Last year I published the volume Understanding Günter Grass at the University of South Carolina Press in their series "Understanding Contemporary European and Latin American Literature." I must tell you it's a bit unnerving to write a volume about someone as hard to understand as Günter Grass with that immodest word from the obligatory title: understanding constantly in the back of one's mind.

When I began the book I was especially concerned about some of the early plays and poems, which had never yielded themselves to me in any meaningful way on previous readings. In fact, I delayed dealing with these earlier works until I had written everything I had to say about the major novels and then, really having no choice, a deadline staring me in the face, I turned to them like a condemned man: "Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten."

One of the earlier works, "Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo" which first appeared in Akzente in 1958 was particularly opaque. The scene of this one-act play, if you'll allow me to refresh your memory, is a flowery meadow with grazing cows, in the middle of which a rusted old steam locomotive stands, overgrown with vegetation. An artist, Kotschenreuther, sits at his easel painting a sea-scape with a sailing ship, a frigate, to be exact, which causes the rustic cowherd Axel to express his bewilderment: he quite naturally expects Kotschenreuther to be painting a landscape with cows. In nautical terminology Kotschenreuther then somewhat paternalistically explains that Axel needs to throw these stupid titles--cows, ships--overboard and begin to perceive the world through what he calls new aspects, sensitive instruments, clairaudient mechanisms. He then asks Axel for a glass of sail juice, by which he means milk, Axel ascertains, for he stipulates that it must be white, like Moby Dick.

I take this to be an invitation to view the play--and perhaps all of Grass--in such symbolic terms, to begin to perceive his works through new aspects, sensitive judgments, and clairaudient mechanisms. At any event, we next see the engineer Krudewil and his fireman Pempelfort pretending that they are racing through the landscape in the old locomotive.

The nautical imagery of the painting and of the Theodore Fontane ballad "John Maynard," from which the title is taken, is reinforced by the revelation that Krudewil and Pempelfort are really sailors after all, who have deserted the navy, their ship, which was a frigate, as it happens, and their captain, a woman also curiously named Frigate (Fregatte), from whom Krudewil has also stolen a pistol. As they pretend to steam along, these sailors even convert their speed to nautical miles and when they stop to refuel--with pats of dried cow-dung--they refer to it as lying at anchor.

Eventually they are forced to halt because they see someone on the tracks. When they investigate they discover that it is none other than Fregatte, their former captain, who is flying all her flags and, in an image reminiscent of ships' stacks, simultaneously smoking three cigars. In fear of her wrath, Krudewil hides the pistol in the smokestack of the locomotive. Eventually the two sailors go off with Fregatte, who is dressed in an admiral's uniform, is carrying a telescope, and is wearing a model frigate as a hat, to harpoon Moby Dick.

From the cowherd Axel's point of view, of course, they are merely chasing cows about the meadow. In the end Alex and his dog Jonah--yet another echo of whales--climb into the locomotive and drive it slowly off stage as Krudewil's pistol hidden in the smokestack becomes overheated and explodes.

Well, as you see, the author of a book that was supposed to be called Understanding Günter Grass was going to have his hands full with that one. I suppose I could have said that the sheer lunacy of the situation itself has an undeniably comic and absurdist appeal and left it at that. But my procrastination and my desperation combined to lead me to begin to understand even this play. Because I had waited until the end to deal with it and others like it, and because I had recently re-read all the secondary material I could lay my hands on and had recently re-read everything Grass had ever written (which is not inconsiderable), I happened to recall an essay published in I>Akzente a year before the play, in 1957, entitled "Der Inhalt als Widerstand: Bausteine zur Poetik", the core of which is formed by a dialogue between none other than two people named Pempelfort and Krudewil, here two poets, who walk through a meadow filled with flowers, exactly like that in the play, whilst discussing the process of making poems. Of course I was not the first to have noticed the correlation of the two names and the respective meadows and flowers. Manfred Jurgensen, for example, has dealt with the epistemological and aesthetic matters raised in the essay and, because of the similarities of the names and the settings, has attempted to apply them to the play as well, though I must confess that even after reading his essay I was still a long way from saying that I thought I understood "Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo."

I had learned from this, however, that there exists in these two very difficult works some kind of a useful interpretive connection, the only clue to which may lie in the verbatim repetition of certain key words, in this case: Pempelfort, Krudewil, Wiese, Blumen.

