The Dentist's Chair as an Allegory in Life

MANN and Camus: dead. Sartre: silent. Malraux: Minister of Culture. The old mullers and brooders, the old definers of crisis, are heard no more in the European novel. For a long time it seemed that there might be no successors. A surprise candidate has now emerged from the wings, an odd figure with a loser's accent and a bizarre past. His earlier books had astonishing power, using dwarfs and drums and scarecrows to explore the nightmare dominion of Nazi Germany and the guilt that followed. To many readers, particularly in the U.S., all this was fascinating. It also seemed very long ago and far away.

Now, with a small new novel, Local Anaesthetic, West Germany's Giinter Wilhelm Grass has reached into the pressing present. The book's setting is Germany today. Its grim narrative device, characteristic of Grass's grotesque humor, offers society as a patient in a dentist's chair. The plot, if it can be called that, involves the threatened sacrificial burning of a dachshund. But Grass's real concern, which currently throbs like a sick tooth through the mind and conscience of the Western world, is the Generation Gap, the morality of revolutionary protest, the apparently helpless and surely tragic bankruptcy of liberalism.

At 42, Grass certainly does not look like the world's, or Germany's, greatest living novelist, though he may well be both. He has a gruff manner and a Dutch-comic soup-strainer mustache. There is a manic-gypsy look at the corners of his eyes, like that of an elf on a high. His face has been described as the sort that nervous mothers warn children against before they skip off to play in the Black Forest. At charades, he couldn't miss as one of those ambivalent wood cutters that lurk in the background of Grimm fairy tales.

For a German, Grass is a nonconformist in more important ways. His country reveres specialization. Grass has exuberantly sprawled out as minor poet, polemical dramatist, artist, sculptor and jazz musician. He has persistently made fun of the Establishment and the past. In the matter of language, he is a total revolutionary. Too often in Germany, culture has suggested lofty abstractions and an aristocratic style. Grass has always liked to stand the German language on its head and shake it. The result is Rabelaisian horselaughs, horrifying images and earthy sights, smells and sounds that make his visions of yesterday as immediate as a stubbed toe --or, yes, a toothache.

Lately, he has also crossed the most sacred boundary of all: the one that separates the German literary artist from politics. By custom, Germans expect a soulful aloofness from intellectuals. Art is enduring, a thing apart, not to be contaminated by the daily, dirty round of politics. Naturally, the last thing that Germans expect of a writer is that he will paint a rooster crowing "Es-Pe-De" (for Social Democratic Party) on the side of a secondhand Volkswagen bus and vulgarly, vulgarly bounce thousands of miles through West Germany campaigning for Willy Brandt. Last summer Grass did just that.

Distrustful Man

In a country still prone to convulsions of superhuman idealism, Grass remains a man thoroughly distrustful of the soaring and the abstract. "I have no ideology, no Weltanschauung," he recently wrote to a friend. "The last one I had fell apart when I was 17 years old."

The principal personification of his distrust, his key corrective agent, as well as Grass's most famous character, is Oskar the dwarf, the protagonist of his first novel, The Tin Drum. The book sold more than 1,500,000 copies around the world (about 600,000 in the U.S.), as appalled and fascinated readers in 16 languages absorbed the dwarf's devastating, knee-high view of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Oskar's "sing-scream" could shatter glass. His magic drum carried him back and forth in time. One of his best tricks was breaking up Nazi rallies by hiding beneath the speakers' platforms and beating out counterrhythms on the tin drum. In his writing, in his life, Grass has played his own version of Oskar. He too has done his demonic best to break up all the going German rhythms, from the marching-to-destiny beat of Deutschland ueber Alles to the amnesiac waltz of postwar prosperity. In three war novels he has drummed: Remember! Remember! REMEMBER!

In articles and speeches, Grass has consistently attacked former members of the Nazi Party, including ex-Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and ex-Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss. In Cat and Mouse (1961), a nearly flawless small novel about German teenagers during World War II, Grass openly made fun of the Iron Cross--by having his hero dangle it in front of his genitals. Mad dreams of superstates, militarism and the kind of procrustean idealism that makes preposterous demands and holds out impossible hopes for society are inevitable Grassian targets. But Grass has also cleverly spun the coin of guilt to show that the Nazi nightmare was built upon Everyman's petty greed, with its corresponding indifference to the fate of others. In dealing with this, Grass's critical contrivances are customarily subtle.

