Constructing Authorship in the Work of Gunter Grass

A challenging new reading of Grass's literary work and political writings that examines how the author has reacted to sustained public interest in his person from the mid-1960s onwards. Braun draws together an eclectic body of literary writing and suggests that questions of authorship lie at the heart of Grass's work.

This book traces a longstanding concern with issues of authorship throughout the work of Günter Grass, Germany''s best-known contemporary writer and public intellectual. Through detailed close-readings of all of his major literary works from 1970 onwards and careful analysis of his political writings from 1965 to 2005, it argues that Grass''s tendency to insert clearly recognisable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant exposure in the media-led public sphere. It underlines the degree of play which has characterised Grass''s relationship to this sphere and himself as part of it and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new interpretative paradigm for Grass''s work. It explains for the first time how his playful tendency to manipulate his own authorial image conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.