So the stage was set for a discovery which I believe is an original one, though it may not be terribly profound, but which helped me, at least, make an important step forward in understanding Günter Grass. Allow me to conclude my plot summary of the play:

After Krudewil and Pempelfort are reunited with their cigar-smoking captain, Fregatte, she delivers herself of a lengthy speech in which she seems to be tracing the history of her life. Originally a Flemish virgin she says, in a century when witchcraft and hexing were popular pastimes she was bewitched and changed into a wooden figurehead. After some pirate voyages and sea battles she was kissed by a leaping dolphin, the spell was broken and she became an admiral, immediately after which she mentions the sites of great naval battles, Lepanto, Trafalgar, and Aboukir. She was victorious, and was sunk, she continues, and became that sea serpent "die dem zeitungslesenden Volk die Sauregurkenzeit versüßt ..." [TS 147] "Ach Fregatte," she laments, "wie oft mußt du noch den Kurs ändern und dein meuterndes Schiffsvolk suchen?!" [TS 147]

The term hölzerne Galionsfigur rang a bell. I re-read the Niobe chapter in Book One of Die Blechtrommel and discovered that not a few elements of Fregatte's bizarre life exactly parallel events associated with Niobe, that man- and boy-killing wooden figurehead, which I had already made out to be the personification of war, evil, and destruction from prior ages, whose miasmic essence leaks out of the cellar store room at the maritime museum and informs the crystal night, Adolf Hitler, that Heavenly Gasman and butcher, and the gas chambers of the death camps: "Doch man kann das Unglück nicht einkellern. Mit den Abwässern findet es durch die Kanalisation, es teilt sich den Gasleitungen mit, kommt allen Haushaltungen zu, und niemand, der da sein Suppentöpfchen auf die bläulichen Flammen stellt, ahnt, daß da das Unglück seinen Fraß zum Kochen bringt." [BT 229]

The figure-head was originally modelled after a Flemish maiden [BT 223ff] we read in Die Blechtrommel, a person near and dear to the merchant who had commissioned the work. Soon thereafter she is accused of witchcraft and burned. The figurehead itself is captured by the semi-official Danzig pirates Paul Beneke and Martin Bardewiek, and after their demise sails with the Danzig fleet under Eberhard Ferber in his unsuccessful sea battles against Denmark. Mutinies break out unexpectedly, and religious wars, attacks by Swedish troops, as well as countless other deaths and calamities are linked to her presence in the city. When Herbert, accompanied by Oskar, takes the job as a museum guard for Niobe, they stage a mock rehearsal of her career, ostensibly to prove that she is harmless: under the models of frigates and other warships suspended from the ceiling Herbert dresses up as an admiral bearing a telescope, Oskar dresses as the admiral's page, and together they play Trafalgar and scatter Napoleon's fleet at Aboukir.

The parallels range from the verbatim: Trafalgar, Abukir, Fregatte, hölzerne Galionsfigur, Admiral, Fernrohr, Meuterei, to the near-verbatim: Hexen, Verhexen, Hexerei, Hexe, to synonyms: Kaperfahrten and Seeräuberbande, Seeschlachten and Die Fahrt der Flotte gegen Dänemark, etc., to analogous configurations: so whereas Fregatte wears a hat shaped like a frigate, Oskar and Herbert have models of frigates hanging over their heads.

What we know about the Niobe figure from Die Blechtrommel helps us understand Fregatte's role in the play, and vice verse. If Niobe is the symbolic personification of the history of evil, of war, of das Unglück an sich, whose chapter is placed directly before the powerful "Faith Hope and Charity" conclusion to Book One of The Tin Drum because it is her miasmal essence that seeps into the gas pipes and into the gas chambers of the Holocaust, then perhaps we can view Fregatte in a similar light. In that light, even such an opaque image, to my knowledge not directly referred to in any other works, as that of her being sunk and becoming a sea serpent "die dem zeitungslesenden Volk die Sauregurkenzeit versüßt" (one is distantly reminded of this by the eels fattening on corpses at Skaggerak mentioned in Die Blechtrommel), might now be rather transparently explainable as an allegory of German submarine warfare during those times--in both world wars--when the Allies controlled the surface of the seas and whose successes sweetened the bad news a bit for Germans reading accounts of the war in newspapers.

I admit that may be stretching it. But be that as it may, I think it is now possible to say that here Fregatte has again come to take command of her mutinous Volk, certainly a politically loaded term, and has set off once more on her monomaniacal hunt for the elusive white whale, perhaps the white whale of military conquest. "Die Herzen kalfatert, Harpunen bereit!" [TS 149] she calls out, and "Schlag, Schlag, wollt ihr wohl, den großen Schlag, den ganz großen..." [TS 150] as her crew rows across the meadow, their hearts sealed or hardened with caulk, repeatedly rowing or "striking" (I think the word Schlag can be read to mean "hit" or "strike") and escalating the size of their "hits" as they go. Perhaps it is going too far to suggest that Fregatte's call for "den großen Schlag, den ganz großen" is a reference to weapons, perhaps nuclear weapons, but surely it is significant that the explosion of Fregatte's pistol--Axel and the train are thus also drawn into the madness--is the final event of the play, for it is an audible echo of her military assault on Moby Dick, the inevitable continuation of her long history of violence and destruction.

