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Too Far Afield
Two old men roam through Berlin observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the Wall in 1989. The men are Theo Wuttke, a former East German cultural functionary, keen observer, and gifted speaker; and Ludwig Hoftaller, a mid-level spy who can serve the Prussian police, or the Gestapo, or the East German Stasi with equal dedication. Both men are employed by the Treuhand-the agency in charge of privatizing former East German state enterprises-which occupies the building in Berlin that was once the headquarters of Goering's Air Ministry. Wuttke, in his capacity as file courier, desperately tries to save the old-fashioned elevator, which has carried the famous and powerful up-and down again. And he comforts the disheartened head of the agency, who seeks relief from the burdens of office by roller skating around the corridors at night. This novel will stand as perhaps the most complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's recent reunification will
672 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
Günter Grass
330 books1,985 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 - 30 of 36 reviews
July 15, 2012
Reich Ranicki hat recht; Autoren, die Ruhm und ein gewisses Alter erreicht haben werden nicht mehr vernünftig lektoriert. Der Roman hat viele charmante Ansätze aber es hapert 1. an einem Plott und 2. ist er viel zu lang-weilig. Eine Kürzung um ca. 400 Seiten, um sich auf einen Kern zu konzentrieren wäre hilfreich gewesen.
March 7, 2013
I am a big fan of Gunter Grass, and have read nearly everything he has written that has been translated in to English, including his essays. I count some of his novels like "the Tin Drum" & "Dog Years" amongst my favourite reads of all time. This book, however, is not among them. Long, drawn-out, meandering, heavy-handed... I was quite excited to read this book and am left feeling quite disappointed.
set-aside
September 7, 2018Abbandonato a pagina 73. Se non si hanno solide basi di storia della Germania (in particolare Prussia, DDR e riunificazione) e di letteratura tedesca (in particolare Theodor Fontane), questo libro risulterà pesante e incomprensibile. Magari lo riprenderò in un lontano futuro, o magari no, chissà.
March 30, 2021
Two old dudes wander around Berlin. Its 1989, the Berlin Wall has fallen, East and West Germany are in the process of reuniting and there's a general sense of "what the heck just happened?" in the air, but these two seem to be having an okay time ambling about discussing the past and present. Except one of them seems to act like he's an author that died ninety years ago. And the other old guy at times seem like he's auditioning for a cut-rate George Smiley role. And why are our narrators seemingly a bunch of faceless people that work at "The Archives"?
Welcome to a late period Gunter Grass novel, where he thinks about a lot of stuff but not necessarily the reader's comprehension of events.
Part of that isn't his fault but more mine because I was reading it at home and not as part of a college course on modern German literature. The basics of the novel are basic enough . . . Theo Wuttke used to work for the East German government and the guy who keeps tagging along with him is Hoftaller, who used to be/might still be a spy and whose reasons for hanging around Wuttke constantly seem at times to be for less than altruistic reasons. Separately, they're the white-haired guys who occupy the tables outside the local doughnut shop on so many mornings that you start to wonder if they're paying rent or plotting crimes. Together, though, they're a metaphor.
How much of a metaphor is going to depend on how well-versed you are in moderately recent history. The reunification of Germany caused a lot of people to start thinking about both the past and the future and it seems that Grass was no different in that regard. One thing to remember about Grass (and will subsequently cause the novel to make a bit more sense) is that he wasn't a big fan of the whole idea of German reunification to begin with, apparently feeling that an intact Germany would become the Germany of old that kept starting wars (though I guess to be fair they didn't have a monopoly on that kind of thing in Europe, although they took it a little bit further than everyone else did). That skepticism tends to permeate the novel to the point where its pretty noticeable even beyond two guys discussing the good old days where everyone was poor and the police kept tabs on you constantly. Its not that Grass was a supporter of Soviet occupation and domination, its that his politics tended toward the German version of democratic socialism and as such he was a bit leery of capitalism sweeping in and turning everyone into profit seeking missiles.
Its an interesting point of view, especially as a lot of us in the West would probably take it for granted that of course Germany would want to be reunited (if not for East Germany's sake, unless you owned stock in barbed wire), and his decision to have the book star two senior citizens at least makes that slant seem somewhat logical at times. Showing the two of them coping with the changes that during the process of unifying would have been compelling enough but Grass of course has to one one step further in layering thematic elements over everything, which is where some of the reader confusion might come in, or at least knock on the window giving you sad puppy-dog eyes and begging to be allowed entrance.
Because even as our two protagonists discuss current events, the narrative keeps doing a little two-step where the life of Wuttke is conflated with that of his literary idol, Theodor Fontane. Fontane, for those of you who don't know (and before this book I include myself among them) was a pretty famous German author of the 19th century, writing a number of novels late in life. The one you might have potentially heard of is "Effi Briest" since its been made into a movie a couple times (one of the more notable versions was directed by Rainer Fassbinder) but whether you have or not the book seemingly assumes that you know all about him, barely mentioning his name (Wuttke is called "Fonty" repeatedly, which helped me not at all figure out who they were referring to) but drawing constant parallels between his life and that of Wuttke. They have wives with similar names, daughters with similar names, both lived during periods of German reunification (that last bit seems to be where Grass is going with all this, as Fontane wrote extensively about the wars that eventually formed the German Empire) and there's probably a dozen more parallels that went over my head. To its credit, the book does point out a lot of this constantly, setting a tone somewhere between thoughtful discourse and "get a load of this guy".
