8 - Die Rättin: Existence and Speech after Apocalypse

Summary

DIE RÄTTIN (1986) reveals Grass's increasing skepticism regarding the potential for dialogue in a democracy, as is seen in the narrator's imaginary and futile exchanges with his pet rat and his interactions with a reincarnated Oskar Matzerath. Altogether, the novel's postapocalyptic scenarios of nuclear and environmental devastation are indicative of Grass's ambivalent attitude toward the Enlightenment. Peter Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Critique of Cynical Reason, 1983) had impressed the author, as he wrote to Helen Wolff in 1983. As is evidenced in ironic references to the “education of humankind,” Die Rättin widens Grass's intellectual agenda beyond facile polarities—e.g., progressive/ conservative; Enlightenment/Romanticism—that became irrelevant in the context of late-century Angst. Had the Berlin Wall not fallen, which was followed by a fundamental change in Grass's fiction, one might ask what direction his work might have taken regarding the precarious situation of humankind after imagining the nuclear wasteland in Die Rättin.

Published in February 1986, Die Rättin seemed to presage the Chernobyl disaster, which took place only two months afterward. Grass's novel contains visions of a world destroyed in a Third World War, yet also relates thematically to Christa Wolf's Störfall (Accident, 1987), which was written in direct reaction to the nuclear accident of April 1986. Grass joins twentieth-century authors in their search for ethical responses to the dangers of technical progress in the modern world. Mark Martin Gruettner situates Die Rättin in a tradition of imagery relating to rats, illness, and doomsday scenarios, as seen in Albert Camus's La Peste (The Plague, 1947) and George Orwell's 1984 (1949). Grass also revisits his early play Hochwasser (The Flood, 1960), in which the protagonists, two rats, prove more adaptable than humankind.

Die Rättin in many ways picks up where Der Butt left off, but was less well received. Whereas the history-making flounder had sought to tutor his protégés, the posthistory rat has no advice left to offer humanity. In a series of dialogues and dreamlike visions, she presents faits accomplis in the form of a world destroyed by humankind's relentless ambition despite—or even with the help of—Enlightenment rationalism.