The Failure of Gunter Grass: Another Nobel bomb

National Review, Oct 25, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gunter Grass wrings a groan from the heart. The Swedish Academy is at it again. A jury of learned professors in Stockholm has the great treasure to confer. They like to see themselves as advancing universal values, which have come to be defined as the rejection of capitalism in general, and of America in particular. In their hands, the Nobel Prize has become one of the world's foremost symbols of an anti-American political correctness that has for years been the intellectual mainstream in much of the world. When the professors claim that Grass, and especially his novel The Tin Drum, has left a mark on the 20th century, they are spouting a most fashionable aberration of the day, which in its local form may be called Swede-think. Needless to say, prize-winners who are so contemptuous of capitalism and America seem able to pocket about a million dollars without noticing the smallest inconsistency.

German is a language that in the hands of its masters in the past had often and beautifully expressed universal values. In this century, of course, Nazism denied the existence of universal values. Germany and its national ends were the sole values that Germans were obliged to respect. Lost was the universalism of Schiller, of that last movement of the Beethoven Ninth; Germans alone had rights. In pursuit of an exclusively German worldview, Nazism imposed an ideology and a vocabulary that drained humanity out of the language, and left its great literature an empty and meaningless ruin.

The high purposes of Schiller, Goethe, Kant, and all the other masters seemed horribly negated.

How was a German writer after 1945 to recover the language and restore humanity to it? This immense task could be achieved only by telling true stories, bringing to life people, their choices and their fates. There is an example of a comparable feat, but it is in Russia. There, also in the face of ruin and a degraded language, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn assembled in The Gulag Archipelago many hundreds of personal stories with an empathy that personalized and dramatized the scale of the disaster, confronting the nation with what had been done in its name. In 1970 he received a Nobel Prize that for once was deserved. Apart from Saul Bellow, I. B. Singer, and Czeslaw Milosz, it has pretty much been Swede-think all the way since then.

Nazism was possible only because so many Germans enthusiastically participated in it, and they were prepared to condone its crimes in return for the apparent supremacy it brought. There has been no German Solzhenitsyn to personalize and dramatize the cause and effect of this. Of course, many if not most German writers and historians have reported stories and facts from the Nazi era, but not a single one has had the power or imagination to bring the nation to face the enormity of Nazism, and through pity and terror to purge itself of the past. Ordinary Germans often remain in a state of confusion as a result. To many, Nazism was all the fault of someone else, usually of Hitler alone, as if he had been the devil with omnipotence. Unable or unwilling to think through the reality of Nazism, they swing uneasily between resentment at the blame still free-floating in the atmosphere, and a self-pity that is the other side of the coin.

Grass's Tin Drum, published in 1959, flourishes a vivid style, but in every other respect it is a misleading book, whose success has been pernicious.

The central concept in the novel is that Hitler really was a devil and Nazism essentially the spell he cast, a bewitchment. If that was so, then Germans were the victims of a higher power against which they were defenseless, and they cannot be held accountable. The reasons that Germans became Nazis are open to rational analysis, but The Tin Drum instead encourages the mystification that they couldn't really help themselves. The opposite of the Solzhenitsyn truth-telling that enables people to understand their choices and their fates, Grass's approach smoothly converts Germans from active agents of Nazism into passive victims. The cop-out could hardly be more complete.

Grass went on to argue that the present was a replica of the past in many ways. The post-Nazi enemy was the United States, with its capitalism and its consumerism. The United States was responsible for starting and pursuing the Cold War, he insisted, while the Soviet Union was not oppressing central and eastern Europe with its military occupation, but merely taking legitimate precautions against U.S. aggression. Not a Communist, Grass became a model fellow traveler by default. A speechwriter and longtime campaigner for Chancellor Willy Brandt, Grass took the position that appeasement of the Soviet Union was an imperative. Victimized once more, the Germans were right to feel resentment and self-pity, but this time they had to take measures to help themselves.

A bear of a man, with a droopy moustache, and a smoker's pipe in his hand, Grass played the eternal student, a caricature beyond parody. He dearly loved a demonstration and a row. Somehow the television cameras seemed to be always in place when he was about to storm a church or a hall, or lead a march against American military installations. On public platforms and at conferences, he specialized in rudeness, hectoring others while proclaiming his own virtues as a feminist, a Green Earther, a Third Worlder, and so on.