Eminent teacher and writer T. Ramachandran, fondly called TR by his students, had interviewed controversial littérateur Gunter Grass, who died on Monday, at the old Guest House in Ernakulam when he visited the city while on a tour of India in 1975.
“TR had taken me along when he interviewed Gunter Grass for ‘Vayana Sala’ — an alternative cultural publication, a kind of little magazine run by him to give space for non-mainstream thoughts, ideas and discussions,” recalls Kerala Public Service Commission chairman K.S. Radhakrishnan. TR had come to know about Grass’s visit from an English daily report.
“Grass had a non-nonsense visage and was tough to get into a conversation. However, when TR coaxed him into saying that his favourite philosopher was Arthur Schopenhauer, who had great exposure to Indian Philosophy, I butted in as I was reading Schopenhauer’s ‘Essays and Aphorisms’ as a student of philosophy then. Subsequently, Grass responded to my queries on Indian Philosophy,” says Dr. Radhakrishnan. “I think he had inexorable pride in his German identity, but to call him Neo-Nazi was just unfortunate.” Probably on the same trip, Grass visited the Department of German at the Kerala University campus. “Dr. Alfred Kastning, then heading the department, had invited him over,” says Latha Thampi, who retired as head of the department last year.
Unlike Dr. Radhakrishnan, she found Grass as an affable, nice person people could easily strike a conversation with. Dr. Thampi, who was a researcher then, recalls that Grass had a free-wheeling interaction with the M.A. students of the department.
She regrets till date that the department could not record the conversation or document the ‘momentous’ visit. “Grass was involved in politics and wanted to infuse a fresh perspective into his writing. Hence the India tour. After a few years of his stay in Kolkata, then Calcutta, he brought out a book, ‘Show Your Tongue’ which by virtue of the Goddess ‘Kali’ image invited brickbats from those who loathed the way he portrayed the city in the work. It seems our doctrine of fatalism was completely lost on him,” she says.
Despite having a contrarian view of Grass’s works, Dr Thampi thinks the controversy over the writer’s long-concealed involuntary membership in the notorious Waffen-SS was gratuitous, as Grass was just about 17 years when he was brainwashed into it. “I think he felt guilty about it all his life. It is unfair to criticise someone in 2014 for what he had done as an adolescent boy,” she says. “Besides being a writer, he used to do sketches and sculpting.”
Poet Balachandran Chullikkad, however, rates Grass the poet ‘below average’. “I can’t comment on his fiction, as I could not complete reading Tin Drum. From the poems of his I read in translation, I thought maybe they were badly translated. But my German friends shared my opinion. Having read the powerful poetry of Berthold Brecht and Paul Celan, I think he comes nowhere close to them.”
