Eva, die [...] sagte: 'Umgekehrt stimmt es. Ich war Mitglied im zionistischen Jugendbund, Fritz war eigentlich unpolitisch. Palästina kam für ihn nicht in Frage. Er wollte nach Amerika auswandern...' (TS 322)

(Fritz Gerson was … But even now, before I make him into a character and call him Doubt's favorite pupil, I have to revise him radically: when in Jerusalem in November, 1971, I spoke with his sister Eva who […] said: 'It's true the other way round. I belonged to the Zionist Youth Organization; Fritz was unpolitical. He never considered Palestine. He wanted to go to America' DS 60)

Grass feels the effects of these limits on his abilities to invent such stories as he contemplates how to integrate Hermann Ott into the body of teachers at the Rosenbaum school.

He imagines Ott looking for relationships with some of the female teachers at the school, possibly even getting engaged to one. However, he feels he cannot continue down this path once he meets the real Ruth Rosenbaum: "Aber als ich Ruth Rosenbaum in Haifa gegenüber saß, zerfiel Ausgedachtes und begann ich längere Abschnitte in meinem Manuskript zu streichen."

(TS 326) ("But when I sat face to face with Ruth Rosenbaum in Haifa, my picture fell apart and I began to cross out considerable sections of my manuscript" DS 64).

Despite the difficulty of mixing documented history with narrative, the process does allow Grass to convey a message to his children. The inclusion of Ott as a non-Jew involved with the Jewish community gives him the opportunity to show that the two communities were tightly integrated. Lichtenstein maintains that Jewish doctors, lawyers, and traders still had customers 91

and no real hostilities existed between the two prior to the expulsion of the Jewish traders from the market in the fall of 1937:

Dies war vor allem darauf zurückzuführen, daß ein überwiegender Teil der Danziger Bevölkerung innerlich den Nationalsozialismus ablehnte und nur unter dem Druck des Terrors keinen Widerstand zu leisten wagte. Viele dieser Menschen, die den unterdrückten Oppositionsparteien angehört hatten, blieben, trotz aller Gefahren, ihren jüdischen Ärzten und Anwälten, den jüdischen Geschäften und Handwerkern treu. Sie waren es hauptsächlich, die immer wieder zum Boykott gegen die Juden aufgefordert wurden. (67-68)

(This was above all based on the fact that the majority of the Danzig population, on the inside, refuted National Socialism and only failed to offer resistance because of the pressure of the terror. Many of these people, who had belonged to suppressed opposition parties, remained true to their Jewish doctors, lawyers, and to Jewish businesses and trades, despite all of the dangers.)

Grass provides an example of such neighborly relations in Ott's friendship with Laban, with whom he argues politics and religion over the garden fence and from whom he buys produce at the market (TS 311, 327; DS 49, 65).

Grass's approach of creating the fictional story of Ott while recounting the history of

Danzig's Jewish community, and then intermingling the two threads with each other, allows him to anchor many elements of the fictional story in a sense of realism. One such example is Ott's work with the Jewish community in Danzig throughout the 1930s. Initially he works as an administrator in a transit camp on the island of Troyl where in the inter-war period Jews from

Eastern Europe were able to wait for visas to the USA or other destinations. Ott also teaches in the Jewish school set up by the real-life Ruth Rosenbaum, who is mentioned in Lichtenstein's history and who Grass interviewed in Israel in 1971. Ott's fate in the mid-1930s parallels that of the majority of the Jews of Danzig up until the time that he takes flight. He has lost his teaching position in the regular school, been refused service in the market, and been the subject of beatings; in the end, it is a second summons to the police station that makes him leave. At this

point the parallels to the Danzig Jews end as his flight does not reflect the hardships of those that fled, the fate of those deported, or those, like Walter and Fritz Gerson, shot while trying to make their way to safety. At the same time, one element of Ott's flight is based on a true story. The critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki endured a similar fate as he fled the Nazi persecution, hiding in a cellar where, like Ott, he had to entertain his hosts by telling stories. Reich-Ranicki himself had told Grass his story, and Grass had asked his permission to build it into one of his works, which

Reich-Ranicki granted. However, what Grass made of the story proved unpalatable for Reich-

Ranicki. He never reviewed this work and for many years he would not refer to it by name. (He finally did refer to the incident publicly when he published an account of how he asked Grass, a year after the book was published, for his share of the royalties and was rewarded with a dinner and a signed etching) (Reich-Ranicki 183-187).

For all the inventive integration of history and fiction, the story of Hermann Ott as sharing the experience of the Danzig Jewish population has some troubling aspects that can call into question its espoused aim of allowing Grass to more easily tell the city's history to his children. One is that as time progresses in the historical narrative and the number of Jews remining in Danzig declines to almost nothing as more and more of the remaining Jews are deported to concentration camps, the situation for Ott improves as the tide of the war turns.

Another potential problem was put forward by W.G. Sebald in his 1983 essay Konstruktionen der Trauer (Constructions of Mourning). Sebald cites Grass's retelling of the transportation of

Jewish school children from Danzig to England in August of 1939 and of the British journalist accompanying him on his 1969 election campaign tour, who turned out to be one of those children. The journalist can remember aspects of the city of Danzig, including its skyline, but cannot recall meeting a teacher called Ott (TS 359; DS 97). For Sebald, such examples raise a

question of the whether the fictional storytelling gets in the way of the historical narrative: "Aus der damit skizzierten Konstellation ergibt sich die Frage, ob die Dominanz der Fiktion über das, was wirklich geschah, dem Schreiben der Wahrheit und dem Versuch, sich ein Gedächtnis zu machen, nicht eher abträglich ist." (Sebald 115) ("From this sketch, the question arises whether the dominance of the fiction over what actually happened is not detrimental to the writing of truth and the attempt to forge a memory").

Adding fiction to the history does allow Grass to put a context around his own experiences and personal memories as he looks to pass them, also as part of the historical context, on to his children. Grass can include here the everyday details he knew of regarding the experiences of the Jews in Danzig. The exclusion of the Jews from the market is a case where he tells his children that he himself remembers it happening even if at that time he did not understand the consequences: "Bei mir zu Hause wurden gegen Ende Oktober 1937 – zehn Jahre war ich alt und begriff nicht – die jüdischen Markthändler vom Danziger Wochenmarkt vertrieben" (TS 344) ("where I come from – I was ten years old and didn't understand – toward the end of October, 1937, the Jewish vendors were driven out of the Danzig market" DS 83). He emphasizes this in the fictional narrative by having Ott make his regular visit to the market stall of his neighbor Laban and then suddenly find that the neighbor is no longer there. Moreover, the market stall holders start to treat Ott with suspicion because he wanted to do business with a

Jewish merchant and they follow him shouting and jeering all the way to where the Jewish market stall holders have set up a new market. Similarly, Grass integrates himself into history to point to his own potential participation in some of the events. As the last 527 Jews permitted to emigrate from Danzig in the August of 1940 head to their departure points, they are subject to abuse from the people of the city, particularly from young people:

Viele Einwohner der Stadt, die auf den Bürgersteigen standen, hinter Blumenkästen aus Fenstern guckten oder ihren Balkon besetzt hatten, verabschiedeten ihre ehemaligen Mitbürger lauthals. Flankierendes Gelächter, Spottverse als Mitgift, Ausspucken. Besonders viel Jugend war eifrig. (TS 411)

(Many inhabitants of the city, standing on sidewalks or balconies or looking out of windows from behind flower boxes, took loud leave of their erstwhile fellow citizens. Flanking laughter, malicious jingles, spitting. The young people showed particular zeal. DS 152)

Grass adds a personal note, acknowledging that – unlike his uncomprehending ten-year old self three years earlier – as a thirteen-year-old he was now an ardent support of the Nazi regime, although in this case he did not take part in this particular incident: "Zwar bin ich nicht dabei gewesen; aber – Kinder – ich hätte mit meinen dreizehn Jahren dabei sein können." (TS 411) ("I wasn't there; but – children – I was thirteen and could have been there" DS 152). Grass directly addresses this comment to his children, not only a confession but also a warning.

Grass self-avowed intention is to get past the difficulties he has in trying to explain the

German past to his inquisitive children, to leave a record for them to refer to that details his own view of what happened. To the available memory cultural artefacts, Grass adds the historical record prepared by Lichtenstein, augmented by his own interviews in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Presenting the fictional account of Ott makes the story more immediately comprehensible to his children. More importantly, mixing the documentary and fictional styles not only gives him the opportunity to provide a more reflexive view of what happened, it also gives him the opportunity to let his children know that he is aware of his own ability to be caught up in the movement around him and so also make himself complicit in the actions of his follow Danzig citizens during the time of his own adolescence.

Conclusion

The Danzig Trilogy made a major contribution to establishing an ethos of

Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of coming to terms with the past, in the Federal Republic. It is only once we have admitted what took place in the past that we can also recognize our own part in that past and draw appropriate consequences. As Grass moved beyond the time and place that formed the basis of the trilogy, he also began to look to how the next generation could gain an awareness of the historical reality. In örtlich betäubt, he presented the narrative of the younger generation taking on the task of analyzing the past, such as Scherbaum with his criticism of Kurt

Georg Kiesinger, who was still Chancellor when the novel was published, and Linde Krings dealing with her father who cannot accept the loss of the war, either militarily or ideologically.

Equally unable to deal with her past, Irmgard Seifert hopes to receive salvation through

Scherbaum's proposed dog-burning protest, but when this does not happen she is unable to resolve her past, and so also she fails to transfer her knowledge. Within Tagebuch einer

Schnecke, Grass adds the personal touch of being the one who is passing on his own knowledge to his children. He recognizes the difficulty involved and calls on two literary devices to help out. The first of these is the historical research of Erwin Lichtenstein, presented in part as stories of individuals and families. This both provides a factual basis for his accounts of what happened in the Danzig he grew up in and allows him to reference events that were known to him personally, even if he was not directly involved. The second device is the story of Hermann Ott who acts as a personification of how and why flight was necessary. Grass believes this fiction will make it easier for his children to understand. Grass also made use of other literary genres, a stage play and a poem, to create additional variations on his representation of how time and the historical events that accompany it continue to have consequences into the next generation.

Underlying all these representations are Grass's public statements. Whether in an election speech in the Bavarian state election in 1966, where he aims his concerns about the Grand

Coalition and especially the acceptance of Kiesinger as Chancellor, at young voters, or in essays associated with presenting the past in a museum setting, Grass always had an eye to how his words could impact the up-and-coming generation by helping make them aware of mistakes made in the past and how to recognize and avoid them.

Chapter 5: Promoting Progress

When, in 1969, Günter Grass received an invitation to speak at one of the events to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the artist Albrecht Dürer, he chose to title the speech he gave Vom Stillstand im Fortschritt (Of Stasis in Progress) (TS 271; DS 9).

His choice of this title and subject matter reflected the central importance that the idea of

"Fortschritt" ("progress") occupied in his works throughout his career. As someone writing for a broad readership rather than a narrow academic audience, Grass uses "Fortschritt" in a general sense of moving forward. The Duden dictionary defines the German word "Fortschritt" as

"positiv bewertete Weiterentwicklung" ("a positively-viewed development") or "Erreichung einer höheren Stufe der Entwicklung" ("achieving a higher stage of development" (Fortschritt).

Similarly, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary provides the following definitions of

"progress" – "a forward or onward movement (as to an objective or to a goal)" and "gradual betterment, especially the progressive development of humankind" (Progress). Thus, we can think of progress as a deliberate and conscious movement towards a specific goal or higher stage of development.

The idea of progress Grass put forward during the late 1960s did indeed involve moving to ever higher stages of societal development, but he rejected the idea that one could ever reach an end state of that development. The journey and the incremental improvements along the way were more important, and he discounted the concept that history, and therefore human development, could have an end. In this chapter, analysis by Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann will help

show how Grass used his speeches and essays to lay out a vision of progress based on an understanding of the enlightened use of rationality in societal decision making. He echoed this idea in his literary work; above all, the discussions of Starusch and the dentist from örtlich betäubt and the image of the snail in the Tagebuch einer Schnecke representing this Grassian idea of progress. Further, education and educators, as the means of transmitting rationality and enlightenment thinking, play a significant role in the speeches and literary works as well as in

Grass's overall view of societal progress. As much as he makes the case for enlightened rationality on the one hand, Grass also makes a case against a belief in absolutist doctrines, which he considered the goals of the student movement to be. In this context, Grass's negative view of Hegel's concept of the world spirit, espoused by the doubting character of Hermann Ott in Tagebuch einer Schnecke among others, acts as a counterweight to what Grass considered

Hegel's certainty. This chapter will conclude by examining specific instances in the works that, to a certain extent, undermine Grass's arguments against thinking in systems. Moreover, his seemingly unthinking insistence on the virtue of the system of parliamentary democracy as the way forward precludes any questioning of the practical application of that system.

Revisionism as Progress

Grass reflects the origins of his understanding of progress as a political and social phenomenon in his 2006 account of his youth and young adulthood, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel

(Peeling the Onion). Grass makes no bones about the fact that he had no formal education from his mid-teens onwards, as his call up to the German armed forces in 1944 interrupted what would have been his high school years. He relates how conversations he had underground while working in a mine shortly after the war introduced him to political arguments and how heated they could become. He divided protagonists in these discussion into three groupings: The ex-

Nazis who bemoaned the loss of the Führer and looked to find who was to blame for the breakdown of the National Socialist regime; the communists who expected the immediate collapse of the capitalist system and the ensuing victory of the proletariat; and finally those in the middle who offered compromises and tried to douse the rhetorical flames of the others with suggestions for improvements (HZ 255; PO 225-226). Often, the first two groups would forget their differences and gang up on the third group, who called themselves social democrats, in a manner which one of Grass's colleagues described as similar to the situation of the social democrats in the period leading up to 1933 (HZ 256; PO 226). This early political education overrode any remnants of the Nazi indoctrination that Grass has mostly lost during the eighteen months he had spent in fear on the frontline, and then hungry in a POW camp, and during his wanderings during his first months of freedom. Grass attributes his inclination to pick and choose elements from different political leanings and to look for ways forward that take the best of all available ideas, rather than adhering to ideologically determined solutions, to this period

(HZ 257-258; PO 228).

At the same time, Grass was a firm believer in the enlightenment process of continuous improvement of the human condition. He asserted that rationality, rather than inspirational views of grand narratives that promise absolute solutions, should be the basis of further societal development. In an interview in late 1969, shortly after the publication of örtlich betäubt, he pointed to the similarity between himself and Starusch as both being "Leute, die auf Vernunft und Aufklärung setzen" (GS 83) ("People who rely on reason and enlightenment"). In an extract from a letter to a friend published in Der Spiegel under the title Unser Grundübel ist der

Idealismus (Idealism is Our Basic Evil), he explained his thinking and why he adopted with pride the word revisionist – an insult used by those on the more radical left against those they

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considered as insufficiently ideologically committed. He commented on the learning experience he had had watching direct democracy in action in his wife's home country of Switzerland and compared it to the approach adopted by the SPD throughout its history in various incarnations of the German state:

Dem entspricht auf moderner Weise [...] der hundertjährige Versuch der deutschen Sozialdemokraten, in diesem Land die europäische Aufklärung politisch wirksam werden zu lassen. Weil die Revision des jeweils Bestehenden notwendig ist, ist deshalb für mich das Schimpfwort 'Revisionist' ein Ehrentitel (ER 393).

(This corresponds to the one hundred years the SPD attempted to put the enlightenment into effect politically in this country. Because we always need to revise what exists, I consider the swearword 'Revisionist' a badge of honor.)

Grass's revisionist philosophy is on full view in many of his political speeches and essays in the late 1960s as he tied his worldview to the SPD as the only party he felt was capable of providing this kind of incremental societal improvement without veering off into the absolutisms offered by others, exemplified at that time by the rise of both the NPD on the right wing of the political spectrum and the APO on the left. His reliance on what he understood as reason is evident even in his first campaign speeches and, as Cepl-Kaufmann points out, the he often described elections as appeals to reason (122). Indeed, Cepl-Kaufmann notes that Grass refers to the idea of "Vernunft" ("reason") in more than 20 other speeches and essays that he crafted between 1965 and 1972 (258, note 21). She regards his use of this terminology, along with the word "Aufklärung" ("enlightenment"), as inflationary, suggesting that the two ideas lost value based on the constant repetition (124). However, the importance of the ideas, or at least Grass's interpretation of them, is such that he made them not only the cornerstone of his public appearances of the time, but also integrated them as major themes into his concurrent literary work.

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The main exploration of reason and enlightenment in örtlich betäubt is in the discussions between Starusch and his dentist. On the one hand, the dentist proposes reorganizing society on the basis of an all-encompassing prophylactic health care system he calls "Krankenfürsorge" (öb

83) ("Sickcare" LA 81). Starusch's counterpart to this is a world of constant learning where everyone is both a teacher and a student. The primary element for the dentist is that his system, like modern medicine, is based on the scientific method, the successes of which he compares to the failures of politics. Any deviation from this model of rationality inevitably ends with people adopting ideologies that promise too much:

Im Gegensatz zur Politik kann die moderne Medizin auf Erfolge hinweisen, die eindeutig belegen, daß es einen Fortschritt gibt, wenn man sich streng und ausschließlich an die Erkenntnisse der Naturwissenschaften und die Ergebnisse empirischer Forschung hält. Jede Spekulation, […] führt, nein, verführt zwangsläufig zu ideologischen Mystifikationen (öb 185).

(In contrast to politics, modern medicine can point to achievements which show conclusively that progress is possible if we confine ourselves strictly and exclusively to the findings of natural science and the results of empirical research. All speculation […] leads – I should say misleads and necessarily so – to ideological mystifications LA 179).

As an example, he discusses how dentistry has evolved over time and, more importantly, how many, many small incremental steps achieve this evolution. Indeed, some steps have failed to have the desired impact, coming too late to solve the problem they were designed to (öb 119; LA

117). The dentist uses the specific example of anesthesia to demonstrate how far science has been able to progress compared to how dentists performed extractions just a hundred years earlier. At that time, four men would hold down the patient, one of them with his knee in the patient's chest and another holding the patient's hand over a lighted candle to distract from the pain (öb 69; LA 68). Now, as the dentist puts it, "In unserem aufgeklärten Jahrhundert" (öb, 69)

("In our enlightened century" LA 68), the injectable alcohol derivative Novocain is the basis of modern anesthesia.

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Starusch contrasts the dentist's system of worldwide healthcare, where the government looks after everyone, with his own idea of a pedagogical province. Here, the difference between student and teacher has been dialectically transcended and everyone is both a teacher and a student (öb 84; LA 82). However, the combination of these two visions becomes one that Grass, as an opponent of absolutist visions, would argue against. The two systems would together overcome all other systems of thought, replacing them with enlightened, but absolute, rationality:

Man stelle sich vor: Ein Zahnarzt und ein Studienrat regieren die Welt. Das Zeitalter der Prophylaxe bricht an. Allem Übel wird vorgebeugt. Da jeder lehrt, lernt auch ein Jeder. [...] Fürsorge und Vorsorge befrieden die Völker. Keine Religion und Ideologien mehr, sondern Hygiene und Aufklärung beantworten die Frage nach dem Sein. (öb 195)

(Just imagine: a dentist and a schoolteacher rule the world. The age of prophylaxis has dawned. Preventive measures are taken against all evils. Since everyone teaches, everyone also learns. […] The question of being is no longer answered by religions and ideologies but by hygiene and enlightenment. LA 188)

Starusch asks the dentist how he would change society without using a system to do so.

The dentist suggests that sick people themselves will simply abolish systems, thus changing the world and creating a space for a Sickcare system that does not govern its population, but cares for it instead, one that seeks to help the world, not change it. Starusch on the other hand, while in the dentist chair and projecting his thoughts onto the television, dreams of destroying the accumulated detritus of modern society. He envisions a fleet of destructive bulldozers that do away with commerce and consumerism in order to make way for his new pedagogical utopia.

The dentist later emphasizes the difference in approach by contrasting his slow and steady method to the violence within Starusch's plan: "Die weltweite Krankenfürsorge ist das Ergebnis langsamer und oft zu spät einsetzender Reformen und nicht dummer Gewalt, die nur das Nichts erschaffen kann" (öb 119). ("Worldwide Sickcare is a product of slow reforms, so slow that they often come too late, not of stupid violence that can only create Nothing" LA 117). Starusch's

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vision of destroying society to create something new echoes the demands of the protesters on the streets advocating the overthrow of the existing order so they can create a new society. The author and cultural critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his essay 1967/68 Berliner

Gemeinplätze (1967/68 Berlin Commonplaces) advocated for such fundamental change, and in doing so, emphasized the utopian nature of the proposals:

Wir brauchen eine Forschung, die revolutionäre Alternativen zur Lösung aller wichtigen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Fragen entwickelt; eine Forschung, die unsere Bedürfnisse erkennt und unsere Wünsche ernst nimmt, deren Einbildungskraft sich von den vorgegebenen Mustern befreit, die den Mut zur konkreten Utopie aufbringt (28)

(We need research which develops revolutionary alternatives for the solution of all important political and social issues; research which recognizes our needs and takes our wishes seriously, whose power of imagination frees itself from predetermined patterns, which has the courage to create a concrete utopia)

In imagining his destructive bulldozers, Starusch is proposing an unthinking means to achieve an essentially rational aim. By contrast, when faced with a specific proposed act of violent protest, his student Scherbaum's dog-burning, he constantly appeals to Scherbaum's sense of the rational to attempt to dissuade him from carrying out this plan. He recognizes that

Scherbaum's desire to protest in this manner is essentially an emotional response to a perceived injustice rather than a fully analyzed and considered answer, as he explains in a conversation with his colleague Irmgard Seifert:

Es handelt sich schlicht um einen dünnhäutigen Burschen, der nicht nur naheliegendes, der auch entlegenes Unrecht spürt. Für uns ist Vietnam allenfalls das Ergebnis einer falschen Politik oder die zwangsläufige Äußerung eines korrupten Gesellschaftssystems; er fragt nicht nach Gründen, er sieht brennende Menschen und will etwas dagegen tun, auf jeden Fall etwas tun. (öb 119-200)

(He's simply a thin-skinned kid who feels the wrongs of the world, not only when they're close to him but also when they're far away. To us Vietnam is at most the product of mistaken policy or the inevitable consequence of a corrupt social system; but he is not interested in explanations, he sees human beings burning and he's made up his mind to do something about it. LA 193)

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To try to persuade Scherbaum, Starusch appeals to reason, pointing out the inhumanity of instances of burning people alive throughout history. He starts with the example of a naval ship in Danzig harbor during the war which caught fire, most likely as the result of arson. (In Die

Blechtrommel, the narrator Oskar denies the involvement of Starusch, in his wartime alter ego of gang leader Störtebeker, in setting the fire (BT 460; TD 367)). He tells of the consequences for the cadets on board who tried to escape through portholes but got stuck and burned from the inside (öb 132; LA 127-128). Moreover, he describes how phosphor bombs dropped on

Hamburg, among other cities, caused people to burn such that water would not douse the flames and they had to bury people in the sand as the only way to prevent the fire catching again immediately after they were exposed to air (öb 132; LA 128). Starusch presents a slide show to show Scherbaum the effects of burning individuals as told by art and history:

zuerst primitive Holzschnitte, die mittelalterliche Hexen– und Judenverbrennungen zum Motiv hatten. Dann das Kochen in siedendem Öl […] Dann dokumentarische Aufnahmen: die Wirkung der ersten Flammenwerfer, […] Dresden, Nagasaki, zum Schluss die Selbstverbrennung einer vietnamesischen Nonne. (öb 136-137)

(first primitive woodcuts featuring the burning of witches and Jews in the Middle Ages. Then […] boiling in oil. […] Then documentary photographs: the effects of the first flame throwers, […] Dresden, Nagasaki. And in conclusion the self-immolation of a Vietnamese nun. LA 132)

Moreover, Starusch borrows the dentist's argument, taken from Seneca, that public burnings are really nothing more than a distraction. As the dentist recounts, Seneca suggested that when nothing else is happening, people need to be entertained: "Denn wie spricht Seneca

über Zirkusspiele? [...] 'Aber es ist doch Pause? -- So soll man derweile den Leuten die Kehle durchschneiden, damit wenigstens etwas geschieht.' […] Öffentliche Verbrennungen schrecken nicht ab, sondern befriedigen Lust." (öb 130) ("What does Seneca say about the circus games? 'Is there an intermission? – Then cut people's throats in the meantime, then at least something will

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be happening,' […] Public burnings are no deterrent, they merely satisfy base instincts." LA

126).

Even with all this presentation of the horror of burning people, Starusch is unable to convince Scherbaum. The appeal to rationality, the rational argument that it is wrong, or at least inhumane, to inflict pain on individuals by setting light to them is not enough to overcome

Scherbaum's response to the same horror being inflicted on others in Vietnam. Instead,

Scherbaum attempts to intellectually discount Starusch's objections to the dog burning by arguing that Starusch's arguments are fine when talking about humans, but burning a dog is different as people cannot just ignore a dog burning where they may be indifferent to people (öb

131-132; LA 127).

On another occasion, Scherbaum presents a similar argument as a reason for making his protest in Berlin rather than in Bonn, the West German capital, where the event would be lost in the usual chaos. He contends, namely, that Berliners care more for dogs (öb 140; LA 135-136).

Starusch later tries to counter this argument with statistics as he and Scherbaum are at the location Scherbaum has chosen for his protest, in front of the cake-eating ladies at the Hotel

Kempinski. Starusch points out that the number of dogs in Berlin has decreased in recent years, undermining Scherbaum's contention that Berliners are crazy about their dogs (öb 174; LA 168).

As they stand in front of the café and look at the ladies, Starusch presents another option for the persuasive use of scientific rationality. He suggests that it would be possible to reduce the cake consumption by making people understand the calorific content of food. In an unexpectedly accurate anticipation of modern nutrition labeling of foodstuffs, he explains the need to publish not only calorie content, but also the breakdown into carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Most telling is his description of this act of public information as a victory for reason and rationality: "Ein

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Aufklärungsfeldzug gegen die Gesellschaft in Überfluss ... " (öb 176). ("A campaign of enlightenment against the society of superabundance" LA 171).

While rationality is the basis of progress in örtlich betäubt, within Tagebuch einer

Schnecke the primary metaphor for progress is the snail itself, something that keeps moving forward, not always quickly, not always purposefully in a straight line, but always moving in the right direction. The snail makes an early appearance during the opening scene as Grass awaits the results of the election of Gustav Heinemann to the post of Federal President; just as the snail does not immediately cross the threshold on its way out of the hall, the election of Heinemann requires three rounds of voting. Grass then presents the first snippet of a conversation with his children to remove any doubt about how to interpret the metaphor:

'Und was meinste mit Schnecke?' 'Die Schnecke, das ist der Fortschritt' Und was issen Fortschritt?' 'Bisschen schneller sein als die Schnecke' … Und nie ankommen, Kinder. (TS 268)

('What do you mean by the snail?' 'The snail is progress' 'And what's progress?' 'Being a little quicker than the snail' … And never getting there, children. DS 5-6)

And thus the metaphor is off on its meandering voyage through the pages and various narrative threads in the book. Indeed, the book's structure itself underlines the idea of progress as something other than a linear march towards an ultimate objective. Instead, several narrative threads each have to pause while the others take their turn to move a few steps forward only to come to a halt while another thread moves into the narrative spotlight. Without a single guiding narrative with a clear chronology, or a unifying element binding them together, it is the metaphor of the snail as slow and steady progress that becomes the glue that holds the narratives together.

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As Ann Mason points out in her essay The Artist and Politics in Günter Grass’ 'Aus dem

Tagebuch einer Schnecke', this "meandering style […] reflects Grass’ aversion to goal-directed, ideological social and political action and his emphasis instead on slow social reform in contrast to student radicals with their utopian demands" (111).

A further metaphor for progress is electoral politics and the journey that Grass and his colleagues undertake on behalf of the SPD electoral program. The two elections that bookend the work represent the first two occasions in the history of the Federal Republic in which the SPD broke the conservative hold on political power at the federal level. The election of Gustav

Heinemann as Federal President in March 1969 required overcoming a combination of right- wing forces. The CDU was attempting to use the support of the NPD to elect its candidate (TS

266; DS 3). The electoral success of the SPD in the Bundestag elections in September placed

Willy Brandt in the office of Federal Chancellor as the head of a coalition government of the

SPD and the FDP (TS 534-536; DS 276-278).

The emphasis on slow incremental progress also permeates the chosen itinerary for

Grass's trek through 79 electoral districts where he spoke to a combined audience of over 60,000 people (Jäckel 10). Grass and his team deliberately chose to visit election districts where the SPD did not necessarily have a strong showing, aiming to bring on small numbers of voters in these districts and so generate enough incremental additions to the national vote tally to make a difference. In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass describes how the team, and in particular Leo

Bauer, constantly monitored the opinion polls for the slightest signs of progress: "Kühle

Hochrechner, niemals blinzelnde Zielgruppenvermesser, Trendbeschwörer und

Zweckpessimisten beim Stoffwechsel: wir fraßen Statistiken und schieden Prognosen aus. Wir füllten Aschenbecher und lasen ihrem Überhang die entscheidende Stelle hinterm Komma ab"

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(TS 418) ("Cool jugglers of big numbers, unblinking appraisers of groups and trends, purposive pessimists engaged in metabolism: we ate statistics and excreted forecasts. We filled ash trays and from their overflow we read the crucial figure after the decimal point." DS 158). As the results come in, it is the small gains that Grass focuses on: "Cloppenburg […] Eine Gegend, so schwarz katholisch vernagelt, daß selbst Kohlensäcke keinen Schatten werfen mögen. Dennoch gelang es, mit Hilfe des Heiligen Franziskus von 14,9 über die Traumgrenze bis zu 20,1 Prozent zu kriechen." (TS 536) ("Cloppenburg […] A region so dyed-black-in-the-wool Catholic that even sacks of coal cast no shadows. Nevertheless, we managed, with the help of St. Francis, to creep from 14.9 per cent, past our dream goal, to 20.1 per cent." DS 277).

The slow trek through the political landscape in areas that might be hostile to the message he was bringing was also the subject of satire in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. Grass recounts one part of the trip through a fictitious series of small towns in an election district where all the town names are puns that emphasize how slow moving, and therefore snail-like, these places are:

Zurück aus Schneckingen, komme ich mir schnell vor. Das liegt südlich Oberzögen, an der Straße nach Kreuchlingen und gehört mit den Gemeinden Schlaichheim, Weilwangen, Weil am Wald und Hinterzig zu einem Wahlkreis, in dem die Sozialdemokraten, seit Bebel, zwar Fortschritte machen, dennoch überdehnt langsam und nur vergleichsweise vorankommen. (TS 301)

(On my return from Snailville, I strike myself as fast moving. It lies to the south of Upper Dawdle on the road to Creepy Corners, and along with the townships of Sluggish Falls, Dally-in-the-Woods, and Backlog, belongs to an election district where the socialists have been making progress since Bebel, but getting ahead only very slowly and relatively. DS 39)

By naming not only these imaginary places, but also many of the towns and cities that he did visit, Grass firstly demonstrates the geographic reach of the tour – that it did indeed go to all corners of the country. Secondly, he once again offers within the text an image of a journey that

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is not direct, that seemingly meanders back and forth while all the while making progress to a final goal, that is in itself not an end, but merely one step towards the next destination.

