Citizen Grass and the World’s End

Neal Ascherson

• On Writing and Politics: 1967-1983 by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim
  Secker, 157 pp, £12.00, September 1985, ISBN 0 436 18773 6
• Günter Grass by Ronald Hayman
  Methuen, 80 pp, £2.75, September 1985, ISBN 0 416 35490 4

‘In the early Sixties,’ said Grass – he was talking to an audience of Greek intellectuals in Athens, during the dictatorship of the Colonels – ‘I started doing day-to-day political work. The presumptuous élitist notion that writers are the conscience of the nation and should rise above the practical realities of politics has always gone against my grain.’