SPIEL 30 (2011) H. 1, 75–96
Hanna Meretoja (Turku, FI)
An Inquiry into Historical Experience and Its Narration:
The Case of Günter Grass
Der Artikel beleuchtet die Rolle fiktiver Erzählungen für die Konstitution und das Verstehen von
Vergangenheit. Dabei wird deutlich, dass narratologische Studien dem Konzept der Erfahrung und
Erfahrbarkeit eine zentralere Position einräumen müssen, als dies bisher der Fall ist, um die
Funktionsweise und Bedeutung historischer Fiktion für unser Verständnis von und Verhältnis zur
Vergangenheit herauszuarbeiten. Stärkere Aufmerksamkeit sollte vor allem der Temporalität und
Historizität von Erfahrung zukommen sowie der komplexen Beziehung zwischen Literatur und
historischer Realität. Der Artikel plädiert für ein weit gefasstes Konzept historischer Erfahrung, das
scheinbar ereignisloses Alltagsleben von Individuen und Gemeinschaften einbezieht; die realhistorische Welt beeinflusst Formen der Erfahrung/Erfahrbarkeit, die ihrerseits Ausdruck in
unterschiedlichen Erzählweisen finden.
Um obige Annahmen zu untermauern, sollen Romane von Günter Grass – insbesondere
Hundejahre (1963) und Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006) – einer genaueren Untersuchung ihrer
narrativen Strukturen unterzogen werden. Die Analysen zeigen wie Grass’ Romane die historische
Erfahrung des Aufwachsens in Nazideutschland und unterschiedliche Formen zeitlicher Wahrnehmung während und nach dem 2. Weltkrieg spiegeln. Die Romanerzähler verbinden die Eindrücke
eines Kindes aus dem Kleinbürgermilieu während der Blüte des Nationalsozialismus mit dessen
retrospektiven Bewertung dieser Erfahrungen. Eine Analyse der Romane von Grass zeigt, dass
Literatur wertvolle, philosophisch komplexe Einsichten in die historisch vermittelte Natur von Erfahrung geben kann und stellt damit die von vielen Narratologen angenommene Unmittelbarkeit
von Erfahrung in Frage.
Romane sind epistemologisch bedeutend, da sie die Vergangenheit nicht nur darstellen,
sondern uns helfen zu verstehen, wie die Menschen die historische Welt wahrnahmen, wie es
möglich war, dass passierte was passierte, und wie wir der Vergangenheit über Geschichten Sinn
geben. Die ontologische Bedeutung der Romane liegt in ihrer Fähigkeit die zeitliche und historische Natur der menschlichen Existenz zu untersuchen und uns vor Augen zu führen, wie die
Vergangenheit und unser Verständnis davon unser Dasein im Jetzt bestimmen. Letztlich können sie
auch ethisch von Wert sein, indem sie uns an die ethische Dimension historiographischer
Erzählung erinnern und an aus vergangenen Ereignissen erwachsende Verantwortung für die
Zukunft.
Introduction
This article reflects on the role of fiction in understanding the past. In what sense can
novels function as valuable forms of alternative historiography? In recent decades,
crucial to the “narrative turn” in the humanities has been reflection on the way in which
not only fiction but also history-writing provides narrative accounts of the past, but less
attention has been paid to the specific historiographical contribution of fictional
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narratives.1 In light of recent debates, there is a need to re-address the question of the
historiographical dimension of literature and its implications for the currently flourishing
field of narrative studies, as well as to re-evaluate Dorrit Cohn’s (1990) “Signposts of
Fictionality,” in which she outlined some “rudiments for a historiographic narratology.” I
would like to suggest that the epistemological, ontological, and ethical significance of
historiographical novels can be acknowledged only in narrative studies that, first, accord
the concept of experience a more central position than narratology has so far done;
second, pay closer attention to the temporality and historicity of experience; and, third,
do not exclude the question of the relation between literature and historical reality.2 This
requires presenting questions of narrative technique from a broader understanding of how
narratives function as ways of making sense of historical experience, that is, of how
people in the past and present experience and have experienced their lives, unfolding in
time, and how their experiences belong to and reflect a certain historical world.
In a recent article, Monika Fludernik (2010, 46) analyses the notion of “historical
experience” from a narratological perspective, but she gives this notion a rather restricted
meaning: she takes it to refer only to contemporary and past experiences that are characterized by “innate reflexivity” in the sense that they involve cognizing events “as either
significant (which will cause them to be experienced as historic even though they are
only just evolving) or as past.” She seems to assume that history consists primarily of
politically significant events that have a major impact on the (political) course of events.3
If we acknowledge however, that the apparently uneventful everyday life of individuals
and communities is also constitutive of history, we can see that experience is historical in
a wider sense: the historical world in which we live affects the ways in which we experience things, it affects the very form of our experience, and different forms of
experience, in turn, find expression in different narrative forms.4 I endeavor to elucidate
this by analyzing how novels by Günter Grass – particularly Hundejahre [Dog Years]
(1963) and his autobiographical, much debated Beim Häuten der Zwiebel [Peeling the
Onion] (2006) – display the historical experience of growing up in Nazi Germany as well
as different forms of experiencing time during and after the war.
1 On the “narrative turn,” see Kreiswirth 2005; Herman 2007, 4–5; Hyvärinen 2010.
2 My argument is not meant to concern a specific genre of literature; rather, I use the shorthand
“historiographical novels” to mean any fictional works that deal with a particular historical
world and contribute to our understanding of the past. On the primacy of the notion of event (at
the expense of experience) in the narratological conception of narrative, see e.g., Rabinowitz
2005, 184.
3 Her examples of “historical experiences” are various wars, the American moon landing, the fall
of the Berlin Wall, etc.
4 Such a wider notion of the historicity of experience has been developed, for example, in the
hermeneutic tradition from the end of the eighteenth century to Heidegger and Gadamer as well
as in many other forms of “continental thought” (such as the Foucauldian idea that everything
has a history, including sexuality, emotions, concepts, etc.).
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
77
Experiencing and Making Sense of the Past
Although it might seem self-evident that literature contributes to our understanding of the
experiences of people living in the past, this has not been fully acknowledged in narratology. For example, Cohn seems to rely on some problematic presuppositions concerning the ontology of literary works as she suggests that what essentially distinguishes
fiction from non-fiction is that only for the latter are the real, historical world and its
events relevant. Cohn (1990, 778) maintains that “a text-oriented poetics of fiction excludes, on principle, a realm at the very center of the historiographer’s concern: the more
or less reliably documented evidence of past events out of which the historian fashions
his story”; it is a “bi-level” model that excludes the relationship between “the story level
and what we might call the referential level (or data base).” Cohn argues that this
exclusion is problematic for historiography, but it is just as problematic for literary
studies if we accept that the referential level is relevant for fiction, too, i.e., that novels
speak about the world and often about a specific historical world.
On the other hand, Cohn’s assumption that there is an immediately given “data base”
available for the historian is also problematic. Several philosophers of history (from
Hans-Georg Gadamer to Hayden White) have argued, convincingly, I think, that historians do not encounter past events as immediately given but as perceived from a certain
historically constituted horizon of interpretation; both history and historiographical
novels interpret the past and make sense of it by means of storytelling. Fludernik (1996,
41) seems to acknowledge this view insofar as she takes fictional narratives to represent
experience, but I find problematic her distinction between history, which “by definition,
is that area of study which interprets, orders, analyses and attempts to explain human
experience, but [...] does not set out to represent such experience,” and fictional texts,
which she takes to present experience and which hence “frequently provide history with
its quotational source material.”
