Günter Grass, Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87
Even bad books are books and therefore sacred. ―From The
Tin Drum, 1959
No idea stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn’t pure.
And the sun has spots. All geniuses menstruate. On sorrow floats laughter. In
the heart of roaring lurks silence. ―From Dog
Years, 1963
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises. ―Quoted
by Arthur Miller in the Paris Review, 1966
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an
exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state
of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
―From From
the Diary of a Snail, 1972
If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this
one utopian principle – absolute busyness – then utopia and melancholy will
come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy – and
without consciousness. ―From From
the Diary of a Snail, 1972
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless,
but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a
puritan to understand. ―From a New Statesman and Society interview, 1990
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth
percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is
already in place. ―From a New Statesman and Society interview, 1990
Believing: it means believing in your own lies. And I can
say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early. ―From BBC documentary Günter Grass: Fiction at the
Frontier, 1992
Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It
tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself;
pedant that it is, it will have its way. From
Peeling the Onion, 2006
I was silent. Because so many others have kept silent,
the temptation is great … to shift the blame onto the collective guilt, or to
talk about oneself only figuratively in the third person: He was, saw, did,
said, he kept silent … From
Peeling the Onion, 2006
The job of a citizen is to keep his
mouth open.
I’m always astonished by a forest. It makes me realise
that the fantasy of nature is much larger than my own fantasy. I still have
things to learn. ―From a Guardian
interview, 2010 - Günter
Grass in quotes: 12 of the best
The writer Günter Grass, who broke the silences of the past
for a generation of Germans, has died in hospital in Lübeck at the age of 87. Grass was admitted to hospital with an infection only a few
days ago, and his secretary, Hilke Ohsoling, said his death had come as a
surprise.
His last public appearance was on 28 March, at the premier
of a stage version of the Tin Drum at the Thalia theatre in Hamburg. “He took
part in the premier party, where many of his own children were present, with
great pleasure,” Ohsoling told the Hamburger Abendblatt. She added that his
family had been at his bedside when he died.
German president Joachim Gauck led the tributes, offering
his condolences to the writer’s widow Ute Grass. “Günter Grass moved,
enthralled, and made the people of our country think with his literature and
his art,” he said in a statement. “His literary work won him recognition early
across the world, as witnessed not least by his Nobel prize.” “His novels, short stories, and his poetry reflect the great
hopes and fallacies, the fears and desires of whole generations,” the statement
continued.
Tributes began to appear within minutes of the announcement
of Grass’ death by his publisher, Steidl. In a short statement, German chancellor Angela Merkel said Grass
“accompanied and shaped Germany’s post-war history with his artistic, social,
and political engagement”. The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had warm personal
memories: “Grass learned a lot from Rabelais and Celine and was influential in
development of ‘magic realism’ and Marquez. He taught us to base the story on
the inventiveness of the writer no matter how cruel, harsh and political the
story is,” he said.
He added: “In April 2010 when there was a mushroom cloud
over Europe he
was in Istanbul and stayed more than he planned. We went to restaurants and
drank and drank and talked and talked ... A generous, curious and a very warm
friend who also wanted to be a painter at first!”
Geoffrey Mulligan, Grass’s long-time British editor, said he
was “one of the giants of world literature”, adding: “Whereas most people would
be delighted to excel in one artistic discipline, Günter Grass was an
accomplished artist, sculptor, poet, playwright and novelist. In person he was
funny, generous and wonderful company.”
Grass found success in every artistic form he explored –
from poetry to drama and from sculpture to graphic art – but it wasn’t until
publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959 that he found the
international reputation which brought him the Nobel prize for
literature 40 years later. A speechwriter for the German chancellor
Willy Brandt, Grass was never afraid to use the platform his fame afforded,
campaigning for peace and the environment and speaking out against German
reunification, which he compared to Hitler’s “annexation” of Austria.
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig – now Gdansk – in
1927, “almost late enough”, as he said, to avoid involvement with the Nazi
regime. Conscripted into the army in 1944 at the age of 16, he served as a tank
gunner in the Waffen SS,bringing
accusations of betrayal, hypocrisy and opportunism when he wrote about
it in his 2006 autobiography, Peeling the Onion.
The writer was surprised by the strength of the reaction,
arguing that he thought at the time that the SS was merely “an
elite unit”, that he had spoken openlyabout
his wartime record in the 1960s, and that he had spent a lifetime “working
through” the unquestioning beliefs of his youth in his writing. His war came to
an end six months later having “never
fired a shot”, when he was wounded in Cottbus and captured in a military
hospital by the US army. That he avoided committing war crimes was “not
by merit”, he insisted. “If I had been born three or four years earlier I
would, surely, have
seen myself caught up in those crimes.”
