EUROPE : The Plot Sickens, German Critics Say : The uneasy merger of East and West Germany is at the core of Gunter Grass’ new novel. His treatment of the topic has angered many.

I took a speed-reading course , where you run your finger down the middle of the page , and was able to read “War and Peace” in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.

--Woody Allen

Trying to describe Gunter Grass’ newest, longest work brings to mind the quip from Woody Allen’s 1975 movie, “Love and Death.”

Grass, a man often hailed as Germany’s greatest living novelist, has written 784 pages, spun a plot that covers two centuries, poured out an ocean of literary allusions and launched his book on the 246th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. So it just sounds silly to say “Ein Weites Feld” is about German unification.

But the uneasy merger of the former East and West Germany is at the core of Grass’ new novel, a book whose title means “a broad field” and that alludes, for those who know their Germanistik , to the 19th-Century German novelist Theodor Fontane.

A celebrity such as Grass, 67, taking on one of the watershed events of the 20th Century was bound to create some excitement in Germany.

But this?

“Unreadable!” stormed the cerebral Hamburg weekly Die Zeit.

“A monstrosity!” raged the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

“Grass does not love his country,” clucked the mass-circulation tabloid Bild-Zeitung.

The respected news weekly Der Spiegel did not stop at publishing a review: It brought in the top gun of German book critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, gave him a full five pages to trounce Grass and even put a photomontage on its cover showing Reich-Ranicki ripping “Ein Weites Feld” in two, as though it were a Los Angeles phone book.

It was a rare drubbing even for Grass, whose social-democratic leanings have brought him occasional trouble before.

But Grass lashed back. He reminded Der Spiegel that destroying unpopular books has a particularly ignoble past in Germany--the Nazis ritually burned all the books they did not like in 1933--and forbade Der Spiegel to print a scheduled interview with him.

U.S. admirers of Grass will have a chance to form their own opinions on the controversy in the fall of 1997, when Harcourt Brace & Co. is scheduled to publish “Ein Weites Feld” in English.

The two-year delay will give Americans a chance to brush up on their Fontane, for without at least a superficial understanding of the Prussian novelist, they are likely to get about as much pleasure out of “Ein Weites Feld” as a German would in plowing through an un-annotated translation of “Finnegan’s Wake.”

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Obscure though Fontane may be to modern American readers, Grass has found in him the perfect foil for his novel’s central character, the oddball Fonty, a clerk who has worked in three different German bureaucracies, all housed in the same central Berlin building: the Nazi Air Transport Ministry, the East German House of Ministries, and the post-unification Treuhan danstalt , an agency created to dispose of the assets of the disappeared East German state.

Fonty is a great admirer of Fontane, who lived through Germany’s first unification in the early 1870s. Grass’ title comes from the melancholy sighs of one Fontane character who, whenever asked about the life and death of his unhappy daughter, replies, “That’s a broad field,” as if to say, “It’s just too long and complicated--I don’t want to talk about it.”

Which is, as it happens, the same answer one is apt to get today if one asks an eastern German what he thinks about Germany’s second unification. Easterners wanted, for the most part, to get rid of their sclerotic and repressive state, but precious few of them are unambiguously delighted with what they got in its place.

Grass, who sympathizes with the eastern plight, says he is offering “Ein Weites Feld” as “an urgent literary correction . . . to what seems now to be the official history” of German unification.

That is why, in the eyes of a few sympathetic critics, Grass’ book has been so thoroughly trashed by Germany’s mostly western critical Establishment: not because it is a literary failure, but because it debunks the comfortable idea that Easterners are grateful to the West for supposedly winning the Cold War, and that all will be well once capitalism takes hold in their drab streets and fallow farmlands.