Education as an Engine of Progress

The slow incremental progress that Grass envisions depends on the active participation of the population in the political process. For Grass, one of the most important enablers of such participation is education. His campaign speeches often talked of the need for education reform and the hopes that Grass had for its impact on society. For example, in the 1969 campaign speech Die runde Zahl Zwanzig (Twenty is a round number), Grass emphasized the expected benefits of introducing comprehensive schools which would replace the traditional split between academically oriented 'Gymnasien', technically or vocationally oriented 'Fachhochschule', and schools offering a basic secondary education up to age 16 (10th grade): "Als erstes nenne ich die

Einführung der Gesamtschule […] Nur die Gesamtschule kann uns die Chancengleichheit aller

Bürger garantieren." (ERI runde Zahl) ("The first thing I shall mention is the introduction of comprehensive schools […] Only comprehensive schools can guarantee equality of opportunity for all citizens"). Even after the Social Democratic Party had taken over the reins of government,

Grass continued to argue for the urgency of educational reform. His 1972 speech, Bürger und

Politik (Citizens and Politics) again underlined how Grass viewed educational reform as the starting point of other societal improvements. In this speech, given at a congress of the Social

Democratic Voters Initiative that he himself had helped found, he tied progress in establishing comprehensive schools and universities to broader participation of citizens in society:

Ohne die Sozialdemokraten wäre der Beginn der Bildungsreform noch um weitere Jahre verzögert worden […] wäre das notwendige Experiment Gesamtschule und Gesamthochschule nicht vorangetrieben worden. […] Ohne die Gesamtschule und Gesamthochschule werden sich alle andere demokratischen Reformen, zum Beispiel die

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Mitbestimmung in allen Bereichen der Gesellschaft, nicht verwirklichen lassen (ER 554- 555)

(Without the Social Democrats, the beginnings of educational reform would have been delayed […] and the much needed experiment of comprehensive schools and universities would not have been pushed forward […] Without comprehensive schools and universities, all other democratic reforms, such as broad participation in all areas of society, could not be realized.)

As noted at the start of this chapter, Grass acknowledged how his own formal education was incomplete. The degree of importance he attaches to education as a component of society is reflected in his literary works by the number of leading or significant characters who are teachers. As Patrick O'Neill points out, Grass himself commented on his obsession with teachers in his 1980 novel Kopfgeburten oder die Deutschen sterben aus (Headbirths or the Germans are

Dying Out) as he lists all the teachers that have featured in his previous works and suggests that even the flounder of the novel of the same name was a pedagogue (118-119)

In örtlich betäubt, both Starusch and Seifert are teachers and many scenes take place in or around the school, with discussions between Starusch and Scherbaum taking place both in the classroom and in the schoolyard. We see Seifert and Starusch take part in a teacher training conference and hear how they view the comprehensive or consolidated school concept. When

Starusch and Irmgard meet after the conference, Starusch emphasizes his support for the concept by imitating one of his colleagues in jest, but pointing out that he agrees with the sentiment: "ich zitierte spöttisch den Kollegen Enderwitz, dessen Meinung ich eigentlich teile: 'Die

Gesamtschule ist das Mittel, der heutigen gesellschaftspolitischen Situation optimal zu begegnen'" (öb, 195) ("I mockingly quoted my colleague Enderwitz whose opinion I actually share: 'The integrated pluridisciplinary school is the best possible means of facing up to the present sociopolitical situation'" LA 188). Grass addressed this topic also in the 1969 election campaign speech Vom alten Eisen (Old Iron). He argues for a reformist education policy, that

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includes all-day schools which help provide for equality of opportunity and are an integral part of preparing for the future: "das Konzept der Ganztagsschule, das Kindern aus allen

Bevölkerungskreisen unbehindert gleiche Bildungschancen eröffnet, ist Voraussetzung für die

Erfordernisse der siebziger Jahre." (ER 382) ("The concept of the all-day schools, which offers equal opportunities without barriers to children from all segments of the population, is a prerequisite for the requirements of the seventies").

Grass picks up on the topic of comprehensive schooling in Tagebuch einer Schnecke, demonstrating a commitment in his own life to the ideas he expresses in his political speeches and literary works. Not only does he advocate for comprehensive schooling but when the first comprehensive school in Berlin opens, he registers his son Franz to attend it. He recounts the trip he takes with Franz to test out the route that Franz will be taking via a couple of buses (and later a new subway line) to visit the school. Grass compares the school to the snail of progress and points out that the relationship between student and teacher is very different and the students will have more opportunity to have a voice in the running of the school:

In Schweden und im Bundesland Hessen gibt es mehr Gesamtschulen: luftige, wie im Spiel entworfene Gebilde, in denen die Lehrer kein erhöhtes Podest und die Schüler keine symmetrische Ordnung mehr finden. [...] Die Gesamtschule ist ein Versuch; pass auf, Franz, daß er glückt! […] Im Wahlkampf sprach ich über die Gesamtschule. 'Sie ist die Voraussetzung für praktizierte Mitbestimmung' sagte ich (TS 540).

(In Sweden and in the province of Hessen there are more consolidated schools: airy, as though playfully designed institutions, where the teacher no longer occupies a raised platform and the pupils no longer sit in symmetrical order. […] The consolidated school is an experiment; it’s up to you, Franz, to make it succeed! […] In the course of the election campaign, I spoke about the consolidated school. 'It's the prerequisite to student participation in decision making' I said." (DS 282-283)

Grass encourages his son to help ensure that the experiment is successful and that the progress continues.

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Hermann Ott in Tagebuch einer Schnecke is also a teacher (286) who, after being forced to leave his position following the Nazi takeover, begins working in the Jewish Rosenbaum

School. In contrast to Starusch and Seifert, who are both teachers of humanities – Starusch describes himself as a teacher of German and therefore history (öb 32, LA 32) while Seifert also teaches music in addition to German and history (öb 56; LA55) – Ott teaches not only German but the natural science of biology. In this he is a counterpart to the dentist from örtlich betäubt as a representative of the scientific method where knowledge is gained incrementally through empirical observation.

Other elements in the storylines of the two works underscore the importance of education for both the plots and the characters. We see early on in örtlich betäubt that school is where the students gain their political education, from the discussions in class and the schoolyard about the

Vietnam War (öb 15; LA 15) to questions of student representation – students are demanding a smokers' corner and a say in curriculum development (öb 8-9; LA 8-9) – as well as the student newspaper that Scherbaum agrees at the end to edit (öb 227; LA 219). Moreover, as Starusch in the final paragraphs recaps the two years that have passed, we learn that Scherbaum is continuing his education and studying medicine, the very example of scientific achievement the dentist has advocated throughout. While Vero Lewand has given up on education for herself, quitting school just before her final exams, she retains a connection to it as she marries an academic, a Canadian linguist (öb 263; LA 255). In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Ott's classical education stands him in good stead when he is in the basement with Stomma and Lisbeth as he has all the classics of literature available to tell as stories to keep his host entertained and thus also keep himself in

Stomma's good graces. Examples include Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and Schiller's

Maria Stuart as Ott swaps hats, props, and voices to indicate the different characters (TS 457-

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458; DS 199-200). Furthermore, Ott's capability to give a voice both to Lisbeth by freeing her from her melancholy (TS 504; DS 245-246) and to her father Anton by teaching him to write

(TS 398; DS 138) underlines his contribution as an educator, as discussed in more detail in

Chapter 6.

A Worldview against the Weltgeist

In her book on the political aspects of Grass's writing, Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann describes Grass's political and philosophical stance as one reduced to a set of individual moral imperatives on how to lead one's life. She underlines the constant appeal within Grass's work to reason as the basis of decision-making but points out that this reflects a very specific understanding of reason which is determined as much by what it is not as what it is (122).

Moreover, she describes his grasp of Hegel, a recurring trope in Grass's work at the time, as being limited to a single specific aspect of the philosopher's work: "Für ihn bedeutet Hegel lediglich die Lehre vom objektiven Geist und der aus ihr resultierenden Eliminierung des

Individuums aus seiner Verantwortung zugunsten eines sich selbst verantwortenden Staates und dem vom bewussten Anteil des Individuums unabhängigen Ziel der Geschichte" (118) ("For him, Hegel is only the doctrine of the objective spirit and the resulting removal of the individual from his responsibility in favor of a state that is accountable to itself and from a final goal of history that is independent of the consciousness of the individual").

Grass confirmed this limited interpretation of Hegel when, in an essay he wrote in 1967 as an afterword to the first published collection of his speeches, he gives a clear resumé of his thoughts on the work of the philosopher:

Hegel machte der Welt ein fatales Geschenk, indem er die Welt mit dem Weltgeist bekannt machte. Ein Volk, das im dialektischen Zusammenhang der Geschichte das 114

notwendige Moment verkörpert, ist das herrschende Volk, von dem Hegel sagt: 'Gegen dies sein absolutes Recht, Träger der gegenwärtigen Entwicklungsstufe des Weltgeistes zu sein, sind die Geister der anderen Völker rechtlos, und sie, wie die, deren Epoche vorbei ist, zählen nicht mehr in der Weltgeschichte.' Hegels Philosophie ist nicht ohne Folgen geblieben. (ER 264)

(Hegel made the world a fatal gift in acquainting it with the world spirit. A nation which embodies the necessary factor in the dialectical content of history is the dominant nation, of which Hegel says: 'Against its absolute right to be the vehicle of the world Spirit’s present state of development, the spirits of other nations are without rights, and, like those nations whose era is past, they no longer count in history.' Hegel’s philosophy has had consequences. Provisional Balance, 104)

For Grass, this view of history had allowed the state to take on the mantle of the end of history, thus endowing it with the ability to claim to be doing everything for the ultimate betterment of its citizens and therefore to decide for them. Alexandre Kojève explained, in his series of lectures at the École des Hautes Études in Paris, published as An Introduction to the

Reading of Hegel, that Hegel had determined the "notwendige Moment" ("critical factor") in history to be the French Revolution and, more importantly, the incorporation of the Revolution and Robespierre's Terror in the person of the victorious Napoleon as he completed his campaign in 1806 in Jena, where Hegel himself could hear the cannon fire (34). Kojève continues that

Hegel considered this also the end of history as humanity had now reached the point where it no longer needed to struggle to achieve a higher level of dialectic synthesis (69). Writing on

Tagebuch einer Schnecke, O'Neill provides a succinct description of this dialectic drive towards the finality of man's self-awareness and realization, termed by Hegel as Weltgeist ("World spirit") as "the abstract spirit of history storming irresistibly towards a glorious future" (86). The

Hegel biographer Terry Pinkard adds to this that Hegel saw Napoleon as the personification of this power in a single individual within the historical process. Hegel witnessed Napoleon's entry into Jena the day before the battle and wrote to a friend: "I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an

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individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it" (Pinkard 228). Grass himself uses this image in Tagebuch einer Schnecke to introduce his interpretation of Hegel and the impact of his work on history that will constitute a significant negative pole in opposition to Grass's own positive view of progress throughout the work: "In Jena, Kinder, hat er den Kaiser hoch zu Ross und in der Einheit Ross und Reiter etwas gesehen, das er den Weltgeist nannte; seitdem galoppiert er – während ich auf das Bewusstsein der Schnecken setze." (TS 304) ("In Jena, children, he saw the emperor Napoleon on horseback and in the unity of rider and horse found something that he called Weltgeist; it has been galloping ever since, whereas I put my money on snail consciousness." DS 42-43).

The Weltgeist makes only one appearance in örtlich betäubt, but it is one that satirizes the image of Napoleon as the all-conquering hero of the end of history. Field Marshal Krings escapes the protestors that had gathered at the Koblenz train station to greet him on his return from being a Soviet prisoner of war by getting off at an earlier stop. He takes a bicycle to ride to his hometown of Andernach and on the way he encounters his daughter Linde who had come to pick him up. As Starusch tells this story in his imagination, he sees himself also as someone returning home and compares the Krings he sees on the bicycle – the man who had lost battles in the war – to Napoleon on horseback: "Der Bimsfilm schwelgte in Voreifellandschaften: ich und ein radfahrender Spätheimkehrer feierten Wiedersehen mit dem Korrelsberg. [Linde] drehte sich in Richtung immer größer werdender Radfahrer. Geschichte passierte: Hegels Weltgeist ritt querfeldein über Acker, unter denen der Bims auf seine Ausbeutung wartete" (öb 47) ("The pumice film luxuriated in Lower Eifel landscapes: a late homecomer on a bicycle and I celebrated reunion with the Korrelsberg. [Linde] turned around in the direction of the steadily

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expanding bicycle rider [sic]7. History was enacted: Hegel's world-spirit rode across country over fields beneath which pumice waited to be exploited" LA 46).

In Tagebuch einer Schnecke Grass explicitly explains his objection to Hegel's thinking and its impact on history in a conversation with his children:

'Wer issen Hegel?' 'Jemand, der die Geschichte über die Menschen als Urteil verhängt hat.' 'Hat er viel oder alles gewusst?' 'Dank seiner Spitzfindigkeit wird bis heutzutage alle Staatsgewalt als geschichtlich notwendig erklärt' (TS 308)

('Who's Hegel?' 'Someone who sentenced mankind to history. 'Did he know a lot? Did he know everything?' ''Thanks to his subtlety, every abuse of state power has to this day been explained as historically necessary.' DS 46)

Thus, Grass ascribes to Hegel the blame for any state that has used a definition of historical necessity as the underlying reason for its existence. His counterpoint to the quasi-messianic view of the Weltgeist is Herman Ott, known by his nickname "Zweifel" ("Doubt"). Ott earns his nickname through his questioning attitude toward any form of certainty, although as a biologist and an avid collector of snails he himself becomes an authority, that is a source of certainty, on the subject. As a youth who would respond like as not with the word "why?", he came under the influence of Schopenhauer and learned – as Grass describes it – to observe first and then perceive rather than to follow the Hegelian method of finding evidence to support preconceived notions (TS 307; DS 45). But it is as a student that Ott makes his first acquaintance with Hegel and, having criticized his ideas, finds himself under attack from those who support Hegel's world view, even if from different perspectives:

7 Ralph Mannheim's translation talks of a single bicycle rider. The German original refers to bicycle riders in the plural. 117

Als er zu Beginn der dreißiger Jahre den Weltgeist […] als ein Gespenst beschrieb, das in Kleppergestalt dem Kopf eines spekulierenden Rosstäuschers entsprungen sein müsse, befeindeten ihn gleichlaut die intim verfeindeten Linkshegelianer und Rechtshegelianer; denn die Linken und die Rechten wollten den Weltgeist beritten und galoppieren sehen -- und wenig später galoppierte er auch. (TS 307).

(When in the early thirties he described the Weltgeist […] as a four-footed spook that must have sprung from the head of a speculating horse trader, those intimate enemies, the left Hegelians and the right Hegelians, attacked him in unison; for right and left alike, they were determined to see the Weltgeist mounted and galloping – and pretty soon it was indeed galloping full tilt. DS 45-46)

Ott incurs the wrath of both the conservative Right or Old Hegelians, and the radical Left or Young Hegelians and so is caught in the middle of ideological battles, much as Grass witnessed the ganging up of left and right political groupings against the SPD in the mines where he worked as a young man. The image that the Weltgeist would soon be off and galloping clearly equates to the Nazi regime and its absolutist philosophy that did not allow for any doubts or deviations. The other absolutist regime, that of Stalin in the Soviet Union, was already galloping apace. And just so that we do not forget that Grass considers the two expressions of absolutism to be both sides of the same coin, Hermann Ott is said to have penned an essay to be printed in the Danziger Volkszeitung on totalitarianism under Hitler and Stalin. The article was never published, but the title remains: "Vom Bewusstsein der Schnecken – oder wie Hegel überholt werden wird" (TS 308) ("On the consciousness of Snails – or how Hegel will be overtaken" DS

46).

In one of his commentaries in the newspaper series Politisches Tagebuch (Political

Diary), Grass refers to Hegel as a corollary of the belief in the infallibility of historical developments, personified by Lenin on the one hand and the Pope on the other. Caught in a snowstorm in the final days of 1970, the Lenin Year celebrating the centenary of Lenin's birth,

Grass muses on how the Russian revolutionary and, in particular, his follower Stalin had abused

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their position of power, obtained via a coup against a legitimate government, to institute a regime that accepted no dissension. Having compared this to the doctrine of papal infallibility, he comments that, unlike the snow that has left him isolated, dictators are not heaven-sent, but rather it is people that make history: "Doch im Gegensatz zum Schnee fallen Diktatoren (und selbst Päpste) nicht vom Himmel. Geschichte, so absurd sie sich niederschlägt, wird von

Menschen gemacht. Hegels Weltgeist reitet als Phantom nur noch durch unwissenschaftliche

Seminare" (ER 492) ("But unlike snow, dictators (and even Popes) do not fall from heaven.

History, however absurdly it may fall like precipitation, is made by people. Hegel's world spirit rides on only in unscientific seminars"). Grass takes the opportunity to cast doubt once more on

Hegel's view of the world spirit as the end of history personified in a great man. Moreover, his use of the term "unscientific" emphasizes his view that this view is based more in a belief in an absolute rather than in the step-by-step progress of empirical scientific observation.

Even if Grass has a basic belief in progress in term of his revisionist approach, he also sees it as his task to propagate skepticism. He makes this explicit in the opening line of his 1969

Federal election campaign speech Die Rede von den begrenzten Möglichkeiten (On limited possibilities): "Ich habe vor, Skepsis zu verbreiten. Nach wie vor besteht kein Anlass, aus Prinzip hoffnungsvoll zu sein" (ER 395) ("I intend to spread skepticism, We still do not have any cause to be hopeful as a matter of principle"). One way that Grass expresses his skepticism is to juxtapose the achievements of modern science against the progress that is still to be made. In the middle of the election year 1969, one event stood out as a sign of technological achievement, namely the Apollo moon landing. In a short article dealing with this event, Hinter und auf dem

Mond (Behind and on the Moon) which was published in the Nuremburg newspaper

Abendzeitung – 8-Uhr Blatt, he notes that the driving force behind the desire for generating the

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technical progress that allowed the moon shot to take place was not necessarily the expected benefit. Instead, it was the competition between the two world views that dominated the Cold

War period:

Zwei Großmächten haben mit überdimensionalem wissenschaftlichem und finanziellem Aufwand ihr Mondprogramm betrieben. Amerikaner und Russen, zwei Riesen aus Neigung und politischer Machtfülle, erklärten den Weltraum, und im Weltraum den Mond zu ihrem Ziel. […] Sosehr mir die wissenschaftliche, technische, und persönliche Leistung der ersten Mondlandung imponiert, Skepsis und das Verhaftetsein mit den Problem der Erde legen es mir nahe, einen Tropfen Wermut in den globalen Jubel zu mischen (ER 389).

(Two superpowers expended enormous scientific and financial resources on their moon program. Americans and Russians, with the inclination and power to be giants, declared space, and within space the moon, to be their objective. […] As impressive as the scientific, technical, and individual achievements are, skepticism and being bound to the problems here on earth make me want to add a drop of bitterness to the global celebration).

Grass compares the monumental achievement with the statements issued two days earlier by the United Nations Secretary General U Thant on the inadequacy of the aid to the developing world, with sixty percent of the world population suffering from malnutrition. He adds that the superpowers are essentially fighting a proxy war in the Nigeria/Biafra conflict, with the two sides receiving their weapons from the West or the East, and points out that the death toll in the

Biafran war is rising to frightening proportions while the world cheers the moon landing (ER

389-390). The Biafran conflict also features as a pointer to geopolitical issues in Tagebuch einer

Schnecke as the narrator Grass tries to explain to his children what they are hearing about the war on the television news, only for the children to be distracted by the prospect of watching a show starting soon on another channel. (TS 360-361; DS 98-99). If Tagebuch einer Schnecke is Grass's literary platform for criticizing Hegel and the concept of the Weltgeist, örtlich betäubt is the vehicle he uses for advocating against the Marxism of the student movement. Marx was close to the Young Hegelian movement and Marxism shares Hegel's view of history as an inevitable and

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dialectic progression towards an ultimate goal (McLellan 24), and the thinking that went into

Grass's anti-Hegelianism is foreshadowed in örtlich betäubt. Starusch's notes the propensity of his students to use Marxist slogans in their arguments (öb 43; LA 42) and his attempts to dissuade Scherbaum from his protest reflect Grass's rejection of the student movement's street protests. Starusch's own visions of revolutionary destruction via a fleet of bulldozers he unleashes while in the dentist's chair are themselves rejected by the dentist as the voice of reason

(öb 101-102; LA 99-100). Throughout the book, Starusch as the narrator only ever refers to the composite "Marxengels" indicating his disdain for the philosophy, even though he is sometimes the one quoting it such as when defending his bulldozers to the dentist. In this instance, he even adds to the sense of condescension toward the thinking by suggesting it is one among a set of confused sources of meaningless quotes: "Wahllos zitiert er Marxengels und sogar den alten

Seneca, der, was die Verdammung des Überflusses betreffe, einer Meinung sei mit Marcuse . . .

(Ich scheute mich nicht, dem späten Nietzsche das Wort zu geben)" (öb 102) ("Promiscuously he quotes Marxengels and even old Seneca who in condemning superfluity was of the same opinion as Marcuse … (I went so far as to give the late Nietzsche the floor)" LA 100). Chapter 6 contains a more detailed discussions of Grass's rejection of the student movement and how it changed his writing of örtlich betäubt.

In the essay Unser Grundübel ist der Idealismus mentioned earlier, Grass commented that an incorrigible skepticism had been his constant companion since the end of the war. His aversion is to every ideology that seeks to transcend humanity. (ER 392). The skepticism of

Hermann Ott in Tagebuch einer Schnecke is clear from his nickname of Zweifel (Doubt) and his embrace of Schopenhauer and rejection of Hegel described earlier reflect the position that Grass adopts in his speeches. In örtlich betäubt, the skeptical characters are the young adult Starusch at

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the time of his engagement to Linde Krings (not his adolescent alter ego Störtebeker) and his fiancée Linde Krings herself. Starusch, using the nickname Hardy for himself, relates via the dentist's television screen how the pair looked on the day their engagement is announced:

Auf graugestufter Mattscheibe stellen sich Sieglinde im schiefergrauen Kostüm und Hardy im basaltgrauen Einreiher vor; ein weltoffenes, etwas zu glattes Paar, rascher sichernder Blicke aus Augenwinkeln fähig, als skeptische Generation eingestuft und der gesteigerten Leistung mehr und mehr verdächtig (öb 28).

(Sieglinde in a slate grey suit and Hardy in a single breasted basalt grey present themselves on the grey graduated screen; an up and coming couple, a little too slick, capable of alert, watchful glances out of the corners of their eyes, classified as members of the skeptical generation and increasingly suspected of stepped-up efficiency LA 28).

Moreover, Starusch describes how both he and Linde dedicate themselves to their studies – she in medicine, he in various types of cement – both with a sense of being "unbeteiligt" (öb 28)

("disinterested" LA 28). The return of Ferdinand Krings from his time as a POW, however, changes this as Linde's disinterested studying soon has an end as she devotes her time to learning military history so as to defeat her father in his battle reenactments. Moreover, she persuades

Starusch, once she has been able to use sex to make him (and others) tell her of her father's plans, to break off their engagement and move on to studying to become a teacher. Starusch is the same age as Grass in real life, suggesting that Grass assigns his own skepticism to the narrator of the novel. However, by the time of the novel's narrative present, the narrating 40-year-old expresses his doubt more from a view of his own resignation than from a detached analytical assessment of the promises of an ideology. As John Reddick explains in his essay Action and Impotence:

Günter Grass's 'örtlich betäubt', Starusch as the narrator is formed by "the morbid, disintegrative process […] whereby, as a result of initial failure, he has lost his wholeness and centredness of identity, and hence, too, his ability to be and to act as it were 'organically'" (567). Indeed,

Starusch's affinity for bulldozers of revolutionary change in the fantasies he projects onto the

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television screen calls into question whether his description of himself as a representative of the skeptical generation really holds.

Grass's skepticism led him to look for the achievable, rather than grand narratives that will take us beyond our own limits and off to some imagined utopia. He suggests that we should view limited possibilities as a challenge, and regard them as an opportunity to find and push the boundaries of these limitations. He does also suggest that recognizing the reality of the limitations is an important part of making progress. He even allows himself to inject a certain amount of optimism into his thinking. In an afterword to his speech on limited possibilities, written after the election of Brandt as chancellor, he reiterates the limits that continue to exist, but also points to where additional opportunities may now be available:

Die knappe Sozialliberale Mehrheit im Bundestag wird sich oft an die Grenzen ihrer Möglichkeiten geführt sehen; doch außenpolitisch ist der Spielraum größer geworden, zumal die Oppositionsparteien […] ohne Alternative zur Deutschland-, Europa-, und Entspannungspolitik ihrer neuen parlamentarischen Aufgabe nachgehen müssen (ER 408)

(The narrow Social Liberal majority in parliament will often be confronted by the limits of its possibilities; but in foreign policy, the room for maneuver has grown, especially as the opposition parties will have to go about their new parliamentary tasks without any alternative in terms of policies on Germany, Europe, and détente.)

Grass sees the possibility for progress in terms of Brandt's Ostpolitik, an opening up of relationships with East Germany and other Eastern European countries, above all Poland, which all in fact took place in the first years of the Brandt administration.

Problematic Progress

Grass presents his idea of progress as a basis of improving society and a rejection of a

Hegelian view of history. However, certain inconsistencies within the literary works run counter to the main thrust of rationality and enlightenment that underpins his work at this time,

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challenging the idea that Grass's view of progress is consistent within itself. Given Grass's reliance on enlightenment as a standard to be borne at the head of his procession toward progress, Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of instrumentalized enlightenment thinking provides a further point of departure for questioning Grass philosophy of progress.

One question raised by Grass's clear insistence on the rejection of faith in absolutist narratives is why in his public speeches and literary work he presents his own absolute faith in democracy with its slow-moving progress that can only offer small additional improvements to the life of citizens. Here again we can draw on Cepl-Kaufmann's explanation that Grass is advocating for what he sees as an appropriate and moral set of behaviors, including the slow and steady approach to improving the political situation. The right path forward is right because

Grass says it is right – and because he maintains that the dangers of the other paths are too great

(125-126). As Cepl-Kaufmann points out, for Grass it is his definition of reason that determines what is the correct action, and what accords with reason is relative: "Als vernünftig kann nur das bezeichnet werden, was sich in der Erfahrung als praktisch durchführbar erwiesen hat bzw. was die Erfahrung positiv ergänzen kann." (123) ("We can only call reasonable that which has proven in our experience to be practicable or which positively expands experience"). Grass disparages

Hegel for a core element of his philosophy – the idea that there is an end to the development of human society, but another aspect of Hegel's philosophy, namely dialectics, underlies a large part of Grass's vision of progress. As noted earlier in the context of his article Unser Grundübel ist der Idealismus, Grass wants to achieve constant improvement by revising "das jeweils

Bestehende" (ER 393) ("that which exists"). Such a process for incremental improvements is itself a dialectic process that looks at the present state of development as its thesis and that which is wrong in that present state as the antithesis. The synthesis should thus bring about an improved

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level of political and social development. Even though the dialectic step is an improvement over what was, it is not aiming at a specific final objective. When introducing us to the image of the snail, having just witnessed an interim step in Gustav Heinemann's election to Federal President,

Grass as the narrator keeps the snail moving by offering it pieces of the future: "Erst als ich ihr versprach, ein neues Ziel zu stecken, als ich ihr Zukunft als Fraß scheibenweis schnitt, schob sie sich über die gedachte Linie und verließ die Ostpreußenhalle, ohne den Beifall der sogleich wieder anwesenden Mehrheit, ohne das Schweigen der Minderheit abzuwarten." (TS 267) ("Only when I promised to set it a new goal, when I cut the future into slices for it to feed on successively, did it cross the imaginary line and leave the East Prussia Hall without waiting for the applause of the majority, who had instantly returned, or for the silence of the minority" DS 5)

The snail cannot stop. It does not acknowledge the applause and the victory celebrations but keeps on moving.

However, the image of the snail is not always one of goalless meandering. Ott is also perfectly happy to set up snail races in Stomma's basement and set goals for his snails that are goals in their own right and not considered as an interim step to another, more distant objective.

In the manner of a scientist, he logs time, records bait types, and looks to optimize the course to encourage the snails and slugs to follow it. He also calculates how to get them to the finish line more quickly, experimenting with different types of food to entice them with the sole purpose of improving their progress (TS 491-493; DS 232-234). The races thus contradict how Grass has previously presented the snail as always on the move and never arriving, and the image of the snail as progress that is slow and ever continuing. The racing snails not only arrive at a specific destination, they so in competition to be the first, and Ott uses science to guide and improve their progress. At one point, two hermaphrodite snails interrupt the race to reproduce, and Ott

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disqualifies them because, after all, a race is a race (TS 491; DS 232). At the same time, their coming together is described in Hegelian terms, offering the possibility of the form of utopia that

Grass normally argues against; it also foreshadows ideas that he would depict in much greater detail in Der Butt, as discussed in Chapter 7. By coming together, the snails create a new world that cancels out the differences between the sexes : "Zweifels Utopie hob die Geschlechter und den Kampf der Geschlechter auf: ausgeglichen und auf Harmonie getrimmt, frei vom Hass auf

Vaters Hosenträger, frei vom Hass auf Mutters Schürze" (TS 491) ("Doubt's utopia did away with the sexes and the battle of the sexes: equalized and harmonized, free from hatred of father's suspenders, free from hatred of mother's apron" DS 232). Ott even starts to write about the utopian possibilities of this situation:

Später hat Zweifel seiner Utopie einen Namen gegeben: »Vom Glück der Zwitter.« So hieß der Untertitel seiner (leider) unvollendet gebliebenen Schrift über das Verhältnis der Schnecken zur Melancholie und Utopie. In Zweifels zwittriger Gesellschaft war Geben und Nehmen eins. Niemand ging leer aus. (TS 493)

(Later on, Doubt gave his utopia a name. "On the happiness of hermaphrodites": such was the title of his treatise, which he (unfortunately) never finished, on the relationship between snails on the one hand, melancholy and utopia on the other. In Doubt's hermaphroditic society giving and taking were one. No one went away empty handed. DS 234)

The seeming acceptance of the Hegelian synthesis of the reproducing snails and the potential existence of a utopian endpoint flies in the face of the many criticisms of Hegelian progress contained in the book. In this way, these scenes of snail racing cut across the main theme that progress is a slow, ongoing, never-ending task. One possible interpretation of these snail races is that Grass is suggesting there are situations where it is reasonable to set specific goals to achieve, much like the SPD is doing with the goal of winning the election. Indeed, the tracking of the snails' performance is reminiscent of how Leo Bauer, as a member of SPD Voter Initiative team, is constantly monitoring poll results, assessing the party's progress towards its goals, and looking

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to adjust strategy (TS 418; DS 158). Alternatively, Grass may simply be indicating that within a limited situation, and Ott's situation in the cellar is very limited, it may be possible to accept whatever small steps toward improvements are available.

In örtlich betäubt, the dentist agues for scientific progress made in small increments, and chooses to emphasize that some improvements may even arrive too late to achieve anything because they have taken so long to materialize. But at the end of it all, it is still a system, the all- pervasive healthcare that he envisions, that will mark the end of illness and so the end of the history of suffering. The inconsistencies in some of the dentist's utterances on this topic are highlighted when he uses Marxist terminology to suggest that the new Sickcare will be both the base and superstructure of society, even if it is not ideological (öb 83; LA 82). This echoes the

Marxist thinking and rhetoric employed by the protest movements, as exemplified by the following characterization by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, taken again from his essay 1967/68

Berliner Gemeinplätze: "Die Basis der autoritären Universität lässt sich nicht mehr reparieren, ihr ideologischer Überbau ist zertrümmert, der Innenbau des 'Akademikers', das Gehäus aus verinnerlichter Gewalt, ist durchlöchert." (37) ("The basis of the authoritarian university can no longer be repaired, its ideological superstructure lies in ruins, the interior of the 'Academic', the structure made of internalized violence, is full of holes"). Moreover, while Grass is more than willing to point out the long-term risks and consequences of the absolutist vision of the

Weltgeist, he places a great deal of faith in the ability of humans within the democratic system to remain in control of the incremental changes they are making. As he himself points out, particularly in Tagebuch einer Schnecke in his descriptions of "mief" ("fug"), the unmoving, stale air that accompanies so many political discussions (TS 480-484; DS 222-225), democratic

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systems have significant inertia that also contributes to the stasis in progress that is marked by melancholy (see Chapter 6).

