How to Save a Language
Gunter Grass spent his life recreating the German language. Then his own history caught up with him.
Searching for a Language to Write in
In my last article I wrote about how the Romanian writer, Herta Müller, had to invent literature because as a citizen of one of the most hermetic totalitarian regimes in the Eastern Bloc, she had no access to media not licensed by the state.*
One thing I did not explore in that article was the challenge she faced to find an appropriate language to write in.
Like many of the countries that emerged from the post-WWI rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Romania contained many different ethnic groups and languages.
Müller had grown up in a small ethnic-German community that had its own unique dialect. But to write in it, she says, was impossible; it had been used already for horribly reactionary writing.
Neither could she write in Romanian, a lanauge she had only learned at the age of fourteen, after she’d left her ethnic-German enclave. Though she developed an affection for the Romanian’s poetic sedition and evocative cursing, it was always a foreign language to her. As an adult, she came to realize that its tendency for deflection and gossiping contributed to the Romanian people’s inability to effectively rally against dictatorship. People bitched and grossed to one another and then called it a day.
Her parents had been taught in Hungarian in school.
Eventually, it was High German she turned to, perhaps because she had nowhere else to go. Or perhaps because High German had been rescued from itself by the efforts of other writers and was now a legitimate language to write true literature in.
The Fall and Rise of the German Language in 500 words
High German… has there ever been a language so subverted by a dictatorship’s social agenda?
In his celebrated travel memoir, A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor, recalls his journey through the Rhineland in the early 1930s, before Hitler’s rise to total power.
Fermor is sitting in a beer hall writing down his impressions of an S.A. march he has observed, when three members of the Nationalist Socialists come in for a post-march debauch. As they drink, they break into song. He writes:
Germany has a rich anthology of regional songs, and these, I think, were dreamy celebrations of the forests and plains of Westphalia, long sighs of homesickness musically transposed. It was charming. And the charm made it impossible, at that moment, to connect the singers with organized bullying and the smashing of Jewish shop windows and nocturnal bonfires of books.
Eventually, of course, such bucolic remembrances would be wrapped up in total with the Nazi’s agenda of returning purity to the country. By the end of the war, simple words such as blood, soil, and fatherland, had lost any semblance of neutrality, and been entirely weaponized by the Nazis.
The Dichotomy of Dictatorship
In a totalitarian dictatorship, everything is divided into two camps: Things that serve the regime, and things that are at odds with it. Nothing is neutral.
Not even the natural world. Herta Müller, in one of the many interviews I read, described how some plants in her region were considered a part of the regime through virtue of their longevity and fortitude. Frailer plants, though lovely to look at, were associated with resistance.
In Hitler’s Germany, history, literature, and art were incorporated into the Nazi propaganda effort or deplored, censored, and forced into obscurity.
The most obvious examples are the infamous book burnings. But there was also the Degenerate Art Exhibition, where ‘undesirable’ art (mostly abstract and modernist pieces) was hung, lopsided and surrounded by graffiti, in the dark corners of a Munich art gallery. Meanwhile, down the road, the Nazi curated Great German Art Exhibition, Romantic and realist art — shameless propaganda by today’s standards — showed concurrently.
The purpose, of course, was to create a false dichotomy of aestheticism that German citizens must choose between.
The Snail: or Gunter Grass as Dubious Witness
For a very long time, the writer Gunter Grass dominated the post-war German literary scene. His first novel, The Tin Drum, burst onto the literary scene shortly after the war and was an instant success. Many people credit his work for precipitating a post-WWII ‘thaw’ of the German psyche.
We take it for granted now that the Germans took responsibility for what they’d done to the Jews and other victims of the holocaust. But the truth is there was a period of paralysis and confronting what they, as a society had done.
In the introduction to Gunter Grass’ book of essays On Writing and Politics 1967–1983, Salman Rushdie writes:
…Grass has written often and eloquently — of the effect of the Nazi period on the German language, of the need for the language to be rebuilt, pebble by pebble, from the wreckage; because a language in which evil finds so expressive a voice is a dangerous tongue. The practitioners of ‘rubble literature’ — Grass himself being one of the most prominent of these — took upon themselves the Herculean task of re-inventing the German language, of tearing it apart, ripping out the poisoned parts, and putting it back together.
Grass’ books, in short, were some of the first honest accounts — insofar as fiction can be honest — of a young man growing up and being a part of Hitler’s Germany.
The Danzig Trilogy — of which The Tin Drum is the first — draws heavily upon his childhood in Gdansk.In them, history and the present collide. He takes liberties with chronological structure because, like Faulkner**, he understood how utterly our past effects our present.
Medieval ghosts parade through village streets. The hulking ruins of battleships heel in the harbor as reminders of prior wars. And a child, at three, decides to arrest his development purely through the force of will; thereby avoiding the worst of the war (and perhaps responsibility) owing to his childlike appearance.
Like Franz Kafka and the Latin American magical surrealists, the veil between reality and fantasy is thin if not inconsequential. Time is an indifferent medium in which events jumble and jostle together. It does not march forward in teleological assertiveness, like — let me search for a proper analogy here — rank upon rank of goose-stepping Nazi goons.
In other words, Grass’ Gdansk (to the Poles, Danzig to Germans) and by expansion, Germany as a whole, is a place of many cultures and languages and peoples. His Germany, by virtue of its place, refutes Hitler’s nationalist reductionism: There isn’t just one homeland, there are many.
Final Thoughts
How does one responds when one’s language has been stolen, when the nuanced, tender terms that evoke the woodlands and rivers of childhood, or the kith and kin of a race have been subverted to serve a bankrupt and dangerous ideology?
By rebuilding it, trimming the parts that have gone gangrenous and replanting the useful parts. This is what Grass did for the German language, and thus for all of us living in the shadow of the the Holocaust.
But Grass was not without his own scandal. In my next article, I will explore what the revelations at the end of his life meant for him and the rest of us.
*A great movie about Communist art and propaganda in the Eastern Bloc is the 2006 German film The Lives of Others.
- Franz Kafka, on the other hand, whose work was deemed ‘undesirable’ — not just because he was a Jew — has become one of the world’s most celebrated writers.
** Famous quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”
