Picture, above: Michael Kunze, Oswald Spengler
Introduction
It is a tradition at Counter-Currents to remember the great German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, on the anniversary of his birth, the 29th of May. This year, I would like to take the time to critically reflect on Spengler’s views of race within his magnum opus, The Decline of the West (1918–22), and, in particular to discuss the importance these ideas hold for modern day racialists and ethno-nationalists.
Some of these issues were touched on by Greg Johnson in his 2010 essay, “Is Racial Purism Decadent? [2],” and my arguments here are largely in response to some of the questions he poses therein. In brief, my intent with this piece is to (1) provide a brief overview of Spengler’s racial doctrine, (2) illustrate the disjunctions existing between the Spenglerian conception of “race” and materialistic ones, and (3) to explore what the Spengler being correct on the question of race means for those currently involved in the various shades of racial preservationism common among Counter-Currents’ readership.
When discussing “race,” it is common parlance among racial preservationists to adopt usages of the term derived from the great physical anthropologists and anthropometrists of the early 20th century. It is in works such as Carleton S. Coon’s The Races of Europe (1939) or Bertil Lundman’s Nordens Rastyper (1940), that the highly developed and nuanced models of the different human races are exemplified. And, it is from works such as these that contemporary discourses on race within preservationist circles find their genealogical root. Primary examples of this can be seen in the wide selection of early-twentieth century literature hosted on the website of the Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology (SNPA)[1]—an organization “founded in January 1999 […] by three university students” with the goals of reviving the theories of “the nature and phylogeny of human biodiversity” which dominated academia “prior to 1950.”[2] The SNPA’s website is presently hosted by a racial preservationist web forum, The Apricity, one of whose most active sub-forums is devoted to classifying both forum members and celebrities according to the racial typologies such as Lundman’s or Coon’s.[3] The deep relationship between pre-1950 physical anthropology and contemporary racialist discourse is hardly unique to The Apricity, and can be found throughout racialist websites and forums.
This biological view of race—focusing both on the phenotypical and genotypical variations both within and without Europe—is, however, quite far from what Spengler means when uttering the word “race.” While he does not deny that there is a biological dimension to race, Spengler does not reduce race to biology.[4] Rather, for Spengler, the notion of race was one which included the material, but supervened over it to include psychological and cultural dimensions as well. Later in life, this non-reductionist position would put him at odds with the high-profile members of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), particularly with Alfred Rosenberg, whose racialism bore more in common with Lundman and Coon’s physical anthropology than with Spengler’s anti-materialism.[5] What, however, is meant by an anti-material conception of race? If Spengler did not reduce race to physical characteristics, how did he understand it?
Spenglerian “Race”
In his own words, Spengler defines a race as “the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, [which] is invested with a character of duration.”[6] Race is, he tells us, “determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape”—with “race” standing in for the “fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or wide landscape.”[7] Prima facie, this definition of the term does not sound too far a cry from those of the physical anthropologists. However, as Spengler develops his thesis within The Decline of the West, his position emerges as one which is far closer to the völkisch landscape mystics of the Bodenbeschaffenheit movement, such as Hermann Keyserling.[8] We see this connection emphasized in the relationship Spengler postulates between race, landscape, language, and culture. In terms of the connection between race and landscape, we see Spengler advocating for a fundamentally formative and governing impact of the latter upon the former:
A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its “home,” but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans.[9]
In this, we see that Spengler’s view on race is such that it can be essentially treated as a function of a specific landscape and place—with individual races being inextricably tied to their geographic birthplaces as peoples.[10] The differences between this conception of racial formation and Darwinian models of evolution are more pronounced when we consider as well that Spengler’s philosophy treated a race not as a collection of related organisms, but rather as a single organism, and that the physical and psychological formation wrought by the landscape was collective rather than individual in nature. This collectivism is seen in the relationship Spengler posits between race and language as well, with the two complementing one another in a way analogous to body and mind in an individual:
In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language the efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one another.[11]
This relationship between a people’s race and its language, then, is one wherein each necessarily complements one another, with both being fundamentally necessarily to the integral unity of the singular organism. Carrying the metaphorical comparison between the individual and the people further, we see culture emerge from this race-language dyad as the natural expression of the two as they exist in the world. Spengler sees language as essentially two-fold, being divided into talk and speech, with each linguistic mode being proper to one “of the two primary Estates” such that “talk belongs with the castle [the state], and speech to the cathedral [the church].”[12] By means of its expression through these two estates, Spengler sees language as participating in the “waking relation that has Culture, [and] that is Culture.”[13] In this way, culture emerges as the activity of the interaction of the bodily race and mental language of a people with their given landscape.
