10 - Ein weites Feld: Rhetorical Performance in the New Berlin

Summary

IN AN INTERVIEW in November 1989, Grass associated the GDR with a particular communicative mode when asked what the former East might offer the West: “Etwas, das uns hier fehlt: ein langsameres Lebenstempo, entsprechend mehr Zeit für Gespräche” (something we're missing here: a slower pace of life, and thus, more time for conversation). Ein weites Feld (1995) largely consists of conversations about the Wende and its consequences. Seventy-year-old Theo Wuttke (born 1919), alias “Fonty,” lives in a fantasy world that revolves around the life and works of Theodor Fontane (1819–98). Even Wuttke's wife, Emmi, and four children, Teddy, Georg, Friedrich, and Martha, bear the same names as the members of the Fontane family. Wuttke has eschewed a successful career and fashions himself the alter ego of Fontane, whose texts often relate to Berlin and surrounding Brandenburg. The publication of Grass's Stasi file also revealed a connection with the name Wuttke: Grass had met a Wolf-Dieter Wuttke, a physician from Neuruppin (Fontane's birthplace), at a literary event in East Berlin 1978.

Ein weites Feld explores various sociopolitical niches in post-Wall Berlin. Grass shows the city's soon-to-be unified inhabitants as they engage in cross-cultural and cross-generational encounters associated with memory sites in Berlin and the former GDR. As Stephen Brockmann writes, the protagonist's status as a revenant even suggests a “communion between the living and the dead.” Grass's approach after 1989 builds on a desire to establish a critical conversation on German politics regarding the dangers of a unified nation. The novel thus continues a dialogue that in real life had been marked by the public's dismissal of Grass's warnings and speeches, for example, in Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR, the title of which expresses his concern with the sellout of the East. The cover of the August 21, 1995, issue of Der Spiegel, which showed Reich-Ranicki physically tearing up the novel he had verbally ripped apart in a devastating review, caused a media sensation. While many rejected Ein weites Feld because of its criticism of unification, East Germans in particular took a positive view of the novel. Christoph Dieckmann claimed that it was “Das letzte Westpaket” (the last West German care package), but largely appreciated Grass's exploration of the GDR past.