A week ago, Günter Grass, one of the most important and controversial intellectuals of the old Federal Republic of Germany, died. In our fourth newsletter from the library, we would therefore like to draw your attention to some of the books by and about Günter Grass that you can find here. After all, Grass was not only a writer (and painter and sculptor), but also a politically active contemporary who repeatedly initiated social debates and wrote far more than just novels and poems. But read for yourself!
Günter Grass: Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland. Tagebuch 1990
(ZZF 20668)
In 2009, Günter Grass published his diary notes from the politically turbulent year 1990. As someone who lives and argues passionately in awareness of the historical moment, Grass provides insights into his everyday life as a publicly visible intellectual and contentious citizen. His diary is full of encounters, e.g. with Richard von Weizsäcker, Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, Elie Wiesel, Nelson Mandela, György Konrád, Nadine Gordimer, Jimmy Carter and François Mitterrand. Ideas for the "Unkenrufe" ("Prophecies of doom") and "Ein weites Feld" ("A wide field" are sketched out and tried out mentally. The diary thus became a narrative record of a time that moved many things.
Günter Grass: Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand. Ein deutsches Trauerspiel
(ZZF 16593)
On 17 June 1953, the construction workers of Berlin's Stalinallee took to the streets to demonstrate against increases in standards. Thus began a "German, i.e. rainy workers' revolution" – a spontaneous uprising for a specific reason, which some intellectuals felt was not thought through enough. For the "boss", for example, the main character of this drama. The latter, a director reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht, was rehearsing a play about revolution when reality, in the form of rebelling workers, invaded his theatre and put all theoretical ideas about the socialist education of the human race to the test.
Günter Grass: Mein Jahrhundert (ZZF 10503)
"Mein Jahrhundert" ("My century") is a book of stories. For each year of the 20th century, a story is told from a different perspective each time – one hundred stories that paint a portrait of this "age of extremes" (Hobsbawm). The various people to whom Günter Grass lends a voice are men and women from all social classes, old and young, left and right, conservative and progressive. However different they all are, they are united by the fact that they do not belong to the famous protagonists of contemporary history, but to the unnamed from the masses of the population.
Günter Grass: Ein weites Feld (ZZF 4172)
Berlin 1989, the time of reunification. Two old men, one tall and lean, the other short and stocky, walk along the Wall that has become porous. An unequal, comical couple: the office boy Theo Wuttke, called Fonty, and his "day and night shadow" Hoftaller, the eternal informer. Both of their memories span great distances, both are living after predecessors, both have a past that is as close and present as the events of the day...
The juxtaposition of unusual life stories and political trajectories creates a panorama of German history between the March Revolution of 1848 and the end of the GDR. Incidentally, when Fonty refers to himself and his colleagues as "We from the archive", he is referring to the Fontane Archive in Potsdam....
Günter Grass/Regine Hildebrandt: Schaden begrenzen oder auf die Füße treten : ein Gespräch (ZZF 1144)
The author Grass and the politician Hildebrandt got involved. They both wanted to verbally 'step on the toes' of others. In this conversation, they debate the mistakes of the Unification Treaty and their consequences and see democracy in danger. Their arguments invite discussion. This dialogue is therefore an exciting document of the political culture of the time.
Günter Grass: Deutscher Lastenausgleich. Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot. Reden und Gespräche (UB 2633)
The volume collects statements on the unification process up to the Extraordinary Party Congress of the SPD in December 1989.
Günter Grass: Ein Schnäppchen namens DDR. Letzte Reden vorm Glockengeläut
(UB 2632)
Following on from the volume "Deutscher Lastenausgleich", this volume offers collected speeches from 1990 by an intellectual disreputable as a "fellow without a fatherland": from a speech given in February at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing to the speech given in October in the Reichstag to the parliamentary groups of the Greens and Bündnis 90.
Heinrich Vormweg: Günter Grass. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten
(ZZF 4566)
Heinrich Vormweg first became aware of Günter Grass in 1955. Fascinated by the "Tin drum", the novella "Cat and mouse" and the novel "Dog years", he then met Günter Grass personally in West Berlin at the beginning of the 1960s. The two had a number of things in common: their age, their time in the Hitler Youth and as air force helpers, as well as their conscription to the Wehrmacht in the final days before the end of the war. From this perspective of collegial contemporaneity, the literary critic Vormweg turns mainly to the literary work of Günter Grass in his introductory monograph.
Fritz J. Raddatz: Günter Grass – unerbittliche Freunde ; ein Kritiker, ein Autor
(ZZF 15540)
Fritz J. Raddatz died a self-imposed death a few weeks before Grass. Since the 1970s, the critic Raddatz had accompanied the author Grass in his journalistic work, not as a writer of eulogies, but as someone who dealt with Grass' works relentlessly. Grass also described the friendship that gradually developed between himself and the critic as "relentless". In the last years of his life, the friends became estranged again, but still in 2003 Raddatz compiled a selection of his reviews, conversations and interpretations written over the course of 30 years to mark the Nobel Prize winner's 75th birthday.
Edition Text + Kritik: Günter Grass (ZZF 6920)
While still a student, the literary scholar Heinz Ludwig Arnold, who died in 2011, founded the journal for literature "text + kritik" in 1963, the first issue of which was dedicated to the writer Günter Grass. We hold the 7th revised edition with essays by Lothar Baier, Hans Mayer and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and others.
(22.04.2015)