At this point I'm going to try to cut my interpretive losses by referring you to my book for a fuller and I hope more convincing discussion of what I have elsewhere called Grass's apocalyptic vision, for I am convinced that in order to understand what Grass is doing with Niobe and with Fregatte one really must bring all the understanding of all the symbols from all the works to bear: Thus die schwarze Köchin from Die Blechtrommel, Die bösen Köche from the play of the same name (who clearly have something to do with Adenauer and Ulbricht arming their respective Germanies with nuclear weapons in about 1958, the time all these early works were written), Eddi Amsel's apocalyptic atomic scarecrows from Hundejahre, Grass's vision of the apocalyptic end of the male historical era in Der Butt, and of female ship captains and neutron bombs in Die Rättin (along with his concomitant alternative irenic visions in örtlich betäubt, Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, etc.) all serve to support my reading, I believe, of these passages.

The point I wanted to make today is that whatever you may think of my clumsy attempts at making some use of the insight that Grass is quoting himself verbatim in "Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo" and in Die Blechtrommel, the undeniable fact seems to be that he is. The question then for the moment is how one might more effectively look for paralells in order to make use of similar verbatim self-quotations in Grass.

As it happens, there are those at my university, Brigham Young, who have had a great deal of experience at creating concordances and word indices using laser scanners and computers, among them my colleague Randall Jones. When Franz-Josef Görtz, a Grass scholar who works for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, came to give a lecture in Provo not long after my book appeared, he suggested that the three of us collaborate on a word index of Günter Grass, and that we start with Die Blechtrommel. Luchterhand has agreed to publish it and has announced its appearance for January, 1990.

Even more convenient to use than a word index is a concordance, of course, since it shows each word in context, but it is bulkier and thus less convenient in other ways. A more ideal way of searching a text for certain words is to use a software program such as "Wordcruncher," also developed by some colleagues at Brigham Young and now commercially available. With the text of Die Blechtrommel now stored in my computer in electronic form I can find all forms of a certain word, for example the word Hexe, in a split second. The word appears in context and by hitting [Enter] one can increase the context to a full screen and beyond. Here we see that Grass uses Hexe twice in Die Blechtrommel, once in the Niobe Chapter, Book I, Chapter 15, page 230 line 25 and once later on, in Book III, Chapter 4, page 596, line 19, in a place nearer the end of the book where I had not remembered Oskar recounting the Niobe story, a place where the evil Niobe appears to raise her ugly head again in the postwar era in connection with the murder of the nurse, Schwester Dorothea.

One of the most important features of "Wordcruncher" is that it can search for certain words in the context of certain other words. One can define this context: it will search for words before a word, after a word, both before and after, and any distance from one character to several hundred characters away to one or more lines away or to one or more pages away. This can be very useful, especially when there are many occurrences of a certain ordinary word which can take on important meaning in certain contexts. Kreuz, for example, appears 100 times in Die Blechtrommel, but only three times in the formula ins Kreuz (though ins appears 192 times).

This becomes important when one notices that when Oskar betrays his presumptive father Jan Bronski at the Polish Post Office "er küßte ihn bedeutungsvoll" then describes the whole affair as a "Judasschauspiel" which culminates in this phrase: "Die Heimwehrleute traten Jan ins Kreuz..." It certainly seems like a little crucifixion following a betrayal by a Judas kiss. (And when I looked for all occurrences of the word Judas I found one much later on, in Book Two, when Oskar wonders if the near-sighted Viktor Weluhn "meine Judastat erkannt hatte und Oskars Geheimnis und Schande nun auf der Flucht mit sich und in alle Welt trug?") But can Grass really be using the word cross, which in this formulation simply means "back" to refer to a crucifixion? The other two examples of ins Kreuz seem to bear out this rather far-fetched possibility.

The first occurs in the church where Oskar runs through all manner of religious permutations of the word cross, culminating in the phrase "auch dem Turner am Kreuz wandte ich meinen Rücken auf die Gefahr hin zu, daß er mir ins Kreuz träte, weil ich mich der Jungfrau Maria näherte, die den Jesusknaben auf ihrem rechten Oberschenkel hielt."

The second also refers to one of his presumptive fathers and to Oskar's jealous relationship to another woman named Maria. It describes Oskar's interruption of the coitus interruptus between Maria and Matzerath on the sofa: "weil ich ihm die Trommel ins Kreuz schlug."

I had intended to touch on one other example today, the word schwarz (which occurs 187 times in Die Blechtrommel) with all its connotations of evil, particularly in connection with the word dreieck (26 times), for I have a theory that Grass connects this evil figure, the black triangle, not only to the pubic triangle and to the strange triadic relationships that obtain between lovers in the novel, not only to the triadic black face of Luzie Rennwand and through her to the black cook, but that he connects it iconographically to the image of black triangular Nazi pennants that fly here and there throughout the novels. When I searched Die Blechtrommel for this connection, however, I noticed that this will require more work: the key passage I had noticed that connects black triangles to Nazi flags is actually in Hundejahre, p. 153f, to be exact, and I had to look for it by hand because we have not yet made Hundejahre accessible through "Wordcruncher" or as a published word index. I hope that eventually the entire Grass opus can be made available in one electronic file accessible through "Wordcruncher". And I hope that my initial feeble efforts to use this tool will eventually lead me, and not just me, I hope, to a more profound understanding of Günter Grass.