What this all means is that book will sometimes dive without warning into the past to discuss Fontane, but not by shifting to a flashback or another narrative but by acting like Wuttke is some kind of medium to access the long deceased writer. It can make for some bewildering reading at times, especially if you aren't as up on all the history Grass is touching upon here as he thinks you are, making those passages at best merely admirable, at worst straight up hard to follow where the story is going, especially since its less than interested in telling a story as acting as commentary for what for the novel are current events.
It works better when it deals with the complex pasts of the two men. While Hoftaller seems to have his own place in the Fontane meta-narrative thing going on (he gets called Tallhover, who is apparently a cop/spy that was assigned to monitor Fontane) for me the book worked best when it danced around the relationship between the two men over the decades, a relationship that is often sketched around without necessarily being spelled out. Its clear after a while that Hoftaller is a sort of minder for Wuttke, for one reason or another, which adds an almost sinister edge to their conversations (abetted by how Hoftaller seems to be cheerfully and blissfully everywhere) as it becomes obvious that Wuttke can do whatever he wants, except what he's not allowed to do. Their talks dance around what a messy place Germany was for the half century prior to its two halves wanting to get back together and how just knocking walls down aren't necessarily going to make everything perfect. In a way, Wuttke's repeated attempts to take a trip just about anywhere stand for German citizens as a whole . . . its not so easy to get away when someone to always there to tap you on the shoulder and bring you back in.
Unsurprisingly, because this is a Gunter Grass novel (the last he wrote before winning the Nobel Prize in 1999), the accessible portion of the plot (such as it is) is nearly entirely buried under layers of history and commentary. I'm not going to lie to you, I did a decent amount of skimming online sources to even give myself a rudimentary idea of what was going on since Grass seems to go out of his way to obscure exactly what he's referencing to (hence Fontane never mentioned by name, only as "The Immortal") even when it comes to agencies like the Treuhandanstalt, which he repeatedly refers to as "The Handover Trust", which would be okay except a decent portion of the book is about the cast's reactions to the murder of Treuhand hand Detlev Rohwedder, who is also never mentioned by name even when its readily apparent in hindsight that who he's referencing to (a documentary, "A Perfect Crime" came out last year about his assassination, for those interested). On the one hand most German readers probably know exactly what he's talking about, but for Americans its going to rough sledding for a while until they either chase down the references for context or just accept they have no idea what's going on and roll with it.
And even without fully understanding the whole context the book is fairly enjoyable, even with all the density. If you can get past the plot being extraordinarily loose almost to the point of shambling, it definitely has its moments. When its not getting bogged down in showing off how Wuttke is a clone of Fontane there's a light hearted swing to it that is sometimes disarming, sometimes off-putting, as if Grass himself isn't taking this very seriously. But there's a barbed commentary hidden underneath all the jocular references to a dead writer, an old man standing outside his country's history and wondering if any of this is a good idea. It comes across as the remnants of a dismantling, an aircraft intentionally disassembled in mid-air and yet still expected to land properly so that the pieces can be reconstructed into something new. Wuttke and Hoftaller are old men walking around in wreckage that never quite looks like wreckage, perhaps because they're been immersed in it their entire lives, perhaps because something half-healed is better than completely broken. Grass has been criticized for leaning too heavily on the moralizing in his novels and while no one likes to be lectured here at least it feels like honest concern, a fear that opportunities (in this case, as the Pet Shop Boys so famously stated, to make lots of money) might lead nowhere good and wind up with unexpected consequences. The fact that past choices didn't lead to great outcomes either may not give him any confidence . . . either way, it leads to a certain sense of uneasiness, that the consequences of some choices can't be undone, how you're not allowed to forget anything when the reminders are all around.
How much patience you're going to have for all this may depend on how much knowledge you have going into this or how much you enjoy novels giving you extracurricular assignments. He captures a certain feeling of a very specific time but its not so much a cross-section as one man's concerns filtered on down to two people who are worried about change for two different reasons, and sometimes those reasons coincide and very often they do not. It’s a novel that takes its sweet time to go nowhere all that exciting (and perhaps could have been a tad bit shorter) but beneath all the postmodernesque tomfoolery there's a valiant attempt to convey a certain texture, to rewrite memories that were already rewriting themselves, to form a history that was already hardening. His linking of distant past and relative present may not be as deft as you'd like but neither was the reunification and the parts that stuck with me may have been the least clever, the constant idea that, fair or unfair, the world isn't going to stay the same and sometimes the best you can do is learn to live in it and perhaps survive long enough for it to change again, with the hope that for once, maybe, finally, it'll be for the better.
Welcome to a late period Gunter Grass novel, where he thinks about a lot of stuff but not necessarily the reader's comprehension of events.
Part of that isn't his fault but more mine because I was reading it at home and not as part of a college course on modern German literature. The basics of the novel are basic enough . . . Theo Wuttke used to work for the East German government and the guy who keeps tagging along with him is Hoftaller, who used to be/might still be a spy and whose reasons for hanging around Wuttke constantly seem at times to be for less than altruistic reasons. Separately, they're the white-haired guys who occupy the tables outside the local doughnut shop on so many mornings that you start to wonder if they're paying rent or plotting crimes. Together, though, they're a metaphor.
