Günter Grass, in one of his final interviews, revealed a deep-seated antipathy towards the digital sphere. He says, “I still write my manuscripts by hand. Afterwards, I type them onto my old Olivetti, my travel typewriter. I don’t have a computer in my studio. I don’t have a mobile phone. The mere thought of having a mobile phone on me all the time – so being reachable all the time and, as I now know, – being monitored all the time, is a horrific thought.” In keeping with Grass’ own penchant for irony, I propose my intention to create a grant that would hopefully create a centralized hub for Grass scholars worldwide.
“Here Come the Snails: The Günter Grass digital archive,” would include writings, drawings, interviews, and other artifacts related to the Kashubian Gdansk-born German novelist, essayist, and political activist. Additionally, I would hope to include annotated bibliographies, critical essays, transcriptions, and other secondary information related to Grass. The idea would be to create a digital space that would represent in form, presentation, and content, the personage and work of Grass.
In going about this, the importance of language would need to be stressed in all the presentation of materials featured on this proposed archive. Grass often wrote about the power of language as a tool of reform and resistance to authoritarian regimes. Specifically, Grass saw his artistic and literary mission as one that sought to “take the goose-step” out of German. In keeping with this tradition, the materials featured should be presented in many different languages so that a cross-national audience of scholars and non-scholars may engage with Grass’ work.
Additionally, Grass was a scholar who attracted much controversy throughout his career due to his involvement with the Waffen-SS early in his life. Further, his novel, The Flounder, was criticized for promoting sexism. He unpopularly opposed German Reuinification and defending his opposition in his works Too Far Afield and Two Nations, One State? And, at the end of his life, he published a poem entitled “What Must be Said,” harshly criticizing Israel foreign policy towards the Palestinians. Because Grass was so rarely neutral on issues of great importance, neither should an archive bearing his name. Essays critical of both Grass himself and current events Grass would likely have something to remark on should be included in this project. The goal is to simultaneously preserve Grass’ artistic legacy while refusing to perform hagiography on him.
Given the ambition of this project, a grant proposal would be more apropos since anything I could do on my lonesome would invariably not live up to the legacy of Günter Grass. Further, as a white male, I possess biases that limit my ability to be critical of Grass from all necessary angles. Therefore, a multi-ethnic, preferably, multi-lingual group of scholars would be necessary not only in the production of critical material in the Grassian vein, but in the maintenance of the website.
The legality and availability of Grass’ writings presents another set of challenges as well – Grass died in 2015 and many of his writings are not yet in the public domain, making tools such as Hathitrust a non-starter. As such, a truly good digital archive would need to reach out to Grass’ publishers in order to gain data for text-mining and topic modeling if such methods are eventually needed.
Further, Grass Studies are connected to Holocaust studies and Diaspora studies – making the necessity of reaching out to these groups far more necessary. As such, the ability to make a satisfactory website requires funds, creativity, perspective, and labor beyond what I can muster at the moment. However, these institutional hurdles can be cleared with the right creative vision and intellectual gumption. As a result, creating a grant proposal of this type represents a great opportunity to “go beyond the page” as it were in exploring the vast literary scope and breadth a writer like Grass offers to a world he admired so dearly.
Sources:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2191/the-art-of-fiction-no-124-gunter-grass
I respect the awareness to not idolicize Grass and to invite criticism and secondary information to be included into the archive. I feel like each intersected field with Grass (Diasporic studies, Holocaust studies, etc) would be a rich area in and of themselves. And since neutrality/objectivity of archives are disputed (in the sense that by definition a collection is predicated on exclusion), what are your thoughts on competing / opposing scholarship on the subject of Grass? Who will you include or leave out? For example, what parameters would you use to reject out of hand materials relating to Grass that might be anti-semitic? (Or what justification might you have for including them, and if the fact of that inclusion might deter others’ participation, and you might want to mediate against that). And if you do enact a curatorial hand, then how does that complicate the politics of your archive?
Thanks for such interesting and important questions. In terms of determining who is left in and out, I presume that judging the veracity of the source and writer will be a major factor. For instance, a piece criticizing Grass in the New York Times or even one written by a graduate student will be worth more than a piece from a Neo-Nazi website or an article by a famous Holocaust denier. As you point out, this may “bias” the archive to not include blatantly anti-semitic criticism, but one may argue that to include such weak or incendiary material may appear to be a thinly-veiled to make Grass look better by proxy. This is not the intent of this project nor should it be.
There are, of course, exceptions. For instance, if a newspaper wished to reprint selections from Mein Kampf, a disclaimer could verify that the views expressed here are not the views of the newspaper. I’m sure the same could be done in a digital archive.
So, the parameters designed to maintain the credibility of the project over appear to relate to source and content: peer-reviewed journal articles and well-written criticism on reputable websites are fair game. But this would benefit material that is already warmly received. In the case of up-and-coming scholars, for instance, a PhD candidate – a reference from that student’s major professor or advisor could be a great boon for the submission process, even if it makes it slower.
I’m not sure the curationial angle disrupts the political angle of the project. Grass, following Camus and Arendt, stressed judgment as a major political faculty need in modern democracies. As a result, certain ideas or viewpoints need to be either opposed or ignored, particularly those that upset the efficacy of democracy and result in authoritarianism. The same principles apply here. While digital archives and databases are not usually democracies in terms of their structure, they exist within democracies and amidst democratic institutions. Thus, the information that these institutions present, particularly those claiming the prestige of academic institutions, ought to be as reliable and conducive to healthy discourse as possible.
I love the idea of creating a site that houses all things Grass in their own respective original languages; the hardest decisions about how to present those sources, though, will probably come from the quandary of metadata language. Will the site’s text be in German? English? Another language altogether? Is there a way to propose from the onset that the site be as visually intuitive as possible, so that a multi-lingual audience can navigate via images instead of text? I’m sure there are no easy answers to these questions, but considering them in a grant proposal (and, perhaps, including a request for funds allotted to translating and translators) would showcase the global scope of your project and highlight the international nature of Grass scholarship.
Excellent question. There a few ways I think this can be navigated. If it’s possible to create a “splash page” that would prompt viewers to select a language at the outset, that seems like the easiest means of doing so. This is typically accomplished by presenting a number of flags, which would allow a user to click the flag that corresponds with their language (this website, for instance, does just that: http://www.auerbachs-keller-leipzig.de/#panel-tab-id2). A dropdown bar that would have several languages available on each page could also work as well. The problem is that this would make the cost in terms of labor and captial increase substantially. A programmer who can navigate the possibilities of a multilingual page would need to be employed/consulted.
These are omnipresent issues presenting scholars of international literature or “weltliteratur,” but such a issues can be cleverly overcome with good planning.