Leaves of Grass

His post-Wall novel. Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad) is a statement of dissent from a man who once considered himself a “constitutional patriot”. No longer a consenting citizen of the fatherland, Grass has already placed his `No’ on the doorstep of a “monster” who “wants to be a great power”. Also set in Danzig (Gdansk), The Call of the Toad tells the story of a widower and a widow who want to build a “cemetery of reconciliation” 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 “nationalistic narrowness.”

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 — The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years — 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 “black tables” of a“forgotten history”. The keeper of liberal conscience has abandoned the tin drum, and won the Prize.