Günter Grass's Tribute to Uwe Johnson

The friendship between Gunter Grass and Uwe Johnson was a significant factor in their lives and, in regard to Grass, in his work. The high esteem Grass accorded his fellow novelist and close friend has been aptly demonstrated by Grass's having listed in Too Far Afield (2000), the translation of his earlier novel Ein weites Feld (1995), the date of Johnson's death as a historic event in the year 1984. It can readily be assumed that Grass prefaced this English version with a list of important political and literary happenings in Germany because he was certain that its readers would have little ready knowledge of them. However, if these readers were acquainted with Grass's previous works, they would at least be prepared for the length and complexity of the text that indeed constitutes ein weites Feld. (1) The close relationship between Grass and Johnson and their families began when they were next-door neighbors living in the no-man's land in Berlin that lay between the German Democratic Republic and West Germany. In the literary realm they soon became the unequal Dioscuri among the writers of a divided Germany. (2) The more acclaimed of the pair, Grass achieved greater recognition because of the gargantuan proportions of the diverse and intellectually stimulating fiction he wrote and published. In turn Grass himself held Johnson in high esteem and considered the somewhat smaller number of his publications to have a literary significance equal to if not even superior to his own. In my view Grass paid particular tribute to his fellow novelist in Too Far Afield, written after Johnson's early death. In addition, I should like to propose that a less obvious allusion to Johnson in Grass's fiction depicts him as a member of the group of authors who sought to reestablish German literature in the seventeenth century, after the Thirty Years War had demolished it. Grass devotes his short novel Das Treffen in Telgte (1979; The Meeting in Telgte, 1981) to this theme. Too Far Afield has the hallmark of all of Grass's major fiction: great length, a text that relates historic events from the viewpoint of a Jonathan Swift-like mind, and a plentitude of characters. Some of these appear in a series of guises; thus the narrator in this story considers himself to be a "we," a group of storytellers. Appearing without fictional embellishment as a close friend of this central figure in Too Far Afield is Uwe Johnson, one of postwar Germany's eminent authors. References to and appearances by Johnson in the novel constitute a tribute to him by Grass. The main character in Too Far Afield is Theo Wuttke, whose resemblance to Grass, particularly in regard to his obsession with the written word, constitutes the basic motif in the story. Theo, called Fonty, is preoccupied both with the nineteenth-century German novelist Theodor Fontane and, as a civil servant, with the official documents he is employed to store away in a massive building in East Berlin during the era of a divided Germany. The book's German title, Ein weites Feld, is a line taken from one of Fontane's best-known characters, namely, Old Briest, who, in one of Fontane's finest novels, Effi Briest, has a penchant for saying "That's too broad a field for us to go into at the moment," whenever he is pressed for his opinion. Thereby, Grass comments ironically on his own daring in undertaking to write about the difficult time when defeated Germany was a pariah among nations. The dilemma of divided Germany's reunification and simultaneously its redemption or, in the opinion of the East Germans, its ultimate downfall is depicted by the symbol of the elevator in Fonty's cubby-hole-ridden workplace, which goes not only up and down but also from one side to the other. (This feature indicates perhaps the all-encompassing nature of Grass's fiction.) The collapse of this house of archives subsequent to the reunification of Germany expresses the author's chagrin in that regard. …