The typically grim, fairy-tale props in Dog Years (1963), for instance, were magic spectacles that allowed postwar German children to see exactly what their innocent parents were actually doing between 1939 and 1945. The cruelest metaphor for greedy indifference occurs toward the end of The Tin Drum, when Oskar's father is killed in his grocery cellar by occupying Russian forces. His body falls across the path of some ants that have set up supply lines to a smashed sack of sugar. "The ants found themselves facing a new situation," Grass wrote, "but, undismayed by the detour, soon built a new highway round the doubled-up Matzerath, for the sugar that trickled out of the burst sack had lost none of its sweetness while Marshal Rokossovski was occupying the city of Danzig."

Such imagery, put to the service of moral passion, has won Grass renown outside Germany as his country's most committed writer. "Much of what is the active conscience in the Germany of Krupp and the Munich beer halls," Critic George Steiner once put it, "lies in this man's ribald keeping." Characteristically impatient with grandiose claims of any sort, Grass rejects this sort of praise out of hand. For other reasons, a great many of his fellow countrymen reject the judgment too, particularly former Nazis, the middle class and petty shopkeepers of the older generation from whom Grass himself sprang. Such folk like to refer to him as "Pornograss," or contemptuously as der Schnauzbart (the mustache).

A Melancholy Awareness

Local Anaesthetic (Harcourt, Brace & World; $6.95) is Grass's fourth novel. It still contains labyrinthine tunnels into the Nazi past. But the book is more obsessed with the affluent society, student revolt and the moral wound of the Viet Nam War. Is it a mark of German progress or American decline that Grass's anguished study of a contemporary German student, his teacher and a threatened antiwar demonstration seems as American, and as unsettling, as the latest homemade-bomb scare? It is one of Grass's several geniuses to ask the appropriate question at the appropriate time. "My God, what did we do?" was the simple right question to ask when The Tin Drum was written. "My God, what do we do now?" is the complicated right question to ask today.

How sick was the middle class in Nazi Germany? Grass knew, and for three novels would not let anyone forget it. How sick is the middle class today throughout the Western world? In Local Anaesthetic the ex-tin drummer is testing, testing.

Give him a crisis. Can Middle-Class Man, 1970, make a decision?

Give him a duty. Can he perform it?

Give him a son. Can he play father?

Grass's principal character is a 40-year-old high school teacher and bachelor named Eberhard Starusch. Stretched between past and future, he preaches reason to an age now raging toward an absolutism as extreme as that held by the Nazis. Starusch appeared fleetingly in earlier books as Stoertebeker, the teen-age leader of the Dusters Gang of Grass's hometown of Danzig, pillager of churches and wartime delinquent extraordinary.

Now it is 25 years later in West Berlin. Stoertebeker has been ground down into a rueful academic mediocrity. A notably unsuccessful lover, he leads an unswinging life. It consists of books, records, a collection of Celtic shards, a new Berber rug, bottles of Moselle wine that generally fail to seduce and a profoundly melancholy awareness that there is no dramatic cure--and perhaps no cure at all--for the pain of the world.

Starusch is stirred to action by Philipp Scherbaum, one of his students. The boy threatens a public immolation, partly to protest violence in general but mainly to lament the use of napalm in the Viet Nam War. He does not plan to burn himself--not from any cowardice, Grass makes clear, but because of a probably correct belief that jaded and cynical Berliners would hardly stop yawning if a 17-year-old made himself a human torch. But, the boy reasons, Berliners love dogs. Accordingly, in front of the pastry-gobbling matrons on the terrace of a Kurfuerstendamm cafe, Philipp plans to burn Max, his own much-loved dachshund, and hold up a sign that reads: "This is gasoline, not napalm."

Even a few years ago, such a situation would have seemed pure farce conjured up by someone peculiarly given to the grotesque--Grass himself, perhaps, or the late Lenny Bruce. Not today. Starusch knows that Philipp means it, and he cares deeply. The boy is his most gifted and likable student. The real thrust of Grass's book concerns the teacher's attempts to save his pupil, casting about in his mind for such shreds of love, logic and learning as Western civilization can provide.

Rummaging urgently through the storehouse of history, Starusch shows his class that revolution inevitably devours its children and ends in reformism. "With a little patience," he points out, "they could have had the same thing at less cost." Says Scherbaum, gently: "You oughtn't to take this business about history so tragically. Spring has no meaning, either, or has it?"

