REVIEWS

...Snails, symbols, and politics...

...I think the book does work in this vein, and I was moved by it...

...So does Willy Brandt...

...Martin Luther King (known as Hope...

...In May, seventy-four, in July, first six, then sixteen children left the Free State...

...Doubt, melancholy, progress...

...THIS IS THE STYLE employed in From the Diary of a Snail to persuade us essentially of the importance of remembering...

...These men and women choose parties, frame policies, enroll in movements...

...They could not do otherBOOKS wise, even if, as Auden kept saying in his later years, a life in literature carries no special warranty of wisdom for a life in politics...

...We cannot be reminded often enough of those who escaped and those who were trapped...

...In fact Willy Brandt scarcely appears, though when he does it is telling, as when, in Warsawer, he went down on his knees "instead of dispensing words" on the massacred Jews...

...Without being pretentious about it, the snail's progress matters a little...

...Orwell, Malraux, and Silone come to mind as contemporary examples...

...Doubt has not only his snails but his Durer print, Melancholia I, to sustain him when he is forced to spend the war in the cellar of a Polish peasant who alternately protects and beats him...

...His novels, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Local Anaesthetic, are about the Nazi nightmare and the morning after in postwar Germany...

...Ott, and the Jewish community, as told to his four children, stays in the mind...

...So does the SDP...

...And so back to Grass, a survivor himself, born in Danzig, now (wryly) a "famous author," but more concerned to make his children see, to remember the names and faces of those from Danzig and now in Israel, to prepare his forthcoming lecture on Durer's Melancholia I in such a way as to show how "melancholy and utopia preclude one another," to "put in a good word for melancholy," to "respect stasis in progress...

...They survive the war, marry, have a child...

...Final device: Doubt lives long enough to learn the fate of the Jewish children who were slaughtered and the Jewish families who survived the precarious journey to Israel...

...In one sense, yes...

...The campaign is only a device, an ignition key to start up reflection about Germany past and present and the human condition...

...they will learn from them why G'rass regards politics, for all the absurdities and the foolish speeches, as a central commitment...

...they will also remember the Jews and Auschwitz...

...As for the issues, apart from a general commitment to humanistic socialism, we are offered only a scatter of footnotes identifying the opposition parties and personalities...

...What is his sense of the political and social conflicts in West Germany today...

...The shuttling back and forth in time, the vignettes of then in Danzig and now in Berlin—all this does remind us of how laden our recent history is with devastation, crisis, despair, followed by an erratic but still perceptible progress...

...Richard Robbins A Writer's Progress FROM THE DIARY OF A SNAIL, by Gunter Grass...

...In the midst of death, life: Doubt and the peasant's daughter awaken to sex...

...Another device: although the sad story of the destruction of the Jewish community is told in a straightforward descriptive way—and all the more moving for that—the fragments are pieced together by an imaginary character, a non-Jew, a teacher, a man of sensitivity whose hobby is snails and whose commitment is to do what he can for Jewish friends: Dr...

...His characters, at once grotesque and deeply human, wander across the German landscape, buffeted by war or made restless by postwar affluence, moved to and fro by "the state...

...Are you listening...

...but he could still see the city—gables, churches, streets, porches, and chimes, gulls on blocks of ice and over brackish water...

...I n some sense, all writers and artists are politically engaged...

...But not really...

...and when you are out in the world, remain true sons of Jewry, to whose sufferings you owe the privilege of going out into the world...

...When, on August 23, 1939 (a week before the outbreak of the war), twenty-six more children set out for England, an article in the organ of the Jewish community con eluded with the words...

...I can imagine in the same way how parents in America will have to explain to their children Vietnam and the civil rights movement and Dr...

...THE CAMPAIGN LEADS to the diary...

...Does it all work...

...q BOOKS...

...He helped with preparations for sending children to England...

...it's a snail's journey...

...Are there Social Democratic programs in housing, economic planning, relations with East Germany, and what do they look like to a writer-citizen...

...Stories and true stories...

...A few days ago, an English journalist who is doing a story for the Observer accompanied me on a campaign trip to Paderborn, Meschede, Schwelm, and Ennepethal...

...No, what the book is really about is personal-political: how a West German of sensibility, a writer, a family man with a wife and four children, can explain to us and to himself the dark history of the Nazi period and why the road back from despair is slow, leading to hope but not utopia...

...And not simply because, stylistically, there are too many pages where confusion is created by symbols inside symbols and flashbacks inside flashbacks...

...So does the writer-citizen who gives some not-very-electrifying speeches in a handful of public places where speaker and audience are equally tired late at night...

...Only a few of the more than a hundred children were to see their parents again...

...Grass's children will remember the snail stories and Dr...

...This English journalist was your age, Franz and Raoul, when he left Danzig in one of those four groups of children...

...Meanwhile his account of Danzig, Dr...

...The diary is in the form of stories for Grass's children...

...And that is never provided...

...And in the context of the more personal political commitment I am describing, Gunter Grass has been, and is now, an activist in the Social Democratic party and a friend of the SDP's leader and ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt...

...Here are two samples of Grass's technique, one coda to the other: When his student gave up Roman snails, Doubt interrupted his speculations and made himself useful...

...Back in the Volkswagen bus after visiting the Stocky & Schmitz factory, he intimated in subordinate clauses that he (like myself) had grown up in Danzig and (like myself) had been just twelve when the war broke out...

...Gunter Grass may well answer that this is another kind of book to be written by another kind of writer...

...He couldn't remember a schoolteacher by the name of Ott (known as Doubt...

...From the Diary of a Snail is about Grass's participation in the 1969 election campaign, his travels through West German towns and cities with friends in 4 little motor van, the hundred-odd speeches he gave for the SDP in pubs and political clubs...

...The stories, in turn, take us back to Danzig just before World War II, when that city was the centerpiece of the Polish Corridor, and the pressures began to mount against the persecuted Jews...

...they have to protect the integrity of their work from the heavy hand of the commissar and the censor...

...Ott in the cellar...

...Herman Ott (Doubt...

...Rather, it is because a reader longs finally for a full discussion of contemporary politics in Germany at some point without all the convolutions...

...All the same, Gunter Grass disappoints in this book...

...A smaller number, whose work itself takes shape from political events, often feel compelled to make a personal commitment...

...Why does a writer like Grass actively plunge into SDP party politics...

...In defense of freedom of expression the nonpolitical painter and the political poet share an ethos...

...Gunter Grass, one of West Germany's most celebrated novelists, belongs in such company...