Rachel Seiffert

Cuckoo in the nest

He was always a controversial figure, rubbing salt in the wounds of his fellow Germans. Though nothing quite matched his brilliant first novel, The Tin Drum, Of All That Ends is a fine swansong

‘Light as a feather, free as a bird.’ Günter Grass starts this final volume of short prose, poetry and sketches with a late and unexpected reawakening of his creative urge. After peevish old age had brought on such despondency that ‘neither lines of ink nor strings of words flowed from his hand’, he was gripped — out of the blue, and to his evident relish — by the impulse to ‘unleash the dog with no sense of shame. Become this or that. Lose my way on a single-minded quest.’

It makes for an invigorating opening: a three-paragraph paean to the unruly and questioning spirit which drove Grass’s writing throughout his hugely productive career.

He established himself from the first as a darkly comic force, his 1959 masterpiece The Tin Drum exposing the failures of his parents’ generation with a shrewd and deft storytelling energy. While much of Germany was still licking its wounds, Grass preferred to rub salt in them — and laugh while he was at it. Readers born after the Third Reich were drawn in their thousands to this boldness, the following two volumes of his Danzig trilogy confirming him as the moral compass for a generation of German left-wingers.

An inveterate attention-seeker and political animal, Grass made the most of this status, aligning himself closely with post-1968 reformers; for a time, Willy Brandt, another great idol of the post-Nazi generation, was rarely seen without Grass at his side. By the late 1970s, Grass’s books were publishing events, with enormous first print runs. But while he was beloved of the left, he was never beholden to it, or to anyone. He took aim wherever he saw fit, enraging feminists with his depiction of women in The Flounder (1977); speaking out against reunification in 1990, and the haste and the presumption with which it was conducted; and, in 2012, getting himself banned from Israel over a poem.

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