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The Günter Grass Reader
Selected from the vast range of his work, the writings included in this anthology trace Günter Grass's development as a writer, and with it the history of a nation coming to terms with its past.
Excerpts from Grass's major novels-from The Tin Drum to Crabwalk-are included, as are numerous short fictions, essays, and poems, many of which have never appeared before in English. Grass's gifts as an observer of and participant in the social and political landscape are justly celebrated, as are his inimitable sense of humor, his consistent defense of the disadvantaged, and his mastery of the forms of expression he has employed over the years.
For readers in search of an introduction to his work or for those familiar primarily with his novels, this diverse collection offers a fresh and stimulating introduction to one of the world's greatest living writers.
310 pages, Paperback
First published December 6, 2004
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About the author
Günter Grass
303 books1,829 followersNovels, notably
The Tin Drum
(1959) and
Dog Years
(1963), of German writer Günter Wilhelm Grass, who won the Nobel Prize of 1999 for literature, concern the political and social climate of Germany during and after World War II.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 22, 2015
A remarkable compilation of works that give a feel for the author's angst and brilliance.
I did not write The Tin Drum for an audience, because I did not know any audiences. I wrote first of all and second of all and third of all for myself, for Anna, and for friends and acquaintances who happened to drop in and were forced to listen to this or that chapter, and I suppose I also wrote for an audience summoned by my imagination. The living and the dead crouched around my typewriter; my meticulous friend Geldmacher; my literary mentor Alfred Döblin with his thick glasses on; my stepmother Rabelais, whose literary expertise never interfered with his belief in the good, the true, and the beautiful; my old German teacher, whose eccentric notions I still find more useful that the dried pedagogical fruit we're given today; and my deceased mother, whose objections and corrections I always tried countering with documents and who never believed me without reservations.
WHEN THE WALL WENT UP - Berlin, August 14, 1961
revered Frau Anna Seghers
It was you who after that never-to-be-forgotten war taught my generation, or anyone who had ears to hear, to distinguish justice from injustice.
After Auschwitz, people think differently; we force ourselves to think differently, and wherever Auschwitz is repeated, we have to think of Auschwitz as the established measure.
The unspeakable cruelty of individuals was not new, but the sleek anonymity and what one might call hard work of pushing paper was new: the patently human invention that we, in distancing ourselves from it, call inhuman.
What chance do I have, after the third playing of a Jimi Hendrix record and the enthusiastically itemized features and components of a Land Rover, to use this abstract number -- a number that seems as if it will never be anything but abstract -- to explain something that for children becomes meaningful, or, to put it trivially, exciting, only when it is presented as a private, individual case, like that of Anne Frank?
ISN'T IT NICE TO BE RICH AND FAMOUS?
The more famous a man gets, the fewer friends he has. Fame isolates. When Fame helps you, he never lets you forget it. When he hurts you, he says something about the price you have to pay. I certify that Fame is boring and only rarely amusing.
I enjoy life. I'd be glad if all those who so persistently try to teach me how to live enjoyed life, too. The betterment of the world ought not to be the monopoly of embittered people with stomach trouble.
I don't like bigoted Catholics or orthodox atheists.
I don't like people who want to bend the banana straight for the benefit of mankind.
I am repelled by all those who are able to prestidigitate subjective wrong into objective right.
I fear all those who want to convert me.
My courage is confined to being as little afraid as possible; I do not give demonstrations of courage.
My advice to all is not to make love in a hurry like cats. (That goes for you, too, children, later on.)
I like buttermilk with radishes.
I like broken old people.
I, too, repeat my mistakes.
I was pretty well badly brought up.
I am not faithful - but attached.
I've always got to be doing something: ...marching forward with the snails and -- because I know war -- resolutely keeping the peace, which, children, is another thing that I like.
----
The general argument against arson is that it can jeopardize the lives of people who have no desire to have their lives jeopardized...
---
In Israel, I talked with friends and acquaintances and heard contradictory things: How a people persecuted for centuries was suffering from having to be an occupying power; how now that they were confirmed by their success in the war, people responded to critical questions by referring to military security...
