Writers in Berlin: A Three-Way Discussion

HÖLLERER: The question to begin with is, why should Berlin, in spite of its unfavorable position, still be the chief center of German literature? Why, for instance, should Gunter Grass be here and not in Munich or Frankfurt or somewhere else?

GRASS: In my case, when I came to Berlin in 1953, I came as a sculptor. But the reason I came was that West Germany had become too much for me. Then I went on to Paris, and when I returned to Berlin for the second time, I came as a writer.

HÖLLERER: YOU had already written Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum] by then? GRASS: Yes.

HOLLERER: And Katz und Maus [Cat and Mouse] was written in Berlin after 1960? And Hundejahre too?

GRASS: Yes. By then I knew that if I had a few ideas to work out, Berlin was the right city to do it in.

HÖLLERER: YOU said it all became too much for you in West Germany. You mean that the whole setup sickened you?

GRASS: It sickened me, though lots of other people weren’t sickened by it; they adapted themselves to it. In West Germany there are only two courses open to you: either join in the swim or, if you work at a different tempo, you must uproot yourself and go to Berlin. People here are really much slower. They even move more slowly in the streets. This really ought to be tested; it could be measured scientifically in some institute or other.

HOLLERER: Here in Berlin people haven’t got so used to the pressure of big business; here everything is more private, more individual. That doesn’t mean that there are no parties here: you could go to as many parties as you felt like every evening; you could divide yourself up into different pieces, and every piece could find some sort of party to go to. But it’s also possible to live your own life without being much disturbed. This is because Berlin is a very spread-out city — the German city which covers the biggest area. It is not identified with a university, as Göttingen and Tübingen are; it is not an industrial city pure and simple; so you feel freer here than in any other city to take part in a great variety of social circles.

GRASS: When you get tired of one particular circle you can change and frequent another, without having to go to another city. But you can do that in any big city; you can do it in Paris too.

HOLLERER: Among students, at least, we can say that political discussions here are more to the point and less boring than in other university cities. Besides, in Berlin it is possible to talk to many people who cannot come from the East to any other West German city. To take an example, the president of the Bulgarian Writers’ Congress recently visited me because he happened to be in East Berlin and wanted to see West Berlin and to meet West Berlin writers. Or take the Czechoslovakian Military Mission — it lets its writers give readings or lectures here, and in this way it is possible to exchange ideas, often extremely surprising ones, in a way which isn’t possible anywhere else. This helps give the Berliners a fuller perspective.

GRASS: We must remember too that the population of Berlin is perhaps the only group of people in Germany which has developed a political sense since the war. We saw this in the last elections, not so much because the Social Democratic Party won but because posters — for example, “Amrehn’s always in Berlin" — which would have been very successful in Bavaria or other places didn’t have any effect here. People here are very wary; they can’t be rushed into making a decision.

HASENCLEVER: Perhaps we ought to explain this: “always in Berlin” was used at the time as a slogan against Willy Brandt, who is often away from Berlin, and some people think he wants to leave Berlin for good and be Chancellor in Bonn. That’s why the opposition candidate, Amrehn, thought up the slogan “always in Berlin.”

HÖLLERER: Here in Berlin the people have enough of a sense of humor not to take such slogans too seriously. There’s plenty of evidence of sharp thinking in the way they argue. Lecturing, for example, is much easier in Göttingen or Frankfurt, where the criticism is much milder. It’s important in Berlin to take pains in expressing oneself; one can’t afford to say just anything and depend on the man in the street being satisfied; the Berliners are not so easily fobbed off with platitudes. This leads me to the point that Berlin is probably the only city in Germany that can boast of an atmosphere which is genuinely metropolitan. The other cities are much more provincial.

GRASS: I don’t know if you can call Berlin really metropolitan. The most provincial feature in Berlin is its hectic effort during the last two years to become a metropolis. This in itself is a sure sign of provincialism.

Berlin can’t compare with Paris in the number of literary names, and can’t hope to do so, and there’s no reason why it should. Where are the numbers of writers to come from? They can’t come from West Germany, because a whole middle rank of writers, so to speak, is missing. We have a few names at the top; then there is a great gap; then comes a whole army of sentimental writers, in Berlin as elsewhere.

HASENCLEVER: We ought to point out that centralization in Germany has never been as marked as in France.

HÖLLERER: I’d like to make a few remarks now about the East Berlin writers. The journal Sinn undForm [Meaning and Form] still exists there; it was edited until recently by Peter Huchel, but they’ve now got rid of him. Then there are writers like Bobrowski, who won the prize of the Group 47. We can call such literary men “Berlin writers,” though their inclusion has become more difficult since the Wall.