How much of a metaphor is going to depend on how well-versed you are in moderately recent history. The reunification of Germany caused a lot of people to start thinking about both the past and the future and it seems that Grass was no different in that regard. One thing to remember about Grass (and will subsequently cause the novel to make a bit more sense) is that he wasn't a big fan of the whole idea of German reunification to begin with, apparently feeling that an intact Germany would become the Germany of old that kept starting wars (though I guess to be fair they didn't have a monopoly on that kind of thing in Europe, although they took it a little bit further than everyone else did). That skepticism tends to permeate the novel to the point where its pretty noticeable even beyond two guys discussing the good old days where everyone was poor and the police kept tabs on you constantly. Its not that Grass was a supporter of Soviet occupation and domination, its that his politics tended toward the German version of democratic socialism and as such he was a bit leery of capitalism sweeping in and turning everyone into profit seeking missiles.
Its an interesting point of view, especially as a lot of us in the West would probably take it for granted that of course Germany would want to be reunited (if not for East Germany's sake, unless you owned stock in barbed wire), and his decision to have the book star two senior citizens at least makes that slant seem somewhat logical at times. Showing the two of them coping with the changes that during the process of unifying would have been compelling enough but Grass of course has to one one step further in layering thematic elements over everything, which is where some of the reader confusion might come in, or at least knock on the window giving you sad puppy-dog eyes and begging to be allowed entrance.
Because even as our two protagonists discuss current events, the narrative keeps doing a little two-step where the life of Wuttke is conflated with that of his literary idol, Theodor Fontane. Fontane, for those of you who don't know (and before this book I include myself among them) was a pretty famous German author of the 19th century, writing a number of novels late in life. The one you might have potentially heard of is "Effi Briest" since its been made into a movie a couple times (one of the more notable versions was directed by Rainer Fassbinder) but whether you have or not the book seemingly assumes that you know all about him, barely mentioning his name (Wuttke is called "Fonty" repeatedly, which helped me not at all figure out who they were referring to) but drawing constant parallels between his life and that of Wuttke. They have wives with similar names, daughters with similar names, both lived during periods of German reunification (that last bit seems to be where Grass is going with all this, as Fontane wrote extensively about the wars that eventually formed the German Empire) and there's probably a dozen more parallels that went over my head. To its credit, the book does point out a lot of this constantly, setting a tone somewhere between thoughtful discourse and "get a load of this guy".
What this all means is that book will sometimes dive without warning into the past to discuss Fontane, but not by shifting to a flashback or another narrative but by acting like Wuttke is some kind of medium to access the long deceased writer. It can make for some bewildering reading at times, especially if you aren't as up on all the history Grass is touching upon here as he thinks you are, making those passages at best merely admirable, at worst straight up hard to follow where the story is going, especially since its less than interested in telling a story as acting as commentary for what for the novel are current events.
It works better when it deals with the complex pasts of the two men. While Hoftaller seems to have his own place in the Fontane meta-narrative thing going on (he gets called Tallhover, who is apparently a cop/spy that was assigned to monitor Fontane) for me the book worked best when it danced around the relationship between the two men over the decades, a relationship that is often sketched around without necessarily being spelled out. Its clear after a while that Hoftaller is a sort of minder for Wuttke, for one reason or another, which adds an almost sinister edge to their conversations (abetted by how Hoftaller seems to be cheerfully and blissfully everywhere) as it becomes obvious that Wuttke can do whatever he wants, except what he's not allowed to do. Their talks dance around what a messy place Germany was for the half century prior to its two halves wanting to get back together and how just knocking walls down aren't necessarily going to make everything perfect. In a way, Wuttke's repeated attempts to take a trip just about anywhere stand for German citizens as a whole . . . its not so easy to get away when someone to always there to tap you on the shoulder and bring you back in.
Unsurprisingly, because this is a Gunter Grass novel (the last he wrote before winning the Nobel Prize in 1999), the accessible portion of the plot (such as it is) is nearly entirely buried under layers of history and commentary. I'm not going to lie to you, I did a decent amount of skimming online sources to even give myself a rudimentary idea of what was going on since Grass seems to go out of his way to obscure exactly what he's referencing to (hence Fontane never mentioned by name, only as "The Immortal") even when it comes to agencies like the Treuhandanstalt, which he repeatedly refers to as "The Handover Trust", which would be okay except a decent portion of the book is about the cast's reactions to the murder of Treuhand hand Detlev Rohwedder, who is also never mentioned by name even when its readily apparent in hindsight that who he's referencing to (a documentary, "A Perfect Crime" came out last year about his assassination, for those interested). On the one hand most German readers probably know exactly what he's talking about, but for Americans its going to rough sledding for a while until they either chase down the references for context or just accept they have no idea what's going on and roll with it.
And even without fully understanding the whole context the book is fairly enjoyable, even with all the density. If you can get past the plot being extraordinarily loose almost to the point of shambling, it definitely has its moments. When its not getting bogged down in showing off how Wuttke is a clone of Fontane there's a light hearted swing to it that is sometimes disarming, sometimes off-putting, as if Grass himself isn't taking this very seriously. But there's a barbed commentary hidden underneath all the jocular references to a dead writer, an old man standing outside his country's history and wondering if any of this is a good idea. It comes across as the remnants of a dismantling, an aircraft intentionally disassembled in mid-air and yet still expected to land properly so that the pieces can be reconstructed into something new. Wuttke and Hoftaller are old men walking around in wreckage that never quite looks like wreckage, perhaps because they're been immersed in it their entire lives, perhaps because something half-healed is better than completely broken. Grass has been criticized for leaning too heavily on the moralizing in his novels and while no one likes to be lectured here at least it feels like honest concern, a fear that opportunities (in this case, as the Pet Shop Boys so famously stated, to make lots of money) might lead nowhere good and wind up with unexpected consequences. The fact that past choices didn't lead to great outcomes either may not give him any confidence . . . either way, it leads to a certain sense of uneasiness, that the consequences of some choices can't be undone, how you're not allowed to forget anything when the reminders are all around.