If fug is the unmoving air that is a product of moving forward, it is not the only image that relies on the idea of something viewed as unpleasant being connected with the search for progress. The snail is, in itself, an image that suggests progress is something messy. It makes its way through the damp earth, pushing through dirt, and leaves behind a trail of slime (that evaporates over time, much in the way that people forget how they came to be at a certain point in progress). This also parallels the nitty-gritty work - down in the trenches, as it were – that

Grass and his team are undertaking in the election campaign. Progress is only possible through hard work at the lowest and slowest level, and it is something where you have to get dirty. It is impossible to stay clean by remaining out of the fray and hoping for large-scale leaps to move society forward, although for many getting dirty in this way is distasteful. Lisbeth's reaction to the snail after it has restored her to a fully functioning person reflects this as she now starts to register her disgust of snails and refuses to bring any more to Ott for his collection. Ott notes this change in behavior and attributes it to human nature, as he records in his notebook: "Die

Schönheit der Schnecken kann den Ekel vor Schnecken nicht einholen. Das Normale siegt und bleibt dumm" (TS 521) ("The beauty of snails cannot overcome the disgust with snails.

Normalcy wins out and remains stupid" DS 263). By contrast, Ott's students while he was a biology teacher at the Rosenbaum school had a child-like, immature fascination with insects and the like, including Ott's collection of snails. The adults here have progressed to a particular level of maturity and are now susceptible to a feeling of disgust at things that formerly did not disturb them. The disgust the adults experience shows a willingness to no longer accept the forms of progress that have brought them to where they are and an acceptance that progress can stop.

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Lisbeth is quite happy to collect snails for Ott while still in her child-like persona, and it is the suction slug that brings her back to adulthood. Once an adult, however, she turns her back on the source of her progress and even goes so far as to squash the slug that helped her so much.

The two literary works examined here reflect the political ideas laid out by Grass in his speeches as far as his expectations for progress are concerned, but he fails to deal with the irony of this position as he elevates the incremental progress in a democratic society to the kind of absolute value and marker of progress that he derides in other systems. His focus on the fug of democratic governance and the dirty day-to-day work of meetings and analysis to determine the best way forward show he is not unaware of the dangers of being so caught up in the details that progress can falter. Throughout the late 1960s, Grass consistently presented a clear message in support of his view of parliamentary democracy. Already in his 1965 election speech Es Steht zur Wahl (The Issue) he cited Walt Whitman's poem For you O Democracy (ER 78) and in his

1974 speech Über die Toleranz (On Tolerance), which celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the West German Grundgesetz (Basic Law or constitution), he repeatedly warns of the need to protect the still fragile parliamentary democracy from politicians whom he considered authoritarian, such as the CSU leader Franz Josef Strauß (ER 656). Grass's almost blind faith in parliamentary democracy as an institution, as he envisions it, runs the risk of fetishizing it in the way that he criticizes other absolute professions of faith in a given system. He fails to address the possibility that systemic inertia, what he refers to as fug, may absorb the energy of a progressive incremental change or stall its progress. Even more problematic in this context is the possibility that an insistence on democracy as a theoretical concept could lead to that concept being instrumentalized in ways that themselves damage democracy. Writing in 1944, the philosophers

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, in their book Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of

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Enlightenment), looked to explain how the rational, scientific thinking of the enlightenment could have devolved so far into irrationality, which they described as essentially the

"Selbstzerstörung der Aufklärung" ("self-destruction of the enlightenment"), as to have allowed for the rise of Nazism and the war that followed. In the introduction, they contended that through a dialectic process, rational, enlightened thinking engenders the very irrationality that opposes it and so it is vitally important to maintain vigilance against its destructive tendencies:

Wir hegen keinen Zweifel […] daß die Freiheit in der Gesellschaft vom aufklärenden Denken unabtrennbar ist. Jedoch glauben wir, genauso deutlich erkannt zu haben, daß der Begriff eben dieses Denkens, nicht weniger als die konkreten historischen Formen, die Institutionen der Gesellschaft, in die es verflochten ist, schon den Keim zu jenem Rückschritt enthalten, der heute überall sich ereignet. Nimmt Aufklärung die Reflexion auf dieses rückläufige Moment nicht in sich auf, so besiegelt sie ihr eigenes Schicksal. Indem die Besinnung auf das Destruktive des Fortschritts seinen Feinden überlassen bleibt, verliert das blindlings pragmatisierte Denken seinen aufhebenden Charakter, und darum auch die Beziehung auf Wahrheit. (3)

(We are wholly convinced […] that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as clearly recognized that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms – the social institutions with which it is interwoven – already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today. If enlightenment does not accommodate reflection on this recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. If consideration of the destructive aspect of progress is left to its enemies, blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and its relation to truth. Dialectic xiii)

Grass's defense of democracy based on rationality and enlightenment thinking, his insistence that

"Wahlen sind Appelle an die Vernunft" (ER 79) ("An election is an appeal to reason", The Issue

7), seems at times naïve. His trust in what he considers reasonable and enlightened in his speeches and essays, the victory of rationality in Scherbaum's decision to forego his dog-burning protest in örtlich betäubt, and the slow snail that never gives up in Tagebuch einer Schnecke all suggest a level of optimism that borders on Horkheimer and Adorno's idea of "blindlings pragmatisierte[s] Denken" ("blindly pragmatized thought"). This is not to say that Grass was uncritical of the institutions of government and civil society, and critiquing existing conditions in

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West Germany was indeed pivotal in his role as a public intellectual. Over time his work did in fact become more pessimistic, tackling issues such as overpopulation and environmental destruction. In Kopfgeburten, Grass's next work that dealt directly with an election, which appeared only eight years after Tagebuch einer Schnecke, the image has changed. As Mark Cory points out: "Grass concludes that the appropriate metaphor for the 1980s is no longer the snail, which has surely outraced any measurable progress, but Sisyphus and his stone" (529). At the same time, his work in the late 1960s shows a great reliance on his own understanding of

"Vernunft" (reason) and "Aufklärung" (enlightenment), which were always the first concepts he reached for in a seemingly unthinking way.

Conclusion

The year 1969 marked a watershed in the history of the Federal Republic as the political landscape was upended. The SPD broke through to take on the leading role in government after the conservative government under the CDU had dominated the first twenty years of the nation's body politic. For Günter Grass, this was a victory for the type of revisionist approach he claimed for himself and that he had long propagated in his speeches and essays. Through the election campaigns of the latter half of the 1960s, he argued in favor of the SPD as a party that would constantly look to improve the lives of citizens through incremental reforms rather than by offering great leaps forward to realizations of a utopian vision. In speeches that he gave in the following years, and in particular in his Politisches Tagebuch newspaper columns, he continued to put forward ideas that represented a long, slow, and, above all, never-ending journey of societal progress. In addition to the political realm as the driver of change, Grass also focused on the need for institutional reform, particularly in the area of education as an essential element of a gradual, progressive renewal of society.

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The question of societal progress pervades the two prose works of the period. In örtlich betäubt, Starusch and the dentist exchange visions of the future and how to get there with the dentist's use of the scientific method receiving a more favorable presentation than Starusch's imagined bulldozers. Moreover, Starusch, through his discussion with Scherbaum, persuades his student of the value of approaching problems from a rational point of view, rather than indulging an emotional desire for protests that are mere outbursts that themselves achieve nothing. The revolutionary claims of the protest movements in the late 1960s were to Grass's mind something he had to fight against, as their desire for utopia could end in making the same mistakes that he realized had been made in the name of his generation. The concept of progress in Tagebuch einer

Schnecke is tied to the image of the snail itself, and its constant movement forward, if not in a straight line. Both the crisscrossing of the county by Grass and his team of election workers and the stop-start nature of the various narrative threads in the work echo this continuous movement without a specific destination in mind, which are also present in the idea of the snail never arriving, of never finishing the journey. Grass's rejection of the idea that progress, that is man's movement through history, has a final goal (personified for him in Hegel's concept of the

Weltgeist and the Marx-based arguments of protesting students) also feeds into the character of

Hermann Ott, known as Doubt. As a student, Ott argues against Hegel's philosophy and so finds himself ostracized by otherwise antagonistic groups that unify in their attacks on him, much as

Grass recounts seeing happen to the Social Democratic workers, demonized by both communists and former Nazis in the mines where he worked after the war.

Grass held that rationality and enlightened thinking would drive society's progress, and he considered education an essential element in society's ability to develop such thinking as underlined by the presence of teachers (Starusch, Seifert, and Ott), their students, and schools in

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the literary works. He also saw democracy as the form of government most conducive to allowing the back-and-forth dialogue that would help determine optimum solutions to society's issues. While he criticizes adherents of what he considered absolutist ideologies for a blind faith in their ideas, his own conviction in the rightness of democratic institutions and the enlightenment thinking that he believed underpins them, could also be uncritical at times.

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Chapter 6: Silence – Against and For Progress

As discussed in Chapter 3, Günter Grass's willingness to address publicly any topic of debate in West German society, along with his contributions to election campaigns on behalf of the SPD, established his reputation as a public intellectual in the 1960s. Grass explained in his speech Über die erste Bürgerpflicht (The Citizen's First Duty) that he considered it essential that the citizens within a democratic society had the confidence and the ability to speak up, directing their concerns to their elected representatives and other agents of social and political institutions

(ER 190; Citizen 80). The publisher of the first collection of Grass's speeches translated into

English chose at its title the simple command: "Speak Out!". In this context, it seems counterintuitive to examine silence within örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke, but I will argue in this chapter that the portrayal of silence in the two works contributes to our understanding of Grass's presentation of the social progress he so often advocated. I will analyze how, on the one hand, the existence of silence can prevent progress while on the other it is an opportunity to pause and take stock, itself allowing us to recognize that progress is indeed progressing.

In örtlich betäubt, it is the inability or unwillingness to hear the words of others that is the main expression of this silence; implicit threats or explicit instances of violent behavior are also linked to attempts to silence others. This threatened or explicit violence has a chilling effect on the dialogue necessary to achieve the incremental progress Grass advocates in his public speeches. By contrast, in Tagebuch einer Schnecke, silence has more to do with the inability to produce words, to speak, as both Lisbeth Stomma and Manfred Augst are unable to express

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themselves as they succumb to a state of melancholy. This state, which in the case of Lisbeth is also associated with abuse, represents a break or stop in the course of incremental improvements.

The portrayal of silence also evolves as a pause in the ability to speak represents an integral stage in the continuation of progress, as the ability to step back from this forward movement allows us to recognize the advances we have made. The following sections assess how silence manifests itself as an aural dysfunction in örtlich betäubt and an oral one in Tagebuch einer Schnecke, and then examine how that silence ties in with Grass's espoused public views on progress.

Örtlich betäubt: Silence – Preventing Dialogue, Preventing Progress

Many commentators focus on pain as a central motif in örtlich betäubt, most often relating the pain of Starusch's toothache to a perceived sense of failure. These interpretations provide a starting point for a different reading which views pain as the existence of dialogue and, as such, something to be endured to allow progress to happen. The importance Grass attached to the idea of dialogue as progress comes through in the history of the creation of the novel as well as Grass's writing of a stage play that presents one of its narrative threads. A close reading of the text of the novel shows how violence is often used to silence others, to exclude dialogue, and so ease pain. Moreover, additional representations of silence that do not necessarily result from violence also emphasize the need to maintain dialogue. The tenor of Grass's public speeches during the time of writing the novel also changed to point to an increasing willingness to use violence in West German society and the risk this posed to dialogue.

In The Pain of Polarities, Peter Graves suggests that "the pain which Starusch endures as he tries to come to terms with his situation and his world is no less real" (138) than the pain that the dentist alleviates with anesthetic and pain killers. Similarly, John Reddick asserts that the

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ambivalence between action and impotence is at the core of Starusch's constant "pain and lamentation" (571). The sense of impotence referred to in these comments relates to Starusch's inability to act in the same way he did in his youth. As a late teenager towards the end of the

Second World War, he saw himself as a radical protester, capable of any action, and we find out that he is actually Störtebeker, the leader of the gang that Oskar Matzerath, the narrator of The

Tin Drum joins (BT 448; TD 358). Now he is a middle-aged schoolteacher having to tell his student Scherbaum not to undertake acts of radical protest. Taking the linkage of toothache and failure even further, Carl Enderstein contends in Zahnsymbolik und ihre Bedeutung in Günter

Grass' Werken (The symbolism of teeth in the works of Günter Grass) that images of teeth are prevalent in all of Grass's oeuvres all the way back to his first volume of poetry published in

1957 (5). Moreover, he cites folklore symbolism of teeth as a surrogate indicator of general health, and sexual health in particular, as well as Freudian assertions that the loss of teeth reflects fear of impotence (6-7). Here, he draws parallels between Starusch's toothache and his possible impotence when one of his students tries to seduce him, with his colleague Irmgard Seifert, and in connection with the constant insults from his fiancée, Linde Krings (14-16).

Graves points out further that Starusch is incapable of acting because of pain even while he is "inwardly attracted by the spirited idealism" of Scherbaum's plan to burn his dog in protest against the use of Napalm in Vietnam (139). This potential for political activism and how pain acts as its opposite is also at the center of Ehrhard Friedrichsmeyer's analysis entitled "The

Dogmatism of Pain". He notes the continuous references by characters such as Starusch, the dentist, and Krings to the philosopher Seneca (Ziolkowski counts more than fifty mentions, 63), which constantly reinforce the stoic acceptance of pain as an alternative to taking part in the violence of tyranny (Freidrichsmeyer 37). For Freidrichsmeyer, this pain is the antithesis of

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utopian solutions, such as those proposed either by the Nazis with their elimination of all challengers, or by the student radicals who want to annihilate the social order, as each would require violent actions to eliminate pain: "Essential to both utopias is the faith that through an act of supreme violence there will be an end to pain" (37).

While the assessments outlined above concentrate on the ideas of Starusch as a loser incapable of action, Nicole Thesz suggests that he does achieve his main goal, namely preventing

Scherbaum from carrying out his plan with his constant dialogues with Scherbaum (64). In The

Communicative Event in the Works of Günter Grass, Thesz argues that örtlich betäubt is the first of Grass's works to use what she calls his 'communicative imperative': "[A] dialogic approach to the past and present [… in which] debate [is] a way to strengthen Germany's democratic structures, proposing dialogue as a means to seek rational perspectives and practical solutions"

(5-6). If dialogue can prevent Scherbaum's protest as an act of violence intended to contribute to the achievement of a utopia, then it can also be considered analogous to the pain that opposes action. A lack of dialogue, silence, can thus allow violence to occur, and the novel contains many examples that pair silence and violent action on the one hand and pain and dialogue on the other.

Dialogue is at the core of understanding the relationship between violence, silence, and pain in örtlich betäubt. Starusch's dentist is a stoic who believes in steady progress through small, scientifically based advances and who dreams of a worldwide preventive healthcare program. In advising Starusch how to deal with Scherbaum's plan to burn his dog, he encourages the teacher to maintain his conversations with Scherbaum: "Setzen Sie das Gespräch mit dem

Jungen fort. Gespräche verhindern Taten" (öb, 143) ("Keep up your dialogue with the boy.

Dialogue prevents action." LA 138). Grass showed the importance of dialogue over actions by presenting many of the arguments from the Starusch/Scherbaum dilemma in the form of a stage

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play, Davor (Max. A Play). The main difference between the two representations is that the story of the Krings – both father and daughter – does not occur in the play, and therefore Starusch's murderous fantasies are also missing. Grass’s stage directions add to the reliance on dialogue as

Grass insists that the director do without any form of "Filmeinblendungen, kabarettistische

Einlagen und zusätzliche Massenszenen, die etwas demonstrieren sollen, das der Autor nicht demonstrieren will" (DV 481) ("film fade-ins, night-club acts, and mass scenes intended to demonstrate something that the author may not wish to demonstrate" MP 3), Together with the bare staging determined by Grass, as Paul Konrad Kurz notes in Das Verunsicherte Wappentier

(The National Symbol Losing Confidence), this instruction ensures that dialogue is the means as well as the message: "'Davor' ist ein Dialogstück. Das bedeutet, Gespräch und Argument müssen alles leisten: die Auseinandersetzung und die Unterhaltung, das Spiel und die Vernunft, die

Spannung und den Beweis" (376-377) ("'Max. A Play' is a dialogue play. This means that conversations and arguments have to do it all: Debate and entertainment, play and reason, tension and proof").

The history of the creation of örtlich betäubt and Davor underlines that Grass saw the two works as a commentary on the contemporary situation where he saw a real danger of a slide into violence on both sides of the political spectrum. Grass's initial plan when he started work on

örtlich betäubt, recorded in a note in "ad lectores", the house journal of his publisher, was for a work entitled Verlorene Schlachten (Lost Battles). In the same note, Grass points to how the student movement then had an impact on the development of the novel: "Während des dreijährigen Arbeitsprozesses bot der beginnende, zunehmende, dann stagnierende

Studentenprotest dem Autor Widerstand and Widerspruch" (ER, 410) ("During the three years of writing, the beginning, growing, and then stagnating student protest provided the author with

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resistance and contradiction"). The idea of lost battles would correspond much more easily to the

Krings plot than to that of Scherbaum's proposed protest, and Volker Neuhaus contends that the atmosphere of the student movement led to both the significant rewriting of the novel as well as to the creation of the separate theater play (255-256). The fact that Grass worked simultaneously on the novel and play gives rise, according to Thesz, to the large number of passages in the novel that are direct dialogue, or which are even presented as a dramatic dialogue (59). At times when

Starusch is inventing stories about Ferdinand Krings, Linde, and Schlottau, such as when Linde offers Schlottau a lift from Koblenz rail station or when she meets her father riding a bicycle,

Starusch describes the action using film terminology and presents the dialogues in the form of a film script (öb 44-49; LA 43-48).

As mentioned above, the title of the novel changed in the process of writing from

Verlorene Schlachten to örtlich betäubt and the German title provides a clue as to how we can establish the link between pain and dialogue as the antithesis of silence and action. The English title of the novel, Local Anaesthetic, certainly does justice to Starusch’s need for relief from dental pain; and anesthesia – being without sensation and therefore without pain – plays a major role in the story. At the same time, the root of the German word "betäubt" - anesthetized - is the adjective "taub". While the secondary meaning of "taub" is indeed “without feeling” or

“deadened”, the primary meaning is "deaf" (Taub). The act of deadening pain is also an act of rendering the subject deaf – silencing or making unheard the cause of the pain. This shutting out of sound is then synonymous within the novel with the deadening of pain via anesthetic.

The opening paragraph shows the extent to which sound is being shut out:

Das erzählte ich meinem Zahnarzt. Maulgesperrt und dem Bildschirm gegenüber, die, tonlos wie ich, Werbung erzählte: Haarspray Wüstenrot Weißeralsweiß … Ach, und die

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Tiefkühltruhe, in der zwischen Kalbsnieren und Milch meine Verlobte lagerte, Sprechblasen steigen ließ: 'Halt du dich da raus. Halt du dich da raus … (öb 8)

(I told my dentist all this. Mouth blocked and face to face with the television screen which, soundless like me, told a story of publicity: Hairspray Vesuvius Life Whiterthanwhite... ah yes, and the deep freezer in which my fiancée, lodged between veal kidneys and milk, sent up balloons: "You keep out of this. You keep out of this …" LA 8).

Starusch makes clear that he is himself unable to talk as he is "maulgesperrt" (öb 8) ("mouth blocked", LA 8). His only means of communication is the television that is, however, just as silent as he is, and the only way he can convey any meaning is through the images of advertising that he has mixed with his own imagined stories of his past fiancée Linde Krings. As Starusch’s recounts his relationship with Linde while in the dentist's chair, he details her constant veiled threats intended to silence him, often to keep Starusch from becoming involved in her dispute with her father: "Halt du dich da raus" (öb 8, 54, 82) (“you keep out of this”, LA 8, 54, 81), and

"das geht dich nichts an" (öb 82) ("it’s none of your business”, LA 81). Under the influence of

Linde’s words, which he does not want to hear, but also feeling the effect of the dentist's local anesthetic, Starusch fantasizes again and again about killing her in a variety of ways, for example, by strangling her with a bicycle chain (öb 52; LA 51), shooting her (öb 74; LA 72), and blowing her up (öb 168; LA 163), although she somehow always reappears in the deep freezer of the TV commercials. In one case, Starusch makes an explicit connection between his killing

Linde (and in this case her mother and their young son) and the need to silence a source of noise:

"[ich verließ] kurz nach siebzehn Uhr unser Schlafzimmer […] und erschoss […] meinen dreijährigen Sohn Klaus, dessen vorsätzliches Quengeln und Kreischen meinen um sechzehn

Uhr, nach der Zwölfstundenschicht begonnenen Schlaf mehrmals unterbrochen, dann verhindert hatte" (öb 73-74) (“I left our bedroom shortly after 5 P.M. […] and shot first my three-year-old

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son Klaus, whose persistent whining and screaming had several times interrupted, then definitively put an end to my sleep, begun at 4 P.M. after a twelve-hour shift", LA 72).

In addition to unleashing imaginary violence on his former fiancée, Starusch is guilty of actual physical violence against Irmgard Seifert, again with aim of silencing her words that he does not want to hear (Chapter 7 presents a more detailed treatment of the issue of violence against women in Grass's work in general as well as in this work). While Starusch and Seifert take an early morning walk together, Irmgard bemoans her failings and recounts once again her tainted past from her wartime service in the BDM. Starusch tries to silence her by blocking her mouth, as his was blocked at the dentist's office, except he tries to do this by kissing her: "als ich sie wütend küsste, um ihr das Maul zu stopfen, jawohl das Maul zu stopfen" (öb 160-161)

("kissing her furiously to shut her up, that’s right, to shut her up" LA 155). However, his kiss is not sufficient to silence her as she continues her sentence immediately afterwards: "[ich bekam], kaum weg von ihr, das Ende eines unterbrochenen Satzes zu hören" (öb 161) ("I was subjected, the moment I let her go, to the end of an interrupted sentence" LA 155). As Seifert talks further,

Starusch uses real violence to silence her: "Heute früh, kurz [..] nachdem ich sie geküsst […] hatte, ohrfeigte ich meine Kollegin Irmgard Seifert […] kappte ich ihren Satz mit einer linkshändigen Ohrfeige." (öb 161) ("This morning, shortly after I had kissed her [...] I slapped my colleague Irmgard Seifert in the face. […] I lopped off her sentence with a left-handed slap in the face", LA 156). Starusch is absolutely clear about his intention to silence Irmgard by cutting off her sentence.

In a similar manner, Scherbaum uses physical violence against his girlfriend Vero

Lewand after she has told others about his plan at a party, involving them in a conversation about his proposed action, something he did not want her talking about. Scherbaum first slaps Vero,

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and then sets about her such that Starusch has to separate them: "Scherbaum ohrfeigte Vero

Lewand noch im Treppenhaus. […] Weil Scherbaum im Hof weiterschlug (er ohrfeigte nicht mehr, er schlug drein) trennte ich beide" (öb 190) ("Still on the stairs, Scherbaum slapped Vero

Lewand’s face. […] In the courtyard Scherbaum dealt more blows (no more slaps in the face, now he was punching) and I separated them" LA 183-184). Not only is the physical violence in these instances by men on women, but the women also accept the violence, and their accompanying silencing, as something they deserved. Vero begs her boyfriend to let her stay (öb

190; LA 184) while Seifert accepts that she was in the wrong and apologizes (öb 162; la 156)

(Pickar 275).

Another instance of violent silencing also occurs between Starusch and Seifert but this time it does not involve physical violence against an individual (Pickar 266). As they sit one evening listening to Gregorian chants, Seifert comments in religious terms on the impact of the music on her. Starusch 'silences' the music, and therefore also Seifert's quasi-religious experience, by destroying the record while making a sarcastic comment about her aquarium fish:

"Sie war erstaunt und verletzt, als ich die Langspielplatte vom Teller nahm und mit einem

Bierflaschenöffner zerkratzte: 'Erzählen Sie das Ihren Zierfischen jeweils kurz vorm Krepieren'"

(öb 229) ("She was surprised and hurt when I took the long-playing record off the turntable and scratched it with my bottle opener: 'Tell that to your ornamental fish before they pass on'" LA

221). Again here, Seifert makes no attempt to defend herself against this act but meekly accepts what has happened as she simply replies: "Ja, […] ich werde das Wasser erneuern müssen" (öb

229) ("Yes, […] I'll have to change the water" LA 221)

By contrast, Linde's threatened violence never becomes truly physical. Although she keeps threatening Starusch, she never physically attacks him. Similarly, she silences her father's

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desire to refight his battles by beating him in each re-enactment, but then she leaves him to suffer his defeats alone. She does succeed in silencing Starusch once and for all, but not through physical violence, but rather by simply buying him off. She learns of his infidelities and sees this as an opportunity to get rid of him, and more importantly, keep him out of her dispute with her father: "Halt du dich da raus. Oder besser: Hau ab. Ich mein es gut mit dir. Brauchst du Geld?"

(öb 82) ("You keep out of it. Or better still: Let’s split, I have your interests at heart. Do you need money?" LA 81).

Starusch is not the only one in the novel to talk of inflicting pain. Linde appears (in

Starusch's imagination) in the dentist's television as a children's storyteller and recounts the fairy tale of the king who waged war against his seven neighbors because he wanted to give his daughter a gift of their "sauber abgehackte Zungen" (öb 114) ("neatly chopped-off tongues", LA

112) – a clear method for silencing them all. Even the dentist is not completely immune from a willingness to use pain as a means to an end. When Starusch wants to launch one of his violent fantasies, the dentist threatens him with pain: "Aber der Zahnarzt besteht auf Gewaltverzicht und droht, bei ausbleibendem Widerruf, die Anästhesie des Unterkiefers zu unterlassen." (öb 102)

("But the dentist insists on my abjuring violence and threatens, if no retraction is forthcoming, to treat my lower jaw without anesthesia" LA 100).

Starusch's presentation of violence through the dentist's television screen is not limited to murderous re-imaginings of his time with his fiancée. Sitting in the dentist's chair, he argues in favor of a single classless society under the guidance of pedagogically oriented structures consisting only of learners who are all also teachers, a counterpart to the dentist's worldwide preventive healthcare system (öb 83; LA 82). However, he maintains that revolutionary violence is the way to such an idyll. He explains that he would build his society on top of the nothingness

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left by a swath of destruction he has conjured up on the TV screen. To this end, channeling the words of the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse on pacification (232), Starusch unleashes a fleet of destructive bulldozers to remove all existing consumer and industrial society:

"den gesamten Ramsch […] wegräumen, […] damit sich […] die Basis verändern lässt und Platz entsteht für ein befriedetes Dasein." (öb 101) ("to clear away all the crap [...] to make room […] for new foundations on which to build a pacified existence" LA 99). Here, Starusch not only talks about clearing out all the detritus of modern consumer life, but also in Marxist terms of changing the basis of society. Later, he makes even clearer that the bulldozers will destroy much of the economic infrastructure: "Beliebig viele Bulldozer ebneten Einkaufszentren, Lagerhallen,

Ersatzteilmagazine, […] Walzstraßen und Fließbänder ein. Warenhäuser fielen aufs Knie und entzündeten sich gegenseitig. Gesang lag darüber: Burn ware-house, burn" (öb 118) ("Brigades on brigades of bulldozers flattened shopping centers, warehouses, spare parts depots, […] assembly lines, and conveyor belts. Department stores fall on their knees and set each other on fire. And over it all a chant: Burn, warehouse, burn" LA 116). The final phrase here is a direct quote from a flier authored and distributed in May 1967 by the counterculture commune

Kommune I with the title "Wann brennen die Kaufhäuser in Berlin?" ("When will department stores in Berlin burn?"), which discussed the possibility of having a Vietnam-like experience in

West Germany and so underlined the link between Starusch's vision and the violent tendencies of the student movement (Libertad!).8

8 In his translation, Ralph Mannheim adds a note that points out the word "warehouse" in the phrase "burn ware-house burn", which appears in English in the original, is a mistranslation of the German word Warenhaus which means department store. Mannheim also chose to remove the hyphen in "ware-house", which is the spelling used in the original flier and in Grass's works whenever he quotes the phrase. 144

Silence, Dialogue, and Action

If, as the dentist suggests, dialogue prevents action, then by silencing others, and so taking away the pain of listening to them, Starusch can become a man of deeds. Early on he blames his inability to respond to Scherbaum's request for a reaction to events in the Mekong

Delta on the distraction of his toothache (öb 15; LA 15). However, when he chooses to silence someone else, covering up the pain of hearing their words, he can imagine himself as a man of action – and his action can also involve violently silencing others. He immediately justifies to himself his attempts to silence Seifert with a kiss and then a slap in the face: "So lächerlich eine

Ohrfeige ist, ist sie doch eine Tat" (öb 161) ("A slap in the face may be ridiculous, but it's still an act" (LA 156). He also now sees himself in a position to slap Linde, and, moreover, imagines receiving praise from Linde's father for doing so. "In rascher Schnittfolge traf ich noch einmal einseitig Irmgard Seifert, doch dann immer wieder links rechts Linde, links rechts Linde […] in

Gegenwart ihres Vaters […] 'Großartig!' sagte er. 'Großartig. Nur so wird sie zu Vernunft kommen"' (öb 161-162) ("in quick sequence I struck Irmgard Seifert once again one-sidedly, but then over and over again left right left right Linde, […] in the presence of her father: […]

'Splendid!' he said. 'Splendid. Only way to bring her to reason'" (LA 156).

The removal of pain also results in the destructive rage that lets Starusch unleash his bulldozers, an action that is clearly linked to a lack of both pain and sound:

Aber kein Schmerz, nur Wut. [...] Maulgesperrt Wut. Wut, die zum Himmel schweigt. [...] Ich zeichne, erschaffe zehntausend wütige Bulldozer, die im Fernsehen, nein, überall aufräumen, die den Ramsch, Überfluss, und komfortablen Stillstand erfassen, knautschen, stapeln, umstoßen und […] in das Nichts kippen... (öb 117-118).

(But no pain, only rage. […] Silenced rage. Rage silent to high heaven. […] I draw, create ten thousand enraged bulldozers, which clean up on TV, no, everywhere, which attack, crush, pile up the rubbish, the superfluity, the lethargic comfort, topple it over and […] dump it […] into nothingness. LA 115-116).

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And here, having silenced the world, he sees the possibility of further action in constructing his new society. During his final session at the dentist's, with his pain almost at an end, Starusch again imagines himself taking action as he replaces Scherbaum and burns a dog in front of the cake eating ladies at the Kempinski. When the treatment is over and he is fully pain free, and for once outside of the dentist's office, he recounts his most brutal vision of murdering his fiancée; as the supervisor of the wave pool at a coastal resort, he turns up the wave power and so beats not only Linde but also her husband and their two children to a watery pulp. (öb 259-263; LA

250-255)

The combination of an unwillingness to listen – to decline dialogue – and violent action reflects a West German society dealing with at times violent student protests and the rise of a new nationalist political party in the NPD. We can view Starusch as the warning of the potential for violence even among the seemingly non-violent population. In his public statements in the late 1960s, Grass emphasized the need for conversations that prevent action and so also mitigate against a descent into a political culture based on violence, whether revolutionary or not. He constantly argued (much as the dentist does) for the steady accumulation of progress towards goals of democratizing society, compared to the desire for a revolutionary overhaul of society's structures. In particular, he saw the danger of an increased unwillingness in society to listen, and the concomitant increased willingness to indulge in violence. Grass pointed this out in his speeches, especially following an upsurge in violent acts in the spring of 1968, referring in particular to two events that epitomized the issue: the attempt by a right-wing radical to assassinate the student leader Rudi Dutschke, and the firebombing of two department stores in

Frankfurt by left-wingers Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. In his speech on the May Day holiday that year, later published under the title Gewalt wird wieder Gesellschaftsfähig (Violence

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Rehabilitated), he took issue with all parties that were no longer willing to enter into the dialogue that democracy requires. As an example, he juxtaposes the calls by the Springer press empire for the SDS to be banned with the SDS demanding the expropriation of the Springer organization

(ER 291; Violence 123). He laments the violent riots over the Easter weekend following the attempt on Dutschke's life which resulted in two deaths in Munich, and sees in them a missed opportunity for initiating a dialogue with the aim of educating the populace: "Nicht eine vorbereitende Pause trat ein, der gutorganisierte Kundgebungen mit aufklärender politischer

Tendenz hätten folgen können, vielmehr reagierte die apolitische Emotion" (ER 284) ("There ought to have been a preparatory pause, followed by well-organized demonstrations calculated to enlighten the public. Instead there was an emotional reaction without political content" (Violence

118).

