Our Times

“If I start a novel that begins this week in Berlin or Dusseldorf,” Gunter Grass said on a visit to New York in 1965, “I always have to go back to the beginning of the century.” So it had been with Grass’ masterpiece, “The Tin Drum,” which opened with the now-famous scene of the narrator’s grandmother hiding an escaped convict beneath her skirts in a Kashubian potato field at the tail end of the 19th century. And so it is now, with the Nobel laureate’s latest work, “My Century.”

A novel sans plot or hero, a novel only in the sense of being an extended work of fiction, “My Century” is a series of 100 vignettes beginning in 1900 and running through 1999. “I, trading places with myself, was in the thick of things, year in and year out,” is how the century begins. And trading places Grass does in each chapter, with nearly 100 other voices, male and female, old and young. There is something almost Studs Terkel-esque about the form, making “My Century” an oral history of 100 years of Germany, but with one crucial difference: Grass the fictionalizer is always in control.

Among the punctuations of the novel are the 1910 testimony of a munitions worker named Bertha whose girth suggested a name for the famous World War I cannon, the 1931 memories of a Brown Shirt and the 1995 rantings of a radio DJ announcing the Love Parade in Berlin celebrating Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag. In 1930 a troupe of theatricals eat pickled eggs and drink schnapps in Franz Diener’s Beer Hall in Berlin and talk about Max Schmeling. “At one point Friedrich Durrenmatt called the assembled company to attention and delivered himself of a Bernese explanation of the universe, complete with galaxies, nebulae and light-years: ‘Our earth, by which I mean everything that creeps and crawls and takes itself seriously, is nothing but a pile of crumbs!’ Whereupon he called over to the bar for another round of beer.”

Pile of crumbs they may be. But Grass has spent his life re-sorting and rekneading these crumbs into rich pastries that never taste exactly how they look. Adolf Hitler makes his first appearance in 1922 as “Corporal Hitler, batty as he is . . . a born crowd pleaser.” A war-time banker, “discretion in pin-stripes,” introduces the punk revolution of 1978 by shaving “off his beautiful thick gray hair, leaving only a stripe running down the middle, and that he’d dyed a bright ginger color.” Grass himself appears three or four times, as a young author and later as an aging father. Occasionally other characters survive several years and give their voices to several chapters. The World War I entries are devoted to a meeting of the two great German chroniclers of that epoch, Erich Maria Remarque, whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” was the anthem of post-war fatigue, and Ernst Junger, whose “Storm of Steel” was the battle cry of Peter Pan nationalism. “ ‘Over 20 million deaths from influenza,’ Junger says to Remarque at a Zurich cafe, ‘approximately the same as the number of deaths on the battlefield. But when you fell in battle, at least you knew what for.’

“ ‘What for, in heaven’s name?’ Remarque muttered under his breath.’ ”

*

Their story, as with many others, is told many decades later. The chapter titled 1938 tells of Kristallnacht, but from the mouth of a schoolgirl in 1989. The Wall has fallen, 51 years to the day after the Night of the Broken Glass, when synagogues and businesses owned by Jews throughout Germany were smashed or put to the torch, and the girl’s teacher, Herr Hosle, can’t ignore the terrible coincidence. He repeats and repeats the story of destruction and murder until the Parent Teacher Assn. puts a stop to his obsession. “Even my father,” the girl recounts, “said more or less this to Herr Hosle: ‘Of course I’ve got nothing against my daughter learning about the atrocities the SA hordes committed all over the place and unfortunately here in Esslingen too, but there’s a time for everything. And that time is not now, when we finally have reason to rejoice and the whole world wishes us well.’ ”

That tale of falling walls and broken glass serves as a perfect introduction to the war that defined the German century so horribly in the dictionaries of the rest of the world. And only a writer with the strength of moral purpose and the mastery of language could pull off the virtuosic choice that Grass makes in this section. For seven chapters, Grass’s narrator becomes a war correspondent who goes, many years later, to a reunion of like-minded chums on the island of Sylt, at the border of Germany and Denmark. “Having started out as a whippersnapper in the Polish campaign and never having held or been suspected of holding a desk job in the Ministry of Propaganda, I enjoyed a certain standing,” the correspondent says, as he trades tales with other veterans--of the Allied carpet-bombing of Cologne, of the siege of Stalingrad, of later wars in Indochina and the Middle East. As his comrades disperse and the big shots make their ways to “the massive beach houses of the island dignitaries,” our correspondent goes off to Algeria, “where after seven years of nonstop carnage the war had abated, though refused to end. What is peace, anyway? For us war never ends.” His account of these critical years and the opportunity he makes to enlarge their story into a panegyric against war in general may infuriate some. But Grass calls his book “My Century.”

And in the end, he has written a deeply personal book. The final narrator is Grass’s dead mother, brought back to life to see the end of her son’s century. “He didn’t force me into it, he talked me into it, the rascal. He was always good at that.” Equally good is Grass’s translator, Michael Henry Heim, who trades languages as surely as the narrator trades voices, with his Protean ear for the development of the American language across the century.

In the end, is “My Century” a novel? It hardly matters. Gunter Grass has spent the better part of his century earning the right to call his works whatever he wants. If nothing else, “My Century” teaches one extraordinary history lesson: These past 100 years were anything but fixed numbers printed on cardboard calendars. For Grass, dates are dynamic actors, the grizzled veterans playing opposite the ingenues--Kristallnacht vs. The Fall of the Wall, World War II vs. Vietnam--mixing memory and desire in a cruel and human drama--on the biggest, bloodiest stage the world has ever known. What better description for a novel?