11 - Mein Jahrhundert: An Exercise in Oral History

Summary

THE COLLECTION OF STORIES in Mein Jahrhundert (1999) contains fictional witness accounts of momentous and minor events in German history from between 1900 to 1999. With the title, Grass stakes out personal and generational ownership of “his” era, conveying the authority to interpret the historical events informed by his cohort and acknowledging a sense of responsibility for the past. At the same time, this model was not part of his original plan for what he called “Verjährte Geschichten” (Dated Stories) in which an old woman narrates the entire century. By using first-person narratives, Grass draws on a tradition of “oral history” that gained academic acceptance in the 1940s in the United States and somewhat later in Germany, where this technique was popularized by scholars such as Lutz Niethammer. Since communicative context is central to an understanding of what Grass's characters remember and what they elide, Mein Jahrhundert requires a between-the-lines reading. Moreover, it is no coincidence that a number of his stories are narrated from a 1960s vantage point, a time when critical dialogue started to cross generational, gender, and social boundaries. The emphasis that oral history places on engaging a broader, democratic perspective would certainly appeal to Grass's political and communicative ethos.

Memories of Rhetoric: Portentous Speeches in Grass's Century

The discrepancy between Mein Jahrhundert's attempt to simulate a multitude of voices and the stories’ predominant Grassian style led Volker Hage to compare it unfavorably to a lesser-known but authentic collection of twentieth-century recollections. Iring Fetscher suggests that the short prose pieces in Mein Jahrhundert are ill-suited to Grass's signature strength of epic narratives. Yet another reviewer faults the book for being “a pale, watery sort of kaleidoscope.” Siegfried Mews argues that the organizing focus in this collection is the topic of war, but one might qualify this statement by noting, as does Ian Buruma, that Grass's concern with the German past lets him conflate different types of guilt, while developing flawed parallels between “fascism and capitalism.”

Grass's collection of fictitious eyewitness accounts ultimately lacks the inadvertent error, emotion, and idiosyncrasy that authentic interviews might have offered. Nevertheless, his stories are more than a celebrity author's attempt to shape future generations’ perception of history.