What Fludernik leaves unacknowledged here is that when novels interpret and give
meaning to certain historical events and experiences, they do not merely present the past
but also help us to make sense of it. In fact, narratological approaches (such as Cohn’s)
frequently tend to ignore that although fictional narratives are not “literally true,” they
can have truth value (or cognitive value) on another level, for example insofar as they
contribute to our understanding of the past. Novels use other means to pursue such
historical understanding than do historians, and it is to these means that narrative studies
wishing to contribute to a better understanding of the relation between history and
literature should attend. I would like to suggest that integral to the way in which we
assess the “truth” dimension of historiographical novels is precisely their ability to make
intelligible the experience of those living in a particular historical world.
Günter Grass’s case shows particularly clearly that, for the reading public, the ability
to deal with and make sense of the past is crucial to literature’s value and significance.
Ever since the publication of the Danzig trilogy (Die Blechtrommel, 1959; Katz und
Maus, 1961; Hundejahre, 1963), Grass has been considered the “moral consciousness” of
the post-war generation who has played a seminal role in the nation’s process of “coming
to terms with the past.” However, his fictional autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel,
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in which he reveals that he was not only a member of the Hitlerjugend (as he had
previously told) but also belonged to the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old in the final
stage of the war, led to a reassessment of his stature.5 Grass’s belated confession stirred a
media debate in which the fact that he had lied about his role in the war devalued in some
eyes the credibility of his novels; some even demanded that he should return his Nobel
Prize for literature (1999).6 In the debate, Grass was often treated as if he were a historian
caught in a lie rather than a novelist writing a work of fiction. What was thereby ignored
was that the value and “truth” of his novels rest not so much in the facts (concerning
what happened) but rather in their capacity to give form to certain historical experiences
and to deal with them in the complex realm of the “as-if” that is possible only in
literature.7 Although the attempt to grasp past modes of experiencing the world is not
foreign to all historiography, especially not to contemporary cultural history, it is
significant that the novelist is entitled to venture into the realm of the imaginary, to
imagine the experience of those who witnessed and lived through certain historical
events, and to thereby deal with the question of how it is possible that what happened
could actually happen.8 Nonetheless, what Cohn (1990, 800) describes as “the constitutional freedom of fiction from referential constraints” can only be relative, and novelists,
too, are expected to “invent” the past in a credible and ethically sustainable form. The
Grass debate manifests particularly acutely how crucial a role the moral integrity and
sincerity of the novelist play in the reception of his work.
The petit bourgeois milieu of Grass’s childhood and adolescence provides a startingpoint for much of his oeuvre. He grew up in a Catholic, National Socialist home: in the
words of his lyrical self, he was raised “between the Holy Spirit and the picture of Hitler”
(Grass 1997f, 198).9 In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass ([2006] 2007, 69–70) tells us
that he was “a Young Nazi” who believed in the legitimacy of the war and was an easy
target for the heroism and war propaganda promoted, for example, by the newsreels
5 This revelation is only a minor part of the novel, which primarily deals with Grass’s
development as an artist. On the question of the genre of this book, see Taberner 2008, 145 and
Schade 2007, 292.
6 For a documentation of the debate, see Köbel 2007, and for useful discussions, see Fuchs 2007
and Schade 2007.
7 For a discussion of how the “‘as if’ of fiction” enables us to re-experience the past, see
Grethlein 2010, 319.
8 Cohn (1990, 786) makes a similar point by writing that historical discourse “cannot present past
events through the eyes of a historical figure present on the scene, but only through the eyes of
the forever backward-looking historian-narrator. In this sense we might say that the modal
system of historical (and all other nonfictional) narration is ‘defective’ when compared to the
virtual modalization of fiction.” For an illuminating analysis of some experimental forms of
historiography that do not hesitate to use literary devices, see Grethlein 2010, which also
provides arguments against Cohn’s project of finding purely textual properties to make a
distinction between fiction and non-fiction. As Phelan (1999, 1104) puts it, “the history of the
two categories shows that there’s been much two-way traffic across the border,” and, hence,
“the distinction is not finally to be found in textual properties but in the extratextual matter of
claims about reference.”
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
79
played before feature films: “I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white ‘truth’
they served up. [...] I would see Germany surrounded by enemies [...]: a bulwark against
the Red Tide. The German folk in a life-and-death struggle. Fortress Europe standing up
to Anglo-American imperialism at great cost.” 10 The boys of his age took part in a
“never-ending hero-worship” (Grass [2006] 2007, 12; “immerwährenden Heldenanbetung” 2006, 19) and wished the war would last long enough for them to enlist. As a 15year-old he volunteered for submarine service, but due to his young age his application
was declined. He was then drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst and, in November 1944,
he joined the Waffen-SS.
True, during the tank gunner training, which kept me numb throughout the autumn
and winter, there was no mention of the war crimes that later came to light, but the
ignorance I claim could not blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a
system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of
people. Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this
day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live
with it for the rest of my life. (Grass [2006] 2007, 111)11
Here – and throughout Grass’s work – it is suggested that the individuals are both part of
a historical world (Nazi Germany), the true nature of which is revealed to them only later
on, and yet they are responsible for their actions and non-actions in that historical world.
In his novels, Grass develops this tension through complex narrative strategies. For
example, Hundejahre consists of three parts each of which has its own narrator. The
novel focuses on the life stories of two narrators, the childhood friends Eddi Amsel and
Walter Matern, during their adolescence in the outskirts of Danzig, and during their
postwar years. The book project is the idea of Amsel alias Brauksel, a mine owner who
has commissioned from the “writer collective” a publication to celebrate the tenth
anniversary of his mine. In the first part, “The Morning Shifts,” Eddi Amsel, under the
guise of mine director Brauksel, tells in the third-person about the childhood years
(1917–1927) of Eddi and Walter. The second part, “Loveletters,” consists of Harry
Liebenau’s letters to his cousin Tulla; in them he recalls the years after 1927 (his year of
birth), focusing on the Nazi era. The third part, “Materniades,” is written in the thirdperson by the actor Walter Matern, who recounts his experiences in postwar Germany
until the year 1957. This narrative strategy allows the novel to depict petit bourgeois
everyday life at the time of the rise of National Socialism, from the perspective of those
who experienced it but who narrate these experiences and events from a retrospective
perspective.
10 “Ein Bollwerk gegen die rote Flut. Ein Volk im Schicksalskampf. Die Festung Europa, wie sie
der Macht des angloamerikanischen Imperialismus standhielt” (Grass 2006, 82).
11 “Zwar war während der Ausbildung zum Panzerschützen, die mich den Herbst und Winter lang
abstumpfte, nichts von jenen Kriegsverbrechen zu hören, die später ans Licht kamen, aber
behauptete Unwissenheit konnte meine Einsicht, einem System eingefügt gewesen zu sein, das
die Vernichtung von Millionen Menschen geplant, organisiert und vollzogen hatte, nicht verschleiern. Selbst wenn mir tätige Mitschuld auszureden war, blieb ein bis heute nicht abgetragener Rest, der allzu geläufig Mitverantwortung genannt wird. Damit zu leben ist für die
restlichen Jahre gewiß” (Grass 2006, 127).