This conception of mankind which Spengler elucidates is not anti-material in that it denies the material dimensions of race, but is so in that it does not treat a people as being reducible to mere physiological characteristics and differences. For Spengler, the very term “people” is not a simple designation for a group with physical or political or linguistic ties, but is “a unit of the soul,” designating a unified collective spiritual internality shared by all members of the group.[14] For Spengler, this racial soul was expresses most fully through the peoples’ modes of cultural production—namely through the arts. He saw racial virility as being intimately tied to artistic expression, with the development of High Art being “a mark of race,” rather than of learning.[15] He tells us that “the great art by which the Culture finds its tongue is the achievement of race and not that of craft.”[16] In this, Spengler is saying that the art whose expression comes to define a people (e.g. the relationship between Gothic architecture and Western man) is essentially racial in nature, and not a learned skill—insofar as the art itself is the cultural “vocalization” of the race’s experience of the world.[17]
It is with this sense of both the terms “race” and “art” that we can make sense of Spengler’s assertion that “the creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race-men, and so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schütz to Johann Sebastian Bach.”[18] For, in this, he is saying that these great artists throughout history exemplified through their works the inner experience of their race, and as such were great men of race. The art of these great men, which forms the core cultural expression of Western man, is for Spengler, thus seen not as the products of artistic education achieved by individuals. Rather, it is a fundamentally racial production, which can no more be separated from the race of the people who birthed it than can that race from its language, nor the race from its landscape. It is through cultural production generally, and through art particularly, that the genius of the race is made manifest—its strength and vitality being translated into forms which supervene over the brute materiality of phenotype and genotype.
Questions of Preservation
If Spengler is correct, what does this mean for contemporary racialists and racial preservationists? To begin, let us examine one of Spengler’s best known statements on the question of racial purity and preservation, from The Hour of Decision (1943):
But in speaking of race, it is not intended in the sense in which it is the fashion among anti-Semites in Europe and America to use it today: Darwinistically, materially. Race purity is a grotesque world in view of the fact that for centuries all stocks and species have been mixed, and that warlike—that is, healthy—generations with a future before them have from time immemorial always welcomed a stranger into the family if he had “race,” to whatever race it was he belonged. Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it. This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children, which historical life can consume without ever exhausting the supply.[19]
In this passage, we see Spengler vehemently rejecting the purity-based racial theories prevalent within the NSDAP. But, what is the nature of this strong rejection? At its root, what we see in Spengler is a sharp contrast between his characterization of (a) the raceless man’s engaging in discourse on race and (b) the man of race’s non-discursive lived experience of race. The former discursive behavior, we see Spengler treat as degenerate and weak—the latter non-discursive behavior, as vital and strong. As Johnson notes, one of the key differences between these two behaviors is the activity’s vector; where “racial consciousness is backwards looking […] the feeling of race is forward-looking.”[20] The former is an after-the-face reflection on the past activities of race men; while the latter is the present experience of the man of race, impelling him to reach new creative heights in the cultural expression of his race.
Spengler would argue, then, that the discursive activities of contemporary racialists and racial preservationists on maintaining racial purity not only miss the point of race entirely by reducing it to mere physical characteristics, but also that such discursive action is a decadent and unhealthy way of approaching race. The man of race would view, Spengler tells us, such concerns with racial purity as entirely backwards-looking, seeking to preserve what his race once was. However, the non-discursive experience of one’s race is correspondingly forward-looking, seeking to actualize and create a strong and vital future culture. Johnson tells us that Spengler would argue that “the racial purist looks to the past, not the future, because he does not have the vitality in him necessary to create a future.”[21] The racial consciousness of the preservationist is defined entirely by his race’s past—a past which is, by definition, immutable and fixed; his engagement with race, then, is wholly discursive, merely talking of past glories and present ills. It is not defined by the action born of the inner experience of race-feeling itself.
