MLR, 100.3, 2005 879 Erich Fried as a successful employee of the post-war BBC, who even had it written in his contract that he was allowed to write poetry during officehours. Lawrie credits the Corporation with giving Fried much-needed support during the early stages of his career. The subject of the BBC's post-war influence on the West German media is explored by Toby Thacker's research, showing how the wartime experience of using music for propaganda purposes influenced the practice of 'music control' in the British zone. Jens Briining's article goes even further and shows that the BBC was used as a model for re-establishing the radio services in Germany, while HansUlrich Wagner provides us with details ofthe radio careers of returning exiles in West Germany. However, there were also careers in the East German media which started with journalistic training at the wartime BBC: Kristin Rebien focuses on the most prominent example, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. In this way, the volume shows the continuing influence of the interrelationship between former exiles and media and institutional structures in both Britain and Germany. Both countries' academic systems would do well to acknowledge this influence and support further research. The last section of the volume is taken up by the memories of Lorle Louis-Hoffmann, Alfred Starkmann, Wladimir Ostrogorski, Peter B. Johnson, and Merete Blatz, all one-time employees of the BBC German-language Service during its almost sixtyyear existence, which ended in 1999. University of Sussex Andrea Hammel Aus zweierleiPerspektiven ...: Zur Rezeption der Danziger Trilogie von Gunter Grass in Polen und Schweden in denJahren ig$8-iggo. By Janina Gesche. (Stockholmer germanistische Forschungen, 61) Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. 2003.312 pp. SEK294. ISBN 91-22-0199i-x Janina Gesche enjoys two advantages over most other Germanists interested in Gunter Grass: she knows both Polish, her mother tongue, and Swedish, the lan? guage of the country where she has settled. With facility in the languages comes detailed knowledge of the literary relations of both countries with Germany. Gesche has exploited her position to write this dual case study of the reception of Grass's first three prose works in two of Germany's neighbours. The book is thorough, painstaking even, as itdeals mainly with thirtyyears of Polish and Swedish newspaper reviews and articles. Grass appears to have spawned no imitators among his fellow novelists in either country, in such stark contrast to the Anglo-Saxon world (see Henrik D. K. Engel's ultimately more rounded study, Die Prosa von Gunter Grass in Beziehung zur englischsprachigenLiteratur (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997)). There is, however, a major imbalance in Gesche's investigation. Whereas the his? tory of reactions to Grass in Poland, where his native Danzig now lies, is an important chapter in recent European cultural history, Grass in Sweden is not a subject which needs any elucidation. While in the model exponent of Scandinavian Social Democracy Die Blechtrommel,Katz undMaus, and Hundejahre were translated shortly after publication in German, then reviewed and bought by the reading public without any noteworthy side-effects, in Communist Poland Die Blechtrommel could not be officially published until 1983, although a translation had been ready since 1969. The novel offended the Soviet Union because of the shooting of Alfred Matzerath by a Red Army 'Kalmuck' and the rape of Lina Greffby several other Red Army soldiers, but it offended nationalist Poles farmore because of the apparently facetious account of the siege of the Polish Post Office on 1 September 1939. The son of the director of the Post Office threatened the publishers with legal action because Grass had used his father's real name. Grass himself, in contrast to some other German novelists such 880 Reviews as Siegfried Lenz, refused to alter passages of his text which caused offence. These all concerned Poland and things Polish, especially the firstmonth of the war, known to Polish schoolchildren as the heroic 'September'. What Grass's non-Polishreaders are unlikely to know is that the defence of the Danzig Post Office quickly entered na? tional mythology and that Grass was challenging the nationalists' narrative of recent Polish history by depicting Jan Bronski's last hours playing...