IN 1932, THE GERMAN AUTHOR Anna Seghers published a piece titled “Kleiner Bericht aus meiner Werkstatt” (A Short Report from my Workshop). The “Kleiner Bericht” portrays an imagined dialogue between S., a German writer, and L., a writer from China, as they work together to describe illegal May Day celebrations in prerevolutionary Shanghai. According to S., the writers should strive to portray the events in a way that will make them “gegenwärtig” (present) to readers not from China, and allow them to understand that, as S. puts it, “der erste Mai auf der ganzen Welt gemeinsam gefeiert wird, daß er aber in jedem Land anders gefeiert wird” (3; the first of May is celebrated around the world at the same time, but it is celebrated differently in each country). It is this rendering of shared time linking different spaces that fosters international solidarity.

L. initiates the illustration of May Day in China by describing what life is like for a participant in the celebrations, a textile worker named Yöji. Her depiction is brief. From it, the reader learns only that Yöji lives in “dem tiefsten Arbeiterviertel” (a working-class neighborhood), in “einer schmutzigen, engen Gasse” (a dirty, narrow, alley), in “ihrem kleinen armseligen Zimmer” (12; in her small, wretched room). Providing feedback on this text, S. finds the portrayal too schematic. According to S., it presents only an abstract figure, a “vage chinesische Genossin” (a vague Chinese comrade), who takes part in a “papiernen Zeitungsdemonstration” (15; a newspaper demonstration). Too many details are missing for a reader who knows nothing about China to feel a connection with Yöji.

At first, L. reacts to S.'s desire for a richer description of Yöji's surroundings with skepticism.

GRASS ORIGINALLY ENVISIONED a play entitled “Verlorene Schlachten” (Lost Battles) before choosing the prose form and developing the middle section into the play Davor (Max: A Play). These shifts in genre help to explain why örtlich betäubt (1969) contains a significant amount of direct conversation and dramatic dialogues in which characters test their political positions. The novel reveals Grass's nascent interest in acts of communication as part of the public democratic sphere. Örtlich betäubt is marked by the student movement, which fueled impassioned protest and resulted in a culture of critical debate. In this new phase in writing, Grass probes the ways in which dialogue can successfully address the past, looking for ways to counteract the violence that threatened to erupt as the student generation flirted with dramatic action rather than engaging in peaceful reform.

The title refers to the numbing effect of a traumatic past—described by the Mitscherlichs as “the inability to mourn”—and to the extensive dental work that Eberhard Starusch, a forty-year-old teacher in West Berlin, undergoes to correct an underbite. In the spring of 1967, he witnesses the stirrings of the student unrest. Grass critically viewed the 1960s rebellion as having justified violent activism in order to counter state oppression: “The student protest was not a peace movement. The German students ran through the streets, and most of them were against the war in Vietnam; but some were for Ho Chi Minh.” In principle, Grass welcomed the opening up of a dialogue regarding the Nazi past but remained a staunch supporter of reform rather than revolution (a position that aligns him with Habermas). Yet he did take issue with the conservative media and spearheaded a protest against the Springer publishing group because of its vilification of the student movement. In his January 1968 Die Zeit article “Vietnam geht auch uns an,” Grass criticized the German government for neglecting to address the Vietnam War, attributing its attitude of “der servilen Sprachlosigkeit” (servile silence) to the unwillingness to criticize the United States; the “sachliche Debatte” (objective discussion) that Grass demands in this article is then attempted in his novel.

Grass called örtlich betäubt “ein unentschiedenes Buch” (an undecided book) based on its presentation of open-ended debates.

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.

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.

In Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung (2010), Grass adopts the role of cultural biographer by entering into an imagined dialogue with Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859). Grass situates himself in German history by positing membership in a long-standing community of writers and artists, represented by the Grimms, whose work on the German Dictionary serves as a catalyst for describing a “home” in language. I read Grimms Wörter as a celebration of philological work of many kinds, while arguing that Grass's images of the brothers’ obsessive collection of words is comparable to the amassing of archival information in Ein weites Feld. The activity of collecting words stands for a productive means of anchoring identity in the ephemeral present. The linguistic focus of Grimms Wörter indicates Grass's idealization of the creative (and democratic) potential of words—albeit offset in his autobiographies by the material presence of the world around him in the form of onions and amber, Rama's photographic legacy, the Grimms’ boxes of index cards with words and quotations, and, finally, the simple objects that Grass contemplates in Vonne Endlichkait.

