76
PARTISAN REVIEW
however brilliantly manipulated and devised, is no substitute for their
kind of authority.
Gunter Grass's new novel,
The Call of the Toad,
takes the form, like
so much of his work, of satirical fantasy, but beneath its wonderfully in–
ventive facade he has some sad and deadly serious things to say, not only
about the newly unified Germany but about the European scene as a
whole, rife with materialism, greed, and nationalistic fanaticism. We are
not allowed to forget, even as Grass makes us laugh, that in German leg–
end the call of the toad is a harbinger of disaster. Yet this new novel is
his funniest and most engaging work of fiction in years.
Set in his native Danzig-Gdansk, which he describes with his usual
nostalgic affection for the city, the surrealistic story casts glaring satirical
light on the post-1989 political atmosphere of Germany and the Baltic
peninsula. Grass takes a dim view of Chancellor Kohl's new Germany -
he was opposed to unification - and the yellow-bellied toad's croak of
doom is his disenchanted symbol of foreboding about the country's fu–
ture.
Since cemeteries form the background of the story, the principal
figures, naturally, are an aging widow and widower, who meet on All
Souls Day, the day of the dead, in 1989 just before reunification.
Alexandra, a Pole whose parents settled in Gdasnk when they were ex–
pelled from Vilno after the Russians took over, is an art restorer, an ex–
pert at regilding old sculpture that has lost its gleam over the centuries.
Alexander, a native of Danzig who now teaches in Germany, is an art
historian whose specialty is Baroque tombstones. He was in the Hitler
Jugend, she an ardent Communist until '68, but they have long since
outgrown and repudiated these youthful transgressions.
As they chat, and begin to fall in love, they brood in sadness about
the many Germans and Poles originally from the Danzig peninsula who
were buried in foreign earth because they were shifted about in remorse–
less dislocation during "the century of expulsions." Then, instead of just
brooding, they decide to form a Polish-German Cemetery Society that
will become a Cemetery of Reconciliation, where the dead can spend
eternity in their native ground. As elderly Danzigers in West Germany
enthusiastically apply for burial plots in the enlarged cemetery, the
Society mushrooms into big business, with a tactfully balanced (half–
German, half-Polish) board of directors, large sums in the bank, comput–
ers humming and clicking, faxes whirling busily between Germany and
Gdansk. The whole enterprise is Grass's mordant caricature of a united
Germany and a united Europe.
Inevitably the board of directors comes up with plans for some lu–
crative "improvements" on the original idea: "twilight homes" on the
