Günter Grass on His New Book and His 'Strenuous Homeland'
By ALAN RIDING
CASAIS, Portugal - As a late autumn sun warms the red tiles of Günter Grass's getaway here, northern Germany could not seem farther away. Yet even in this isolated corner of southern Portugal, where the author escaped a year ago to prepare his Nobel address to the Swedish Academy, where he vacations every summer with his grandchildren, where he now fills his afternoons painting watercolors, Mr. Grass never quite leaves Germany.
His "strenuous homeland," as he likes to call it, is the principal theme of his literature. It is his favorite topic of conversation. It is also the frequent target of his wrath.
Germany, of course, is no less haunted by Mr. Grass. Since the publication of "The Tin Drum" in 1959 turned him into a household name at the age of 32, he has gone out of his way to lecture, even hector, his fellow Germans on their past and present failings. He has done so in novels, plays and essays as well as in political speeches and newspaper articles. And all too often he has said what many people did not want to hear.
When his latest novel, "Ein Weites Feld," was published in German in 1995, he provoked a fresh scandal by portraying German unification in 1990 as West Germany's de facto occupation of East Germany. Naturally, Mr. Grass was unrepentant. Indeed, attacks on the book - including a photograph on the cover of Der Spiegel, the mass circulation news weekly, showing a well-known literary critic tearing up the novel - helped sales reach 350,000 in one year.
Five years later, with the book finally appearing in the United States under the title "Too Far Afield" (Harcourt), this 1999 Nobel laureate in literature feels further vindicated: he believes that time has proved him right.
"The reality is much darker than I presented it," said Mr. Grass, 73, peering over half-moon glasses and puffing on his trademark pipe. "The wall has gone, but Germany is still divided. People in the East were happy in 1989 when the wall came down, but then the West Germans arrived like colonizers. They didn't accept that the East Germans had a different biography, that they had gone from Hitler to Stalin, that they had never had a democratic experience."
"They had to live their own lives," he went on. "But West Germans said: `Forget about it. It was all a mistake. Now do as we did in the West and you will be happy.' But we didn't know each other and we still don't know each other. The ignorance in the West makes it very difficult. Further, West Germany now owns East Germany. This is a terrible kind of colonization, and it will go on. So what I try to show in my novel is how it began, its criminal beginnings."
In its central political message, the 658-page book targets Treuhand, the government body charged with privatizing or shutting down thousands of East German companies after unification. Translated in English as the Handover Trust, it is presented in "Too Far Afield" as a heartless instrument of capitalism that put millions of East Germans out of work and handed over the economic remnants of the Communist regime to avaricious West German investors.
"Treuhand worked for four years without any democratic control," Mr. Grass said.
The novel's literary embrace, however, is far wider. At one level, it tells its story through two former East German government workers: Theo Wuttke, erudite, eccentric and dreamy, who had been a guide and a lecturer at the Cultural Union; and Ludwig Hoftaller, Wuttke's "day- and-night shadow," who had worked as a spy for the Stasi. Both now 70, they end up with jobs in the Handover Trust.
But the novel also works on other levels. Wuttke, for instance, is not only an expert on the 19th-century historian and novelist Theodor Fontane (who is referred to here only as "The Immortal"), but he also identifies with Fontane to the point of being known as Fonty and of frequently reliving this writer's life. Hoftaller's personality, on the other hand, merges with that of Tallhover, a 19th-century spy for the Prussian empire and its successor, the Second Reich.
Mr. Grass, in turn, uses Fontane- Wuttke and Tallhover-Hoftaller and their collective memories to lead readers through Germany's convulsed history from its first unification in 1871 to its second unification in 1990. Some of this is symbolized by the Treuhand headquarters in former East Berlin. Built for the Nazis' Air Ministry, it was called the House of Ministries under Communism and, after Treuhand had done its work, it became the country's new Finance Ministry....
...At center stage throughout the book is Berlin, a city that was home to Mr. Grass for 35 years until he moved to Lubeck, a northern city, in 1995. During his long years in West Berlin, he rarely visited the East: he was declared persona non grata there after the publication of his 1966 play, "The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising," about the 1956 workers' revolt in East Berlin. Then, when the wall came down, he immediately began traveling in East Germany.
"I had always believed in the possibility of unification, but from the beginning, I said we have to go slowly and carefully," he recalled. "But Helmut Kohl was interested only in winning the 1990 election. East Germany had paid more for the lost war than West Germany. We had the Marshall Plan, freedom, a mild occupation. They had the Soviet Union. We had to share the burden. But Kohl was afraid of raising taxes. So we destroyed the East German economy."
Even here, sipping white wine on the shaded terrace of his Portuguese home overlooking an empty valley 10 miles from the Atlantic coast, this writer never lets go. He denounces Germany for turning away asylum- seekers. He accuses mainstream German politicians of encouraging the extreme right by criticizing immigration from the third world. He also worries that younger German writers do not speak out.
"The line for young writers is, `Don't touch politics,' " he said. " `Only tell your story. Look to American literature.' Many young writers are influenced by American writers, not always the best. And they are afraid to touch political problems. Then they are astonished when they are victims of political developments. For me, politics is a terribly important part of reality. If I ignore it, that is also a political action."...
[The rest of the article is at <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/14/arts/14GUNT.html?pagewanted=2> & <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/14/arts/14GUNT.html?pagewanted=3>.]