ABSTRACT
In Cloppenburg, a town in Lower Saxony where the Christian Democrats habitually gain more than 60 per cent of the vote, the party issued a statement following the visit of Grass in 1965 which seems to imply that the good people there had withstood an alien invasion: ‘Gunter Grass spoke on Tuesday evening in Cloppenburg. The sense of scandal and outrage engendered by the novel was furthered by the impression conveyed by Grass as a person. Grass’s first entry into specifically political writing is his contribution to Die Alternative in 1961, although it should not be forgotten that his previous fictional work, that is to say Die Blechtrommel, has an important political dimension. Grass’s commitment to the parliamentary democracy of the Federal Republic leads in turn to the rejection of those forces perceived as a danger to it.
