The title of the book, and the would-be film -- Headbirths -- refers to the god Zeus, "from whose head the goddess Athene was born: a paradox that has impregnated male minds to this day." The subtitle, The Germans Are Dying Out, originates from Franz Josef Strauss -- a fear-inspiring notion meant to provoke the anxiety, among Germans, that other, less-restrained nations are outproducing them and will overtake them.
"And since fear in Germany," Grass writes, "has always had a high rate of increment and multiplies more quickly than do the Chinese, it has provided fear-mongering politicians with a program." Thus, right-wing election tactics and a trip to China provide Grass with an insight to a moral and political global concern: world population growth, world starvation, and the complicated, personal dignity that is called for in a conscientious contemporary couple's decision to have or not to have a child. With the accessibility of a diary or a journal -- an accessibility rare to the writer's more recent work -- Grass constructs a fictional couple and imagines their trip to Asia (on the eve of the German elections in which they are seriously, and liberally, involved).
Within this deceptively plain narrative, Grass uncovers insoluble, irreducible complexity; he writes at his baroque best. "A couple straight out of a contemporary picture book," he calls his invented family -- he, named Harm; she, Dorte. "They keep a cat and still have no child." (They met at a sit-in against the Vietnam War.) They're serious; their political consciousness is keen. She belongs to the Free Democrats; he lectures about the Third World at Social Democratic meetings. Regarding China -- their Asian adventure -- they are schoolteachers traveling for their education; they care about being informed, and about being right. This problem about having a child or not having one -- it nags at them, personally and politically. "The child is always present. Whether they are shopping at Itzehoe's Holstein Shopping Center or standing on the Elbe dike at Brokdorf, bedded on their double mattress or looking for a new secondhand car: the child always joins in the conversation, makes eyes at baby clothes, wants to crawl on the Elbe beach, longs at ovulation time for the sprinkling that fructifies, and demands auto doors with childproof locks. But they never get beyond the what-if or supposing-that stage, and Harm's mother (as surrogate child) is alternately moved to their apartment and shipped to an old-people's home, until some forenoon shock derails their single-tracked dialogue."
Like so many motifs in Grass's work, the couple's dilemma is repeated, is used as a refrain, is compounded; sometimes it is converted into elegy, sometimes it is mocked. That he is writing a book as instructions for a film provides Grass with the opportunity to visualize the couple's indecision. He accomplishes this with characteristic irony and compassion. "This time Dorte's laugh is really a bit too loud. And just as spontaneously, she can take the contrary view. 'But I want a child, I want a child! I want to be pregnant, fat, round, cow-eyed. And go moo. Do you hear? Moo! And this time, my dear Harm, father of my planned child, we're not calling it off after two months. So help me. As soon as we're airborne ... I'm going off the pill!'
"The director's instructions are roughly: Both laugh. But because the camera is still on them, they do more than laugh. They grab hold of each other, roughhouse, peel each other's jeans off, 'fuck,' as Harm says, 'screw,' as Dorte says, each other on the dike among the cows and sheep, under the open sky. A few guards at the still-future construction site of the Brokdorf nuclear power plant may be watching them, no one else. Then two low-flying pursuit planes. ('Shit on NATO!' Dorte moans.) In the distance, ships on the Elbe at high tide.
"A note on one of the slips I took with me to Asia and then home again says, 'Shortly before landing in Bombay or Bangkok -- breakfast has been cleared away -- Dorte takes the pill.' Harm, who only seems to be asleep, sees her and accepts it with fatalism."
And, intricately woven through this would-be screenplay, Grass reveals his actual Asian travels with Schlondorff. "In every city we stopped in I read simple chapters from The Flounder: how Amanda Woyke introduced the potato into Prussia." In every great novelist's mind, everything is related to everything else; the history of food, Grass notes, "is timely in present-day Asian regions." It takes a cook, which Grass is reputed to be -- and a good one -- to give food the honorable role of subplot, which a German liver sausage is given here. A "plot-fostering sausage," it is rightly called. Harm and Dorte are stuck with a kilo of it to take with them to Asia, a typically German gift intended for some obscure relative of a friend of a friend, supposed to be living in Java and pining away, of course, for liver sausage from the Fatherland.