GRASS: Yes, but there are also a large number of writers — serious writers, too — with whom it was impossible to discuss literary questions even before the building of the Wall, and now, of course, it’s out of the question.

HÖLLERER: It’s very difficult to make any generalizations about relations between writers in East and West Berlin — each individual is different. Some are genuine writers, others are Party officials. Depending on which they are, you can discuss things with them or not.

GRASS: Writers with whom you could discuss literary subjects are the very ones that you must now try to leave alone — otherwise you might get them into serious trouble; the others are to be avoided at all costs.

HASENCLEVER: Can you still see Bobrowski or the poet Christa Reinig, for example?

GRASS: They don’t come to West Berlin, and we can’t go over there. Christa Reinig never comes. Bobrowski finds it very difficult to get a pass.

HÖLLERER: He was here for half a day when he received the prize of the Group 47. He got a visa for that, but it was a great exception. We who have West Berlin passes can’t go over to East Berlin at all.

HASENCLEVER: What was the reaction in East Berlin and in the East zone in general to your Tin Drum?

GRASS: The book hasn’t been published there. I read three reviews, opinions of readers, and have talked to a few people; it was at least a sympathetic reaction. The three or four reviews mentioned my talent, but said apart from that I had nothing to offer. They’re quite right. [Laughter.]

HÖLLERER: I think there were a few reviews printed officially. But the book couldn’t be obtained, and so people had to rely on what the reviews said. Of course, these were written by the chosen hacks.

GRASS: Dozens of paperback copies have been sent over.

HASENCLEVER: When you were in Leipzig, did you give readings from your book to students?

GRASS: Yes; that was in May, 1961, shortly before the Wall was built.

HASENCLEVER: And it’s impossible to do that anymore?

GRASS: Yes. I’d do it, but nobody’s invited me since. The questions asked after the readings are always the same. If the audience like the book, they clap, with greater or lesser enthusiasm, but the same questions always crop up during discussion: Why do you write books? What are you trying to do? Do you want to improve mankind, change people in some way? This has nothing to do with the Iron Curtain, these questions come from all ideological directions. There’s hardly ever any literary discussion.

HASENCLEVER: Are there no novelists in East Germany today? New talents, like, say, Solzhenitsyn in Russia?

GRASS: There’s Strittmacher—he’s a talented writer. He’s written some good stories.

HÖLLERER: Of course, there are the old-timers, the ones who were well known before — Arnold Zweig, Anna Seghers.

GRASS: But they wrote their best books before the East German Republic came into existence.

HOLLERER: They haven’t written anything since, just as Brecht didn’t write much more after he went over. There are a few lyrical writers of some importance, like Peter Huchel, Johannes Bobrowski, Christa Reinig.

HASENCLEVER: Stefan Heym is a very special case. He went over to the East so that he could write in German again, after emigrating to America during the Nazi era. While he was abroad he wrote several quite successful books in English The Crusaders, for example. When he arrived in East Berlin he continued to write in English because he refused to use the German language of the East zone. So his opposition takes the form of writing only in English; and then he has his books translated into German.

GRASS: One of our most talented writers, who lives in West Berlin, is Uwe Johnson. Both of his books show him to be a writer belonging to the East German Republic, but his books cannot be published there.

HASENCLEVER: Now, that is a category of writers who should be included — people who have actually written East German literature but cannot publish it in East Germany.

HÖLLERER: Gerhardt Zwerenz, for example, came from East Germany and has launched a very critical assault on conditions over there. Uwe Johnson attempts to show empirically what life is like on both sides. But the East Germans won’t print these books.

hasenclever: I think that Uwe Johnson is the only writer who has presented the dialectics which separate the East from the West, but he can’t come to any real conclusions. The “Third Book of Achim” can’t be written, because it nowhere quite jibes with either East or West. So the book must stay unwritten.

HOLLERER: There are some extremists who even think there’s an East and a West German language, that German is developing in two different directions. That’s just not true.

HASENCLEVER: I don’t altogether agree with you on that. I remember when I came back to Germany as an American soldier and read the newspapers, which were trying very hard to be democratic, their words sounded as though Goebbels had written them, because of the Nazi corruption of the language.

HÖLLERER: Yes, but that’s not a linguistic change, it’s stylistic.

HASENCLEVER: But even single words had different values. Words like “mother” or “native land” or “community” were used, quite simple words. But all of them had a flavor of Nazidom about them and really couldn’t be used for purposes of communication until they had been “de-Nazified.”

