Campo Santo (Modern Library Paperbacks) (11 page)

The Mitscherlichs’ diagnosis of the inherent inadequacies of German postwar literature, which at this time was undoubtedly correct, does not register the fact that since the beginning of the 1960s, and at least since the appearance of Hochhuth’s in many respects devastating play
Der Stellvertreter
(“The Deputy”), several authors had begun auditing the balance sheet of German guilt.

We may account for the delay before they did so not
least by remembering that the real dimensions of the genocide perpetrated by their nation were only just beginning to dawn upon men of letters unused to factual research, and the legal reconstruction of the circumstances of that mass crime had itself been delayed. The minds of authors who would be important in the further development of West German literature began to be politicized to the same extent as the legal procedures culminating in the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt shed light on the functionalism of a “pedantically controlled apparatus of human destruction.”
¹¹
Die Ermittlung
(“The Investigation”), by Peter Weiss, whose road to Damascus the Frankfurt trial was, is one indication of that fact, and so are the
Frankfurter Vorlesungen
(“Frankfurt Lectures”) given in the mid-1960s by Heinrich Böll. These last mentioned say more about Germany and the Germans, and say it more cogently, than anything in Böll’s previous literary works.

Here for the first time Böll speaks, with his by now characteristic honesty and immediacy, of the lengthy emergence of recognition and emancipation in a country where “too many murderers [go about] freely and boldly,” people “of whom it can never be proved that they are guilty of murder.” And he continues: “Guilt, remorse, penance, insight, have not become social and certainly not political categories.”
¹²
However, he does not say that literature itself fended off possible insights longer than was good for it, and that the political and social immobility and provincialism that the Mitscherlichs connect directly with the “doggedly
maintained resistance to memories”
¹³
had its counterpart in literary immobility and provincialism.

Just as the nation as a whole concentrated all its energy and its entrepreneurial spirit “on restoring what had been destroyed, extending and modernizing our industrial potential all the way to kitchen fittings,” so the literature of the fifties, in a kind of parallel process, was notable less for a desire to investigate the truth than for a certain resentment of the miracles achieved in the economy; a situation diagnosed by the Mitscherlichs as “political apathy with, simultaneously, a high degree of emotional stimulation in the field of consumption.”
¹⁴

Deliberately taking sides against political apathy instead of merely deploring the lack of foundation for this parallel to
Father Malachy’s Miracle
^*
was to a great extent the task of West German literati in the sixties. It provided them with their true
éducation sentimentale
as independent writers. These years of apprenticeship then found political expression in the commitment of many authors to political parties in the 1969 election.

This political commitment openly faced the question of the authenticity of democracy in Germany, where, as Böll has often reminded us, too swift and enthusiastic a readiness for reform aroused doubts of its real political substance. The commitment of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass
in the 1969 election was determined not least by the suspicion that their West German fellow countrymen would have been satisfied with a Christian Democratic Unity Party continuing into the future, from which they concluded that it was crucially important to the further development of democracy in Germany for the Social Democrats to come to power.

The outstanding feature of the history of the 1969 campaign is the elation felt when the Social Democrats just snatched victory; once again, the true line of democracy in the Federal Republic was identified with the long march of the Social Democrats, and not least with the role played by the literary figures who forged ahead in the last phase of that arduous journey. Part of the sum total of this experience was the realization, now consolidated, that democracy is concerned with more than a healthy economy. Grass apostrophizes it in his
Diary of a Snail
by taking the popular clichés of the time expressing the nation’s new self-confidence and incorporating them in his text as quotations:

The question raised through this synoptic ridicule is directed at the nation’s mental identity and, as the collage effect of the
Diary
makes clear in its first pages, can be answered only by presenting the experience of success in the present together with the debit entries, still not correctly deciphered, of our past.

So this literary and political guide to the election campaign in Germany also becomes an account of the exodus of the Danzig Jews and the description of a place that had long remained a blank area on the map of any work devoted to Danzig. Without the passages describing the fate of the persecuted minority, the
Diary of a Snail
would surely have remained a work written on a single level. For only the dimension of concrete remembrance lends substance to the central story of the schoolmaster nicknamed “Doubt,” and on another level substance to the reflections on melancholy. The presentation of local history does not, as usual in texts about that act of genocide, deal with “the Jews” in a sense that, however terrifying, is abstract; instead the author
and with him the reader understand that Jews from Danzig, Augsburg, and Bamberg once really were fellow citizens and fellow human beings, and did not exist merely as a nebulous collective.

