Günter Grass and the Genders of German Memory

From the Tin Drum to Peeling the Onion
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64014-085-1
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 1, 258 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

Reihe: Culture and Power in German-Speaking Europe, 1918-1989

The first book to examine the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre, which is especially timely in light of current concerns about male privilege.

Günter Grass (1927-2015) was a fixture at the heart of German cultural life, a self-styled spokesman of the Kulturnation (cultural nation) who imagined it linking him to canonical male literary figures and their authority. He was also the object of valid feminist criticism: a rigid conception of gender permeates his works, belying his professed skepticism toward ideologies. A heterosexual male, Grass lent his representative persona a natural veneer by appropriating his era's gendered discursive constructs, including Heimat, the Bildungsroman, and narratives about German wartime victims and perpetrators. Such appropriation elevated his remembering artist's masculinity above that of the status quo's defenders and exploiters of memory.
This book is the first to evaluate the connection between gender and memory in Grass's oeuvre and its legacy in light of current concerns about male privilege. It highlights his breakthrough novel The Tin Drum (1959) and his memoir Peeling the Onion (2006). The former establishes the gendered persona that Grass would develop in subsequent decades to relate contemporary issues to Nazi-era memories. The latter reclaims the novel's autobiographical material but fails to account for his decades-long silence about having served in the Nazi Waffen-SS. Instead, it foregrounds his mourning for his mother, allowing for a more personal reading of his oeuvre and its gendered imagery.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Malchow, Timothy B

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations, Translations, and Transcriptions
Introduction
Grass's Biography in Context: 1927-1959
Corporeal Memory, Trauma, and Art in The Tin Drum

Bildung, Heimat, and Gendered Modes of German Memory in The Tin Drum
A Patriarchal Arbiter of German Cultural Memory and His Feminized Others: Leveling Bildung, Opening Heimat, and Championing Art from the 1960s to the New Millennium
Grass's Early Life Once Again: Broken Silence, Mourning, and Gendered Approaches to Memory in Peeling the Onion
Epilogue
Works Cited

Über Autor(innen)

Malchow, Timothy B
TIMOTHY B. MALCHOW is Professor of German at Valparaiso University.