In much the same way as Grass saw a need to rewrite the novel to include the material on

Scherbaum's plan as a comment on incidents of violence involving protesting students, his speeches and public statements show a change in his response over time as he saw heightened rhetoric on the streets on both sides of the political divide. In his November 1968 speech,

Radikalismus in Deutschland (Radicalism in Germany), as he had done in his May 1 speech, he emphasized how a lack of dialogue and listening on both sides, had led to violent acts in April of that year:

Dabei ließe sich leicht beweisen, daß ohne die monatelange Hetze mehrerer Springer- Zeitungen der Dutschke-Attentäter, Josef Bachmann, kaum ein Ziel für seine latente Aggressivität gefunden hätte; dabei ließe sich leicht beweisen, daß ohne die Gewaltaufrüfe des SDS, daß es ohne die Zynismen des Rechtanwaltes Mahler und seine Verharmlosung der Kommune-Flugblätter – 'Burn, ware-house, burn! – kaum zu den Frankfurter Kurzschlußtaten gekommen wäre. (Radikalismus, 195).

(It can be easily shown that without the months-long smear campaign by several Springer newspapers, the Dutschke assassin Josef Bachmann would hardly have found a target for

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his latent aggression; it can be easily shown that, without the call to violence from the SDS, without the cynical remarks by the lawyer Mahler, defending the Kommune I fliers – 'Burn, ware-house burn!' – the Frankfurt arson attacks would hardly have come to pass.)

The reference to the phrase "burn ware-house burn!", from the Kommune 1 flier, also anticipating its use in Starusch's vision of destructive bulldozers, marks a direct criticism of the actions of the protesting students. This criticism contrasts starkly with Grass's much milder comments when he contributed, in the fall of 1967, to the defense of Kommune I members Fritz

Teufel and Rainer Langhans when they were charged with incitement to arson for the flier that included the line "burn ware-house burn!". Grass was one of a number of academics and publicists who argued that the flier could not be regarded as a serious attempt at incitement to commit a crime (Enzensberger, U 184). Instead, in a court briefing, Grass described this and other Kommune I fliers and happenings as the "pubertäre Erzeugnisse einiger verwirrter, schon

älterlicher Knaben" ("adolescent products of a few confused, somewhat overgrown boys") who had succumbed to "schwärmerische[r] Anarchismus" ("impassioned anarchism") (185). In

örtlich betäubt, Starusch writes a letter to send to prosecutors in the case of Scherbaum's arrest and in doing so, uses wording very similar to Grass's own public intervention in the case of

Teufel and Langhans (öb 191-192; LA 185).

Silence Without Violence

Silence in the novel is not limited to the violent silencing described so far. The story has many instances of attempted communication not succeeding because of one party's inability to hear what is being communicated. Cartoon speech balloons, where the words cannot be heard, regardless of whether the communication reaches its intended recipient, is a method Grass uses throughout. For example, Linde sends up a balloon as she emerges from the deep freeze in the

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opening paragraph or simply insults Starusch as "Du Superfeigling …" (öb 103) ("You super- yellow belly …" LA 101) again from within the freezer in an ad on the television. Starusch recounts a discussion with his dentist that takes place as an inner dialogue purely in speech bubbles (öb 252, LA 244) and, just before Vero attempts to seduce him, Starusch is imagining what he could say to her "Schon wollte ich einige Danton-Zitate spazieren lassen, schon wollte ich ein paar Sprechblasen mit meinem Bedürfnis nach zärtlichem Verstehen füllen, schon war ich bereit, meine Einsamkeit zum Abbruch anzubieten" (öb 215) ("I was going to trot out a few quotations from Danton, to fill a balloon or two with my need for tender understanding, I was going to yield up my loneliness for demolition" LA 207-208). An extension of this is when the speech balloons are themselves empty. For example, when Starusch and Vero Lewand are sitting at a table having coffee and cake at the Kempinski, they are unable to communicate with each other leaving the empty speech balloons as an opportunity for Linde once again to invade

Starusch's thoughts via a memory of their walks along the Rhine river: "[Vero] rauchte an mir vorbei. Ich rauchte an ihr vorbei. Pausen warfen geräumige Sprechblasen, die für Dialoge auf der windige Rheinpromenade zu Andernach Platz boten" (öb 231-232). ("She smoked past me.

Pauses cast spacious balloons offering room for dialogues on the windy Rhine Promenade in

Andernach" LA 223).

In the same vein as empty speech balloons, some forms of protest in the book end up as simply air, negating any possibility of the communication succeeding. Starusch specifically uses this image when discussing the protest against Krings in Koblenz where the target of the protest simply evaded it, and a similar situation at a recent demonstration against Federal Chancellor

Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who avoided protesters by changing the location of a wreath laying ceremony at the last minute: "Was immer die Leute auf die Straße gebracht hat: ob vor einer

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Woche gegen Kiesinger, ob im Sommer fünfundvierzig gegen Krings, nichts als Sprechblasen..."

(öb 43). ("Whatever may have brought those people out on the streets, a week ago against

Kiesinger or in the summer of 1954 against Krings, it was all hot air" LA 42). Scherbaum dispenses with other oral/aural forms of protest in much the same way. When Starusch suggests they go together to a protest against the Vietnam war, he dismisses the idea: "Das ist nur das

übliche Luftablassen" (öb 217) ("Just the usual blowing off steam" LA 209). He also rejects

Starusch's proposal that he could write a protest song as something ineffectual: "Das ist doch zum Einlullen […] Das bewegt doch nichts" (öb 164) ("Only lulls people to sleep. […] No impact" LA 158).

A further aspect of the portrayal of silence in the novel is the fact that Irmgard Seifert has silenced herself. She has locked away the secret of her wartime denunciation of a local farmer when she was a member of the BDM, which only comes to light again when she discovers her old letters in a suitcase in her mother's attic. By refusing to confront this past action, she has denied herself the opportunity to come to terms with it and, as Starusch often suggests she should, understand that her actions were without consequence. Even after she has revealed her secret to Starusch, opening up the possibility for dialogue, she insists on shutting down any possibility that this dialogue could occur. When Starusch not only points out that her denunciation did not have an immediate impact on the farmer concerned – he had a long life and died much later of natural causes – but also offers to forgive her for her act as a seventeen-year- old, she can only snap back at him: "Ich verbiete Ihnen, bei aller Freundschaft, derart oberflächlich meinen Konflikt lösen zu wollen" (öb 142) ("Friendship or not, I forbid you to try to resolve my conflict by such superficial means" LA 137). Seifert promises herself that she will stand in front of her class and read the letters, but never does so. She recognizes that she lacks

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the courage to do so but expects to receive inspiration from Scherbaum's public protest, which would be enough to prompt her to reveal her own secrets publicly. In looking to Scherbaum, she is not making a rational decision to come forward based on a analysis of the pros and cons of such an action, but rather is backing away from dialogue into a quasi-religious hope that

Scherbaum's action will provide the magic that will break the barrier holding her back (öb 198;

LA 191), and even says she would be willing, were it not for her position as a teacher, to take him as a lover to encourage him to go ahead (öb 224; LA 216).

But the dog burning does not happen, and neither does Seifert's revelation of her past to her class, as she chooses to give up on this action and its associated salvation. It is not the burning of Scherbaum's dog that provides real relief to Seifert from her inner struggle, but the burning of the letters themselves. Starusch sees an image of his mother who advises him that getting rid of the letters is the first step to a successful engagement with Irmgard. Speaking the

Danzig dialect of Starusch's childhood, she tells him: "Ärstmal missen die dammlichen Briefe wäg. Denn da mecht kein Friede nech sain meegen, wenn se emmer von damals mecht reden ond wie jewesen ist daamals" (öb, 253) ("Those stupid letters gotta go first. 'Cause there won't be any peace if she keeps on talking about those days and the things that happened" LA 245). Starusch asks Seifert for the letters, using the phrase: "Ich will dich davon befreien" (öb, 253) ("I want to set you free of them" LA 245). She gives them to him on their next walk in the Grünewald and they burn them. Thus, Seifert's ability to reveal her past has effectively been silenced and the confession that was to be heard by her students can no longer take place. By refusing dialogue,

Seifert has denied herself the opportunity to progress.

While violence can silence an individual or society, örtlich betäubt shows also that its impact can be prevented or even undone. Starusch's destructive bulldozers are set into reverse by

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the dentist through the simple expedient of rewinding the video tape: "Wir haben uns erlaubt,

Ihren Abräumungsprozeß aufzuzeichnen […] [Sie werden] erleben, wie sich nach dem Nichts – und aus dem Nichts – wieder der Zustand wie vor dem Nichts herstellt" (öb 119) ("We have taken the liberty of recording your demolition process. [....] you will see how after Nothing – and from Nothing – the status quo ante Nothing is created" LA 117). Silence is also undone through the constant reawakening of Linde and the reemergence of consumer goods from within the deep freezer where, as Starusch himself says, "der Schmerz sich […] frischhält" (öb, 30) ("pain keeps fresh" LA 30). Taberner ascribes to the deep freezer both the repressed memories of the novel's characters as well as the "sexual frigidity of a collectively neurotic society overwhelmed by the need to compensate for past and present evils" (Taberner 1998 72). The constant reappearance not just of Linde but also the consumer products destroyed by Starusch suggests an uncanny resurgence of that which – at least in Starusch's mind – should remain hidden and therefore silenced.

Ultimately, Scherbaum provides evidence not only that words are the antidote to violence, but that even when working with words, dialogue and compromise are necessary.

Having given up the potentially revolutionary tactic of protesting by burning his dog, he instead takes on the editorship of the student newspaper (öb 227; LA 219), a role more in accord with

Grass's proposal for enlightening the public with words in reaction to the street violence of April

1968 discussed earlier. As planned, Scherbaum writes his first article on Helmuth Hübener, a wartime activist who used words as his weapon of resistance in that he transcribed, translated, and distributed news reports from the BBC. The other members of the editorial board, however, prevent Scherbaum from including in the article a criticism of Kiesinger that he had originally intended to write (öb 241; LA 233). Having embarked on the road of progress, Scherbaum

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cannot move forward unhindered with his plans but has to stop and take a pause, involving himself in a dialogue with his fellow students on the editorial board. In doing so, he foreshadows the stop-start view of progress that Grass would develop more fully in Tagebuch einer Schnecke.

Presentations of violence in örtlich betäubt are often tied to idea of silencing another or, having done so, finding the ability to act and possibly inflict further violence. Early on, Starusch makes clear what has to be his public stance towards acts of violence: "Als Studienrat für

Deutsch und also Geschichte sind mir Gewaltaktionen verhasst, zutiefst verhasst." (öb 32) ("As a teacher of German and therefore History, I have a deep-seated horror of violence" LA 32).9 His private imaginings, on the other hand, always use violence to silence and destroy, echoing the violence and lack of dialogue that Grass saw in the protest movements of both left and right- wing politics. An interpretation of the novel that links pain to dialogue does, however, lend the final scene a more optimistic note. Two years on, Starusch has failed to become a consistent man of action, proven as much by the fact that he and Irmgard are still only engaged, not married.

More importantly, the dental treatment Starusch underwent has to be undone because of an infection and abscess. As Starusch laments, pain – that is dialogue – cannot be held at bay:

"Nichts hält vor. Immer neue Schmerzen" (öb 264) ("Nothing lasts. There will always be pain.

LA 255)

Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke: Silence as Melancholy – A Step Forward (?)

In contrast to örtlich betäubt, where silence is mostly portrayed as an utterance not being heard, in Tagebuch einer Schnecke silence has much more to do with an inability to create the

9 Ralph Mannheim's translation reads simply "As a teacher of German and history" (LA 32). To my mind, this misses an important nuance in the use of the word "also" in the original German, which implies that a teacher of German is automatically a teacher of history as well. I have thus included the work "therefore" in my translation. 153

utterance in the first place. In this latter work, Grass still occasionally uses the image of deafness, reminiscent of örtlich betäubt, when talking about potentially violent people: "Die Gewalttätigen und die Gerechten hören schlecht" (TS 287) ("The violent and the righteous are hard of hearing"

DS 26). For the most part, however, he describes attempts by students and members of the APO to disrupt his campaign appearances – something that would count as violent silencing in örtlich betäubt -- as more of a minor annoyance than a major disruption of his ability to convey his message (TS 313, 442; DS 51, 183). This is also the case for interruptions caused by right-wing political opponents (TS 518; DS 260-261) and the crowd of right-wing Jewish protesters chanting "Die Deutschen sind Mörder", (TS 373) ("The Germans are murderers" DS 112) at a reading during a trip to Israel on the anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht.

The narratives of Lisbeth Stomma within the story of Hermann Ott (Doubt) and of

Manfred Augst show much more clearly how an inability to express oneself can be interpreted as a metaphor for a breakdown in progress. This breakdown is not, however, a complete halt in moving forward. Instead, as Grass laid out in his speech Vom Stillstand im Fortschritt (Of Stasis in Progress), it is an opportunity to assess what has been achieved so far, and so is an important step in our ability to recognize our own progress. The speech, which Grass wrote as a contribution to the celebrations of the five-hundredth anniversary of Dürer's birth, takes as its basis an excursion on the subject of melancholy and uses Dürer's engraving Melancholia I as its inspiration. The development of the ideas for the speech represents an additional narrative thread throughout the book and the speech itself appears as its final chapter (TS 544-567; DS 286-310).

Together, the two narratives and the speech show how Grass depicted the concept of melancholy and its relationship to progress as laid out in the Dürer speech. Kant's concept of emergence from immaturity as the basis of enlightenment helps assess the story of Lisbeth Stomma as an

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indication of how silence, and the melancholy that engenders it, is one step on a path of progress.

The change in Lisbeth from a limited ability to speak to complete silence dominated by melancholy to – after her black bile is removed – a fully capable individual represents moving forward in the sense of a Kantian awakening to enlightenment. The melancholy silence of

Manfred Augst, on the other hand, presents a challenge to the interpretation of melancholy as a stage on the continuum of progress,

In his 1917 essay Trauer und Melancholie (Mourning and Melancholy), Sigmund Freud established that mourning, while associated with feelings such as emotional pain or loss of interest in one's environment, is a normal part of processing the loss of a love object, whether a person or a concept. Mourning work, which leads to an understanding and acceptance of the loss, eventually allows the sufferer to find a new object of affection and so return to a healthy state of mind (197-199). On the other hand, a sufferer unable to identify the lost object cannot process the loss through mourning work and the depressed state of mind remains, causing the sufferer to succumb to melancholy (200). Cosgrove succinctly summarizes the condition in her essay

Melancholy Competitions: W.G. Sebald Reads Günther Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer: "The melancholy sufferers find themselves in a state of inexplicable sadness which cannot be linked to any external cause" (2006, 220). She expands on this in her 2014 book Born under Auschwitz:

Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature, in which she analyzes melancholy as a performative phenomenon (4). Against the background of the medical, religious, and romantic interpretations of melancholy, she presents a concept of melancholy as being "bad" and "good"

(her quotation marks). "Bad" melancholy, a melancholy without a clear cause, was once considered a sign of the sin of sloth or even demonic possession (16) while "good" melancholy was associated with creativity as the sufferer would shift "incessantly between the poles of

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listlessness and inspiration" (17). Cosgrove's concept of "bad" melancholy helps with an assessment of the melancholic situation of Manfred Augst as discussed later.

In his speech on melancholy, Grass begins his contemporary exposition on the topic by laying out various examples of how it represents an inevitable stage in the development of a modern society driven by technical advances. The epitome of technological progress at the time was the first Apollo moon landing, which happened during the summer of 1969 while he was on the campaign trail for the SPD. He satirizes this progress not only by suggesting that the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pay tribute to Dürer by inscribing the artist's initials in moon dust while walking on the moon's surface, but also by having them lay out the utensils from the Melancholia I engraving. These utensils include, for example, the scales, the hourglass, the magic number square, and the open compass, and were themselves symbols of the scientific progress in Dürer's time (TS 544; DS 286). However, even where society is based on incremental increases in consumer wealth and choice, Grass points us to the downside of modern consumerism. He pictures the melancholic angel as a worker on a production line, repeating the same soulless task of manufacturing souvenir replicas of herself and suffering the ennui of the modern world of work (TS 546-547; DS 288-289). Leisure time does not help as the same angel, reincarnated as Touristica, encounters similar feelings of surfeit and boredom through the never- ending possibilities provided by consumer travel of sights to see and to photograph. He pictures the suburban housewife, with tranquilizers or dildo in hand, looking for connections and answers to a world lacking in communication despite a glut of information and economic growth (TS

554; DS 296-297). Grass adds that the ideology-based systems of the industrialized world have failed to deliver what they promised. Both the pursuit of happiness of US American capitalism and the communist utopia of the Soviet Union have contributed to feelings of melancholy. He

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sees the insistence on the pursuit of happiness in the former as nothing more than a surface reversal of melancholic puritanism, while the projected happiness of Soviet propaganda merely hides bureaucratically engineered misery and the criminalization of skepticism (TS 557-558, DS

300).

Grass also points to the difficulty in avoiding melancholy, as he himself had experienced it in his own work on the election campaign trail, in other words while working on behalf of the kind of enlightenment-based incremental progress he has always advocated:

Auch mich überfiel oft genug, während ich sprach und während sich meine Rede selbsttätig vortrug, schwermachende Mutlosigkeit. Also schwieg ich, während ich sprach. Also gab ich auf, während ich noch Teilziele als erreichbar beschrieb. Also war ich—und viele gleich mir — schlecht entlohnt im Dienst der Aufklärung tätig und hockte dennoch unbewegt inmitten papierener Argumente, umstellt von sich widersprechenden Reformmodellen, angeödet vom Streit der Experten, unter einer Glasglocke: abwesend da. (TS 561)

(Often while speaking, while my speech automatically delivered itself, I was overcome by leaden discouragement. I fell silent while speaking. While – like many others – active for small reward in the service of enlightenment, I sat dejectedly, surrounded by paper arguments and mutually contradictory projects for reform, crushed by the conflicting opinions of the experts, as though under a glass bell: absently present. DS 303-304).

This passage again underlines the connection between feeling melancholy and being reduced to silence as Grass explains that the feelings of discouragement force him into the paradox of falling silent while still speaking

Self-contradictory images, such as being silent while speaking, pervade the speech, and the most important of these is the concept of stasis in progress – the idea that standing still is as much a part of progress as moving forward. Progress can only occur if it is interrupted, if pauses provide the opportunity to take stock and also to question what has happened until now such that a new paradox appears – namely the certainty of doubt: "Stillstand im Fortschritt. Das Zögern und Einhalten zwischen den Schritten. Denken über Gedachtes, bis nur noch der Zweifel gewiss

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ist" (TS 557) ("Stasis in progress. Hesitation, halts between steps. Thought about thought, until the only remaining certainty is doubt." DS 299). In the final sentence of the speech, Grass gives us the clearest expression of the view that periods of being stationary, caused or accompanied by melancholy, are a necessary and essential element in our ability to recognize and understand our progress: "Nur wer den Stillstand im Fortschritt kennt und achtet, wer schon einmal, wer mehrmals aufgegeben hat, wer auf dem leerem Schneckenhaus gesessen und die Schattenseite der Utopie bewohnt hat, kann Fortschritt ermessen (TS 567) ("Only those who know and respect stasis in progress, who have once and more than once given up, who have sat on an empty snail shell and experienced the dark side of utopia, can evaluate progress" DS 310).

Lisbeth Stomma: Melancholy as Enlightenment

In the fictional narrative in Tagebuch einer Schnecke – the story of Hermann Ott and his flight from Danzig during the war – the character who most clearly exhibits symptoms of the sadness associated with melancholy is Lisbeth Stomma, daughter of the owner of the bicycle repair shop where Ott takes refuge in the basement. When we initially meet her, she does not say very much. Her lack of communication results from the trauma of losing the father of her son and then her infant son himself - both in the first days of the war. The son was caught under the wheels of a carriage of the retreating army when the horses shied at the sound of dive bombers and the child's father died in battle as an infantry man (TS 394, DS 134). She decides that she wants to spend all her time in cemeteries and can only talk in terms of her cemetery visits; instead of announcing she is going shopping for groceries, she says that after visiting the cemetery, she will shop for groceries. As this point, she is regarded as mentally ill, "Man nannte sie dwatsch, meschugge oder plemplem" (TS 395) ("People referred to her as cracked, nuts, or meshuga" DS 134), and even her father Anton lets Ott know about her by describing her mental

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state: "Da ist noch Lisbeth, was maine Tochter ist. Die is nich janz richtich im Kopp" (TS 393)

("There's nobody else but Lisbeth; that's my daughter. She's not quite right in the head" DS 133).

The turning of the tide of the war following the Battle of Stalingrad brings good news for

Ott and presages major changes for Lisbeth. Ott's life improves as Stomma no longer beats him regularly and gives him better food. Most importantly, Stomma sends Lisbeth to the cellar to sleep with Ott. Being Ott's sex slave does nothing for Lisbeth, and she does not actively participate in, or take pleasure from, the act. Indeed, it reminds her of the uninspired and uninspiring relationship she had had with the railroad worker who fathered her child: "Offenbar erinnerte Lisbeth, wie sie es bei dem Eisenbahner gemacht und bekommen hatte: legte sich einfach hin, machte die Beine breit" (TS 446) ("Evidently, Lisbeth remembered how she had done it and had it done to her by the railroad man: she simply lay down and spread her legs" DS

187). While Ott takes advantage of the situation, he does also want Lisbeth to be an equal and active partner: "Er gab sich Mühe [...] wollte sie heiß haben und zum Überfließen bringen: Glück als Programm. Er wollte, daß sie 'Ja' sagte und 'Jetzt'." (TS 446) ("He tried hard […] he wanted her hot and overflowing: his program was happiness. He wanted her to say 'Yes' and 'Now'." DS

187-188). Despite Ott's best efforts to waken sexual feelings in her, she does not react to him in any way, simply lying under him, silent and sore, until he is finished (TS 446; DS 187). It is at this stage in the narrative, whether or not it is a direct result of Lisbeth's changed relationship with Ott, that she goes completely dumb, and now does not even talk of cemeteries:

Als Lisbeth Stomma stumm wurde, änderte sich nichts außer ihrem Verzicht auf die Zunge. Weiter ging sie zum Friedhof, auch auf den Markt, der immer weniger bot. Wie vorher kam sie zu Zweifel und legte sich für ihn auf die Matratze. Aber kein Wort mehr über Geschehnisse zwischen Grabsteinen. (TS 452)

(When Lisbeth Stomma went mute, nothing changed except that she dispensed with the use of her tongue. She kept going to the cemetery and also to the market, which had less

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and less to offer. She still went to the cellar and lay down on the mattress for Doubt. But no more talk about happenings amid tombstones. DS 194)

The use of the word "Verzicht" ("dispensed") suggests that she made a conscious decision not to talk anymore, as if an additional burden placed on her by her new situation with Ott, or perhaps the memory of the railroad man and her lost child, has increased the melancholy in her to a new level.

As Ott sets up snail races in Stomma's cellar, Lisbeth shows at least some interest and enjoyment in following her snails (which always seem to win). However, her silence persists until Ott places a previously unknown variety of slug on her skin. Grass relates that the practice of putting snails and slugs on skin was known to Persians and Hittites (TS 496, DS 237), and Ott has placed snails and slugs on Lisbeth's skin before. This new slug, however, elicits a different type of reaction from Lisbeth, both physically and emotionally: "Lisbeths Zunge kam wieder

[…] Langsam und zögernd über Schwellen begann sie, aus sich heraus zu lallen, sobald ihr

Zweifel die unbestimmte Schnecke auf den Unterarm, auf den Handrücken, aufs Knie setzte. [...] die unbestimmte (die wunderbare) Schnecke gab ihr die Sprache wieder." (TS 501) ("Lisbeth recovered her tongue […] Slowly and hesitating at thresholds, she began to stammer whenever

Doubt put the unidentified slug on her forearm, on the back of her hand, or on her knee. […] the unidentified (miracle) slug restored her speech" DS 242). The secret of the slug is that, like a leech used for bleeding patients, it is withdrawing a black liquid from Lisbeth, essentially removing the black bile that is her melancholy self.

It is here that we can see an analogy between Lisbeth's melancholy, her silence, and

Kant's idea of emergence from immaturity as a precondition to moving towards enlightenment.

The more that Lisbeth falls victim to the feelings of melancholy, not just from the losses of her child and the child's father, but also with her degradation to a sex object that removes any last

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agency she has, the more her melancholy robs her of the will to speak. She has become child-like and immature. To use Kant's terminology, she is now "unmündig", literally "unmouthed", as she refuses to utter another word. As Kant laid out in his essay Antwort auf die Frage: Was ist

Aufklärung? (Answer to the Question: What is enlightenment?), the emergence from one's immaturity that represents enlightenment comprises two elements, a willingness to speak out and a desire for knowledge (Kant). By withdrawing the black bile of melancholy from Lisbeth's body, Ott's "Sogschnecke" (TS 504) ("suction slug" DS 245) restores both these characteristics for her. First, she regains her capability of speech, the ability to use her mouth as a sign of maturity. Her progress resembles a child learning to speak as she begins by making noises that are not yet words and then slowly gains the capacity to form full sentences: "Von Tag zu Tag näherte sich Lisbeths Lallen und gaumiges Stöhnen fassbaren Worten. Schon brümmelte brabbelte sie. Und eine Woche, nachdem Lisbeth die unbestimmte Schnecke gefunden hatte, konnte sie sagen wo: 'Na baim klainen Hannes war se jewesen.'" (TS 501) ("From day to day,

Lisbeth's stammering and palatal grunting became more and more like intelligible words. Soon she was muttering and mumbling. And a week after Lisbeth had found the unidentified slug, she was able to say where: 'It was with little Hannes'" DS 242). Not only does she begin to talk again, but Lisbeth regains both her ability to communicate and her thirst for knowledge as a sexual being. The suction slug passes over her lower abdomen and induces rapidly repeating orgasms. From this point on, Lisbeth is no longer a passive, unfeeling sex object, but a full partner in an adventurous and fully satisfying sexual relationship:

Lisbeth Stomma wurde neugierig, konnte staunen, musste anfassen anfassen. Sie wollte wissen, was wo wie gemacht wird und lernte alles. [...] [Lisbeth und Ott] turnten, als wären Preise und Medaillen zu gewinnen gewesen. Alles, was sich machen ließ, bis endlich (so schien es) genug war und nur noch Schlaf blieb. (TS 516-517)

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(Lisbeth Stomma became curious, capable of astonishment; she had to touch, to grab hold of. She wanted to know what's done how and where and learned all about it. […] [Lisbeth and Ott] performed gymnastic feats as though there were prizes and medals to be won. Everything that could be done, until at last (so it seemed) they had enough and the only resource was sleep. DS 258-259).

Now that she has matured, Lisbeth can return to a normal life, symbolized by her visits to the hair salon to have her hair permed (TS 516, DS 258).

A further characteristic of both Lisbeth and Anton Stomma that underlines the concept of a Kantian emergence from within "Unmündigkeit" ("immaturity") is their (in)ability to communicate with language. Both Anton and Lisbeth use dialect in their speech and both are functionally illiterate. As Grass tells their history, their use of language and its limitations feature greatly, and the changing geo-political standing of the area around their town of Karthaus also reflects their education and their national identity:

Da Westpreußen damals preußisch war, lernte Anton Stomma in der Schule deutsch sprechen, aber kaum lesen und wenig schreiben. Zu Hause sprach man kaschubisch, und wenn Besuch aus Berent oder Dirschau kam, polnisch. […] Lisbeth hatte in der Schule polnisch sprechen, aber kaum lesen und schreiben gelernt. Zu Hause sprach man kaschubisch oder – als noch Besuch aus Berent und Dirschau kam — deutsch. (TS 396- 398)

(Since West Prussia belonged to Prussia at that time, Anton learned in school to speak German, but hardly to read or write it. At home, Kashubian was spoken, and when visitors came from Berent or Dirschau, Polish. […] At school, Lisbeth had learned to speak but hardly to read or write Polish. At home, Kashubian was spoken, or when visitors came from Berent or Dirschau, German. DS 136-137).

As Ott arrives in Karthaus, Stomma explains his dilemma now that the Germans have incorporated their part of what was Poland into the German Empire. Should he be a Kashubian, and therefore a Pole, or should he declare himself to be an ethnic German? When he decides to do the latter, it is Ott the educator who teaches him to write so that he can fill out the application forms and write a personal history, and so helps give him a German identity. And during the process of Stomma learning his alphabet, Grass again uses the image of retreating into childhood

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to emerge, to an extent at least, with a new level of linguistic capability and so also a new level of maturity: "Stomma kämpfte um jeden Buchstaben. […] [Otts] Schüler wurde kindisch überm linierten Papier und fürchtete sich vor Tintenklecksen […] langsam lernte Stomma schreiben"

(TS 398) ("Every letter Stomma formed cost him a struggle […] Over lined paper [Ott's] pupil became a child: he dreaded inkblots […] slowly Stomma learned to write" DS 138). Stomma's education, and his maturity, did however have its limits: "aber lesen, die Zeitung, den 'Danziger

Vorposten' lesen, lernte er nie" (TS 398) ("but to read, to read the 'Danziger Vorposten', he never learned" DS 138).

If the story of Lisbeth provides an example of how overcoming melancholy can be seen as a step on the way to enlightenment, it also offers a cautionary tale as the voice and curiosity attained also have a potential to be harmful once the melancholy has been overcome. Lisbeth's sexual curiosity already meets the Kantian expectation of Sapere Aude (Kant) ("Dare to know"), a critical part of Kant's view of enlightenment. She is now a full-grown young woman and starts to show curiosity in other dimensions. She begins talking of more general topics and reaches the point of being a gossip (TS 504-505, DS 246). She starts to ask questions about Ott, where he came from, and the story of his flight against the background of the plight of the Danzig Jewish community, something that potentially could be used against him under the continuing Nazi regime (TS 529; DS 271-272). She also becomes sufficiently self-sufficient to begin demanding her rights, trying to enforce a claim to some land (TS 525-5256; DS268). Finally, she turns against the slug that had given her back her maturity. By now changed from its initial purple color, dark and swollen with the black fluid it had extracted from Lisbeth, the slug becomes a victim of a campaign of hate by her. She secretly curses and spits at it while she believes Ott to be asleep, (TS 521, DS 263) and then one day she matter-of-factly squashes the slug with her

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shoe (TS 521-522, DS 264). Moreover, she starts to nag Ott, becoming the archetype of a shrew.

After the war passes over them, Ott has emerged from the cellar and married the now pregnant

Lisbeth, but he is now a changed person. After a couple of years constantly searching for a suction slug in cemeteries, he himself succumbs to melancholy. Lisbeth has him committed to an asylum where he falls silent for twelve years. (TS 531-532, DS 274). Lisbeth has indeed completed a process of maturation. She has regressed to a melancholic and childlike state where she is without a voice but then has her voice and adulthood, symbolized by her active sexuality, restored to her. Completing the process is, however, not enough in itself, and the potential for being harmful or uncaring is still present and still needs to be worked on, much as Grass would see the development of West German society.

