Gunter Grass

...His political activism—and his very clear commitment to democratic socialism—caused shrill attacks against him in the American press when he won the Nobel Prize...

...There is no end to writing after Auschwitz, no such promise can be made— unless the human race gives up on itself completely...

...In the new millennium, we will discover if social democracy can indeed create a decent society...

...But Brandt's and Grass's commitment to democracy does not need to be justified...

...The attacks on Grass remind us that the United States remains a parochial country, its pundits still fighting the cold war long after the Soviet Union has dissolved into tribal warfare, still unable to fathom the subtleties of social democratic politics...

...His article on Cuba in Dissent ("Pity on Cuba," Fall 1993) criticizes elections where "nothing like a recognizable opposition was allowed to present itself to the voters...

...Throughout the book, Grass is lyrically accompanied by a snail—"The snail is progress," he explains, and it is the perfect construct for Grass's incremental social democratic climb...

...Nothing to dilate your pu pils...

...Most notably, Grass was accused by Jacob Heilbrunn in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece of a "nostalgia for East Germany" and castigated as a "leftist dinosaur...

...It not only chronicles Brandt's rise to leadership, but clearly shows how, for Grass, contemporary Germany is inextricably bound up with the Holocaust and with the need to rebuild democracy in its aftermath...

...Although each creative writer forms his or her work by reshaping language to a particular vision, the burden of using a language contaminated by the Nazis has been an everpresent burden for Grass and his comrades...

...Indeed, he took Adorno's now famous dictum— that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz—to mean something other than silence...

...Accordingly, I expect only partial achievements...

...But today, Frankfurt stands as one of the most important, and one of the most cosmopolitan, literary centers in the world...

...IF TIMING is everything, one can imagine how pleased Gunter Grass's publishers were to have the Nobel Prize for Literature announced during the Frankfurt Book Fair this past October, where Grass was an honored participant...

...His fear of a unified Germany as a military power has not been justified by events...

...And guess what...

...On the New York Times op-ed page, James Atlas took up the same cause: during a literary panel, Grass had challenged Saul Bellow about the ability of American capitalism to grapple with poverty and economic inequalities...

...Grass, as part of what he terms "the Auschwitz generation—[belonging] "not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals," feels a strain no American writer would feel...

...For, in a profound way, Gunter Grass's output—his literary career—helped make a German city a publishing and literary center by cleansing the German language of the Nazi stain...

...Even his fears about reunification were not unrealistic...

...Where did they go...

...Ronald Reagan's military buildup is once more hailed as the reason for the collapse of the evil empire, judged positively against Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, whose embrace by Grass earned him the American pundit's wrath...

...Grass attempts to explain the landscape of twentieth-century Germany to his two young children, moving back and forth among the remnants of the past to explain the present...

...Heilbrunn asks, who won the cold war...

...But his concern about economic inequality in the two former Germanys was prescient...

...It is for his literary interventions—reclaiming the German language through the fantasies of his most famous character, Oskar, the thirteenyearold boy from The Tin Drum who refuses to grow up, that Grass will be remembered...

...Heilbrunn's chastising remarks about Grass's "illusions about communism" are ridiculous if one reads or listens to Grass...

...Today, with heroes like Brandt long gone and with communism and revolution having fallen away, Grass's snail is still on the move...

...A writer must face up to the test of reality...

...A bone-dry, inflexible sentence...

...No doubt Grass would enjoy being associated with Brandt and attacked along with his hero...

...But there was a greater significance to Grass's participation than the announcement of the award...

...But, for Grass, political activism and the chronicling of it is as important a component of his own legacy as his novels and poems...

...This pressing question puts Grass's concerns front and center...

...His snail has seen decades of struggle, from Bebel to Bernstein to Brandt...

...DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 91...

...Grass wrote this journal-type book during the election campaign in 1969 when Willy Brandt and the SPD won election in the Federal German Republic for the first time since World War II...

...Most chilling in his telling are the questions his own children ask him when they listen to the story of the Jews' expulsion from Danzig by the Nazis...

...Did they all learn English quick...

...Earlier on, his "excessive" defense of these regimes was focused mostly on the argument that American policy had driven them into the arms of the Soviet Union—not an unreasonable claim, and one broadly supported on the democratic left, especially in Europe...

...In From the Diary of a Snail, Grass describes his travels around West Germany while speechwriting for Brandt...

...Can it equalize a global order, with capitalist America at the helm...

...Nothing to cheer about...

...True, Grass challenged American imperialism in our own backyard, joining with the majority of social democratic parties in Europe and many American leftists in defending Sandinista Nicaragua and Castro's Cuba, and he (and they) took much too soft a line on democratic rights...

...and that can't be done if he keeps his distance," he wrote against his critics who said that the literary life and politics don't mix...

...How could one use—or trust—the language or build a nation of literary worth after Hitler's book burnings and extermination camps...

...Grass states clearly: "I am a Social Democrat because to my mind socialism is worthless without democracy and because an unsocial democracy is no democracy at all...

...After recounting to his children the experience of the convoy of children who went on the "kinder-transport" to England, leaving their parents for safety, his children ask: "Did they have to go to school, too...

...And what about their parents...

...It would behoove Grass's critics to reread his gem of a book From the Diary of a Snail...

...10-ANN MORT, a member of the Dissent editorial board, writes frequently about issues of Jewish concern...

...But he never defended communism...

...Ironically, while he has been vilified in the United States as a leftist, in left-wing circles in Europe and once upon a time, among the New Left in the States, he was criticized as a cheerleader for incremental change instead of one-stop revolution...

...After all, one of the casualties of the Holocaust was the German language...

...Divisions between the 90 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 NOTEBOOK rich West and the poor East have led to serious problems in the new republic and are the cause, in part, of the current social democratic decline, especially in the poorer, resentful East, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) continues to slip and the former German Communist Party (PDS) continues to rise...

...He begins his story in Danzig, the city where The Tin Drum is set, and the city of his own birth...

...Atlas put this forward as proof of Grass's leftist (read communist) sentiments...

...I have nothing better to offer, though I know of better things and wish I had them...