Günter Grass is the most consistently interesting and disturbing writer at work in Europe today. With his prodigious talents, unmistakable voice, alarming energy, wayward genius and sheer physical presence, he has made himself a tremendous force in modern European literature. He has faults, naturally: as befits a great writer, he sometimes has great faults. But—as he himself might say—this much is certain: for the German novel he has once more gained an international audience. (p. 11) T...

With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are not only the greatest writers of their age, they are also its witnesses. Each of them worked in a different genre…. Yet the questions they ask have a family likeness; and the answers they offer remind us forcibly that theirs was an age of terror. Any author whose literary gifts and moral disposition lead him towards this contemporary...

[This essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published in Dimension, Summer 1970.] When I ask myself what makes Günter Grass so outstanding a phenomenon as a poet, the first answer that occurs to me is: the circumstance that he is so many other things as well, an outstanding novelist, playwright, draughtsman, politician and cook. In an age of specialists such diversity of interest and accomplishment could well be suspect, as indeed it is to some of Günter Grass's critics....

For most readers Günter Grass's work is so dominated by the Danzig trilogy that it is difficult to see what he wrote after it in the proper perspective. (p. 56) The Danzig trilogy is an attempt on a grand scale to explore how things came to be the way they are now—an exploration of 'unbewältigte Vergangenheit.' This is a subject which is easy to treat in general terms and in so doing to allow it to escape into vagueness, leaving unexplained precisely those things wh...

In approaching Grass as a poet and a dramatist, it is extremely difficult to forget that Grass has gained pre-eminent recognition as a novelist: in what follows I have not attempted to do so. Certainly the most immediate kind of interest that these works are likely to arouse for admirers of Grass's novels lies in the large number of parallels or anticipations of images and themes explored in the prose works. Standing by themselves, they would not have made Grass a significant contemporary writer ...

[Günter Grass's] novel Der Butt (The Flounder) … seems to have put paid to the view that his recent work exhibits a continuous decline from the standard of his first novels…. Despite its characteristic baroque complexity of form the book has many immediately attractive features that make it fairly easy to understand why it has been so successful. It is probably the funniest book Grass has written; it contains some agreeable sensations, titillations, and provocations; and its subj...

Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel may be read as a novel which proclaims the death of Faust as a hero in literature by showing the degeneration of the Faustian ethos. Such an interpretation is based on Grass's point of view and style in the novel, on the life of Oskar Matzerath and, most significantly, on the novel itself as a social document. Grass's point of view remains largely consistent in that everything is seen from the obverse side, from the perspective of insanity, and fro...

There are ropewalkers, lion tamers, and clowns among novelists; also bareback riders, trapeze artists, strong men, and illusionists; and once in awhile an impresario will appear who commands a whole circus, as Günter Grass did a few years ago with The Flounder, the three-ring, cymbal-clashing, sawdust-kicking entertainment he gave himself as a fiftieth birthday present. Headbirths is a much more modest performance, a mere juggling act—but let that "mere" not imply any disparageme...

[Grass's works] deal with the question of guilt, specifically Germany's guilt, but more importantly, universal existential guilt. The picture he paints, to use his own words, is gray, perhaps depressing to some of his readers, but the reason for the gray is because this color is mid-way between black and white, and therefore closer to the reality which Grass knows is somewhere between evil and good. (p. 436)

"I'm curious about the 80s," comments Günter Grass in his latest book [Kopfgeburten]. His curiosity is shared by the readers of Grass and of his creative countrymen who currently populate the German literary scene. One aspect of this curiosity regards the role which Grass himself will play within German literature in the decade which has just opened. The observations which follow concern the problem of representation in contemporary German writing: to what degree can a present-da...

Grass has said that he wrote [The Flounder] as a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, and a birthday present need be pleasing only to the recipient. Much of The Flounder seems to have been pleasing to Grass—a nice change, probably, from all his political involvements of previous years…. It may have been fun fiddling with the number nine and finding other notions to apply it to, such as providing the book with nine sub-heroines who are also nine cooks. But what if none of the nine is interesti...

Critics who urge upon American writers more social commitment and a more public role should ponder the cautionary case of Günter Grass. Here is a novelist who has gone so public he can't be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches to his readers from the front lines of his engagement. His latest work, "Headbirths; or, The Germans Are Dying Out" … is topical and political with a specificity that warrants a prefatory Publisher's Note: Headbirth...

"The Flounder" is one of those monstrous miscellanies like Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Melville's "Moby Dick" (a Grass favorite), Flaubert's "Bouvard and Pecuchet," and (in our century) Joyce's "Ulysses," that can take on the guise of narrative fictions but whose wilder energies lie elsewhereȁ...

Famous writers tend to become institutions, or rather to institutionalize themselves. As designated seers or gadflies, they take on the burden of everyone else's conscience and poke around in all sorts of public business. Tolstoy ended as a writer of this kind; Camus, more subtly and gracefully, was one; Norman Mailer works hard at it. Today there is no writer more swollen with self-importance or, if that's too harsh, more convinced of his responsibility for the whole of his culture than G�...