Instead he trained as a stonemason, studied art in
Düsseldorf and Berlin, and joined Hans Werner Richter’s Group 47 alongside
writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Heinrich Böll. After moving to Paris in
1956 he began working on a novel which told the story of Germany in the first
half of the 20th century through the life of a boy who refuses to grow.
A sprawling mixture of fantasy, family saga, bildungsroman
and political fable, The Tin
Drum was attacked by critics, denied the Bremen literature prize by
outraged senators, burned in
Düsseldorf and became a global bestseller. Speaking
to the Swedish Academy in 1999, Grass explained that the reaction taught
him “that books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is
undertaken out of love for one’s country can be taken as soiling one’s nest.
From then on I have been controversial.”
A steady stream of provocative interventions in debates
around social justice, peace and the environment followed, alongside poetry,
drama, drawings and novels. In 1977 Grass tackled sexual politics, hunger and
the rise of civilisation with a 500-page version of the Grimm brothers’
fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife. The Rat (1986) explored the apocalpyse,
as a man dreams of a talking rat who tells him of the end of the human race,
while 1995’s Too Far Afield explored reunification through east German eyes –
prompting Germany’s foremost literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, to brand
the novel a “complete and utter failure” and to appear on the cover of Der
Spiegel ripping
a copy in half.
His last novel, 2002’s Crabwalk, dived into the sinking of
the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, while three volumes of memoir –
Peeling the Onion, The Box and Grimms’ Words – boldly ventured into troubled
waters.
Germany’s political establishment responded immediately to
the news of Grass’s death. In a statement posted on the German government’s
website, state culture secretary Monika Grütters, said: “The Tin Drum belongs
without a doubt to the foundations of German literature. Günter Grass was a
world literary figure, and his literary legacy will stand next to that of
Goethe.”
The head of the Green party, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, called
Grass a “great author, a critical spirit. A contemporary who had the
ambition to put himself against the Zeitgeist.” Culture secretary Monika Grütters said: “The Tin Drum
belongs without a doubt to the foundations of German literature. Günter Grass
was a world literary figure, and his literary legacy will stand next to that of
Goethe.”
“Günter Grass was a contentious intellectual, his literary
work remains formidable,” tweeted the head
of the opposition Free Democratic party, Christian Lindner. The foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was “deeply
dismayed” at the news of the author’s death, a tweet from his ministry said. Steinmeier is a member of the Social Democratic party, with
which Grass had a fraught relationship - after campaigning for the party in
1960s and 70s, he became a member in 1982, only to leave ten years later in
protest at its asylum policies. “Günter Grass was a contentious intellectual who interfered.
We sometimes miss that today,” SPD chairwoman
Andrea Nahles said.
Volker Schlöndorff, director of the Oscar-winning 1979 film
of the Tin Drum, had thoughtful words for his old friend. “He was the voice you
listened to, both at home and abroad. The voice from Germany that made the
world listen after the war, which he, famously or infamously, took part in. He
knew what he was talking about when he wrote. And he - usually - sensed the
resonance ... the typewriter was his tin drum. He knew how to use it, for the
sake of the reader and our country. Because of course he was a patriot.”
While there were plenty of tributes recognising Grass as one
of Germany’s most important post-war writers, social media users swiftly
revived many of the controversies of his divisive career, bringing up his
membership of the SS and his alleged anti-Semitism. Speaking
to the Paris Review in 1991, Grass made no apology for his abiding focus on
Germany’s difficult past. “If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might
have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that,” he said. “That
hasn’t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.”
The controversy flared up again following by publication of
his 2012 poem What
Must be Said, in which he criticised Israeli policy. Published simultaneously
in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Italian La Repubblica and Spanish El País, the
poem brought an angry response from the Israeli ambassador to Germany, Shimon
Stein, who saw in it “a disturbed relationship to his own past, the Jews, and
Israel”.
Despite his advanced age, Grass still led an active public
life, and made vigorous public appearances in recent weeks. In a typically
opinionated interview for state broadcaster WDR, which he gave in February
after a live reading from Grimms’ Words, Grass called his last book a
“declaration of love to the German language”. He also talked about how the internet and the loss of the
art of letter-writing had led to a “new illiteracy”. “Of course that has
consequences,” he said. “It leads to a poverty of language and allows
everything to be forgotten that the Grimm brothers created with their glorious
work.”
He remained critical of western policy in the Middle East
(“now we see the chaos we make in those countries with our western values”),
and talked about how his age had done nothing to soften his political
engagement. “I have children and grandchildren, I ask myself every day:
‘what are we leaving behind for them?’ When I was 17, at the end of the war,
everything was in ruins, but our generation, whether for good reason or not,
had hope, we wanted to shape the future. That’s very difficult for young people
today, because the future is virtually fixed for them.”
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/13/gunter-grass-german-nobel-laureate-dies-aged-87
