In response to the rising popularity of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) in the 1960s, the novelist, poet, and artist Günter Grass (1927–2015) added yet another label to his repertoire: public intellectual. In this role, Grass became an avid campaigner for Willy Brandt, giving 52 speeches on Brandt’s behalf in 1969 alone.1 He remained a public intellectual for the rest of his life, dramatically regaining national prominence in 1990 when he declared his opposition to German reunification. Recent PhD graduate and political scientist, Friederike Stausberg’s impressive new volume, “Günter Grass und die Berliner Republik. Eine biografische Fallstudie über die kommunikative Macht von Intellektuellen”, takes this period of Grass’s career as a starting point for an ambitious research project, highlighting his importance to the German public.

In three introductory chapters on her perspective (Fallauswahl), theory and methods, Stausberg differentiates her work from existing Grass scholarship in two major ways: Firstly, she does not focus on Grass’s novels and their content, so much as the media and political response to his novels; secondly, she employs statistical analysis to empirically gauge Grass’s influence over policy in his capacity as a public intellectual. Regarding the latter question, Stausberg finds Grass’s direct influence over policy somewhat lacking. In the book’s final chapter, she demonstrates that Grass’s influence on specific questions of German Kulturpolitik and Geschichtspolitik remained much stronger than in other areas, such as foreign, domestic and asylum politics. On German reunification, Grass was able to shape the “structure” of the debate on the topic, but he did not achieve the same influence on policy or the shared “meaning” of the event (p. 522). Stausberg gives a fascinating and important reason for his failure on these fronts: Grass’s connection to the “inner circle” of left-wing German political parties and figures like Gerhard Schröder and Antje Vollmer ironically prevented him from being as vocal about these topics as he could or should have been, precisely due to his proximity to prominent politicians (p. 10).

Stausberg demonstrates that, despite his break with Brandt over the question of German reunification in 1990, Grass remained an incredibly influential figure in political discussions, but lacked the “near-papal status”2 over German writing he possessed at the beginning of the 1990s, or even in the mid-2000s after the publication of his novel “Im Krebsgang” (p. 487). By his death in 2015, Grass’s influence had waned significantly, partially due to his 2006 revelation that, as a youth, he was a member of the Waffen-SS and his controversial 2012 poem, “Was gesagt werden muss.” However, Stausberg convincingly argues that Grass’s proximity to German political figures worsened the situation. His historical connection to Brandt and his staunch advocacy for the “Red-Green” Coalition of 1998 provided the then-right-wing Merkel government with an opportunity to part ways with the left-wing writer and intellectual, especially after his Waffen-SS confession.

Stausberg’s volume delves into the politics of the media landscape and competition over “the discourse.” While she argues that Grass remained a “Wortführer,” he could not always remain “in the spotlight.” Her empirical research establishes a pattern. During discourse on especially fraught topics like German reunification or German guilt over the Holocaust, Grass would enter the fray with an essay or speech and would later follow up his discussion with a novel. Most notably, Grass performed this feat with his essay “Schreiben nach Auschwitz” in 1990, followed five years later by his “post-unification novel,” “Ein weites Feld”. However, Stausberg demonstrates that Grass’s influence had started to wane even before his SS confession in 2006. For instance, only 169 articles were written about Grass on asylum politics, 285 on his support and reaction to Gerhard Schröder, and 556 on the forced displacement of Volksdeutsche at the end of World War II. While interest in Grass began to rise again after the publication of “Im Krebsgang” in 2002 and his SS confession (497 and 1,090 articles respectively), later issues like his thoughts on Israel and his poem on the topic, “Was gesagt werden muss,” produced only 647 articles (p. 120). Stausberg elaborates that by September 2006, just one month after Grass’s SS confession, the media fell silent about his autobiography, “Beim Häuten der Zwiebel” (p. 487). In her conclusion, she also argues that the advent of social media has dramatically altered the form and, therefore, the content of written output from public intellectuals: namely, that the “influencer” has come to replace the public intellectual writer (p. 526). To wit, Hilmar Klute writes in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” following Grass’s death in 2015 and the passing of Martin Walser in 2023, that “Die Zeit der Großschriftsteller ist vorbei, die Gründe kennt jeder, der einen Twitteraccount besitzt.” / “The time of the great writers is over, and anyone with a Twitter account knows why.”3

