(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The great beast in German literature, Günter Grass – the fabulous, demanding, debatable and always contentious poet – has died in Lübeck after a short illness, and has closed a door behind him. He has left behind a large piece of literary history. Even I would like to remind my colleague and friend, Günter.
This: The fact that Grass grew so old, 87 years, contributed to his position. He was a living connection back to a time that we will soon have no living memory of. Sitting with him and hearing him tell, or read his books was a kind of adventure. But no good adventure. It was brutal, historical reality he told. He told this tale of political slumber and crude evil. And he told it from a German – and his own Polish-German – stand.
I had it adventurous luck getting to know Günter Grass. Then he was already an aging man. Grass was to read and tell from his book in Oslo this year 2000 – the year after the Nobel Prize My century. I was asked by Janneken Øverland in Gyldendal if I could give an introduction. Rarely have I been so nervous about any assignment. Grass didn't just look so gay in the pictures, with the walrus bark and all – he was to me a kind of literary idol in line with Hemingway and Thomas Mann. sensation novel Blikktrommen (1959), one of life's most obsessive reader experiences, was already a man's age back, and was published six years before I was born – that is, in the classic era. Just that the author was still alive. In addition, I was to hold this introduction in German, in the presence of the undisputed champion of the German language, a linguistic championship nobody, even his most ardent critics, ever professed the Nobel Prize winner.
Sandwich meeting before the event: Grass turned out to be a short-grown man, even smaller than me. But powerful. So I wasn't very reassured. He looked angry and black-haired. I knew he was an educated stonecutter. Also a dreaded debater. He greeted the mutt. We spoke in one-syllable words. It did not promise well. The auditorium in the cramped University Library opened as an abyss in front of us, and I left, nauseated with anxiety.
At one point in the reading of the words I had written, over and over again, and which seemed so inadequate, I ventured a brief glance in the direction of the Great Beast. He must have liked what I said anyway, because he smiled.
Then he read for himself, and I have never heard of any better reader. He could have been an actor too. He slipped effortlessly in and out of roles, voices, voices and moods. From poetic high language to dialect, from slang to political gibberish jargon. He then recounted: All the sentences he wrote – and he wrote them by hand (with a handwriting only a select few could decipher) – must also be able to be said. He told them, pronounced them, over and over again, until they were right.
"This young man is going to sit here, next to me," Grass said during the reception afterwards, when the young man wanted to circulate a little and let others go. I sat down. "You must call me Günter," he said. "Yes," I said.
That night he would not go home. He quarreled with the German ambassador – they disagreed on how the reunification of the German states had taken place, or should have taken place, one of Grass' major topics – and then, after the ambassador had abstained with some coolness, he would talk to «the young». It was late, it became more and more grinning in Hotell Continental's premises, it was even later, and Janneken Øverland looked worried at the butler. He gallantly parried: "You can see that we are not closing for you tonight, Mrs. Øverland."
Finally – after we had talked through much of the world literature – he insisted that I follow him to his own hotel, Bristol. Do not talk about anything else. He put his arm in mine. So there we went, arm in arm, along Karl Johan, and chatted in the autumn night. I thought: About someone, when you were seventeen, Erik, when you read Blikktrommen for the first time, had told you that when you are twice as old as you are now, you should go and dangle along Karl Johan arm in arm with just Günter Grass – then you would have said: Jah! And in the other arm, of course, I have John Steinbeck!
This was the beginning of a friendship. A friendship and a togetherness on many occasions, for which I can hardly thank enough. His collegiality and attention was overwhelming. His personal care and insight as well. Günter had a strange ability to "read" his fellow human beings. For example, he knew I was going to divorce long before I knew it. He saw my problems and situation in a way I myself did not understand them. He looked straight through one. He read everything I wrote, and had comments and encouragements, but also admonitions and rebukes, quite harsh.
He absolutely feared agreement. It reminded him of something unpleasant, this that had put the world to ashes.
I will remember him as one of the friendliest and warmest people I have ever met. The walrus beard actually hid a good-natured grandfather smile. The bushy eyebrows a pair of kind eyes, full of unstoppable laughter. He was constantly preoccupied with so much more than literature and the many debates: with all his friends, with life, with society, with reality, with the sensuality of reality. This is also how many have experienced Günter Grass, as a gentle and friendly and gracious being. That in his old age he gathered young German writers every year for meetings, where they discussed their texts with him and with each other in a closed forum, shows a craftsman collegiality that sprang from a basic and never failing care for all creative and formative people.
