In Die Box: Geschichten aus der Dunkelkammer (The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, 2008), Grass reflects on his role as a paterfamilias by depicting his children's dialogues on family life. His eight children and stepchildren recall their childhoods with the help of snapshots—albeit imaginary ones that were magically enhanced—taken by Maria Rama (1911–97), who for decades documented Grass's family life and supported his literary projects with photographs of various motifs (e.g., pictures of Telgte for his work on Das Treffen in Telgte; Bo, 135–36). Rama's 1930s-model Agfa Box camera was salvaged from the charred debris of the artist's studio, which was destroyed during an air raid in the Second World War. Grass implies that her Eastern European provenance—and by association, his literary powers—is somehow responsible for her gift for conjuring up the past, foreseeing the future, and making unfulfilled dreams come true. Like the camera that gives the book its title, Rama and Grass are leftovers from a disappearing generation that seeks to keep history alive. The narrative communicates the past through visual metaphors that both embellish the past and cover up uncomfortable truths. Much as visual memories helped to assuage wartime guilt, Grass's second autobiography employs colorful photographic scenarios that dominate the scrutiny of his personal past in Die Box.

Sibling Dialogue: A Communicative Family Album

Die Box is conceived of as a tribute to Rama, a photographer and family friend who had contributed to the volume Mariazuehren (Inmarypraise, 1973), which reproduced her prints alongside Grass's poems and etchings. The motherly role that she plays in the lives of the Grass children in Die Box makes her, as the earlier title had implied, a sort of Madonna if not a pagan wise woman or fairy godmother. In particular, her interspersed statements expose layers of guilt in the author's memories of an imperfect work-life balance and family situation that affected his children. The autobiographical narrative continues soon after Beim Häuten der Zwiebel leaves off and goes on to draw more openly on the “affective impact” of visual memories. The seductiveness of images, which Grass construed as problematic in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, now becomes a positive means of enhancing reality.

IN BEIM HÄUTEN DER ZWIEBEL (2006), Grass takes a new approach to communicating with his readers by using internal monologues to construct a literary version of self. Although it includes some scenes of encounter and dialogue, the narrative's focus lies on the author's meditations on formative experiences. Grass moves away from the dialogic approach to history that had characterized his fiction (and political efforts) since the appearance of Die Blechtrommel. In his autobiography, he adopts instead an introspective stance as he retraces his personal and professional footsteps in what might be called a dialogue with memory. He engages in internal conversations that give readers the impression of witnessing his painstaking attempts to uncover his past. From a stylistic standpoint, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel appears predominantly monologic, while its retrospective stance establishes implicit relationships between Grass and his readers, his past selves, and people he had encountered in his earlier life.

In contrast to Stuart Taberner's emphasis on Grass's self-congratulatory “old-age style,” I would contend that Grass's autobiographical writing takes on an existential—rather than aesthetic or political—role as he integrates various phases of his biography through inquiry into past circumstances. Despite his recurring inclusion of critical questions regarding the accuracy of his memories, Grass does not dwell on his audience's possible reactions to his internal monologue. The autobiographical mode, which causes readers to expect to hear the truth “first-hand,” is necessarily a one-sided “conversation” between listener and author. Rebecca Braun interprets Grass's creative use of autobiographical prose as a successful attempt to counter “simplifying reading practices” involving idealized images of writers.

A distinct shift in communicative style is evident in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel; whereas the first part negotiates difficult wartime recollections by using key encounters and a confessional internal dialogue, the second half is more anecdotal and light-hearted. The autobiography reflects on instances of blind acquiescence in Nazi Germany, but moves on to convey increasing evidence of personal integrity after the war's end. Grass depicts his younger self in relation to various exceptional individuals he encountered in his youth and additionally relies on depictions of symbolic objects like the onions and amber that serve as interlocutors regarding his role in Nazi Germany. Georg Just has proposed that objects took on human-like qualities in Grass's debut novel, and I would argue that this presence becomes a distinctly communicative one in his autobiography.