This book does a great service to Grass scholarship by consolidating a significant number of media reactions, interviews, reviews, and coverage of Grass in a legible and accessible format. In addition to her useful statistical research, Stausberg highlights reactions to Grass’s novels and opinions in painstaking detail. The acknowledgments and some of the materials cited include personal interviews and conversations with people close to Grass, such as his assistant and the executor of his artistic archive, Hilke Ohsoling, and the director of the Günter Grass-Haus in Lübeck, Jörg-Philipp Thomsa. Stausberg also completed archival work at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Indeed, this book leaves few stones unturned in examining Grass’s media output from 1989 to 2015. However, Stausberg’s attention to detail sometimes diminishes her own voice, making it difficult to tell until the book’s conclusion what her opinion of Grass’s importance in the current fraught German political landscape is.

Stausberg ends her lengthy book by evoking Grass’s concepts of Vergegenkunft and the “happy stoneroller” (fröhlicher Steinewälzer), a term Grass uses in a 1985 interview with L’80, referencing Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” (p. 514).4 To Grass, the true political meaning of Camus’s Sisyphus involves seeing his stone as a metaphor for humanity’s aspirations, fears, and history and keeping this stone away from ideological endpoints or political subterfuge. However, in another interview, Grass discusses Camus’s Sisyphus with the German novelist Siegfried Lenz in 1982. The latter’s reaction to Grass’s reading of Camus may provide a possible avenue for Stausberg’s future research (and Grass studies). Lenz disagrees with Grass, arguing that in Camus’s Sisyphus, the titular stoneroller’s moment of happiness involves glancing back at the stone when it rolls downhill, responding with mirthful scorn at the gods for punishing him with infinite drudgery.5 In an age of political turmoil with the return of Donald Trump to national politics in the United States and the rising popularity of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, is merely “keeping the stone” a viable strategy? If people step forward with a political response, should it be one of scorn, or perhaps one of righteous anger? These questions lead to another: If the work of public intellectuals possesses a rather weak “direct causal effect” (p. 514) on politics, as Stausberg contends, is the Sisyphean response sufficient, given the crisis? Perhaps not. However, Friederike Stausberg finds an opening for further discussion, quoting Günter Grass when comforting Antje Vollmer in early 1990 (p. 150): “Wir haben wenigstens gekämpft für das was wir wollten.” / “At least we fought for what we wanted.”

Notes:
1 Jörg-Philipp Thomsa / Stefanie Wiech (eds.), Ein Bürger für Brandt. Der politische Grass, Lübeck 2008.
2 A Final Drumbeat, in: The Economist, 13.04.2015, https://www.economist.com/europe/2015/04/13/a-final-drumbeat (31.01.2024).
3 Hilmar Klute, Die Mahner, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25.08.2023. Although, it must be mentioned that Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to the “X Platform” has seen a reduction in the site’s reputation and active user base. See: Andrew Hutchinson, New Report Suggests X Usage Is Declining Amid Various App Changes, in: Social Media Today, 20.10.2023, https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-report-suggests-x-usage-declining-amid-various-changes-app/697409/ (31.01.2024).
4 See Günter Grass, Sisyphos und der Traum vom Gelingen. Interview by Oskar Negt, Johano Strasser, and Horst Wernicke. June 1985, in: Gespräche 1958–2015. Ausgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Timm Niklas Pietsch, Göttingen 2019, p. 337.
5 Günter Grass, Phantasie als Existenznotwendigkeit. Interview by Siegfried Lenz. January 1981, in: Gespräche 1958–2015, p. 272.