14 - Die Box: Conversations around the Family Album

Summary

In Die Box: Geschichten aus der Dunkelkammer (The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, 2008), Grass reflects on his role as a paterfamilias by depicting his children's dialogues on family life. His eight children and stepchildren recall their childhoods with the help of snapshots—albeit imaginary ones that were magically enhanced—taken by Maria Rama (1911–97), who for decades documented Grass's family life and supported his literary projects with photographs of various motifs (e.g., pictures of Telgte for his work on Das Treffen in Telgte; Bo, 135–36). Rama's 1930s-model Agfa Box camera was salvaged from the charred debris of the artist's studio, which was destroyed during an air raid in the Second World War. Grass implies that her Eastern European provenance—and by association, his literary powers—is somehow responsible for her gift for conjuring up the past, foreseeing the future, and making unfulfilled dreams come true. Like the camera that gives the book its title, Rama and Grass are leftovers from a disappearing generation that seeks to keep history alive. The narrative communicates the past through visual metaphors that both embellish the past and cover up uncomfortable truths. Much as visual memories helped to assuage wartime guilt, Grass's second autobiography employs colorful photographic scenarios that dominate the scrutiny of his personal past in Die Box.

Sibling Dialogue: A Communicative Family Album

Die Box is conceived of as a tribute to Rama, a photographer and family friend who had contributed to the volume Mariazuehren (Inmarypraise, 1973), which reproduced her prints alongside Grass's poems and etchings. The motherly role that she plays in the lives of the Grass children in Die Box makes her, as the earlier title had implied, a sort of Madonna if not a pagan wise woman or fairy godmother. In particular, her interspersed statements expose layers of guilt in the author's memories of an imperfect work-life balance and family situation that affected his children. The autobiographical narrative continues soon after Beim Häuten der Zwiebel leaves off and goes on to draw more openly on the “affective impact” of visual memories. The seductiveness of images, which Grass construed as problematic in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, now becomes a positive means of enhancing reality.