As I contemplate what I have prepared to discuss with you today, I realise that on the one hand it contains far too much plot summary, yet on the other it perhaps does not do enough to acquaint you with the works treated in order to convince you of the possible validity of my reading of those works. The problem is that I am still too close to my recent book, Understanding Günter Grass, and have tried to pack bits of the whole book into one brief lecture, which will probably have the effect of discouraging you from ever reading the actual book.

Oh, well. I hope what I intend to discuss will be useful for some of you anyway, for there is a certain class of writers, namely living writers, who present a special challenge to those of us who try to understand their works: many of them will simply not stop writing, thereby requiring us to read their latest works, to re-read in light of these all their former works, and to revise our views continuously about the whole oeuvre accordingly. (This is, of course, exactly what we should be doing with the works of dead artists as well.)

And I don't think I'm the only person who has found that it's impossible to do justice to all living Austrian, Swiss, or German authors, not to mention all the rest from all the other parts of the globe. We must divide up the work. So I will attempt to do today with Günter Grass what others must do for me with other important recent authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf, Siegfried Lenz, Sarah Kirsch, Martin Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, Gabriele Wohmann, etc. etc. all of which I have to one degree or another begun to read. So now to the matter at hand.

In Die Rättin (1986), a culminating tale in which he also suggests certain readings of many of his earlier works, Günter Grass brings back the apocalyptic hero of Die Blechtrommel to help trace the genesis of evil from the Third Reich to the present. He closely examines the mistakes and lies of the postwar period in Germany which he believes turned each part of a puppet state into the armed camp of its respective superpower, thus moving all humankind closer to nuclear destruction. Oskar's archetypal theme-song "The Great Pretender" is invoked (albeit in the plural "We are the Great Pretenders") and applied to those men Grass views as Hitler's postwar alter egos: Walter Ulbricht and Konrad Adenauer. Grass believes that Hitler's evil still lives on in a divided Germany, having become global in scope, and all the more threatening to humankind. But deep down, in the final analysis, the grotesquely pessimistic Grass is also a pragmatic optimist and makes some practical prescriptions for a more sane and decent world.

My paper will attempt to demonstrate this paradigm in his recent writings, and link it to earlier expressions of concern about the evil heritage of the past such as those involving the symbol of the Black Cook from Die Blechtrommel as well as the wicked cooks from the play of the same name, and show how Grass proposes--in Das Treffen in Telgte among other places--that writers and artists from both Germanies unite to begin to exorcise their evil heritage once and for all. Let me begin with The Rat, which appeared in 1986.

Written in large part during the Orwell year 1984, which was also the Chinese Year of the Rat, it is an anti-utopian nightmare. It is informed with an air of eschatology and doomsday, but also of irony and grotesque self-parody, in part because it is something of a swan song for Günter Grass himself, as he approached age sixty (in 1987). His previous works and their characters are here reunited and come full circle to their beginnings.

Okar, whose blue eyes still see through every fraud, we are told, now reappears in time for his sixtieth birthday. "Ist abermals die Zeit für ihn reif?" [DR 29] asks the narrator, who is very nearly identical with Grass. Oskar Matzerath-Bronski, as he now signs his name, and who can now almost hear the blackness of the Orwellian age growing ("Ist die Schwarze Köchin da? Ja! Ja! Ja!"), Oskar, as I said, is a collector of memorabilia and a specialist in the details of the era of Die Blechtrommel, the false fifties, as he calls them. Grass also makes him a film producer (a reference to Grass's own collaboration on the filming of the first 2/3rds of the novel with Volker Schlöndorff) and, in another act of self-irony, since he has been called "Der Pornograss," an erstwhile producer of pornographic videos, whom the narrator engages to make a silent movie about acid rain and the death of the forests.

Oskar decides for this film on a parody of fairy tales and of the Walt Disney style: "die Wahrheit heißt Donald Duck, und Mickey Mouse ist ihr Prophet!" [DR 87] Oskar [read also: Günter Grass] plans to bring together for this last, apocalyptic fairy tale all the figures from all the fairy tales [read also: from all Grass's previous works] to fight to save the forest [read: the world] from those monied interests, in league with corrupt church and government officials, who are destroying it. The Brothers Grimm will play the role of environmentalist ministers of the interior in opposition to an almost allegorical chancellor, Helmuth Kohl. (The Grimms are quite clearly based on members of Germany's Greens, who have been accused of living in the past, in a romantic, fairy-tale world.)

