Günter Grass once remarked that the narrators in his first three books all ‘write out of guilt—out of suppressed guilt, out of ironised guilt, out of a histrionic craving for guilt, a need for guilt.’ He might have been speaking about himself, and about his generation of writers for whom Germany’s Holocaust guilt became a central concern. The literature of the so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung—or ‘coming to terms with the past’—laid the foundation for the German republic’s memory culture: a national narrative determined to stare historic guilt in the face.
This is a narrative that international commentators seem to take for granted. Domestic opinion, by contrast, is becoming more ambivalent. The hard-right Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) Björn Höcke, who in September led the party to victory in the state of Thuringia, has described Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial as a ‘monument of shame’—an unambiguous attack on the way the country has traditionally remembered its past. Against this dissent, President Frank Walter-Steinmeier is uncompromising: ‘We must keep the memory [of the Holocaust] alive, so that what happened does not happen again.’ The emerging battle-lines criss-cross familiar culture-war territory: national identity, national narratives, and national pride.
While notionally a debate about history, the struggle for legitimacy of contesting national narratives can be understood as an aesthetic struggle. The extraordinary impact of Grass’ novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) is a case in point. It was not the scientistic analysis of a historian nor the reasoned exposition of a philosopher that provided the outstanding response to the Schuldfrage, the ‘question of [German] guilt’. It was a novelist. This raises the question: which particular narrative techniques from Grass’ work—described as ‘the defining novel of the 20th century’—enable critical engagement with the contested past? And why does Grass’ approach not have the same rhetorical power it once did?
To answer these questions, it is necessary to briefly consider how narratives can inform identity formation. National identity, understood as a modern phenomenon, first became narrativised in the nineteenth century works of Romantic historians. According to Hayden White, the likes of Thomas Carlyle and Jules Michelet sought in their histories to achieve ‘the kind of inspiration […] that an older aesthetics called sublime’—not so different from their novelistic contemporaries. This is especially clear, for example, in the more self-indulgent passages of Michelet’s History of France, where Joan of Arc is elevated to a mythic personification of the French people: ‘In her there at once appeared the Virgin… and, already, country.’ This we might consider ‘heroic’ narrativisation: the nation is glorified as the sum of its people’s noble deeds and presented for the reader to identify with.
But why should history be narrativised in the first place? According to White, the writing of history ‘arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary.’ This ‘coherence, integrity, fullness and closure’ is for White the very essence of ‘history’; it is precisely these characteristics that distinguish it from mediaeval annals, which proceed aimlessly and break off without warning. Historiography ought therefore be understood as the creative deployment of narrative—to use White’s terminology, emplotment—sharing its formal characteristics with the novel.
This is a sharp break from the more conservative understanding of ‘history’ as the systematic and scientistic analysis of real facts in the past. Indeed, knowledge of history’s inescapable craftedness undermines ‘heroic’ narrativisation, because ‘facts in the past’ are instead read as rhetorical devices in a narrative and assessed accordingly. All that is left is ‘ironic’ narrative, perpetually self-critical, incapable of satisfying closure.
White’s theory is significant in considering the narratology of Die Blechtrommel, precisely because the novel’s ‘historiography’ resembles his own. Three-year-old Oskar Matzerath, born in the short-lived Free City of Danzig to a Polish-German family, decides to stop growing in order to escape the petit-bourgeois fate of running his father’s grocery store. Living his life as an adult with an infant’s body, he observes the rise of Nazism in the city from a detached perspective, witnesses Kristallnacht, serves in a theatre troupe in Normandy, is expelled with his few surviving family members, and is finally sectioned to an asylum in Düsseldorf, all the while beating perpetually on a tin drum.
Grass’s narrator is a ‘Whitean’ historian on three counts. Firstly, historiographic convention tends towards occlusion of the narrative voice, so as to give an impression of scientific neutrality. Oskar, by contrast, revels in the subjective. In the novel, political developments are reduced to peripheral annoyances alongside Oskar’s bizarre preoccupations. In one memorable scene, he dashes through the first engagement of WWII to procure a new tin drum. If for White the historian is always the creator of an imagined coherent history, then Grass simply brings the creative agency of his creator to the fore.
Relatedly, traditional historical works (realist fiction as much as history) seek to conceal the ‘craftedness’ of their narrative, which White calls ‘the embarrassment of plot’. Grass’s narrative instead relishes its own artifice. ‘You can begin a story in the middle and create confusion by striking out boldly, backward and forward […]’ Oskar muses. ‘You can be modern, put aside all mention of time and distance […]’. This narrative potential takes a more troubling turn as the narrator adeptly lies about his responsibility for the death of his uncle, and then reveals this deceit in a flash of guilt. But Oskar’s dishonesty has a critical edge; by fessing-up, he implicitly calls into question the truth value of traditional historical narrative which doesn’t engage in self-interrogation. Again, the ‘ironic’ mode of narrative is invoked—one that calls the reader to handle the text with scepticism.
Finally, the narrative voice in the novel is incessantly satirising, as the naivete and emotional stuntedness of Oskar’s worldview renders the violence of the Nazi regime farcical. The deaths of the narrator’s entire extended family—not least his mother who, it is widely agreed, killed herself because she could bear no longer the perpetual drumming of her son—are apparently received without great distress. Yet moments of clarity reveal that Oskar is conscious of the guilt he bears; his emotional numbness can be understood as a coping mechanism. If Oskar is to be read as a personification of the German nation, then it is a far cry from the romanticism of Michelet’s Joan of Arc. But Grass intends Oskar to personify post-war Germans on a spiritual level: as stunted, infantilised people, unable to come to terms with the destruction of the near past.
Northrop Frye argued that irony is characterised by the disappearance of the heroic. The collapse of the Nazi metanarrative—the One-Thousand Year Reich—left a gaping void in German national identity and a general cynicism of any would-be replacement. Grass’s effort is effective because it harnesses the ironic rhetorical mode of the era—resonant with a population whose faith in heroism had been dashed by the exposure to Nazi crimes. That the historical narrative epitomised in The Tin Drum should lose its force after three generations is hardly surprising. The protest which critics of Vergangheitsbewältigung raise is precisely that personal interrogation of guilt is no longer relevant when the active historical agents have ceased to represent a major portion of German society. There is a new impulse towards the heroic, a frustration with the ironic mode which, by White’s argument, ‘as the basis of a world view, […] tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions.’ This, surely, is the root of the AfD’s contention with the Berlin Holocaust Memorial: it fosters the kind of self-critical memory culture that undermines the heroic understanding of history. And their contention is popular: when the guilt of the past is not so keenly felt, then the uses of irony may be not so clearly recognised.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.