Israel squandered its reputation by increasingly setting up house in both the occupied territories and the already annexed ones. Israelis began to buy up land, defense settlements were established, and Arabs in the occupied territories were treated like colonial subjects.
Multinational corporations, free from democratic control and recklessly pursuing profit, add to the Arabs' extortion a capitalist Western one. The first was to be anticipated; the second calls into question the feasibility of parliamentary democracy. We can no longer speak of a free West with conviction if it can be shown that Western politics is being steered by multinational corporations.
All of us, myself included, have become susceptible to our own immediate, everyday concerns - the specter of economic stagnation, the threat of unemployment.
A year paved with good intentions. Too scattered in its contradictions to be sobering. Western parliametarism gone threadbare with corruption and capitalist hubris.
--
IMMURED
Like every great love, our had come to an utterly banal end. One day she could no longer tolerate the sound that apples make when a person with decent teeth bites into one and proceeds to devour it in solemn tranquility down to the hard core. She didn't like the crunching.
--
BY A ROUGH ESTIMATE
I decided to come here in order to see India for myself and possibly to learn something - never mind that we all think we already know everything and that the facts lie in great heaps all around us. I come bearing not a message but my own helplessness, which I would like to explain. But first my thesis: I am convinced that human beings have been overwhelmed by the results of their own expertise. While they may be able to extract wonderful discoveries out of their knowledge, their technological skills, and their investigative curiosity,these milestones of human progress stand in the midst of a society that is eminently barbaric, albeit in a sense that can be illustrated brilliantly with advanced statistics. They are still incapable of feeding the world's children.
Children make up half of the world's population. Human science is capable of directing the reentry of a space capsule and its happy astronaut passengers down to the square mile where it will land, but we can only "roughly estimate" the millions of famine victims who die each year.
We no longer think of this in precise terms, no longer want to know the precise details. Precise numbers are tallied up only for airplane crashes and robberies and the taking and freeing of hostages... and for weekend with particularly heavy traffic.
Where the dead are concerned, we can only count up to a hundred. Anything more than that becomes abstract, can no longer be identified; it gets repressed or shunted out of the way with religious hairsplitting, and is not addressed.
Humans are great perpetrators; in most cases, they're undeniably brilliant in action. But the consequences of their actions usually leave them bewildered, as it they had had no idea what those would be. They behave like children; that is, they act irresponsibly.
the Fourth World: those countries that are doubly deprived: not only poor in terms of gross national product but also without natural resources, and thus dependent on wealthy industrial nations and their goods.
In the United States, unemployment, the hopeless impoverishment of broad sections of the population, and continuing racial discrimination all belie the country's wealth and complacent self-image.
The UN created hope. Everywhere people realized that global problems could only be solved from the standpoint of a world government.
1973 Chancellor Willy Brandt's address to reason at the UN: Hunger is war, too!
All the great religious ideas are declarations of peace. Hinduism, and Buddhism both teach tolerance. Even secular religions - capitalism and communism - once saw themselves as the Enlightenment's children: they intended to make mankind happy and freedom universal.
Nothing is left of this. Tolerance has become impatience; neighborly love has degenerated into bigoted self-righteousness. Capital yields its return in abuses of power. And all that has survived in communism is the revolutionary slogan. Everywhere people who believed and were betrayed are suffering. They are not players; they are played with. Kept in the dark, these many hundreds of millions of roughly estimated illiterates cannot see through the corruption, recognize the misuse of power or disprove a single lie. Where there is no strong hand to oppress them, they are mollified instead by pious promises and the clever assessment of their inconsiderable wants and needs.
Well outside of this growing misery, a privileged international elite spends its time in carefully demarcated security zones. It may not possess political power itself, but the politically powerful are the guarantors of its petty freedoms.
I don't wish to be unfair here, especially since I belong to this elite and share in its arrogance and impotence. But isn't it true? Even as we're predicting the imminent catastrophe and hating each other's guts, we still wink at each other and exchange comforting phrases: Don't worry, we'll survive. We most definitely will survive.
