Out of the Mouths of Monsters:
Perspectives on Nazism in Grass and Tournier
by Judith Ryan

"Monsters are extremely valuable in literature, just as they are in science: they cast a new and penetrating light on other, so-called normal creatures."1 This is how Tournier in his essay on "Gunter Grass and His Tin Drum" interprets his German contemporary's use of the dwarf Oscar as the narrator of the novel The Tin Drum. "The world described by a dwarf-observed from what the Germans call the 'frog's-eye perspective'-opens the way to perturbing and devastating insights," Tournier goes on to explain in this perceptive nine-page introduction to Grass's novel.2 In view of this tribute to the advantages of the monster as narrator, it is perhaps not surprising that Tournier himself, in his prize-winning novel on the Nazi period, adopts a monstrous narrator-though his, to be sure, is monstrously large.3 But the similarities between the two novels go beyond mere narrative perspective; in fact, they are so striking as to suggest that Le Roi des Aulnes (The Ogre, 1970) by Tournier is an answer of sorts to The Tin Drum (1959) by Grass.

What happens when a French writer creates a response to a German novel about Nazism? To understand the full force of the question, we have to remember how much the French suffered under the German occupation, how very much alive their resentments still are today, and how very little appeal things German hold for the majority of the French reading public. Against that background, it is all the more surprising that Tournier's novel about Germany not only was so successful, but also managed to win for him the coveted Prix Goncourt. By contrast, The Tin Drum, unanimously nominated for the Bremer Literaturpreis, was prohibited by the Senate of Bremen from actually receiving the award-a fact that Tournier mentions on the very first page of his essay on Grass. Yet despite the difference in their success as literary prize candidates, Tournier must have sensed a certain closeness to Grass. Born to parents trained as Germanists (although they did not actually teach), Tournier spent many childhood vacations in Germany and eventually studied philosophy there for four years right after the end of World War II. He attributes his failure to become an 'agrege' in philosophy to the alienating effect of his long exposure to German thought.4 He describes the Grass of The Tin Drum as similarly alienated from his compatriots, writing an essentially realistic novel at a period when the writers in vogue were "Kafka and the apologues of timelessness and placelessness.5

There is, Tournier points out, "nothing of that sort in The Tin Drum, deeply rooted as it is in its author's homeland, stripped of myth making and sublimation.6 Tournier seems particularly struck by the novel's geographical origins, its evocation of what is now Poland, where Grass was born and grew up. But Tournier also points out that Grass does not attribute mythic qualities to his homeland; he specifically praises the way Grass substitutes the sordid petite bourgeoisie of Danzig for the vast Eastern European landscape. Yet curiously enough, it is precisely this legendary East Prussia that Tournier evokes in his novel The Ogre, and he does so precisely in the novel's densest and most poetic passages. Indeed, in a later essay Tournier insists upon the mythic quality of his vision in The Ogre and expresses particular pride in the fact that he was able to describe that territory so convincingly years before he actually had a chance to see it for himself.7

When Tournier finally was able to go to Poland, however, he saw immediately that it was not the landscape he had painted in his novel.8 What are we to make of this apparent contradiction between Tournier's claims for realism9 and his claims for myth making?

To begin with, the problem is not new to Tournier; it is endemic to the entire complex of literary reflection on Nazism. The Tin Drum itself had addressed this question in an especially provocative way. The scandal surrounding The Tin Drum was not solely the result of its abrasive tone and certain disgusting-or obscene-passages and episodes. Tournier sums up the problem very astutely when he describes the novel by Grass as "questioning religion, the motherland, and conjugal love."10 The most serious of the three affronts was the implicit insult to the homeland, specifically in its relation to Nazism. Here Grass took issue with a number of convenient myths that had grown up about Nazism, its nature and genesis, and replaced them with a more sober, sociologically based analysis. On one level, in fact, his novel was an answer to another famous novel, the first literary work of major importance to deal with Nazism and its relation to the German tradition: Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. Whereas Mann had used the Faust myth to suggest that the Third Reich was merely another version of an inevitable human attraction to evil, Grass located Nazism in a very specific set of social and historical circumstances, notably the petite bourgeoisie of the twenties and thirties.