Morality and metaphysics are marshaled. "Public burnings are no deterrent," Starusch thinks, "they only satisfy base instincts. (I'll tell Scherbaum that.)" To show the absurdity and ineffectuality of any action, Starusch ponders assigning a paper on "What are acts?" Democracy, that most inefficient if most protective form of government, is also invoked. Scherbaum is not impressed. "Freedom of choice and second helpings," he says, summing up the cafe ladies, "that's what they mean by democracy."

Growing desperate, Starusch even offers to burn another dog with Scherbaum. He hopes to confuse the issue and thinks that, at the very least, he will be able to protect the boy from the angry crowd. Scherbaum refuses sadly. "You're over thirty," he observes. "All you care about is limiting the damage." "Watch yourself, Flip," advises Scherbaum's politicized girl friend Vero, who wants to see her lions eat her Christians, or vice versa. "Mao warns us against the motley intellectuals."

Meandering into Love

The crucial third party in the tug of war over Scherbaum's soul, however, is an unnamed man in tennis shoes: Starusch's dentist. Starusch has an overshot underjaw. Pain and multiple appointments are involved. Along with other local anaesthetics, the dentist maintains a diversionary TV set on his wall. As a modern opiate it is not far behind Novocain and the ultra-high-speed drill.

Much of what Starusch thinks, feels and seems to dredge up from his memories and fantasies occurs in the form of a surrealist TV show glimpsed past his tormentor's ear. Meanderings into Starusch's early love life, barely suppressed feelings of violence and real or imagined career in reinforced concrete multiply, not always fruitfully for the reader. Grass, who has long admired Herman Melville, sometimes seems bound to do lightly for dentistry what the author of Moby Dick did for whaling. Symbols clang. Tartar on the teeth, one gathers, is Evil--"calcified hate." Parallels are drawn--and stretched--between pumice (for cleansing) and pumice (for building), and between middle-aged teeth and the decayed pillboxes on the Normandy beaches.

Grass's intention is broader than one at first suspects. Local Anaesthetic, in fact, may go down in history as the first novel to turn the dentist's chair into an allegory of life. Absolutist revolutions, religions and moralities have all foundered on the problems of pain and how to cure it. Now Grass's dentist steps forward, an apostle of technology, a priest of the "relative." He reduces philosophy to Seneca plus hygiene. He is the exact fulfillment of Spengler's prophecy that absolute engineering is man's historical destiny.

"One man held the patient's left arm," he complacently lectures Starusch, comparing the painless extractions of today with the dental horrors of a century ago. "The second wedged his knee into the pit of his stomach, the third held the poor devil's right hand over a candle flame so as to divide the pain." True, too true. Few benefactors of humanity can more easily prove relative progress in the conquest of pain than dentists. Few are less lovable. The dentist takes an interest in Scherbaum's case. He even offers the boy a free examination. Mercilessly, Grass shows how close in some ways the dentist's liberal views are to the muddled humanism of Starusch. "I can counsel moderation," says the proud dentist. "I refuse to demand the abolition of Kirsch Torte and hard candy." Then comes the coup de grace. "How do you feel about napalm?" Starusch asks between rinsings. The reply: "Well, measured against the nuclear weapons known to us, napalm must be termed relatively harmless." Local Anaesthetic is thinner and more schematic than Grass's earlier books. The positions taken by Starusch, Scherbaum and the dentist are not new. How could they be? But they have more nuances of feeling and rueful perceptions than can be imagined or explained easily, or than the elements of a Socratic trialogue have any right to demonstrate.

The Sadness of Knowledge

Grass is Starusch, essentially. Yet Starusch is the least effectual spokesman present. Student Scherbaum, whose feelings Grass also largely shares, is a more plausible, a purer personality. What lends the story its inner force is the relationship between student and teacher--a compound of affection, melancholy, slight understanding and profound gap. The truths of middle age are usually enunciated with the smugness of Spiro Agnew speaking of effete snobs. But Humanist-Fumbler Starusch possesses charity, or what he calls "the sadness of my better knowledge."

Like Grass, Starusch is aware of how depressing it is to know that all actions, even the purest, are likely to be compromised, and that society, possessed of enormous power to harm itself, has only small power to improve. Like Grass, he mourns the fall of valor and of hope that occurs each time his kind of knowledge prevails, catching up a youthful spirit in the toils of conventional wisdom.

Childless Starusch comes very close to a father's love. What can man learn? What can man teach? Grass asks these questions while confronting a world where conventional wisdom seems to find itself hopelessly compromised and often outflanked by impatient rage. But his book's debate also seems to accept the classic definitions--though not the romantic solutions--of Nietzsche, whom Starusch quotes both seriously and ironically.

