Too Far Afield by Günter Grass

Took close to a month to read this 560 page epic. Had to re-read some parts as I didn't fully grasp what it was about until I almost finished reading it. Too Far Afield is very similar to Grass' other books like Tin Drum or Crabwalk, that deals with German history, and how Germans try to come to terms with their own rather colourful past. The book goes through almost two hundred years of German history starting from the early eighteen hundreds to the late nineteen eighties when the Berlin wall fell and Germany was reunited. The book is told from the perspective of two main characters - Theo Wuttke, an author and intellectual, and Ludwig Hoftaller, an officer of the secret police. The title of the book gets it's name from the German novel Effi Briest by Theodore Fontaine. This sentence is found before the beginning of the book:

"...and Briest said queitly, 'Oh, Luise, let it be...that takes us too far afield.'"

And then for a long time nothing more. The silence of the grave.... Each hacked out the slice that appealed to him: sometimes he was stylized as the 'rambler through the Mark Brandenburg', sometimes abbreviated to the 'serenely detached observer', sometimes celebrated as the balladeer, sometimes rediscovered as a revolutionary or dismissed on partisan grounds. Schools were named after him, even apothecary shops. And further misuse and abuse. Already he was dismissed in schoolbooks, consigned to the dustbin of the ages, threatened with oblivion, when at last this young man in Luftwaffe blue turned up, sat down on this particular bench in the Tiergarten, alone or with a companion, and proceeded to become a mouthpiece, for him, and for him alone, the 'Immortal'.

The main character Theo Wuttke known as the Immortal still alive as an old man close to eighty during the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, actually began his life in the early eighteen hundreds in Neuruppin a bit north of Berlin in what was then Prussia. Very interesting that Grass decided to portray two of the main characters as immortals, but call only one of them so. Seems like an appeal by Grass to portray the cultural and intellectual aspects of Germany as the true immortal spirit while the other unsavoury character is an unfortunate byproduct. Theo Wuttke in his early like until 1918 lived as an author, lecturer and also sadly a propaganda mouthpiece of the Prussian regime. The author of several celebrated works, he also wrote (or was coerced to write) grandiosely about the Prussian wars. At times honoured by the Prussian regime, at other times censored, his vacillations between assisting revolutionaries and toeing the official line was brought out several times in the book.

The Immortal was born again in the next stage of Germany through the Nazi regime followed by communist East Germany. During the Nazi regime he served officially in the Luftwaffe but in reality was tasked with writing articles glorifying Germany's occupation of France and boosting the morale of the German occupying troops. During the years after the war, he is a member of the Cultural Union, touring Germany and giving talks on German literature and culture, once again as part of their propaganda machinery. Just like the Prussian times, many of his speeches were censored and he was prohibited from speaking about certain themes such as the Soviet Union's crushing of the uprising in Czechoslovakia.

"Of course, the Cultural Union existed precisely to accommodate such bourgeois wavering. It was a playground with little space but much activity.... Our mail displayed a splendid internationalist array of postal stamps. Alas, the album was lost. But what wasn't lost? I swear, Wuttke! Does anything matter anymore? As I wrote you recently: Nothing is left. In the end we all stand here empty-handed."

A large part of the book comprises either of conversations between Wuttke and the other immortal Hoftaller or other German intellectuals such as his professor friend Freundlich, or even his own daughter Martha. The appearance of Freundlich who is Jewish is a very symbolic insertion by Grass to describe how Germany faced the consequences of the Holocaust. Fruendlich's father - a communist Jew - had to flee Nazi Germany to Mexico, but then returned back after the war. Freundlich becomes a professor at a university only to find himself running foul of the East German communist regime that strips him of his party membership.

Freundlich personifies the effort made to humanize Germany after the war. This makes me recollect a conversation with a German acquaintance who is now close to being eighty. Growing up just after the war, she described how the German school curriculum described the Germans being evil monsters. This might only be in contrast to the Nazi brainwashing about the Germans being the greatest race on the planet. This swinging of the pendulum in German politics is fairly common, where Germans throw in their lot with whatever ideology that exists, only to find that they were blatantly wrong and then swing in the opposite direction.

We've lived them, these times. I know, I know. And you know even more. I'd give a great deal not to have written some of those letters, or to have written them differently. It must have been the times.

Grass also talks about the guilt that most Germans, especially of the immediate post-war generation, carry with them either due to their active participation in the Holocaust or by just being mute spectators. The above quote is from Wuttke to Hoftaller, who admits that in some of his correspondences, he wrote condescendingly of Jews, even though he had several Jewish colleagues and friends. Hoftaller confronts him because being a member of the secret police, he knew about all these derogatory references. I remember listening to an interview with Bernhard Schlink, the author of The Reader. Schlink spoke about how after the war, during the investigations, many were aghast to find what had happened, how even respected professors and intellectuals had attacked and denigrated Jews.

Hoftaller, the other immortal in the book, is called Wuttke's day-and-night shadow. Almost seems to personify the German conscience, someone who sees and knows everything that happens, but does not necessarily stop it. He is privy to every aspect to Wuttke's life, his marriage in his past life as well as his marriage in the current one. He is also aware of every detail of Wuttke's affairs in both lives. His confronting of Wuttke is almost symbolic of the way Germany in many cases abandoned many of it's victims, and never fully owned up to it's past. In this aspect, this book is a bit similar to Dog Years also by the same author, as the main character in post-war West Germany is haunted by an act of violence committed by him.

Who wants to reach eighty and sit around shaking his head, with no one sure whether it's from old age or at the ways of the world?

A lot of the book deals with the problems faced by re-unification. About how East Germans felt they would be completely dispossessed by the West Germans, their factories worth little more than scrap, their land up for grabs. The book describes the Handover Trust, which is in charge of liquidating East German assets. Theo Wuttke's final job is with this Handover Trust, where he is tasked with finding a suitable term for this liquidation.

Another brilliant book by Grass, this book that won the Nobel Prize for literature, truly deserves this award. I am happy I read this book soon after leaving Germany after four years, as many of the nuances in the book are quite familiar. I tried my best not to throw in spoilers, though this book is not really a thriller, but more of an introspection. However, the abstract provided in the cover of this book is nowhere close to describing how deep and profound this book is. This book truly takes you too far afield.