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The way in which Grass’s novels depict Nazi Germany from the perspective of those
who collaborated in National Socialism without fully understanding its true nature can be
linked to the “perpetrator testimonies” and “perpetrator fiction” that have lately attracted
scholarly interest, such as Jonathan Littell’s much debated and celebrated novel
Les Bienveillantes (2006), whose innovative narrative structure Susan Suleiman (2009)
praises. 12 Its first-person narrator and protagonist, the SS officer Aue, is both a
perpetrator, a willing if somewhat passive participant in the Holocaust, and a moral
witness whose depiction of the action in the past is intertwined with the kind of reflection
that is “clearly retrospective, even though it seems to be occurring at the moment”
(Suleiman 2009, 8).
Littell, in making his SS narrator into a reliable historical witness – that is, one who
functions as a witness informed by retrospective historical knowledge – accomplishes something completely new. For here the historical truth – which includes
not only the facts but also an attempt to grapple with their ethical and psychological
implications – comes out of the mouth of one who was part of the very system
responsible for the horrors he is recounting [...]. This procedure, which lacks plausibility historically, is extremely effective as fiction. (8–9)
Such a narrative strategy, however, is not as “completely new” as Suleiman suggests; a
similar strategy was developed by Grass several decades before Littell. All the narrators
of the Danzig trilogy as well as that of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel are character-narrators
who perceive their younger selves through the lenses of their older selves. They recount
their past experiences (of growing up in National Socialist Germany) in such a way that a
sense of immediacy (the perspective of the time when the experiences took place) is
intertwined with retrospective interpretations of these experiences.
In Hundejahre, Nazism arrives at Langfuhr (an outlying district of Danzig) little by
little, taking hold of people’s daily lives: “gradually more and more swastika flags”
(Grass [1963] 1987, 661).13 In the novel, the success of the National Socialist doctrine is
linked to its ability to appear as normal and natural, that is, as representing the values of
decent, upright, hard-working Germans. As Grass shows, many petty bourgeois join the
Nazi Party mainly because the neighbours, too, are members. A crucial impetus for the
community’s enthusiasm for Hitler is a letter that the Führer has sent them, furnished
with his photo, in order to thank them for giving him the dog Prince: “Letter and picture
of the Führer – both were on long excursions in the neighbourhood. As a result, first my
father, then August Prokriefke, and finally quite a few of the neighbours joined the Party”
(Grass [1963] 1987, 682).14
12 A couple of years ago Suleiman wrote that perpetrators’ testimonies have been so far “virtually
nonexistent,” maintaining that anyone “curious about the actions and motivations of those who
willingly participated in the Nazi project of mass murder has had to rely on historians and
philosophers such as Raul Hilberg, Hannah Arendt, Christopher Browning, and Daniel
Goldhagen” (2009, 1), but, in fact, these testimonies have been discussed by literary critics at
least for a decade (see e.g. Wood 1999).
13 “Mehr und mehr Hakenkreuzfahnen” (Grass [1963] 1997b, 164).
14 “Brief und Führerfoto – beides wurde sogleich unter Glas gelegt und in eigener Tischlerei
gerahmt – machten lange Wege durch die Nachbarschaft und bewirkten, daß zuerst mein Vater,
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
81
Here and throughout the book we can see how strongly people yearn to be part of some
larger movement in order to feel accepted and important. The novel suggests that among
the most crucial needs to which National Socialism responded was that of identity, which
was provided by a sense of belonging to a collective movement. 15 As Adorno and
Horkheimer ([1944] 1998, 212) have analysed, such a need is particularly powerful in
“authoritarian personalities” who compensate for a weak self by identifying with a
powerful collective and complying with the prevalent ideology whatever it may be. In
Hundejahre, such a personality is displayed most clearly by Matern, who is first a
Catholic, then a Nazi, then a Communist, and in the end searches for a new master, like a
dog, which symbolizes, in the novel, the desire to give up one’s autonomy and to lead a
life based on following authorities.
In Hundejahre, some Danzigians quickly become devoted adherents of the Nazi
movement, but more typical is passive collaboration that enables one to blend into an
affirming crowd. Liebenau, for example, asserts self-ironically that he suited only the
tasks of “Zugucken” (onlooking) and “Nachplappern” (parroting) (Grass [1963] 1997b,
392). With this modus operandi, he follows the model of his parents. He lives in a
community in which no one wants to know what is happening around them. This wilful
ignorance is shockingly exemplified by the mountain accumulated from the bones of the
victims of the concentration camp Stutthof: “No one talked about the pile of bones. But
everybody saw smelled tasted it” (Grass [1963] 1987, 809).16 People struggle to forget its
existence, but it penetrates their consciousness with its stubborn presence, as the sickeningly sweet odour of cremation ashes wafts around in the surrounding villages.
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass ([2006] 2007, 20–21) depicts himself in similar
terms as Liebenau:
I did my part unquestioningly [...]; I was a fellow traveler [Mitläufer] whose mind
was forever elsewhere.17
But I can take care of the labelling and branding myself. As a member of the Hitler
Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi. A believer till the end. Not what one would call
fanatical, not leading the pack, but with my eye, as if by reflex, fixed on the flag
that was to mean ‘more than death’ to us, I kept pace in the rank and file. No doubts
clouded my faith[.] (35)18
dann August Pokriefke, danach etliche Nachbarn in die Partei eintraten” (Grass [1963] 1997b,
197).
15 The need for an identity has been often singled out as one of the most crucial factors behind the
rise and success of National Socialism (see e.g. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1990).
16 “Niemand sprach von dem Knochenberg. Aber alle sahen rochen schmeckten ihn” (Grass
[1963] 1997b, 402).
17 I have changed the translation of ‘Mitläufer’ as ‘fellow traveler,’ which Heim translates as
“schemer.” “[M]itgemacht habe ich fraglos […]; ein Mitläufer, dessen Gedanken immer
woanders streunten” (Grass 2006, 27–28).
18 “[D]as Belasten, Einstufen und Abstempeln kann ich selber besorgen. Ich war ja als Hitlerjunge
ein Jungnazi. Gläubig bis zum Schluß. Nicht gerade fanatisch vorneweg, aber mit reflexhaft
unverrücktem Blick auf die Fahne, von der es hieß, sie sei ‘mehr als der Tod,’ blieb ich in Reih
und Glied, geübt im Gleichschritt. Kein Zweifel kränkte den Glauben” (Grass 2006, 43).
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The narrator here – as in Hundejahre – can be said to function as a moral and historical
witness.19 He sees himself not only as crucially shaped by the socio-historical milieu but
also as an active agent who could have questioned prevailing forms of power. It is
significant that both novels also show the possibility of resistance. In the former, one of
the teachers (Dr. Brunies) refuses to collaborate with the Nazis, is deemed too unpatriotic
and ends up in a concentration camp. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the narrator tells us
that among the boys serving in Reichsarbeitsdienst is one whose performance is
otherwise exemplary but who refuses to hold a gun. He drops it each time it is put in his
hands and asserts simply “wedontdothat” (Grass [2006] 2007, 86; “Wirtunsowasnicht”
2006, 100). He is repeatedly and severely punished but without success, until he
disappears – presumably to the concentration camp. This episode not only underlines
Grass’s personal guilt – he too had the option to resist – but also shows how widespread
conformism was and how fatal were the consequences of resistance (cf. Fuchs 2007, 269;
Schade 2007, 287).
