Minifictions in Diverse Voices

...Some of Grass' ironies are too heavy: A man intent on building a bomb shelter, for instance, dies under it when it collapses on him...

...There are moments when the whole enterprise has the feel of yet anotherNew York Times Millennium Project...

...Nevertheless, for readers unfamiliar with the wild flights and passionately inflamed grotesqueries of Grass' novels—the hunchback child who refuses to grow up...

...Other stories seem rather arbitrarily connected to their years, though the general spirit of their times always asserts itself...

...The opening tale, " 1900," is told to us by a soldier embroiled in the so-called Boxer Rebellion in China...

...When the breadth of his ventriloquism is not merely a tour de force it seems intended, for the purpose of democratic equity, to keep us from discerning where the author's sympathies lie...

...We —that is, several of us—toyed with the thought of undermining the sordid deal...'" His wish culminates in a belief that the explosion of the Hindenburg 13 years later was sabotage, not by men like himself but by "the Reds...

...and the forthcoming "Half a Heart" Every celebration of the end of the last millennium and/or the advent of the new one has left me cranky—too many marketing possibilities wrapped around an arbitrary concept...

...And anyone who tries to stop us....'" Under (but again not in) "1944," a man "well on in years...

...Felix, she called the kid, but he got TB, from the brick dust, I guess, and died on her in '47 before her husband—he was a POW—came home...

...We seem to be eavesdropping on the conversation of a good many chauvinistic Germans who continue to be holdouts against the judgment of history: worse yet, we must assume they are confiding to listeners who share their opinions...

...Testimony to a more familiar kind of refusal of responsibility is provided by what happens to a history teacher who tells his students about Kristallnacht and spends many class periods chronicling that shameful period...

...It all goes back to the time we was living in the workers' colony, they called it...

...Of course, it is likely that Grass' publisher rang him up one day and proposed the idea, a neat little gift book by the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize...

...One of Grass' virtues has always been that no matter how surrealistic the adventures of his characters, he has painted the scenery that contains them in the most intricate and recognizable detail...

...A second literary confrontation pits the poet Paul Celan against the philosopher and presumed Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, one of Grass preoccupations in his past writing...

...And because the Japanese executioners got a clean cut by chopping the pigtails of the Boxers, who were just young fellows like ourselves, there were lots of little piles of them lying around in the dust, and I picked one up and sent it home as a souvenir...

...He dares to hope, in "1957," that even though "foreign powers have willed" that "two German armies now stand facing each other," they will eventually be united and "then all our soldiers will wear the helmet that evolved during the Second World War into a maximally bulletproof descendant of pure German lineage...

...If nothing else...

...Back in Germany I wore it at Fasching and everybody was in stitches until my fiancée threw it in the fire...

...It was the voice of Providence...

...They seemed to be blessing me...

...Remarque's is one of disillusionment: "Cannon fodder quaking in oversized boots—that's what they were...

...boxers: photographers...

...demonstrators from the ecstatic period of the 1968 student revolution and their detractors, of whom Grass himself happened to be one...

...But he is hounded into silence, in spite of his students' interest, by the Parent-Teacher Association of his school...

...The later sections—ranging from an elderly soap opera fan's lack of sympathy for Steffi Graf and her troubles with her father to a consideration of the fact that Dolly the sheep came into the world without the help of any man but her "doner"—reflect either the less interesting or all-too-familiar world we know firsthand...

...There is a woman whose factoryworker husband was promised a "Strength through Joy" automobile by Volkswagen, his employer, in return for having pasted stamps in a book for years, and not only hasn't received it but fears he never will because they live in the Communist East and perhaps "don't...

...and the "kids of big business" of the'90s...

...Hadn't we been humiliated enough at Versailles...

...predicts] a great future forthe 'Hitler myth...

...What makes this book absorbing in its own right...

...He blends the simplified, primary-colored fury of George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht with the peculiar narrative patience of magical realism, whose impossible dramas take place in actual rooms and streets...

...Is it not clear by now that Germany actually won the War...

...forthe salvation of a scrap of their dignity...

...the metaphoric cat, mouse, flounder...

...The world looks on with envy and admiration as we make our comeback...

...Me and my daughter—Lotte's her name—we did column work, right in the middle of town, where just about everything was bombed flat...

...Representing (but long after) "1931," two men reminisce: '"...more than 100,000 Brownshirts gathered in orderly ranks...

...a man who speaks, to his young listeners' indifference, of the heroic time gone by when he helped to tunnel under the Wall...

...Each small first-person story has a year for its title, and some characters speak out of, or at least about, that year...