Born in 1927, I belong to a generation that bears to this day the responsibility for the German crime - the genocide of six million Jews -- and is neither able nor willing to forget it. I said: Six millions Jews murdered. Once again, a rough estimate. The too-immense abstract number.
After 1945 the whole world believed that this, the gravest crime in history, would act as a curative shock, would have its causes plumbed and brought to light, and that restitution for it would be necessarily cathartic. Nothing of the sort has occurred. Just as before, minorities are discriminated against and murdered in the hundreds of thousands. Instead of shocking us, the abstract number has simply been suppressed.
The world watches from the sidelines or involves itself in the preparations with only a mild sense of shame. With their arms shipments, the superpowers - the US and the USSR - ensure that the conflict will be a military one.
The majority of Germans knew nothing about the Final Solution's bureaucratic organization int he concentration camps.
Today there is nothing we don't know. Hunger has become a commonplace. And it isn't a tidal wave or some other natural disaster that is responsible for this scandal, but human action, or rather, human inaction. Nothing can acquit us.
Cynicism celebrates the survival of the fittest.
What if Indian poverty, like all other poverty, is merely the result of class and caste power, of mismanagement and corruption? Then there should be a way to end it, this poverty, because that is humanity's work.
--
BUT WHAT IS MY STONE?
Albert Camus published his essay in 1942, in the middle of the war. I read The Myth of Sisyphus in the early fifties.
But what is my stone? The toil of piling words on words? Or love, with all its epileptic fits? Or the fight for justice, that boulder so hard to push upward and so ready to tumble?
I also laugh at the stone, which wants to make me the hero of its overandoveragain. "Look, stone," I say. "See how lightly I take you. You are so absurd and so used to me that you've become my trademark. Sisyphus is a good advertisement. You are a good traveling companion."
--
DER STEIN - THE STONE
---
THE ARTIST'S FREEDOM OF OPINION IN OUR SOCIETY - address delivered in Florence, 1973
I must also speak in the name of those artists in Greece, as well as Czechoslovakia, whose freedom of opinion is restricted to the dimensions of a prison cell, and whose cold skepticism I seem to feel when it becomes necessary to discuss generally known facts in the pleasant atmosphere of this conference.
I took it for granted that along with my writing I would do the share of the political work that seemed to be incumbent on me as a citizen.
The concentration of capital and the monopoly status of the giant corporations are largely removed from democratic control, thus highlighting the impotence of freely elected parliaments.
The European Enlightenment, which in the 18th century gave birth to the ideas or concepts that still shape our lives - socialism, liberalism, and probably capitalism as well - also developed the notion of tolerance. Anyone who is prepared to accept Michel de Montaigne as the father of the European Enlightenment may be amused to note how absurdly his descendants have reviled him as a reactionary.
To come out for freedom of opinion - and that's what I'm doing here - is to plead for diversity, to protect the desperately blasphemous outburst, to tolerate the kitsch that blooms everlastingly, to grant admittance at all times to subversive doubt, even where faith has established an entrenched society, to live with the contradictions characteristic of man and human society.
--
THE LAST MEAL
Who will join me in a dish of tripe?
The time it takes. Those are the best hours. When the tough has to be made tender, but can't be hurried.
--
LITERATURE AND MYTH
The cost of every miracle has been accounted for.
Even Reason is tired of going about in sackcloth and ashes. Ever since she was deified, long before the French Revolution, as the alpha and omega of European Enlightenment, and set up in the course of the Revolution in her own temples and shrines, Reason has become as much a myth as has our notion of progress: Reason transcends. And now, because she can't bear her saturnine [def. slow and gloomy] condition any longer, she gazes forlornly and asks for pills to make her happy.
We can unseal anything. Nothing is hidden from us. We will not tolerate any missing information.
If a present-day John, a writer say, were to set his revelation down on paper, it would come out as some doom-and-gloom dime novel, a trivial science-fiction brew.
--
THE DESTRUCTION OF MANKIND HAS BEGUN -1982
Optimism is expressed at all award ceremonies, as though one could take it for granted that life will go on as it is.
