ABSTRACT
“This chapter analyzes the French-Algerian novelist, playwright, and journalist Albert Camus’s influence over Günter Grass’s political thought. In his work in literature, theater, and poetry, Grass developed a specifically political interpretation of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus which imagines Sisyphus’s stone as representing humanity’s hopes, aspirations, and virtues. For Grass, allowing Sisyphus’s stone to remain “atop the hill” means accepting an “ideological endpoint” for humanity. Thus, those who wish to preserve democratic or “anti-ideological” politics must become “happy stonerollers” and reject the teleological designs of National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Highlighting Grass’s early works, Flood (Hochwasser); The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel); and The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand), as well as supplementary interviews and texts, this chapter considers Grass’s lifelong evocation of the Absurd with his own brand of Social Democratic politics and advocacy.