He himself was creative and formative on so many levels. He was as much a visual artist as a writer; especially his sculptures are unique, plastic masterpieces.
And here is what I come to the statement that he repeated so often, also to others than me: "I know one thing, and that is that I live only by chance." And he could justify it quite concretely. He had seen soldiers of the same age, only boys, being torn to pieces, literally, before his eyes, by grenade fire in the last weeks of the war. He survived. By coincidence. And knew: I live only by this brutal coincidence.
He felt, I think, that it obliged him. To create, tireless. If he did not write, he drew. If he did not draw, he erased. If he did not delete, he painted. And he did not paint, he modeled. In all, there was an obligation to remember, see, sense, reproduce. There was a gratitude in it too, for this coincidence that had let him live, and for life itself. He was a seemingly inexhaustible source of creativity and joy. He was also a gifted and passionate cook. Happy to see people around him, including six children and countless grandchildren, his beloved Ute, and members of a group of friends who filled the Stadsteateret in Lübeck to the last place during the memorial ceremony on May 10, thousands in number, and yet there could be many multi. Food, wine, schnapps, pipe tobacco, friends: if only these necessities of life were in place, he would never go to bed, at least not until those 40 and 50 years younger had to stretch their arms. Still, it carried on in the early hours of the morning, into the studio or the office, to create further with renewed, incomprehensible energy. This is how he kept going, until the day before he died.
It was brutal, historical reality he told about.
His and my parents' generation had been enemies. Germany, and everything that was German, were therefore inherited hate objects. Günter Grass told all the rest of us, who were not Germans and who had not experienced this time, about this period in the country's history, seen from within. And he himself bore witness that there also was one other Germany. He was very much involved in building up this other Germany, after the war, and helping to shape it. Always combative, rarely agreeing – and if he agreed, he usually only partially agreed. This became almost a method: he feared absolute agreement. It reminded him of something unpleasant, this that had put the world to ashes.
The dumbest thing I know, he said, these are films in which they portray the Nazis as uncivilized howler monkeys and lunatics, screaming hysterics with foam on their mouths. That was not how they were. That was exactly what was scary. The leading Nazis in the local community were often civilized, educated, nice people. It could be teachers, academics, youth leaders, merchants, solid and decent people, who all, in fact, agreed with each other on one big issue.
That his own role in the last months of the war, as a soldier in the SS, was problematized – he could live with that. He could also live with being criticized for not having said this before, not before in his book When the onion is peeled; he could counter or explain it. But to be hanged almost as a war criminal in the tabloids, it went noticeably towards him. He had been what would today be called a child soldier. But the harsh criticism and attacks did not prevent him from continuing to express his opinion on things in time, which then created further uproar. There could be a sigh of relief: It is strange, he could say, that there can never be peace, no matter what I do or say! He longed in many ways for a reconciliation with his critics, felt rightly misunderstood or over-interpreted, emphasized that he was a man who did not want anyone to hurt, but only said what he meant and tried to be honest, but just this, this . . . it was felt really shit. "You must take it as a sign that you are not yet exclusively a monument that everyone admires," I told him on such an occasion, "but that you are still boiling your minds." He chewed on it a little. Sent some clouds of smoke up from the chimney. Well, he said. Jojo. It's probably not so bad of such an old man after all.
He liked to come to Norway and to the other Nordic countries, and was well informed about Norwegian literature – not only in the present, but also in the past. Johan Bojers The last Viking was one of his favorite books as a boy. The title of his autobiographical work When the onion is peeled is a point to Peer Gynt: As is well known, the onion has no core, which Peer discovers. "There was an unstoppable amount of teams then? / Is not the core coming soon for a day? / No God, if it does, to the innermost interior / is everything layered, only smaller and smaller! »
anyway: There was a core in him. That had to be it. Anyone who came in contact with Günter noticed this core. Its golden warmth shone through everything he said, all the great things he did and created.
Fosnes Hansen is an author.