How much patience you're going to have for all this may depend on how much knowledge you have going into this or how much you enjoy novels giving you extracurricular assignments. He captures a certain feeling of a very specific time but its not so much a cross-section as one man's concerns filtered on down to two people who are worried about change for two different reasons, and sometimes those reasons coincide and very often they do not. It’s a novel that takes its sweet time to go nowhere all that exciting (and perhaps could have been a tad bit shorter) but beneath all the postmodernesque tomfoolery there's a valiant attempt to convey a certain texture, to rewrite memories that were already rewriting themselves, to form a history that was already hardening. His linking of distant past and relative present may not be as deft as you'd like but neither was the reunification and the parts that stuck with me may have been the least clever, the constant idea that, fair or unfair, the world isn't going to stay the same and sometimes the best you can do is learn to live in it and perhaps survive long enough for it to change again, with the hope that for once, maybe, finally, it'll be for the better.
July 9, 2008
It is with great sorrow that I come to the finish of "Too Far Afield." With the help of Wikipedia this book taught me volumes of German history and literature. For non-German readers, I highly recommend researching all the unknowns you will find in each paragraph of this large tome. The rich overview of 100+ years of Germania will leave you satisfied. You will need months in which to plow your way through, however.
**** you will benefit in your understanding of this novel if you read "Effi Briest" by Theodor Fontane prior to picking up "Too Far Afield."
Grass uses a literary device to proved his point: History is cicular. Two elderly gentlemen are at the center of the novel. The story begins on the day of the fall of the Berlin wall.
Gunter Grass is a Nobel Laureate in Literature. Reading this novel confirms that he is one of the greatest literary geniuses of our day.
**** you will benefit in your understanding of this novel if you read "Effi Briest" by Theodor Fontane prior to picking up "Too Far Afield."
Grass uses a literary device to proved his point: History is cicular. Two elderly gentlemen are at the center of the novel. The story begins on the day of the fall of the Berlin wall.
Gunter Grass is a Nobel Laureate in Literature. Reading this novel confirms that he is one of the greatest literary geniuses of our day.
April 30, 2025
Vaya, tenía mucho tiempo en el que un libro no me quedaba tan grande, pero de Günter Grass creo que ya ni debería de sorprenderme. Lo abandone, lo retome, lo volví a abandonar y por fin junte las fuerzas necesarias para reeler un poco y por fin terminarlo. Una lectura compleja que combina aspectos históricos de la cultura alemana, desde los tiempos prusianos hasta la caída del muro de Berlín, con personajes históricos (algunos reconocibles como Bismarck y el Kaiser Guillermo II) con personajes de la cultura alemana (no tan reconocibles al menos para mí, como Theodore Fontaine) y un solido conocimiento geográfico de la ciudad de Berlín, sus calles pero sobretodo sus plazas aunado con una trama sutil que parece no llegar a nada sepultada en páginas y páginas de discursos y monólogos internos y (al menos en esta edición múltiples notas de pie de página que tratan de ofrecer un contexto a lo que se está narrando, ah y un humor irónico que hace más difícil la lectura pues sepultado en todo esto no se sabe que tomar enserio y que no (personalmente opte por dejar de tomar enserio todo). Esta lectura es un desafio, el cual no pude disfrutar y para el cual claramente no estaba listo. Habrá personas más versadas que yo que sin duda encontrarán en este libro una joya, pero este no fue para mi.
¿De qué va el libro? Bueno, pues en realidad de nada pero se centra en dos personajes: Theo Wuttke y Ludwig Hoftaller, ambos ancianos uno bajito y otro alto. El primero un antiguo corresponsal de guerra del régimen nazi que terminó en Alemania Oriental trabajando para algo así como la "Secretaria de Cultura" del régimen comunista y el segundo un espía que lo sigue. El primero es comúnmente llamado "Fonty" en honor a su héroe, el escritor aleman Theodore Fontaine de quién en sus múltiples discursos toma ideas y versos, y el segundo es su "Sombra de día y noche" que lo acompaña a todos lados. ambos ancianos observan la caída del muro de Berlín y pues básicamente vemos que es lo que pasa con sus vidas después de esto. Entre tanto las cosas de "Fonty y su sombra" se mezclan con recuerdos de su pasado, imágenes y recreaciones de la unificación de Alemania pasada y su presente en el proceso de la unificación de la Alemania actual. Todo muy confuso pues hablan de personajes muertos como si estuvieran vivos, o incluso sin hacer referencia a sus nombres hacer alusión a ellos por medio de frases o fragmentos de sus discursos (aquí es en donde entran las miles de notas de pie de página), y además metafórico (otra cosa que añade complejidad al libro y que olvide mencionar, muchas de las cosas de las que aquí se hablan son metaforicas), algunos objetos como las flores, las estatuas y los edificios pero la más importante es un paternoster (una especie de elevador) que aquí lo asocian con la historia que se repite una y otra vez.
El libro contiene una crítica sobre la reunificacion alemana y como el capitalismo tiende a monetizar y codificar cosas como la historia y la cultura y que si no se tiene cuidado esto irremediablemente termina en que los errores del pasado se repitan por qué se pierde el significado (lo cual estoy de acuerdo), esto llevo a que prácticamente crucificaron al autor en el momento en el que se publico el libro. Sin embargo como es muy vago todo y está todo mezclado esta crítica se pierde o se hace muy sutil o difícil de ver. Pierde fuerza e irónicamente para mí, significado. Quizá ese es parte del punto, no lo se.
