Post War German Literature

Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel has suggested widely divergent readings, not least in respect of the aesthetic grounds that the novel might offer for realistic social hope.  This article considers the novel to embody the dialectic of hope and despair more broadly characteristic of Grass’s sense of a socially engaged post-war literature; and it is in this connection that it argues for its powerful ethical impetus.  Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of “Mimesis” can help to provide an account for Grass’s success in letting the ethical speak through the aesthetic.  After outlining this theoretical framework, the article will examine the senses in which Oskar Matzerath embodies a mimetic dynamic, and through this stakes a subversive and emancipatory ethical claim.  It will then turn to consider Grass’s revalidation of bodily existence as a site of uniqueness resistant to both representation and redemption.  This unrepresentable moment may be read in affinity with Mimesis, suggesting in conclusion the inextinguishable (if ever-vanishing) hope, embedded in Grass’s text, for an escape from the catastrophic circularity of history.