In Grimms Wörter, Grass imagines himself traveling back in time to observe scenes of the Grimm brothers’ everyday life and provides intimate portraits of their relationship, which was both a personal and professional one. In particular, this cultural biography examines lives devoted to philology, an interest shared by Grass and the Grimms. It is likewise an examination of the political pressures the Grimms were subjected to, which Grass uses as a springboard to describe his own interventions in public speeches. He explained in an interview that historical similarities prompted these biographical comparisons: “Das Dasein der Grimms, die wie ich von radikalem Wechsel bestimmte Zeiten erlebten, bietet sich dazu an” (the cultural context of the Grimms, who experienced turbulent changes much as I did, seemed to provide the opportunity). Yet German reviewers proved unreceptive to Grass's celebration of his public role, criticizing Grimms Wörter for what was seen as vanity-driven emphasis on his decades of political engagement. Indeed, this narrative's strength lies in its nuanced depiction of the Grimms’ work habits, historical context, and the intricacies of the German language.

THE WORK OF SEGHERS and her contemporaries highlights a tension that was at play in literary institutions of the Comintern era and in the context of socialist states. While these institutions aimed to develop and support authors whose work would be that of fostering solidarity, they also defined the writer's relationship to history in ways that constrained her capacity to highlight people's coevality. Popular Front cultural initiatives supported the writer as bourgeois celebrity who conveyed transcendent truths, rather than as a figure aligned with the proletarian class whose solidarity would engender revolution. The socialist state preferred the author as representative of a historicist and state-sanctioned solidarity vision, rather than an agent that made possible international solidarity based on recognition of shared material conditions. In the anti- and postcolonial moment of the 1970s and early 1980s, Seghers and her younger contemporary, Gayatri Spivak, shed light on another mode through which radical institutions that emphasized the author's role in crafting international solidarity actually constrained this possibility. Specifically, both focus on the way that the very frameworks through which an international left aimed to highlight anticolonial struggles and thus show solidarity with them actually served to silence oppressed women's voices and exclude them from a solidarity discourse.

Rather than examining the limitations to crafting solidarity placed on those who do have a platform for speaking, as Seghers and Carpentier had done, the central issue for Seghers and Spivak is how to imagine the possibility of international solidarity, if the stories of those who experience oppression and engage in resistance are unhearable?

AUS DEM TAGEBUCH EINER SCHNECKE (hereafter, Tagebuch; 1972), Grass's first explicitly autobiographical novel, was written in reaction to his experiences while campaigning for Willy Brandt and the SPD in 1969 alongside other intellectuals such as Heinrich Böll and Kurt Sontheimer. A collage of family anecdotes, encounters on the campaign trail, and philosophical reflections, this political diary continues to develop the pedagogical and dialogic aspects that define the second phase in Grass's literary work. The author suggests connections between different historical events by developing three major plotlines—one devoted to observations on contemporary political life; another based on historical accounts of Danzig's Jews under Nazi Germany; and a third consisting of a biography of the fictional teacher Hermann Ott—all of which are interspersed with conversations with Grass's four children.

Tagebuch's mix of poetry and prose draws on his literary beginnings. Grass had after all first been published as a poet in Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (The Advantages of Wind-Chickens, 1956), and the journal-style travelogue of Tagebuch seems to represent a mid-life attempt to rejoin the simplicity of his early lyrical perspective as he copes in various ways with the increasing pressures to balance writing, family life, and political activities. The anxiety that resulted from these competing roles is expressed in his self-description as a “mobiler, regional zerstreuter, kaum faßbarer Vater” (TS, 10; mobile, regionally dispersed, almost intangible father, DS, 6). The subtle stirrings of guilt in Tagebuch presage the autobiographical Die Box (published in 2008), in which Grass implicitly admits that his writing often distracted him from his children. Moreover, the writing process between 1969 and 1972 was accompanied by the dissolution of his marriage with Anna Grass, which is subtly visible in his editing of the manuscript.

Tagebuch presents the author's efforts at political and private dialogue as a heroic attempt to dispel feelings of melancholy and middle-aged disillusionment. Grass's exchange with his fellow Germans is mirrored in the interactions with his four children and continues through the implicit conversation with his readership as well as with the audience of his 1971 lecture on Dürer's Melencolia I, which appears as the last chapter of Tagebuch As seen in some of his other mid-career works, Tagebuch is an attempt to counter the twin concepts of utopia and melancholy, which Grass thinks render humans vulnerable to “Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten” (311; communication problems, 296).

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.

