The Berlin Fall

Enter Grass, a natural candidate to puncture those predictions. Grass won the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work as a novelist, but in Germany he's more readily identified with a parallel career as his society's moral truth-teller, the self-styled embodiment of its national conscience. In his 50 years of public life, Grass has exposed his fellow citizens to countless jeremiads, targeting everything from militarism to acid rain, from mistreatment of immigrants to the exploitation of the working class.

Grass's literary sensibility, psychological acuity, and sensitivity to moral cant have helped him look clearly at his country's many self-delusions. His early critique of Chancellor Helmut Kohl now seems especially farsighted. In a 1990 essay, "A Bargain-Basement Deal Called East Germany," Grass argued that Kohl's government was encouraging Westerners to see the East not as a polity in need of justice but as an undervalued property to be bought low and, presumably, sold high later. Even at the time Grass was writing Journeys, evidence against Kohl was accruing: The one-to-one currency exchange that he offered won many votes from Easterners whose purchasing power suddenly multiplied, but it also multiplied the debts of Eastern industries, condemning many of them to immediate bankruptcy. As Grass notes in his journal, many Easterners quickly regretted the votes they cast for Kohl's plan, some even fatalistically pleading that they were too ignorant of the laws of capitalism and democracy to avoid succumbing to the allure of Kohl's promised shortcut.

Grass's criticism extends to Kohl's heavy-handed mechanism for codifying reunification. The West German government arranged for East Germany to be annexed under the West's existing constitution, dispensing with a reunification produced through cooperation by equal parties. Instead, the East was made to conform overnight to the West's laws, standards, and regulations. The process left no political room to articulate a defense for any positive aspect of life in East Germany, though there were plenty of arguments to be made in favor of the East's education and child-care systems and its fostering of gender equality. Grass shows a Federal Republic of Germany that is comfortable displaying nationalist swagger and materialist entitlement—a dismaying portrait.

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