The sense of conformism that pervades Grass’s novel is integral to the historical
experience of those living in that historical world. Fludernik (2010, 48) argues that
“novels and fiction films tend to foreground the universally human in past experience,”
but it seems clear to me that the ambition of many novels and films is to create a sense of
a certain historical world as a “space of experience” in which it is possible to say, think,
and experience certain things and difficult or impossible to experience other things.20 In
the Danzig of the 1930s, widespread conformism prevailed, and although it was possible
to resist National Socialism, doing so meant risking what were often fatal consequences.
In Hundejahre, National Socialism builds on and radicalizes the everyday evil of
modern society, that is, what Hannah Arendt ([1965] 1994) has described as the banality
of evil: the novel shows that National Socialism was not enabled by any essential
evilness of the Germans but by quotidian indifference fueled by the instrumental logic of
modern Western society that divides responsibility into so many pieces that nobody feels
responsible for the ends and goals of societal developments. In his essay “Wie sagen wir
es den Kindern?,” Grass (1997d, 516) writes about the “complex ‘modernity’ of
genocide”: extreme evil disguises itself as the modern virtues of decency and efficiency –
as a mentality that encourages everyone to take unquestioningly care of their own strictly
defined responsibilities. As Arendt shows, Eichmann and his ilk sat responsibly at their
desks and executed the commands they received. In depicting this banal evil, Grass
prompts the reader to ponder how much the logic of contemporary Western society
differs from that of Nazi Germany. His novels encourage us to recognize around us
mechanisms similar to those that enabled the rise of Nazism. In our society, too,
individuals end up as cogs in machineries, in processes the ends of which are not subject
to critical discussion. It is crucial to Grass’s ethics of remembering what he designates
metonymically as “Auschwitz” and to his depiction of the historical experience of Nazi
19 For Margalit (2002, 175–76) “a paradigmatic case” of “moral witnessing” has to do with “an
encounter with external evil,” but he asserts that he cannot see any conceptual reason for
disqualifying confessions of encountering evil in one’s “own soul” from counting as moral
testimony.
20 On the notion of “space of experience,” see Koselleck [1979] 2004, 259.
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
83
Germany that he forces us to acknowledge that the Nazis and those who failed to resist
them were ordinary, conscientious men who did what they were told and were driven by
a need to conform and to belong.
“Idealism,” History, and Experiencing Time
In Grass’s novels, the mentality fostering the banal evil depicted above is linked to a
particular historically constituted experience of time characterized by a certain kind of
duality. On the one hand, the characters are immersed in the events they are
experiencing, and their future is open in the sense that they do not know where the
present events are leading; they cannot (or are unwilling to) see the consequences of their
own actions or to make sense of the larger contexts to which they belong.
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the narration brings out the tension between the
experience of those on the spot, immersed in the course of events, and the perspective of
those looking back at the past and retrospectively narrativizing the events. For example,
the narrator tells us that no one talked about “war crimes” at the time they were
committed or declared in Marienbad, when the Germans surrendered to the Americans,
that this is “Stunde Null” (a “fresh start”): the events experienced as confusing and
chaotic by those immersed in them came to be seen, later on, as marking “an end and a
beginning,” a shift of eras (Grass [2006] 2007, 164).21 On the other hand, the sense of the
openness and uncertainty of the future is coupled with a sense of inevitability. The
characters do not perceive themselves as agents making history but, rather, as being
immersed in an inevitable process that they are powerless to affect: “What is man? A
mere particle, partner, fellow traveler, cog in the cog-wheel of history. A colourful ball
being kicked around – I guess that was the way I pictured myself” (Grass [2006] 2007,
217).22
This experience of time as both open to the future and simultaneously a determined
process is connected to an “idealistic” conception of history. Grass thinks, like Arendt
(cf. 1976, 461–65), that a central premise of Nazism was reliance on the necessity for an
individual to submit to an inevitable historical process: he considers “faith in a coherent
historical process in a Hegelian sense” to be an extremely dangerous “form of super21 In the translation, I have changed the articles into an indefinite form. “Eine ‘Stunde Null’
dennoch, die später als Zeitenwende [...] im Handel war, wurde mir nicht geläutet. [...]
Vielleicht wirkte der Ort des Geschehens [...] zu einschläfernd, um den historischen Tag als ein
Ende und Anfang bezifferndes Datum wahrzunehmen.” (Grass 2006, 185–186.) In my view,
the following translation by Heim misinterprets the passage by ignoring the ironical and critical
distance the narrator maintains to what was announced as a “new beginning”: “a fresh start
[Stunde Null] of the sort I felt later as a whole new era [...] I did not yet feel. [...] [I]t was too
soporific a setting for marking the monumental day as the end of one era and the beginning of
the next” (Grass [2006] 2007, 164; emphasis added).
22 I re-translated the end of the quotation, which Heim translates somewhat too definitively as
“that is how I saw myself.” “Was ist der Mensch? Nichts anderes als ein Partikel, Teilhaber,
Mitläufer, ein Stück im Stückwerk der Geschichte. So etwa, als jeweils anders bunter Spielball,
den andere querfeldein stießen, werde ich mich eingeschätzt haben” (Grass 2006, 245).
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stition” that has been used to legitimate some of the most hideous crimes of the twentieth
century (Durzak 1985, 14). Grass’s novels manifest the idea that what is real consists of
the everyday actions, non-actions, and sufferings of concrete individuals: this, indeed, is
the stuff of history. He worries that we lose sight of this reality if history is viewed only
through abstract ideas or portrayed as a teleological, rational, and meaningful process
with a given end, rather than as a process devoid of inherent meaning (à la Döblin, for
whom “no Hegelian Weltgeist rides over the battlefields”; Grass 1997c, 265, 272).23
For Grass (1997c, 472–74), a basic evil (Grundübel) underlying and enabling the rise
of National Socialism is “idealism,” by which he means sacrificing the particular and the
individual in the name of universal and abstract ideas. In Hundejahre, the fascist
ideology attempts to sublimate, sanctify, or conceal the concrete suffering of individuals
by abstract conceptual constructions. For example, hero-worship and misuse of pseudophilosophical (here: pseudo-Heideggerian) jargon enable Liebenau and Matern to dismiss
the mass murder taking place in the nearby concentration camp:
A boy, a young man, a uniformed high school student, who venerated the Führer,
Ulrich von Hutten, General Rommel, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, for
brief moments Napoleon, the panting movie actor Emil Jannings, for a while
Savonarola, then again Luther, and of late the philosopher Martin Heidegger. With
the help of these models he succeeded in burying a real mound made of human
bones under medieval allegories. The pile of bones, which in reality cried out to
high heaven between Troyl and Kaiserhafen, was mentioned in his diary as a place
of sacrifice, erected in order that purity might come-to-be in the luminous, which
transluminates purity and so fosters light. (Grass [1963] 1987, 814)24
As Grass (1997c, 472–74) stresses, his anti-idealism means first and foremost that he
holds fast to that which is particular, to the concrete nature of reality, at the expense of
the general and abstract. Thereby he uses the concept of idealism in approximately the
same sense as Arendt ([1965] 1994, 42), who comments on Eichmann’s way of defining
himself as an “idealist”:
An ‘idealist’ was a man who lived for his idea – hence he could not be a businessman – and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially,
everybody. When he said in the police examination that he would have sent his own