At the time of writing Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass certainly considered that West

German society had undergone such a process of maturation by gaining a voice and a thirst for knowledge. In an interview in 1974 with Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Grass reflected on what he called the Brandt/Heinemann era, the period the began in 1969 when Brandt was elected

Chancellor and Heinemann was chosen as Federal President. These two elections bookmark the period of Grass's travels throughout Germany described in Tagebuch einer Schnecke, and Grass defined the era as lasting until Brandt's resignation following a spy scandal in his office. He used

Kantian terminology to describe the increased political awareness and the greater social contribution of the West German population:

[Es] gab bei der jüngeren Generation, aber auch bei meiner Generation […] einen Prozess des Mündigwerdens, der Hoffnungen machen konnte. […] neben all dem, was an Gesetzeswerken verabschiedet und an Verträgen unterschrieben worden ist und was üblicherweise als politische Leistung vorgezeigt wird, ist das wahrscheinlich die größte Leistung, die während dieser kurzen Phase Brandt/Heinemann zustande gekommen ist: dieser Prozess des Mündigwerdens. (GS 141-142)

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(A process of maturation took place among the younger generation, and also among my generation, that was able to give us some hope. […] Alongside all the laws passed and treaties signed, and the kind of thing normally used as evidence of political progress, perhaps this was the greatest achievement of the short Brandt/Heinemann phase: This process of maturation.)

Thesz takes this concept even further and suggests that we can consider Tagebuch einer

Schnecke as a whole as an explication of this maturation process. She contends that citizens acquire such maturity through dialogue, a process where gaining not only a voice – attaining your mouth or becoming "mündig" – but also an ability to have one's voice heard together with a capacity to listen are all essential elements in achieving that dialogue (77-78). This also corresponds to her analysis of Grass's work as a whole where she describes his mid-career works, from örtlich betäubt though his 1986 dystopian novel Die Rättin (The Rat), as his pedagogical period, where dialogue and debate should contribute to West Germany's democratization (5-6).

The conservative CDU had led all governments in West Germany from its founding to the election described in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. Grass often refers to them as "die

Schwarzen" ("the blacks"), as black is the color of their logo and other symbols. We can continue with the metaphor of removing black bile as the first step in this process of maturation by regarding the removal of the CDU from the West German government as taking some of the black bile out of the body politic. In particular, the elections of Heinemann and Brandt, in March and September 1969 respectively, had ended the presence of two former high-ranking National

Socialist officials in the two highest offices of the country (Lübke as Federal President and

Kiesinger as Federal Chancellor), a presence that Grass was often at pains to underline, for example in Die Nadelstichrede (ER 198) (The Pinprick Speech, 88).

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Manfred Augst: Melancholy and Failure

The story of Manfred Augst is the second narrative thread within Tagebuch einer

Schnecke that presents a link between silence, defined as the inability to express oneself, and melancholy. Grass makes an explicit link between the narratives of the real-life Augst and the fictional Lisbeth Stomma by including the two characters in a single-sentence paragraph: "Am

Mikrofon: Augst. Lisbeth verstummelte ganz." (TS 452) ("At the microphone: Augst. Lisbeth became totally mute" DS 193). While Lisbeth is denying herself her own voice, Augst is at a microphone, making a final attempt to find a voice for himself in public. He was a middle-aged husband and father of four, and an ex-Nazi who had not been able to find his way in the Federal

Republic. His last public utterance is at a session of a Church Congress where Grass has been reading from his novel örtlich betäubt. Augst's attempt to find the words in public that will give him entry to society represents also his final rejection of that attempt. Immediately after he has finished speaking, he commits suicide in front of the two thousand or so people attending the session.

The account of Augst's appearance at the Church Congress suggests that throughout the time he spoke, he was at no point able to express himself clearly.

Beengt von seinem Wortschutt, sprach er von verlorengegangener Kriegskameradschaft. Er vermisste Werte. Er bedauerte, daß niemand ihn und seine Generation (die Kriegsgeneration) gelehrt habe, flüssig zu sprechen, wie es die Jugend heute könne: freisprechen. Er sagte noch mehr und wiederholte sich. Es lässt sich nicht nachschreiben, was er sagte, weil er verheddert im Unterholz und traurig wirr sprach. (TS 422)

(Cramped by his word rubble, he spoke of lost soldierly comradeship. He deplored loss of values. He regretted that no one had taught him and his generation (the war generation) to talk freely, like the young people today, to unburden themselves. He said still more and repeated himself. It is impossible to reproduce what he said, because he tangled himself up in the underbrush and his confusion was pathetic. DS 162-163)

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His speech is incoherent and rambling, prompting some heckling from within the hall and calls for him to relinquish the microphone. Yet his final two sentences leave no doubt as to their content and intent. Grass noted down Augst's penultimate statement, made publicly into the microphone: "Er hatte sich vorbereitet und beeilte sich springend auf den letzten Satz zu. Ohne in seinen Zetteln zu suchen, sagte er: 'Ich werde jetzt provokativ und grüße meine Kameraden von der SS!' Vom Podium aus schrieb ich mit." (TS 422) ("He had prepared his conclusion, and he leapt into it. Without rummaging in his notes, he said, 'Now I've got a provocation for you. I salute my comrades from the SS'. Seated on the platform, I took it down." DS 163). Grass also reports the final sentence Augst uttered: "Einer Studentin, die beim Kirchentag in der Halle I neben ihm saß, zeigte Augst, nachdem er daraus getrunken hatte, das Fläschchen. Sein letzter

Satz (ohne Mikrofon) hieß: 'Das war Zyankali, mein Fräulein.'" (TS 477) ("After drinking from it, Augst showed the little bottle to a girl student who sat next to him in Hall 1 at the Church

Congress. His last words (without microphone) were: 'That, young lady, was cyanide.'" DS 219-

220).

Augst remained in Grass's thoughts and he found that he was unable to simply pass the suicide off as a footnote in the description of travels. (TS 467 DS 209). He visited the family after the election campaign was over, meeting with the widow and her sons, and then called in on the local pastor. Invited to return to the Augst house for dinner, Grass also met the youngest child in the family, a daughter. As Augst's family recount their memories of him, they paint a picture of a man mourning the loss of his connections to society, desperate to find his way and engaged in a constant search to find the kind of belonging that had eluded him since the end of the Nazi period. The litany of the different organizations Augst has tried to join testifies to the fractured nature of his quest, which itself speaks to an inability to settle:

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Nach fünfundvierzig begann Manfred Augst, vieles gleichzeitig zu sein: ein Anhänger der soldatischen Kameradschaft und […] ein überzeugter und in seinem Drang, bekehren zu wollen, unermüdlicher Pazifist. […] Später organisierte er sich. Bis zur Mitte der sechziger Jahre gehörte Augst der Bewegung 'Kampf dem Atomtod' an. Als Kassierer und Organisator half er bei den Vorbereitungen der alljährlichen Ostermärsche. (TS 476)

(After 1945, Manfred Augst began to be many things at once: a proponent of soldierly comradeship and […] a convinced pacifist, untiring in his urge to make converts. […] Later, he started joining. Up to the mid-sixties, he belonged to the "War on Atomic Death" movement. As cashier and organizer, he helped with preparations for the annual Easter marches. DS 218)

His desire to connect is reflected not only in his constant search for an organization to call home, but also, as his sons report, in the fact that he spends large amounts of time at public meetings for these organizations (TS 470-471 DS 213) and in his constant search for

"Partnerschaft" (TS 471) ("Fellowship" DS 213 ) in his relationship with the church. He had tried out various courses in an attempt to learn more about public speaking – the family still had the tapes (TS 492, DS 233). Grass's discussions with the family also clearly show that Augst's communicative issues were not limited to public speaking. and his wife points out that even when he was trying to discuss things with his sons, true communication rarely happened: "Aber ein richtiges Gespräch kam nie zustande. Immer aneinander vorbei." (TS 491) ("But it never got to be a real conversation. They always talked past each other" DS 232).

Grass also learns from the family that Augst had suffered, particularly in the last years of his life, from a depression that would look similar to the portrayal of melancholy that Grass would develop in his Dürer speech. The local church Dean, who had read the funeral service for

Augst, confirmed that it had been difficult for Augst's wife to cope with him at the end (TS 493,

DS 234), while Augst's wife tells of his resignation, an unwillingness to undertake anything as it seemed to have no point (TS 494, DS 235). She is convinced that he had given up and was planning to commit suicide at some point, but the family is not entirely clear about whether

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Augst truly intended to do so the day he did. They discuss whether he planned to attend the

Church Congress that day or another event at a politically conservative seminar. One of the sons remembers Augst on his way to the train that morning stopping off at the pharmacy where he worked, presumably to pick up the cyanide he used to kill himself.

The name Manfred Augst is a pseudonym given by Günter Grass to the real individual who committed suicide in Hall 1 of the Church Congress. When Grass visited the family, the then thirteen-year-old daughter, Ute, missed the first conversation but was present at the second meeting over dinner, even if she did not say anything at the time. Thirty-five years later, now a professional writer and journalist, she accidentally came across a trove of her father's papers and diaries in the attic of the family home. She took the find as the starting point for an investigation of the father she had hated because of his indifference and distance to her. In her book, Das

Falsche Leben. Eine Vatersuche (The Wrong Life. In Search of My Father), she refers to her father by the name Grass had given him, although Grass's notes for Tagebuch einer Schnecke make clear that the man in question is Wolfgang Scheub (Braun 70-74). Ute Scheub paints a comprehensive picture of her father, his membership in the National Socialist party, and his belief in its ideals. She also confirms many of the characteristics of her father that Grass had gleaned from his conversation with the family.

One aspect of Augst's life that comes through very clearly is the dominance of silence

(Thesz 79). For example, Scheub titles one section of the book "Lerne zu schweigen, ohne zu platzen" (63) ("Learn to be quiet without bursting"), a phrase that hung as a motto on a wall in

Augst's childhood home. She shows that his home life, particularly in the last years, was marked by his silence towards his family as he completely retreated into isolation: "In seinen letzten zwei

Lebensjahren absolvierte mein Vater die gemeinsamen Mahlzeiten im Wohnzimmer, ohne einen

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vollständigen Satz über die Lippen zu bringen." (31) ("In the last two years of his life, my father took all family meals in the living room and never spoke a complete sentence"). Moreover, she attributes his suicide to this silence: "Mein Vater hatte einen Erstickungstod erlitten, Er war an seinem Schweigen erstickt" "(40) ("My father died of suffocation. He suffocated in his own silence").

Based on his letters written between 1933, when Augst joined the SS, and the end of the war, Augst was a committed Nazi who believed strongly in the party program. For example, in

1934 he registered as a student of "race studies" in Jena, where four of the most notorious professors of National Socialist racial ideology taught. (83-84). His (self-censored) wartime letters provide few details of his activities, leaving Scheub to speculate over what violent acts he might have committed or seen – she even wonders if he was trained for and sent on secret behind-the-lines missions in the final months (123) – and whether they could have contributed to his silence in the post-war years. Grass mentions finding tracts and other writings among Augst's papers (TS 472-473; DS 215) and Scheub gives us further insight into this aspect of her father's life: "Nebenher produzierte mein Vater Manuskripte wie ein Schreibautomat. Oder ein

Schreiautomat? Die alte Schreibmaschine, die auf dem Chaos an Zetteln and Papieren auf seinem

Schreibtisch thronte, klapperte Tag und Nacht." (176) ("On the side, my father produced manuscripts like an automatic writing machine. Or should that be a shouting machine. The old typewriter that sat atop the chaos of notes and papers on his desk rattled on day and night"). She references essays with titles such as "Die neue Selbstentfremdung", "Halt verloren?" and "Der

Mensch in Einzelhaft" (176-177) ("The new self-alienation", "Nothing to hold onto?", "Man in solitary confinement"), which all show again his level of alienation and detachment from the life he found himself in. In Scheub's view, he was not capable of creating coherent sentences or

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arguments, constantly confused reality with his ideals, and interchangeably used words such as

"Glauben, Blut, Treue, Zucht, Aufgabe, Kameradschaft, Partnerschaft" (177) ("Faith, blood, loyalty, breeding, task, comradeship, fellowship"). Notable here is that he is writing, that he has words that he wants to produce and meanings that he wants to convey, even if his expression is confused. But when he has to actually say the words, as when he was standing in front of the microphone at the Church Congress, he is unable to speak.

In examining her father's silence, Scheub draws on her contacts with, and research into, support networks for the children of both Holocaust victims and perpetrators, as well as on the work of Alexander and Margareta Mitscherlich in their book Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The inability to mourn). Cosgrove considers Augst an embodiment of the Mitscherlich's theory (2014

67) and Scheub points out that her father's writings contain several references to the

Mitscherlichs. He may have seen them speak at the Church Congress where they presented on the topic of human aggression in the very hall where Augst would kill himself two days later

(Scheub 220). Unlike many Germans in the post-war period, as the Mitscherlichs suggested (see also Chapter 4), Augst was not able to de-realize and so rechannel his past into the economic miracle as he did not fully integrate into the new democracy. At the same time, he was not allowed to mourn and so did succumb to melancholy, represented on the surface as his inability to contribute, to have a voice, in society. Augst's melancholy and silence are, however, qualitatively different from Lisbeth's in that he does not have any way to escape the melancholy and the silence it encompasses. His only way out is to take his own life.

Interpreting the contrast between Augst's inability to connect with society and Lisbeth

Stomma's recovery from melancholy presents a quandary. Augst's endless melancholy does not appear to have a concrete cause which would put it into Cosgrove's category of "bad"

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melancholy. By contrast, Lisbeth does have the ability to emerge from her melancholy, and even if she does not exhibit creativity and inspiration (except perhaps in bed with Ott), she does regain her curiosity. I suggested earlier that removing the black bile of melancholy from Lisbeth can be equated to taking the black of conservatism out of the German body politic. This interpretation implies that a period of conservative power can also be an example of a pause on the road of progress that allows us to take stock, as posited by Grass in Vom Stillstand im Fortschritt. If we continue this image, however, we have to address how to interpret the period of intense black in the body politic that was National Socialism. Moreover, what does it mean that Augst, a member and therefore also a representative of that regime, is not able to recover from his melancholy and so is condemned to remain silent. It would not be credible to suggest that Grass wanted to provide an image that would allow for an interpretation of the National Socialist regime as a necessary pause in an otherwise ongoing move towards progress. Cosgrove offers an explanation that ultimately admits that there may not be an answer: "[Augst] remains inhibited by a melancholy that is difficult to explain as it has no identifiable cause […] In the final analysis, the reasons must lie within the individual and his endogenous melancholy". She further questions whether Grass is suggesting that such "bad" melancholy "led to the rise of National Socialism as much as it characterizes the inability to mourn after the war" (67). If we accept that Cosgrove is right with her diagnosis of endogenous melancholy, then I would contend that another possibility is that Grass is simply saying that some individuals will always suffer from such incurable melancholy. Incurable melancholy is simply part of the human condition, and while much melancholy will be the pause to take stock that Grass refers to, some melancholiacs will fail to gain a voice, just as Augst was unable to emerge from silence.

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Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined how, in contrast to the idea of speaking out that Grass considered the duty of all citizens, including himself, silence also plays a role in the two literary works under consideration. In örtlich betäubt, silence is a danger signal, a warning that the dialogues that represent progress are under attack on two possible fronts. Firstly, there are those like the protesting students who seek action instead of dialogue and in doing so run the risk of using violence to quieten others. The second threat comes from those who would encase themselves in silence by blocking out or refusing to hear those dialogues. On the other hand, the disruption of progress by the silence of melancholy depicted in Tagebuch einer Schnecke does not appear to be as threatening. While it does mean that progress can come to a standstill – can reach a state of stasis in progress – it represents more an interruption that a complete closing down of progress. The ability to pick up progress again, to return to the incremental, small-step improvements achieved in the West German body politic since the arrival of the social liberal coalition under Willy Brandt (TS 534-535; DS 277), is always possible after the pause dictated by the inertia of melancholy is overcome.

In the final sentence of the speech, the core idea – that of "Stillstand im Fortschritt"

(stasis in progress) – shows melancholy as a pause in progress which itself helps us the recognize that progress is continuing. As such, I contend that Tagebuch einer Schnecke, much like örtlich betäubt, ends on an optimistic note. If Starusch at the end of the earlier work is left facing pain as a metaphor for continuing dialogue, negating the silence that represents violence, at the end of

Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Grass is making noise of his own. He is heading back out on the lecture circuit: "Tagsdrauf fuhr ich nach Bremen: redenreden. Viele Teilziele: das noch und das"

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(TS 542) ("The next day I went to Bremen to talktalk. Many partial goals: this that and the other"

DS 284). The work of propagating dialogue and incremental progress is never-ending.

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Chapter 7: Where Progress Stops – Gender and Individual Violence

The idea of progress was central to Grass's thinking, and he saw it as the gradual, dialogic improvement of the wellbeing of the citizens of a country. For him, as outlined in Chapter 5, progress was a matter of finding what was wrong with society and taking incremental steps to provide a better environment. However, this would only occur within the confines of the overall system of a parliamentary democracy with social democratic governance. He denounced any suggestion that radical restructuring, particularly if achieved through revolutionary violence as demanded by the students in the 1960s, could improve society. He warned equally constantly against continued conservative government under the CDU, with the concomitant risk of backsliding toward the thinking that gave rise to fascism and authoritarian forms of government.

He saw the social democrat (SPD) and liberal (FDP) coalition in 1969 under Willy Brandt as a government that would follow the course he had recommended in his literary works and his speeches and essays during the preceding eight years. He expected the Brandt government to take incremental steps towards improving the social wellbeing of the population by making decisions in the traditions of the Enlightenment idea of emerging from one's own immaturity.

The ideas that underlined his thinking found ample expression in both his public speeches and essays and his literary works. However, Grass's portrayals fail to live up to the promise of these progressive ideals in two areas. In his overall presentation of women and the portrayal of individual acts of violence, Grass presents essentialist and traditional views that offer no hint of the progress depicted elsewhere in his works.

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The book that followed Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Der Butt (The Flounder) provides additional context for discussions of Grass's presentation of gender. As Patrick O'Neill notes in

Günter Grass Revisited, Der Butt turned "attention […] to the politics of the war of the sexes"

(91) and so represented Grass's contribution to the debates around women's emancipation in the

1970s. The novel, however, also became a focal point for critical assessments of Grass's depiction of women. In this chapter, I use Der Butt and its reception as an entry point for a discussion of how Grass portrayed women. Despite the fact that political activity by informed citizens formed a core of the content his work in the late sixties, Grass largely excludes women from any kind of political activity. Indeed, women fail to gain much recognition in his political speeches and essays, even though as a demographic they made up more than fifty percent of the population (Noelle-Neumann, 3). Much criticism leveled at Der Butt berated the violence perpetrated against the female characters, and such gendered violence had already been present in the earlier works. The presentation of individual, as opposed to political, violence in the

örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke displays an almost exclusively one-sided pattern of violence by men on women. Furthermore, Grass's disparaging depiction of women as both political and sexual beings within the literary works produces the same effect as the speeches, namely that of erasing women by excluding them from public discourse. Finally, applying a model of violence as an expression of a lack of power, understood in this case as an ability to persuade someone to act in a certain way (rather than purely political power which accrues from political and social institutions) shows that in the two prose works men use violence as an attempt to prevent this type of power accruing to women.

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Grass and Gender: Der Butt

The level of Grass's public engagement from the mid-1960s through the 1972 federal elections inevitably had an impact on the volume of his literary output. The play Davor, which recapitulates the arguments around Scherbaum's proposed dog burning as a protest against the use of Napalm in Vietnam from örtlich betäubt, was the last stage play Grass wrote (Barnett

190-191). He did not publish any poetry collections between Ausgefragt (New Poems) in 1967 and the publication of a compendium of his poems in 1973. His literary prose output in this period was also limited, with örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke his only publications.

After the 1972 Election, he chose to reduce his political work in order to devote himself more fully to his writing. The toll his public life had taken on his private life also played a part in this decision and in 1972 he separated from his wife Anna (Mayer-Iswandy 2002 128, Neuhaus 226).

While the Danzig trilogy had focused on the time before, during, and after the Nazi regime, and örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke were clearly anchored in the contemporary world, Grass's next novel, Der Butt, offered a much broader vision of the history of human development. Still based in the area of the Vistula Delta and the Baltic coast that would develop into the city of Danzig, it accounts for four thousand years of history. Recounted via chapters written by a series of narrators who each observe and recount the events of a specific period, the story tells how the patriarchy has ruined history itself, using its knowledge and technology to fight wars and destroy the planet. Mews notes the positive reaction to the book's use of myth, literary and intellectual history, and its narrative structure (149-159). In her

2002 biography of Grass, Claudia Mayer-Iswandy describes the immediate popular success of

Der Butt on its release in 1977, with its initial print run in Germany of 300,00 selling out in a few months. Moreover, the success was not just domestic as the English translation, released in the

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US in 1978, shot to the top of the Wall Street Journal best seller list and was among the most discussed books of the year in the USA (Mayer-Iswandy 2002 139-140).

Mayer-Iswandy notes, however, that the reception was not entirely favorable: "In

Deutschland war die Aufnahme überaus positiv. Allerdings bemängelten Teile der

Frauenbewegung die Tribunalhandlung und die Darstellung des Feminismus der siebziger

Jahre." (140) ("In Germany, the reception was extremely positive. However, parts of the women's movement criticized the tribunal proceedings and the presentation of 1970s feminism").

Even as the novel sought to point out the failings of the patriarchy and demonstrate the progress women had made in West German society, it elicited a scathing response from many within the

West German women's movement. The book's portrayal of women in general, and the stereotypical presentation of members of the movement in particular, together with its pervasive violence toward women, prompted a visceral reaction from many feminist critics. In her essay

Günter Grass and Gender, Helen Finch recounts that the novel "unleashed a torrent of condemnation from feminist critics" who "accused Grass of writing a novel that rejoiced in male chauvinism, sexual objectification, gratuitous violence, self-indulgence, narcissism and more besides" (81).

As with the multiple threads of Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Der Butt intertwines several different narratives (Volker Neuhaus even suggests that Tagebuch einer Schnecke was a test run for the narrative complexity of Der Butt and other later works (Neuhaus 257)). The eponymous flounder is a character from the Grimm brothers' fairy tale Von dem Fisher un syner Fru (The

Fisherman and his Wife) in which an impoverished fisherman on the Baltic coast finds a magical flatfish that fulfils wishes. His wife makes ever greater demands, asking to be a Lord, then a

King, then an Emperor, and the magical fish fulfills each wish for her. Finally, she asks to be

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God, at which point the couple are returned to their original impoverished existence. In the

Grassian retelling, the flounder accompanies a series of narrators (who are all also reincarnations of the same individual) through nine epochs in the history of the Vistula delta, starting back in a pre-iron age matriarchy. The flounder promises to teach each narrator how to make man dominant over woman leading to "the pursuit of progress, war, and the impending apocalypse"

(Finch 82). In the narrative present (West Germany in the 1970s), the flounder has now been caught by three feminists and they institute a tribunal (the "Feminal") to put the flounder on trial for all the damage wrought against humanity, and especially against women, by his interference on behalf of men.10 The tribunal hears about the narrator's relationships with eleven women, all cooks, from the history of the area. The book has nine chapters, each dealing with a different time period; the narrator in the present and his wife conceive a child at the beginning of the book and the nine chapters also follow the nine months of her pregnancy. The name of the narrator's wife is Ilsebill, the same as the wife in the Grimms' fairy tale, and her strident demands throughout the book are for a dishwasher (DB 7; TF 4) and a Caribbean holiday in the Lesser

Antilles (DB 641; TF 544).

Like many other literary works by Grass, Der Butt contributed to a political and social debate ongoing in West German society at the time of its writing and publication. By the late

1970s, the West German women's movement had shifted its emphasis somewhat away from political action, particularly given progress in areas such as relaxation in restrictions on abortion, towards "new womanly pride in body and self" (Hoshino Altbach 457). However, the movement was still important in terms of shaping political discussions at the time (Finch 82-83) and Der

10 The German words Butt and Fisch are both masculine in terms of grammatical gender. In referring to the Flounder with he/him/his pronouns, I am following the practice adopted by Ralph Mannheim in his translation of the novel. 179

Butt was Grass's attempt to become part of those discussions. In 'Der Butt' - A Feminist

Perspective, Ruth Angress credits Grass with writing "the first major novel in any language to deal with organized feminism in our time" (43). The novel does indeed suggest that the time for the patriarchy is past; at the end of the novel the flounder has now pledged to help women rather than men, and the final sentences show the narrator's wife is now clearly ahead of him: "Ilsebill kam. Sie übersah mich, überging mich, Schon war sie an mir vorbei. Ich lief ihr nach (DB 645).

("Ilsebill came. She overlooked me, overstepped me. Already she had passed me by. I ran after her" TF 547). The overall effect, however, even as the women are placed in the center of each episode and given the opportunity to make contributions to culinary, and therefore also societal, history, is to present women using the language and ideas of an essentialist view of gender.

Mayer-Iswandy traces a history of this essentialist view in her 1991 analysis of the men and women in Grass's work from a perspective of gender rather biological sex entitled Vom

Gluck der Zwitter: Geschlechterrolle und Geschlechterverhältnis bei Gunter Grass (The joy of hermaphrodites: Gender Roles and Gender Relationships in Günter Grass). She notes that philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche had all, to a greater or lesser extent, expressed the same view of women as subordinate to men (83-85). Such thinking has its echo in Der Butt; intellectually powerful or historically significant women are either erased or portrayed as less than they were. Angress points to a chapter dealing with the history of socialism and social democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in which Rosa Luxemburg appears fleetingly while Grass is able to draw male characters from history with great aplomb (44). Grass relegates Luxemburg's appearance to an encounter on a train with Lena Stubbe, the cook in chapter 7 in the novel, in which Luxemburg has to listen to Stubbe criticizing her political ideas

(DB 518-520; TF 441). In keeping with his overall criticism of revolutionary thinking, Grass

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thus limits the contributions of a leading Marxist thinker and founder of the German communist party who was ultimately assassinated by right-wing forces in 1919 (Neue). Similarly, the historical Bettina von Armin was a highly regarded writer in her own right, and "a significant presence in German literary circles through the influence of her salon" (McAlpin 296). Yet, as

Angress suggests, Grass leaves her looking like "merely another illustration of the female pseudo-intellectual with no mind of her own" (44-45) as she agrees in turn with each of the diverging opinions given by the men around her (DB 410; TF 347-348).

Moreover, the feminists who make up the members of the tribunal in the narrative present come across as shallow and unserious. They devolve into factional fighting between more radical and less radical groups. Some depictions are clearly intended to be satirical, such as when the women meet to discuss Amanda Woyke, who is reputed to have introduced the potato to Prussia, in terms of Mao's Great Leap Forward. Some of them turn up wearing "zur Kette gereihte

(keimende) Winterkartoffeln als Halsschmuck" (DB 392) ("necklaces of (sprouting) winter potatoes" TF 334). However, the level of exaggeration makes the depiction unsympathetic, and fails to address issues dear to the cause (Finch 84-85) that Grass is ostensibly trying to enter into conversation with (Angress 49).

Grass's approach to his female characters in Der Butt is not limited to his presentation of their inability to be creative or to shape history. Even in their role as cooks, women are to act as muse to the creative male, not to take on the role of being creative themselves: "Die Muse ist der

Kübel, in den hinein der schaffende Künstler alles ergießt, was er loswerden möchte. Sie ist das

Behältnis, in das er hineinlegen kann, was immer er möchte" (Mayer-Iswandy 1991 97) ("The muse is the bucket into which the creative artist can pour everything he wants to get out. She is the container into which he can put whatever he wants"). Finch adds the physical and sexual

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dimension to the same image when she notes: "throughout the text, women's sexuality is reduced to their genitalia, which are portrayed as cavernous, cleft or otherwise empty, ready to be filled with a male phallus" (92). Angress draws a similar conclusion emphasizing both how women are depicted and the resulting impact: "women are always introduced as sex objects, usually genitals first, while for men such treatment remains the exception. The obscenity is not in the multilayered vocabulary that Grass employs, but in the reductive effect that undermines any pretense of equality in the treatment of the sexes" (43).

The eighth of the nine chapters in Der Butt, Vatertag (Fathers' Day) represents a break in narrative style compared to the rest of the book. It tells of a single incident – four lesbians dress as men to take part in the traditional Fathers' Day picnic and barbeque in the woods in Berlin of

1962 – and is not told as a flashback from the time perspective of the Feminal. Consequently, the flounder himself does not appear. The narrator does occasionally comment on the action, but is not directly involved, lending the storytelling a "stark drive" (Finch 93). The women, playing the parts expected of men on their holiday, drink beer, eat meat, engage in games demonstrating feats of strength (DB 554 TF 471), and, with the help of a dildo, stand as they relieve themselves against a tree (DB 546; TF 465). The dildo makes a reappearance later in the day when, with its help, three of the women – Siggi, Fränki, and Mäxchen – each intent on conceiving a son, rape the fourth, Billy, as she sleeps (DB 573-4; TF 487-488). Billy wakes up during the third rape and leaves the others only to be followed by a group of leather-clad motorcyclists (described by

Finch as 'Hells Angels' (94)), who had earlier observed Billy taunting some students, mooning them and thus revealing herself as a woman. Having caught up to her, the motorcyclists each in turn rape Billy before running over her with their bikes and leaving her for dead. Given its graphic portrayal of violence against women, this chapter featured in much of the feminist

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criticism of the novel (Mews 163) and I shall return to the question of the violence meted out to

Billy later in this chapter as part of a broader examination of violence in Grass's prose works in the late sixties, where some of the elements seen here were already foreshadowed.

In an analysis of the chapter and how it fits into the telling of history in the book as a whole, titled Günter Grass's 'Der Butt'. History and the Significance of the Eighth Chapter

(Vatertag), Noel Thomas cites Grass's explanation that the chapter represents an "expression of skepticism towards an emancipation of women which is orientated towards the guiding principles men have brought into being [which] process of emancipation would not be in the interests of men or women" (1979 84). Grass himself confirmed this idea to the Swedish translator of Der Butt, Eva Liljegren, as she recalls in Etwas Neues in der Geschichte des

Übersetzens (Something New in the History of Translation), her contribution to Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen: Grass-Übersetzer erzählen (The Flounder Speaks Many Languages: Grass

Translators tell their Tales). This book arose out of the symposia that Grass and his publishers started holding for translators of his novels, beginning with Der Butt. Liljegren notes that during a discussion of the presentation of women's emancipation in the book, Grass explained his misgivings about the women's movement: "[Grass] will die Fürsorge der Frauen gegen den

Fortschrittswillen der Männer stellen. Indessen hat das Emanzipationsstreben der Frauen, ihre

Lust, es den Männern gleichzutun, ihn ein wenig erschreckt, und er vermisst, in diesem Fall, wie in vielen anderen, 'auch politisch, etwas Drittes'" (13-14) ("Grass wants to set women's caring against men's desire for progress. In the meantime, women's striving for emancipation, their desire to do the same as men, had frightened him a little and he felt, in this case as in many others, the lack of 'a third way, also politically speaking'"). Grass specifically sets women's

"Fürsorge" ("caring nature") as the opposite to a drive to achieve emancipation and implies that

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women do not have the wherewithal to achieve their own progress, even if it is through a reformist agenda. This denial of political agency to women recurs throughout both the literary and non-literary work of the period as discussed in the following sections. This not only denies women the agency to liberate themselves, but also denies a path to progress as they cannot initiate even the small, reformist changes, that could improve their situation.