Man, Nietzsche thought, tugs himself in two opposite directions. The Greek god of wine, Dionysus, represents the feeling part of man: vital, creative, inspired but, if carried to excess, also deranged and destructive. Apollo, the sun god, stands for the reasoning part of man, drawn toward order, systems, and justice--with the risk, of course, of deadening overorganization.

Totally Reasonable

Looking at Scherbaum, Starusch, in effect, asks: Can life be passionate, alive, Dionysian, without spinning off into chaos? Looking at his stoic dentist, spouting Seneca, Starusch asks: Can life be orderly, totally reasonable, Apollonian, without becoming as sterile as a dentist's office?

Here is the dilemma of the middle class, and here is Grass flapping wildly to maintain balance, while looking despairingly at the record of bourgeois society, 1939-1970. The patient, especially in Germany, keeps going on awful binges--between which he snores away in a complacent stupor. Bloodlust or Novocain-tingle: Are there no alternatives? Grass has been haunted by this question all his life.

In a remarkable passage in The Tin Drum, he dreams of the perfect Nietzschean synthesis: "Oskar was a little demigod whose business it was to harmonize chaos and intoxicate reason.' This may also be as close to a definition of the artist's job as Grass has come. The bloodletting material, the tin-drumming style of the war novels, has partly disguised what Local Anaesthetic makes apparent: Grass is a fanatic for moderation. He is a moderate the way other men are extremists. He is a man almost crazy for sanity.

Balance is Grass's game. He is in love with the firm, the tangible. He has a peasant's instinct for the solid ground, an artisan's feeling for materials. His West Berlin home--described by one visitor as "a god-awful Wilhelmian house"--is solid as a fort. The furniture is reassuringly thick-legged. The floors are bare. There are no curtains.

In clean, wrinkled, absolutely undistinguished clothes--open-necked shirts are the rule--Grass walks from room to room with workmanlike purpose. He looks like the visiting plumber who has a job to do and knows quite well that he can do it. He is a man who rolls his own cigarettes, from black, earthy, wonderfully vile-looking tobacco (Schwarzer Krauser No. 1). His notion of vacation is to rent a cottage in Brittany and dig all day for clams.

He loves West Berlin, including its Kneipen (corner pubs). With his Swiss wife Anna, a former ballet dancer, and the children--twins, Franz and Raoul, 12, Laura, 8, and four-year-old Bruno --he still goes on long investigatory walks. Whatever puts him at one remove from the physical, Grass hates, including the automobile (he refuses to learn to drive) and the telephone (he used to hide his in a cupboard and beg his friends not to call).

On Sundays and other special occasions, he cooks for the family and friends. His specialty: roast mutton `a la Grass (recipe, secret), which he has used occasionally as the lure to political gatherings in his home. "Cooking is like sculpture," he says. "It's working with real material. Writing, just words on a page; it's too abstract to satisfy."

Still, Grass makes writing as corporal and kinetic as he can. He composes standing up, as Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe did before him, planting himself before a tailored-to-order desk like a craftsman at his workbench. And when he works, he works: up to seven hours a day. He makes notes in a large scrawl with a felt pen but does his actual writing on a typewriter. A good day he will usually produce six pages, double-spaced, that eventually go through two, maybe three, rewrites. Even so, The Tin Drum took more than five years to complete.

From his very beginning, Grass was born to be one of nature's liveliest balancing acts. German grocer father. Mother a volatile product of the Kashubians, a Slavonic tribe with its own language that figures, right down to its recipes, in all of Grass's novels. A good, sturdy mongrel strain for an artist who would have to carry out (literally) Joyce's advice to the writers' guild: silence, exile and cunning.

What his native city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk) meant to young Grass is laid bare in his novels in passages as close to lyricism as this anti-sentimental man can come. The boyhood scenes along the Vistula in Dog Years bear a universal-urchin resemblance to Mark Twain's recollections of his own lost Eden, the Mississippi. "For me," Grass recalls, "Danzig was a modern port and a medieval town, a marvelous mixture."

Grass's Danzig comes through the pores: the swoop of gulls, the rainbow oil slicks on harbor water, those unique greens and maroons that encrust the sides of tramp steamers, the look of rusty iron against snow. Then there is the city itself: a palette of earth tones and potato browns under spirals of wood smoke. The Danzig sentences flow like the Vistula, chock-full of the flotsam that Grass loves to describe.

