Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (46 page)

Grass had already said that if Germany unified too quickly — without certain careful stages (in preparation for the devastating changes) — there would be rioting against foreigners, and renewed right-wing extremism; and Grass asked, wisely, what could possibly alleviate the anticipated bitterness of the greatly disadvantaged new citizens from the East… about 17 million of them. In essence, he was saying
SLOW DOWN!

Frankly, this was the point of view I'd expected Grass to have, and I agreed with him. Quite the opposite of trivializing the past, Mr. Grass has always said that it is impossible to maximize the Holocaust — that too much could never be made of it. And as for his predictions regarding a reunified Germany, he has been largely right; to be right about such horrors as now befall the new Germany does not make Mr. Grass any happier. Nor are Grass's critics in Germany altogether happy with him. On a recent cover of
Der Spiegel
(August 21, 1995), there is a photograph of Marcel Reich-Ranicki — a senile tyrant, but a celebrated critic — ripping Grass's newest novel in half; actually, Reich-Ranicki appears to have
butted
the book in half with his bald head. One would think that Germans would be sensitive to such a symbolic display of publicly and literally destroying a book. (Is ripping a novel in half a politically correct substitute for book-burning?) Grass, at least,
was
sensitive to the image: he withdrew a recent interview with
Der Spiegel
from publication.

The concept of a celebrated critic is an oxymoron to me; nevertheless, I feel I must explain to my fellow Americans that German literary culture is quite different from our own. Our literary culture is small and contained; our writers are of no political influence in our society. One happy result of the relative unimportance of writers in the U.S. is that literary critics are of even
less
importance to us. (Try to imagine
any
critic on the cover of
Time
or
Newsweek!)
But writers
are
important in German society, and they are of political influence, too; the perversion is that a critic of Reich-Ranicki's shrill and pompous sort can — if only temporarily — achieve a stature in Germany almost equal to Günter Grass's stature there.

Would Woody Allen be on the cover of
People
magazine, and be on
60 Minutes
, if what Woody wanted to tell us was why he disapproved of speedy reunification of Germany? Woody Allen is this country's most original filmmaker; I would be very interested to hear his views on German reunification — and on a host of subjects related to his
work
— but the only subject that has made Mr. Allen such widespread cover-story material in
our
culture is the melodrama of his legal battles with Mia Farrow.

We must remember that what writers
say
— I mean, not only in their work — is of much more sizable interest in Europe than it is here. And what Günter Grass says in Germany is of the utmost interest to Germans. Furthermore, it is not just Germany that Mr. Grass has been critical of. In 1982, following a trip to Nicaragua, Grass said he felt ashamed that the United States was an ally of his country. He asked this provocative question: “How impoverished must a country be before it is
not
a threat to the U.S. government?”

This was first published in
Die Zeit
and later reprinted in Grass's collected essays
On Writing and

Politics
, which include his essay called “What Shall We Tell Our Children?” In it, Grass cites the guilt of the Protestant and Catholic churches for what happened to the Jews.

“In Danzig,” Grass writes, “the bishops of both churches looked on, or stood indifferently aside, when in November of 1938 the synagogues in Langfuhr and Zoppot were set on fire and the shrunken Jewish community was terrorized by
SA Sturm 96.
At that time I was 11 years old and both a Hitler Youth and a practicing Catholic. In the Langfuhr Church of the Sacred Heart, which was 10 minutes' walk from the Langfuhr Synagogue, I never, up to the beginning of the war, heard a single prayer on behalf of the persecuted Jews, but I joined in babbling a good many prayers for the victory of the German armies and the health of… Adolf Hitler. Individual Christians and Christian groups shared the utmost bravery in resisting Nazism, but the cowardice of the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany made them tacit accomplices.

“No television series says a word about that. The many-faceted moral bankruptcy of the Christian West would not lend itself to gripping, shattering, horror-inspiring action. What shall we tell our children? Take a good look at the hypocrites. Distrust their gentle smiles. Fear their blessing.”

Günter Grass, both in his fiction and in his courageous, often unpopular politics, has done exactly this: he has consistently spoken out against the “many-faceted moral bankruptcy of the Christian West.” He has not limited his speaking out to the repression of the West
and
the East, nor to the insidious fear-mongering of the right wing; he has also bashed the irresponsibility of the New Left. It is not surprising that he's made many enemies among those literati who are merely fashionable; among polemicists; among the politically cynical and the politically impatient. Predictably, Grass's critics have complained that his novels have become deliberately terrifying and apocalyptic. No kidding — and no wonder. He has never been a writer who seeks to be liked. As a novelist, he is a wide-ranging moral authority; he's not supposed to be polite. In fact, he's often at his best when he's a little
im
polite.

That was what my former landlady in Vienna said about him. This was 1962, when I was a student at the University of Vienna. I was carrying around the German edition of
Die Blech trommel
, pretending my German was good enough so that I could read Grass in the original. I knew the book was terrific, but unfortunately I couldn't read it without a dictionary — or without one or two Austrian students sitting beside me. Nevertheless, I carried the book around with me; it was a great way to meet girls. And one day my landlady saw me carrying the book around and she asked me what was taking me so long — or was I reading
Die Blechtrommel
twice?

Well, I was surprised that a woman of my landlady's generation was also reading Günter Grass — in those days, I thought of Grass as exclusively student property — and so I asked her what
she
thought of Grass, and (proper Viennese that she was) she said only:
“Er ist ein bisschen unhöflich?
(“He is a little impolite.”)

In his 21st book,
The Call of the Toad
, Mr. Grass is even a little impolite about such a revered subject as death — especially concerning where we want to be buried. If Grass once described a writer's gradual progress as “the diary of a snail,” now the writer has swallowed a toad; it is this creature (the toad within him) that compels him to speak. Günter Grass's toads have a way of speaking to us even after they've been flattened in the road.

