Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T21:29:17.800Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Günter Grass’s political rhetoric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2010

Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Get access

Summary

My concern in this chapter is with the rhetoric of Günter Grass's political speeches. I use the term 'political' broadly to characterise orations on matters of public and social interest, particularly where they intersect with moral and ethical concerns. To judge by sheer quantity alone, Grass's speeches and the political activity they represent are an important adjunct to his fictional and poetic work, a view he has endorsed on many occasions while always insisting on their entirely distinct mediations of reality. As a further measure of the importance Grass attaches to politics, he has been willing to sideline his 'creative' writing for lengthy periods, for example in the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, when his electoral campaigning for the Social Democratic Party caused a hiatus in his literary output. Moreover, Grass's speeches are worthy of attention as they document political interventions on a plethora of issues over almost five decades, while the controversies they often provoke have sometimes conditioned the reception of his creative work, as other contributions to this volume demonstrate. In finding a political platform, Grass, as is widely recognised, was initially assisted by the fame afforded by the meteoric success of The Tin Drum (1959), not least as it extended - unusually for a German writer - to the international stage. With the possible exception of his older, fellow German Nobel laureate, Heinrich Böll, he has commanded a public role like no other writer. Moreover, Grass's breakthrough coincided with a pivotal era in postwar West German society and politics, as well as with a new, more expansive phase in the development of the German media which were ever eager to solicit the views of the country's best-known authors.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×