Grass fiercely denies that he writes autobiography. In preparation for The Tin Drum, he revisited Danzig briefly and researched the story of its Polish post office besieged by the SS Home Guard. Yet he only recently received a stack of photographs of the city that he shuffles through, making precise identifications. "This is the school in Cat and Mouse . . . Here's the cemetery in The Tin Drum."

When a Grass protagonist leaves Danzig, the world starts at once to turn into a nightmare. It is as if a malediction had been pronounced. Homey realism begins to tear apart into fantasy. Characters are likely to change not only their names but their personalities--thinning out, abstracting, becoming jeering ghosts of their former selves.

Grass has succinctly outlined his own journey into that nightmare: "At the age of ten, I was a member of the Hitler Cubs; when I was 14, I was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. At 15, I called myself an Air Force auxiliary. At 17, I was in the armored infantry." Grass left Danzig as a soldier in 1944. He was wounded on April 20, 1945, and the end of the war found him in a hospital bed at Marienbad. He was one of the first Germans to be marched through Dachau for a whiff of what the infernal was really like. He has not forgotten.

Patriotic Ideology

Call those the live-or-die years. Grass characters are nothing if not survival artists, and Grass survived. He estimates that 80% of the Danzig he knew was bombed out. He had to abandon, naturally, the patriotic ideology he once held as a self-styled "dutiful youth." Like Mahlke, the schoolboy hero of Cat and Mouse, he once could identify most German warships by class. Unlike Mahlke, Grass admits: "I myself was thinking right up to the end in 1945 that our war was the right war."

How did a grocer's son from Danzig ever put together the nerve, the innocence, the cold fury, the sheer talent to play tin drummer to the most traumatic decade in modern history? The general pattern was one of slow maturing and lots of retreat time in the desert--the training rules of artists and saints. Grass did not exactly step out of P.W. uniform with calling in hand. He worked as a farm laborer, then in a potash mine--the scene of the climactic Walpurgisnacht in Dog Years. There followed further preliminary skirmishes among the ruins, more rehearsed handholds on life tentatively resumed.

Grass's sense of direction became firmer when he, like Oskar, apprenticed himself to a tombstone cutter in Duesseldorf--an almost too perfect school for the artist, considering Grass's bent. One imagines him, teeth bared in a macabre grin, ferociously attacking stone angels. In 1949 it all began to come together. Grass was accepted at Duesseldorfs Academy of Art, to study painting and sculpture. He played drums and washboard with the local jazz band ("to fill my stomach"). He began to write poetry ("to ease my soul"). He met Anna in 1952 on a hitchhiking vacation in Switzerland. They were married two years later, after she had moved to Berlin to dance. When, in 1953, he got into the Berlin School of Fine Arts, he also began to write plays.

In 1955, Anna entered a selection of her husband's poetry in a radio contest. He won third prize. More important, he earned a meeting with Group 47, once described by Grass as "the ambulant literary capital of Germany." It was a monumental encounter that must rank in literary legend with the day Hemingway first visited Gertrude Stein for tea.

Group 47, named after the year it was founded, had been established as a forum where young German writers could read works-in-progress and have them appreciated, or criticized. (The reader's chair is known as the electric chair.) "That noisy horde of smart alecks," the last guardian of German Kultur, Thomas Mann, called them. But in the cultural power vacuum of postwar Germany, Group 47 had the influence of an intellectual Mafia. Unshaven, in working clothes and a peaked cloth cap, as veteran Group 47 members now recall him, Grass stood in the doorway and announced: "Ich bin Grass." The tin drummer was on his way.

Condemned to Limbo

To this young man with the absolutely undefeatable lower jaw, what did it matter that his first published book of verse fell into instant oblivion? In search of personal isolation and a new environment, Grass picked up his wife and moved to Paris. There he wrote, living on a monthly income of 300 marks (about $75) from a German publisher that he eked out by selling strong-minded but simple drawings. In 1958, Grass read the first chapter from the electric chair. It is the custom for Group 47 to award an annual prize. Grass won in a landslide, getting more than 75% of the vote. The Tin Drum was published the following year, with an advance sale --then an astounding figure in Germany --of more than 40,000.

Every artist kills the middle class he loves, and Grass can seem merciless. "The truth is," he writes of Oskar's presumptive father before killing him off, "he had never been anything but a blue-eyed boy, smelling of cologne and incapable of understanding." Obedient in war, complacent in peace, the blue-eyed little nobody is the villain of all Grass's pieces, the real god that failed. Grass does not spare him.

