Gunter Grass and the Artist in History

Abstract

With the rise of Nazism, the German artist became dramatically implicated in his historical milieu. This implication is one of the chief concerns of the works of Giinter Grass; the artist-heroes of his novels find themselves in difficult and finally contradictory positions vis-a-vis their contemporary society, so that they typically have to engage in a series of disguises or changes of identity in order to survive. From one standpoint this is simply a variation on the familiar theme of the moder artist without an identity; at the same time, the cliche was made more pointed and even grotesque by the impact of Nazi history. More important, however, is that Grass is writing in the tradition of the Kiinstlerand Bildungsroman and, more specifically, in the wake of Thomas Mann; as such, he is very aware of how the artist has been used symbolically, particularly in Doktor Faustus, as a means of voicing and representing the essential forces at work in German history and culture. As in the traditional Kiinstlerand Bildungsroman, the artistic careers of Oskar in Die Blechtrommel and Amsel in Hundejahre interact with and symbolically epitomize the circumstances and the structure of German history and culture; at the same time, however, Grass has given new dimensions to this interaction and symbolic relationship. Oskar's relationship to his historical milieu is exceedingly difficult to define. At one extreme, he is the kind of person whom the Nazis persecuted ruthlessly because of his physical deformity and counterfeited mental retardation; indeed, he is threatened once explicitly with such persecution,l and the possibility of his extermination is always in