Literature has always been sure of one ally: the future. Silone and Moravia, Brecht and Döblin outlived fascism, just as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam outlived Stalinism - though it killed them.
Literature has always had superior staying power.
Can human beings stop thinking about themselves.
... stop frightening one another, relieve one another of fear by disarming to the point of nakedness.
--
ALEXANDR AND ALEXANDRA
"Kiek in de Köck" (Peek in the Kitchen)
--
OBITUARY FOR HELEN WOLFF
Dear Helen, I'm so glad you oculd make it.
Schädlich's Approximation
Kurt Wolff knew that all great literature was centered in the provinces, tucked away there, without being the least provincial, which was why it had such international appeal...
What is Glumse?
I miss her.
--
LITERATURE AND HISTORY
[Reading]
For this is what distinguishes humanity. No image is lovelier than the sight of a reading child. Utterly lost in the world between two book covers, that child is no less present in this one; she simply does not want to be disturbed.
--
TO BE CONTINUED... - Nobel Lecture 7 Dec 1999 - Stockholm, Sweden
The publisher of the Vossichen Zeitung, where Trials and Tribulations first say print, exclaimed in a rage: "Will this sluttish story never end!"
Hilf mit! (lend a hand!) story contest in a Hitler Youth magazine
Nigerian writer, Ken SaroWiwa 1995
We look on in horror as capitalism - now that his brother, socialism, has been declared dead - rages unimpeded, megalomaniacally replaying the errors of the supposedly extinct brother. It has turned the free market into dogma, the only truth, and intoxicated by its all but limitless power, plays the wildest of games, making merger after merger with no other goal other than to maximize profits. No wonder capitalism is proving as impervious to reform as the communism that managed to strangle itself. Globalization is its motto, a motto it proclaims with the arrogance of infallibility: there is no alternative.
Anything the human mind comes up with finds astonishing applications. Only hunger seems to resist. I tis even increasing. Poverty deeply rooted shades into misery. Refugees are flocking all over the world accompanied by hunger. It takes political will paired with scientific know-how to root out misery of such magnitude, and no ones seems resolved to undertake it.
In 1973, just when terror - with the active support of the United States - was beginning to strike in Chile, Willy Brandt spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, the first German chancellor to do so. He brought up the issue of worldwide poverty. The applause following is exclamation "Hunger is war, too!" was stunning.
The affluent North and West can try to screen themselves off in security-mad fortresses, but the flocks of refugees will catch up with them; no gate can withstand the crush of the hungry.
MITTEN IM LEBEN (1996) In the Midst of Life
denke ich an die Toten,
die ungezählten und die mit Namen.
Dann klopft der Alltag an,
und übern Zaun
ruft der Garten: Die Kirschen sind reif!
I think of the dead,
those uncounted and those with names.
Then Every-Day knocks on the door
and over the fence
the garden calls out: The cherries are ripe!
I REMEMBER...
...Or I am reminded by something that stands in my way...
The effervescence of first love, that tingling sensation experienced once and never again.
A writer is a professional rememberer.
We Germans came up with the stereotypical and clichéd expression: Memory work
My great-aunt whispered to me in 1958, Ech waiß, Ginterchen, em Wästen is bässer, aber em Osten is scheener [Oh, little Günter, I know, the West is better, but the East is more beautiful.
-
I REMEMBER
At present, not a week goes by in which we are not warned against forgetting.
"Never forget!" cried some.
"We've had enough!" declared others.
For Germans, remembering is torturous. No matter what plan we make for the future, the past has already marked the supposedly virgin territory with its scent and everywhere staked signposts pointing back to our history.
Yet it is strange and troubling to think how lately and with what hesitation we remember the suffering inflicted on Germans during the war. The consequences for us of that unscrupulously initiated and criminally executed war, that is, the destruction of German cities, the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians through Allied carpet bombing, and the forced expulsion and privation of 12 million emigrant Germans from the East, have been relegated to the background.
The victims of violence, regardless of who its perpetrators are, tend not to want to remember what they have suffered, and for their part, they have the right to forget, even to repress, those horrors.