LESS THAN A YEAR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Guatemalan writer and literary critic Arturo Arias received a surprise in the mail: notification that he had won the Seghers Stipendium. Arias, who had just moved from Central America to San Francisco, welcomed the award and the monies that came with it, but he had no frame of reference for this sign of support for his work as an author. He did not know that he had been nominated, nor had he heard of Seghers, who founded the stipend. Further contributing to the award's inscrutability for Arias was the fact that it originated in a state, East Germany, and institution, the East German Academy of Arts, about to be dissolved.

The stipend that came Arias's way from an almost-defunct country was not an anachronistic museum piece. Instead, it can be seen as the principle of solidarian authorship made material. What Arias received in 1990 was the fellowship Seghers had willed before her death in 1983 to be funded by the net proceeds from her works. The fellowship structure reflects her understanding of cultural work as a collective project to represent shared time and to foment international solidarity, in accord with her “Kleiner Bericht.” By creating an award to annually support two artists—one from East Germany and one from a developing country—whose work demonstrated both a commitment and contribution to historical and social progress, Seghers effectively recognized, fostered, and created authorship as an international, collective practice of coevals.

Seghers willed the rights to her works to the East German Academy of Arts and charged the same institution to administer the fellowship. Drawing on instructions that Seghers outlined in her will, the Academy articulated the award's criteria as follows:

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.

IN THE YEARS 2015 and 2016, the Seghers Preis only went to one writer, not two. Based on my conversations with Dietger Pforte, former head of the Seghers Stiftung, the decision to give only one award each year was likely due to repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis on the foundation's endowment and the desire of the Seghers Stiftung board not to deplete the prize's funds. It seems that funding limitations are preventing the form of the prize from realizing Seghers's plan of joining authors, making it just another of many prizes that reward exceptional writing. But knowing about the history leading up to the prize and about the lifelong project Seghers shared with her contemporaries to develop solidarian authorship makes it possible to expect more from the award.

Even if the form of the 2016 prize does not reflect coevality, the content of the work by that year's Seghers Preis winner, Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, resonates with conceptions of shared time and the idea of authorship that the Seghers award was intended to recognize and shape. The texts for which Herrera was recognized—published as a trilogy in German translation—are set on the US-Mexican border around the turn of the last century. All three works tell stories about the violence that attends the movement of people and drugs across the border. The narratives highlight the power of the border to separate and hurt people and imply the need for paradigms of imagining human community beyond territories enclosed within national boundaries.

Herrera's novella Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World, 2011), in particular, highlights shared time across space as one way to understand and shape ideas of connection between people living on either side of the Mexico-US frontier. Makina, the protagonist of the novella, embodies this understanding of interrelationship through her work as a switchboard operator in her Mexican village that has “the only phone for miles and miles around.” As a switchboard operator, Makina connects people who are making calls either from Mexico to the United States or from the United States to Mexico.

DAS TREFFEN IN TELGTE (1979) illustrates the dynamics of public communication by staging an imaginary gathering of some thirty Baroque poets, professors, and publishers in 1647. Modeled on the postwar literary circle Gruppe 47, the seventeenth-century poets deal with the effects of war, hoping to revive society with words: “Wo alles wüst lag, glänzten einzig die Wörter” (TT, 24; Everything had been laid to waste, words alone kept their luster, MT, 17). Yet both the fictional and historical meetings faced fundamental religious (1647) and political (1947) divisions. While the historical writers at the imagined Telgte gathering are remembered for their published works, Grass assigns them a different legacy: as partners in heated conversations concerning the power of literature and language. Whereas Der Butt focuses on combative exchanges, Das Treffen in Telgte emphasizes the writers’ search for communicative authority. Nevertheless, their manifesto calling for peace is not “what remains.” Rather, the result is what has taken place during the Telgte meeting—discussion, mutual understanding, resolution of conflict, and openness for new aesthetic and political ideas.