Oscar's father is a grocer; and we are treated to a detailed description of his store, jam-packed with boxed and canned goods of the most ordinary variety,"11 as well as of his home, decorated with objects dear to the hearts of those who have never had a chance to develop good taste.12 In choosing this setting, Grass was deliberately taking issue with the widespread notion that ordinary people had been unwitting dupes of Nazism. Instead, he showed that the petit bourgeois mentality was intricately connected with the Nazi mentality. That view was hardly calculated to endear him to his readers, many of whom, after all, were members of the middle classes. But not only did he break with the mass-victimization theory, he also broke with Thomas Mann's idea that to live in Hitler's Germany had been to engage in a grand encounter with the forces of Evil. This affront, much more than Giinter Grass's offenses against religion or morality, had militated against his receipt of the Bremen Prize for Literature.

In insisting on the essential realism of The Tin Drum, Tournier acknowledges the social embeddedness of Grass's view of Nazism, but he is less attentive to the attack by Grass on the myths that have grown up around Nazism. Speaking of his own beginnings as a novelist, Tournier describes his work as an attempt to turn metaphysics into fiction, to create what he calls "the mythic dimension."13 Why does Tournier reinstate the very element that Grass had taken such care to eliminate?

In order to understand the differences between the two points of view-and with them, the different needs of the French and German reading publics-we shall have to look more closely at the two novels. We will need to consider the choice of protagonist by both authors, their presentation of milieu, and the possibilities for action available to the characters.

Let us begin with the two heroes-the "monsters" out of whose mouths we hear the two stories. Oscar from The Tin Drum is not just any kind of dwarf. He claims to have deliberately caused his own stunted growth by deciding to fall down the cellar stairs at the age of three.14 This puts a particular cast on what Tournier terms the "monstrous" nature of the narrator Oscar. His claim to have willed his dwarfism helps him to retain some control over his environment, symbolized by his ability to shatter glass with his voice.15 At first Oscar appears to be a rebel who has refused to be involved with the immoral grown-up world, which he observes from below with malicious enjoyment and disgust. His smallness lets him see beneath the surface of things, as indicated in the scene where his parents and his mother's lover play cards while he watches, from underneath the table, the amorous "footsies" of the two lovers.16 Theoretically, Oscar finds himself in a privileged position to criticize that degenerate society and protest against it. Grass wants us to see that moral degeneration is part and parcel of political degeneration.

From Oscar's point of view, he does in fact protest. At a Nazi rally, for example, he lurks beneath the podium and distorts the rhythm of the Nazi band music by beating out waltz rhythms on the tin drum that gives the novel its title.17 But Oscar's protest has no significant effect. In disrupting the rally, he merely evokes nostalgic recollections of an earlier age and plays upon the sentimentality that has already perverted society around him (the picture of Mary Magdalene at the head of Oscar's parents' bed18 is typical of the same kind of sentiment). Similarly, his frenetic drum playing during the defense of the Polish Post Office-an important moment in the history of the Polish resistance against annexation by the Nazis-remains ineffectual.19 Here even Oscar ultimately sinks into passivity as he plays cards with his mother's lover- Jan Bronski-and a dying friend.20 If there is any doubt left about Oscar's status as a protestor, it is removed in the second part of the novel, when he falls in with a pernicious psychological cover-up designed by an official West German organization to prevent people from genuinely coming to terms with their Nazi past.21

In his essay on The Tin Drum, Tournier points out that Grass is inverting the scheme of the traditional German novel of education (Bildungsroman) by selecting a protagonist who, as a perennial three-yearold, is constitutionally incapable of learning anything.22 Yet in inverting the familiar pattern, Grass does not entirely eliminate the notion of development. Oscar's growth is itself another inversion: from an amusing dwarf who could have been a telling social critic to a deformed creature who participates in the iniquity around him. When we first meet Oscar, he tells us that he is writing his story from a pristine white hospital bed on a ream of virgin paper.23 We know that he is in a mental hospital, but we assume that Oscar is that proverbial kind of madman who knows better and sees more clearly than so-called normal people. Only toward the end of the novel do we see what Oscar really is: accused of a crime he did not commit, he has escaped sentence by simulating insanity;24 overwhelmed by guilt for crimes of which he is not legally accused, he prefers to remain in the shelter of the mental hospital. It is hard to imagine a tougher indictment of certain participants in the crimes of the Third Reich ("we did dreadful things, but we didn't know what we were doing"). This technique is clearly an ingenious one, for it makes us first identify with Oscar and his unmasking of the immoral society around him, only to watch in shock as he himself is ultimately unmasked.

