ABSTRACT
In an essay of 1993 Helmut Peitsch compactly summarizes the divergence in emphasis between Günter Grass and Martin Walser: ‘Die Demokratie wurde von Walser mit ihren gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen konfrontiert, von Grass hingegen mit der faschistischen Vergangenheit’. The political differences between Walser and Grass correspond to their different emphases, that is, Grass’s focus on the Nazi past and Walser’s criticism of the Federal Republic. Grass’s insistence in 1989/90 that Auschwitz should remain an eternal obstacle to a single German state exemplifies his fixation on the nation’s failed history. From the mid-1970s, Walser’s priorities have shifted from Auschwitz to the divided nation. This reflects the extent to which coming to terms with the past had become the dominant social paradigm by the end of the 1960s. For Walser, the same alliances are at work in a conspiracy coordinated by the media and intellectual classes to suppress the ‘natural’ development of national feeling in post-unification Germany.