The Call of the Toad
is an exquisite novel, both political and a love story. It is as bitterly comic and ironic a short novel as Mr. Grass's
Cat and Mouse;
it is as moving and touching a love story as Garcia Märquez's
Love in the Time of Cholera
, but it doesn't drift as far into fantasy as that novel — as wonderful as that novel is,
The Call of the Toad
is better. Indeed, as in the very best of his novels, Mr. Grass is Dicken-sian — in the sense that he combines darkly comic satire with the most earthly love, the most positively domestic affection.

In his excellent review of
The Call of the Toad
(on the front page of
The New York Times Book Review)
, John Bayley observes that Grass's “fellow Germans may be inclined to say that he is becoming all too obviously a merely humorous and lightweight novelist, but they will be wrong.” I agree: many of Mr. Grass's fellow Germans and critics have
already
been wrong about him.

Just as Günter Grass is capable of out-imagining history, he will outlast his critics — just as snails make their own progress, and toads go on crossing the road.

In 1962, I was proceeding at less than a snail's pace through
Die Blechtrommel;
it was embarrassing, because I could handle my professors at the University of Vienna — I could fake it, in German, well enough to pass my courses — but I couldn't read German as complex as the German of Günter Grass. Finally, a friend from the States saved me: he sent me the English translation of
The Tin Drum
, and from that moment I knew that all I ever wanted to do was to be like Oskar Matzerath; was to be funny and to be angry; was to
stay
funny and to
stay
angry.

Then one night — this was easily more than 10 years ago — Günter and I had dinner in New York; as we were saying good-bye, I thought that he looked a little worried. Grass often looks worried, but what he said surprised me because I realized that he was worried about
me.
He said: “You don't seem quite as angry as you used to be.” This was a good warning; I've never forgotten it.

After leaving Günter in Frankfurt, the day after reunification, I traveled to several other German cities. I was on a book tour. I was reading largely to university students — in Bonn, in Kiel, in Munich, in Stuttgart. About a hundred times, students asked me if I had given Owen Meany the same initials as Oskar Matzerath as a gesture of homage to Günter Grass — a kind of tipping the hat — and I said Yes, Yes, Yes (of course, of course, of course) about a hundred times. But I had also been quoted in the press as agreeing with Grass about the problems of reunifying Germany too quickly; everywhere I went, although the audiences at my readings were generally friendly, there was always at least one unfriendly question from the audience — it always concerned the matter of my agreeing with Grass.

It was Grass they were angry with. As for me, they thought I was just some fool foreigner who was going along with what Grass had said. All I did was repeat what he had said,
and
repeat that Günter Grass had always made good sense to me. But this answer was unsatisfying to the students; they had already embraced the future — they did not want to be reminded of the past.

To them, there was comfort in a mob, for a mob can drown out any single voice. It is inevitable that we writers take no comfort from a mob. A mob always wants to go too fast. Our method is moving slowly and speaking at length, like snails and toads.

That was the end of my book tour in Germany, about one week after reunification.

That night in New York, when I introduced Günter Grass to an appreciative audience at the 92nd Street Y, I concluded my introduction by stating my opinion that Grass is “one of the truly great writers of the 20th century.” It sounded monumental in German — even in my German.
“Hier ist meiner Meinung nach einer der wirklich Grossen der Weltliteratur des 20. Jahrhunderts — Günter Grass.”

And now, as I write, comes a letter from Günter in Berlin. We will be together at the Frankfurt Book Fair again; the German translation of
A Son of the Circus
(in German,
Zirkuskind)
will be published in the fall of ‘95, at the same time as a new novel by Grass —
Ein weites Feld.
A literal translation:
A Wide Field.
A novel of epic proportions.

Grass suggests that Janet and Everett and I visit him and his wife, Ute, in their house in Behlendorf in September, before the madness of the book fair. My German publisher is planning some readings for me in several German theaters — in Kiel, in Hamburg, in Munich, in Berlin (in addition to Frankfurt). It shouldn't be difficult for me to get away from Hamburg on my first weekend in Germany — I can take the train to Lübeck, and then a taxi, or I can drive directly to Behlendorf from Hamburg in about an hour.

In his letter, Günter says that he hopes my shoulder surgery has been successful; he is facing some surgery on his nose, he adds — he came down with a virus infection immediately upon completing the manuscript of his new novel. (This has happened to almost every writer I know: the body lets down after the end of a big book.)

In his letter, there are some directions to his house in Behlendorf; the house is described as
“weissgetüncht
,” which I think means “white-tinted”— probably “whitewashed.” (Grass's English is much better than my German, yet he always writes to me in German. I write to him in English.)

I'm looking forward to seeing him — this time especially, because I have a story to tell him. It's a true story — about meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane.

I was taking an Air France flight from Toronto to Paris. Everett and Janet were seated across the aisle from me; my seat companion was an elderly woman with a disturbingly deep cough. She had a refined German accent and a face of patrician detachment, of unending wisdom and constraint; with hindsight, this should have been all that was necessary in order for me to recognize her father in her, but I was misled by the only name that was printed on her boarding pass, which she repeatedly turned face-up and face-down, like a playing card, on the armrest between us. The name on her boarding pass was Borgese — she was a German who'd married an Italian, I supposed.

I liked her very much, but not her cough. I drank a beer, she sipped a Scotch. She was so eloquent, but concise. I began to wish I were better dressed. I think she said her first husband was Czech; the Italian was her second — by the brevity of her accounting for them, I presumed she'd outlived them both.

Of her children and grandchildren she spoke at length; on this trip, she told me, she would be visiting her daughter in Milan. But she had some business in France to attend to first, she said.