In Der Butt, the flounder has led men forever onward in the march of history and they are now only capable of violence. Grass portrays women looking to emancipate themselves from the patriarchy as ending up in the same place. (In this context, we should keep in mind that Siggi,

Fränki, and Mäxchen are the women who more than a decade later capture the flounder and establish the Feminal). As Angress explains it: "Grass's women […] do not want to live among equals but to be masters" (49). An opposite view is provided by Patrick O'Neill when he contends that the episode is "the most truly feminist [...] in the novel" in that "a true liberation of women […] would also be a true liberation of men, rather than a one-sided quasi-liberation that would merely reverse the direction of age-old injustice" (99-100). O'Neill's argument would be more persuasive if he could point to a place in the text where Grass explains what he envisions true liberation of both men and women to look like, but he can only point out that it would be as

"unlikely to be realized" as the "utopian dreams" of some of the cooks (100). The violence against women perpetrated by women pretending to be men does not itself serve as a break in the endless presentation of male violence on women. Grass may be sending a warning to women not to try to be like men, but in doing so he is not doing anything to change the current patriarchy and so alter the essentialist underpinnings of that system. That Grass presents women taking on masculine traits and desires, such as wanting to sire a son, allows for the possibility that gender is separate from biological sex, and Mayer-Iswandy in her commentary on this scene emphasizes

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the role-playing that is an integral part of the socialization process that determines how men and women act (1991 257-258). Finch even suggests that the women acting as men and wielding a dildo "approaches the notion of utopian and cyborg gender transgression that only gained widespread theoretical currency more than ten years later in the works of Butler and Donna

Haraway", but she continues that Grass "pulls back from the radical implications of such transgression" (94).

The expectation that women are simply and always available as sex objects is also borne out in Der Butt by the fact that the narrator claims to have slept with all the members of the

Feminal (Angress 47). Finch points out that in spite of some potential for a breakthrough in terms of gender mentioned above, Der Butt primarily offers the stereotypical view of gender that has been a staple of Grass's writing throughout his career. An early example is provided by

Barbara Becker-Cantarino in her essay 'The Black Witch': Gender, Sexuality, and Violence in

'The Tin Drum'. She comments on Oskar's obsession with the nurse Dorothea which included stalking her and hiding out in her wardrobe, ignoring "the invasion of Dorothea’s privacy, as well as her right to be acknowledged as a human being and not be used merely as the object of a sexual fantasy" (181). When Oskar "corners Dorothea and […] makes her believe he is Satan

[…] Grass has Dorothea become an apparently willing participant" (181). Becker-Cantarino explains that accusations of witchcraft during witch hunts in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth century often included the trope of wanting the have sex with the devil, and notes the "misogynist undercurrent" is "uncritically presented and remains unmitigated" in the novel

(182).

Commentators are at pains to point out that narrators in Grass's works, such as the first- person narrator in present time in Der Butt, should not be equated to Grass as a person despite

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the similarities between the life of the narrators and the author (Finch 95; Braun 7, 97).

Regardless of whether we ask the same questions about the degree of reliability of Grass as an autobiographical narrator as we do of his fictional narrators, the self-centered picture Grass chooses to give of himself and his relationship to women in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), his 2006 autobiographical account of his years as a young adult, does not differ very much from the attitudes exhibited by his fictional narrators. Demonstrating a significant lack of empathy for the other people involved, the accounts contain much of the same objectifying and exploitative view of women that caused the feminist reaction to Der Butt outlined above. In describing what he calls his 'second hunger', that is sex (coming after the first, food, and before the third, art), he relates his attempts as a young man living, working, and studying in the immediate post-war years to come together with young women, often as conquests. These include the daughter of a co-worker he was staying with while he was working in the potassium mines in the first years after the war (HZ 259; PO 229-230), nurses from the clinic near the stone mason's shop where he completed his apprenticeship, and weekend dance partners from the local telephone exchange (HZ 301-304; PO 266-269). More telling of his attitude, however, is his account of his morning tram rides to work:

Halb aus Absicht drängelnd und halb geschoben, stellte ich mich zwischen junge Mädchen, wurde ich zwischen ausgewachsene Frauen gezwängt. Und wenn ich nicht verkeilt zwischen ihnen stand, rieb sich meine Hose dennoch an weiblicher Verkleidung. Mit jedem Halt, jedem Anfahren der Straßenbahn kamen sich Stoff und Stoff, Fleisch und Fleisch unterm Stoff näher. […] Kein Wunder, dass mein ohnehin selbständiger und überdies leicht reizbarer Penis während der halbstündigen Fahrt halbsteif bis steif wurde (294-295)

(Half shoving, half shoved, I would insert myself between young girls, find myself forced between old women. Even when I wasn't wedged between them, my trousers would rub against female clothes. With every stop, every start of the tram, cloth and cloth, flesh and flesh beneath the cloth moved closer. […] No wonder my penis, which had a mind of its own and excited easily, was either half erect or fully throughout the half-hour ride. PO 261-262).

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It is satisfaction of his own desire as a man that is the most important thing, and whatever

(objectified) person can contribute, willingly and knowingly or otherwise, will be called into use.

As discussed in Chapter 3, Grass saw his autobiographical work as an opportunity to set the record straight and have the last word. Such passages the from Beim Häuten der Zwiebel suggests that even at the beginning of the twenty first century, Grass feels no need to be apologetic about his objectification of women for the sexual satisfaction of men.

The feminist response to Der Butt was only one strand among the many critical and academic studies that accompanied the release of such a long awaited and popularly successful book (Mews 137-168); Mews considers Angress's account to be "scathing" and "extreme" noting that it fails to address ideas contained in other contributions to the secondary literature (165).

Angress's description of Grass's writing in Der Butt is indeed at times as provocatively reductive as she accuses the book of being: "It's all tits and cunts, business as usual in current male fiction"

(43). At the same time, however, the examples cited provide ample evidence that the feminist movement had cause to be upset with Grass, as his long-avowed position on social progress did not appear to include ideas of equal treatment for the sexes and, more than that, he ridiculed and criticized the movement's goals.

While Der Butt was the first of Grass's works to receive this degree of attention from feminist critics, many of the traits that attracted such criticism were already visible in his previously published work. In his speeches and essays, his pronouncements are marked by an almost complete absence of discussion of either specific women or of policy matters affecting women's issues; where such topics do arise, they appear mostly as part of other topics and not as discussions of women's issues. The following section analyzes an underlying misogyny in

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Grass's speeches and essays that suggests the political and social progress Grass advocates in these works applies only apply to men.

Grass, Gender, and the Late 1960s: Speeches and Essays

Analyzing something by pointing to its absence can be a challenging task, but a discussion of women's position in society – and especially their role in the world of politics – in

Grass's essays and speeches has to begin from this perspective. Klaus Theweleit, in

Männerphantasien (Male Fantasies), his study of the writings of Freikorps soldiers who would become a significant part of the support for fascism and the Nazi party, begins his analysis by pointing out that these men often erased the women in their lives, and specifically their wives and fiancées, from their writings. The first example he provides is that of a naval officer who celebrates his marriage by writing about a posting to Wilhelmshaven and the cottage his new father-in-law has bought for him: "'Mir', nicht 'uns', sagt der Mann. Damit hat er […] die

Tatsache seiner Heirat und deren erste Folge, das Geschenk eines kleinen Häuschens, vor den

Leser gerückt. Nicht einmal die Frau; über sie kein Wort, auch nicht der Name. […] Das

Verhältnis zu Wilhelmshaven scheint bedeutender als das zu der Namenlosen." (Theweleit)

("'For me', the man says, not 'for us'. That is how [he] introduces the reader to the event of his marriage and its first consequence, the gift of a little cottage. Not one word about his wife, not even her name. […] The relationship to Wilhelmshaven seems more important than the relationship to the nameless one." (Male Fantasies 3). In her foreword to the English language translation of Theweleit's text, Barbara Ehrenreich points out that in such writings the wives and fiancées are often "absent, […] left behind and generally unnamed and unnoted in the

Freikorpsmen's most intimate diaries" (xiii). Ehrenreich further comments that it can be "the normal middle class citizen" who, without necessarily fully following the fascist fantasies of the

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Freikorpsman, "simply prefers that women be absent from the public life of work, decision, war"

(xv). This kind of erasure of women from public life is a hallmark of Grass's handling of women and women's issues in his contributions to public debates.

In the literary works, we can simply look to the number of female characters compared to their male counterparts and examine their portrayal. For example, örtlich betäubt has several female characters that are all integral to the work while Tagebuch einer Schnecke has only

Lisbeth as a fictional character that pays a pivotal role; most other women – including Grass's own wife Anna – serve more as backdrop than anything else. Scouring Grass's speeches and essays for mentions of specific women, or for issues being discussed as women's issues, yields only a small number of results relative to the discussion of general political issues and to the number of individual men mentioned. Grass's collected works as issued by the Steidl publishing house in 2007 contains 135 of his speeches, essays, and political columns covering the time period from 1965 to 1974. Of these, eight can be said to contain content dealing in a substantive manner with an issue considered to be a women's issue, for example, abortion or women's rights in the workplace, or with a specific woman. Another eight have tangential or passing references, such as pointing to a policy position that benefits women. Mayer-Iswandy noted this as being in line with the general portrayal of women in Grass's early works: "In seinen zahlreichen Reden und Aufsätzen referiert Grass fast ausschließlich auf Männer. Frauen erscheinen allenfalls in

Parenthesen, was sein früheres Frauenbild illustriert" (1991 98) ("In his numerous speeches and essays, Grass talks almost exclusively about men. Women appear in parentheses, if at all, which is illustrative of his early depiction of women"). While women and women's issues were not entirely absent from his speeches and essays, their presence often implied that women did not belong in politics and political discussions. On only a very few occasions did women feature as

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individuals or did issues related to women in society move him sufficiently to address them in in his non-literary work.

Considering how much women's issues had become part of the political landscape by the turn of the 1970s, and given that Grass was constantly willing to insert himself in contemporary public debates, his reticence in debates around such issues is surprising. The women's movement as a political and public force in the Federal Republic had emerged from within the student movement, and in particular the SDS. In January 1968, frustrated by the generally dominant role of men in the movement and acutely aware of a practical need for shared childcare, a group of

SDS women in Berlin founded the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the

Liberation of Women) (Cornils 144). At the September 1968 SDS conference in Frankfurt, Helke

Sander of the Aktionsrat challenged the (male) leadership, noting that her group had already started organizing practical solutions, such as childcare centers, and was working together with trade unions and teachers (Hoshino Altbach 455). She emphasized that changing society would also need a change in the relationship between the sexes. As Sander finished her speech, the men on the podium, in a move that completely underlined her main point, simply chose to move on to other business, at which point Sigrid Rüger, another member of the Aktionsrat, launched tomatoes at the men on the podium (Cornils 144). The ensuing media reaction, mainly by male editors (Meinhof 150), helped raise the public profile of the debate, exemplified by the fact that the influential cultural quarterly Kursbuch dedicated one of its 1969 issues to the topic "Frau,

Familie, Gesellschaft" ("Woman, Family, Society") (Enzensberger HM 1969).

One of the most important battles fought by the women's movement at this time was for the abolition of Paragraph 218, the section of Germany's criminal code that criminalized abortion. Grass was unequivocal about his support for liberalization of the laws, describing it as

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"längst überfällig" (ER 657) ("long overdue") in his 1974 speech Über die Toleranz (On

Tolerance). However, in this speech and in entries for his Politisches Tagebuch (Political Diary) columns in the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Grass did not describe the issue of abortion as a women's issue, subsuming it under a general set of issues being addressed by the

SPD/FDP coalitions in the early 70s and being discussed in the general population: "Die Themen heißen: Langzeitprogram, Steuerreform, Massenmedien, §218" (ER 543) ("The topics are: Long term planning, tax reform, mass media, Paragraph 218"). Grass devoted more detailed consideration to the issue of abortion rights in two pieces, the 1972 Politisches Tagebuch column

Unfehlbar daneben (Infallibly wrong) and a 1974 letter to a member of the former

Sozialdemokratische Wählerinitiativen. In these instances, he again did so not from a position of women's rights but as a criticism of the attitude of Germany's Catholic Church and its hierarchy towards abortion and birth control. In the 1972 column Grass notes the: "Dem Nein zur Anti-

Baby-Pille folgt nun das Nein zur Änderung des Paragraphen 218. Zweimal sprach sich der

Vatikan unüberhörbar aus – und zweimal sprach er unfehlbar daneben" (ER 560) ("The 'no' to changes to the Paragraph 218 follows on from the 'no' to the contraceptive pill. The Vatican has spoken out clearly twice, and both times it has been infallibly wrong"). The 1974 letter, given the title Unverbesserlich Undemokratisch (Incorrigibly Undemocratic) by editor Volker Neuhaus, was Grass's response to a question from a Catholic supporter about his decision to formally resign from the Catholic Church. Grass cited not only the Church's policy towards reform of the abortion laws, but also its participation in defamation campaigns against politicians who voted in favor of the reforms. (ER 660)

Grass's most vociferous argument in favor of reform of the abortion laws was in his 1965 election speech Des Kaisers neue Kleider (The Emperor's New Clothes) and so predates the rise

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of the organized women's movement. He expounds on what he calls "eines der wichtigsten

Themen unserer Zeit" (ER 122) ("one of the most important issues of our time"), discussing the matter as one of public health. He lays out the risks and dangers to large numbers of women arising from abortion as an illegal, and therefore underground, activity, and uses statistics to lay out the outcomes for those impacted. He further compares these risks to the experience of those who have the money to seek an abortion abroad and demands a change in the law to legalize the right "zur klinisch kontrollierten Schwangerschaftsunterbrechung" (ER 123) ("to a clinically controlled termination of pregnancy") which would also undercut the work of backstreet abortionists. He finishes by pointing out how unfavorably the rates of post-abortion sterility in the Federal Republic compare to those in the German Democratic Republic, where abortion is legal (ER 123). While Grass makes this argument as something that will benefit women, he does so as part of a more overarching discussion of deficiencies in the health policies of the Erhard administration.

Even when addressing a topic of such importance to women, Grass cannot move beyond his reluctance to see women in politics. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Grass often used his election speeches to direct attacks at specific individuals. In this case, he addresses his critiques of health policy directly to the Minister for Health, Elizabeth Schwarzhaupt. More than that, however, he wishes he had a more appropriate adversary, and in particular a male one: "So ungern ich eine

Dame zum Ziel einer politischen Anklage mache und so sehr ich mir an ihrer Stelle einen der hartgesottenen Herren […] zum Gegenüber wünschte, ich muss mich doch auf Frau

Schwarzhaupt konzentrieren" (ER122) ("As much as I do not like to make a lady the target of a political attack, and as much as I would like to have in her place one of the hardened men […] as an opponent, I have to focus on Frau Schwarzhaupt"). Even in politics, Grass expects the sexes

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to maintain traditional essentialist qualities: the soft "Dame" ("lady") should make way as an opponent for one of the "hartgesottene" ("hardened") men (Mayer-Iswandy 1991, 98).

When Grass mentions women by name in a speech or essay, it is often not for their own worth, but rather by dint of their relationship to a man or political idea being discussed. An example is Professor Klara Fassbinder, an academic historian who lost her position under the

Nazis. She was reinstated following the Second World War and was awarded the French honor

Palmes Académiques. It is in this context that she appears in Die Nadelstichrede (The Pinprick

Speech), where she is mentioned not so much to laud her achievements as a pacifist, which Grass does note in passing, but more to allow Grass to criticize the Federal President at the time,

Heinrich Lübke, for not confirming her award (ER 194-195). (She did finally receive the award when it was confirmed by Lübke's successor, Gustav Heinemann (ER 968)). Similarly, in the speech Über das Ja und Nein (On Yes and No) Grass references Beate Klarsfeld, an anti-Nazi activist who generated a great deal of attention, and received a one-year prison sentence, when she slapped Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in the face at the CDU party congress in 1968

(Ganz hübsch 30). However, Grass does not comment at length on Klarsfeld's motives despite the fact that she, like Grass, wanted to emphasize Kiesinger's Nazi past. Instead, he uses her action to complain about the media's sensationalist reaction, compared to their prior failure to call out Kiesinger for his past:

Es besteht [keinen] Anlass […] Beate Klarsfeld rote Rosen zu schicken. Ohne Kurt Georg Kiesenger gäbe es keinen Fall Klarsfeld; ohne die folgenreiche Entscheidung des Dezember 1966 und ohne das Versagen der deutschen Öffentlichkeit hätte sich Beate Klarsfeld nicht zu einer Tat entschließen können, deren hysterische Begleiterscheinungen die Ursache verwischen und die Wirkungen und Nebenwirkungen in den Vordergrund rücken" (ER 324)

(There is no reason to send red roses to Beate Klarsfeld. Without Kurt Georg Kiesinger, there would not be a Klarsfeld affair; without the momentous decision of December 1966

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and without the failure of the German media, Beate Klarsfeld would not have made up her mind to commit an act, the hysterical reaction to which is blurring the root cause and pushing the effects and side effects into the foreground).

In minimizing Klarsfeld's act as something forced upon her by circumstances, Grass is downplaying her previous attempts to draw attention to Kiesinger's past, including publishing an article at the time of his appointment that caused her to lose her job (Bereit sein) and a protest she made in the chamber of the Federal Parliament earlier in 1968. Indeed, Grass's statement that there was no need to congratulate her essentially erases her act, unlike the clear expression of support by his fellow writer Heinrich Böll who sent Klarsfeld a bouquet with a dozen roses (Rote

Rosen 34).

In a 1969 election speech, Rede über die Parteien (Speech About the Parties) Grass minimized women's political awareness in general, underlining his view that politics is not women's business. As part of his argument in favor of the SPD, he talks about the party's achievements on behalf of women, but bemoans the party's ability to broadcast that message. He does not, however, blame the party alone:

Ich bin überzeugt, dass die meisten wahlberechtigten Frauen nicht wissen, dass es die Sozialdemokraten gewesen sind, die ihnen 1919, gegen den erbitterten Widerstand der Konservativen, das aktive und passive Stimmrecht gegeben haben. […] [Es sind] die Sozialdemokraten gewesen, die die politischen und gesellschaftlichen Interessen der Frauen, oft genug gegen den Willen und das Desinteresse der Frauen, vertreten haben. (ERI Parteien)

(I am convinced that most women with the right to vote do not know that it was the Social Democrats who, in 1919, gained them both active and passive suffrage against the bitter resistance of the conservatives. […] It has been the Social Democrats that have represented the political and social interests of women, often enough against the will and disinterest of women.)

The first three words of this paragraph, "Ich bin überzeugt" ("I am convinced"), show that Grass is making a broad generalization out of his opinion that women do not pay adequate attention to

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politics and so are not in a position to make an accurate assessment of what the SPD as a party has achieved and continues to argue for on behalf of women.

Grass did take a position on an issue impacting women as women in his 1974 speech

Bildungsurlaub (Training release). He gave the speech at an event celebrating the fact that membership of the metalworkers' union IG Metall in the state of Baden Württemberg had passed the half million mark. Grass devoted part of his speech to issues raised by another speaker, a woman whose work on the assembly line was, in Grass's words, threatening her marriage and family (ERI Bildungsurlaub). His attitude again seeks to deny the agency of women in the workplace when he suggests the worker is putting marriage and family at risk for "ein

Achtelchen Emanzipation" (ERI Bildungsurlaub) ("a little piece of emancipation"). Similarly, when he contends that women want to work for additional income or, as he views it, simply escaping their existence as a housewife, he does not see women wanting to work for its own sake. Moreover, Grass argues that women are not going to find any emancipation in the workplace. He had already evoked the image of the bored woman working on an assembly line in the person of Melancholia making replicas of herself in the speech Vom Fortschritt in

Stillstand (Of Progress in Stasis) featured in Tagebuch einer Schnecke. He now points out the precarious and exploitative nature of work for women, not just on assembly lines, and that women will always be the first to be laid off in an economic downturn. He adds that working women will still carry the additional burden of running a household, which in Grass's mind also includes taking care of the husband's wants: "Denn der Haushalt […] muss noch rasch rasch gemacht werden; die gestauten Fragen und Nöte der Kinder müssen auch noch rasch rasch beantwortet oder verdrängt werden; der Mann […] muss noch rasch rasch befriedigt werden"

(ERI Bildungsurlaub) ("Housework quickly quickly must be done; the children's questions and

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needs quickly quickly must be answered or suppressed; the husband quickly quickly must be satisfied"). He does refer to the housework done by housewives as a "Beruf" ("profession") and stresses that it is "hochqualifiziert" (ERI Bildungsurlaub) ("highly qualified") despite the lack of recognition it receives from men. His answer is to legally recognize the profession of housewife, institute payments for it, and found a housewives' trade union (ERI Bildungsurlaub). At no point does he suggest that men should take on any of the duties of running a household or consider that not even a majority of women are married (Noelle-Neumann, 3). This ideas of the domestic sphere as primarily the place for women is a foreshadowing also of the role that women would play as cooks in Der Butt.

In the most telling sentence in this speech, Grass recognizes that his ideas will be unpopular among members of the women's movement, but declares that trying to be like men is no way for women to emancipate themselves: "Und wenn mich sämtliche Frauenrechtlerinnen steinigen wollen, muss dennoch gesagt werden, dass es ein folgenreicher Irrtum ist, wenn sich ohne Unterlass junge Frauen am Beispiel unemanzipierter Männer zu emanzipieren versuchen"

(ERI Bildungsurlaub) ("And even if all women fighting for equal rights want to stone me, it has to be said that it will be a momentous mistake if women constantly try to emancipate themselves using unemancipated men as an example"). Without giving an example of what "emancipated" men would look like, Grass suggests that women should not look to emerge out of their traditional roles. In criticizing women who try to emancipate themselves by following the example of men, Grass provides a foretaste of the underlying premise of the chapter Vatertag in

Der Butt, as noted by Thomas and Liljegren.

In one of his Politisches Tagebuch columns, Grass exhibits a further blind spot in regard to his own treatment of women in his work. Preece notes that Grass was "unabashed in his

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depiction of sex" (2018 54), and, as discussed above, feminist critics of his works, especially after the publication of Der Butt, took him to task for his penchant for descriptions of female anatomy. The kind of charges that critics would aim at Grass were the same ones that he aimed at the magazine konkret in 1971. In his column Wie konkret ist 'konkret'? (How concrete is

'konkret'?) he accuses the magazine of shamelessly exploiting women in the guise of promoting enlightenment. Originally founded with the name Studentenkurier (Student Courier) in 1951, the

"Magazin für Kultur und Politik" ("Magazine for culture and politics") took the name konkret in

1957 (Aust 48-49). It published young left-wing intellectuals, among them many leaders of the student movement, and through its main columnist, Ulrike Meinhof, also became a rallying point for the growing protest movement throughout the decade. (Meinhof was herself the lead editor in the early sixties and was married to the publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl). In 1964, konkret underwent a major change; it had previously been subsidized by the East German government, but the subsidies stopped following disagreements between konkret staff and the East Germans

(Aust 75). Röhl decided to keep the magazine going as an independent concern and to raise circulation he capitalized on the breaking of taboos around sex, using sex and sexuality to sell more copies and, at the same time, giving the publication a leading role in the politicization of sex in the 1960s (Eitler 239). Stefan Aust, who edited konkret from 1966 to 1969 noted:

"Vollbusige Mädchen zierten fortan die Titelseiten, im Innenteil mischte Röhl Politik und Kultur mit Sex. Die Auflage stieg in wenigen Monaten von 20 000 auf 100 000 Exemplare." (Aust 75)

("Large-breasted girls decorated the covers and inside Röhl mixed culture and politics with sex.

In a few months, circulation rose from 20,000 to 100,000 copies sold").

Grass began his column on konkret by pointing out how much he used to enjoy reading the magazine but lamented the turn it had taken since the mid-60s (he was most likely unaware

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of the loss of East German funding that had led to the shift in the magazine's style). He dismissed the women who appeared in the magazine as "höhere Töchter" (ER 531) ("daughters of better households"). Grass often used often this term to describe members of the student movement – suggesting that as children from well-off families, they were dabbling dilletantes rather than making serious political statements.

In a single sentence, he critiqued the looks of the women appearing in the magazine, its content in general, and the expected effect: "Sie werben mit mehr oder weniger ansehnlichen

Brüsten, mit Hohlkreuz und anderen Haltungsschäden, insgesamt mit viel rosa Fleisch für eine

Spielart des Marxismus, die allenfalls Impotenz zur Folge haben kann." (ER 531) ("With more or less impressive breasts, hollow backs, and other bad postures, overall with a lot of pink flesh, they advertise a variety of Marxism that at best can cause impotence"). Here Grass suggests an interaction between the failure of the young women to meet the standards that he has set for physical beauty and the failure of their politics. Both the beauty and the politics are bound to fail as impotence is the result – suggesting not only a lack of sexual virility and but also a lack of political power on the part of the magazines publishers and readers. His choice of the word

"Spielart", literally "way of playing" for the idea of a variant or type as a qualifier of Marxism, also underlines the implication that the politics are unserious, that the young women are playing at politics. Grass's disparagement of both the women and their politics echoes the idea of Vero

Lewand in örtlich betäubt playing at Marxist politics, discussed later in this chapter. Moreover, the ambivalence around Starusch's potential impotence in the scene where Vero attempts to seduce him takes on additional significance as Grass is drawing the same set of parallels between

Marxism, young women, sex, and impotence.

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While Grass's sentence implies an interaction between these elements, it is not clear which influences the other. Is the politics the cause of the young women wanting to display themselves as sex objects or is their promiscuity leading them to political ideas that are doomed not to succeed? Ambiguity also infuses Grass's reference to the magazine's style as an

"Ausverkauf aufklärender Substanz" (ER 531) ("sell out of enlightening material"). The question is what kind of enlightening material is being sold out, as the German word "Aufklärung" can mean, among other things, both the philosophical movement "The Enlightenment", and the idea of sex education. On the one hand, is the magazine's new focus on sex detrimental to the former practice of publishing material that served to enlighten by setting "kritische Maßstäbe" (ER 532)

("critical standards")? On the other hand, Grass mentions the current format shows "Ansätze […] auch sexueller Aufklärung" (ER 531) ("attempts at sex education"), suggesting that valuable attempts to talk openly about sex are being undermined by association with Marxist politics.

Grass also contends that the young women removing their clothes are "karrierebewusst" ("career conscious"), acknowledging that they are doing this as work. Thus, his criticism once again aims implicitly at keeping women out of the workplace and also preventing them from taking part in the public sphere, even if their "voice" is actually their bodies.

Grass places the blame for the changes at konkret on the shoulders of publisher Röhl whom he accuses of exploiting sex for commercial gain, selling American war crimes in

Vietnam "mit Hilfe pornographischer Traktate und Erektionshilfe für pubertierende Herren"

(532) ("with the aid of pornographic tracts and erection aids for pubescent males"). Finally, he explains the whole phenomenon as simply "Maskuline Anmaßung: die Frau als

Gebrauchsgegenstand" (532) ("male arrogance: women as objects"). This final statement shows truly the extent to which Grass was blind to his own short comings. When Der Butt appeared a

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few years later, the accusation thrown at Grass by many of the feminist critics is exactly as he is presenting here, that male arrogance seeing women as objects, and first and foremost as sex objects, is a hindrance to progress.

In addition, in his discussion of konkret, Grass shows a further example of his lack of acceptance of women as equals when it comes to political agency. He calls the one-time editor

Ulrike Meinhof "eine Publizistin von Format" ("a journalist of distinction") but he remains convinced that it was her personal life that caused her to go underground: "[ihr] späteres

Abrutschen in anarchistische Gewalttätigkeit [mag] private Gründe haben " (532) ("her later slide into anarchic violence may have been for private reasons"). This is a topic he will return to in a later Politisches Tagebuch column, Erneuter Versuch ("Renewed attempt"), which focused on the media coverage of the terrorism threat of the Red Army Faction. Here he again insists it is something personal that is behind Meinhof's decision although he does not want to say what he thinks that might be: "Auch wäre es verfrüht, über die privaten Motive der Ulrike Meinhof zu mutmaßen. Ich fürchte, sie wird Stoff abgeben für Reportageromane und heroisierende Filme"

(550) ("Also, it would be too early to speculate about the private motives of Ulrike Meinhof. I fear she will provide the basis for reportage novels and heroic film portrayals"). Without offering evidence, Grass simply maintains that Meinhof had personal rather than political reasons for choosing the path she did.11

In many of his contributions to public debates in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Grass was advocating for changes that would come to pass in the not too distant future. The arrival of

11 Grass was not the only one to make such an assertion. In their biography of Ulrike Meinhof, Sara Hakemi and Thomas Hecken report that writer Peter Rühmkopf attributed Meinhof's radicalization to the breakdown of her marriage to Klaus Rainer Röhl (38), and Gerd Koenen in Vesper Ensslin Baader notes that both Meinhof and Ensslin started down the path towards terrorism after the break-up of long-term partnerships, in each case with the fathers of their children (189-190). 200

the Social Democrat/Liberal coalition under Willy Brandt saw many of the policy positions that he had been calling for realized to some degree. At the same time, he was arguing against the more radical demands being made on the street by student protesters. For someone so clearly attuned to the political issues of the time, the relative lack of discussion of women and the policy issues affecting them in his political commentaries suggest either that he was willfully or unknowingly ignoring issues that were part of a large ongoing debate at the turn of the 1970s.

Alternatively, he did not consider them important enough to merit comment. In either case, his speeches and essays leave a clear impression that political work was not something where women could or should be involved. As the next section discusses, the concept that women should not be a part of political work also permeates Grass's two main prose works of the time.

Grass, Gender, and the Late 1960s: The Literary Works

örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke each have a close and direct connection between their narrative content and the concrete political events of the day. The inclusion of student protests in örtlich betäubt and of Grass's own involvement in electoral politics in

Tagebuch einer Schnecke gave both an immediacy in the political and social environments in

West Germany at the time of their publication. In this context, a comparison of the depiction of the men and the women and their involvement in these environments will yield insights into how

Grass wishes to portray the sexes in relation to prevalent political fights as well as a more general commentary of the sexes within society.

One characteristic of Tagebuch einer Schnecke, which echoes the minimal coverage of women in his speeches and essays, is the almost complete lack of women across the various narrative threads, with the exception of Lisbeth Stomma. Some women make brief appearances,

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such as Ott's fictional fiancée from his short-lived engagement (TS 328; DS 66) and one or two women from the real-life Danzig Jewish community, either in Danzig itself in the 1930s (TS

357; DS 95) or in Israel in the narrative present (TS 539; DS 281). The Grass family au-pair merits a couple of mentions and offers Grass a chance to criticize her ongoing political education as she reads Hegel (TS 282; DS 20). The only women to appear more than fleetingly do so in their capacity as wives. One is the wife of Manfred Augst, the ex-Nazi who committed suicide during a Grass reading at a Church Congress in 1969, and the other is Grass's own wife Anna, who mostly is part of the domestic backdrop of Grass's weekends off from the campaign trail.12

One other female character does play a role in the book, namely Melancholia, the female angel of Dürer's engraving of the same name who is the focus of Grass's musings on stasis in progress, and who, along with her counterparts Utopia and Touristica, also forms part of the speech Grass gave at the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the artist's birth.

In the same way that politics was not considered a topic for women in Grass's essays and speeches, in these two literary works the men do politics and women do not. It is the men who are involved in the detached rational conversations and informed decision making on behalf of progress. In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, no women are part of the core team of the

Sozialdemokratische Wählerinitiativen, the organization that Grass established with some other writers and academics to work towards creating local initiatives in electoral districts to push the

SPD message to new audiences. As Grass recounts the first planning session at his house in

Berlin, he describes the serious, hard work the men are undertaking (at least evidenced by the

12 For the purpose this analysis, I am leaving Grass's daughter Laura out of the equation, although her desire for a pony could be regarded as a gender stereotype as much as her brother Bruno's obsession with car wrecks at the local intersection (TS 341; DS 79). 202

smoke they are generating) and then emphasizes the degree to which women are not considered part of the process but rather an adornment:

… denn als wir uns – lauter viereckige Männer – in der Niedstraße vor einem Jahr zu treffen begannen, um unseren langen Tisch zu belagern und einander unbequem zu sein, setzten wir zwischen überforderten Aschenbechern einen winzigen, von Anbeginn an hinkenden Anfang […] Schwierig, einander aussprechen zu lassen. Dieses gelangweilte Stochern in Pfeifen mit Zubehör. Ausflüchte in die Vorhöfe professoraler Intrigen. Komplimente an Anna, die kurz und eher abwesend 'mal reinschaut'. Absicherndes Ausklammern und Aufforderungen, endlich zur Sache zu kommen (TS 290-291)

(… For when we – all of us cubical men – started to meet at my house on Niedstrasse a year ago to besiege our long table and exasperate each other, we put down between overloaded ashtrays, a wee little beginning, it was lame from the start […] Hard to let each other finish speaking. That bored poking about with pipes and appurtenances. Evasions into the vestibules of academic intrigues. Compliments to Anna, who 'looks in' rather absently for a moment. Precautionary omissions and enjoinders to come to the point. DS 29)

While the men take on military-style planning, they exclude women from what they consider the 'real work' of politics, and now the women serve only as the objects of compliments.

