Günter, Super Grass

Complicity, guilt and confession, like some purging medieval monk, German literary history post WWII has often been a sadomasochistic exercise in a type martyrdom that is promethean in its denial of redemption. An ecstasy of guilt forever caught in the unabsolved, the unforgivable remaining unforgiven. An eternal return that has you chained to the rock of history as your liver is eaten out of your complicit body. As if this, like some romantic ideal of 'fragment', could point to a totality of redemption, an absolute absolution.

When Michael Jürgs speaks of the "Ende einer moralischen Instanz", the end of a moral institution he is perhaps expressing more anger with Grass as a liar than he is as some traitor to some confessional moral cause of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" - after all, he was the biographer who was duped - the one scoop he didn't get and that renders his work obsolete. I suppose this brings us to the idea of conscience. As Nietzsche once so aptly put it in an aphorism: "One can train it to kiss as it bites".

Is this what lies behind Günter Super Grass? One can only speculate. A burden kept back to drive the creative process? A skeleton in the cupboard to keep the tension of the charlatan high enough for him to write his fictions? Perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the shame was so great that it was unspeakable and therefore unspoken for so long?

The question remains, why now Günter? Why after the Danzig Trilogy and the sad ballads of looking for redemption in all the wrong places does it come out now? Some have suggested an earlier confessional would have jeopardized the Nobel Prize, others that this is a publicity stunt in an era when Gruppe 47 are more likely to be miscategorised as a pop group. Maybe they have a point. The hand-wringing of his generation seems increasingly irrelevant in a Germany where everyone is happy to be seen singing the national anthem at the world cup. In this context is not the confession simply self-serving, or at best, self-indulgent?

Is this simply a function of a new uncomfortable condition: namely, that once the vanquished have joined the victorious and a threshold of history has passed from the immediacy of the post-war years? That the discourse has entered a realm of historical distance, more abstracted and dispassionate, led perhaps by the desire that the sins of the fathers are consigned to a past that does not carry the critical burdens of historical determinacy?