Re: Günter Grass: the man who broke the silence

[Mark Kohut]

When I saw him and Norman Mailer speak at the NYPL 8-10 years ago, he said he had revealed his youthful complicity at the start of his career--and nobody seemed to care. He was so laid-back that Stormin ' Norman, war novelist, carefully offered perspective. 

" The Nothing Nihilates Totally" is one of his Heidegger parody lines. ( this from Local Anesthetic, which I am rereading as if for the first time. It,-- I was a stupid youth too, ---helped shape my POLITICS!). I thought of you, Kai, who seem to differ a lot about Heidegger; I had no idea of the sentence back when. 

Our whole moral lives and conscience are a tangled knotting-into when we think deeply, Dostoevskianly. I remember Martin Buber starting an essay on good and evil with an example of
How someone's evil act led to a new moral conscience. 

We plisters accept TRP's late confession of his moral lacks in SLOW LEARNER but no others?

Controversial Plist notion ( based on not enough reading of Grass very admittedly) Gunter Grass as novelist, in aspects of style and Lotsa themes, is the 20th Century writer most like Thomas Pynchon. 



Sent from my iPad

> On Apr 19, 2015, at 1:57 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 19.04.2015 05:13, Dave Monroe wrote:
>> 
>> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/18/gunter-grass-tributes-man-broke-silence
> 
> > Most German novelists look southwards, like Thomas Mann, gazing towards Bavaria, Italy and the biblical lands. Grass looks eastwards, and it’s a cold wind he braces himself against.<
> 
> Hans Henny Jahnn looks northwards, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann looks westwards ...
> 
> None of those statements, discussing the supposed uniqueness of Grass for German postwar literature, mentions writers like Arno Schmidt or Wolfgang Koeppen ( - whose 'Der Tod in Rom' with the Blicero-like SS-man Judejahn was published years before the 'Blechtrommel').  Whom they mention is, of course, Heinrich Böll. A more likable guy than Grass, but certainly not a great writer.
> 
> (Regarding the moral issue: You cannot teach your nation on a weekly basis for decades and then come around the corner with the facts about your own share of evil.)
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l