HÖLLERER: But these are all associations which you read into a language, not a change in the actual language. Certain expressions are connected with certain things, and you can’t bear to listen to them. That’s a psychological phenomenon, but it doesn’t mean that anything in the language has changed. After ten years have passed, the phrases can be used again quite easily. I might add that both radio and television here help to preserve the unity of the German language. They provide opportunities for Berlin to transmit information and material which it would be impossible to send to the East in any other way. because, of course, all printed matter can be intercepted. That means that when Günter Grass reads a chapter from his book over the air, a large number of people will be listening in the East.

GRASS: Uwe Johnson, for example, read his Book of Achim in six installments in a program transmitted by Sender Freies Berlin. They heard the whole of it over there.

HÖLLERER: Sender Freies Berlin also transmits a Third Programme in the evenings. It is put together so that everything of interest to intelligent people which is broadcast can be made public in the East. It has an enthusiastic audience because it’s made as critical as possible. We must, of course, be careful not to broadcast propaganda programs, but to stick to factual reports. Take, for example, the Spiegel affair. There was tremendous interest in East Berlin about the reactions in the West, and the pros and cons were openly debated. The Third Programme broadcast a discussion about the Manifesto of the Group 47 against Strauss. Letters are received from the other side, and we hear again and again from friends that this program is eagerly listened to. This is why there are plans to do something for the so-called mass media in Berlin. In the Berlin Colloquium, which the Ford Foundation is helping to finance, we are planning to have a department where writers and producers will sit down together and work out television films, independent of commercial interests. We are planning to set up a film academy to deal with questions like this, and the results will be quite different from anything we could achieve if it were somewhere else in West Germany. Television and radio are the only methods of breaking down the Wall.

HASENCLEVER: Has Berlin also become a center for painters and sculptors?

GRASS: No, we can’t say it has. At the moment, there are no really talented artists. This isn’t Berlin’s fault; it’s just that nobody has made the great breakthrough, although there are quite a few clever people about.

HÖLLERER: Berlin used to be a city of critics. In the era of Theodor Fontane it always had outstanding critics, critics who were ready to fight for causes and for issues. More recently, there was the time when Alfred Kerr was here, or Ihering, who is still in Berlin. There were sharp duels of wit. Nothing like that has gone on since 1945, chiefly because there are no really great newspapers in Berlin anymore.

GRASS: The main problem for Berlin is the fact that it has no hinterland. For the last ten years the same old faces in the same official posts — when you go to a first night at a theater, there’s Herr Karsch again. On the other hand, we have Berlin sentimentality, which is well catered to in Axel Springer’s newspapers. That’s the most negative factor of all — the Berlin press working hand in hand with Berlin sentimentality. Words that are used over and over here, like “Wall,” “Wall of Shame,” and other formulas of this kind, are completely unnecessary; but probably this is something that can’t be changed.

HÖLLERER: Facts speak for themselves, anyway.

GRASS: The Berliner is not sentimental when he talks to you; he speaks to the point and he’s skeptical, but many ironic and skeptical people are very sentimental inside. This is something that the press seizes upon; and it’s reflected again in speeches.

HASENCLEVER: The Berliner is always ready with a smart reply to hide his sentimental side. Yet he has a sentimental streak in him.

HÖLLERER: But this is inevitable, because he’s always hoping. Everyone hopes sooner or later to be able to go over to the Alexanderplatz again, or to visit his relations in the East, or to make longer trips into the country. Not many people can afford to travel to West Germany several times in the year. All these things add up over a period of time and are exploited by people who know what makes good headlines. The special situation in Berlin is a favorite theme for these journalists.

GRASS: It’s been a special boon to the Springer press, which controls four of the most widely read newspapers in Berlin — Die Berliner Morgenpost, Die Berliner Welt, Die Bildzeitung, and Die Welt am Sonntag. The “Wall” tone which is set by Springer has nothing at all to do with the real state of things, but churns out enough sentimentality for the total impression to be a completely negative one.

HASENCLEVER: You spoke a moment ago of a gap, a kind of missing link in the Berlin literary world.

GRASS: Not only in Berlin, but in all of Germany. There are maybe two hundred writers who write truly readable books.

HÖLLERER: In this gap I include writers of books which are not of high literary value, but are not rubbish.

HASENCLEVER: And why is there a gap, a missing social link?

GRASS: It could be a question of the present generation and the kind of professions they went into after the war. One main reason is the aftereffect of the war. There are no Jews in Germany, and the whole literary milieu and the critics have disappeared too. No gauntlets are thrown down, nobody issues challenges anymore. The occasional experiments in this sphere are artificially nourished.

HÖLLERER: Yet the whole development of paperbacks is very interesting. They’ve become intellectual books. The rest of the reading public borrow books from public libraries, belong to a readers’ circle, or just watch television instead of reading. Writers who might otherwise write books now write for television and radio, because they’re much better paid. But, after all, who reads The Tin Drum in America? Don’t you think it’s mostly students?