Gunther Grass, the German novelist and 1999 Nobel Literature Laureate, fell terminally silent on Monday, aged 87. While he may not be a familiar figure in the Caribbean, as a bibliophile and European �migr�, I'm compelled for both literary and personal reasons to honour his life and work.
Born in 1927 to parents of Polish and German extraction in what was then the German city of Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, Grass was conscripted into the notorious Waffen SS in the last months of the Second World War, fighting Soviet Russian troops before being captured by the Americans. Although he only revealed his brief youthful Nazi past late in life, his literary oeuvre has been hailed as a significant part of Germany's postwar recovery–which besides economic rebuilding more importantly allowed the Germans to reflect on the horrors of Nazism and the collective guilt many felt but were unable to express.
Trained as a sculptor, Grass catapulted to fame with the first book in his famous Danzig trilogy -The Tin Drum, published in 1959. This allegorical picaresque novel mixed naturalistic realism with fantasy and can be viewed as a European magical realism text. The protagonist is the dwarf Oskar Matzerath, born with all his intellectual faculties intact, who at the age of three decides not to grow up, his faithful tin drum the symbol of his refusal.
Oskar's arrested development can be read as symbolic of Germany's postwar trauma, and his adventures a therapeutic review of the many issues a new generation of Germans would have to face in order to ensure the aberrations of the Nazis never reoccurred and the country could then move forward. Awarding Grass the Nobel in 1999, the Swedish Academy noted: "...it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction," while Germans acknowledged Grass as a worthy successor to their great poet Goethe.
I must have stumbled on The Tin Drum in my early teens, when I was devouring Kafka, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Dickens, Joyce and DH Lawrence and investigating my own confused Jewish origins with further readings of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Arthur Koestler. Alienated from my London and English roots, which seemed tenuous at best for me, I was trying like all teenagers to forge my own identity and to understand where I was really coming from.
Besides being a compulsive page-turner saturated with bizarre humour, The Tin Drum not only allowed me to explore my eastern European roots (my paternal grandmother was born in Warsaw and my paternal great grandfather had fled the same European Jewish Pale of Settlement, which extended from Poland into the part of Russia now known as Belarus) but also opened up a path for me to question my position on Germany. It was impossible for me to disassociate myself from a Final Solution aimed at exterminating my blood.
Shortly after graduating from Oxford the serendipitous opportunity presented itself for me to live and work in Germany. Bored with the laissez-faire/trippy hippy lifestyle of my fellow ex-students in what felt increasingly like a toytown and not wishing to return to London, a brief visit to Hamburg convinced me I'd be better off working with the youth organisation Release.
Founded in London to advise young people with drug convictions the German sister organisation was far more proactive, setting up therapeutic communes to rehabilitate young drug abusers. I signed on as a counselor cum Communications facilitator cum music therapist, because after three years of intense reading I yearned for action. There was the further incentive of being on the ground in the same country which had attempted to exterminate the Jews, the same country where my father had spent some of his early adulthood as a prisoner of war.
In many respects, my time on the famous Luneberg Heide in Lower Saxony, a famous medieval witches heath, was a better introduction to the Enigma of Survival than the postgrad MA in Linguistics at Berkeley California I'd been contemplating as my alternative.
I didn't solve my Enigma of Survival in Germany, nor indeed on my unwilling return to London. I should have taken note of the huge sense of relief at getting out of Europe I'd felt one long summer vacation when I'd hitched round Morocco. It was not till much later after a lost decade in London that I arrived in the Caribbean and stepped out of the plane into a sweltering Trinidadian green night, that I was able to leave much of my unwanted baggage behind.
Besides the relief and a sense of coming home there was the thrill of realising that after a long sleep I was awaking to my real life. Some years later in Martinique I met my brother from Odessa, the offspring of an SS officer and his Jewish wife. One of our shared pleasures was The Tin Drum, whose rhythms I've learned to discern in Trini pan and Vodou drums, something maybe even Gunther Grass cannot have envisaged.