But the silence of the victims is irresistible: we cannot pretend not to hear it. And since there has never been peace -- memory will continue to be the echo of past suffering.
Hungarian György Konrád wrote, with regard to European history, "To remember is human, we could even say it is the essence of humanity.
In memory, we converse with both the living and the dead. In being remembered, we survive. Forgetting, however, is the seal of death.
***
I did not write The Tin Drum for an audience, because I did not know any audiences. I wrote first of all and second of all and third of all for myself, for Anna, and for friends and acquaintances who happened to drop in and were forced to listen to this or that chapter, and I suppose I also wrote for an audience summoned by my imagination. The living and the dead crouched around my typewriter; my meticulous friend Geldmacher; my literary mentor Alfred Döblin with his thick glasses on; my stepmother Rabelais, whose literary expertise never interfered with his belief in the good, the true, and the beautiful; my old German teacher, whose eccentric notions I still find more useful that the dried pedagogical fruit we're given today; and my deceased mother, whose objections and corrections I always tried countering with documents and who never believed me without reservations.
WHEN THE WALL WENT UP - Berlin, August 14, 1961
revered Frau Anna Seghers
It was you who after that never-to-be-forgotten war taught my generation, or anyone who had ears to hear, to distinguish justice from injustice.
After Auschwitz, people think differently; we force ourselves to think differently, and wherever Auschwitz is repeated, we have to think of Auschwitz as the established measure.
The unspeakable cruelty of individuals was not new, but the sleek anonymity and what one might call hard work of pushing paper was new: the patently human invention that we, in distancing ourselves from it, call inhuman.
What chance do I have, after the third playing of a Jimi Hendrix record and the enthusiastically itemized features and components of a Land Rover, to use this abstract number -- a number that seems as if it will never be anything but abstract -- to explain something that for children becomes meaningful, or, to put it trivially, exciting, only when it is presented as a private, individual case, like that of Anne Frank?
ISN'T IT NICE TO BE RICH AND FAMOUS?
The more famous a man gets, the fewer friends he has. Fame isolates. When Fame helps you, he never lets you forget it. When he hurts you, he says something about the price you have to pay. I certify that Fame is boring and only rarely amusing.
I enjoy life. I'd be glad if all those who so persistently try to teach me how to live enjoyed life, too. The betterment of the world ought not to be the monopoly of embittered people with stomach trouble.
I don't like bigoted Catholics or orthodox atheists.
I don't like people who want to bend the banana straight for the benefit of mankind.
I am repelled by all those who are able to prestidigitate subjective wrong into objective right.
I fear all those who want to convert me.
My courage is confined to being as little afraid as possible; I do not give demonstrations of courage.
My advice to all is not to make love in a hurry like cats. (That goes for you, too, children, later on.)
I like buttermilk with radishes.
I like broken old people.
I, too, repeat my mistakes.
I was pretty well badly brought up.
I am not faithful - but attached.
I've always got to be doing something: ...marching forward with the snails and -- because I know war -- resolutely keeping the peace, which, children, is another thing that I like.
----
The general argument against arson is that it can jeopardize the lives of people who have no desire to have their lives jeopardized...
---
In Israel, I talked with friends and acquaintances and heard contradictory things: How a people persecuted for centuries was suffering from having to be an occupying power; how now that they were confirmed by their success in the war, people responded to critical questions by referring to military security...
Israel squandered its reputation by increasingly setting up house in both the occupied territories and the already annexed ones. Israelis began to buy up land, defense settlements were established, and Arabs in the occupied territories were treated like colonial subjects.
Multinational corporations, free from democratic control and recklessly pursuing profit, add to the Arabs' extortion a capitalist Western one. The first was to be anticipated; the second calls into question the feasibility of parliamentary democracy. We can no longer speak of a free West with conviction if it can be shown that Western politics is being steered by multinational corporations.
All of us, myself included, have become susceptible to our own immediate, everyday concerns - the specter of economic stagnation, the threat of unemployment.
A year paved with good intentions. Too scattered in its contradictions to be sobering. Western parliametarism gone threadbare with corruption and capitalist hubris.