...his sardonic resistances to vile and corrupt governments and a cowardly, conforming populace— My Century can be read as a satisfying if oblique overview of a century of nightmarish contradictions...

...It turns out, though, to be both...

...count anymore as Germans...

...I wrote that to my fiancée and enclosed a little desert sand in the letter...

...It was one of those War weddings—by proxy, you know—'cause he was off fighting...

...It is therefore not surprising that Grass can create plausible speaking voices for a multitude of characters, and that their particularity keeps us from seeing "German-ness" as monolithic...

...He feels "no child could understand the end of the Wall without knowing when and where things started going wrong and what actually led to Germany being divided...

...Why should Hitler and Copernicus, Darwin and Gutenberg have to buck for votes for Main Man of the Millennium...

...Yet what country in the world is sufficiently provocative to deserve a hundred dramatic returns if not the Germany of this century...

...schoolyard Fascists...

...Another woman, who works for Krupp, intones, "Anyways, now I want to tell you about the nickname the boys here pinned on me just cause my name's Bertha and I'm pretty big...

...victims of the Stasi...

...a poet drowned in ice...

...Similarly defensive is the man who helped to design the German steel helmet (lauded earlier by the writer Jünger in one of those flights of patriotism so derided by Remarque...

...Nor are many of Grass' women—and they are far fewer in number than his mouthy men—very convincing...

...Everything was yellow including us...

...Long after both World Wars, they justify, they boast, they do anything but acknowledge either defeat or deserved di shonor, like our own unreconstructed Southerners who refuse to believe the Civil War is over...

...Their vision of Germany's experience differs enormously...

...I did...

...It's plain as the nose on your face: There's a German way of praying, a German way of loving, and a German way of hating...

...Jünger's is one of idealization: "As the years went by, the flame of the prolonged battle produced an increasingly pure and valiant warrior caste...

...So when I picked up Günter Grass' My Century, 100 minifictions in diverse voices, one for each year since 1900, I was prepared to be irritated by yet another bit of high-concept cuteness masquerading as thoughtful reconsideration...

...A few are continued across more than one year...

...Possibly the forced rhythms and studied colloquialisms of such speech, which seem patronizing, are a translation problem—although for the most part the translation, by Michael Henry Heim, is smooth and flexible...

...And what if this collection is read independently of the monumental fictions, for whose monumentally it is unfair, really, to punish their author...

...The Führer's eyes met mine...

...Lotte had to take the baby along...

...But I suspect they reflect Grass' discomfort and unfamiliarity with certain sectors of his population...

...We also meet a "rubble woman" whose postwar job it is to sweep up the bomb debris: writers...

...Practically strangers they were...

...Inevitably, too, Grass is walking in his own footsteps here, revisiting, with less imaginative conviction, his most constant obsessions...

...Its premonitory echoes are haunting: "There was a wind blowing through Tienanmen Square...

...Or better, to diffuse those sympathies so that we feel when we have finished that—instructed, amused, chagrined, troubled—we have seen most of the faces of the old and new Germany, including the Janus-faced who have managed through their portion of an extraordinary century to stay turned in both directions at once...

...The success of the snapshots in this "Family of (German) Man (and Woman)" is, not surprisingly, inconsistent...

...About the dedication of a dirigible, presented to America in 1924, a mechanic says, '"Many of us looked upon that [construction and presentation] as a disgrace...

...Many of these little monologues are disquieting...

...it came from the desert, stirring up clouds of yellow dust...

...His voice coming over the speakers was like the Germany of discipline and valor shining through the Great War's thunderclouds, like Destiny communing with us...

...It takes a few years of reporting to clear the air—which the narrator, a literature student, does only by putting aside his original ambitions and, as if in revenge, becoming an engineer...

...For example, a long conversation between Erich Maria Remarque and Ernst Jünger, author of a novel called The Storm of Steel, covers five entries, from " 1914" through " 1918," narrated by a young woman who arranges a meeting, long after World War I. between the two now elderly men...

...It could've haunted the house,' Resi said two days before we were married...

...For those who have enjoyed (if that's the word) Grass' vigorous and bitter creations, this will be thin stuff, generally engaging, intermittently fascinating, but often merely journalistic, as if an imaginary Studs Terkel had taken his tape recorder out to the Swabian countryside or into the workers' quarters of Danzig...

...Animals...

...Hadn't the enforced peaceplaced a heavy enough burden on the Fatherland...

...The "rubble woman," for example, says, "It was hard work, shoveling rubble...

...My Century is a sort of national photo album that ingeniously presents a diverse set of personae with some quirky experiences to report to those of us who do not know Germany face-toface...