'Die Raettin': Guenter Grass und die Genealogie der Post-Apokalypse. (German text)

The Rat, published in 1986, is a summation of Gunter Grass's works from the earliest poems and The Tin Drum to the present. Via this novel and the underworld it opens onto the dissertation pursues a poststructural and psychoanalytic reading of Grass's oeuvre.; An examination of the relationship between The Rat and traditional forecasts or receptions of apocalypse reveals that Grass has ever been dismantling the familiar image of the end of the world. An outspoken agent of Eighteenth century Enlightenment, Grass deplores the consumerist appeal of the literary apocalypse; it advertises an easy way to cash out the guilt feelings which have accrued to the German heritage.; Nietzsche's description of guilt management and Freud's analysis of the Rat Man provide the framework for a reading of Grass's text in which the rat is indeed the master signifier and standard of currency and exchange.; The rat not only as signifier but also as super ego draws the author/narrator into a kind of narrative first charted by Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream logic which governs The Rat at the same time mirrors a logic of the post-apocalyptic text which the dissertation seeks to establish. Mourning and melancholia are the chief aspects of this genre in which the apocalypse has already taken place. "Life" has become a mere phenomenon of belatedness (Nachtraglichkeit): in The Rat, mankind only exists in the minds of the dreaming rats. The post-apocalyptic text reveals a realm of the dead which, coextensive with that of the living, is no longer in some other place.; In The Rat, Grass's preoccupation with mother figures reaches a climax within the context of apocalypse. The image of the Great mother or MAGNA MATER introduces a new apocalypse which finds narcissistic redemption in returning to the mother's womb. However, the ambivalence at the core of this phantasmic wish renders the post-apocalyptic project precarious: the Great Mother can also always come back as the devouring phallic mother or, in Grass's terms, the "Black Cook".