Auch das Nachdenken über Deutschland ist Teil meiner literarischen Arbeit : Il lungo “autunno tedesco” in Novemberland di Günter Grass

This essay addresses the position poetry occupies within Grass’ literary activity. Several motifs of his narrative production begin to take shape synthetically in his poetry before reaching their fuller form in his novels. To Grass, the genre plays a similar function to that of the figurative arts: the compression of writing into verse reveals the essential aspects of specific subject matters just as the visual component of painting provides the core of aesthetic representation with its materiality. In Novemberland (1993) these elements help represent the social and political context of reunified Germany. The orderly structure of the sonnet draws attention to the chaos of collective life. As in an inevitable repetition of the past, Germany appears to Grass in the grip of an unreasonable euphoria, which reveals a desire for domination and manifests itself in the exclusion of those who are different and aggression against the marginalized.