--
IMMURED
Like every great love, our had come to an utterly banal end. One day she could no longer tolerate the sound that apples make when a person with decent teeth bites into one and proceeds to devour it in solemn tranquility down to the hard core. She didn't like the crunching.
--
BY A ROUGH ESTIMATE
I decided to come here in order to see India for myself and possibly to learn something - never mind that we all think we already know everything and that the facts lie in great heaps all around us. I come bearing not a message but my own helplessness, which I would like to explain. But first my thesis: I am convinced that human beings have been overwhelmed by the results of their own expertise. While they may be able to extract wonderful discoveries out of their knowledge, their technological skills, and their investigative curiosity,these milestones of human progress stand in the midst of a society that is eminently barbaric, albeit in a sense that can be illustrated brilliantly with advanced statistics. They are still incapable of feeding the world's children.
Children make up half of the world's population. Human science is capable of directing the reentry of a space capsule and its happy astronaut passengers down to the square mile where it will land, but we can only "roughly estimate" the millions of famine victims who die each year.
We no longer think of this in precise terms, no longer want to know the precise details. Precise numbers are tallied up only for airplane crashes and robberies and the taking and freeing of hostages... and for weekend with particularly heavy traffic.
Where the dead are concerned, we can only count up to a hundred. Anything more than that becomes abstract, can no longer be identified; it gets repressed or shunted out of the way with religious hairsplitting, and is not addressed.
Humans are great perpetrators; in most cases, they're undeniably brilliant in action. But the consequences of their actions usually leave them bewildered, as it they had had no idea what those would be. They behave like children; that is, they act irresponsibly.
the Fourth World: those countries that are doubly deprived: not only poor in terms of gross national product but also without natural resources, and thus dependent on wealthy industrial nations and their goods.
In the United States, unemployment, the hopeless impoverishment of broad sections of the population, and continuing racial discrimination all belie the country's wealth and complacent self-image.
The UN created hope. Everywhere people realized that global problems could only be solved from the standpoint of a world government.
1973 Chancellor Willy Brandt's address to reason at the UN: Hunger is war, too!
All the great religious ideas are declarations of peace. Hinduism, and Buddhism both teach tolerance. Even secular religions - capitalism and communism - once saw themselves as the Enlightenment's children: they intended to make mankind happy and freedom universal.
Nothing is left of this. Tolerance has become impatience; neighborly love has degenerated into bigoted self-righteousness. Capital yields its return in abuses of power. And all that has survived in communism is the revolutionary slogan. Everywhere people who believed and were betrayed are suffering. They are not players; they are played with. Kept in the dark, these many hundreds of millions of roughly estimated illiterates cannot see through the corruption, recognize the misuse of power or disprove a single lie. Where there is no strong hand to oppress them, they are mollified instead by pious promises and the clever assessment of their inconsiderable wants and needs.
Well outside of this growing misery, a privileged international elite spends its time in carefully demarcated security zones. It may not possess political power itself, but the politically powerful are the guarantors of its petty freedoms.
I don't wish to be unfair here, especially since I belong to this elite and share in its arrogance and impotence. But isn't it true? Even as we're predicting the imminent catastrophe and hating each other's guts, we still wink at each other and exchange comforting phrases: Don't worry, we'll survive. We most definitely will survive.
Born in 1927, I belong to a generation that bears to this day the responsibility for the German crime - the genocide of six million Jews -- and is neither able nor willing to forget it. I said: Six millions Jews murdered. Once again, a rough estimate. The too-immense abstract number.
After 1945 the whole world believed that this, the gravest crime in history, would act as a curative shock, would have its causes plumbed and brought to light, and that restitution for it would be necessarily cathartic. Nothing of the sort has occurred. Just as before, minorities are discriminated against and murdered in the hundreds of thousands. Instead of shocking us, the abstract number has simply been suppressed.
The world watches from the sidelines or involves itself in the preparations with only a mild sense of shame. With their arms shipments, the superpowers - the US and the USSR - ensure that the conflict will be a military one.