Try to imagine Walter Savage Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" rewritten by John Barth in Restoration English to parody a meeting of the American branch of the PEN club, and you will have a reasonably good approximation of Günter Grass's strange new production [The Meeting at Telgte.] In early September 1947, a German writer named Hans Werner Richter invited some 15 colleagues to a two-day meeting at an acquaintance's estate in the Bavarian Alps, an occasion that r...

The Meeting at Telgte is an imaginary conference of German writers toward the end of the Thirty Years War when, as after another disastrous and unbelievably violent 30 years (from 1915 to 1945) every detail of civilization had been raped, mutilated, and dishonored. Ostensibly, Grass' gathering of literary people is to assess what can be saved from the rubble. Their concern is for the German language: which dialect is most "German," what authors from ancient times are to be used as model...

Headbirths is a novelist's diary or quarry, unprocessed working materials published long before their time…. Grass is fashioning a new discourse and claiming (or repossessing) new territories for modern fiction. It's evidently not easy, and may indeed be impossible. A dominant myth alluded to is that of Sisyphus's sterile labour, and the main plot of Headbirths ostensibly chronicles an ambitious novel-film collaboration which never got off the ground, and of which the present boo...

The Meeting at Telgte contains none of the ambitious devices of Herr Grass's earlier novels. There is none of the symbolic machinery of tin drum or flounder drawing the strands of the characters and their narrations together. Instead, at the center of the novel there is a featureless, anonymous, timeless "I"—the author as abstract tricentennial witness. The narration is in appearance a straightforward account of what was discussed, of poems read at meetings. The writers consider ...

Like much American fiction of the 1960s, The Flounder represents a variety of what I would like to call kitchensink modernism: form and control are out the window; anything goes, including the kitchen sink, or, in this case, the kitchen stove. Into his enormous stew of a narrative, Grass stirs large chunks of social history, some fanciful anthropology, travelogues, fairy tales, a virtual cookbook of succulent recipes, mock-romantic pastoral, including some of the great mushroom-hunting passages in recent li...

The Flounder is even more epic in conception, if not in scale, than Günter Grass's previous big novels. (p. 57) [All] major historical periods and sociopolitical phenomena enter into this tale of food and sex and power struggle through the ages. Significantly, no matter how repressed women are in any given time, they manage—usually through cookery—to control their men….

[In The Meeting at Telgte,] Günter Grass has taken the story of a group of writers who set about the task of seeing sharply, but with a sense of humor, and projected it 300 years backwards in time; which of course, Grass being Grass, enables him to tell the tale more humorously…. [We] have been given a marvellously credible portrait of a bunch of bitching, pedantic, devout, bawdy, gloomy and innocent men struggling to build a new world from the flawed fabric of their minds.

The term "universal man" has acquired bombastic overtones, but if any of our contemporaries deserves the appellation, it is Günter Grass: novelist, poet, draftsman, sculptor, public speaker and "politician of the good." He has been known as an essayist for many years; it is good to have these literary pieces [collected in Aufsätze zur Literatur]. As was to be expected, he often leaves the realm of belles lettres, especially in "Wie sagen wir es den Kindern?&#...

In The Flounder [Günter Grass] dishes up the history of the German branch of the human race from the end of the Stone Age to the present as seen from the perspective of the digestive tract. Flavored with dill, stuffed with prunes, and awash in beer, The Flounder is a kind of Germanic One Hundred Years of Solitude, a Baltic Ulysses (at least in scale), and fantastic in any language…. (p. G1) The Flounder is a very European novel, one in the tradition of Rabelais and Beckett, not that of Thomas ...

Grass has repeatedly expressed his scepticism about the use of symbols, associating this mode with Nazi propaganda and with ideological thought in general…. (p. 69) For Grass, the symbolic mode is tied to the German idealistic tradition. As a result, he constantly devalues fixed symbolic patterns in his works and discovers symbolic equivalents for ideas, traditions, or historical conditions that exhibit simultaneously their relevance and their absurd arbitrariness. Grass both uses and parodies his us...

There is no room for upperclass pretensions or propriety in Gunter Grass's Germany, no matter the century. And, indeed, one imagines his mind as a farraginous cauldron, simmering with a thick bouillabaise of precisely observed detail. The Meeting At Telgte, held to create a new order, itself devolves into chaos. The readings and arguments grind on, only to abruptly conclude with the book's shattering climax. The parallels Grass draws between the two centuries are pointed, his weighing of the p...

Since his seventeenth-century authors are all historical figures [in The Meeting at Telgte],… Mr. Grass has counted on a German audience's familiarity with them to fill out his quick, simplified characterizations. American readers, barring German specialists, may have some trouble distinguishing one of these hymn writers from another but will have no trouble enjoying their activities. Their critical debates are a wonderful muddle of disinterested aesthetics and self-serving maneuver, and there...

[The Meeting at Telgte,] in Grass's hands, is a novel without dialogue that aspires to instant literary embronzification as the poets squabble in dactyls, mock in metaphor, and surrender to the divine spirit of language in a kind of discourse and triumphal progress of wind instruments through a nutshell. Many pages provoke an Olympian boredom that, in German, may be relieved by the music of language; but in English, too much fades into encyclopediana. The powerlessness of poets over anything but lang...