And so our German tourists, despite their serious-mindedness, carry a sausage with them, a sausage that never finds its customer. In countless hot hotel rooms, deprived of refrigeration, the sausage sits, grows green and dubious, gets packed up and travels again. Finally, this world-traveling sausage returns to Germany -- in somewhat the same state as the accompanying couple, a little the worse for wear, and symbolically undelivered: Dorte and Harm, at the book's end, still don't know whether or not to have a child. "Even in China," Grass chastises them, they wouldn't know "whether or not to bring a child into the world." (It's not an easy question.)
As with the characters in his other books, Grass makes fun of Harm and Dorte without ever removing his sympathy from them. As with his masterful handling of the subplot of the liver sausage, he demonstrates-- even in this little book -- his scrupulousness of detail, which is the truest indication of a writer's conscience. On a "wide sandy beach ... a stranded turtle becomes a photograph"; in a village of 5,000 inhabitants, 3,000 are children ("worm-ridden, visibly ill, marked by eye diseases. They don't beg, they don't laugh or play; they're just quietly too many").
Of his travels, Grass writes that he "loyally wrote 'writer' on the profession line of [his] immigration card. A profession with a long tradition, if the word was really in the beginning. A fine, dangerous, presumptuous, dubious profession that invites metaphoric epithets. An East German apparatchik, a Chinese Red Guard, or Goebbels in his day might have said what Franz Josef Strauss, leaving his Latin on the shelf, said a year ago in German. Writers, he said, were 'rats and blowflies.'"
Of himself and Schlondorff, Grass remarks: "What did we drink to? Since our glasses were often refilled, we drank to contradictions, to the repeatedl
y contested truth, naturally to the health of the people (whoever they may be), and to the white, still-spotless paper that clamors to be spotted with words. And we drank to ourselves, the rats and blowflies."
He calls himself "childlike like most writers." Probably this is why the mischief lives in him still. He is serious enough to know what any truly serious person knows: that the confidence for enduring mischief can come from only the greatest seriousness. In The Flounder he writes, "Fairy tales only stop for a time, or they start up again after the end. The truth is told, in a different way each time." And at one point in Headbirths, he keeps Dorte and Harm "circling over Bombay without permission to land, because I forgot to inject something that's in my notes and should have been considered before takeoff: the future."
As for the future, Grass is wisely cautious about ours. He even speculates that the Germans may be dying out. "And is it not possible that German culture (and with it literature) will come to be prized as an indivisible but manifold unity only after and because the Germans have become extinct?" Although he is fun to read, Grass is never so insecure as to be polite.
(In praising the work of Celine, Kurt Vonnegut has written: "He was in the worst possible taste ... he did not seem to understand that aristocratic restraints and sensibilities, whether inherited or learned, accounted for much of the splendor of literature ... he discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes. Every writer is in his debt... no honest writer ... will ever want to be polite again.")
Grass also knows how to be harsh. Of his character Dorte: "Now that she wants a child -- 'This time my mind is made up!' -- she has been tiptoeing on religious pathways. With Balinese women she offers up little flower-patterned bowls of rice in temples under holy trees, in each of which a white, fertility-bestowing woman is said to dwell." On the other hand, she stops sleeping with Harm ("I haven't got to that stage yet'").
Of the limitations of the movie art: "The cave breathes what a film cannot communicate: stink."
Of Dorte and Harm's whole generation, which is my generation, the student-protest generation: "They have found themselves knee-deep in prosperity-determined consumption and pleasureless sex, but the student protest phase left sufficient imprint to keep the words and concepts of their early years available to them as an alternative, as something they can relapse into wherever they may be sitting or lying."