The chancellor's own children, here called Hansel and Gretel, who represent the young people of Germany, will desert his cause for that of the environment. In the process they will expose his attempts to hide the truth about the death of the forest from his constituency: they cut down a large painted backdrop portraying a healthy forest for television cameras, revealing the silent, dead forest [read: world] behind.

The magical "mirror, mirror, on the wall" will parallel Oskar's television and film screens. The witch, with her Niobe-like amber eyes will distribute magical seeds to regenerate the scorched earth and reclaim buildings, freeways, and airports for nature. (In Die Blechtrommel, you might recall, Niobe was a symbol of all the murderous evil of war, thus this also can be read as another portent of the total destruction of civilization.) In the process the witch will also illuminate the human tendency to seek out and dehumanize scapegoats--Jews, rats, witches, Japs--and burn them. Red Riding Hood's grandmother will be on hand to read aloud from the Grimms' monumental German dictionary all permutations of the word Angst.

Meanwhile, Oskar's own grandmother--such is the linkage here between narratives--Anna Koljaiczek, still living in Poland, is approaching her 107th birthday. She extends an invitation to Oskar and to all the other members of her far-flung family, all related Kashubian characters from earlier Grass works, including the Colchics of Chicago: apparently Joseph Koljaiczek did survive his swim under the raft of logs after all and was prevented only by his death (at the time of the Soviet invasion of Danzig in 1945) from becoming a US Senator.

Precisely because of his grasp of the past, it is also Oskar's gift to foresee the future. Even his firm is called Postfuturum, a reference to Grass's idea that the future is a function of the past, which he elsewhere refers to by the neologism Vergegenkunft. Oskar manages the amazing feat of making a video of the coming event before he leaves Düsseldorf. He and his chauffeur, his former male nurse Bruno Münsterberg of Die Blechtrommel, load his Mercedes with this prophetic video and other gifts, including exactly 130 of those plastic dwarves known as Schlümpfe, (Smurfs)--some playing red and white tin drums--and set out for Gdansk, where among other things Oskar will also pay a significant visit to the Polish Post Office, the site of the beginning of World War Two.

Tightly interwoven with these strands of narrative, all of which function as potential scripts for Oskar's films, is an account of five women, including the narrator's wife Damroka, an organist like Ute Grass and a transmogrification of Ulla Witzlaff of Der Butt, who "woman" an ancient boat (launched in the significant year 1900) named "Die Neue Ilsebill," which readers of Der Butt will recognize as the central female figure based on the book's central fairy-tale myth "Der Fischer und seine Fru."

Ostensibly they set out on a scientific expedition into the Baltic to study the link between pollution and the population explosion of jelly-fish. Along the way, however, Damroka secretly consults with the flounder and is led by him to Vineta, the site of a legendary sunken city. Closely resembling Danzig, but located off the mouth of the Vistula, Vineta had once been ruled by women, but fell into decline after 130 mysterious settlers from Hameln on the Weser river arrived in 1284 and began to oppose the matriarchy. Eventually the city was inundated by a great storm.

Yet another strand of narrative cum film script concerns a certain Lothar Malskat, a painter who in the fifties was convicted of art forgery after he confessed to having completely re-painted the ceilings in Gothic buildings, especially that of St. Mary's in Lübeck, rather than having merely restored the (almost nonexistent) originals. The case, which Oskar labels "three master forgers" or the "triumvirate of forgers" appeals to him because Malskat is, as Oskar had been, the Zeitgeist of a corrupt age, the guilty, yet by comparison almost innocent microscopic victim of fraudulent behavior on the part of entrepreneurs and high church and government officials eager to derive prestige and income from the Gothic monument.

Malskat is thus the symbolical vehicle, as Oskar had been, for bringing into focus those Grass considers the really great political forgers of the age, Hitler's alter egos Walter Ulbricht and Konrad Adenauer, architects of a fraudulent restoration of a militarized postwar Germany, BRD-DDR, albeit now in two opposing halves, each beholden to a larger, even more corrupt political "employer," the USSR and the USA respectively, hence his song: "We are the Great Pretenders." His film about Malskat and the false fifties will, he thinks, like Eddi Amsel's magical eyeglasses in Hundejahre, open the eyes, especially of young people, to the fraudulent nature of the era and of its legacy, the final global arms race.

Indirectly, Die Rättin reveals Ulbricht and Adenauer also to be "Die bösen Köche" of Grass's early play of that name, written during that critical cold-war period when the Adenauer administration agreed to allow its NATO ally, the United States, to arm the Bundeswehr with atomic weapons, and Ulbricht presided over similar nuclear deployments in the east by the Soviet Union in the name of the Warsaw Pact.

