politics for the 99%

Published on Spiegel Onine International, by Sebastian Hammelehle, April 13, 2015 (Photo Gallery: Remembering Günter Grass).

As a writer, he helped define postwar German literature. As a political activist, he helped shape the nation’s conscience. For some 60 years, Günter Grass was one of the most influential figures in Germany (on de.wikipdia, and on en.wikipedia).  

It was the All Saints’ Day holiday weekend in 1958, and a fug of pipe and cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air at the Schwarzer Adler Inn in the Allgäu region of the German Alps, where legend has it that farmers gathered during the German Peasants’ War in the 16th century. Standing underneath the stag’s antlers hanging on the wall, Hans Werner Richter, president of the famed Gruppe 47 literary association, rang a cowbell. It was time for the assembled writers to quiet down and let the debut novelist seated to his right begin his reading.

As Richter later recalled, all it took was a few sentences for the room to be electrified. Grasping a thick wad of papers, the author with the walrus moustache read out loud two chapters of his book. The novelist was Günter Grass and the book was “The Tin Drum”. Thirty-one-years-old at the time, he had been a familiar presence at the Gruppe 47 meetings, but until that day in autumn, his talent had gone largely unnoticed. The reading changed everything. “(It) started a whirlwind,” says Richter. Siegfried Unseld, who went on to become the head of the prestigious Suhrkamp publishing company, urged Richter to give Grass the Gruppe 47 literature prize, which had last been awarded three years previously. There and then, the writers present began making phone calls and collecting funds — while Grass himself stood beaming at the bar and downing a homemade fruit brandy whenever Richter came up to him to tell him another 500 deutsche marks had been raised. Before too long, 5,000 deutsche marks had come together.

As Richter later recalled, all it took was a few sentences for the room to be electrified. Grasping a thick wad of papers, the author with the walrus moustache read out loud two chapters of his book. The novelist was Günter Grass and the book was “The Tin Drum”. Thirty-one-years-old at the time, he had been a familiar presence at the Gruppe 47 meetings, but until that day in autumn, his talent had gone largely unnoticed. The reading changed everything. “(It) started a whirlwind,” says Richter. Siegfried Unseld, who went on to become the head of the prestigious Suhrkamp publishing company, urged Richter to give Grass the Gruppe 47 literature prize, which had last been awarded three years previously. There and then, the writers present began making phone calls and collecting funds — while Grass himself stood beaming at the bar and downing a homemade fruit brandy whenever Richter came up to him to tell him another 500 deutsche marks had been raised. Before too long, 5,000 deutsche marks had come together.

Faust, Mother Courage, Oskar Matzerath: … //

… Eggs and Tomatoes: … //
… The Sum of My Characters: … //

… As Poor as a Church Mouse:

Grass was born on Oct. 16, 1927 in Danzig’s working class Langfuhr neighborhood. His father ran a grocery store and his mother, as Grass was fond of telling and mythologizing, was the offspring of Kashubians, a Slavic ethnic group. As a child, he grew up in a modest two-room apartment with a small kitchen and a toilet shared with other families on the landing. The children didn’t even have their own room in the apartment. “My sister and I each had a niche under the window sills of the living room. That’s where I put my books and my things,” he once said.

Although Grass studied sculpture and graphics at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, a famous art school in the city, from 1948 to 1952, following an apprenticeship in stone masonry, he still considered himself to be an autodidactic throughout his life. “I was an uneducated or only partially educated young man,” he would recall. “I quit school at the age of 15 and I couldn’t even spell properly when I began writing my first longer manuscript.” Indeed, the manuscript for “The Tin Drum” was full of spelling mistakes.

Grass never lost the mordant wit he developed fighting his own way to the top. One well-known German poet once called him “Mister Testosterone” behind his back. Culture writer Fritz J. Raddatz, who was a longtime friend of Grass’, wrote in his memoirs that “he always makes these imperial gestures that he wants to say something, and gets aggravated when others are talking rather than waiting for the sphinx to speak and solve all the world’s riddles.”

After many years spent living in Berlin’s Friedenau district and a sojourn in the Algarve, Portugal, Grass settled in Behlendorf in Schleswig-Holstein, where he could often be seen walking along the river smoking the obligatory pipe. He married his second wife in 1979 and was the father of six children from four relationships.

In 2010, Grass published his last major work “Grimm’s Words,” a biography of the Brothers Grimm and a sequel to his own autobiography in one. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he played down the significance of his Nobel prize and said that another award had been far more formative. “The Gruppe 47 prize for literature in 1958 meant more to me because at that point, I was as poor as a church mouse.”
Grass proved he was worthy of the prize. That promising young novelist went on to become a literary icon.

Günter Grass died in Lübeck on Monday at the age of 87.

(full text).

Links:

UK elections: Five things we learned from the Conservative manifesto, on Left Foot Forward, by James Bloodworth, April 14, 2015: What to expect from a Conservative government;

Ilargi: The American Consumer Will Never Be Back, on naked capitalism, by Lambert Strether, April 14, 2015;

Bolivia’s Voters Reaffirm ‘Process of Change’, but Issue Warnings to the Governing MAS, on The Bullet, Socialist Project’s E-Bulletin No. 1105, by Richard Fidler, April 14, 2015 (my comment: leftists must learn to make a difference between their critic of capitalism and their critic on what is needed/wanted from modernism, respectively desired by (an often corrupted) people … a big differnce, always moving, never fixed forever – Heidi);

Labour’s manifesto commits to a new industrial strategy, on Left Foot Forward, by Tony Burke, April 13, 2015: Miliband has promised a future Labour government will improve productivity through a new industrial strategy;

Eduardo Galeano – ¡Presente!, on New Politics, by Dan La Botz, April 13, 2015: Eduardo Galeano, the world-renowned leftist Uruguayan journalist and writer made famous with the publication in 1971 of his book;

The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, died today at the age of 74 in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he lived …
(book: on en.wikipedia, and on es.wikipedia: Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina;
- author: on es.wikipedia, and on en.wikipedia);

The Making of Hillary Clinton, on Counterpunch, by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, April 13, 2015:First in a three-part series: from Nixon Girl to Watergate;

The War on Yemen: Where Oil and Geopolitics Mix, on Global Research.ca (first on RT), by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, April 12, 2015;

Boston Marathon Bombings’ Guilty Verdict Exposed as a Gross Travesty of Justice, on Global Research.ca, by Joachim Hagopian, April 11, 2015;

Egypt: Regional transformations, on Al-Ahram weekly online, by Dina Ezzat, April 9, 2015: The early signs of a new regional order have been appearing through diplomatic and military developments this weekts;

SPIEGEL Interview with Slavoj Zizek: The Greatest Threat to Europe Is Its Inertia, on Spiegel Onine International, conducted by Romain Leick, March 31, 2015: Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek is one of Europe’s boldest intellectuals and also a self-avowed leftist. In a new work, he argues Europe shouldn’t be overly tolerant towards Islamism and that the Continent needs a ‘leading culture’ of Enlightenment … on en.wikipedia.