Voice of reason

In memoriam

Guenter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner whom many called his country’s moral conscience had stunned Europe when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.

Grass was hardly the only member of his generation who obscured the facts of his wartime life. But because he was a pre-eminent public intellectual who had pushed Germans to confront the ugly aspects of their history, his confession that he had falsified his own biography shocked readers and led some to view his life’s work in a different light.

Grass came under further scrutiny in 2012 after publishing a poem criticising Israel for its hostile language toward Iran over its nuclear programme. He expressed revulsion at the idea that Israel might be justified in attacking Iran over a perceived nuclear threat and said that such a prospect “endangers the already fragile world peace”. The poem created an international controversy and prompted a personal attack from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Grass later said that he had not meant to criticise the country, but only its government.

He was propelled to the forefront of postwar literature in 1959, with the publication of his wildly inventive masterpiece, The Tin Drum. Critics hailed the audacious sweep of his literary imagination. A severed horse’s head swarming with hungry eels, a criminal hiding beneath a peasant woman’s layered skirts and a child who shatters windows with his high-pitched voice are among the memorable images that made The Tin Drum a worldwide triumph.

In awarding Grass the Nobel Prize in 1999, the Swedish Academy praised him for embracing “the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.” It described The Tin Drum as “one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.”

Grass was a playwright, essayist, short-story writer, poet, sculptor and printmaker as well as a novelist, but it was as a social critic that he gained the most notoriety, campaigning for disarmament and broad social change.

But ultimately, his uncompromising anti-militarism and his warnings that a unified Germany might once again threaten world peace led some of his countrymen to criticise him as a pedantic moralist who had lost touch with real life.

He revealed his Nazi past himself, days before a memoir, Peeling the Onion, was to be published, bringing on accusations of hypocrisy. Grass had long said that he had been a “flakhelfer” during the war, one of many German youths pressed to serve in relatively innocent jobs like guarding anti-aircraft batteries. But in an interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, he admitted that he had in fact been a member of the elite Waffen-SS, which had perpetrated horrific crimes.

“It was a weight on me,” said Grass, then 78. “My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote the book. It had to come out in the end.”

Weakness & militarism

An intense anti-nationalist, Grass viewed his country with emotions that could flare into fear and hatred. Some critics said the purposely small and weak Oskar symbolised what he wanted for Germany.
In the 1960s and 70s, much of Grass’s work dealt with the German themes of disillusionment, the militaristic past and the challenges of building a post-Nazi society. His greatest successes of the period were Cat and Mouse, about a man whose unusually large Adam’s apple forever sets him apart from the rest of humanity, and the Joycean Dog Years, which analyses three decades of German history and suggests that the country has not progressed much. These two novels, together with The Tin Drum, make up what Grass called his Danzig Trilogy.

Many of Grass’s books are phantasmagorical mixtures of fact and fantasy, some of them inviting comparison with the Latin American style known as magical realism. His own name for this style was “broadened reality.”

“Guenter Grass’s books present surprising and extremely contradictory combinations of opposites,” the Russian-German writer Lev Kopelev wrote in an essay on the occasion of Grass’s 65th birthday. “Minutely detailed presentations of real things and scientifically precise descriptions of historical events are melted together with fairy tales, legends, myths, fables, poems and wild fantasies to produce his own special poetical world.”

Grass was renowned for his wide-ranging tastes. He was an epicure who favoured hearty peasant food, and his work carries the aroma of home-cooked dishes like smoked goose breast and roast pork with sauerkraut and caraway seeds.

His fascination with animals was reflected in book titles like The Flounder and From the Diary of a Snail. He was a jazz lover, once worked as a jazz musician, and collaborated on O Susanna, an illustrated book on jazz, blues and gospel music published in 1959.

Some critics hoped Grass would produce a monumental novel encompassing all the great themes that have tormented Germany through its history and felt betrayed when he did not. The dominant German literary critic during most of his career, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died in 2013, called him “greatly overrated.” Reich-Ranicki once appeared on the cover of the magazine Der Spiegel ripping apart a copy of a Grass book he especially loathed, Too Far Afield.

A character as a nation

Grass came of age on a continent torn by hatred. He was born in Danzig on October 16, 1927, to a German father and a mother who was a Kashubian, a Slavic ethnic group. Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, was then a free city under the control of the League of Nations, but its population was mostly German and loyal to the Reich.

Critic Morris Dickstein wrote of the city: “One of the world’s most frequently besieged and contested cities, Danzig during the 1930s was a symbol of Germany’s lost territories and a focus of Nazi agitation. By the end of the war it was buried in rubble with all its German population driven out. It is a truism to say that except for Southerners like Faulkner, who inherited the consequences of the Civil War, US writers have a relatively undeveloped sense of history. But even among Europeans, Grass was well situated to learn how history buffets and battles local dreams and individual lives.”

Grass’s marriage in 1954 to Anna Margareta Schwarz, a Swiss dancer, ended in divorce in 1978. He is survived by his second wife, Ute Grunert, an organist; four children from his first marriage; two stepsons from his second marriage; two other children and 18 grandchildren.

Grass found defenders among his American friends. One was the novelist John Irving, who assailed the “predictably sanctimonious dismantling” of Grass’s reputation “from the cowardly standpoint of hindsight.” “You remain a hero to me, both as a writer and a moral compass,” Irving wrote, adding Grass’s courage was heightened by the truth.