Günter Grass (October 16, 1927-April 13, 2015) wrote to hold on
to life. His last published book was in 2010, but I imagine he wrote
until his death. He was a Nobel prize laureate German author, his
eminently popular novel is The Tin Drum (1959), the first one in Danzig
trilogy. The film The Tin Drum (1979) was directed by Volker
Schlöndorff. It won plenty of the available film industry prizes: The
Palm d'Or, The Cannes award and the Oscar for best foreign movie.Grass was also an illustrator, sculptor and graphic artist living in troubled times and spaces. He developed into one of the explorers (as Vonnegut or Heller) of the effects of war and politics. Another recurrent theme in his books is his place of origin. That is Danzig (currently Gdańsk), a port town with an agitated history. Its inhabitants: local Kashubians, Poles and Germans.
At ten, Grass was a member of The Hitler Youth Movement, at sixteen he was a soldier, one year later war ended. He details this experience later in his life, in Peeling the Onion (2006). But although he admitted it later in his life, it was a fact implied in his novels. He states the naïve perceptions of the child and young man he was in those days - that he was doing what was right. Moreover he talked about difficulties in accepting the wrongs German people had done.
All Grass's novels are uttering realities and exercising acceptation. His work defined him as the voice of German conscience. For a few it was difficult to understand that the one denouncing had also been part of Nazism.
Eberhard Starusch is a forty-year-old German and history teacher living in 1967's West Berlin. As a teenager, in wartime Danzig, he had been the leader of a war gang.
Eberhard Starusch has a resolute point of view on his past. The past was dreadful, but it did happen, one can only try to improve one's future ways. That is his chosen path. As a human being he progresses by helping those within his reach. Steering his smart, but impulsive students in the interest of avoiding violence. Even though one could find violence justified. He progresses also by refusing every other path his contemporaries take. That of his ex fiancé: one of destruction and self-destruction. The one of a colleague that made the same youth mistake, but lost herself in analyses and depression. The path of lucidity and detachment taken by his dentist. The path of detachment and of enjoyment of life's pleasures, practiced by rich contemporaries.
Local Aneasthetic is Grass's fourth novel, published in 1969. On the surface the narrative follows Eberhard Starusch undergoing a dental procedure. Also fulfilling a social role of professor, mentor and friend. Nevertheless, it has deeper undertones. It's marrow holds a meditation on the human fate and its transformable character.
The current amiable and privy teacher mediates, while being operated on, on his dental history. On his first teeth and how they were linked with personal tragedies. On his mandibular protrusion (progenia) and how as a young man such a profile made him appear aggressive. So much so that later it created him the image of an imposing person. It is perceivable that this character, up to a certain point, went where life led him. Even in the arms of Nazism.
Local Anesthetic is a difficult read. By reason of its subject and its reality and still, its contemporaneity. Large portions are stream of consciousness. The reader ponders along with Eberhard: What if changing oneself was possible? Would one be less predisposed to aggressions, mistakes? Or thoughts as these are just penitence? "Just", as if destroying a former self is something minor. Painful ruminations. And there are remedies for pain, but only local.
In a strange turn of events, in 1967 at one public reading from Local Anesthetic, a former SS member poisoned himself to death. He stated that he wants to be provocative. And then it was once again, another narrative: Diary of a snail (1973), that Grass constructed to make sense of life.
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