Tournier uses a very similar technique. His protagonist, Abel Tiffauges, is an ordinary garage mechanic who, suffering an accident to his right hand and forced to give up work for a time, discovers that he can write equally well with his left. So he begins what he calls his "Sinister Writings," which take up about the first third of the novel and resume toward the end interleaved with third-person narration. Unlike Oscar, Tiffauges is not a dwarf; he is virtually a giant, towering above most people around him. His girlfriend, with whom he has just broken at the beginning of the story, calls him an "ogre," a designation he accepts willingly and elaborates as a "fairy-tale monster, emerging from the night of time."25 In keeping with the concept of the valuable monster developed in his essay on Gunter Grass, Tournier has Tiffauges explain to us that monster comes from montrer, to show.26 The Ogre, then, is a demonstration. Like Mann's Adrian Leverkuhn, the protagonist of Doktor Faustus, Abel Tiffauges belongs to the company of "the chosen and the damned. " He starts out identifying himself with Saint Christopher, patron saint of the boarding school he attended as a boy. Saint Christopher, of course, was also a giant, the one who aided the Christ Child by carrying him across the water. At school there is another important figure, the strange child Nestor, short and fat. Tiffauges calls him "either an adult dwarf or a baby giant.27 Nestor, too, is a "monstrous being, a genius, something out of a fairy tale.28 When Nestor finally dies in a fire, Tiffauges feels that his friend lives on within him. Thus Tiffauges is at one and the same time a giant and a dwarf.

In his Sinister Writings, Tiffauges begins to develop a peculiar theory of "benign inversion": the world, he fancies, is the result of Satan's "malign inversion" of the original Paradise; writing so miraculously with his left hand seems to be a way of undoing the satanic spell and returning the world to its unperverted state. He conceives the notion of a special destiny for himself: in a grandiose vision, he sees himself as a second Atlas bearing not only the world, but also the stars on his shoulders29 But even quite early on, we begin to have doubts about the high-mindedness of Tiffauges, especially when he begins to tell us of certain disgusting habits such as that of giving himself "shampoos" by pulling the chain while his head is in the toilet. We see through Tiffauges sooner than we see through Oscar.

And Tournier leaves no room for doubt about the increasing involvement of Tiffauges with evil as the story progresses. The first part of the novel concludes with his condemnation for a crime reminiscent of Oscar's: in the one case a murder, in the other a rape, crimes that both protagonists claim they did not commit. The war puts a convenient end to Tiffauges's confinement in prison. Tiffauges first serves in the French army and becomes a prisoner of war in Germany, but he is soon converted to the Nazi cause and is made a key recruiter of Aryan boys for an elitist training school. Now at last we see the relevance of the novel's French title, Le Roi des Aulnes, with its reference to Goethe's ballad of the erlking who steals a young child away from his father. At the end, however, the plot takes a new turn: Tiffauges comes upon a young Jewish child who has escaped from a concentration camp, feeds and cares for him until his strength returns, and bears him away on his shoulders when the Russians attack. In the novel's final moments, Tiffauges achieves his special destiny by carrying the child who wears the Jewish star. But ironically, in an attempt to avoid roads where the Russians might come upon them, he strays into a quagmire; and the two sink together into death and oblivion.

In terms of development, Tournier has his protagonist move from bad to worse; but he does grant him insight in a visionary moment before his death. What does this mean with respect to the "answer" he gives Gunter Grass? Both authors deal with popular conceptions of their countrymen's relation to Nazism, in particular with notions about the resistance to Nazism. Grass has a difficult problem here, because he is obliged to deal with two nations at once. Poland is the subject of at least the first half of his book, but Germany is simultaneously the subject of the whole. Resisting Nazism or being duped by it obviously meant something quite different in the two countries.