DER BUTT (1977) presents an episodic survey of human civilization in terms of cooking, sexuality, and politics, while interpreting history as fundamentally shaped by the struggle for communicative dominance. Proceeds from the novel enabled Grass to establish the Alfred Döblin Prize for manuscripts in progress, indicating a new form of public engagement. Der Butt's male protagonist, Grass's alter ego, is called Edek in the Stone Age and returns in various incarnations throughout history. His counterpart, the tribal leader Aua, is the first in a line of eleven female cooks that extends from the Bronze Age matriarch Wigga, Mestwina in the Middle Ages, and fourteenth-century Dorothea von Montau to the Reformation-era nun Margarete Rusch, the maid Agnes Kurbiella (17th c.), the cooks Amanda Woyke (18th c.), Sophie Rotzoll (19th c.), and Lena Stubbe, who witnesses the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, and dies in the Stutthof concentration camp in 1942. Billy Miehlau is brutally murdered in 1963 in West Berlin, while the Polish cafeteria cook Maria Kuczorra remains embittered by her fiancé's death in the December 1970 Lenin Shipyard uprising.

Grass modernizes the Grimms’ tale “Von dem Fischer un syner Fru” (The Fisherman and His Wife) to explore the history of poverty and gender struggle. The Grimm tale exposes the wife Ilsebill's greed since her escalating wishes—which, significantly, are granted indirectly through her husband's conversation with the magic fish—provoke the forces of nature (i.e., the flounder or, possibly, God) and cause the couple to lose all they had gained. Der Butt in turn criticizes the suppression of alternate versions of the tale that fault men, not women, for their greed. The oral tradition, after all, reflects an entire community's perspective, whereas printed renderings embody a particular author's viewpoint. Although Der Butt construes the limitless yearning of both men and women as the root of materialism and warfare, the novel retains precisely the communicative (and thus power) imbalance between the genders.

Revisiting History without Finding “Her” Story

In Der Butt, conflict is born of ambition instigated by the flounder's persuasive rhetoric. An example of the novel's focus on competition between genders is reflected in the 1970s frame narrative of the protagonist and his spouse Ilsebill, whose relationship represents a “zentrales Mitteilungsverhältnis” (communicative focal point).

GRASS's DEBUT NOVEL was received with both great enthusiasm and outrage. Published in 1959, it remains his most acclaimed work and the one to which the Nobel Committee referred most prominently when awarding him its prestigious prize. The commentary on the Second World War that Oskar Matzerath beats out on his drum has been read as an example of the principle of Störung (disturbance), and his ambiguous presence in the narrative draws attention to the irrational and carnivalesque dimensions of life. From a communicative perspective, Grass recreates and probes the milieu of prewar Danzig, its dialects, ethnic mix, and speech habits. He then goes on to extend his study of communicative modes to the postwar years, adopting a critical stance toward the business negotiations undergirding the Economic Miracle of 1950s West Germany. Human verbal exchange, after all, mirrors the ethical choices of individuals and can be read between the lines to reveal blind spots, hidden agendas, and fears.

In Die Blechtrommel, the act of communication can mean the difference between life and death and frequently involves skewed exchanges that reflect differences in the power and position of interlocutors. Oskar's memories are shaped by the unkind utterances of his parents and other adults. However, just as he is closely scrutinized by fellow Danzigers, they themselves also suffer from being pigeonholed or branded. The Danzig years are characterized by exchanges that result in the pronouncement of social judgments or verdicts. This chapter argues therefore that Die Blechtrommel revolves around a “language of judgment,” suggesting dynamics of persecution at both the personal and public levels. The protagonist is labeled a gnome, his mother overweight, Matzerath a murderer, Jan Bronski effeminate and cowardly, Sigismund Markus a Jew, and Herr Meyn an alcoholic. The greengrocer Greff, a homosexual and ostensible pedophile, is summoned by the Sittenpolizei, or vice squad, on moral charges (Bt, 414). His grotesque suicide through the use of a bizarre scale conveys the objectification of being measured—and found wanting—in the Nazi state's distorted value system.

Direct conversations in Die Blechtrommel are not always fully developed, but rather described or abbreviated.

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.

THE SEGHERS PREIS, however its rationale may have shifted over the span of its existence, exists as an institutional trace of Seghers's commitment to a vision of authorship as the shared work of coevals to change the world through writing. Yet Seghers's work to support this view of the author did not begin with her plan for the stipend. The prehistory of the prize, as I argue, begins with Seghers's contemplation of authorship and coevality in her 1932 “Kleiner Bericht,” a concern that characterized her writing career. Nor did Seghers pursue her commitment to authorship and solidarity alone. The project of supporting leftsolidarian authorship that constituted her working life is not a story of a single author's idea. It was an endeavor that took place within cultural institutions that were also organized around the question of authors as participants in the international struggle to remake exploitative material relations. The Third Comintern, created as the “global party of the proletariat” and in existence from 1919 to 1943, provided early support for such organizations.

