ABSTRACT
As we watch in terrified fascination the coming of the third and last world war, in our age of universal television that brings starving children and dying soldiers nightly into each living room, we know less than ever how to think about responsibility. Whose fault is it that the world is as it is? Whose fault is it that I am as I am? Whose job is it to change the world? To change me? For those of us committed to the radical or the liberal left, to human liberation, these questions pose a special dilemma. If we blame oppression on the powerful and privileged who benefit from it, then their victims and we ourselves are likely to seem like helpless objects. Look what they are doing to us! And thereby the possibility of freedom is mystified: how can objects ever become free actors? It may then seem that a magic legislator is required to make the transformation-to import or even impose freedom. In order to realize my powers, don’t I have to recognize my complicity in my own victimization? Yet, if to escape this horn of the dilemma, we stress the victims’ complicity, insisting that freedom cannot be given but must be taken and that it is a constant potential in us all, even the most oppressed, then we are gored by the other horn. For then we seem to be “blaming the victim” and denying the legitimate anger of the oppressed. Recognizing that normally suppressed anger and its legitimacy also seems essential to liberation. The political theorists do not seem able to help us here, for these very issues
trouble the interpretation of thinkers like Marx and Freud, Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt. What is the right way to understand the relationship between politics and economics, between choice and necessity in history, between ideals and bodily needs and drives, between public and private, or-in the words of Richard Flacks-between “making history” and “making life” (Flacks 1976: 263-80)? Günter Grass’s (1979 [1977]) epic novel, The Flounder, illuminates this troubling
terrain more brilliantly than any didactic work of theory.1 It also ties these questions further to relationships between men and women, to ecology and technology, to
localism and imperialism, and to the future of the earth. Of course the novel does not “solve” these problems, but it leaves our thinking about them transformed, enriched, and renewed. This chapter is intended only to whet the reader’s appetite for The Flounder and suggest some of the book’s potential significance. Even that much is not easy, for the novel’s structure is almost as complex as life itself. Begin with the author and the context: Günter Grass writes in German and now
lives in West Germany, but he hails originally from Danzig or Gdansk, a city that is now part of Poland and known to us as the birthplace of Solidarity, the recent rebellious grass-roots movement of Polish workers and intellectuals.2 The Flounder is, first of all, a patriotic history of Grass’s native city, an act of homage to his people from exile. By “patriotic” here I mean that it is a very loving history, appreciative of what is unique about the region-Pomerania-and its inhabitantsthe Pomorshians or Kashubians. I emphatically do not mean imperialistic, warlike, or hero-worshipping (cf. Schaar 1981). From early on, Grass contrasts the Kashubians to both the Germans and the Poles, presenting them as one of those small peoples who mostly suffer history rather than imposing it on others.3 The book’s protagonist is also that sort of man-diffident, ironic, artistic, definitely not macho. Early in the book, in the period of the great Gothic migrations, he does set out rather tentatively into the world to seek adventure, only to be painfully buggered by a Goth behind a gorse bush. Limping home, he foreswears all further attempts at making history.4