These unhealthy manifestations of discursive preoccupations with racial purity run counter to the healthy non-discursive race-feeling and its resulting cultural production not because the discourse of the purist is wrong. Indeed, as Johnson argues, “decadent people can be right, and healthy people can be wrong.”[22] However, in terms of effective action, there are more important things than simply holding “correct” opinions, or engaging in “correct” discourses. What is needed so much more than mere discourse is the action which springs naturally from the healthy man of race’s vitality. In, correctly in my estimation, judging “White nationalism in America” as “as overwhelmingly degenerate movement,” Johnson concludes his musings on Spengler by asking the question: “what would a vital white nationalism look like?” We know now what a movement whose primary activity is discourse on race looks like; it is what we have today—a decadent movement which produces a near endless stream of discussion and literature on the topic of race. How would a vital and healthy movement differ from this? Johnson speculates:
A vital white nationalist movement would be a utopian, progressivist, eugenicist mythical-cultural phenomenon. It would not be founded on empirical studies of how race influences culture. It would not propagate itself through academic conferences and policy studies. It would be founded on a grand culture-creating, race-shaping myth, propagated through art and religion, that enthralls and mobilizes a whole people. It would be less concerned about the race we were or the race we are than about the race we can become.[23]
In terms of Spenglerian views on the question of race, we can imagine a healthy movement as one whose primary activity is not discourse, but cultural production. A healthy movement would not necessarily be wholly unconcerned with “correct” discourse on race, but its dominant and overriding concern would be the cultural production stemming from the non-discursive experience of the vital feeling of one’s race. The healthy movement would by defined not by polemic literature on the “dangers” of race-mixing, but by grand works of art expressing the inner experience of the race. It would be a movement whose “celebrities” were not the authors of books on race, but men whose entire being was devoted to the furtherance of their race’s artistic expression.
In this way, Richard Wagner, stands forth as the near-ideal example of Spengler’s man of race. Wagner was not unconcerned with the question of race, or with discourse on race, but when we look at the scope of his life and work, his activities were overwhelmingly defined by cultural production rather than discourse. We remember Wagner not primarily for his writings on race. Rather, we remember him because the art he produced was a force of nature, which expressed to purely the soul of his race that it drew together thousands upon thousands of the German people—giving rise to sweeping cultural movements. Taking Wagner as our paradigm, then, we should perhaps revise our questions. Rather than asking what would a vital movement look like, perhaps we should ask how can I become a Spenglerian man of race? It is my contention that if we are to succeed—to win, as Johnson puts it—it will not be through the endless discourse we have engaged in thus far; nor will it be through grand plans to re-shape the movement from the top-down.
Our success will come through individual change and progress. It is not necessary that we cease engaging in racialist discourse, or that such discourses are wrong, but this is not the means of our victory. Rather than through imitation of racialist authors like Francis Parker Yockey, our success will come through the imitation of cultural producers like Wagner. Naturally, such a movement would be characterized by physical vitalism and fecundity as well, but it would not be limited to such. It would be equally—if not moreso—characterized by cultural fecundity and strength. In this way, a reevaluation of our very idea of “race” in Spenglerian terms proves to be of the utmost importance in providing a pathway to success.
Bibliography
Bolton, Kerry. “Oswald Spengler: May 29, 1880–May 8, 1936.” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 29 May 2012. http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/oswald-spengler/ [3] [accessed 25 May 2015].
Borthwick, Stephen M. “Historian of the Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Words for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student.” Institute for Oswald Spengler Studies. https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography [4] [accessed 25 May 2015].
Brown, David Henry. “Metaphysical Presuppositions in Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes.” PhD diss., McMaster University 1979.
Coon, Carleton S. The Races of Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1939. http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/racesofeurope.htm [5]
Dreher, Carl. “Spengler and the Third Reich.” The Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion. 15, no. 2 (1939). http://www.vqronline.org/essay/spengler-and-third-reich [6] [accessed 25 May 2015].
