Der ECONOMIST, der zu den 10 besten Zeitungen (eigentlich ja eine Zeitschrift) der Welt z\u00e4hlt, \u00fcber G\u00fcnter Grass und seine Wurzeln…
\nDas sch\u00f6ne Wortspiel …Grass-Roots…tja, da k\u00f6nnen wir mit der deutschen Sprache so nicht mithalten – gespickt mit jener decent and indecent Ironie, die so typisch f\u00fcr THE ECONOMIST….Neu f\u00fcr FEM war, dass Grass nach dem Scheitern des letzten Attentats auf Hitler sich \u00fcber diese „aristrokatische Brut“ aufgeregt hatte, die dem F\u00fchrer an den Kragen wollte…
20th-century Germany<\/p>\n
Grassroots
\nAug 24th 2006
\nFrom The Economist print edition<\/p>\n
IN HIS teens, G\u00fcnter Grass suffered three great hungers: first a hunger for food in an American prison camp in 1945 where near-starvation was part of the punishment. He took imaginary cooking lessons from a Bohemian chef, who described in great detail how to slaughter a pig and use every part, from its trotters to the deboned hog’s head. The obsession with cooking and eating fatty food stayed with him.<\/p>\n
On his release Mr Grass spent months as a labourer in a D\u00fcsseldorf potash works trying to satisfy his second hunger, for sex. Often the nearest he got was in the tram on the way to work, pressing himself against strap-hanging secretaries. However, thanks to earlier dancing lessons in Danzig, the Baltic town where he grew up, he was able to pull a few girls. <\/p>\n
Mr Grass’s third great hunger, to be an artist, had only partly been satisfied by wartime sketches and poems. In January 1947, he left his refugee parents, now living near Cologne, and tried for a place at sculpture school in D\u00fcsseldorf. His professor advised him to learn stonemasonry first; there was plenty of work making headstones. Later at art school in Berlin, Mr Grass progressed from carving conventional figures to out-sized statues of animals. After marriage, the birth of twin sons and a move to Paris, Mr Grass began working on \u201cThe Tin Drum\u201d, which, after publication in 1959, made him famous.<\/p>\n
This is the essence of \u201cBeim H\u00e4uten der Zwiebel\u201d (\u201cPeeling the Onion\u201d), an autobiography which explains the post-war Grass. But the first 150 pages are completely different\u2014an apologia by an old man for not previously linking himself to the 17-year-old youth who in November 1944 joined the Waffen-SS, the combat divisions of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel. The youth was a typical Nazi sheep, a willing subject for propaganda films, with typical schoolboy fantasies of winning laurels as a submariner. When the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed in July 1944, Mr Grass joined his neighbours in decrying the conspirators as \u201cthat brood of treacherous aristocrats\u201d. He volunteered for U-boat service, but was drafted willy-nilly into the SS, an accident of history which thereafter was so shameful to Mr Grass that, despite his impeccable Social-Democrat credentials, he never found the right time to come clean.<\/p>\n
Does this mean that much of his previous work, which focuses on Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung (\u201ccoming to terms with the past\u201d), has forfeited some of its artistic truth, as some critics and politicians have argued? No, it does not degrade Mr Grass as a fabulist of burlesque events, a veritable bestiary of characters: \u201cCat and Mouse\u201d, \u201cThe Flounder\u201d, \u201cFrom the Diary of a Snail\u201d, \u201cDog Years\u201d. What is interesting, however, is the unconvincing nature of his wartime recollections. That section of the book is colourless and stereotyped. Many of the scenes could have been lifted\u2014and the suspicion remains that they were\u2014from Mr Grass’s frequent visits to the cinema. The author himself makes many references to films and often throws doubts on his own memory and his ability to convince. There is no description of wartime friends, for example. Only one character stands out: the Aryan youth who at training camp refused to bear arms and one day disappeared. There is an episode in which Mr Grass’s platoon tries to escape from the enemy by bicycle and is cut down. He, a non-cyclist, is the sole survivor. Even if this were true, he fails to suspend disbelief.<\/p>\n
Contrast that with Mr Grass’s mastery of character once the \u201cdubious\u201d few months in the SS are over. He meets a salt-of-the-earth corporal who helps him back to the German lines. Both are hit by shrapnel. Many later encounters with the Bohemian chef, with art professors and stonemasons, are the stuff of his later novels. A boy with a tin drum, who bursts in to a room in Switzerland in about 1952, becomes Oskar in his most successful work. Mr Grass may have satisfied his three hungers, but he has left a corner of doubt: why should his recollection of those few combatant months appear so weak? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Der ECONOMIST, der zu den 10 besten Zeitungen (eigentlich ja eine Zeitschrift) der Welt z\u00e4hlt, \u00fcber G\u00fcnter Grass und seine Wurzeln…
\nDas sch\u00f6ne Wortspiel …Grass-Roots…tja, da k\u00f6nnen wir mit der deutschen Sprache so nicht mithalten – gespickt mit jener decent and indecent Ironie, die so typisch f\u00fcr THE ECONOMIST….Neu f\u00fcr FEM war, dass Grass nach dem Scheitern des letzten Attentats auf Hitler sich \u00fcber diese „aristrokatische Brut“ aufgeregt hatte, die dem F\u00fchrer an den Kragen wollte… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-supissima","entry"],"yoast_head":"\n