“My Dear Günter Grass …”

THE COVER OF DER SPIEGEL (21 August 1995) shows critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki literally tearing apart a copy of Grass's Ein weites Feld, and the condescendingly rather than cordially phrased caption reads, “Mein lieber Günter Grass….” In what amounts to a review of the novel in the form of a purportedly open letter in the same journal, Reich-Ranicki proceeds to assure Grass that he esteems him as an extraordinary writer, but, at the same time, he professes to be unable to hide the fact that he considers Ein weites Feld an utter failure, because Grass has tackled a highly charged political topic, the so-called Wende and the aftermath of German (re)unification (for a definition of these two terms, see Frank Thomas Grub 2003). Not without justification, Reich-Ranicki points out that Grass's negative views on the (re)union of the two postwar German states, as he deems them to be reflected in the novel, are not shared by the majority of his fellow citizens; hence Grass finds himself among a distinct minority (for a cogent summary of the development of Grass's stance with regard to German unification, see Jan-Werner Müller 2000). Apart from the all-important politics that underlie many of the negative reviews, the critic considers the writer's ploy to introduce Fonty, a kind of doppelgänger — or, as the English translation has it, “revenant” (TFA, 347) — of nineteenth-century novelist Theodor Fontane (1819–98), a complete disappointment and the figure of Fonty itself an artificial construct.