Duchesne, Ricardo. “Oswald Spengler & the Faustian Soul of the West, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 2 January 2015. http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-1/ [7] [accessed 25 May 2015].
———. “Oswald Spengler & the Faustian Soul of the West, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 5 January 2015. http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/01/oswald-spengler-and-the-faustian-soul-of-the-west-part-2/ [8] [accessed 25 May 2015].
“Essays & Excerpts.” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology. http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/index2.htm [9] [accessed 25 May 2015].
Farrenkopf, John. “Spengler’s Historical Pessimism and the Tragedy of Our Age.” Theory and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 391–412.
———. “Spengler’s Theory of Civilization.” Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology 62, no. 1 (2000): 23–38.
“Introduction.” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology. http://www.theapricity.com/snpa/introduction.htm [10] [accessed 25 May 2015].
Johnson, Greg. “Is Racial Purism Decadent?” Counter-Currents Publishing: Books Against Time. 10 July 2010. http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/is-racial-purism-decadent/ [2] [accessed 25 May 2015].
Lundman, Bertil. Nordens Rastyper: Geografi och Historia. Verdandis Småskrifter 427. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier, 1940.
Noll, Richard. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Revised edition. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961.
———. The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
Notes
[1] [11] “Essays & Excerpts,” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology.
[2] [12] “Introduction,” Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology.
[3] [13] “The Apricity: A European Community.”
[4] [14] Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s Historical Pessimism and the Tragedy of Our Age,” 395; Borthwick, “Historian of the Future”; Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”.
[5] [15] Dreher, “Spengler and the Third Reich”; Bolton, “Oswald Spengler.”
[6] [16] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:113.
[7] [17] Ibid.
[8] [18] Noll, The Jung Cult, 95–103.
[9] [19] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:119.
[10] [20] Brown, “Metaphysical Presuppositions in Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes,” 223.
[11] [21] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:114.
[12] [22] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:153.
[13] [23] Ibid.
[14] [24] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:165.
[15] [25] Spengler, The Decline of the West,
[16] [26] Ibid.
[17] [27] Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s Historical Pessimism and the Tragedy of Our Age,” 396; Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s Theory of Civilization,” 24–25.
[18] [28] Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2:118–19.
[19] [29] Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 219.
[20] [30] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”
[21] [31] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”
[22] [32] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”
[23] [33] Johnson, “Is Racial Purism Decadent?”
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Ihr habt „den Krieg gewonnen“, habt „gesiegt“. Ihr habt alle kulturellen, geistigen und metapolitischen Machtzentren inne – und wohin habt ihr uns gebracht? Eure epochale Ohnmacht gegenüber Positivismus, Kapitalismus, Liberalismus und eure postmodernen Zerfransungen, die Routine gewordene, aktivistische „Gesellschaftskritik“, die keine Sau interessiert – all das beweist: Ihr lebt in einer ideologischen Nische des Empires (Negri & Hardt), werdet von ihm alimentiert und habt euch damit zurecht gefunden. Heidegger gehört euch nicht, weil ihr seine wahre Botschaft und Kritik nicht hören wollt: darin nämlich, worauf sie, über das Kritisierte hinweg, verweist: das Ungedachte. Das Kommende, das oft gerade von dort her kommt, wo das Heute nur Chaos, Wahnsinn, Bosheit und Krankheit sieht.
Der Kolumbianer Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) bezeichnete sich selbst als »Reaktionär«. Sein Denken ist ein Gegenentwurf zur Neuzeit und Aufklärung. Gómez Dávila stellt alles auf den Prüfstand, was manchem Zeitgenossen lieb und teuer geworden ist. »Automatismen demontieren« kann daher als ein Motto seines Denkens gelten. Zweifellos gehört der Autor zu den bedeutenden politischen Theologen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Daß sein Werk lange Zeit nur einem kleinen Kreis zugänglich gewesen ist, liegt vor allem daran, daß Gómez Dávila sich nie besonders um die Verbreitung gekümmert hat. In den letzten Jahren erleben seine Werke aber immer größere Beachtung. 