Yet the members of the middle class remain Grass's wary hope too, and the object of his unspoken compassion. Seldom good enough, but never really bad either, they are condemned to the limbo of Dante's trimmers. Grass shares the pain he gives them because, finally, he knows he cannot save them or himself. Or can he?

That is why Grass goes apoliticking. "My fame must have some use," he says grimly, and plods around Germany, an earnest Apollonian, devoting himself to what he calls "the boring, laborious task of reasoning." And of repeating himself. Guenter Grass, concerned-citizen-on-the stump, bears little resemblance to Grass the nightmare poet of past and present. He comes on anticharismatic and plainspoken. Gruffly he explains that there are only "limited opportunities." Then he pleads for bigger pensions for war widows, bigger inheritance taxes on estates over $1,000,000, some sort of reconciliation with East Germany--in short, Social Democrat Willy Brandt's program.

Grass worries about the moral absolutism of the revolutionary young who seem willing to destroy society in the hope of curing it. Though much better motivated, he believes, such apocalyptic thinking could prove as dangerous as the absolutism of the Nazis. Grass worries about the posters of Che Guevara and Martin Luther King Jr. that he finds on his son's bedroom walls "Public mythology," he grumbles. "Che never wanted to be a picture that people pray before." (Grass himself is a lapsed Catholic, but he is letting his children be brought up in the church.)

The Establishment, of course, has never been able to abide Grass. The lower middle class has never forgiven his desecration of the Iron Cross. For his anti-militarism, his stand against sweeping Nazism under the rug, his insistence that a consumer society soon consumes far more than goods and services, he was for long a great hero of leftish intellectuals and the radical young. After all, the latter felt about their World War II parents the same way their American counterparts now feel about parental acquiescence to Viet Nam.

Grass, however, has spoken slightingly of the cloistered attitudes of writers in their "heartwarming velvet jackets" who walk their "freedom and independence like lap dogs." Four years ago, he lost the intellectual left for good by writing The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising a play that implicitly criticized Leftist Cult-Hero Bertolt Brecht for not supporting the 1953 workers' rebellion against the Communist regime in East Germany.

That left youth, the one group that Grass cares most about, the one group tor which, essentially, Local Anaesthetic was written. Almost as much as the young do, he detests the dentist's pet philosopher Seneca, whose stoic acceptance of the status quo, however horrifying, the elder generation in Germany and elsewhere has unwittingly come to adopt: "Let us train our minds to desire what the situation demands."

On Greece and War

Like the young of Germany, Grass deplores materialism and hates the repressive power of the Soviet Union. Like them, he is enraged by U.S. support of a bad government in Greece. Viet Nam he has said, is a tragedy for postwar Europe because it has turned idealistic youth away from the U.S.--once hopefully looked to as a symbol of freedom and democracy. If anyone can or could speak to the Scherbaums of today, Grass can. But for how long? Morally, Grass is a liberal with a radical conscience In politics he is a step-by-step progressive and a practicing Social Democrat. However, much as he wants change from deep inner conviction and bitter experience, he is against all apocalyptic self-delusions, supersystems, magic social cures and high-flown notions that human society is swiftly perfectible. In sadness he speaks out against youthful extremists and what he calls the "blind activism of a pseudo-revolutionary movement." In anger he sees Neanderthal reaction setting in by men who speak with grim relish of restoring law and order. Tirelessly, subtly, he preaches the folly of posturing.

Pain eats up energy. Politics does not encourage precise thought. "When you begin to shout and find the smile fixing itself on your mouth," Grass says, "you know you're really in politics." Political campaigns are also distracting--as Norman Mailer, the one major writer in the U.S. whose recent course seems to parallel Grass's, recently found out. There are critics who say that Grass will turn from writing to action for good if Willy Brandt should offer him a big enough job in the new government. Grass denies that. As proof, he holds up not only his work in progress but a completed body of writing, some of it done during his political period in the past five years, that has placed him beyond Mailer and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, at least in creative range and staying power.

It is a measure of Grass's seriousness that he has chosen to make a novel out of a theme as spectacularly unappealing as that of Local Anaesthetic. It is a measure of his honesty that he persists in giving the young the one answer they do not want to hear: "There is no answer." It is a measure of his abilities that he succeeds--touchingly, amusingly, agonizingly. Since Local Anaesthetic came out in Germany, Grass is often confronted by bitter high school and college students. "You only criticize," they complain, "you only show us how things are. Why don't you show us the way?" "I'm not a prophet," he growls in response, "I'm a writer." In the long run, that will probably have to be enough.

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