father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely to stress the
23 Cf. Saariluoma’s (1995, 66) discussion of Grass’s relation to Döblin.
24 “Ein Knabe, ein Jüngling, ein uniformierter Gymnasiast, der den Führer, Ulrich von Hutten,
den General Rommel, den Historiker Heinrich von Treitschke, Augenblicke lang Napoleon,
den schnaufenden Schauspieler Heinrich George, mal Savonarola, dann wieder Luther und seit
einiger Zeit den Philosophen Martin Heidegger verehrte. Mit Hilfe dieser Vorbilder gelang es
ihm, einen tatsächlichen, aus menschlichen Knochen erstellten Berg mit mittelalterlichen
Allegorien zuzuschütten. Er erwähnte den Knochenberg, der in Wirklichkeit zwischen dem
Troyl und dem Kaiserhafen gen Himmel schrie, in seinem Tagebuch als Opferstätte, errichtet,
damit das Reine sich im Lichten ereigne, indem es das Reine umlichte und so das Licht stifte”
(Grass [1963] 1997b, 409). Several commentators have stressed that Grass’s critique is not
aimed at Heidegger’s philosophy as such but at the way it was imitated and made use of (which
was quite common in the 1930s and 1940s, and, according to Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass
himself took part in such imitation), but to me it seems likely that part of its critical edge is
directed at Heidegger’s inadequate way of dealing with the question of National Socialism.
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
85
extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he also meant to
show what an ‘idealist’ he had always been. The perfect ‘idealist,’ like everybody
else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit
them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his ‘idea.’
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the narrator articulates a recurrent theme of Grass’s ([2006]
2007, 81) oeuvre by saying that the ability to doubt developed in him “much too late”
(“viel zu spät” 2006, 94): only that ability could have enabled him to resist National
Socialism, and on the basis of that ability he developed – through the painful process that
is the main topic of his autobiography – into an artist. Grass has suggested repeatedly that
this ability is crucial to art, which can thereby resist idealism and show that there are
different possibilities of being and acting in certain historical or possible worlds. In
Hundejahre, especially Eddi Amsel’s way of recounting the past draws the reader’s
attention to the possibilities of action available for certain individuals in certain situations
– possibilities that they often leave unrealized with fatal consequences. An illuminating
example is the so-called pocket knife scene at the beginning of the novel. Walter Matern
plays with his friend Eddi and the dog Senta on the Nickelswalde dam and wants to
throw a stone into the Vistula, but he does not find one and ends up throwing into the
river a pocket knife that he has received as a gift from Eddi. The narrative makes clear
that he could have asked Eddi to throw him a stone or commanded the dog to fetch him
one: “He could catch Amsel’s eye at the foot of the dike with a hey and a ho, but his
mouth is full of grinding and not of hey and ho” (Grass [1963] 1987, 564).25 As he
decides not to call Eddi but, instead, throws away his gift, something is permanently
shattered between them – and in Walter – without it having been necessary. The novel
suggests that history consists of such amorphous situations in which individuals seize
certain possibilities and do not act on others.
Whereas for those growing up and living in Germany at the time when National
Socialism was seizing power the events appeared largely inevitable, from a retrospective
perspective the narrator can show that history consists of concrete choices and that each
historical situation is a space of possibilities in which various options of action are
available for the agents. The novel builds on the tension between these notions of time –
time as unfolding different possibilities defined and structured but not determined by the
past, and time as an inevitable succession of predetermined events.
This tension can be clarified by Koselleck’s ([1979] 2004, 258) concepts of “space of
experience” and “horizon of expectation,” which he uses as metahistorical, transcendental categories that allow us to disentangle different ways of experiencing time, or “the
inner relation between past and future or yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” The “space of
experience” refers to the manner in which the past and its reception – the past as
remembered, reworked, and unconsciously present – constitutes a space of possibilities
within which it is possible to experience certain things, whereas the “horizon of
expectation” refers to the diverse ways in which we orient ourselves to the “not-yet.”
With the rise of a new sense of historicity at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the space of experience and horizon of expectation began to drift apart, due to
25 “Könnte Amsels Blick mit Häh! und Häh! von der Deichsohle auf sich ziehen, hat aber den
Mund voller Knirschen und nicht voller Häh! und Häh!” (Grass [1963] 1997b, 12).
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Hanna Meretoja
the novel vision of the present as a disconnected starting point of a new future. Since
then, “there has existed and does exist a consciousness of living in a transitional period”
in which the “historical experience descending from the past could no longer be directly
extended to the future” (Koselleck [1979] 2004, 259, 268–69). In modern philosophies of
history, however, the idea of an open future was coupled with a belief that history
follows a conceivable teleological course (cf. Ricœur 1985, 375–78, 386–87; Lyotard
[1988] 1991, 67–68). Hundejahre displays such a dual sense of disruption and
inevitability. Its petit bourgeois characters are waiting for a future that is in principle in
the process of becoming in the present but that they nevertheless experience as being
beyond their influence and as ultimately dependent on a “world-historical” plot, in which
certain individuals and nations (such as the Nazi leaders) are destined to fulfil special
tasks (cf. Koselleck [1979] 2004, 266; Ricœur 1985, 378). Grass thereby shows how
literature can display a certain experience of time and history that is itself historically
constituted, that is, rooted in a particular historical world, instead of presenting that
experience as universal, as Fludernik (2010, 48) deems to be typical of literature.
Vergegenkunft: The Co-Existence of the Temporal Dimensions and
the Return of the Repressed
Grass’s novels not only reflect on the historical experience of those living in Nazi
Germany but also on that of those living in postwar Germany and trying to come to terms
with its traumatic past. The three narrators of Hundejahre provide an account of their
wartime experiences by weaving them into narratives that manifest and reflect on
different ways of relating to the past. The novel suggests that in postwar Germany the
most common strategy was the attempt to simply forget and leave behind the traumatic
past:
Left behind: mounds of bones, mass graves, card files, flagpoles, Party books, love
letters, homes, church pews, and pianos difficult to transport.
Unpaid: taxes, mortgage payments, back rent, bills, debts, and guilt.
All are eager to start out fresh with living, saving, letter writing, in church pews, at
pianos, in card files and homes of their own.
All are eager to forget the mounds of bones and the mass graves, the flagpoles and
Party books, the debts and the guilt. (Grass [1963] 1987, 849)26
The quotation renders a view of petit bourgeois life as a practically oriented everyday
affair that revolves around the accumulation of commodities. It can be temporally
26 “Zurück bleiben Knochenberge, Massengräber, Karteikästen, Fahnenhalter, Parteibücher,
Liebesbriefe, Eigenheime, Kirchenstühle und schwer zu transportierende Klaviere. Nicht
bezahlt werden: fällige Steuern, Raten für Bausparkassen, Mietrückstände, Rechnungen,
Schulden und Schuld. Neu beginnen wollen alle mit dem Leben, mit dem Sparen, mit dem
Briefschreiben, auf Kirschenstühlen, vor Klavieren, in Karteikästen und Eigenheimen.
Vergessen wollen alle die Knochenberge und Massengräber, die Fahnenhalter und
Parteibücher, die Schulden und die Schuld” (Grass [1963] 1997b, 456–66).