The stereotypes continue with the setting up of the office in Bonn, where three (male) student workers and one (male) driver and Grass are supported by a (female) secretary who coordinates with Grass's (female) secretary in Berlin. Grass mentions that the building which housed the office had a flower shop on the ground floor where, as a further stereotype, the young students would buy flowers to placate the secretary if their language got out of hand (TS 315; DS 54).

When women do venture onto the political stage, they are treated dismissively. Grass recounts how one of his colleagues gets into an argument with a radical young woman from the

APO (Extraparliamentary Opposition) and he calls her a "Kölscher APO-Jungfrau" (TS 526)

("APO-Maiden from Cologne", DS 269). Grass refers to the young woman as one of Cologne's

"neunundneunzig törichten Jungfrauen" (TS 526) ("ninety-nine foolish virgins" DS 268) and in doing so combines the coat of arms of the city of Cologne, which celebrates the legend of St

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Ursula, supposedly martyred along with 11,000 virgins, with a reference to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (WA IV 626). The implication is that a young woman who argues radical politics is not only virginal, but foolish. That Grass on the campaign trail regarded politics as something not for women is emphasized by his account of a visit to the coal-mining town of Wanne-Eickel. After meeting with local union leaders, he was scheduled to make a campaign speech and he found himself in front of a hall full of coal miners' wives:

Da komme ich mit ausgeklügeltem Manuskript und sehe einen Saal Bergarbeiterfrauen: abweisend unbetroffen. Schon wird mir Geschriebenes komisch. Ich setze mich auf die geschriebene Rede, muss gleich (jetzt) schwitzend ins kalte Wasser, muss freiweg und auswendig, während der Schweiß nach innen schlägt, was mir einfällt aus Not […] Und das solange, bis sich die Frauen und Mütter der Bergarbeiter auf ihren Stühlen vom Streuselkuchen wegdrehen […] (Stand später in der 'Westfälischen Rundschau': "Frauen haben ihn ins Herz geschlossen . . .") (TS 527)

(I come in with my carefully worked out manuscript and see a hall full of miners' wives: unfriendly, indifferent. Instantly, my written matter strikes me as ridiculous. I sit down on my written speech, I'm sweating; in a second (right now) I'll have to jump into cold water, speak off the cuff while I’m sweating internally, say whatever comes to me in my distress […] And keep it up until the miners' wives and mothers in their chairs turn away from their crumb cake […] (The Westfälische Rundschau reported: 'The women took him to their hearts . . . ' DS 269)

Grass clearly assumes that women could not be interested in his prepared speech, so he feels he has to adlib to stand any chance of getting their attention. Recalling this incident again in his later book, Grimms Wörter (Grimms' Words), Grass (unwittingly?) adds insult to injury as he describes his speech as follows: "Mein ausgefeiltes Manuskript, dessen rhetorischer Aufwand

Jungwähler, lesende Hausfrauen und vom Schuldienst erschöpfte Lehrer motivieren mochte, wäre zu hochfahrend gewesen" (GW 37) ("My highly polished manuscript, whose rhetorical elegance could motivate young voters, reading housewives, and teachers exhausted from plying their craft, would have been too pretentious"). Here he implies quite clearly that miners' wives, unlike other housewives, do not read, and so would not be able to follow his political rhetoric.

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For örtlich betäubt, the comparison of the depiction of men and women in terms of politics focuses primarily on Starusch, Scherbaum, and the dentist on the one side and Irmgard

Seifert, Vero Lewand and Sieglinde Krings on the other. Again here, serious politics is the domain of men. Starusch and the dentist discuss their various political aims and the methods they will use to achieve them. Both want to establish a new order; the dentist relies on incremental improvements in the science of medicine to arrive at his worldwide healthcare system, while

Starusch want to build a new pedagogical state on top of the nothingness created by the fleets of bulldozers he unleashes in his visions in the television set he watches while under local anesthetic in the dentist's chair (öb 83-84, 101; LA 81-83, 99). The two men use rationality to dissect each other's ideas and the associated philosophical underpinnings. Starusch also discusses politics rationally with his student Scherbaum after the student has revealed his plan to burn his dog as a protest against the use of Napalm. (öb 136-137; LA 132-133). Scherbaum's constant questions about the situation in the Mekong Delta also provide evidence of his political awareness (öb 15, 45; LA 15, 44). Even if Scherbaum's planned protest action was a political one, his true political self finally comes to the fore in his choice to abandon his protest action and instead to take on the editorship of the student newspaper. In this sense, he follows Grass's own avowed political path of small incremental change and rational rather than emotional decision making. Scherbaum also considers this a political position, as seen in his desire to make his first editorial a comparison of the Nazi past of Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger with the life of the resistance fighter Helmuth Hübener, who transcribed and disseminated BBC radio broadcasts and who was executed in 1942. In a discussion with Starusch, Scherbaum explained both his admiration for Hübener and his disgust at Kiesinger's appointment as Chancellor (öb 209; LA

201-202).

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Scherbaum's clear-minded politics contrast sharply with the expression of politics by his girlfriend, Vero Lewand. While Scherbaum's politics are presented as genuine, Vero's are unserious. Her ability to think politically is limited to snippets of other people's political philosophy delivered unthinkingly and, as he did in his criticism of the magazine konkret, Grass links Marxism and other left-wing political thinking to young women playing at politics.

Starusch explains to the dentist that he was talking to his class about protests as a moral gesture when, "Vero Lewand [stoppte mich] mit einem Marxengels-Zitat (immer hat sie Zettelchen bei sich): 'Die kleinbürgerlichen Revolutionäre nehmen einzelne Etappen des Revolutionsprozesses für das Endziel, um dessentwillen sie sich an der Revolution beteiligen . . .' – Der Kleinbürger, das bin ich." (öb 43) ("Vero Lewand stopped me with a quotation from Marxengels (she always has little slips of paper on her): 'Petit bourgeois revolutionaries mistake the stages in the revolutionary process for the final goal which is their reason for participating in the revolution …

' – Petit bourgeois, that's me" LA 42). Vero's politics are shown to be child-like, if not childish, by their association with her bedroom and its toys: "Sie lebt zwischen Stoffhunden und liest die

Worte des Vorsitzenden Mao. In ihrem Zimmer […] muss […] der Revolutionär Ernesto Che

Guevara als grobkörniges Großfoto den Blickfang abgeben" (öb 206) ("She lives with stuffed dogs and reads the words of Chairman Mao. In her room […] it is the revolutionary Ernesto Che

Guevara, in the form of an outsized, coarse-grained photograph, who first catches the eye" LA

199). Even Scherbaum, who addresses Vero with the diminutive nickname "Pißnelke" (öb 164)

("Teenybopper" LA 158), realizes how unrealistic Vero's political stances are: "Er sagt:

'Manchmal bekomm ich natürlich zuviel: Sie liest Mao, wie meine Mutter Rilke liest.' Den düsteren Che nennt er 'Veros Pin-up.' […] 'Früher hing da mal Bob Dylan. Hatte ich ihr geschenkt. "He’s so damn real . . ." hab ich ihr draufgeschrieben. Naja, das war mal'" (öb 206)

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("He says: 'Sometimes of course it's more than I can take: she reads Mao like my mother reads

Rilke.' He speaks of the somber Che as 'Vero's pin-up.' […] 'Bob Dylan used to hang there.

Present from me. "He's so damn real" I wrote on it. Oh well, that was long ago'" LA 199). As

Chloe Paver observes in her essay on Grass's use of tropes from popular culture in the novel Lois

Lane, Donald Duck and Joan Baez: Popular Culture and Protest Culture in Günter Grass's

'örtlich betäubt', the reference to the photo of Guevara as a 'pin-up' removes any possibility that its purpose is political: "The implication is clear: the poster has nothing to do with the direct political action which Che Guevara represents and of which the Maoist Vero is such a vocal advocate, but simply panders to a teenage girl’s fantasy about an exotic, dynamic, male hero- figure" (62). Grass emphasized this point in his 1968 speech Die angelesene Revolution (The well-read revolution): "Der tote Revolutionär 'Che' Guevara kann sich nicht dagegen wehren, wenn er heute in Deutschland romantische Bedürfnisse als pin-up befriedigen muss" (ER 301)

("The dead revolutionary 'Che' Guevara cannot defend himself if, as a pin-up, he has to satisfy romantic needs in today's Germany"). Starusch tells us that Vero Lewand did actively participate in the protest against the Shah of Iran and "könnte Platzwunden und Blutergüsse vorweisen" (öb

254) ("was able to display contusions and a bloody nose" LA 246). However, at the very end of the novel, as he tells of what has transpired in the past two years, he provides further evidence of the shallow nature of Vero's politics. She has abandoned her education and her activism: "Vero

Lewand [verließ] die Schule und heiratete (kurz vor dem Abitur) einen Kanadischen Linguisten"

(öb 263) ("Vero Lewand left school (shortly before her final exams) and married a Canadian linguist" LA 255). It is noteworthy that the alternative to activism is the domestic life of marriage. By contrast, Scherbaum has continued along the path of a rational, public-minded profession: "Scherbaum studiert Medizin" (öb 263) ("Scherbaum is studying medicine" LA 255).

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While Vero's politics are presented as driven as much by her age as by her emotional, rather than rational, engagement with the ideas, Irmgard Seifert's politics are entirely based in emotional, demonstrative responses. Starusch describes her at times florid language as evoking a flaming sword (Pickar 266). He says that she always wants "Ein Zeichen setzen, Ein Beispiel geben" (öb 57) (To give a rallying cry. To set an example" LA 56) and recounts that her reaction to daily news headlines is often: "Dagegen sollte protestiert, scharf und eindeutig protestiert werden" (öb 57) ("That calls for protest, energetic and uncompromising protest" LA 56). Yet when her political positions call for decisive individual action, she fails. She initially says that she will stand up in front of her class and admit to her actions as a young girl in the BDM at the end of the war, as evidenced by letters she wrote at the time and has recently found again in which she denounced a local farmer for refusing to allow tank defenses on his land. However, she admits she lacks the courage to do this by herself (öb 59; LA 58). She considers that

Scherbaum's dog burning protest will be the impetus she needs to make her do so (öb 199; LA

192) and also talks about encouraging him by providing emotional support even to the point of taking him as a lover (öb 224; LA 216). Ultimately, it is Starusch that takes away her opportunity for agency in this matter, first when he stops her talking about it to him when he kisses and then slaps her to shut her up (öb 161; LA 156) and then when he instigates and carries out the burning of the letters, putting to an end any chance of her completing her classroom confession (öb 253;

LA 245). Both Vero Lewand and Irmgard Seifert assert that they have political agency in that they make political statements, but both fail to follow through and turn the promise of their statements into political actions. Moreover, not only can they both not act themselves, but they both also perpetuate the male dominance of political action as they transfer their political aspirations onto Scherbaum's proposed act of protest (Pickar 265).

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In contrast to Vero and Irmgard, Linde Krings does demonstrate both agency and follow- through as she succeeds in her plan to prevent her father from refighting and winning the battles he had lost in the war. This is, however, presented as personal rather than political agency.

Linde's first encounter with her father as he returns from the war is distinctly frosty (öb 48-49;

LA 47-48) and defeating her father as he re-enacts battles in a giant sandbox becomes an obsession for her. She quits her medical studies and devotes her time to learning the history of the war, also by visiting the military archives in Koblenz (öb 105-106; LA 103). Giving up her medical studies to achieve a personal rather than public goal both echoes Vero's decision to forego studying for marriage and contrasts with Scherbaum's choice to study medicine. The desire and the planning to beat her father become Linde's sole focus as she recruits all others in the household, willing or otherwise, into her effort. She sells sex favors for information from both Schlottau and Starusch, and then uses the dispute with her father as an excuse to split up with Starusch and send him away (öb 82; LA 81). She wins the decisive re-enactment of the battle of Stalingrad and, when her father refuses to surrender, she places an army pistol on the edge of the sandbox and leaves (öb 248; LA 240-241). She does not appear again in the story as an active character until Starusch's final murderous fantasy of killing her in the wave pool (öb

259; LA 250).

Linde's action fits in with the ideas of not letting the memory of the war and the regime that perpetrated it die out, of not allowing history to be rewritten, and of not ignoring questions of individual culpability. As Katherina Hall notes as she considers the connections to Danzig in

örtlich betäubt and the later Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) in her essay Günter Grass's Danzig

Quintet, these are all themes that had featured in Grass's previous work (69). They are also in keeping with Grass's original intention to write a novel entitled Verlorene Schlachten (Lost

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Battles) (ER 410), as the story of Linde and her father revolves around the battles which he and others lost and which now cannot be won. Throughout her entire action against her father, however, we are given no insight into Linde's motivation. We hear once that it is her task – "[es] fällt mir die Aufgabe zu, meinen Vater zu schlagen" (öb 68) ("it's up to me to defeat my father"

LA 67). Neither Linde herself in any dialogue, nor Starusch as the narrator, give any indication as to what drives her forward, nor are we privy to the cause of the distant relationship between her and her father. One possible explanation is personal animosity, as suggested by the dentist when he reveals that Krings is a figment of Starusch's imagination but, at the same time, is typical of many former soldiers who want to rewrite their own past and consequently get into arguments with their daughters (öb 235; LA 227). Linde's agency is personal and private, making her the third major female character in the novel without political agency. Her private (female) battle against her father contrasts to the public (male) effort to maintain the historical record made by Starusch (albeit unsuccessful within the timeframe of the novel) as he works on a monograph on Feldmarschall Schöner, the historical figure who serves both Grass and his narrator Starusch as the model for Ferdinand Krings. (öb 211-212; LA 204). While Starusch may not be going beyond the boundaries of his own field of history, he is the one with access to the public sphere and can use his expertise to contribute to public debates in the manner of a pubic intellectual, but this avenue remains denied to Linde.

The women in örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke not only lack political agency, they are, in general, not favorably portrayed. Pickar notes that they are "im Grunde genommen unsympathische wenn nicht sogar ausgesprochen negative Figuren" (260) ("basically unsympathetic, if not decidedly negative figures"). She also points out that everything we see of all the women in the novel is written from Starusch's perspective and has a negative tint. From

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the three main female protagonists to the "kuchenfressenden Topfhüte" (öb 129) ("ladies in hats, stuffing themselves with cake" LA 125), no woman is shown in a positive light (she does make an exception for the character of Starusch's mother, who only appears briefly in his imagined conversations with her) (Pickar 260). As previously discussed, Irmgard Seifert is emotionally driven and speaks in a language shaped by "rechtsextremen Blüten des Spätexpressionismus" (öb

58) ("right-wing offshoots of Late Expressionism" LA 57). Mews suggests that her willingness to adopt causes based on her emotional reactions to them hews closely to Adorno's definition of the Authoritarian Personality (118). Very little is given to the reader by way of physical description for either Seifert or Linde Krings and while no aspect of their physical appearance can be used to sway the reader's sympathy away from each of them, none is described in a way that could make them appear desirable or attractive (Pickar 261). Only in the case of Vero

Lewand do we learn of one specific physical attribute, and even though it is not visible, it is presented negatively: her problematic adenoids lend her voice a "nasale Eindringlichkeit" (öb

152) ("nasal intensity" LA 147) (Pickar 261). Moreover, her appearance is dominated by the very visible but non-physical attribute in that she constantly wears "zinkgrüne Strumpfhosen" (öb

226) ("absinthe-green tights" LA 218).

Moreover, both Linde in örtlich betäubt and Lisbeth in Tagebuch einer Schnecke, after her recovery from muteness, are presented as women who snipe at their men. With "Halt du dich da raus" (öb 8) ("You keep out of this" LA 8), Linde constantly insists that Starusch not get involved in her battle with her father She also repeatedly insults Starusch, often impugning his courage and manhood: "Du Memme Versager Superfeigling" (öb 16) ("You coward failure superwashout" LA 16); "Wenn er nur nicht so feige und wehleidig wäre…" (öb 82) (If only he weren't so cowardly and sorry for himself…" LA 80); "Du Superfeigling …" (öb 103) ("You

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super-yellowbelly …" LA 101). She belittles him, calling his toothache "Wehwehchen" (öb 16)

("little aches and pains" LA 16) and dismissing his comments during a car trip: "Hör endlich auf mit dieser elenden Kunsterziehung" (öb 66) ("Leave us alone with your crummy art talk." LA

65) (Pickar 269).

In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Lisbeth becomes spiteful toward both the suction slug and

Ott himself. She also becomes more and more demanding, claiming rights to land and asking Ott to explain his flight. Grass draws a parallel between her behavior and that of the supposedly

"zänkisch" ("cantankerous") Agnes Dürer, wife of the painter Albrecht, and suggests that Ott would recognize both in the melancholic angel of Dürer's etching (TS 530; DS 272).

Furthermore, with her behavior Lisbeth foreshadows the demanding Ilsebill of Der Butt and echoes the wife of the fisherman of the Grimms' fairy tale. A further interpretation of the turnaround in Lisbeth's attitude to the snail comes in Cosgrove's analysis of melancholy in

Tagebuch einer Schnecke. She suggests the negative portrayal of Lisbeth after her emergence from melancholy is rooted in a misogynistic view of melancholy in women that Grass is perpetuating:

Grass reproduces here in literary grotesque form the gendered history of melancholy genius. Lisbeth represents the damaged, as opposed to artistic, imagination. […] In her grieving state she embodies the pathological side of melancholy: female depression. That only a special snail may cure her makes it explicit that the remedy for female depression comes from without. [Women] simply tend towards pathological illness from which they must be rescued. (2014 50)

Cosgrove suggests that Grass is implying that the task of post-Holocaust

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is to be reserved for the "moderate male literary genius" that is the melancholy narrator of the book (50).

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The negative portrayal of women in these two works extends further to their presentation as sexual beings. Lisbeth in Tagebuch einer Schnecke cannot be both sexually mature and portrayed positively. She is initially sent by her father to be Ott's sex object without any word being said about her own agency in the matter (TS 445; DS 186). Unresponsive to the point of pain (TS 446: DS 188), she endures his using her and retreats into full muteness, essentially erasing her own voice (TS 452: DS 194). As she recovers from her melancholy when Ott treats her with the suction slug, she becomes a full partner in an active sex life with Ott, regains her voice, and turns into "eine junge und erschreckend normale Frau" (TS 507) ("a young and terrifyingly normal woman" DS 248). But Grass cannot leave her in this improved presentation, as, now that she has a voice and is reinserting herself into public life, he turns her into a shrew who eventually nags Ott into his own state of mute melancholy. In örtlich betäubt, women use sex as a means of persuasion as Linde obtains information from both Starusch and Schlottau in exchange for sexual favors, while both Irmgard Seifert and Vero Lewald show a willingness to use sex to ensure Scherbaum's protest will go ahead. Irmgard describes her desire to give herself to Scherbaum to encourage him (öb 224; LA 216) and Vero attempts to seduce Starusch to persuade him to leave Scherbaum alone (Thesz 65). Vero calls at Starusch's apartment and during their conversation she unexpectedly drops to the floor and writhes around on his oriental rug, taunting him about having sex with her. (öb 215-216; LA 208). Vero later uses the evidence of threads from the rug on her coat when she suggests to Seifert that she and Starusch did make love (öb 222; LA 214) and Starusch both imagines what the tabloid newspaper headlines would be (öb 219; LA 211-212) and how he would explain the act to Scherbaum (öb 216; LA 209).

Scherbaum himself tells Starusch that he half expects that Vero would offer herself to Starusch and makes a dismissive comment about women in general and their need for sex:

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"Wahrscheinlich müssen Frauen das ziemlich regelmäßig haben, sonst fangen sie an zu spinnen"

(öb 220) ("Probably women need to have it fairly regularly or they go nuts" LA 212). As Pickar points out, in this instance Starusch does not contradict his pupil and the two men have consigned sex to the realm of things that are for women to worry about (273) while Scherbaum is concerned with more important things (öb 220, LA 212-213). A dismissive attitude to women also comes through in Starusch's stories that emphasize his own sexual prowess, at least in his youth, and here again the prevalent image is of women who are sex objects there for his taking.

He tells of having revenged himself for Linde's infidelity with Schlottau by sleeping with her friends Hilde and Inge (öb 82; LA 81). Moreover, he recounts, in the style of a fairy tale, starting with the phrase "Es war einmal ein Student" (öb 88) ("Once there was a student" LA 86), how he took advantage of delivering ration cards to all the women living in an apartment building who were widowed, single, or whose men had not yet returned from the war; he spent extra time with each, and learned the intimate details of each household (Pickar 272).

Irmgard Seifert does provide a moment of contrast as she resists Starusch's crass attempt to make a pass at her just after she has asked Starusch about Vero's attempted seduction, and just before she talks about how she would take Scherbaum as a lover: "ich setzte mich übergangslos neben die Seifert, griff zu und versuchte mit dem rechten Knie ihren geschlossenen Sitz zu

öffnen — [sie sägte] meinen halben Vorsatz knapp über der Wurzel ab: 'Bitte Eberhard. Ich glaube Ihnen auch so, daß Sie das können.'" (224) ("I sat down abruptly beside la Seifert, leapt to the attack, and tried with my right knee to open her closed lap – she sawed off my half-intention right above the root: 'Please, Eberhard. I know you're able to. You don't have to prove it'" (LA

216).

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Even when women appear in the domestic sphere, they are not necessarily depicted in a sympathetic manner. Given the impending breakup of their marriage, it is hardly surprising that

Grass does not dwell on his wife Anna or give her any large part in Tagebuch einer Schnecke.

She gets to pop in on Grass's political meetings and greet the other men (TS 291; DS 29) and accompanies him on his trip to the Dürer celebrations where he gives his speech Vom Stillstand im Fortschritt (TS 542; DS 284). They travel together with their son Bruno to Czechoslovakia and, as Preece accounts, Grass "hints that Anna was in love with the Czech translator of The Tin

Drum, Vladimir Kafka" (2018 100). And it is not only Grass whose domestic situation is precarious, at least in Grass's eyes. Friedhelm Drautzberg, who is driving the VW bus for the speaking tour in the election campaign, studiously take routes around and not through

Nuremberg to avoid running into a former fiancée who lives there (TS 269-270; DS 7)

In both örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke, female characters are generally portrayed as subservient to their male counterparts. Irmgard Seifert is unable to make good on her commitment to talk openly about her past and it is Starusch who persuades her to give up on the effort and burn the letters. Vero is in awe of Scherbaum's planned protest and is shown as being incapable of generating her own political statements and ideas. Linde has some agency and is able to get the better of the young Starusch, but she is limited to the personal success against her father. Once their battle is over, Starusch is able, at least in his fantasies, to re-establish his position of power vis-à-vis Linde by repeatedly enacting her murder. Lisbeth suffers abuse at the hands of Ott until he is able to free her from her melancholy, and her later ascendency over him is tainted by the negativity of her character as she nags him to exercise her own form of control over him. The men in these works attempt to maintain their dominant position over women and deny them any chance of agency, to a greater or lesser extent, through individual acts of physical

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violence or, at the very least, the threat of the same. The following section examines how, portraying an essentialist view of men as perpetrators of violence and women as victims, this violence helps men establish a position of control, which also serves to keep women out of the public sphere. A stereotype of the sniping shrew also underlies the presentation of how two women prove they can have power over men without the use of physical violence, even if this presentation paints them in a bad light.

Gender and Individual Violence

In her 1997 article 'Danach ging das Leben weiter'. Zum Verhältnis von Macht und

Gewalt im Geschlechterkampf. Systemtheoretischen Überlegungen zu Günter Grass und Ulla

Hahn ('Afterwards, life went on'. On the Relationship of Power and Violence in the Battle of the

Sexes. System-theoretical Consideration of Günter Grass and Ulla Hahn), Mayer-Iswandy differentiates between power ("Macht") and violence ("Gewalt"). Mayer-Iswandy describes

"Macht" as the means to influence the actions of others by making them do what you want them to do. As such, I will refer to it here as "persuasive power" to distinguish it from the political power usually associated with Macht as discussed in Chapter 2 in connection with the perceived dichotomy of Geist and Macht in German culture. In Mayer-Iswandy's model, those who have this persuasive power are able to offer apparent alternatives that make the person influenced feel they are willingly, as a matter of personal choice, undertaking the action the influencer wants.

When such persuasive power does not exist, or no longer suffices – the influencer no longer has the ability to steer the actions of the influenced – then duress, and its extreme, violence, come into play. The use of violence becomes the means of coercion that will ensure the person suffering the violent action will act in accordance with the will of the person committing violence (308-309).

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The violence depicted in Grass's speeches and essays and his prose works can be political or individual. The former comprises acts of violence, often committed against unknown individuals or large groups, that are motivated by ideology with a clear aim to effect a significant change in political or social structures. Political violence in Grass's work is often accompanied by a commentary or narrative elements that depict it as undesirable. By contrast, individual acts of violence involve single persons using violence against a known individual with the intent of making that individual either do or not do something. These acts of individual violence have no accompanying critical counterweight in the narration, and also nothing to suggest the reader should view them negatively. They are simply presented as matter-of-fact acts of violence, part of everyday life, with little explanation of their cause; the reader is free to interpret them as neutral to positive.

Accounts of violence in the speeches and essays are always about violence as a political and social phenomenon, rather than an individual one, and Grass is clear about who is to blame for any violence that occurs. In the May 1, 1968 speech Gewalt ist wieder gesellschaftsfähig

(Violence rehabilitated), Grass comments on people's willingness to commit violence as a result of the heightened rhetoric from both the media, in the form of the Springer press in particular and from the protesting students (ER 291; Violence 123). This theme is picked up again in the

Politisches Tagebuch contribution Angst & Co. (Fear & Co.) in which he tells an anecdote of sitting in a pub as a small but very vocal demonstration by young people passes by, chanting opposition to the Vietnam War. The bar regulars start to suggest solutions to the problems of protesting students that involve either a return to the authoritarian, even murderous, methods of the Nazi past or, at least, ridding themselves of the problem:

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Die alten, soeben noch verspielt friedfertigen Herren schlugen die Endlösung vor: 'Der Eichmann hätt die all vergast. Bei Adolf hättes das nicht. Alle Mann hops.' Doch weil sich die Endlösung offenbar (leider) nicht als praktikabel erwies, wurden andere Lösungen an den Stehtischen erwogen und über die Theke gereicht: 'All rüber in die Zone. Innen Arbeitslager mit die. Ab zum Iwan. Langhaariges Gesocks!' (ER 571)

(The old men, who a minute before had been playful and peaceful, suggest the Final Solution: "Eichmann woulda gassed 'em all," "This would never happen with Adolf," "Do the lot of 'em in." However, as the Final Solution (unfortunately) did not turn out to be practical, other solutions arose from the tables and across the counter: "Send 'em over the wall," "Off into a labor camp with 'em," "Send them to Ivan," "Longhaired rabble!")

Grass suggests that the reactions in the bar are the result of an atmosphere of fear, again evoked by both sides. One the one hand, Grass counts out the sources of fear from the political right

(Strauß and Barzel), the media (Springer Konzern), and acts of violence against left-wing protesters (the death of Benno Ohnesorg at the hands of a policeman and Josef Bachmann's assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke). Contrasted against this, he lists the arson attack on the

Frankfurt department store in 1968 and the ever sharper rhetoric of revolution that germinated the seed of terrorism which was on everyone's mind as new attacks were expected (Grass times the anecdote as being a few days before the arrests of the Baader Meinhof Gang). Grass finishes this essay by suggesting that such fear-mongering, and the political violence it engenders, should not be tolerated: "Boykottiert werden sollte, wo es betrieben wird – das Geschäft mit der Angst"

(ER 573) ("we should boycott places that make fear their business").

Political violence is represented in örtlich betäubt as a potential, both by Scherbaum's proposed dog-burning protest and by Starusch's revolutionary bulldozers. However, in both cases, dialogue prevents it from happening. Starusch, aided by the dentist, dissuades Scherbaum from carrying out his plan, while the dentist, in turn, stops Starusch from unleashing the bulldozers. Within Tagebuch einer Schnecke, political violence by members of the student movement or other protesters is less prevalent as a contemporary phenomenon but does occur occasionally at Grass's speaking engagements both in Germany and internationally. Grass

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himself was the subject of politically motivated attacks, most notably an arson attempt at his house in 1965 (Preece 2018 91-92); at the end of Tagebuch einer Schnecke, he recounts an incident when his son answered the phone in the middle of the night only to hear the threat of a shot being fired (TS 523; DS 265). The political violence of the Nazi regime shows through in the treatment of the Jews in Danzig in the accounts of life there in the 1930s and 1940s, both the historical story of the Jews and the fictional narrative of Hermann Ott. In both örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke, the description of the violence makes clear to the reader that this is something unacceptable.

When it comes to assessing the depiction of individual violence, an examination of violence in Der Butt – and specifically in the chapter Vatertag – provides a starting point in the same way that the novel offers ideas that help examine issues in Grass's depiction of women in general in his speeches, essays, and prose works of the late 1960s. Mayer-Iswandy suggests that, at least in terms of how Grass presents the battle of the sexes in Der Butt, all violence is a question of persuasive power: "Gewalt als Bestandteil eines auf Macht bezogenen symbiotischen

Mechanismus […] zeigt, dass Gewalt zwischen den Geschlechtern analysiert werden muss als

Machtproblem" (1997 310) ("Violence as a constituent part of a mechanism of symbiosis based on persuasive power shows that violence between the sexes has to be analyzed as an issue of persuasive power"). Barbara Garde goes further in that she sees the violence in Der Butt as part of a systematic attempt to remove women and women's voices from the public sphere. In Selbst wenn die Welt unterginge, würden deine Weibergeschichten weitergehen (Even if the world ended, your affairs would continue), her examination of women and the women's movement in

Grass's works from Der Butt to his 1986 Armageddon novel Die Rättin (The Rat), Garde points out that rape as carried out in Der Butt is sending a message to other men: "Vergewaltigung [ist]

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immer eine Aktion, die auf die Anerkennung anderer Männer zielt […] Darum wird im Butt nur in Gruppen und vor Publikum vergewaltigt" (84). ("Rape is always an act that looks for approval by other men […] That is why rape in Der Butt only happens in groups and in front of an audience"). The use of violence against women (whether as extreme as rape or not) is a means to express male domination over women publicly, to suppress the voice of women in public, and so maintain their absence from public and political debate. Garde notes that the alternative for the lesbians in the Vatertag chapter, if they are not able to keep up with the manly activities, is that they should stay home: "Nein, Mäxchen. Wärst du doch bloß zuhause geblieben […] Das ist nun mal nichts für dich, dieser Männerauftrieb" (DB 541) ("No, Maxie. Oh, why didn't we leave you at home […] These hordes of men – it's no good for little girls like you" TF 460). Garde explains that this phrase emphasizes the importance of women staying out of the public realm: "Der angebotene mögliche Schutz […] zeigt, wohin solch ständig präsente Gewalt Frauen treibt: in die private Zurückgezogenheit außerhalb der so zwangsläufig männlich dominierten Gesellschaft"

(85) ("The means of protection offered […] show where the constantly present violence is pushing women: back into the private withdrawal from inevitably male-dominated society")

Acts of individual physical violence within örtlich betäubt are almost all committed by males against females and many can be seen, as discussed in Chapter 6, as an attempt to silence another individual, to prevent women from raising their voices. Starusch slaps Irmgard Seifert with the express purpose of silencing her (öb 161; LA 156) and Scherbaum attacks Vero Lewand after the party where she has talked out of turn about his plans (öb 190; LA183-184). The most common examples of male on female violence within the novel are Starusch's visions of having murdered Linde Krings, as his former fiancée, in a number of different ways. Starusch himself has declared that "Gewaltaktionen [sind mir] verhasst, zutiefst verhasst." (öb 32) ("I have a deep-

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seated horror of violence" LA 32), but this does not prevent him from imagining being violent towards Linde and indeed of finding many different ways to kill her. For the most part, these visions come to Starusch while he is in the dentist's chair and watching commercials on the television or occasionally while reading popular magazines and newspapers in the dentist's waiting room. Starusch describes Linde being strangled with a bicycle chain (öb 52; LA 51), shot

(öb 74; LA 72), and blown up in the sandbox Schlottau has built for Krings's battle reenactments

(öb 168; LA 163). On one occasion, his fantasy is less immediately violent, but the end result, death, is the same. Referring to his fiancée this time as a famous singer named Arantil – the same name as the brand of pain killers the dentist provides to him – Starusch begins a third-person account of a photographer who hides, paparazzi-like, under the bed in her hotel room. Once

Arantil is asleep, Starusch adopts the first person as he tells of emerging from under the bed to cause Arantil's death with a single flashlit shot: "meine Ablichtung hat sie das Leben gekostet.