OVER THE past few years, the conviction that the end of the Cold War inaugurated an era of great-power peace to accompany the inevitable spread of democratic capitalism has been shattered. In Georgia and Ukraine, thousands have died as Washington’s attempt to fence in Russia with NATO allies and affiliates has been answered by Moscow’s determination to rebuild a Eurasian sphere of influence. In East Asia, China’s growing assertiveness has alarmed its neighbors and collided with America’s determination to remain the dominant power in the region. Regime-change efforts sponsored by the United States and its allies in Iraq, Libya and Syria have created power vacuums and bloody regional proxy wars, to the benefit of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
An alternative approach, the so-called Central European approach, favors redrawing arbitrary political boundaries to create more homogeneous ethnic or linguistic groups. Neither doctrine is inherently illiberal. In his Representative Government, John Stuart Mill thus argued that liberal, representative government is most likely to succeed in countries in which most of the citizens share at least a common language, a thesis that the continuing disintegration of multiethnic states in our time would appear to confirm. In Mill’s words, “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” Neither approach to defining the citizens of sovereign states equates political independence of one community from another with inherent and unremitting enmity.
En estos artículos, que muestran la obsesiva actividad proselitista del autor, no nos encontramos con el Jünger elogiado por Hermann Hesse o H. G. Gadamer, con el ensayista profundo, el novelista imaginativo o el observador preciso, sino con el agitador político que lanza sin ambages su mensaje subversivo. No obstante, en estos escritos también se puede comprobar cierta evolución temática e intelectual. En los primeros textos se ocupa principalmente de la experiencia guerrera, del valor del sacrificio y de la sangre como cemento de una nueva sociedad, a lo que se une un profundo odio a la burguesía y a la República de Weimar. Jünger consideraba que en su generación había surgido un nuevo 'tipo humano', forjado en la guerra de material y de trincheras, a quien, a su vez, correspondía forjar un nuevo mundo: 'Como somos los auténticos, verdaderos e implacables enemigos del burgués, nos divierte su descomposición. Pero nosotros no somos burgueses, somos hijos de guerras y de enfrentamientos civiles...'. Inspirándose en Nietzsche, Spengler y Sorel, y haciendo suyo el pathos del futurismo italiano, Jünger ensalza el odio y la destrucción como elementos creativos: 'La verdadera voluntad de lucha, sin embargo, el odio verdadero, se alegra de todo lo que destruye a su contrario. La destrucción es el único instrumento que parece adecuado en las actuales circunstancias'. En estos pasajes, el escritor adopta un nihilismo heroico que convierte la violencia en un fin en sí mismo, en una experiencia mística del combatiente que debe continuar su lucha en la sociedad civil. En ellos desarrolla una estética pura de la violencia que se mueve en un vacío ético y que, supuestamente, según el autor, debería generar nuevos valores. 
En el terreno ideológico, los artículos reflejan una visión particular y nebulosa que no llega a identificarse con ninguna de las ideologías dominantes. Sus rasgos principales son, en su vertiente negativa, un profundo sentimiento antidemocrático y antipacifista, así como un fuerte rechazo de las instituciones, excluyendo al ejército como encarnación de la idea prusiana. Su odio a la República de Weimar es manifiesto; una República, si bien es cierto, que se ha definido con frecuencia como la 'democracia sin demócratas' y que era el blanco favorito del desprecio de la mayoría de los intelectuales. Aunque Jünger se confiesa nacionalista, en concreto 'nacionalista de la acción', no asocia el concepto con una forma política concreta, más bien se limita a describir vagamente modelos utópicos o retóricos que encontrarán un desarrollo más maduro en su libro El trabajador. Armin Mohler empleó el término 'revolución conservadora' para explicar esta posición política, pero Jünger también se acercó al nacionalismo de izquierdas de un Niekisch e incluso colaboró en su revista Der Widerstand, prohibida con posterioridad por los nacionalsocialistas. La impresión que recibimos es que Jünger estaba obsesionado con una revolución, viniese de donde viniese, siempre que fuese nacional. En sus escritos solía dirigirse a 'los nacionalistas, los soldados del frente y los trabajadores'. Este empeño revolucionario fue el que le acercó al nacionalsocialismo en los primeros años del movimiento: 'La verdadera revolución aún no se ha producido, pero se aproxima irresistiblemente. No es ninguna reacción, sino una revolución auténtica con todos sus rasgos y sus manifestaciones; su idea es la popular, afilada hasta un extremo desconocido; su bandera es la cruz gamada; su forma de expresión, la concentración de la voluntad en un único punto: la dictadura. Sustituirá la palabra por la acción, la tinta por la sangre, la frase por el sacrificio, la pluma por la espada'.
