German Cultural Memory and Gender in the Work of Günter Grass

The Nobel laureate Günter Grass (1927-2015) was at once an authoritative figure at the heart of German cultural life and the object of valid feminist criticism, largely due to his acclaimed novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959). This lecture explores Grass’s appropriation of gendered cultural constructs—including the Heimat (homeland), the Bildungsroman (novel of education), the Kulturnation (cultural nation), and discourse on wartime victims and perpetrators—to represent national trauma. He shared assumptions about gender with his conservative cultural-political rivals, weakening his efforts to inscribe authentic cultural memory of Nazism while bolstering his representative status in Germany. And yet his 2006 memoir, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), undermined that status, revealing his long suppression of his Nazi Waffen-SS service and voicing his personal mourning for his mother, a rape victim who died within a decade of World War II.