9 - Unkenrufe: East-West Exchanges and the Remembrance Business

Summary

GRASS'S FIRST POST-WALL WORK, Unkenrufe (1992), received mixed reviews. It was lauded by Iris Radisch as an ironic and convincing depiction of old age, while Marcel Reich-Ranicki compared it unfavorably to Grass's earlier novels. Unkenrufe reveals a shift in Grass's oeuvre after reunification, as he begins to explore communicative encounters related to practices of remembering. In the novella, the memorial cemeteries for former Danzigers offer an opportunity for German-Polish dialogue, but the resulting business ventures convey Grass's worries that Germany's economic power would let it exert control over poorer European countries. Indeed, the epitaphs featured in the graveyards contain revisionist messages. However, Grass seems to assuage his fears of the potential nationalism after unification by imagining critical conversations between Germans and their European neighbors, while also including a Bengali businessman as the protagonist's interlocutor. Giving mutual understanding precedence over gross material concerns, Unkenrufe proposes crosscultural dialogue as a way to navigate a shifting political landscape.

East-West Dialogues in a Changing Europe

Grass's sonnet “Allerseelen” (All Souls) from his 1993 collection Novemberland describes how the past symbolically resurfaces on this holiday in honor of the dead. Here too, remembrance relates to the sensitive German-Polish past, while the author specifically evokes an unwillingness of each side to listen to the other: “so heimlich zugetan, doch taub auf beiden Ohren” (secretly inclined, yet deaf now in both ears). While Unkenrufe initially, as Siegfried Mews writes, “posits the possibility of reconciliation,” and Robert Gliński's cinematic rendering suggestively includes the subtitle Die Zeit der Versöhnung (Days of Reconciliation, 2005), the plot does not justify such optimism. Grass emphasized that the issue of culpability was the driving force behind his writing: “Wir stehen ganz am Anfang und müssen, und das zeigt dieses Buch, an den Ort des Geschehens zurückgehen auf die Friedhöfe. Da finden wir, was wir uns wechselseitig angetan haben” (We are still at the very beginning, and we need to go back, as this book demonstrates, to the scene of events, to the cemeteries. That's where we will understand what we did to each other). His call for mutual acknowledgment of guilt contrasts with the German left's reluctance to discuss German suffering. This “taboo,” which was supposedly first broken in Im Krebsgang, is thus presaged in Unkenrufe.