”Drum for him, little Oskar” - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Richard Lea and Ben Knight “Günter Grass, Nobel-winning German novelist, dies aged 87” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/13/gunter-grass-german-nobel-laureate-dies-aged-87

４月12日に、独逸の作家ギュンター・グラス氏*1が独逸リューベック市*2の病院で逝去。享年87歳。グラス氏は高齢とはいえ、活発に公的活動を行っており、３月28日には舞台劇『ブリキの太鼓』の初日に出席したばかりだった。
突然ともいえるグラスの死に対しては、ヨアヒム・ガウク独逸大統領、メルケル総理を初めとした多くの人々が追悼のメッセージを発しているが、先ず土耳古の作家オルハン・パムク *3の言葉；

The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had warm personal memories: “Grass learned a lot from Rabelais and Celine and was influential in development of ‘magic realism’ and Marquez. He taught us to base the story on the inventiveness of the writer no matter how cruel, harsh and political the story is,” he said.
He added: “In April 2010 when there was a mushroom cloud over Europe he was in Istanbul and stayed more than he planned. We went to restaurants and drank and drank and talked and talked ... A generous, curious and a very warm friend who also wanted to be a painter at first!”

映画『ブリキの太鼓』を監督したフォルカー・シュレンドルフ *4；

Volker Schlöndorff, director of the Oscar-winning 1979 film of the Tin Drum, had thoughtful words for his old friend. “He was the voice you listened to, both at home and abroad. The voice from Germany that made the world listen after the war, which he, famously or infamously, took part in. He knew what he was talking about when he wrote. And he - usually - sensed the resonance ... the typewriter was his tin drum. He knew how to use it, for the sake of the reader and our country. Because of course he was a patriot.”

ブリキの太鼓 [DVD]

出版社/メーカー: ハピネット・ピクチャーズ
発売日: 1999/03/25
メディア: DVD
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ギュンター・グラスの初期のバイオグラフィ。『ブリキの太鼓』は最初全く評価されなかった；

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig – now Gdansk – in 1927, “almost late enough”, as he said, to avoid involvement with the Nazi regime. Conscripted into the army in 1944 at the age of 16, he served as a tank gunner in the Waffen SS, bringing accusations of betrayal, hypocrisy and opportunism when he wrote about it in his 2006 autobiography, Peeling the Onion *5 .
The writer was surprised by the strength of the reaction, arguing that he thought at the time that the SS was merely “an elite unit”*6 , that he had spoken openly about his wartime record in the 1960s*7 , and that he had spent a lifetime “working through” the unquestioning beliefs of his youth in his writing. His war came to an end six months later having “never fired a shot”*8, when he was wounded in Cottbus and captured in a military hospital by the US army. That he avoided committing war crimes was “not by merit”*9, he insisted. “If I had been born three or four years earlier I would, surely, have seen myself caught up in those crimes.”*10
Instead he trained as a stonemason, studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin, and joined Hans Werner Richter’s Group 47*11 alongside writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann*12 and Heinrich Böll*13. After moving to Paris in 1956 he began working on a novel which told the story of Germany in the first half of the 20th century through the life of a boy who refuses to grow.
A sprawling mixture of fantasy, family saga, bildungsroman and political fable, The Tin Drum was attacked by critics, denied the Bremen literature prize by outraged senators, burned in Düsseldorf*14 and became a global bestseller.
Speaking to the Swedish Academy in 1999, Grass explained that the reaction taught him “that books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is undertaken out of love for one’s country can be taken as soiling one’s nest. From then on I have been controversial.”*15

ブリキの太鼓 1 (集英社文庫)

作者: ギュンター・グラス,高本研一
出版社/メーカー: 集英社
発売日: 1978/09/20
メディア: 文庫
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ブリキの太鼓 2 (集英社文庫)

作者: ギュンター・グラス,高本研一
出版社/メーカー: 集英社
発売日: 1978/09/20
メディア: 文庫
購入: 2人クリック: 7回
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ブリキの太鼓 3 (集英社文庫)

作者: ギュンター・グラス,高本研一
出版社/メーカー: 集英社
発売日: 1978/09/20
メディア: 文庫
購入: 4人クリック: 4回
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また、

While there were plenty of tributes recognising Grass as one of Germany’s most important post-war writers, social media users swiftly revived many of the controversies of his divisive career, bringing up his membership of the SS and his alleged anti-Semitism.
Speaking to the Paris Review in 1991, Grass made no apology for his abiding focus on Germany’s difficult past. “If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that,” he said. “That hasn’t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.”*16
The controversy flared up again following by publication of his 2012 poem What Must be Said*17, in which he criticised Israeli policy. Published simultaneously in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Italian La Repubblica and Spanish El País, the poem brought an angry response from the Israeli ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, who saw in it “a disturbed relationship to his own past, the Jews, and Israel”.

死の翌日、西班牙の新聞El Paísに、３月21日に語られたギュンター・グラス最後のインタヴューが掲載された*18。「世界戦争」の勃発を懸念する悲観的な内容。AGFの記事”Günter Grass: final interview reveals author's fears of another world war”*19から；

Germany’s Nobel-winning author Günter Grass said he feared humanity was “sleepwalking” into a world war in the last interview he gave before his death on Monday.
“We have on the one side Ukraine, whose situation is not improving; in Israel and Palestine things are getting worse; the disaster the Americans left in Iraq, the atrocities of Islamic State and the problem of Syria,” he told the Spanish newspaper El País in the interview published on Tuesday.
“There is war everywhere; we run the risk of committing the same mistakes as before; so without realising it we can get into a world war as if we were sleepwalking,” he added.
Spain’s top-selling newspaper said the interview, carried out at the author’s home in Lübeck in northern Germany on 21 March, was his last before his death aged 87.

In his lengthy interview with El País, he also expressed concern over climate change and overpopulation.
“All of this together makes me realise that things are finite, that we don’t have an indefinite amount of time,” he said.

タイトルは、サルマン・ラシュディ *20の言葉*21。

*2:http://www.luebeck.de/ See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCbeck http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AA%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%99%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF

*3:http://www.orhanpamuk.net/ See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orhan_Pamuk http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AA%E3%83%AB%E3%83%8F%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%83%91%E3%83%A0%E3%82%AF Mentioned in http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20071011/1192112818 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110715/1310706171

*4:Mentioned in http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080331/1206898459

*5:See Samuel Loewenberg “Storm grows over Grass's belated SS confessions” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/aug/16/germany.books

*6:Giles Tremlett “Gunter Grass: I needed time to reveal my Waffen-SS past” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/13/books.secondworldwar

*7:See Maya Jaggi “A life in writing: Günter Grass” http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/01/gunter-grass-interview-maya-jaggi

*8:Gunter Grass “How I Spent the War” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/04/how-i-spent-the-war?currentPage=all

*9:Maya Jaggi “A life in writing: Günter Grass”

*10:Giles Tremlett “Gunter Grass: I needed time to reveal my Waffen-SS past”

*11:See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_47

*12:See eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingeborg_Bachmann http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B2%E3%83%9C%E3%83%AB%E3%82%AF%E3%83%BB%E3%83%90%E3%83%83%E3%83%8F%E3%83%9E%E3%83%B3