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
87
interrupted by mounds of bones and mass graves but will soon return to its former course.
The grotesque impression created by the quotation derives from its way of drawing a
parallel between economic matters (such as taxes) and ethical or existential questions
(such as guilt linked to the Holocaust). It draws attention to the way in which the German
word “die Schuld” signifies both debt and guilt, and suggests that in the Germany of the
“economic miracle,” these two meanings were conflated. Economic productivity was
offered as a solution to the society’s moral dilemma, as if guilt could be paid off like a
debt. Moreover, Hundejahre suggests that forgetting and the idea of a new beginning
formed the official ideology because they guaranteed the smooth functioning of the
economic machinery: “Little by little this becomes the first principle of all concerned:
Forget! Maxims are embroidered on handkerchiefs, pillow slips, and hat linings: Learn to
forget. Forgetfulness is natural” (Grass [1963] 1987, 938).27
Of the three narrators, Matern represents most clearly an obsessive attempt to forget
the past. His unwillingness to remember is manifested by the fact that unlike the two
other sections of the book, the “Materniades” are written in the third-person present
tense, reflecting his attempt to live in a present moment cut off from the past. He is
unwilling to tell about his life in the form of a story, which would require relating the
past to the present and reflecting on who he is on the basis of how he has lived. The time
experience that dominates the “Materniades” is similar to the chronotope of “adventure
time,” which Mikhail Bakhtin has shown to be typical for Robinsonades, modeled after
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, that is, narratives about a series of exciting adventures
that remain episodic, i.e., disparate in relation to each other, and that do not substantially
change the agent of the adventure (see e.g. Bakhtin [1981] 1988, 87–88, 125, 244, 391;
cf. Mäkikalli 2007, 70, 80–93). Matern sees his past in terms of such disparate episodes.
In the beginning of the novel, he betrays his friend by throwing the pocket knife Amsel
gave him into the river. In the end of the novel, he receives a second chance when Amsel
gives him another pocket knife, but he throws it again into the same river. This scene is
emblematic of his tendency to repeat the same aggressive patterns of conduct, largely as
a result of his inability to deal with the past, which he attempts to compulsively erase
from his mind and his surroundings:
Matern buys a large eraser, stations himself on a kitchen chair, and begins to erase
the names, crossed off and not crossed off, from his heart, spleen, and kidneys. As
for Pluto, that four-legged hunk of past, feeble with age though still running around,
he’d be glad to sell him, send him to a rest home for dogs, erase him[.] (Grass
[1963] 1987, 938)28
27 “Diese Verhaltensweise wird mehr und mehr zur Hauptlebensregel aller Beteiligten:
Vergessen! Sprüche werden in Taschentücher, Handtücher, Kopfkissenbezüge und Hutfutter
gestickt: Jeder Mensch muß vergessen können. Die Vergeßlichkeit ist etwas Natürliches”
(Grass [1963] 1997b, 605–606). See also Grass, Dog Years, 932 and Hundejahre, 595.
28 “Matern kauft sich einen großen Radiergummi, setzt sich auf einen Küchenstuhl und beginnt
alle abgezinkten und nicht abgezinkten Namen von Herz, Milz und Nieren wegzuradieren.
Auch den Hund Pluto, ein altersschwaches und dennoch herumlaufendes Stück Vergangenheit
auf vier Beinen, möchte er verkaufen, in ein Tierheim geben, ausradieren” (Grass [1963]
1997b, 606).
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The novel, however, shows that even when the past is repressed, it affects the present,
and those unable to confront it are condemned to repeat it. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel,
this ontological insight, according to which the past experiences constitute us, is
developed through the image of an onion, which appears as a metaphor for human
experience of time. The metaphor suggests that life is ultimately about memories piling
up on each other like layers of an onion. When “skin upon skin” is peeled off, this “life’s
onion” proves devoid of any “meaningful core” (Grass [2006] 2007, 384; “keinen sinnstiftenden Kern” 2006, 433); rather, there are only layers of time built from
interconnected experiences.
In several novels, Grass suggests that art plays a crucial role in making us aware of
the presence of the past in the present. In Hundejahre, such reflection is conducted by
Eddi Amsel, whose character makes most salient the possibility of the individual to resist
the pressures of the social environment and its prevailing narratives. As a child, his
resistance takes the form of creating his own world of scarecrows, which parody and
critically comment on the surrounding social reality. After the war, he constructs a
“scarecrow hell” in a former mine: he asserts that man has created the scarecrow from his
own image, and his vocation is to create an entire scarecrow world in the image of the
contemporary world, that is, the aboveground hell: “Here the turning points in history are
scarecrowified. Degraded yet dynamic, scarecrow history unfolds in its proper order,
reciting dates, defenestrations, and peace treaties” (Grass [1963] 1987, 1016).29 The end
of the novel gestures toward the view that art can bring us to a kind of self-encounter,
even if it cannot save us from ourselves; it suggests that Matern’s visit to the scarecrow
hell causes him to realize just what kind of a hell has been built on earth. Such selfencounter is manifested, in the final scene, by the way in which Matern finally relinquishes his third-person perspective and assumes a first-person narrative voice:
And this man and that man – who now will call them Brauxel and Matern? – I and
he, we stride with doused lamps to the changehouse [...]. For me and him bathtubs
have been filled. I hear Eddi splashing next door. Now I too step into my bath. The
water soaks me clean. Eddi whistles something indeterminate. I try to whistle something similar. But it’s difficult. We’re both naked. Each of us bathes by himself.
(1023)30
Undressing suggests that the protagonists have given up their role costumes, which they
have been wearing throughout the novel. On the other hand, nudity does not imply here
knowing who one is and what one should do. Matern’s way of lying in the bathtub
helpless and perplexed, trying to imitate Eddi’s whistling in the bathtub behind the wall,
indicates that, in the end, everyone is alone with his past and his guilt – they cannot be
29 “Hier finden sich die historischen Wendepunkte scheuchifiziert. Verunglimpft und dennoch
dynamisch ereignet sich der Reihe nach und Jahreszahlen, Fensterstürze und Friedensschlüsse
herbetend die Geschichte in Scheuchengestalt” (Grass [1963] 1997b, 732).
30 “Und Dieser und Jener – wer mag sich noch Brauxel und Matern nennen? – ich und er, wir
schreiten mit abgelöschtem Geleucht zur Steigerkaue [...]. Für mich und ihn wurden die
Badewannen gefüllt. Drüben höre ich Eddi plätschern. Jetzt steige auch ich ins Bad. Das
Wasser laugt uns ab. Eddi pfeift etwas Unbestimmtes. Ich versuche ähnliches zu pfeifen. Doch
das ist schwer. Beide sind wir nackt. Jeder badet für sich” (Grass [1963] 1997b, 744).
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
89
cleansed off like dirt – but at least Matern now has the courage to acknowledge that it is
his own guilt. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass ([2006] 2007, 1) recalls the
“temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person” (“die Versuchung, sich in dritter
Person zu verkappen” 2006, 7): “But because so many kept silent, the temptation is great
to discount one’s own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to
speak about oneself [...] in the third person: he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent”
([2006] 2007, 28–29).31 An important undercurrent of the book is the idea that in a way
he has already said all this – in his novels in which he has trapped his “dual self” (9;
“sein doppeltes Ich” 2006, 15) – but that he still needs to write about these things in the
first person.
