Günter Grass in the Late 1960s: The Writer as Public Intellectual

Günter Grass initially achieved fame as a writer with the release of his debut novel The Tin Drum in 1959. Grass used his renown as a platform to take stances in public discussions on political issues, later involving himself in election campaigns on behalf of Germany's Social Democratic Party. By tackling subjects beyond the literary world, Grass took on the role of a public intellectual, willing to comment openly on any issue of the day, and the years 1965 to 1972 marked a period of especially intense involvement by Grass in public life through speeches, essays, and election campaigns. Grass insisted that this activity as a "citizen and social democrat" was mostly, although not entirely, separate from his literary writing. This dissertation argues that a close reading of his speeches and essays of the period, alongside two literary works published at the time, Local Anaesthetic (1969) and From the Diary of a Snail (1972), belies the idea of such a separation. It examines the concept of the public intellectual in the German context and the interaction of intellectuals with the political environment in the first two decades of the Federal Republic, before assessing Grass's own contributions. It shows how major themes in Grass's literary works also dominate the non-literary works. These themes include the need to continue processing Germany's Nazi past and Grass's understanding of enlightened rationality as the core of societal progress, epitomized by modern democracy. At the same time, Grass's literary and non-literary writing both exhibit the same blind spots where his progressive stance falls short: his essentialist presentations of women, which also suggest they should not participate in the public sphere; and his portrayal of acts of individual, as opposed to political, violence, almost exclusively depicting male-on-female violence. The dissertation concludes by noting that, fifty years on, the discussions Grass participated in remain largely unresolved.