Poland, after all, was annexed by Germany in 1939, but only after a desperate battle for control over the Polish corridor (needed by the Germans for access to Eastern Europe) and the city of Danzig itself. The German attack on the Danzig Post Office, so vividly recounted in The Tin Drum, was one of the critical moments in that struggle; the battle of the peninsula Hela, mentioned by Grass both in this novel and in Cat and Mouse was also one of the most determined pockets of resistance. In depicting the Polish resistance to annexation by Germany, Grass must do justice to the paradoxical nature of this episode in history: the concerted, but localized, attempts at fending off the Germans, complicated by the proverbial Polish ineffectuality. It is not accidental that Grass represents the latter by one of his more likable characters: Jan Bronski, Oscar's mother's lover and the person Oscar designates as his putative father. In contrast to Oscar's official father, Matzerath, who is of German descent, Oscar's mother, Agnes, is, like her lover of Polish or, in her case more specifically, of Kaschubian origin. Jan Bronski is, significantly, the person who gives Oscar his beloved tin drum, bought from the Jewish toy- seller Sigismund Markus. In the film version of the novel, Markus becomes a central figure in one of its most moving scenes as his store is smashed to pieces on Kristallnacht.30 By linking a Polish and a Jewish figure through the symbolic toy drum, Grass helps us understand some of the complexities and ambiguities of the Polish relation to Nazism. For one thing, Jan Bronski has merely been taking advantage of Sigismund Markus, who minds little Oscar in his toy store while Jan and Agnes keep their rendezvous in a nearby hotel. For another, the Polish resistance, as exemplified by the battle for the Polish Post Office, is in effect the equivalent of the house of cards built by Jan and Oscar before they are finally hauled out of the building by the victorious Germans.31 How awkward for the reader to identify with the valiant little troop of resisters only to find, in the end, that the resistance is a highly ambiguous affair!

Worse still is the denunciation of postwar Germany that takes place in the later chapters of The Tin Drum, where the Federal Republic is implicitly accused of participating in a deliberate attempt to prevent what is known as Trauerarbeit: the need to mourn for what happened under Nazism and to come to terms with one's own involvement, however passive it might have been. It is not surprising that the Bremen senate refused its prestigious prize to such an unsettling novel.

In the case of Tournier, the problem of dealing with the past is naturally very different. For his French audience, he needs to show two things: how the Germans could have been attracted to Nazism and how the French reacted to it. With an ingenious stroke, he solves this problem by making his central character a French prisoner of war in Germany. But unlike Grass, who has Oscar tell the whole story himself, Tournier lets his "monster" narrate only the first part and small sections of the final part in his own voice. The last scene is told in the third person by a narrator who is somehow able to report the newfound understanding that Tiffauges can no longer articulate himself:

Now he had to make a superhuman effort to counter the slippery resistance that pressed against his stomach, against his chest, but he kept on going, knowing that it was right this way. And as he lifted his head towards (the Jewish child) for the last time, he saw only a six-pointed star turning slowly in the black sky.32

Clearly, on one level Tournier has corrected in The Ogre one of the problems some readers saw in the novel by Grass: its failure to portray a more acceptable point of view. In having The Tin Drum narrated by a character who becomes increasingly "monstrous," Grass assumed that his audience could put Oscar's ambiguous behavior into the proper perspective. But in point of fact, readers were not always able to do this, even in a postwar Germany that had vowed to become more critical and aware. In his recent novel, The She- Rat, Grass makes his own attempt to rectify that ambiguity by identifying Oscar with the worst aspects of West German society: he reappears in The She-Rat as a prosperous citizen driving a big Mercedes. Tournier, by letting his "monster" discover his own monstrosity, gave a more immediate answer to the problem posed in The Tin Drum.

