Günter Grass's Novels Are as Pure as Ever -- New York Magazine

Grass Roots

Never mind that you don’t ruin your own reputation to sell extra copies of a book. That the man probably kept silent for so long about the boy who “wore that double symbol” for the very reason he says he did: He was ashamed. That we already knew he had been a Hitler Youth and refused to believe in the Holocaust till he saw photographs of “the shoes, the glasses, the hair, the corpses” that “resisted abstraction.” That anyone could have learned his secret by looking in the files at his 1946 discharge form from the U.S. Army Marienbad prison compound, on which, right above his own signature, POW No. 31G6078785 was described as a marksman for the Tenth SS Tank Division “Frundsberg.” That even as all of this speaks to a return of the repressed, none of it can touch his novels, without which, speaking as they do of the unspeakable, of the screaming midget hiding in the potato-woman’s skirts, twentieth-century European literature would be not only infinitely poorer but practically unintelligible. And that Grass himself established the measure by which he is now found wanting—we judge him from his own bench.

He was not pure. Surely that is as much a part of his authority as of his psychodynamic. What else are his books about, and not secretly? In a Dog Years fairy tale, nothing was pure—not snow, pigs, children, salt, virgins, or ideas. Crows, “creaking unoiled,” stood on pyramids of bleached bones: “nothing is pure, no circle, no bone. And piles of bones, heaped up for the sake of purity, will melt cook boil in order that soap, pure and cheap; but even soap cannot wash pure.” No wonder he dreamed in 1982 of writing a book that no longer pretended “to the certainty of the future. It will have to include a farewell to the damaged world, to wounded creatures, to us and our minds, which have thought of everything and the end as well.”

Never mind, because we live in a culture where all confessions must undergo a scarifying rite and assume a therapeutic form as rigid as Kabuki, usually involving cable television and Betty Ford; where instant opinions are available in color-coded blister packs, for niche shopping; where everything, including great novels and soul-shriving secrets, will be read through a screen of prurient self-interest by fatback bravos and heat-seeking piffles in the moral-indignation racket. I wonder what planet these people come from. I know that his kick in the stomach has left me upside down, with my legs sticking up and my head underwater. Still, when some of us emerged from all those hours of Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, we hoped against hope that we would have behaved as honorably as, say, Pierre Mendes-France. We feared that we might not have. But we could be pretty sure that if, in an awful future, we did behave honorably, one of the big reasons would be because we had prepared for our behavior by reading Günter Grass.