Thomas’s Reviews > My Century: Stories of Victories and Terrors, Glory and Grimness Across the Twentieth Century > Status Update

Grass, from what little I read on Wikipedia, clearly believed that denazification did not go far enough. Clear from the fact that 'the war years' are from the POV of open and closed Nazis.

Each story is like its own guessing game. Not just on protagonist but also on when it’s even taking place cause it’s rarely the actual year the perspective of narrative is set on.

To throw the Communists under the bus is slimy, even if they opposed the Weimar Republic. The SPD also employed and allied with groups who would eventually fall in with the Nazis, their own regrets realized too late. It isn’t a clean story, but elevating the SPD at all times while pushing down on the Communists isn’t a solid impression. Both of them were flawed parties.

Grass’ portrayal of Jünger, the more “foreign” when it comes to his war memory, gives the man a tint of clearly having been traumatized by the war even if his supposed lack of portrayal of said trauma is offensive to men such as Remarque.

Next book in my graduate seminar. Have to present this one and honestly I don’t know how I’m going to manage.