Es por eso que para poder desentrañar todo lo que esté libro ofrece necesitas un conocimiento vasto sobre la cultura alemana. Tuve que hacer búsquedas en Google, ver algunos vídeos y leer algunas opiniones y reseñas (bastante vagas también) para poder hacer sentido de esta lectura. Para un lector casual puede resultar demasiado, pero en un contexto más académico creo que esté libro puede ser explotado.
No es una lectura fácil ni casual, es muy demandante. Si tienes conocimientos previos de la cultura alemana podrás disfrutarlo más que yo, Si te da curiosidad adelante, pero si recomiendo que vayas informándote conforme vas avanzando. Esto me gusta pues como lector me saco de mi zona de confort y me hizo ir más allá para poder entender esto, pero si no estás buscando una experiencia de este tipo, te recomiendo que vayas con algo más ligero. No es un mal libro, al contrario, solo que yo no iba preparado y no era la experiencia que estaba buscando. Aquí la cosa no es el libro si no yo como lector.
¿De qué va el libro? Bueno, pues en realidad de nada pero se centra en dos personajes: Theo Wuttke y Ludwig Hoftaller, ambos ancianos uno bajito y otro alto. El primero un antiguo corresponsal de guerra del régimen nazi que terminó en Alemania Oriental trabajando para algo así como la "Secretaria de Cultura" del régimen comunista y el segundo un espía que lo sigue. El primero es comúnmente llamado "Fonty" en honor a su héroe, el escritor aleman Theodore Fontaine de quién en sus múltiples discursos toma ideas y versos, y el segundo es su "Sombra de día y noche" que lo acompaña a todos lados. ambos ancianos observan la caída del muro de Berlín y pues básicamente vemos que es lo que pasa con sus vidas después de esto. Entre tanto las cosas de "Fonty y su sombra" se mezclan con recuerdos de su pasado, imágenes y recreaciones de la unificación de Alemania pasada y su presente en el proceso de la unificación de la Alemania actual. Todo muy confuso pues hablan de personajes muertos como si estuvieran vivos, o incluso sin hacer referencia a sus nombres hacer alusión a ellos por medio de frases o fragmentos de sus discursos (aquí es en donde entran las miles de notas de pie de página), y además metafórico (otra cosa que añade complejidad al libro y que olvide mencionar, muchas de las cosas de las que aquí se hablan son metaforicas), algunos objetos como las flores, las estatuas y los edificios pero la más importante es un paternoster (una especie de elevador) que aquí lo asocian con la historia que se repite una y otra vez.
El libro contiene una crítica sobre la reunificacion alemana y como el capitalismo tiende a monetizar y codificar cosas como la historia y la cultura y que si no se tiene cuidado esto irremediablemente termina en que los errores del pasado se repitan por qué se pierde el significado (lo cual estoy de acuerdo), esto llevo a que prácticamente crucificaron al autor en el momento en el que se publico el libro. Sin embargo como es muy vago todo y está todo mezclado esta crítica se pierde o se hace muy sutil o difícil de ver. Pierde fuerza e irónicamente para mí, significado. Quizá ese es parte del punto, no lo se.
Es por eso que para poder desentrañar todo lo que esté libro ofrece necesitas un conocimiento vasto sobre la cultura alemana. Tuve que hacer búsquedas en Google, ver algunos vídeos y leer algunas opiniones y reseñas (bastante vagas también) para poder hacer sentido de esta lectura. Para un lector casual puede resultar demasiado, pero en un contexto más académico creo que esté libro puede ser explotado.
No es una lectura fácil ni casual, es muy demandante. Si tienes conocimientos previos de la cultura alemana podrás disfrutarlo más que yo, Si te da curiosidad adelante, pero si recomiendo que vayas informándote conforme vas avanzando. Esto me gusta pues como lector me saco de mi zona de confort y me hizo ir más allá para poder entender esto, pero si no estás buscando una experiencia de este tipo, te recomiendo que vayas con algo más ligero. No es un mal libro, al contrario, solo que yo no iba preparado y no era la experiencia que estaba buscando. Aquí la cosa no es el libro si no yo como lector.
Did Not Finish
October 13, 2026Jeg gav op efter 50 sider. "Sprogligt mesterværk" skriver Peter Poulsen i Information, men jeg ville være måneder om at komme igennem den på grund af sproget. Laaange sætninger tilsyneladende direkte oversat fra tysk. Og en uendelighed af navne på tyske kulturpersonligheder fra en svunden tid som ikke siger mig noget. Pluklæste længere fremme i romanen uden at spore ændring.
Opgivet pga. mine egne manglende forudsætninger.
Opgivet pga. mine egne manglende forudsætninger.
