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Authors: W.G. Sebald
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all learn English quick?”
“And what about their parents?”
“Where did they go?” 23
Grass responds by telling them about an English journalist who came from Danzig and had accompanied him for part of the electoral campaign. To this journalist, who left Danzig at the age of nearly twelve on one of the children’s transports, pictures of his native town were still clear: “gables, churches, streets, porches, and chimes, gulls on blocks of ice and over brackish water—in chiaroscuro, like broken toys,” but “he couldn’t remember a schoolteacher by the name of Ott (known as Doubt).” 24 The situation thus sketched makes one wonder whether the dominance of fiction over what really happened does not tend to militate against the recording of the truth and the attempt to commemorate it.
The Social Democratic Electoral Campaign
Another of the images of wishful thinking constructed by Grass in the
Diary of a Snail
is his idea of German Social Democracy, on behalf of which he undertakes all the stress and strain of a campaign trip covering 31,000 kilometers.
The first striking feature in this context is that while Grass likes to describe the prehistory and early history of Social Democracy, he says nothing about the political debacle brought about by the party in Germany in the years after the First World War. We see August Bebel in his greenturner’s apron, and “Ede” Bernstein, and we are told that Willy Brandt now owns the watch that once belonged to the first party leader and that it is still in working order, details conveying a pleasing air of family solidarity with the representatives of an upright past, but we hear nothing of Ebert and Noske, to name just two of the less glorious figures. *
Nor is it explained to a younger generation of readers how a country which, in the late nineteenth century, produced the strongest and best-organized of all Socialist movements, came to fall into the arms of Fascism twenty to thirty years later. As Grass presents it, the historical background of Social Democracy is underexposed, merely adorned for effect with a few picturesque details and brave figures such as that of the upright Bebel traveling illegally through the country and setting the comrades an example under the anti-Socialist laws, thus of course helping the campaign of the new pioneers of Social Democracy to appear in a somewhat heroic light.
From time to time a sense of fraternity in a common cause spreads among the generation of “quadragenarians” who hope for a new political dawn and who, Grass thinks, “seem to be trying to compensate by overproduction for the reduced achievement of a few decimated war years.” 25 The reader almost feels that the author finds absolution forwhat still irks him about the German past, although he knows himself innocent of it, in his practical commitment to a better German political system, and that only in active politics and the hectic haste of traveling—identified by Böll in his
Frankfurt Lectures
as a particularly German form of desperation—can he keep a little way ahead of those resolute, monosyllabic snails Guilt and Shame. 26
Dürer’s Melancholy
If the political activity in which, as Grass constantly emphasizes, he sees something more real than the construction of utopian plans, thus succeeds in warding off a despair that is moving in itself, then Dürer’s
Melancholia
has made her way into his traveling bag as fellow traveller and angel of his guilty conscience.
That monstrous lady, in whom a dog lies buried, and whose draped garment covers the stench of the whole country, “with clammy fingers … holds the compass and cannot close the circle,” probably because—like the author himself—she is concerned, over and above the present task, with the problem of squaring morality implied by the question of whether by writing, and thus representing everyone else who does not write, he cannot make a contribution to the therapy of the nation,
“And what about their parents?”
“Where did they go?” 23
Grass responds by telling them about an English journalist who came from Danzig and had accompanied him for part of the electoral campaign. To this journalist, who left Danzig at the age of nearly twelve on one of the children’s transports, pictures of his native town were still clear: “gables, churches, streets, porches, and chimes, gulls on blocks of ice and over brackish water—in chiaroscuro, like broken toys,” but “he couldn’t remember a schoolteacher by the name of Ott (known as Doubt).” 24 The situation thus sketched makes one wonder whether the dominance of fiction over what really happened does not tend to militate against the recording of the truth and the attempt to commemorate it.
The Social Democratic Electoral Campaign
Another of the images of wishful thinking constructed by Grass in the
Diary of a Snail
is his idea of German Social Democracy, on behalf of which he undertakes all the stress and strain of a campaign trip covering 31,000 kilometers.
The first striking feature in this context is that while Grass likes to describe the prehistory and early history of Social Democracy, he says nothing about the political debacle brought about by the party in Germany in the years after the First World War. We see August Bebel in his greenturner’s apron, and “Ede” Bernstein, and we are told that Willy Brandt now owns the watch that once belonged to the first party leader and that it is still in working order, details conveying a pleasing air of family solidarity with the representatives of an upright past, but we hear nothing of Ebert and Noske, to name just two of the less glorious figures. *
Nor is it explained to a younger generation of readers how a country which, in the late nineteenth century, produced the strongest and best-organized of all Socialist movements, came to fall into the arms of Fascism twenty to thirty years later. As Grass presents it, the historical background of Social Democracy is underexposed, merely adorned for effect with a few picturesque details and brave figures such as that of the upright Bebel traveling illegally through the country and setting the comrades an example under the anti-Socialist laws, thus of course helping the campaign of the new pioneers of Social Democracy to appear in a somewhat heroic light.
From time to time a sense of fraternity in a common cause spreads among the generation of “quadragenarians” who hope for a new political dawn and who, Grass thinks, “seem to be trying to compensate by overproduction for the reduced achievement of a few decimated war years.” 25 The reader almost feels that the author finds absolution forwhat still irks him about the German past, although he knows himself innocent of it, in his practical commitment to a better German political system, and that only in active politics and the hectic haste of traveling—identified by Böll in his
Frankfurt Lectures
as a particularly German form of desperation—can he keep a little way ahead of those resolute, monosyllabic snails Guilt and Shame. 26
Dürer’s Melancholy
If the political activity in which, as Grass constantly emphasizes, he sees something more real than the construction of utopian plans, thus succeeds in warding off a despair that is moving in itself, then Dürer’s
Melancholia
has made her way into his traveling bag as fellow traveller and angel of his guilty conscience.
That monstrous lady, in whom a dog lies buried, and whose draped garment covers the stench of the whole country, “with clammy fingers … holds the compass and cannot close the circle,” probably because—like the author himself—she is concerned, over and above the present task, with the problem of squaring morality implied by the question of whether by writing, and thus representing everyone else who does not write, he cannot make a contribution to the therapy of the nation,
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