Fortan fand sie keinen Schlaf mehr. (Weggeblitzt hatte ich ihn)" (öb 62) ("my snapshot also cost her her life. From that moment on she could find no sleep. (I had flashed it away)," LA 61). Over the next several months, Arantil – and her singing voice and so also her public presence – simply wastes away. Starusch's final fantasy of killing Linde, also his most violent and the one described in the greatest detail, does not appear to him on the TV screen in the dentist office, but comes to him after his treatment is complete. Ten years on from his engagement to Linde, Starusch follows her as she goes on vacation at the coast with her husband, Schlottau, and their two children. When they visit a wave pool, he disguises himself as a lifeguard and turns up the wave machine so that breakers beat them all to death (öb 259-263; LA 250-255).

Such acts of violence are also a means for men to assert or reassert domination over women as shown by the fact that both Irmgard Seifert (öb 162, 229; LA 156, 221) and Vero

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Lewand (öb 190; LA 184) become meek and apologetic after being hit. Moreover, Starusch slapping Seifert then turns into him slapping Linde, which provides him a further opportunity to reassert his control over her, as reinforced by his imagining her father watching and approving

("'Großartig. Nur so wird sie zu Vernunft kommen"' (öb 162) ("Splendid. Only way to bring her to reason" LA 156). Also, Starusch's various murders of Linde often occur with him in a different guise, such as the taxi driver or the lifeguard at the wave pool (öb 73, 260-262; LA 72,

252-254), and their relationship is always at a different stage (engaged, married with a child, her married to someone else with older children.) As a result, Starusch is always killing a different version of Linde. In this way, he is always imagining another possibility of reasserting his position of dominance; he will not submit to the woman regardless of the form she takes.

Within Tagebuch einer Schnecke, the clear example of male-on-female violence – namely Ott's treatment of Lisbeth as a sex object – is at the same time an act of violation. Lisbeth indicates when she first comes down to offer herself to him that she is doing so at her father's behest (TS 445; LA 186). Suffering as she is from melancholy, she is as unresponsive during the sex act as a completely inanimate sex doll. Grass presents Ott as attempting to get her to feel something during sex, so in that sense he is trying to allow his character not to seem entirely unfeeling about these episodes, but that does not prevent Ott from taking advantage of the situation, regardless of the pain he is causing. Grass even emphasizes this not only by telling us how distant and unresponsive she is in the prose narrative, but also speaks of her pain in one of the poems he occasionally intersperses into the work: "Zwar kam Saturn über Nacht, hat sie gestoßen gestoßen, aber es kam nichts, kam nicht: nun is sie nur wund" (TS 446) ("True, Saturn came during the night, bucked her and bucked her, but nothing came, nothing: now, she's just sore" DS 188). In this context, Lisbeth is also an early prototype of the women in Der Butt as an

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empty vessel into which a man can put whatever he wants, as discussed earlier. Moreover, Ott's violence towards Lisbeth does silence her as well, as she stops talking completely (TS 452; DS

194).

Grass does not explicitly recount a scene where Anton Stomma, the bicycle store owner and Lisbeth's father, uses violence against his daughter. However we know he is prepared to do so to keep Lisbeth from visiting cemeteries: "solange ihr niemand die Friedhöfe ausreden wollte oder versperrte, wie es ihr prügelnder Vater tat"(TS 395) ("as long as no-one tried to talk or keep her out of cemeteries, as her father did with a stick" DS 135). Through the character of Stomma,

Tagebuch einer Schnecke offers a depiction of male-on-male violence in that Stomma maintains his dominant position over Ott by delivering beatings, both with his belt and with spokes from a bicycle wheel that would sing in the air (TS 408-409, 436; DS 149, 177). As the tide of the war turns, Stomma begins to treat Ott more as an equal and the beatings diminish in frequency (TS

444; DS 186). In the case of Stomma, Grass does offer us some reasons for his use of violence, but these surface reasons do not provide any explanation of root causes: "Warum Stomma schlug? – Weil er an Schläge – immerhin – glaubte. Weil Schläge von ihm erwartet wurden.

Weil er sich spurte, sobald er schlug. Weil er Angst hatte" (TS 408-409) ("Why did Stomma resort to blows? Because he believed in blows – if in nothing else. Because blows were expected of him. Because when striking blows, he felt alive. Because he was afraid" DS 149). There is also a suggestion that Stomma sees this as how things are done: "auch weil er bekommene

Schläge austeilen wollte" (TS 409) ("and also to redistribute blows he himself had received " DS

149). Aside from these few lines, Grass does not, within the text, explain, condone, condemn, or otherwise comment on any of the individual violence portrayed in these works. Neither Starusch nor Ott is punished in any way, the former for his imagined killings of Linde and the latter for his

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abuse of Lisbeth. This compares to negative commentary, such as, for example, the constant debate between Starusch and the dentist on the question of political violence, Starusch's attempts to dissuade Scherbaum from burning his dog, and the dentist's threat to withhold the local anesthetic if Starusch were to unleash the political violence of his bulldozers.

Grass did suggest in the speech Bildungsurlaub that women should not try to liberate themselves by copying men and, as mentioned above, commentators have used this idea as the basis of interpreting the extreme presentation of male-on-female violence in the Vatertag chapter in Der Butt. As the four lesbians dressed as men celebrate Father's Day in typical male fashion in the woods of Berlin, Siggi, Fränki, and Mäxchen act in ever more masculine ways and become increasingly aggressive. For example, when challenged by drinking students who have realized they are women, each grabs a weapon. Billy breaks this cycle when she taunts and insults the students, but in doing so she also provides the final confirmation that she is a woman, not just to the students but also to the leather-clad motorcyclists watching in the distance (DB 560-562; TF

476-478). Billy's position as the woman in the group comes through again and again in that she cooks (DB 547; TF 465-466), is told to wash the dishes (DB 566, TF 481), and is not allowed by the others to use the dildo that lets them stand and urinate against a tree (DB 547; TF 465). The maleness of Siggi, Fränki, and Mäxchen reaches its logical conclusion when they use the dildo to

"penetrate" the sleeping Billy, an act of playing a male role that turns deadly when the motorcyclists take their revenge on Billy for having dared to transgress gender norms. (Finch

94). Angress points out that the presentation of sexual violence against woman in this case has a considerably different treatment than an earlier incident where the male stone-age narrator is raped by a passing Goth (DB 120; TF 102-103): "By way of contrast, early in the novel a man is raped. The event occupies one short paragraph and is dominated by the victim's desire to forget

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the shameful event […] unlike the drawn-out and pleasurable description of the counterpart involving women" (Angress 48-49). Also here, at the end of the chapter, Grass does not make any commentary or suggestion that such violence is anything other than normal. On the contrary, after Siggi, Fränki, and Mäxchen have found Billy's body, they leave it where it is and, while on their way home, call the police to let them know there is a body to be found.. The final sentence of the chapter is just the matter-of-fact statement "Danach ging das Leben weiter" (DB 581)

("After that, life went on" TF 493).

The trope of violence by men on women in örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke both foreshadows the violence against women in Der Butt and reflects back on earlier works such as Oskar's attempted rape of the nurse Dorothea in Die Blechtrommel (BT 635-638; TD

506-508). In the model of persuasive power versus violence posited by Mayer-Iswandy discussed earlier, violence is the last resort of those who can no longer persuade through persuasive power. While men in the literary works use violence to make the women do what they want, women make use of persuasive power, the ability to persuade without coercion. Linde uses only words to defeat her father in his reenactments, and this is acceptable as it is a personal, rather than a public, political intervention. Both Linde and Lisbeth are able to dominate their men. Linde controls Starusch up to the point she tells him to leave, and haunts him afterwards with her insults as she emerges from the deep freeze on the dentist's television screen. To counteract this, Starusch's fantasies about killing her are his attempts to re-establish control over her and, of course, silence her in the process. Once Lisbeth has regained her voice, she starts to exert persuasive power over Ott, making him tell his past (TS 522; DS 264) and persuading him to leave the cellar (TS 531; DS 273-274). The negative result of her persuasive power is that she eventually institutionalizes him and nags him into his own silence (TS 531-532; DS 274). Billy's

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taunting of the students is another example of how women can make men obey their wishes through verbal abuse and not physical violence; her taunting makes the students leave (DB 561-

562; TF 477-478). Grass does offer one example of female-on-male individual violence, but it is also an example of the failure of attempted female dominance which occurs in the play Davor.

As part of her campaign to stop Starusch from interfering with Scherbaum's plan, Vero Lewand slaps Starusch in the face, something that is missing from the novel (DV 552; MP 116).

However, like her campaign of notes (words) and her attempt to seduce Starusch (sex), this action (violence) also fails to achieve its aim, demonstrating that Vero has no persuasive power and cannot even use violence to achieve her ends.

A characteristic that Linde in örtlich betäubt and Billy in Der Butt have in common is that not only do they die (Linde repeatedly) due to seemingly unmotivated, individual violence, but they also are both ex-fiancées of the narrator (öb 8; LA 8; DB 535; 455). Grass is allowing his characters to erase their (former) fiancées as Theweleit's Freikorpsmen did in their writings about their wives and fiancées (Theweleit; Male Fantasies 3). As Preece reports, Grass's marriage to Anna was precarious at the best of times, with affairs on both sides. At one point they built a physical wall through their Berlin house and Grass lived for a time with Veronika

Schröter, a former worker with the Sozialdemokratische Wählerinitiativen, with whom he had a child. Grass's relationship with her and her pregnancy formed the model for Ilsebill in Der Butt.

Preece notes also that the story of Linde in örtlich betäubt could have seemed particularly troubling for Anna as Linde was born in the same year as Anna and Starusch and Linde were engaged in the same year as Grass and Anna (2018 100-101).

In both his literary writing and his speeches and essays, Grass guides his reader to regard political violence as something negative. No such commentary or authorial 'finger pointing'

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accompanies individual violence, which appears only in the literary works. Such violence is often intended to force someone to act in a particular way and in many cases, it is a means for men to persuade women to remain silent and withdraw from public participation. The ultimate effect is therefore the same as that advocated by Grass in those speeches where he talked about women's participation in politics, namely that women should stay out of the public sphere.

Conclusion

Writing in 1991, Claudia Mayer-Iswandy titles her examination of the discussion of the gender role of men in literature as Kapitel ohne Gegenstand: Über die nicht vorhandene

Literatur zur männlichen Geschlechterrolle (Chapter without a topic: On the non-existent literature on the male gender role) (1991 132). She maintains there is no such discussion: men in literature are simply given, and their role is understood, and there is no need for a discussion of the male gender role in literature analogous to discussions of the female gender role. Part of the understood role of men in Grass's work in the late 1960s is that they are responsible for public, political debates and actions. While in örtlich betäubt, women are present in equal numbers to the men, they do not take an active role in the public debates of the novel. In Tagebuch einer

Schnecke men dominate all the narratives to a large extent. When Grass presents his own literary assessment of the history of the battle of sexes in Der Butt, he finds good reason to criticize the patriarchy, blaming it for a history of war and destruction. But here, as in his previous works, he provides no female answer to the problems of the patriarchy, instead downplaying women's contribution to history in the guise of celebrating it, and mocking modern women and any alternative ideas that they put forward. Women are even more clearly considered an afterthought in Grass's speeches and essays during the period of his most active work as a political campaigner. He makes several references to the fact that women should not be involved in

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politics, such as his wishing for a male opponent to attack instead of a female one, and his suggestion of paying housewives so that they do not feel a need to participate in the labor market or other areas of the public sphere and so will not put at risk the work they need to be doing in the home.

Grass denies women access to the progress he propagates in his literary and non-literary works. They participate in Vergangenheitsbewältigung only in the private sphere, as Linde

Krings did, or not at all, as exemplified by Irmgard Seifert. When it comes to the reformist political dialogues that Grass considers essential to moving society forward, women are either silenced, or they are ridiculed for expressing political opinions in favor of an ideology that Grass considers dangerous. This erasure of women as equal citizens from public and political life runs counter to Grass's professed position that citizens have a duty to become involved in public life, to take part in democracy. He views progress as continual societal improvements brought about by rational decision making, undertaken by enlightened citizens, that is, those who have emerged from their own immaturity. In Der Butt, Grass took issue with those women who were attempting to emerge from the immaturity imposed on them by the patriarchy even within the premise of the story. In his speech Bildungsurlaub, he explicitly expressed his opinion that women should not attempt to emancipate themselves in the same way that men do. Yet in the literary works and speeches he wrote from the mid-1960s though to the appearance of Der Butt, he fails to provide any suggestion of how women should attempt to emancipate themselves or describe any female character that might indicate a possible way forward. On the contrary, he presents women as best advised to take themselves out of public matters and concentrate on their private, domestic lives as housewives and muses. They are to be the empty receptacles that men can, violently or not, fill with the products of their creativity, or whatever else they wish.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

The preceding chapters have shown that the content and themes of Grass's literary works in the late 1960s are, to a great extent, interchangeable with his public statements, whether in the form of general speeches and essays or his campaign work on behalf of the SPD. His protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, namely that the writer and the citizen are two separate entities, both his literary works and his non-literary works display a consistent set of themes and content.

I defined a public intellectual as someone who intervenes in public debates in a field beyond their own area of expertise and, importantly, grounds this intervention in a sense of right and wrong – a moral imperative to speak out. Grass certainly fit into this paradigm as he took his first steps into the political arena in 1961, when he spoke out first against the building of the

Berlin Wall, and then in defense of Willy Brandt. From the mid-60s to the early 70s, Grass was ceaselessly involved in public debates, and took on a significant role as a campaigner for the

SPD. Even after he cut back on his election-specific campaign work, his engagement in political debates of the day continued until his death in 2015. He never feared speaking his mind even when it went against the prevailing public mood (Taberner 2009 8) as, for example, following the collapse of the East German government, when he vehemently opposed the reunification of

Germany (Zimmermann 197). In much the same way as his earlier literary works were clearly intertwined with the content of his political pronouncement, his arguments about the pace and process of reunification featured in his 1995 novel Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield).

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In terms of themes in his work of the late 1960s, Grass was driven mainly by a desire for a better society. For him, an important element in helping society improve was recognizing and learning from past mistakes. With Die Blechtrommel, he had been among the major contributors to beginning the debate about Germany's National Socialist past and the role of ordinary

Germans and their acceptance of the regime. In both his literary and non-literary works, he now began to look forward to the next generation, showing that it also must learn the same lessons and not repeat the same mistakes. In örtlich betäubt, Linde Krings is the torch bearer for dealing with the past, as she takes on and defeats her father's attempt to rewrite history while in

Tagebuch einer Schnecke he includes his own children as he tries to explain and entertain, and so also educate them. Developing a better society also involves looking forward and determining the steps to take to make progress. Grass was very clear that progress for him involved the use of reason and the application of Enlightenment thinking, that it comprises many small steps and compromises, and that the search for improvements should never stop. He argued constantly, both directly through his speeches and essays, and indirectly through his characters, against the temptation to look for solutions that promised a place where society could not develop further, such as that offered in his view by Hegel's concept of the Weltgeist. He also took pains to draw attention to the risk inherent in the rhetoric of the adherents of such solutions, which he saw as potentially leading to violence.

For all the positive emphasis on how society can move forward peacefully, Grass's worldview on display during the late 1960s, in both his speeches and essays on the one hand, and his literary works on the other, has a significant blind spot in that his presentation is only positive when dealing with men. The presentation of female characters in the literary works is almost uniformly unsympathetic, implying that women cannot and should not become involved in

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public life. His speeches and essay underline this point, both in terms of occasional statements that suggest Grass believes women serve society best by staying at home as caring wives and mothers, and by largely ignoring or minimizing women as individuals active in the public sphere.

Grass made such statements despite the public debate taking place in West German society as a strong and vocal women's movement emerged in the early 1970s from the protest movements of the 1960s. Another aspect of Grass's treatment of women is that in the literary works, acts of violence are almost exclusively carried out by men on women, suggesting another means of ensuring that women do not venture into the public sphere. Grass did explicitly make a contribution to the debate on the position of women in society in his 1977 novel Der Butt, but many of the images and ideas outlined above from his works in the late 60s recurred, demonstrating the consistency in Grass's thinking in respect to the question of women's participation in society.

Grass in the 1960s – still relevant today?

Grass saw the turn of the 1970s as a coming to fruition of the arguments he had been putting forward throughout the 1960s as the Brandt government had taken on the mantle of power. The progressive policies Grass had advocated were to be put into place and the population was starting in on a "Prozess des Mündigwerdens" ("process of attaining maturity")

(GS 141-142). For Grass, the continued application of reason and enlightenment, in the form of small incremental changes to politics and society in the Federal Republic should help the country move to an ever-higher level of development, even if there was no ultimate goal. That this did not occur is seen also in the more pessimistic turn Grass's work took, especially from the 1980s onwards. Nonetheless, the themes addressed in örtlich betäubt and Tagebuch einer Schnecke and in Grass's speeches and essays five decades ago are to a great extent still topical, and even

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dominate some modern political discourse. To conclude, I will examine how, fifty years on from the time of writing, Grass's work from that time still provides contributions to and/or commentaries on contemporary public debates around the topics of democracy and governance, science, and the situation of women.

One theme that Grass was concerned with that still resonates today is the question of the survival of democracy. Grass was operating in a relatively young state as evidenced in his 1969 speech Die runde Zahl zwanzig (Twenty is a round number). This speech celebrated that the

Federal Republic, founded in 1949, had survived for twenty years as a liberal parliamentary democracy. Grass's celebration of that fact contrasts with several countries whose current political systems emerged from the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the cold war, such as Victor Orban's Hungary and Poland under the Law and Justice Party. These states are turning into illiberal democracies (Kaufmann) where, despite the veneer of democratic elections, institutions of constitutional liberalism essential for the maintaining democracy, such as an independent judiciary and a free press, are at risk. (Zakaria).

Grass's willingness to fight on behalf of democracy did not just express a preference for the institutions of democracy per se, it also included warnings against the rise of anti-democratic forces in the student movement and particularly from the political right. His railing against the

Grand Coalition and the concomitant appointment of the former National Socialist party official

Kurt Georg Kiesinger to the Chancellorship, as well as his warnings against the electoral strength of the NPD, attest to his fear of a resurgence of fascism. The Federal Republic of Germany has seen the periodic emergence of neo-Nazi parties within its body politic, from the NPD that Grass fought against in the 1960s, to Die Republikaner (The Republicans) in the 1980s and the

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD - Alternative for Germany) in the past decade. In this light,

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Grass's warnings from the 1960s about the dangers of a return to fascism and the need for a memory culture that is passed on to successive generations remain as necessary as ever. The rise of the AfD also brings to mind Grass's discussion of the theme of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and the need to remember and account for the past. The presence in the AfD of politicians, such as Björn Höcke, who would like to do away with Germany's memory culture surrounding the

Holocaust, underlines the need to keep Holocaust history alive (Gemütszustand).

Writing from the specific perspective of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe, Grass's attitude to science also feeds into contemporary debates. In örtlich betäubt, Grass uses the figure of the dentist to represent progress via the scientific method and reflecting the idea of societal progress as small, incremental improvements. Science here is seen as a way to create a world that benefits people, as the Dentist's incremental improvements ultimately lead to his preventive healthcare system (öb 185; LA 179), Moreover, medicine is associated with other characters seen as progressive. Scherbaum, having completed his schooling at the end of the book, is now studying medicine (öb 263; LA 255), as was Linde Krings before answering the call to prevent her former Nazi father from rewriting history (öb 28; LA 28).

Grass's attitude to science was ambivalent to a certain extent and he tempered his enthusiasm for scientific progress when it failed to lead to benefits for humankind. In Tagebuch einer Schnecke, we see this in skepticism toward the Apollo moon landings, which Grass extended to the space race in general, describing it as almost a proxy battle in the cold war, much like the proxy war destroying millions of human lives in Nigeria (ER 390). This also foreshadows his much more dystopian view of environmental degradation which came to the forefront the early to mid- eighties and which is still a much-discussed topic in terms of climate change.

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Even those aspects of his work where Grass's work showed his blind spots in terms of political and social progress remain timely as many issues they touched on (and often failed to resolve) are by no means settled. In this context, I described Grass's work as lacking any understanding of women's interests in society. Three areas I discussed were the lack of political and public agency, the sexual objectification of women, and the question of violence against women. Grass argued that women should not try to replicate the errors of men in their attempt to find equality, but in doing so he denied them any public participation and suggested they find their raison d'être in being a caring wife and mother (Mayer-Iswandy 1991 98; Liljegren 14), even if he thinks they should be paid for this profession (ERI Bildungsurlaub). Against Grass's expectations, the ability of women to achieve and wield political power in a male-dominated world has been proven many times in the intervening years. It is ironic in terms of Grass's argumentation that in the current coronavirus pandemic, women have not been repeating the errors of men: governments headed by women (most notably by Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand,

Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan, and Angela Merkel in Germany) have handled the crisis with far better outcomes in terms of health and economic impacts than many of those of their male-led counterparts (Fioramonti). At the same time, however, the denial of women's participation in public life is still an issue as evidenced by the pay gap between the genders

(Gehaltsunterschiede), and the lack of women in positions of economic power (Anteil der

Topmanagerinnen). Even the one policy that Grass advocated as a benefit for women as caring wives and mothers, the idea of a stipend for women working in the home, has not come to fruition.

By itself, the existence of the #MeToo movement with its campaign against systemic sexual abuse and sexual violence (MeToo) is evidence that the attitudes Grass depicted in his

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work are still prevalent. Even if Grass felt he was suggesting, as indicated in relation to Der Butt, that women should look for a third way to achieve their emancipation, the presentation of women as sexual objects that are free game for being violently abused comes across more as a tacit acceptance of such behavior, or even an attempt at titillation, rather than a critique of the men indulging in the acts of violence. This type of masculine behavior fits more into that criticized by the #MeToo movement and would offer potential examples that could feed into discussions of sexual violence.

* * *

Within a much more fractured and diverse media environment, Günter Grass was less able, in later life, to dominate cultural and political debates in the manner he had during the

1960s and 1970s (Taberner 2012 530). At the same time, the scandalized reaction to his admission of his wartime service, as well as the controversy surrounding his poem Was gesagt werden muss, were both proof of his ability, as Preece puts it, to "grab public attention, sometimes with a play, a novel, or a poem, but equally often with a gesture or statement which left no doubt which side he took on a question of the moment." (2018 10). While he did not expect his account of his youth in Beim Hauten der Zwiebel to engender the debate that it did, the poem was intended to be provocative. (Taberner 2012 530). These later public debates were sparked by his literary works, not a political or campaign speech or an essay. He first ventured outside of the arts and into the world of politics in 1961 with his open letter to Anna Seghers on the Berlin Wall and his speech writing for Willy Brandt in the Federal election that same year.

Since then, Grass's participation in public debates has taken place as much in his literary works as in his non-literary writing, and Taberner lists the vehicles for his public interventions as

"literary texts, speeches, essays, open letters or other forms of engagement with pressing

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contemporary issues" (Taberner 2012 520). I will conclude by returning to the analogy Grass himself used to distinguish what he considered two sides to his work, the two beer mats that he called his "politische Arbeit [..] als Sozialdemokrat und Bürger" and his "Manuskript, […] Beruf,

[…] Weißnichtwas." ("political work […] as a Social Democrat and citizen"; "manuscript […] profession […] whatchacallit" (TS 542; 284). Two beer mats that advertise the same beer are essentially indistinguishable, and no matter how much Grass feels that he can move them towards and away from each other and place one on top of the other (and vice versa), they continue to sell the same beer; the content remains one.

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Cited Literature

Primary Sources

Grass, Günter. Werksausgabe in zehn Bänden. Edited by Volker Neuhaus. Darmstadt: Luchterhand Verlag 1987.

Band I: Gedichte und Kurzprosa

Band II: Die Blechtrommel. 5-731.

Band IV: örtlich betäubt. 5-264.

Band IV: Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. 265-567.

Band V: Der Butt. 5-645

Band VI: Kopfgeburten oder die Deutschen sterben aus. 139-270

Band VII: Die Rättin. 5-456

Band VIII: Davor. 479-555

Band XI: Essays Reden Briefe Kommentare.

Band X: Gespräche.

---. Ausgefragt. Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag. 1967.

---. Ein weites Feld. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 1995

---. Im Krebsgang. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 2002

---. Essays und Reden I 1955-1979 Göttinger Ausgabe Band 11, Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, Kindle Edition 2015.

---. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. München: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag. 2008.

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---. Grimms Wörter Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 2010

---. "Radikalismus in Deutschland". Über das Selbstverständliche. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. 1969. 186-196.

---. "VW-Bus-Rede". Günter Grass auf Tour für Willy Brandt, Edited by Kai Schlüter. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag GmbH. 2011. 152-163.

---. "Wer wird dieses Bändchen kaufen" Die Alternative oder brauchen wir eine neue Regierung. Edited by Martin Walser. Reinbek bei Hamburg: rororo. 1961. 76-80.

---. "Was gesagt werden muss" Süddeutsche Zeitung. April 4, 2012 (Web page updated April 10, 2012). https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/gedicht-zum-konflikt-zwischen-israel-und-iran- was-gesagt-werden-muss-1.1325809. Accessed 09/05/2020

Grass, Günter and Harro Zimmermann. Vom Abenteuer der Aufklärung: Werkstattgespräche. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. 1999.

Primary source translations

Grass, Günter. The Tin Drum. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1965.

---. New Poems. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1968

---. Local Anaesthetic. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Fawcett Crest. 1970.

---. Max: A Play. Translated by A. Leslie Wilson and Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harvest. 1972.

---. From the diary of a snail. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harvest. 1973.

---. The Flounder. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harvest. 1986.

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---. Headbirths, Or The Germans Are Dying Out. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

---. Too Far Afield. Translated by Krishna Winston. New York: Harcourt. 2000.

---. Crabwalk. Translated by Krishna Winston. Orlando: Harcourt. 2002.

---. Peeling the Onion. Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harcourt. 2007.

---. "An Exchange of Open Letters with Willy Brandt". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 61-64.

---. "Ben and Dieter: A Speech to the Israelis". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Helen Mustard, Venable Herndon, and Ursula Molinaro. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 89-98

---. "Open Letter to Kurt Georg Kiesinger". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 65-67.

---. "On the Self-Evident". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 28-46.

---. "On Writers as Court Jester and on Non-Existent Courts". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 47-53.

---. "Provisional Balance: Attempt at an Epilog". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 104-115.

---. "Speech to a Young Voter Who Feels Tempted to Vote for the NPD". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 54-60.

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---. "Song in Praise of Willy" Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 16-27.

---. "The Citizen's First Duty". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 72-80.

---. "The Issue". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 3-15.

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---. "Violence Rehabilitated". Speak out! Speeches, open letters, commentaries. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace World. 1969. 116-126.

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---. "The Meaning of the Nazi Past in the Post-Postwar: Recent Fiction by Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Martin Walser". Seminar. 50.2 2014. 161-177.

---. "'Was gesagt werden muss': Günter Grass's 'Israel/Iran Poem' of April 2012." German Life and Letters. 64.4. October 2012. 518-531.

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Weiss, Peter. Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in elf Gesängen. Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp 1991.

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Ziemann, Benjamin. “The Code of Protest: Images of Peace in the West German Peace Movements, 1945–1990.” Contemporary European History 17.2. 2008. 237–261.

Zimmermann, Harro. Günter Grass und die Deutschen. Eine Entwirrung. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. 2017.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. "Seneca: A New German Icon?" International Journal of the Classical Tradition. 11.1. Summer 2004. 47-77.

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VITA: Adrian Chubb

Education 2021 PhD, Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago Dissertation: Günter Grass in the Late 1960s: The Writer as Public Intellectual (Advisor: Dr. Sara Hall, Committee members: Dr John Ireland, Dr Elizabeth Loentz, Dr Imke Meyer, Dr Heidi Schlipphacke.) 1986 MA German Studies: University of Lancaster, England Program Title: Intellectuals in East and West Germany 1984 BA, German and Russian Studies. University of Lancaster, England

Publications 2019 Chubb, A. "In Search of Public Sphere Pluralism in 1960s West Germany". Unsettled 1968 in the Troubled Present edited by Konarzewska, A.; Nakai, A.; Przeperski, M. London: Routledge. 2019.

Scholarships/Awards/Grants 2020 Robert Kauf Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching 2018 Max Kade Fellowship, University of Illinois at Chicago 2018 Robert Kauf Memorial Award for Excellence in Teaching 2018 Robert Kauf Memorial Scholarship Award for Excellence in Graduate Research 2017 Fruman and Marian Jacobson “Bridges” Fund Award 2017 Robert Kauf Memorial Scholarship Award for Excellence in Graduate Research 2016 American Association of Teachers of German: MINT: Fortbildungskurs mit Schwerpunkt Forschung/Materialentwicklung und Lehre in den Unterrichtsfächern Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften und Technik 2015 Max Kade Fellowship, University of Illinois at Chicago 1985 Peel Trust Studentship Award, University of Lancaster, England 1985 Assistant Dean, Lonsdale College, University of Lancaster, England

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Conference Presentations

2020 "The Political is Personal: Günter Grass on the Election Campaign Trail" German Studies Association, Virtual Conference, Sept 30, 2020. 2019 "You keep out of this": Violence, silence, and the (lack of) pain in Günter Grass' "Local Anaesthetic" German Studies Association, Portland, OR October 3-6. 2018 Public sphere pluralism in 1960s West Germany. Unsettled 1968: Origins – Myths – Impact, Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, June 14-16. 2018 More than just a counter public: Public sphere pluralism in 1960s West Germany. The Languages, Literatures and Cultures Conference, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, April 19-21. 2016 Pop goes the Counterculture, Conflicts of Interest – The Productive Power of Confrontation, Department of Germanic Languages, University of California, Los Angeles, Apr. 29, 2016. 2015 From Passivity to Pop, Contextualizing Irony: Change and Continuity from the 18th Century to the Present, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, 04 Dec. 2015.

Teaching experience

Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Illinois at Chicago

Instructor of Record 2020 Introduction to German Film – Online (two sections) 2019 German for Reading Knowledge 2018 German for Reading Knowledge 2017 Elementary German I (two sections) 2017 Intermediate German I 2016 Elementary German II Assistant to Professor 2019 Introduction to German Film (Professor Imke Meyer) 2016 Vikings and Wizards: Northern Myth and Fairy Tales in Western Culture (Professor Patrick Fortmann)

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