BERLIN LETTER
339
But the work of Ina Seidel, even though it is still widely
admired, is no longer typical of the contemporary German novel.
This was not a bad year. Heinrich Boll wrote a new novel that
delighted many critics but strikes me as being hindered by a slightly
obtrusive symbolism: it concerns three generations of a Rhenish
family of architects who build, then blow up, and finally rebuild an
abbey. Worthier of notice are two newcomers of promising talents.
Gunter Grass, a 32-year-old lyricist of German-Polish 'extraction,
has written a picaresque novel; reviewers compared it to Grimmel–
shausen's
Simplizissimus,
or even to Rabelais, but it reminds one,
more fittingly perhaps, of Saul Bellow's Augie March. To be sure,
the hero is more comical even than Augie March. At the tender age
of three Otto Matzerath gets a tin drum as a present and decides
to stop growing. With the craftiness and the unscrupulousness of a
child, Otto drums his way through an age that is just as infantile
and as unprincipled as he is. The novel is widely read and much
praised and is provocative enough to startle many worthy citizens.
It was nominated for the annual literary prize of Bremen, but the
city senate reconsidered and voted it down. The senators were prob–
bably more shocked by the apparent blasphemy of the story than by
its latitudinarian attitude toward sex. During a visit to a Catholic
church in his native Danzig, Otto falls in love with a nude plaster
statue of the Christ child. This bold friendship with erotic over–
tones is a leitmotif of the work and as a kind of provocative counter–
point it satirizes a widespread religious sentimentality. Grass's
Blechtrommel
might be compared with Thomas Mann's
Doktor
Faustus;
the two novels are perhaps the most significant post-war
Germany has produced. They try to chronicle and to interpret what
really happened in Germany during the last fifty years. Of course,
the methods employed are radically different. Thomas Mann's
descriptions are the work of a sharply analytical mind; Grass relies
exclusively on his imagination. It is a highly original kind of
imagination that never strays beyond its proper bailiwick. Grass
does not have recourse to those artistic tricks of modern literature
that are sometimes taken for imagination, while actually they are
the expression of intellectual capriciousness. The "Tin Drum"
cannot be interpreted as an ordinary novel with symbolic intent,
for the author rarely aims for a deliberate meaning. He seems to