All these cooks are related in character to Grass's "schwarze Köchin" who casts her evil political and martial shadow over the events of Oskar's entire life, even when Axel and Nuchi et al cooked their repulsive soup and forced him to eat it with a spoon, an image linked to all Grass's evil cooks, including that of grandmother Matern in Hundejahre and that of Mestwina in Der Butt, in whose hands the spoon becomes the first murder weapon, all of which is echoed in the cooks in Grass's drawings, who are invariably menacing, standing invariably in association with gory, severed heads and bloodstained newspaper.

One of the groups of wicked cooks in its well-appointed kitchen under Chef Petri [Adenauer] represents the capitalistic West--serving men with black suits and blonde women. The other, the masses of cooks under Chef Kletterer [Ulbricht] has its roots in the proletarian world of the "Volksküchen" or "Groß- und Betriebsküchen" (words which clearly smack of the East German term for a collective enterprise: Volkseigener Betrieb).

The cooks compete for the recipe for a certain mysterious grey soup containing special ashes--clearly those from the death camps--and their foot race for the recipe at the end of the play is, mutatis mutandis, the arms race, which takes on a momentum of its own, causing governments to run for the sake of running. The mysterious Count, the previous owner of the recipe, is a Hitler figure, upon whose suicide and that of his girlfriend his evil legacy passes to his postwar heirs, in East and West, who will pursue each other relentlessly, each one hoping to become the sole heir of evil, each one pretending to be a white cook, pretending to provide for its people, but each one cooking up catastrophe instead.

To return to Die Rättin, the main strand of narrative concerns, as the title implies, a she-rat, which the narrator asks for and receives as a Christmas gift, a barb clearly aimed at Franz-Josef Strauss who, not long before, had made a reference to writers as "Ratten und Schmeißfliegen." Hundejahre, of course, particularly in those long passages parodying the language of Martin Heidegger, had portrayed the rat as a symbol for and simultaneously a victim of, bestialized humanity. The narrator of Die Rättin also recalls that Grass had early on used two speaking rats in his play Hochwasser to comment on human calamity.

And now the she-rat does the same. While the narrator circles the earth in a space capsule, the she-rat stands on a pile of human refuse, her nightmarish speech modelled on "Die Rede des toten Christus vom Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei" from Jean Paul's Siebenkäs, and says that the human race is gone, only its refuse survives. "Gut, daß sie weg sind!" [DR 32] she says, these humans who were "Sklavenhaltende Sklaven. Fromme Heuchler! Ausbeuter! ... Nagelten ihres Gottes einzigen Sohn. Segneten ihre Waffen. [DR 33] As the she-rat relates the end, the third stage of the three-stage World War, the big bang, Ultimo, as she calls it, the narrator sees the events happening before him on his video screen.

The she-rat begins her account well back in time, with the dinosaurs, that became extinct when rats learned to crack open their enormous eggs, and with Noah's flood, the first global calamity in which humans also faced extinction. She explains that Noah had refused to take rats on board his ark, so the rats saved themselves by digging deep tunnels and air chambers, stocking them well with food, plugging them tightly with the bodies of elderly rats, and waiting for the flood waters to subside. All their survival instincts and heightened powers of perception stem from this time, she says, hence rats unerringly know when to leave a doomed ship, for example. Now, sensing that the entire earth is doomed again, the rats dig deep underground shelters. In anticipation, some begin to make themselves immune to radioactivity by tunnelling under reactors and into radioactive waste.

The rats, like the dying trees in the forest, try to warn the humans that their world is heading for calamity. Large numbers of rats venture forth in mute protest demonstrations, as do other natural creatures such as the jelly fish, who sing an eerie Kyrie across the sea to lament the approaching end. Yet humans fail to realize what they are trying to say.

There are other warning signs such as the phenomenon of punkers and other modern-day followers of various pied pipers, who adopt pet rats and dye them zinc green--a color Grass had previously used to identify young anarchists like Vero Lewand in örtlich betäubt--to match their own dyed hair. Resembling the symbolical portraits of Oskar in the Art Academy in Düsseldorf from Die Blechtrommel, these are "Immerverschreckte Kinder, die einander die Blässe des Todes anschminkten, sich mit Leichengrün ahnungsvoll zeichneten. Selbst ihr Gelb, Ihr Orange waren auf Schimmel und Verwesung gestimmt" [DR 46].
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