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Loading... Mein Jahrhundert.door Günter Grass (ook onder Günter Grass)
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zeker iets voor jou Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek mooi zult vinden.  eairo | Sep 3, 2009 |  A book of short-short stories by the German Nobelist Gunter Grass--one story for each year of the 20th century. Like anything Grass writes they are well written. More or less a chronological fictional telling of the history of Germany in the 20th century through a series of snapshots. Of particular note for me were those concerning the first world war years 1914-1918 in which the German novelists Remarque and Junger remark on their war experiences to a much younger female interviewer many years later. Then the years leading up to the second world war and the years following. The 1960's and the student demonstrations and the rise of the Baader-Meinhof gang followed in the 80's by the fall of the wall and the East German communist regime. This probably is not one of Grass's major works but it is good work and easier to follow than some of Grass's longer and more difficult fiction. For someone who hasn't read Grass it would not be a bad choice to start out with. (  ) lriley | Nov 10, 2006 |  geen besprekingen | voeg een recensie toe
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Yet as year succumbs to year and one narrative voice piles on top of the next, My Century becomes more than the sum of its parts. And Grass always manages to surprise. The chapters "1914" through "1918," for example, rather than being narrated by the usual suspects--young soldiers in the trenches, worried mothers at home, embittered war widows or shell-shocked veterans--are relayed by a '60s-era young woman who brings two great German chroniclers of the war together. As the now-elderly Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Ernst Jünger (On the Marble Cliffs) meet and spar over the course of several meals, their reminiscences of the Great War present two radically different views. Jünger, for example, says: "I can state without compunction: As the years went by, the flame of the prolonged battle produced an increasingly pure and valiant warrior caste..." Remarque's response is to laugh in Jünger's face:
Come on, Jünger! You sound like a country squire. Cannon fodder quaking in oversized boots--that's what they were. Animals. All right, maybe they were beyond fear, but death never left their minds. So what could they do? Play cards, curse, fantasize about spread-eagled women, and wage war--murder on command, that is. Which took some expertise. They discussed the advantages of the shovel over the bayonet: the shovel not only let you thrust below the chin; it gave you a good solid blow, on the diagonal, say, between neck and shoulder, which then cut right down to the chest, while the bayonet tended to get caught between the ribs and you had to go all the way up to the stomach to pull it loose.It may be Remarque and Jünger talking, but the prose is pure Grass. The years leading up to and including World War II are narrated by a variety of voices: a communist in a forced-labor camp in 1936; a schoolboy "playing" Spanish Civil War with his classmates in 1937. The events of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, become inextricably linked with the November 9, 1989, fall of the Berlin Wall, as a German schoolteacher gets in trouble with the Parent-Teacher Association for his "obsession with the past." Indeed, it is the way Grass mixes past and present, the voices of the famous and the ordinary, that lends such power to My Century; and by the time he brings the reader up to the last weird and wonderful chapter, his century has become ours as well. --Alix Wilber
(opgehaald bij Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:33:04 -0500)
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I can understand--though I have only read one other book by Grass--that this is not considered as one his best works. But it is still a good read. This is history through German eyes, but it is still universal and generally human enough to be interesting to anyone. Whatever really important happened during that century is there, and only few times it happened that a story left me cold, not knowing anything about the subject of the story in question.
But, there is a but... Like said by the author's mother (dead by then) in the last 'year' of the book: "...now I should tell you all what it was like in the old days and even before that. And what else would it have been but war, war all over and then again with just a little break in between." It truly was. The first half of the century was like preparation for the big one and then the next thirty or so years were spent trying to recover from it all; trying to figure out what on earth happened and what should we do about it. And that is a good question any time. (