The German Genius

crying. This “underformed” morality would obsess Grass in the years that followed. 8
    Both Böll and Grass saw themselves as moral guardians in postwar Germany. 9 Both were involved politically with the peace movement, but the shine was rather taken off Grass’s role when it was revealed in 2006 that he had himself been a member of the Waffen-SS. 10 Not everyone accepted that it was simply a case of a misguided teenager “doing his duty.”
    Among his critics was the third of the triumvirate, Martin Walser (b. 1927), who was himself in the Wehrmacht and may have joined the Nazi Party during the war. Walser was a much wittier writer than the other two, with a caustic turn of phrase, but not so well known outside Germany. His dominant theme to begin with was the effects of the rat-race on middle-class employees ( Halbzeit [ Halftime ; 1960] and Der Einhorn [ The Unicorn ; 1966]), though later and more interestingly he explored the psychological consequences of living in a divided country (as in his novella Dorle und Wolf , translated as No Man’s Land ; 1987). Walser didn’t want to look back, not in public: the present-day problems of Germany were too pressing. His most well-known work in the English-speaking world is Ein fliehendes Pferd ( Runaway Horse ; 1978). 11
    M OURNING B ECOMES O EDIPUS
     
    Böll and Grass in particular, then, had at last begun to come to grips with the Third Reich, stimulating an appetite that would finally germinate in the 1960s and 1970s. But their collective achievement went wider than that. In the words of Keith Bullivant, “Gone at last was the ultimate concern with a transcendental world, gone the allegorical, mystical treatment of the great questions of life without real regard for those of the day.” 12
    By this time, however, none of them were young men and so they did not involve themselves with the student radicalism of the 1960s to anything like the same extent as, say, Max Frisch, Peter Schneider, and Peter Weiss. This younger generation was also much affected by the (Baader-Meinhof) terrorism of the early 1970s, mainly for the way in which it provoked (and therefore revealed) the still -authoritarian instincts of the government agencies. Schneider’s Lenz (1973) and Frisch’s Stiller (1964) in particular explore the authoritarian ground before the internalization of democratic values around 1968 referred to in the previous chapter. This culminated in the late 1970s in what became known as the “German autumn,” when the chief prosecutor, a high-ranking banker, and the head of the Federation of German Industry were all assassinated. The gap between the writers and the government widened in times of terrorism. Writers accused the state of restricting civic rights, and politicians repeated their claim that the writers were offering “mental support to anarchism.”
    But not all German literature can be snugly fitted into this pattern of “coming to terms with the past.” The critics Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Walter Jens both drew attention to the greater readiness, from about 1970 on, of German writers to be more aware politically—in the broadest sense (civil rights, U.S. nuclear missiles on German soil, secularization), important aspects of this “new realism” being an emphasis on language ( Sprachrealismus ), documentary narrative (concrete realism), and the emergence of the women’s movement in Germany, as elsewhere. Probably the most significant names here were Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) and Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946), both Austrian and both Catholic. In Die Klavierspielerin ( The Piano Player ; 1983), and in particular Lust (1989), Jelinek exposed the allegedly modern worlds of film and media where women are still treated in the same old way, as often as not as sex objects. 13 Jelinek’s style is deliberately deadpan in order to confront the reader, especially the male reader, with how pornography strikes women. 14
    The Vaterromane , or “father novels,” which faced the burden of the parental Nazi past in a kind of collective Oedipal revolt, formed a distinct subgenre of German literature in the late 1970s. The (delayed) timing of these works rather reinforces the Mitscherliches’ conclusions. 15
    T HE A LLIANCE OF W RITERS AND R EADERS IN THE GDR
     
    To the east was another Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republick (DDR) or German Democratic Republic (GDR), which underwent its own trajectory in which religious instruction was abolished