Both the scarecrow hell and Amsel’s book project are fueled by the dual need to
address the past and to grapple with it in the present. Already as a schoolboy,
remembering is important for Eddi. The motto of his diary is: “Began at Easter because I
shouldn’t forget anything” (Grass [1963] 1987, 595).32 Similarly, Grass considers it an
essential task of the writer to struggle against forgetting. In Aus dem Tagebuch einer
Schnecke (1972), he explains: “A writer, children, is someone who writes against the
current of time,” because time “passes for the benefit of the perpetrators,” not the victims
([1972] 1997a, 147–48).33 This ethos is linked to fierce criticism of ways of thinking that
assume the Nazi past to be appropriable, to be “taken care of.” Hundejahre, for example,
parodies attempts to find technological solutions to the “problem of the past” by
depicting the invention of “miracle glasses,” which enable children to see the crimes
committed by their parents (Grass [1963] 1987, 936; [1963] 1997b, 601–602). The way
in which the characters in Grass’s novels remain affected by their traumatic pasts, even
when they believe they have through repeated effort put the past behind them, manifests
a view according to which time does not consist of a succession of dot-like moments but,
rather, the past is a constitutive part of the present. Grass ([1980] 1997g, 127) has
depicted this conception of time underlying his oeuvre with the term Vergegenkunft,
which intertwines the words referring to the past, present, and future (Vergangenheit,
Gegenwart, Zukunft).
Such a conception of time and history, stressing the coalescence of the past, present,
and future, is central in the hermeneutic tradition of thought as well as in Koselleck’s
analyses of temporality and historicity. Koselleck uses the concepts of “space of
experience” and “horizon of expectation” to disentangle the ways in which the past and
future are always present in the present. With the spatial metaphor of “space of
experience,” Koselleck ([1979] 2004, 260) indicates how the past experiences are
“assembled into a totality, within which many layers of earlier times are simultaneously
present,” thereby underscoring that experience is not constituted as an additive series of
events (cf. Ricœur [1984] 1991, 467). On the basis of Koselleck’s ideas, Ricœur has
31 “Weil aber so viele geschwiegen haben, bleibt die Versuchung groß, ganz und gar vom eigenen
Versagen abzusehen, ersatzweise die allgemeine Schuld einzuklagen oder nur uneigentlich in
dritter Person von sich zu sprechen: Er war, sah, hat, sagte, er schwieg” (Grass 2006, 36).
32 “Fing an auf Ostern weil man nichts vergessen soll” (Grass [1963] 1997b, 61).
33 “[D]ie Zeit, die vergehende Zeit vergeht zugunsten der Täter; den Opfern vergeht die Zeit
nicht. [...]. Ein Schriftsteller, Kinder, ist jemand, der gegen die verstreichende Zeit schreibt.”
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written about the need to resist the shrinkage of the space of experience that pertains to
the tendency to see the past as separate from the present, that is, as a closed and
unchangeable collection of past events. He suggests that, through processes of
reinterpreting and retelling, the past should be kept open so that its presence in the
present is acknowledged and attention paid to the possibilities of being, thinking, and
acting that it opens up in the present. Similarly to Grass, he thinks that the past is handed
down to us as a heritage that includes a debt to the people of the past: a responsibility to
do justice to the victims of history by telling their stories and by ensuring that they will
be remembered. (Ricœur 1985, 388–400, 411–13, 420–23; 1986, 306; 1998.) Particularly
in the case of extreme atrocities, “the relation of debt is transformed into the duty never
to forget” (Ricœur [1990] 1992, 164; see also 2000, 106–11). From this perspective,
literature can function as a crucial form of alternative historiography that follows “the
plot of suffering rather than the plot of power and glory” (Ricœur [1984] 1991, 464).
Grass’s work, however, suggests that in responding to this challenge, it is important that
literature explores, on an experiential level, the perspectives of both the victims and the
perpetrators in order to help us confront and imagine how such atrocities were possible
and wherein lies the possibility of acting otherwise.34
Reflections on the Narrative Mediation of the Past
Novels can also be historiographically significant due to their ability to display the
narrativization of the past and the perspectival production of historical knowledge. Cohn
(1990, 789, 800) signals “the doubling of the narrative instance into author and narrator”
as one of the signposts of fictionality, distinguishing fiction from historiography, but for
her the privileged, properly fictional narrative mode is heterodiegetic narration, whereas
she mentions homodiegetic narration (as in Grass’s Katz und Maus) as an example of the
way in which “the constrictions and constraints under which the historian writes are not
entirely absent from (nor unknown to) fictional narrators.” What I would like to draw
attention to here is that precisely such “constraints” can play a crucial role in providing
insights into the partial, constructed, and narrative nature of historical knowledge.
In Hundejahre, the use of three character-narrators with distinct perspectives and
styles of narrating the past emphasizes that the past is always rendered from someone’s
perspective and can never be neutrally recounted. The events narrated are always
observed, interpreted, and experienced by a particular individual. Such a play of narrative
perspectives not only allows the display of different ways of experiencing (such as
different experiences of time, examined above) but also underlines the perspectival and
ethically charged production of historical understanding, and shows experience to be
always historically mediated.
In many novels written in response to the trauma of the Second World War, the
dissolution and fragmentation of narrative forms manifest the experience of
34 Ricœur (2000, 507–11) presents similar ideas on the relation between history and cultural
memory, for example in suggesting that the “culture of memory” provides history with
important “imaginary variations.”
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
91
disorientation itself.35 Grass, in contrast, embraces storytelling as something that belongs
inextricably to the human mode of making sense of experience in time, but in his oeuvre
it does not pretend to simply reflect order found in reality; rather, storytelling presents
itself as a matter of interpretation, construction, and selection, involving both
remembering and forgetting.36 Grass thematizes repeatedly in his books – and especially
in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel – the relation between memory and storytelling, that is, the
ways in which we deal with our experiences and store them in our memory by weaving
them into narratives. Storytelling is presented as ethically ambivalent in that it often
distorts experience (“once experiences of this sort blossom into stories, they take on a life
of their own and flaunt one detail or another,” Grass [2006] 2007, 172; 2006, 194), but on
the other hand, memory has a tendency to link events and experiences together into
stories because we can remember stories better than disparate events: “Clearer in my
mind, because it can be told as a story, is an incident that took place outside the hazing
routine” ([2006] 2007, 115).37
The alternation of three “constrained” narrative perspectives, with no overriding
authorial intervention or normative commentary, displays the way in which the work of
interpretation is ethically charged and in which there is no single “correct” perspective.
Whereas in history-writing the author’s task is to interpret, give meaning, and explain the
narrated historical events and experiences, in historiographical novels with homodiegetic
narration, this task is left to the reader.
For example, in Grass’s novels depicting the conditions in which the children were
raised in Nazi Germany, the reader is left to interpret and judge. Occasionally, in
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, an authorial voice takes part in this reflection, observing his
past self as if from an outsider’s perspective: “[M]y now lenient, now stringent eyes
remain focused on a boy still in shorts, snooping into hidden affairs, yet failing to ask
‘Why?’” (Grass [2006] 2007, 10).38 Grass ([2006] 2007, 4) the narrator tries to recognize
himself in “the boy I apparently was” (“Junge, der anscheinend ich war,” Grass 2006,
10), and asks in what sense he is that child and therefore responsible for his actions and
omissions. He calls himself the “Young Nazi” and interrogates himself, but elsewhere he
feels sympathy for the 12-year-old tortured by these questions and accusations, and
thinks he clearly demands too much from him (Grass [2006] 2007, 10; 2006, 17). The
reader takes part in this process – pondering, for example, what one can expect from a
35 I have analysed elsewhere how the antinarrativity of the Robbe-Grilletean nouveau roman can
be seen to respond to the experience of the Second World War (see e.g. Meretoja 2006; 2010).
