Günter Grass as Historian: The Thirty Years' War in Grass's Works

The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) has served as subject matter for generations of German writers, from Friedrich Schiller to Günter Grass. Grass assumes the role of historian in his accounts of seventeenth-century Germany to "correct" more official renditions of that era. The paper ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monatshefte (Madison, Wis. : 1946) Wis. : 1946), 1993-04, Vol.85 (1), p.24-36
Main Author: Anderson, Susan C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Historians
History
Literary history
Men
Narrative history
Narratives
Narrators
War
Writers
Written narratives
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) has served as subject matter for generations of German writers, from Friedrich Schiller to Günter Grass. Grass assumes the role of historian in his accounts of seventeenth-century Germany to "correct" more official renditions of that era. The paper examines Grass's notions of history and his narrativization of the Thirty Years' War in excerpts from Der Butt (1977) and Das Treffen in Telgte (1979). Grass's manner of transmitting history is a parody of accepted historiographical procedures. His focus on actual men intellectuals and invented women cooks, personified footnotes, visual and gustatory archival material, and nonlinear chronology serves his purpose of inventing "more exact facts" than those found in history books. His blatantly subjective chronicle of Baroque Germany depicts the historically marginal and neglected, that is, the majority of people, to challenge a historiography he believes is still mired in patriarchal modes of perception.
ISSN:0026-9271
1934-2810