We owe the story of the Danzig Jews as Grass tells it not primarily to the work of the author himself, knowledgeable as he is about the history of Danzig, but to the Jewish historian Erwin Lichtenstein. It is quite surprising to reflect that Grass—if his own text is correctly understood here—may in a way have come by the story gratis. “On my visit to Israel from November 5 to November 18, 1971,” writes Grass in a parenthesis in the
Diary
, “Erwin Lichtenstein informed me that his documents on ‘The Exodus of the Jews from the Free City of Danzig’ were soon to be published in book form by Mohr in Tübingen.”
¹⁶
And in fact the impressively real details that lend authenticity to the account of the journey of the Danzig Jews traveling from their home into exile and from exile home again derive almost exclusively from Lichtenstein’s research.

We may leave aside the question of when, in developing his concept, Grass incorporated the exodus of the Jewish community of Danzig into the plan for his book. It is certain, however, that this chapter in the “dark, complicated story,” of which the narrator of
Cat and Mouse
says that it
is not to be written by him “and in no case in connection with Mahlke,” could not ultimately be written by Grass himself, for German literati still know little of the real fate of the persecuted Jews.
¹⁷
But as, to employ an image of Canetti’s, like all writers they follow their noses over the chasms of time, yet now, as Grass himself puts it, they have come home with “the sniffed insight that it smells everywhere, and not only in quaint one-family houses, that sometimes frankly and pungently, sometimes lavender-sweetened, here masked by refrigeration, there streaked with mold, and next door unspeakably, it stinks, because here, there and next door the cellars harbor corpses.”
¹⁸

Discovering the truth is thus shown to be the business of the dog described by Benjamin as the emblematic beast of melancholy, which, as Kafka too knew, “symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy” as well as its “tenacity.”
¹⁹

“A writer,” says Grass, reflecting with melancholy on his own profession, “a writer, children, is a man who loves fug and tries to give it a name, who lives on fug by giving it a name; a mode of life that puts calluses on the nose.”
²⁰
Despite this almost constitutional compulsion of the man of letters to carry out research, noted by the Mitscherlichs, “the real people we were ready to sacrifice to our master race have not yet appeared before the perception of our senses.”
²¹
The fact that Grass succeeded in making up some of that deficit in his
Diary
is something he owes primarily to the efforts of a historian living in Tel Aviv, and that in its own turn shows that literature today, left solely to its own devices, is no longer able to discover the truth.

For this very reason the story of Hermann Ott that forms the backbone of the
Diary
, and is used by the author to offer the reader’s receptive imagination many consoling ideas, will not ultimately stand up to critical examination. Unlike the documentary passages about the exodus of the Jews and the electoral campaign, the writer’s own family life, and the essaylike digressions, it is pure invention although everything else relates to it. This fact, of course, is initially disguised by the repeated suggestion that we really have here an incident from the life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki which cannot at present be made public.

Hermann Ott, nicknamed Doubt, by trade a teacher and a skeptic, has been teaching at the Rosenbaum private school since state schools were closed to the Jewish children of Danzig, and still buys his lettuce from Jewish tradesmen even when the market women call him names for it. This Hermann Ott is a retrospective figure created by the author’s wishful thinking; structurally no different, if of far less fateful import, than the angelic young Father Riccardo Fontano in Hochhuth’s
The Deputy
who provides evidence that good still exists even in the face of mass annihilation.

In order to leave Hermann Ott’s German identity in no doubt, Grass gives us his literary alter ego’s Aryan family tree of all the way back to Groningen in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century. The implication here, as in everything we learn about Hermann Ott, is that there really
were Germans of a better kind, a thesis that stakes its claim to a high degree of probability through the combination of fiction with the documentary material. Whether the good and innocent Germans leading their quiet, heroic lives in the country’s postwar literature really existed in the way suggested to the reader probably matters less, objectively speaking, than the obvious fact that, as we can read in Böll, they confined their effective activities to saying a Good Friday prayer which “even includes the unbelieving Jews.”
²²

German literature of the postwar period sought its moral salvation in these fictional figures, of whom Günter Grass’s Doubt is certainly one of the most honorable, and, thus preoccupied, failed to understand the grave and lasting deformities in the emotional lives of those who let themselves be integrated into the system without questioning it.

The invented figure of the teacher Doubt, enabling Grass to develop his snail-theme of melancholy, thus functions as an alibi to counter the programmatic intention of mourning, and the real aspects of the story of the Danzig Jews once again fail to get their due, despite the aid of Erwin Lichtenstein. One of the passages in the
Diary
where an appearance of truth is created by the confrontation of historical reality and retrospective fiction is a passage about the transports taking those Jewish children who were able to leave Danzig to England. Faced with his own children’s questions:

“Did they have to go to school, too?”

“Did they 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.

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 green
turner’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.
^*