The majority of Germans knew nothing about the Final Solution's bureaucratic organization int he concentration camps.
Today there is nothing we don't know. Hunger has become a commonplace. And it isn't a tidal wave or some other natural disaster that is responsible for this scandal, but human action, or rather, human inaction. Nothing can acquit us.
Cynicism celebrates the survival of the fittest.
What if Indian poverty, like all other poverty, is merely the result of class and caste power, of mismanagement and corruption? Then there should be a way to end it, this poverty, because that is humanity's work.
--
BUT WHAT IS MY STONE?
Albert Camus published his essay in 1942, in the middle of the war. I read The Myth of Sisyphus in the early fifties.
But what is my stone? The toil of piling words on words? Or love, with all its epileptic fits? Or the fight for justice, that boulder so hard to push upward and so ready to tumble?
I also laugh at the stone, which wants to make me the hero of its overandoveragain. "Look, stone," I say. "See how lightly I take you. You are so absurd and so used to me that you've become my trademark. Sisyphus is a good advertisement. You are a good traveling companion."
--
DER STEIN - THE STONE
---
THE ARTIST'S FREEDOM OF OPINION IN OUR SOCIETY - address delivered in Florence, 1973
I must also speak in the name of those artists in Greece, as well as Czechoslovakia, whose freedom of opinion is restricted to the dimensions of a prison cell, and whose cold skepticism I seem to feel when it becomes necessary to discuss generally known facts in the pleasant atmosphere of this conference.
I took it for granted that along with my writing I would do the share of the political work that seemed to be incumbent on me as a citizen.
The concentration of capital and the monopoly status of the giant corporations are largely removed from democratic control, thus highlighting the impotence of freely elected parliaments.
The European Enlightenment, which in the 18th century gave birth to the ideas or concepts that still shape our lives - socialism, liberalism, and probably capitalism as well - also developed the notion of tolerance. Anyone who is prepared to accept Michel de Montaigne as the father of the European Enlightenment may be amused to note how absurdly his descendants have reviled him as a reactionary.
To come out for freedom of opinion - and that's what I'm doing here - is to plead for diversity, to protect the desperately blasphemous outburst, to tolerate the kitsch that blooms everlastingly, to grant admittance at all times to subversive doubt, even where faith has established an entrenched society, to live with the contradictions characteristic of man and human society.
--
THE LAST MEAL
Who will join me in a dish of tripe?
The time it takes. Those are the best hours. When the tough has to be made tender, but can't be hurried.
--
LITERATURE AND MYTH
The cost of every miracle has been accounted for.
Even Reason is tired of going about in sackcloth and ashes. Ever since she was deified, long before the French Revolution, as the alpha and omega of European Enlightenment, and set up in the course of the Revolution in her own temples and shrines, Reason has become as much a myth as has our notion of progress: Reason transcends. And now, because she can't bear her saturnine [def. slow and gloomy] condition any longer, she gazes forlornly and asks for pills to make her happy.
We can unseal anything. Nothing is hidden from us. We will not tolerate any missing information.
If a present-day John, a writer say, were to set his revelation down on paper, it would come out as some doom-and-gloom dime novel, a trivial science-fiction brew.
--
THE DESTRUCTION OF MANKIND HAS BEGUN -1982
Optimism is expressed at all award ceremonies, as though one could take it for granted that life will go on as it is.
Literature has always been sure of one ally: the future. Silone and Moravia, Brecht and Döblin outlived fascism, just as Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam outlived Stalinism - though it killed them.
Literature has always had superior staying power.
Can human beings stop thinking about themselves.
... stop frightening one another, relieve one another of fear by disarming to the point of nakedness.
--
ALEXANDR AND ALEXANDRA
"Kiek in de Köck" (Peek in the Kitchen)
--
OBITUARY FOR HELEN WOLFF
Dear Helen, I'm so glad you oculd make it.
Schädlich's Approximation
Kurt Wolff knew that all great literature was centered in the provinces, tucked away there, without being the least provincial, which was why it had such international appeal...
What is Glumse?
I miss her.
