The German Genius

and/or prisoners of war, were, among other things, hindered by the American obsession with establishing collective guilt. In some ways, this was another straitjacket.
    As the Mitscherliches also showed, Germany—both Germanies—tried hard to “shrug off” their old identities and aligned themselves instead with the victors, the Soviet Union or America (as indeed did Japan). They both embarked on “a mindless labor” of reconstruction, which created in the West Konrad Adenauer’s “economic miracle” and, in the East, “the most successful economy of the Soviet bloc.” 4
    In these confused circumstances, three authors emerged who were not especially young (all being “Forty-fivers,” members of the skeptical generation), but who were the first to come to grips with the immediate German past in the postwar world.
    First came a series of warnings and protests from Heinrich Böll (1917–85). Born in Cologne and wounded four times in the war, Böll felt the moral failures of the Nazi years very keenly (he resisted joining the Hitler Youth), and he devoted much energy to chronicling the chaos and brutality, the black market, the hunger, the homelessness. In Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa… ( Traveller, if You Come to Spa ; 1950), a fatally wounded schoolboy-soldier is taken to an emergency operating theater, which turns out to be the very school he had left only six months before. There, amid the rubble of destruction, he recognizes a Greek epigram scrawled on a blackboard in his own handwriting. It is not just his death we are being shown, but that of Bildung too. 5
    Böll’s main warning to his fellow Germans was that “affluence may bring forgetfulness.” In books that included Billard um halb zehn ( Billiards at Half Past Nine ; 1959), and Ansichten eines Clowns ( Views of a Clown ; 1963), he explored how the Adenauer doctrine of “business as usual” led to morally damaging clashes within families, with the younger generation set against the older. This conflict would be reinforced later on in the raft of Vaterromane , the so-called father novels of the late 1970s.
    Böll’s work culminated in Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann ( The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead ; 1974), in which he attacked the Axel Springer press for advocating authoritarian tactics by the government security services against students and left-wingers who, they felt, were “preparing the way mentally” for the terrorists who so disfigured Germany in the 1970s. 6 Certainly, Böll’s books do appear to dwell on the pathologies of capitalism, and for this reason his work was always very popular in Eastern Europe. Böll, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, gave sanctuary to Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Steve Crawshaw says Katharina Blum and the film that was made of it were a turning point, after which the silence on talking about the past, and the fact that many ex-Nazis were still in positions of power, was at last overcome. * (This was already 1974, reinforcing the Mitscherliches’ argument.)
    Günter Grass (b. 1927), the second of the triumvirate, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, is best known for Die Blechtrommel ( The Tin Drum ; 1959), part of what is sometimes called his Danzig Trilogy, completed by Katz und Maus ( Cat and Mouse ; 1961), and Hundejahre ( Dog Years ; 1963), all dealing with the rise of Nazism in and around Danzig. On the surface, The Tin Drum follows the life of Oskar Matzerath, who decides at the age of three to stop growing and then proceeds to drift through life armed only with a tin drum. Nothing seems to touch him in any way, not even the most farcical and terrible absurdities of Hitler’s Reich, although he does end his days in a mental asylum, where he composes his memoirs. 7 Underneath, however, the book is a satire on what Grass sees as the self-righteous (priggish) tradition of the Bildungsroman. The book achieves its effect stylistically by contrasting the childlike understanding revealed in the narrative with Grass’s super-sophisticated language, intended as a metaphor for Germany’s postwar predicament: technical virtuosity alongside an underformed morality. One scene describes a fashionable restaurant that only serves onions. People relish the onions so that, in the “tearless [twentieth] century” they may experience