November 10, 2008
At the risk of turning my list into an extended love affair with Gunter Grass, I must say a few things about this recent novel. This is a major work, first published in 1995, 670 some odd pages in English. I must admit that for the first few hundred pages I fully intended to get rid of the book after finishing it, because the "subject," nineteenth century German novelist Theodor Fontane, was not very interesting to me. But let me explain the sense in which he is the subject. The context of the novel is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, and the main character is someone who not only looks exactly like Fontane and was born exactly 100 years after him in the same town, but is an unsurpassed expert on everything about his life and works, and furthermore is himself a writer whose life, coincidentally or not, has closely paralleled Fontane's. So Grass writes his novel on two historical platforms, 100 years apart, and the modern Fontane often refers to himself as though he were the original one. If this were the novel, I would still be planning to get rid of it. But in fact, like all of Grass's novels, this one is about how human beings go about their difficult lives in interesting historical contexts, but the contexts never change the basic reality of being human. There is no context, not even socialist East Germany, someplace we may all think of in the "West" as grey and lacking in humanity, that can rob human beings of the quality of being human, and that is Grass's subject in a nutshell, no matter what the trappings are. Since I'm on a roll I'll tell you the scene that made me decide I have to keep the book and probably read it again and again. Besides this East German writer, there is a character who works for the Stasi, the East German secret police. Both of them are now old men, but for many decades the writer has been shadowed by the secret policeman, whose special area of expertise he has been, even as Fontane has been the area of expertise of the writer. It is as though the two men, the writer and his constant shadow, are one character, and in fact they are friends, of a sort, by the time the Wall comes down. So this scene takes place at the bridge between East and West which by then has no meaning, but in former times was where the top-notch spies were exchanged, East for West and West for East. The spy in this story feels third-rate because he never justified such an exchange, but to make him feel better, after the Wall comes down the writer, upon whom he has been spying for decades, takes him to the bridge where they play the game of spy exchange over and over, as though the writer were a western spy being exchanged for his shadow, and then trading places. It does the East German spy a world of good to imagine himself such an important character, and his depression lifts. I challenge anyone to come up with a more human story, and Grass tells it with such a mix of amusement and compassion that you can't help but feel sympathetic with both of them, the writer and his spy. Obviously, here is another Grass novel I have to wholeheartedly recommend, even if it's just for one scene (which it isn't). One has to be patient with this author, more so than with most, but I think the rewards are proportionately greater too. Though I have to say as a word of caution: there are lots of people, lovers of books, who disagree with me.
October 5, 2013
Parallele und verwobene Handlungsstränge aus der Wendezeit der DDR und der Wiedervereinigung und vom Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die beiden Hauptfiguren aus der DDR, der Querdenker Theo Wuttke und sein Spitzel Hoftaller, sind Spiegel zweier historischer Gestalten: Theodor Fontane (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_...) und Tallhover (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallhover). Die Beziehungen und Verstrickungen bis hin zu ihren Familiengeschichten wiederholen und vermischen sich und nehmen ständig aufeinander Bezug.
Tatsächlich fand ich mich oft verloren in den historischen und literarischen Referenzen. Ein fundiertes Wissen über deutsche Geschichte und Literatur ist meines Erachtens unabdingbar, um dieses Buch wertschätzen zu können. – Genau das störte mich in meinem Lesevergnügen. Gerne lerne ich aus Romanen; wenn ich aber ohne Wikipedia den Faden meiner Geschichte verliere, ist mir das zuwider. Auch empfand ich es teilweise als „aufgedrängtes“ Wissen, als ob Günter Grass es nötig gehabt hätte, den Leser mit seinem Wissen zu beeindrucken.
Generell fand ich die Geschichte zu weit ausholend, zu langatmig. Die Charaktere der Wendezeit und ihre Beziehung zueinander haben mich fasziniert und werden ihre Spuren in meiner literarischen Erinnerung hinterlassen – nur hätten sie dafür eher nicht fast 800 Seiten benötigt.
« Die Blechtrommel » ist mein Lieblingsfilm, das Buch dazu habe ich (noch) nicht gelesen. Vielleicht ist „Ein weites Feld“ nicht der beste Einstieg in die geschriebene Welt von Günter Grass?
Tatsächlich fand ich mich oft verloren in den historischen und literarischen Referenzen. Ein fundiertes Wissen über deutsche Geschichte und Literatur ist meines Erachtens unabdingbar, um dieses Buch wertschätzen zu können. – Genau das störte mich in meinem Lesevergnügen. Gerne lerne ich aus Romanen; wenn ich aber ohne Wikipedia den Faden meiner Geschichte verliere, ist mir das zuwider. Auch empfand ich es teilweise als „aufgedrängtes“ Wissen, als ob Günter Grass es nötig gehabt hätte, den Leser mit seinem Wissen zu beeindrucken.
Generell fand ich die Geschichte zu weit ausholend, zu langatmig. Die Charaktere der Wendezeit und ihre Beziehung zueinander haben mich fasziniert und werden ihre Spuren in meiner literarischen Erinnerung hinterlassen – nur hätten sie dafür eher nicht fast 800 Seiten benötigt.
« Die Blechtrommel » ist mein Lieblingsfilm, das Buch dazu habe ich (noch) nicht gelesen. Vielleicht ist „Ein weites Feld“ nicht der beste Einstieg in die geschriebene Welt von Günter Grass?
July 9, 2020
One of my goals or I should say what are the things on my bucket list to do has been to read a book by Gunter Grass and so I did it. I knew when I started this book that I wouldn’t understand everything because as this book showed me there are many details of German history that I still do not grasp. I have my fortes but apparently I need to do some reading because I missed most of the east German references. I got the World War II ones and discussions about the Kaiser and comments although some of those details went over my head. The references to winding down I understood because I knew that most things have been publicly owned and they were switching to private ownership at the end there but I am sure there is a lot of sarcasm that I missed. I can say that because the sarcasm that I got I understood.