THE FINAL WORK of the trilogy, Hundejahre (1963) focuses on the shift from “passive-aggressive” relationships to outright physical violence combined with vindictive verbal exchanges. The initials “HJ” implied in Hundejahre remind the reader of the Hitlerjugend, the Nazi youth organization. Foregoing any pretense of rational interaction, Walter Matern and Tulla Pokriefke mete out both insult and violence to peers who are physically and ethnically different. Eddi Amsel and Jenny Brunies—he a half-Jewish boy and she a Roma foundling—stand in for Nazi Germany's persecuted minorities. Grass's fairy-tale style to some extent obscures the brutal reality of the Holocaust, which his characters also seek to ignore, but the contrast between repression and vivid suffering offers compelling evidence of the pervasiveness of victimhood in the Third Reich. His characters exhibit some of the evasiveness seen in Katz und Maus, and there are instances of abusive language as well as physical aggression. Yet in Hundejahre, Grass's portrayal of communication begins to shift toward the dialogues that would become typical for much of his career. Amsel repeatedly speaks out against injustice and pursues his aggressor Matern, using a combination of artistic representations of evil—his scarecrow collection— and persistent efforts at dialogue. Although his attempts at conversation never result in mutual understanding, Amsel opens the door on the past, orchestrating discussions in postwar Germany that reflect Grass's own move into the political forum in the early 1960s.

This epic novel—which Grass always said was his favorite of his works—is challenging due to its complex interconnections, fugue-like repetitions, mixture of myth and history, and the protagonists’ puzzling behavior. Hundejahre contains three books, the last of which takes place in the Federal Republic. The first section (1917–27, “Frühschichten” or Morning Shifts) is narrated by Amsel alias Brauxel and describes the friendship between Matern and Amsel, who grow up in the same village on the Vistula River outside of Danzig. In Book 2, the two boys attend high school in Danzig, and love letters (“Liebesbriefe”) from Harry Liebenau to his cousin Tulla describe the abuse of their friends by Tulla and Matern. The third book, narrated by Matern, depicts his travels through Germany (“Materniaden” or Materniads) as he seeks to prove other Nazis’ guilt and desperately tries to repress his own.

In Vonne Endlichkait (Of All that Ends), which was published posthumously in August 2015, Grass adopts a new tone for relating his musings on mortality. The volume combines poems and images with the autobiographical genre, as was the case in Fundsachen für Nichtleser (Found Objects for Non-Readers, 1997). The poems and vignettes in Vonne Endlichkait are internal conversations in which Grass uses natural objects to convey his unsentimental and wryly humorous attitude toward old age. His attention is directed at capturing the simple essence of being and communicating an awareness—sharpened by imminent end of life—of the immateriality of thoughts and ideas. Whereas Grimms Wörter had focused on the satisfaction found in work, Vonne Endlichkait contemplates existence at its most basic level, as seen, for example, in mushrooms, skeletons of animals, birds, and feathers. One fundamental difference between human beings and the world around them can be found in the awareness of the finality of death. Grass implies both a leave-taking and an everyday enjoyment of simple objects such as the snail's shell as distractions from ailments. Yet he does not avoid the topic of decline, seen in allusions to the loss of teeth and repeated images of dead leaves. In particular, floating feathers (which appear prominently on the cover) contrast with the weight of nails, which may be associated with coffins and death (VE, 115).

Grass's dialogue with these objects involves an erasure of the dichotomies between human beings and nature, as is seen in the short poem “Damit sie ins Gespräch kommen” (138; So They Can Converse, 132). Ostensibly, it was Grass's pencil that recommended placing an elk's skull next to the writer's false teeth. In a drawing of this surrealist still life, shown on the opposite page, the skull is turned to “gaze” at the bottom left-hand corner, its eye socket large and eerily staring, while the false teeth appear primly closed, facing the viewer in full-frontal mode (139). Grass contrasts his own mortality, conveyed by the false teeth, with the elk's death, a comparison that evokes parity between animals and humans. No longer is the man's (impending) death more tragic, but it is simply more reflected. This can be seen in the portrayal of the false teeth without their owner, which Grass uses to “try out” a world without him.