Leaves of Grass

The writing was on the Wall. Literally. Gunter Grass, novelist, polemicist, professional disillusionist, always raged against the borderl...

The writing was on the Wall. Literally. Gunter Grass, novelist, polemicist, professional disillusionist, always raged against the borderline, the frontier. There was a time when Grass, as a sorcerous stylus of history, could demolish every pretence of separation with whirling words of protest.

In 1959 when he migrated to the body of the three-year-old Oskar Matzerath and beat the tin drum, history unravelled itself, every notion of bourgeois existence in pre-War Danzig, the birthplace as a model of Every Man8217;s land of memory, was shattered. More than thirty years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, it could have very well been a posthumous homage to the drumbeats of Oskar the dwarf. And Gunter Grass should have felt vindicated. When the Ossis and Wessis became one in a Kohlossal display of re-unification, Grass should have been happy with the vanished Wall. He was not: 8220;So what is this arrogance, with its boasts of a favourable balance of trade and great glass houses? What is this we know better8217; aboutdemocracy, when our grade on the first exam is satisfactory8217; at best? And, measured against the modest wishes of those we presume to call the have-nots on the other side, what is this imperiousness incarnate in the person of Helmut Kohl?8221; He continues to protest, as a disillusioned liberal. The new Nobel laureate of literature is today more than the maker of The Tin Drum. He is a dissident, an outsider.

His post-Wall novel. Unkenrufe The Call of the Toad is a statement of dissent from a man who once considered himself a 8220;constitutional patriot8221;. No longer a consenting citizen of the fatherland, Grass has already placed his No8217; on the doorstep of a 8220;monster8221; who 8220;wants to be a great power8221;. Also set in Danzig Gdansk, The Call of the Toad tells the story of a widower and a widow who want to build a 8220;cemetery of reconciliation8221; for those Germans and Poles hounded out of Danzig during the war. The plan becomes a capitalist madness, so remote from the original idea of the widower and the widow. Ithas become a luxurious fantasy of the new entrepreneurs. Amid the anarchic plans and counter-plans no one hears Unkenrufe, the call of the toad, which signals doom. This is the utopia of the graveyard, and for Grass, nothing else can be expected in the age of post-communist, post-reunification euphoria. For Grass, a renowned Banglaphile, hope is personified in a Bengali who is in the cycle rickshaw business, a man free from 8220;nationalistic narrowness.8221;

The Nobel Prize has only amplified the call of Gunter Grass, the resonance of which is more political than literary today. In the Danzig Trilogy 8212; The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years 8212; Grass could achieve perfect harmony between idea and story, between history and imagination. In the hall of modern fiction, The Tin Drum will continue to be a supreme achievement in the art of storytelling. It is a much parodied work. Today his imagination is subordinated to his disillusion, the mind is more visible than the metaphor. No longer 8220;black tables8221; of a8220;forgotten history8221;. The keeper of liberal conscience has abandoned the tin drum, and won the Prize.