Having said all that I found the book really interesting and I would probably read this book again so that I could understand more of it. I first heard of Gunter Grass when I was reading a book on the introduction to German literature. So I thought I would put a book on my list of things to accomplish. Well, I did it. It was long and tedious but part of that was because I didn’t immediately grasp everything. But I’ll try again and I’ll probably read other books by him. The style is very casual? I’m not sure quite how to describe it. It’s not a really hard read it it’s only hard to read if one doesn’t understand the history. It seems like I say that about a lot of books that I read. I will usually say if you don’t know the history you may have a hard time with this book. I found my own admonition to be true in my own case. So, I have some homework to do.
Having said all that I found the book really interesting and I would probably read this book again so that I could understand more of it. I first heard of Gunter Grass when I was reading a book on the introduction to German literature. So I thought I would put a book on my list of things to accomplish. Well, I did it. It was long and tedious but part of that was because I didn’t immediately grasp everything. But I’ll try again and I’ll probably read other books by him. The style is very casual? I’m not sure quite how to describe it. It’s not a really hard read it it’s only hard to read if one doesn’t understand the history. It seems like I say that about a lot of books that I read. I will usually say if you don’t know the history you may have a hard time with this book. I found my own admonition to be true in my own case. So, I have some homework to do.
November 15, 2019
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the HGerman Unification this book follows the conversations of two old men. One is a former Luftwaffe pilot who lived in East Berlin during the Cold War. He gave lectures on cultural subjects. As he was deemed somewhat subversive, he is followed by a security agent. Although the Cold War is over, the agent, who knows where many of the skeletons in the life of the pilot are buried, still tales the pilot. Maybe it was the translation, but the book seemed to ramble a lot. Maybe someone with more of a sense of German history would enjoy it more,
September 16, 2019
Gekocht op de rommelmarkt in Roeselare
omdat het een grote naam is.
Fictie over de gelijkenissen en verschillen tussen de Duitse éénmaking op het eind van de 19de eeuw en deze van 1989.
Ik liep totaal verloren in dit boek, ik begreep er niets van en vond het dus helemaal niet mooi. Ik had de indruk dat het mij aan kennis over alles ontbrak: de personages die hij leent en ik niet kende, beide geschiedenissen waar ik details van mis, ...
Helemaal niet graag gelezen.
omdat het een grote naam is.
Fictie over de gelijkenissen en verschillen tussen de Duitse éénmaking op het eind van de 19de eeuw en deze van 1989.
Ik liep totaal verloren in dit boek, ik begreep er niets van en vond het dus helemaal niet mooi. Ik had de indruk dat het mij aan kennis over alles ontbrak: de personages die hij leent en ik niet kende, beide geschiedenissen waar ik details van mis, ...
Helemaal niet graag gelezen.
April 6, 2024
Looking for a book which will have you checking to see how many pages you have left? Then you've come to the right place. Nothing happens in the course of this book, but nothing happens very slowly while being shrewdly observed in close detail. Who was it who said the she liked to read boring books because it made her life seem longer? I think this will make your days feel interminable.
But that's just me.
But that's just me.
March 19, 2019
This book is a masterful translation of the reunification of modern Germany on the human level of affected Germans, especially from the former East Germany. I found it a fascinating read in terms of understanding the full impacts of geopolitical events that occurred in my life time. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
February 16, 2021
This may be one of the more challenging works I have read, especially with Grass bouncing between personas, but the work is revelatory about how East Germany functioned and then merged.
Just the use of the Trabant as a literary device makes the work worth it.
Just the use of the Trabant as a literary device makes the work worth it.
May 30, 2024
Moments of Grass genius interspersed with some of the most unenjoyable rambling I have ever read. As someone that otherwise loves Grass and never leaves reviews on Goodreads, I leave this as a warning, only to be read if you are the most die hard of Grass fans.
April 11, 2019
one of the worst and tiresome books i ever read...
July 17, 2024
DNF page 216. I recommend skipping this one unless you are already a big fan of German historical literature. Furthermore, the translate to English leaves something to be desired
August 27, 2025
Am Stück durchgelesen, es ist alles sehr lau. Da wurde eine nette Erzählung in ein viel zu dickes Werk verpackt und was genau wollte uns der Autor denn sagen? Ein ziemlich überflüssiges Spätwerk.
March 28, 2020
Favourite parts:
Das Hochzeitsessen
Die Suche nach dem Wort
Fonty im Fieber
Das Hochzeitsessen
Die Suche nach dem Wort
Fonty im Fieber
March 21, 2021
A great book about Germany around 1989/1990 (the “Wendezeit”) and Germany after 1871 (the “Gründerzeit”), connected by Theodor Fontane and Wuttke, alias Fonty.
Many of the story locations (Tiergarten, Prenzlauer Berg, Potsdam) and novels (Effi Briest, Poggenpuhls, Stechlich, Treibels) are well-known to me, so this was a great pleasure to read.
Many of the story locations (Tiergarten, Prenzlauer Berg, Potsdam) and novels (Effi Briest, Poggenpuhls, Stechlich, Treibels) are well-known to me, so this was a great pleasure to read.
July 8, 2020
Ein interessanter Blick auf die „Wende“ und die deutsche „Wiedervereinigung“. Fiktion und Realität sind gekonnt miteinander verflochten, und es hat mich auch dazu inspiriert, das eine oder andere Faktum nachzuschlagen oder durch TV-Dokumentationen zu vertiefen. Außerdem hat das Buch mein Interesse an Theodor Fontane geweckt. Alles in allem also eine Lektüre, die öffnet und zum Nachdenken und Nachlesen anregt.
