Introduction

Summary

GÜNTER GRASS (1927–2015) devoted a long career to assessing German actions and reactions, creating vivid scenarios of encounters and conflicts in Danzig, West Germany, and the Berlin Republic. The writer's passionate and sometimes controversial engagement in the intellectual life of the Federal Republic may have irked some, but also confirmed his belief in the value of debate in public life. He has been a voice of dissent and reform, using his fame as an artist-author and his position as a highly opinionated intellectual to make his mark on postwar politics. Admired for his expressive prose, Grass's appeals to his nation's conscience regarding the Nazi period over the years earned him the resentment of many Germans, while being more appreciated by international audiences. As this study will argue, Grass was deeply committed to active dialogue, not only in debates with political opponents, but also in the context of his fictional characters, whose manner of speech helps to define them. This book aims to show that the tenor and content of his communicative scenarios shifts significantly in the course of the main stages of the Nobel Laureate's writing.

Grass's Waffen-SS revelation upon publication of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006) and the ensuing debate exposed cracks in the left-liberal façade of moral indignation at Nazi atrocities that Grass had long typified. Such tensions were again on display in the furor caused in April 2012 when the Süddeutsche Zeitung published his poem, “Was gesagt werden muß” (What Must Be Said), which criticized Israel for its regional politics. An awkward poem at best, it was met with accusations of antisemitism, although it might be more accurate to term it an anti-Israel work and to question its naive and unwarranted dismissal of the threats the country faced. The less-than-positive reaction to Grass's poem suggests that the author had lost touch with political realities, thereby compromising his perceived position as a moral authority. Yet the topos of things that the author believed “must be said” can be seen as fundamental to his ethos of “speaking out” or voicing uncomfortable truths.