delit1-9, Exercise 2: Celan and Grass

Model answer (check the details):

Celan: a Jewish poet from Romania who survived the war and wrote in German, the language of the murderers of his family. "Todesfuge" (1948) is a poem of the camps built like a musical fugue, with repeated lines such as "Black milk of daybreak". His later poems became increasingly compressed and fragmentary, refusing easy comfort. His response was to change and strain the language itself.

Grass: a West German writer whose novel The Tin Drum (1959) follows a boy who refuses to grow up, through Danzig and the Nazi years. He used comedy, grotesque exaggeration and an unreliable narrator to deal with the past and the complicity of ordinary people. His own undisclosed membership of the Waffen-SS, revealed in 2006, added a further layer to the debate about his role.

Contrast: Celan's response is lyrical and compressed, from the standpoint of a victim. Grass's is narrative and comic, from the standpoint of a generation that had lived through it as young people.