But do we really need to be told so explicitly that we cannot believe all we hear out of the mouths of monsters? And doesn't Tournier, by postulating the final vision by Tiffauges, indulge in a kind of dangerous myth making? When Tiffauges and the child vanish into the bog, they repeat an earlier scene in which two bodies, a child and an adult wearing a star upon its forehead, are recovered from the peat marshes. The Nazi doctor called in to examine the bodies finds them to be prehistoric corpses, portions of which have been preserved by the chemical action of the marshes. In his report-a clever pastiche of Nazi scientific documentation-he gives the adult peat-corpse the name er1king.33 Thus even in the scene where Tournier recognizes his falsifying view of reality, Tiffauges is identified with that death-bearing representative of the malevolent fairy world. More importantly, the novel itself presents events in terms of repetitions or recurrences.

We have seen that one of Grass's aims was to debunk the myth of inevitable historical recurrence and thus give more power to the individual and to the role of individual choices in the unfolding of human history. One way in which Grass accomplishes this goal is to ask the age-old question whether we can ever go home again. Oscar begins his tale on the Kaschubian potato fields in 1899 with his grandmother and her four skirts, beneath which his mother Agnes was conceived by a criminal on the run. The movie, which begins with this scene against the haunting sounds of a Jew's harp, endows the Kaschubian plains with profoundly emotive associations. But in the novel Grass, characteristically, also revokes this symbolism. Yes, the "heart of Kaschubia"34 is indeed a kind of mother of all Poles, the homeland and the psychological womb to which Oscar repeatedly tries to return. But from the very outset it also has certain negative attributes: in hiding a criminal beneath her skirts, Oscar's grandmother herself commits a criminal act. The motif of complicity is sounded from the beginning.

And as the story rapidly moves away from its countryside setting, the Kaschubian fields are shown to be a myth that must be left behind. Poland, Grass tells us very clearly, is no longer a land of earthy peasant folk, but has joined the middle-class mentality, which he sees as partly responsible for accepting Nazi ideology. Grass implicitly urges his readers to abandon overidealized views and wake up to a reality that is not always so simple or so pleasant.

For Tournier, with quite another audience, the problem is very different: how to make the French reader, still motivated by a sense of obligatory resistance against things German, accept a novel whose very topic is the fatal attraction of this enemy tradition. For this, he needed an unusually compelling setting. In its French designation, East Prussia (Prusse Orientale) sounds a great deal more romantic than it does in English or German. For Tiffauges, this country is a land of signs from which he awaits some kind of profound revelation35 and for which he hopes to develop, like a critic analyzing a novel, his own special way of reading, the "Tiffaugean interpretation."36 In a particularly ironic turn of phrase that recalls for the French reader Descartes's two criteria for truth, he describes the East Prussian countryside as a "meaningful reality that was almost always clear and distinct."37 In the final scene, Tiffauges realizes, to his shame, that such profundity is really a quagmire and that signs whose interpretation has seemed so obvious must be read as the exact opposite of what he has thought. This novel is also a novel about reading novels, and it attempts to make the reader think about problems of interpretation and interpretability in a way that Grass's novel does not.

But is his book really a sufficient response to The Tin Drum? For the French reader, we can imagine that Tournier's demonstration of the possible misinterpretation of signs goes a long way toward making intelligible the genesis of Nazism in Germany. He makes us see how satisfyingly well structured this way of thinking might have appeared and how much in tune it was with certain deeply felt psychological truths. He shows how easy it might have been not to recognize the deception until it was already too late. Through the figure of the Nazi convert Tiffauges, he shows, too, that resistance was not the only French response: there were also collaborators.38

One of these two themes alone, the aesthetic dimension of Nazi thought or the shame of French collaboration, might have sufficed to make Tournier's novel unacceptable to French readers. He minimized the difficulty, however, by giving it an ending that clearly redeems its protagonist. In suggesting that Tiffauges finally recognizes the error of his ways, Tournier gives a positive alternative to the "sinister" vision that prevails in the rest of the novel. The French reader, in particular, is left identifying with the idea that repentance and insight are possible, not with the shame of collaboration.