Of us all: "Our complexities and neuroses are mass-produced articles."
He writes (in 1979): "There's no shortage of great Fuhrer figures; a bigoted preacher in Washington and an ailing philistine in Moscow let others decide what they then proclaim to the world as their decision. Of course we still have (as trademarks of salvation) good old capitalism and good old communism; but thanks to their tried and true enmity, they are becoming more and more alike ... two evil old men whom we have to love, because the love they offer us refuses to be snubbed.
"And so we grope our disconsolate way into the next century. In school essays and first novels, gloom vies with gloom."
But the gloom that Grass perceives is always underlined with wit, and elevated by it: "My proposal to my Eastern neighbor-dictator would be that the two states should exchange their systems every 10 years. Thus, in a spirit of compensatory justice, the Democratic Republic would have an opportunity to relax under capitalism, while the Federal Republic could drain off cholesterol under communism."
Grass asks, "How will Sisyphus react to Orwell's decade?"
To Orwell he writes: "No, dear George, it won't be quite so bad, or it'll be bad in an entirely different way, and in some respects even a little worse."
Of Sisyphus he asks: "What is my stone? The toil of piling words on words? The book that follows book that follows book?... Or love, with all its epileptic fits?" (The writer's stone, he says, is a "good traveling companion.")
Headbirths also provides us with some terse, shorthand insights into Grass's earlier work: "It was a mistake to imagine that Cat and Mouse would abre-act my schoolboy sorrows. I never run out of teachers. I can't let them be: Fraulein Spollenhauer tries to educate Oskar; in Dog Years, Brunies sucks his cough drops; in Local Anaesthetic, Teacher Starusch suffers from headaches; in The Diary of a Snail, Hermann Ott remains a teacher even when holed up in a cellar; even the Flounder turns out to be a pedagogue; and now these two teachers from Holstein ..." his Dorte and Harm, who take up teaching, Grass admits, "with the best intentions." What prevents him from letting his teachers be, he writes, is "that my growing children bring school into the house day after day: the generation-spanning fed-upness, the to-do over grades, the search, straying now to the right and now to the left, for meaning, the fug that stinks up every cheerful breath of air!"
For such a small book, this is such a rich one. "In our country everything is geared to growth," Grass writes. "We're never satisfied. For us enough is never enough. We always want more. If it's on paper, we convert it into reality. Even in our dreams we're productive. We do everything that's feasible. And to our minds everything thinkable is feasible."
And of that truly German question -- its divided East and West parts -- he says, "Only literature (with its inner lining: history, myths, guilt, and other residues) arches over the two states that have so sulkily cut themselves off from each other." It is what Grass provides us with every time he writes: "Only literature." His gift for storytelling is so instinctually shrewd, so completely natural. If it's true, as he says, that he never runs out of teachers, he never stops being a teacher either. In The Flounder--which is, he writes, "told while pounding acorns, plucking geese, peeling potatoes" -- he doesn't resist indulging his irritation with the world of fools on whom fiction is largely wasted. "A good deal has been written about storytelling. People want to hear the truths But when the truth is told, they say, 'Anyway, it's all made up.' Or, with a laugh, 'What that man won't think up next!'"
Scherbaum, the favorite student in Local Anaesthetic, tries to reach the conscience of Berliners by setting fire to his beloved dachshund. He observes, with a sad truthfulness, that human beings are more apt to notice the suffering of animals, and be moved, than they are likely to care for the suffering of fellow humans. It's possible that, in the character of Scherbaum, Grass was thinking of the radical Rudi Dutschke, whom Grass calls (in Headbirths) a "revolutionary out of a German picture book." (Following an epileptic fit, Dutschke drowned in a bathtub.)
"What makes me sad?" Grass asks. "How he was carried away by his wishes. How his ideals escaped him at a gallop. How his visions degenerated into paperbacks."