Sämtliche Veranstaltungen finden in der 
Im Ukraine-Konflikt haben sich zwei geschlossene Logikkreise herausgeschält. Der Westen sieht in der Ukraine den endgültigen Aufbruch zu Freiheit und Demokratie; Rußland sieht eine Putschregierung unter Beteiligung von Faschisten. Der Westen bezeichnet den Anschluß der Krim als völkerrechtswidrige Annexion; Rußland bezeichnet die Unabhängigkeit des Kosovo als völkerrechtswidrige Sezession. Beide Seiten bezeichnen die Argumente der jeweils anderen als haltlos. Das Ganze spielt zudem vor dem Hintergrund des ersten weltanschaulichen Konflikts in Europa seit dem Ende des Kommunismus. Spätestens 2013 haben sich die russischen Eliten offen von dem säkularen, individualistischen Weltbild der westlichen Demokratien distanziert. Darin werden sie von der überwiegenden Mehrheit der russischen Gesellschaft unterstützt. 
Bij me thuis hangt een litho van Günter Grass met een zelfportret als Dummer August, een domme nar of triestige ‘rode’ clown met een zotskap gemaakt van het krantenpapier waarop de Duitse ‘weldenkende’ pers hem als nazi had besmeurd. Gij domme august, zegt het gedicht dat rond zijn kop gekrabbeld staat, komisch toch zoals ge hier nu muilen staat te trekken onder het snelrecht van de rechtvaardigen: Schnellgericht der Gerechten. Had beter kunnen weten.
Grass was wel wat tegenstand gewoon, en als meester-spelmaker van de publieke opinie kon hij zijn belagers ook gemakkelijk uiteenspelen. Memorabel is die kaft van Der Spiegel waarop de gevreesde criticus Marcel Reich-Ranicki een roman van Grass letterlijk in tweeën scheurt – hopelijk was het boekwerk al een beetje ‘voorgescheurd’ want in een twee drie kon je de turven van Grass niet zomaar kleinkrijgen: De bot, De rattin, Een gebied zonder eind, De blikken trommel – ik vermeld enkel de ‘dikste’. En telkens won Günter Grass. De bitterheid in de correcte pers werd er niet minder om. Tot ze hem tot prulschrijver degradeerden – precies zoals ze nu doen met de filosoof Peter Sloterdijk.
En dan, natuurlijk, zijn ‘echte’, grote, originele, onnavolgbare debuut: De blikken trommel. Die Blechtrommel is evident een oorlogsroman. Het is juist dat de immer klein blijvende Oskar Matzerath op den duur als ‘pseudo-dwerg’ bij een variétégroep belandt die de soldaten aan het front en aan de Atlantikwall wat amusement moest brengen. Maar de beschreven gebeurtenissen en oorlogshandelingen kunnen niet verder staan van wat bijvoorbeeld een Jonathan Littell evoceert in De welwillenden. Daarin komen slechts gruwelen voor, begeleid door de analyse van de psyche van hen die de gruwelen beramen. Met De blikken trommel konden de Duitsers leven: geschreven van binnenuit, en dus met als stof datgene wat de mensen toentertijd redelijkerwijze konden weten – mensen die immers over geen ooievaarsblik beschikken maar slechts over de beperkte blik van de spelers op de kleine rechthoek waar ze handelen. In vergelijking met wat Reemtsma’s Wehrmacht-tentoonstellingen te zien gaven gebeurt er in De blikken trommel niets. Precies daardoor heeft deze roman bijgedragen tot Auseinandersetzung en Vergangenheitsbewältigung. 