--
LITERATURE AND HISTORY
[Reading]
For this is what distinguishes humanity. No image is lovelier than the sight of a reading child. Utterly lost in the world between two book covers, that child is no less present in this one; she simply does not want to be disturbed.
--
TO BE CONTINUED... - Nobel Lecture 7 Dec 1999 - Stockholm, Sweden
The publisher of the Vossichen Zeitung, where Trials and Tribulations first say print, exclaimed in a rage: "Will this sluttish story never end!"
Hilf mit! (lend a hand!) story contest in a Hitler Youth magazine
Nigerian writer, Ken SaroWiwa 1995
We look on in horror as capitalism - now that his brother, socialism, has been declared dead - rages unimpeded, megalomaniacally replaying the errors of the supposedly extinct brother. It has turned the free market into dogma, the only truth, and intoxicated by its all but limitless power, plays the wildest of games, making merger after merger with no other goal other than to maximize profits. No wonder capitalism is proving as impervious to reform as the communism that managed to strangle itself. Globalization is its motto, a motto it proclaims with the arrogance of infallibility: there is no alternative.
Anything the human mind comes up with finds astonishing applications. Only hunger seems to resist. I tis even increasing. Poverty deeply rooted shades into misery. Refugees are flocking all over the world accompanied by hunger. It takes political will paired with scientific know-how to root out misery of such magnitude, and no ones seems resolved to undertake it.
In 1973, just when terror - with the active support of the United States - was beginning to strike in Chile, Willy Brandt spoke before the United Nations General Assembly, the first German chancellor to do so. He brought up the issue of worldwide poverty. The applause following is exclamation "Hunger is war, too!" was stunning.
The affluent North and West can try to screen themselves off in security-mad fortresses, but the flocks of refugees will catch up with them; no gate can withstand the crush of the hungry.
MITTEN IM LEBEN (1996) In the Midst of Life
denke ich an die Toten,
die ungezählten und die mit Namen.
Dann klopft der Alltag an,
und übern Zaun
ruft der Garten: Die Kirschen sind reif!
I think of the dead,
those uncounted and those with names.
Then Every-Day knocks on the door
and over the fence
the garden calls out: The cherries are ripe!
I REMEMBER...
...Or I am reminded by something that stands in my way...
The effervescence of first love, that tingling sensation experienced once and never again.
A writer is a professional rememberer.
We Germans came up with the stereotypical and clichéd expression: Memory work
My great-aunt whispered to me in 1958, Ech waiß, Ginterchen, em Wästen is bässer, aber em Osten is scheener [Oh, little Günter, I know, the West is better, but the East is more beautiful.
-
I REMEMBER
At present, not a week goes by in which we are not warned against forgetting.
"Never forget!" cried some.
"We've had enough!" declared others.
For Germans, remembering is torturous. No matter what plan we make for the future, the past has already marked the supposedly virgin territory with its scent and everywhere staked signposts pointing back to our history.
Yet it is strange and troubling to think how lately and with what hesitation we remember the suffering inflicted on Germans during the war. The consequences for us of that unscrupulously initiated and criminally executed war, that is, the destruction of German cities, the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians through Allied carpet bombing, and the forced expulsion and privation of 12 million emigrant Germans from the East, have been relegated to the background.
The victims of violence, regardless of who its perpetrators are, tend not to want to remember what they have suffered, and for their part, they have the right to forget, even to repress, those horrors.
But the silence of the victims is irresistible: we cannot pretend not to hear it. And since there has never been peace -- memory will continue to be the echo of past suffering.
Hungarian György Konrád wrote, with regard to European history, "To remember is human, we could even say it is the essence of humanity.
In memory, we converse with both the living and the dead. In being remembered, we survive. Forgetting, however, is the seal of death.
***
May 6, 2010
He's a great writer, but most of this man's metaphors are beyond me. I'll just go ahead and say they don't translate. His poetry is surprisingly good. This collection includes some cool short stories that are hard to find elsewhere...those about his youth in Danzig are especially memorable.
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October 27, 2018everything gunter grass writes is worth reading. this particular book has a picture of his face on it, and is a nice size to carry around. why not!
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