Did Not Finish
November 27, 2025DNF 30%
TBH I believe I'm the problem. The book is complex as fuck, and choosing to listen to the audiobook without any context about the novel or the author was a wild shot, and though it usually works, this time it didn't. Maybe I'm too dumb to understand Günter Grass yet. I'll stick to my comfort genres to recover.
TBH I believe I'm the problem. The book is complex as fuck, and choosing to listen to the audiobook without any context about the novel or the author was a wild shot, and though it usually works, this time it didn't. Maybe I'm too dumb to understand Günter Grass yet. I'll stick to my comfort genres to recover.
March 10, 2017
This one was very much of direct interest to me, because of the subject matter. Also, the author is one of my favorite 20th century German thinkers, and he had only died recently. I found the story, the experiences they were conveying, the whole ambience captivating. This is one of the rare books I will probably read again sometime.
February 10, 2017
As I completely enjoyed Grass' older well known works (der Blechtrommel, Katz und Maus..) I was looking forward to this book. I recall both "Ein Weites Feld" and Grass himself were embroiled in controversy at the time after publishing due to some revelations about his SS past and so I expected it to be at least an interesting read. Unfortunately this book didn't live up to that expectation. It took me an eternity to read since it is, frankly, boring and repetitive and steeped in difficult to understand references. I suppose you have to have lived through the DDR era to understand a lot of what it goes on about, but if you ask me what it is about, I cannot tell you since it couldn't hold my attention for more than about half a page before my mind started to drift off onto more interesting things like how dry the washing is getting, or what I had for breakfast this morning
January 5, 2015
“Just recently he wrote to me: “It was Marx’s mistake to cast the pearls of his insight before the swine of a party.” He may be right, even if I must add that I didn’t care one whit for Marx, not even during the time we shared in London; Dickens had more to say.”
Social and political changes never happened without painful or tragic costs, and in reality normal people are the ones who are suffering most. Although history books discuss the details of the events with obsession but there are rarely anything about life of normal people in chaotic conditions. Germany is an exceptional country in the contemporary history, playing the main role in two World Wars, divided into two countries after WWII, being in the heart of the cold war, being the first country to unite afterward and becoming the biggest economy in Europe. We read and heard a lot about criminals such as Hitler and what German politician and army did during the World Wars but not that much about life of normal people in that period. “Too Far Afield” is the story of two old men from eastern Germany who told their memories about life before and after fall of Berlin Wall. Although it is one of the most complicated Gunter Grass’s books and in some parts it is a bit confusing, but this book is a very good example that shows unlike history, literature is about people not political rulers.
“…deafness always sets in when things start to fall apart.”
Social and political changes never happened without painful or tragic costs, and in reality normal people are the ones who are suffering most. Although history books discuss the details of the events with obsession but there are rarely anything about life of normal people in chaotic conditions. Germany is an exceptional country in the contemporary history, playing the main role in two World Wars, divided into two countries after WWII, being in the heart of the cold war, being the first country to unite afterward and becoming the biggest economy in Europe. We read and heard a lot about criminals such as Hitler and what German politician and army did during the World Wars but not that much about life of normal people in that period. “Too Far Afield” is the story of two old men from eastern Germany who told their memories about life before and after fall of Berlin Wall. Although it is one of the most complicated Gunter Grass’s books and in some parts it is a bit confusing, but this book is a very good example that shows unlike history, literature is about people not political rulers.
“…deafness always sets in when things start to fall apart.”
May 21, 2011
As mentioned in previous reviews, a broad and deep understanding of German history would benefit appreciation of this book. I found myself consistently putting it down and picking it back up. Why? I wondered. Grass does a fantastic job of character development in Too Far Afield, and I always came back to it in order to return to these characters. Even so, I often felt bored reading Too Far Afield and complained fairly bitterly and openly about how much I disliked reading it, because I found it so easy to put down. I will give Günter Grass another opportunity, but this was not the book of his for me.
May 13, 2015
Ich hielt nach dem zweiten Buch: Deutsch zu schwierig und ich verpasst auch die ganze Hintergrundinformationen über die Geschichte von Preußen ab. Update: ich habe es bis zum Ende gelesen, aber auf English.
Mi sono fermata dopo il secondo libro (che sono quasi 300 pagine comunque) perché il tedesco alla fine era difficile e mi mancavano tutte le informazioni sulla storia della Germania dal momento in cui aveva smesso di chiamarsi Prussia in poi. Update: a causa del mio disturbo ossessivo ho dovuto finire il libro, ma in inglese
Mi sono fermata dopo il secondo libro (che sono quasi 300 pagine comunque) perché il tedesco alla fine era difficile e mi mancavano tutte le informazioni sulla storia della Germania dal momento in cui aveva smesso di chiamarsi Prussia in poi. Update: a causa del mio disturbo ossessivo ho dovuto finire il libro, ma in inglese
July 6, 2007
I think I liked this better than The Tin Drum, although I would understand if most people thought I was crazy. Two men, tied together through history, and making their ways through a Nazi, a communist, and a capitalist regime. They push and pull, and are utterly flawed. And random.
September 19, 2014
Είναι η τρίτη φορά που προσπαθώ να το διαβάσω, δυστυχώς δεν τα κατάφερα πάλι, απλά... δεν είναι για μένα... με κούρασε πάρα πάρα πολύ και δεν είμαι τόσο ψυχαναγκαστικός ώστε να πρέπει οπωσδήποτε να το τελειώσω.
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