Taking the Stage: Words in Action

The importance of dialogue in Grass's second writing stage is still evident in the spoken language used in Das Treffen in Telgte, but also in deliberate silences. Moreover, the literati's discussions complicate the relationship between reality and literature. For them, the purpose of literature is not to mirror life, but to provide a basis for addressing the world's problems. In the descriptions of the poets’ debates, Grass conveys their obsession with language by inserting countless variations on “words.” This scenario of lives lived in language reflects Grass's profession and prefigures the lexical focus of his third autobiographical novel, Grimms Wörter (2010). In the 1979 novella, the German poets meet for “literarische Wechselworte” (TT, 9; literary exchange, MT, 5), but soon find themselves embroiled in an “eitlen Wörterfest” (155; vain feast of words, 117), succumbing to the temptation to spout off some of their “beredten Weisheit” (134; eloquent wisdom, 101). Grass implies a conflict between Schein and Sein as the aesthetic potential of language drives some members to use “Klingwörter” (123; sonorous words, 93) and create “Wortplunder” (161; verbal trumpery, 122).

IN KATZ UND MAUS (1961), power relationships arise in the everyday interactions between schoolboys during the Second World War. Polish-German Joachim Mahlke attempts to compensate for ostracism by striving to improve his status, which he hopes to achieve by speaking on his high school's stage. He has remained an outsider despite having repeatedly impressed his classmates with his feats in sports. In the novella, truths are seldom directly addressed, as both Mahlke and Pilenz, who survives to tell the tale, strategically ignore brutal wartime realities through evasive communication styles. In the end, Pilenz's more stable social standing enables him to betray his friend—first verbally, then physically. Katz und Maus evolved from a section of Grass's project “Kartoffelschalen,” which eventually became Hundejahre after he had extracted the material for the novella.

Like Die Blechtrommel, the novella was at once admired and reviled due to its inclusion of explicit sexuality and criticism of the Catholic Church. Grass leaves behind stories of family entanglements and instead examines youth in Nazi Germany in the tradition of schoolboy literature. In war-era Danzig, young Pilenz admires Joachim Mahlke yet joins his friends in ostracizing the ungainly overachiever, who stands out by being both more mature and more self-conscious than his peers. Pilenz and his classmates spend their summers on the wreck of the Polish minesweeper Rybitwa in the Bay of Danzig, where Mahlke impresses the others by retrieving various spoils from the wreck and even saving the life of a younger boy who had become trapped inside the Rybitwa. These heroic feats are attempts to draw attention away from his role as an outsider, due primarily to his Polish ethnicity and exemplified by his prominent Adam's apple (KM, 29, 69–70). Only when others applaud his underwater feats can Mahlke relax and temporarily forget that he is different: “Beifall tat ihm gut und besänftigte seinen Hüpfer am Hals” (KM, 29; Applause did him good and quieted the jumping mouse on his neck, CM, 32). However, his quest for acceptance through outstanding performance will ultimately prove deadly for the adolescent.

IN THE DECADES AFTER the dissolution of the Comintern and the end of World War II, new socialist cultural institutions emerged in the newly formed Communist states in Europe and in the formerly colonized world. Seghers, who returned from Mexican exile to Germany's Soviet-Occupied Zone, immediately became a leader in the GDR cultural sphere. Similarly, Alejo Carpentier, who returned to Cuba from Venezuelan exile in 1959, took up a leading role in a revolutionary Cuban literary scene. A key project for the states and the cultural institutions affiliated with them was to critique what they perceived to be exploitative imperialist relations across the globe, and to call for solidarity with people suffering as a result of those relations.

In the early 1960s, the East German Anna Seghers and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier obliquely took up this issue in historical narratives they published of the slave uprisings that had rocked French and British colonies in the Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Seghers's story “Das Licht auf dem Galgen” and Carpentier's novel El siglo de las luces, frame this Caribbean history in terms of the encounter of French revolutionary ideals with a New World context. In both texts, revolutionary agents who are charged by the French government with disseminating a message of emancipation and, at times, encouraging slave revolt, stand at the crux of this encounter.

Seghers's and Carpentier's protagonists are more than passive mouthpieces of the French state, however. Instead, they constantly negotiate their positions vis-à-vis the messages they are to deliver. That is, in both works, agents struggle to resolve the tension between their identification with the cause of liberation and France's shifting and ultimately reactionary policies toward its Caribbean territories, such as Napoleon's revocation in 1802 of the 1794 decree freeing slaves. Ultimately, the agents in these works are pushed to tell either one of two “stories” of emancipation: a version that subordinates the reality of disenfranchisement to the requirements of political expediency and the state's priorities, or one that insists on maintaining an affective and embodied connection of solidarity with the oppressed.