Head births or the Germans die out

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Kopfgeburten or Die Deutschen die aus is a work by Günter Grass published in 1980 . It is a mixture of a literary essay, novel and screenplay.

prehistory

From 1978 onwards, Grass was involved in drafting the script for the film adaptation of his work Die Blechtrommel . A friendship developed with the filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff . In 1979, Grass traveled through Asia with his wife and at times with the Schlöndorff couple. Thoughts arose about another possible film project that deals with the diverse population trends in Germany and Asia .

content

In the book, real experiences of the trip to Asia are compiled with fictional fragments from a film that was never made. At the meta level, the author also reflects on his protagonists and, to a limited extent, on himself.

The narrative strand of the film idea accompanies the north German teacher couple Harm and Dörte Peters (the "head births" of Grass) on their trip with the tour operator " Sisyphos " through various Asian countries, in their thirties. a. India , China and Indonesia . The couple's core problem is the decision for or against a child throughout the trip. Although both want the child, they can not decide on a child in constant weighing processes that also include political realities at the end of the 1970s (e.g. the construction of a nuclear power plant in their home region of Brokdorf in Schleswig-Holstein ). Arguments like "I won't put a child in a world like this" are repeatedly put forward to postpone the desire to have children. The child is always born in the head, but not in reality. This contrasts with the observation of the population explosion in Asia, the problematization of the north-south divide and the report “ The Limits to Growth ” by the Club of Rome .

In addition to the story about the couple, Grass, as a first-person narrator, sets up various thought experiments on the future of Germans . These range from the extreme of the idea of ​​what if there were suddenly a billion Germans to the idea that all Germans would decide not to reproduce at all in the future and to die out completely within 80 years. Several times an image of Germany is drawn up in which the Germans would become more and more of a minority in their own country as a result of constant immigration, mixing (in the sense of merging into the Asian majority population) and less personal increase.

Topics such as demographic change and the fear of foreign infiltration are ironically satirized. There are clear evaluative references to current politics in Germany, especially because of the upcoming elections, in which Franz Joseph Strauss , who described Germany's intellectuals as "rats and blowflies" in 1978, was still the top candidate of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group at that time .

criticism

John Irving praised the “absolute honesty” of the work.

“The German criticism reacted mostly negatively to the “ head births ” . The author respects the virtuosity of the author, but it seems as if Grass can write about anything, but currently has nothing more to say, an example of what Grass himself once called “these perfectly written but empty books”. "

- Volker Neuhaus 1997

First edition

literature

  • Brunssen, Frank: The absurd in Günter Grass literature of the eighties, Würzburg 1997
  • Gruettner, Mark Martin: Intertextuality and criticism of time in Günter Grass' Kopfgeburten und die Rättin, Tübingen 1997
  • Michel, Willy: Models of foreign perception and projection in the literary travelogue and in the novel by Koeppen, Ernst Jünger, Nizon, Muschg, Handke and Grass, in: Wierlacher, Alois (Hrsg.): Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Volume 11, 1985, p 157-178
  • Neubauer, Jochen: With Sisyphus on a trip to Asia (2005) (PDF; 203 kB)
  • Neuhaus, Volker: Writing against the passing of time. On the life and work of Günter Grass, Munich 1997