The choice of a closed ending by the French writer, as opposed to the open ending of his German counterpart, is not a mere matter of convenience or opportunism. It is not that Tournier wished in the last analysis to appeal to his readers, whereas Grass was willing to risk alienating his. It is, rather, that the two different reading publics needed to be shown two very different things. In Germany of the late fifties and early sixties, it was essential to foster a spirit of critical thinking after the relative avoidance of politics that had characterized immediate postwar writing. It was important that readers be encouraged to think for themselves and not to wait for the novelist to tell them what to think. In the sluggish atmosphere of the fifties, when it was widely claimed, for example, that there was no real parliamentary opposition in the Federal Republic, a certain amount of provocation was necessary to mobilize critical reflection on the Nazi past. The Tin Drum was an excellent vehicle for this. In France this situation did not obtain, however. Although it was important to qualify the widespread idea that the French Resistance had been a straightforward and unproblematical phenomenon, there was no need to foster an oppositional spirit in French culture. Despite Tournier's depiction of the fictional Tiffauges, collaborators during the Nazi occupation were more likely to have been motivated by opportunism than to have been mentally co- opted. The different endings of The Tin Drum and The Ogre are direct responses to the very different political and cultural situations of postwar Germany and France.

Nonetheless, as if to signal his alliance with the writer he is also answering, Tournier dedicates The Ogre "to the defamed memory of ... Rasputin. . ., assassinated for having opposed the unleashing of war in 1914."39 Rasputin figures somewhat more prominently in The Tin Drum as the author of one of the two works from which Oscar teaches himself to read (the other is Goethe, the more conservative half of Oscar's dual allegiance and the author from whom Tournier takes his title). The two novels, Tournier's and Grass's, are engaged in a kind of literary debate with one another, but in the end they do agree on two points. They refute the notion of unalloyed resistance (French, German, or Polish) to Nazism in the past and urge opposition to any renewal of Nazism in the present, on either side of the Rhine. Written under the sign of Rasputin, these words from the mouths of monsters perform a devastating critique of "other, so-called normal creatures."

NOTES

A version of this paper was given as the Eleventh Annual Max Kade Lecture at Oberlin College in October 1986; 1 am grateful to the Max Kade Foundation for funding it. Other versions were also given as talks at the University of Pittsburgh (October 1986) and Columbia University (February 1987). My thanks go to all three audiences for their helpful comments and discussion.

1. Michel Tournier, "Gunther [sic] Grass et son tambour de tole," in Le vol du vampire: Notes de lecture (Paris, 1981), p. 324. Translations from Tournier are my own.

2. Ibid., p. 325.

3. Tournier takes up the theme of the dwarf more explicitly in his short story "Le nain rouge," in Le Coq de bruyere (Paris, 1978), pp. 101-2.

4. See Michel Tournier, Le vent Paraclet (Paris, 1977), p. 163.

5. Tournier, "Gunther Grass," p. 322.

6. Ibid., p. 323.

7. Tournier, Le vent Paraclet, pp. 130-45.

8. Ibid., p. 140.

9. Ibid., p. 114.

10. Tournier, "Gunther Grass," p. 321.

11. Gunter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (Darmstadt and Neuwied, Sammlung Luchterhand 1986, originally published in 1959), p. 34. Translations from Grass are my own.

12. Ibid., pp. 34-35. On this point, also see Judith Ryan, The Uncompleted Past (Detroit, 1983), chap. 3.

13. Tournier, Le vent Paraclet, pp. 149-210.

14. Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p. 48.

15. Ibid., pp. 49-50.

16. Ibid., p. 54.

17. Ibid., pp. 96-99.

18. Ibid., p. 34.

19. Ibid., pp. 179-200.

20. Ibid., pp. 193-97.

21. Ibid., pp. 463-64.

22. Tournier, "Gunther Grass," p. 324.

23. Grass, Die Blechtrommet, p. 10.

24. Ibid., p. 490.

25. Michel Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes (Paris, 1970).

26. Ibid., p. 14.

27. Ibid., p. 36.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., p. 136.

30. See Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p. 164.

31. Ibid., pp. 198-99.

32. Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes, p. 581.

33. Ibid., p. 295.

34. Grass, Die Blechtrommel, p. 11.

35. Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes, p. 261.

36. Ibid., p. 283.

37. Ibid., p. 405.

38. On collaboration, see Le vent Paradet, p. 80, where Tournier speaks of what he calls the "self -intoxication of an entire nation concerning a less-than- glorious episode in its history."

39. Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes, p. 9.