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Günter Grass poursuit, depuis plus de cinquante ans, une œuvre non conformiste bousculant les classifications. Déterminantes dans le champ artistique, ses publications comptent aussi dans le débat public. La plupart d'entre elles suscitent des réactions souvent passionnelles, obligent à reconsidérer des événements clés trop vite digérés ou normalisés - à l'instar de la chute du mur de Berlin, des catastrophes écologiques ou de la domination du tout-économique. L'engagement de l'écrivain plasticien est réel, intense : il envisage le contenu comme résistance, la forme comme éveil de l'esprit critique et politique.

Grass, Günter, 1927-2015

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Authors, German --- Ecrivains allemands --- Biography --- Biographies --- Grass, Günter, --- Grass, Günter,

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In receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Günter Grass, a prominent and controversial figure in the ongoing discussion of the German past and reunification, finally gained recognition as Germany's greatest living author, a writer of international importance and acclaim. Grass's 1959 novel 'The Tin Drum' remains one of the most important works of literature for the construction of postwar German identity. Peter Arnds offers a completely new reading of the novel, analyzing an aspect of Grass's literary treatment of German history that has never been examined in detail: the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, which resulted in the persecution of so-called asocials as 'life unworthy of life,' their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and their marginalization in the Adenauer period. Arnds shows that in order to represent the Nazi past and subvert bourgeois paradigms of rationalism, Grass revives several facets of popular culture that National Socialism either suppressed or manipulated for its ideology of racism. In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these 'asocials,' for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that Grass creates in the novel an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a 'Stunde Null,' that putative tabula rasa in 1945. Peter O. Arnds is associate professor of German and Italian at Kansas State University.

Eugenics in literature. --- Grass, Günter, --- Grass, Günter, --- German past. --- Günter Grass. --- Nazi ideology of race. --- Nazi ideology. --- Nazi science. --- Nobel Prize for Literature. --- Stunde Null. --- The Tin Drum. --- asocials. --- destruction rationalism. --- eugenics. --- postwar German identity. --- postwar Germany. --- representation. --- subversion.