36 In Suleiman’s (2009, 9) terms we can say that there is a degree of “derealization” in his
narratives, as they make us aware of the literary choices the author is making and thereby add a
metanarrative dimension to his novels. Hence, they are closely related to what is commonly
called, after Hutcheon (1988), “historiographic metafiction.”
37 “Deutlicher, weil erzählbar, ist mir ein Ereignis” (Grass 2006, 131). Variations of this idea
recur in the book (see e.g. Grass [2006] 2007, 199; Grass 2006, 225).
38 “[M]ein mal nachsichtiger, dann wieder strenger Blick auf einen Jungen gerichtet bleibt, der
kniefreie Hosen trägt, allem, was sich verborgen hält, hinterdreinschnüffelt und dennoch
versäumt hat, ‘warum’ zu sagen” (Grass 2006, 17).
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child of a certain age – and at the same time is encouraged to think of how what is
narrated concerns us today.
The narrative organization of Grass’s novels is also relevant from the perspective of
the debate around his belated confession. Does his Waffen-SS past (and its concealment)
undermine the way in which he has dealt with the questions of guilt, forgetting, and the
obligation to remember in his literary oeuvre? Condemning Grass on such grounds
entails adopting a position of moral high ground that Grass’s oeuvre in fact depicts as
problematic. His novels undermine the perspective of an external, morally superior
narrator in possession of the unconditional truth: their narrators are themselves entangled
in the events they narrate, and although they sometimes try to adopt an impartial thirdperson narrative mode, this gesture is thematized, and guilt is revealed as the motor for
their narration.39 Although it has now been brought out that Grass’s own guilt, too, is
very personal and not just of a “collective” kind, this hardly means that the value of his
novels were simply reducible to the question concerning his personal role in the Second
World War.
The ethical challenge Grass (1997e, 63, 236, 239) presents us is intertwined with the
view pervading his work that “Auschwitz” is not only a German or a Jewish trauma, it is
an “incurable rupture of civilization history,” which can never be totally understood and
“will never stop being present in the present”: it is not only a crime of past generations
but a permanent moral debt, an obligation to remember, for all of humanity, although it is
particularly urgent for European self-understanding to address this debt. Grass’s oeuvre
provides insights both on the historical experience of those living in Nazi Germany and
on the way in which the legacy of that historical world continues to shape the
contemporary world. It encourages us to ask how do we live and how should we live with
the trace that the past has left in us: “After is always before. What we call the present,
this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now in such a way that
the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes” (Grass
[2006] 2007, 144).40
Grass’s insistence on the way in which the past is never totally past and experience is
always historically charged questions in many ways the assumption of the immediacy of
experience (and the notion of “raw data”) to which both Cohn and Fludernik subscribe.41
Grass’s novels display the historically mediated character of experience, that of both the
present and the past, by providing us with different narrative accounts of the past, which
– instead of pretending to give us access to immediate reality or experience – are shown
to be subjective interpretations and narrativizations arising from a certain cultural and
historical tradition. In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, for example, the narrator articulates an
39 Grass has often asserted that guilt functions as the motor of narration for all of the narrators of
the Danzig trilogy (see e.g. Arnold 1971, 10–11).
40 “Danach ist immer davor. Was wir Gegenwart nennen, dieses flüchtige Jetztjetztjetzt, wird stets
von einem vergangenen Jetzt beschattet, so daß auch der Fluchtweg nach vorn, Zukunft
genannt, nur auf Bleisohlen zu erlaufen ist” (Grass 2006, 165).
41 Cf. Cohn’s (1990, 778) notion of “data base” and Fludernik‘s (2010, 42) suggestion that a
distinct category of “raw experience” is needed for “direct physical experience of processes and
events.”
Historical Experience, Narrative and Time
93
awareness of the way in which he interprets his own childhood and adolescent
experiences, such as the experience of war, through a cultural imagery handed down to
him from novels, such as those by Remarque and Céline: “But I had already read
everything I write here. I had read it in Remarque or Céline, who – like Grimmelshausen
before them in his description of the Battle of Wittstock, when the Swedes hacked the
Kaiser’s troops to pieces – were merely quoting the scenes of horror handed down to
them” (Grass [2006] 2007, 125).42
In Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, the metaphor of an onion, not unlike the notion of
Vergegenkunft, points to the layered character of temporal experience. When the onion of
memories is peeled layer by layer, “each skin sweats words too long muffled, and
curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still
germinating, had decided to encode himself” (Grass [2006] 2007, 3).43 What makes this
process particularly challenging is that a large part of the layers of our memories is only
partly “ours”: we are marked by a certain historical world, and we can understand it –
and ourselves – only in a very limited way, but this does not relieve us from an obligation
to try to remember and to understand. Here, the “ethics of memory” must be understood
in a somewhat wider sense than, for example, Avishai Margalit does.44 For Grass, similar
to Ricœur (cf. 1985, 339–42), it pertains to the obligation of the whole of humankind to
remember “Auschwitz.” Grass’s work, however, suggests that it is not just a matter of
remembering what happened but involves an obligation to try to understand how it was
possible that what happened could actually happen and how we could, through such
remembering and understanding, try to prevent history from repeating itself. It is hence
an obligation to try to understand something that cannot be accepted.
To conclude, I hope narrative studies will continue to explore the historiographical
contribution of fictional narratives and, in so doing, to acknowledge how fictional
narratives provide interpretations of historically charged experience of living in the
world, thereby offering compelling, philosophically complex insights into the very nature
of historical experience itself and to different experiences of temporality. The example of
Grass demonstrates that such narrative interpretations can be epistemologically significant in exploring how the people of the past experienced their historical world and how
we understand the past through telling stories about it. Further, they can have ontological
significance, for example, by examining the temporal, historical nature of human
existence as well as by showing how our interpretations of the past constitute us and
define the way in which we orient ourselves to the future. Finally, their ethical
contribution lies in their ability to make us more sensitive to – and provide new insights
42 “Aber das, was hier im einzelnen geschrieben steht, habe ich ähnlich bereits woanders, bei
Remarque oder Céline gelesen” (Grass 2006, 142).
43 “Und jede weitere schwitzt zu lang gemiedene Wörter aus, auch schnörkelige Zeichen, als habe
sich ein Geheimniskrämer von jung an, als die Zwiebel noch keimte, verschlüsseln wollen”
(Grass 2006, 9).
44 Margalit (2002, 6–9, 78–79) reserves this term only to “thick relationships” within “commu-
nities of memory” or between individuals, based on feelings of intimacy and belonging.
94
Hanna Meretoja
into – the ethical issues involved in the processes of remembering, imagining, and giving
a narrative account of the past.45
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Author’s Address:
Dr. Hanna Meretoja
Department of Comparative Literature,
20014 University of Turku, Finland
E-mail: [email protected]
URL:
http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/yleinenkirjallisuus/en/personnel/meretoja.html