Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics in Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

189 Pages·2004·0.88 MB·English

by  Peter Arnds

Representation, Subversion, and Eugenics
in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum
In receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Günter
Grass finally gained recognition as Germany’s greatest living
author. If there is one book in post-1945 German literature that
is known throughout the world, it is Grass’s novel The Tin Drum
(1959), which remains one of the most important works of lit-
erature for the construction of postwar German identity. Peter
Arnds offers a completely new reading of this novel, analyzing an
aspect of Grass’s literary treatment of German history that has
never been examined in detail: the Nazi ideology of race and
eugenics, which resulted in the persecution of so-called asocials
(including the physically and mentally handicapped, criminals,
homosexuals, and vagabonds) as “life unworthy of life,” their
extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and
their marginalization in the Adenauer period. Arnds shows that
in order to represent the Nazi past and subvert bourgeois para-
digms of rationalism, Grass revives several facets of popular cul-
ture that National Socialism either suppressed or manipulated for
its ideology of racism. In structure and content Grass’s novel
connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution
and extermination of these “asocials,” for whom the persecuted
dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor
and voice. This comparative study reveals that through intertex-
tuality with the European fairy-tale tradition, the picaresque nov-
els of Rabelais and Grimmelshausen, and through an array of
carnivalesque figures Grass creates an irrational counterculture
opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with
racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of
this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurd-
ity of a Stunde Null, that putative tabula rasa of 1945.
Peter O. Arnds is associate professor of German and Italian at
Kansas State University.
Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture
Edited by James Hardin
(South Carolina)
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CAMDEN HOUSE
Copyright © 2004 Peter Arnds
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2004
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydell.co.uk
ISBN: 1–57113–287–2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Arnds, Peter O., 1963–
Representation, subversion, and eugenics in Günter Grass’s The Tin
Drum
p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–57113–287–2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Grass, Günter, 1927– Blechtrommel. 2. Eugenics in literature.
I. Title. II. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture
(Unnumbered).
PT2613.R338B55323 2004
833'.914—dc22
2004002996
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1: Representing Euthanasia;
Reclaiming Popular Culture 10
2: Heteroglossia from Grimmelshausen
to the Grimm Brothers 28
3: The Dwarf and Nazi Body Politics 49
4: Oskar’s Dysfunctional Family and Gender Politics 77
5: Oskar as Fool, Harlequin, and Trickster,
and the Politics of Sanity 97
6: Gypsies, the Picaresque Novel, and
the Politics of Social Integration 124
Epilogue: Beyond Die Blechtrommel:
Germans as Victims in Im Krebsgang 152
Works Cited 161
Index 171

Acknowledgments
INITIALLY, THE IDEA for this book took shape during the summer of 2000
at Washington University, St. Louis, where I was able to conduct research
thanks to the DAAD summer grant at the Center for Contemporary German
Literature. I wish to thank Professor Paul Michael Lützeler for this opportu-
nity and the generous financial support that accompanied it. I would also like
to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer stipend
in 2001, as well as Kansas State University for several faculty development
awards that assisted me with travel to conferences as far away as Bergen and
Bangkok. I am especially grateful to Robert Corum and Michael Ossar for
proofreading the final manuscript, as well as to my good friend and office mate
Lucia Garavito for never failing to lend an ear to tales of Tom Thumb when
she was trying to work. Finally, I wish to extend my gratitude and love to my
dear wife Jerrilynn Romano for staying awake and listening to uncounted wee-
hour-in-the-morning ideas about folk culture and Nazi racism.
P.A.
September 2003

Abbreviations
The following abbreviations have been used in the text.
AS Grimmelshausen, Johann Jakob, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1962).
B Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1986).
BK Daniel Wildmann, Begehrte Körper: Konstruktion und Inszenierung
des “arischen” Männerkörpers im “Dritten Reich” (Würzburg: Königs-
hausen & Neumann, 1998).
D Pär Lagerkvist, The Dwarf, trans. Alexandra Dick (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1945).
DP Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl
Emerson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994).
FSLH Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York:
Farrar & Rinehart, 1935).
GP François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955).
HM Lynne Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the
Visual Arts (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).
MC Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Random House, 1988).
NT Klaus Wolbert, Die Nackten und die Toten des “Dritten Reiches”:
Folgen einer politischen Geschichte des Körpers in der Plastik des deut-
schen Faschismus (Gießen: Anabas Verlag, 1982).
RW Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984).
S Grimmelshausen, Johann Jakob, Simplicissimus, trans. Mike Mitchell
(Sawtry: Dedalus, 1999).
SM Wilhelm Hauff, Sämtliche Märchen, ed. Hans-Heino Ewers (Stutt-
gart: Reclam, 1986).
T Wilhelm Hauff, Tales, trans. S. Mendel (Freeport, NY: Books for
Library Press, 1970).