188 Besprechungen / Reviews itself is constructed with such great care, and that it creates historically and politically accurate contexts which form a sound backdrop for the vibrant personality of von Bülow as created by Czernin. Laurentian University Bettina Brockerhoff-Macdonald T HOMAS A. K OVACH AND M ARTIN W ALSER : The Burden of the Past. Martin Walser on Modern German Identity: Texts, Contexts, Commentary. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. 141 pp. $ 29.95. This book is about Walser’s intellectual negotiations with the German past since the 1960s. Thomas Kovach has expertly translated six of Walser’s essays/ speeches dealing with the German past and its impact on contemporary German identity. These texts are presented chronologically, tracing Walser’s development from a decidedly leftist intellectual to a more conservative stance. By placing Walser’s texts in a larger historical and literary context it is the author’s hope to elucidate - especially to non-German readers - how not only Walser but German society at large deals with the conflicted sentiments regarding the country’s problematic past, in particular the issue of the Holocaust. Kovach approaches Walser’s essays as literary texts, paying close attention to their literary complexities and rhetorical strategies, and attempts to distinguish what may be considered a valid critique of Germany’s culture of remembrance from those aspects that may be seen as problematic. Naturally, Walser’s Friedenspreisrede of 1998 takes center stage here, although it is essential that the previous and subsequent texts embed this speech in a broader framework, which enables Kovach, through comparisons, analogies and cross-references, to extract and explain Walser’s reasoning in a much more differentiated and balanced way than otherwise possible. For each text Kovach provides introductory comments, detailing Walser’s personal circumstances and the historical-political conditions under which the texts originated. Following each piece, Kovach’s commentary progresses from a brief recap to close analysis of the text. Starting with the 1965 essay «Our Auschwitz,» it becomes clear that Walser was at the «forefront of public voices» (20) in dealing with this issue overtly and explicitly, offering a number of subtle psychological observations and insights into the role Auschwitz played in the German psyche, and insisting on collective responsibility and the necessity of reflection on the sheer incomprehensible and inexpressible reality that is Auschwitz. In his speech «No End to Auschwitz» (1979), Walser continues his forceful engagement with the past on a deeply personal level, identifying himself and all Germans with the perpetrators condemned to share the burden of collective guilt. While in these first two texts Walser’s voice is that of a public speaker, the tone changes from here on. In «Handshake with Ghosts» (1979), Walser laments the impossibility for Germans of being able to devote thought to the division of Germany, thus inhibiting a «reconstitution of a German national identity» (52). As Kovach points out, «guilt for the Holocaust is viewed as the problem preventing Germans from devoting themselves to national tasks, rather than as an essential fact each German must face and deal with» (52). In the 1988 speech «Speaking of Germany,» Walser again voices his unappeasable irritation about Germany’s divi- Besprechungen / Reviews 189 sion, blaming the «self-interest of [unnamed] other countries.» It is here that Walser’s urgency becomes problematic, for, as Kovach makes clear, it «evok[es] something approaching a sense of German paranoia» which for many intellectuals «assumed a troubling nationalist stance» (79). The center of attention here is of course Walser’s Peace Prize Speech, «Experiences While Composing a Sunday Speech» (1998), which emanates a much more patriotic tone. German collective guilt has been reduced here to collective shame or disgrace, and the Germans have suddenly become the «accused» (suggesting their guilt has yet to be established). Auschwitz now has become a moral bludgeon, a routine threat, an unceasing presentation of German disgrace and its concomitant exploitation, against which «something» in Walser rebels. As other critics have previously recognized, Walser wishes to distance personal forms of memory from the moralizing tenets of public memory. Kovach pays special attention to the mitigating fact that Walser’s speech with its self-reflexive title is based on a «fictional stance» (104), a meta-speech so to speak, the nature of which is then illuminated in retrospect by the last essay, «On Talking to Yourself: A Flagranti Attempt» (2000). Kovach emphasizes Walser’s preference for a «literary mode for public speaking» (127), which conveys the notion that an interior monologue (which the prize speech in essence constitutes) addresses the audience in a much more «intense and personal fashion» (128). In this way, Kovach explains, the verbalization of what moves Walser when confronted with images of the Holocaust expresses his hope «to allow his listeners to experience a kind of freedom, a reminder of their own difficulty in finding an appropriate language for the theme, and thus to generate a ‹liveliness of exchange› lacking in the discourse of politicians and professors» (126). Kovach’s conclusions are sound, nuanced, and, above all, balanced assessments of Walser’s texts. The burden of the past weighs heavily on Walser. While his obviously conflicted internal dealings with his Jewish fellow citizens may be seen as «symptomatic of his generation of Germans» (131), in Kovach’s view, they do not warrant a «charge of anti-Semitism» (130). On the other hand, he takes Walser to task, in that «responsible German citizens should exercise particular care not to validate the sentiments of neo-Nazi or similar groups» (102). What becomes clear, however, is that modern German identity continues to be constituted to some degree by a «legacy of guilt» (130). Consequently, there persists an «unbridgeable gulf separating the descendents of the perpetrators from those of the victims» (130). Yet Walser’s speeches have opened up a «broader discourse» (131), perhaps clearing a path to a shared «mode of remembrance» (104), a rapprochement that Kovach, in juxtaposition to America’s conflicted past, sees materializing with the «passing of time and the emergence of new generations» (105). Given that the sections of Kovach’s commentary (together with his introduction and conclusion) comprise a mere 42 pages, this makes for a rather slim volume. In light of the veritable flood of critical literature Walser’s speech has elicited, it would have behooved Kovach to supplement his citations of Noelle (2004) by acknowledging other major studies that cover very similar terrain, especially those assembled in the essay collection Seelenarbeit an Deutschland (2004), as well as several book publications (e.g. Brumlik, Funke, Rensmann, 2000; Borchmeyer, 2001; Lorenz, 190 Besprechungen / Reviews 2002). At the very least, annotated entries of the major publications could have been added to the bibliographical lists of Walser’s works available in English translation, English-language books on Walser, and selected studies about Germans and their past. However, neither this slight shortcoming nor the occasional error (9, 14, 48, 51, 101n) should detract from the indubitable merits of this immensely informative and highly readable book that makes Walser’s most important non-fictional texts available for the first time in English translation. Georgia Institute of Technology Frank Pilipp M ONIKA S HAFI (E D .): Approaches to Teaching Grass’s The Tin Drum. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 258 pp. Cloth $ 37.50; Paper $ 19.75. The publication of a volume of essays on The Tin Drum constitutes a welcome addition to the more than one hundred titles in the MLA series Approaches to Teaching World Literature inasmuch as German belles lettres had been merely represented by Goethe’s Faust, Kafka’s Short Fiction, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The status of The Tin Drum as a prominent example of «world literature» is also attested to by the relative frequency with which the novel - its considerable length and daunting complexity notwithstanding - is apparently taught in either the German original or Ralph Manheim’s English rendering at US and UK institutions of higher learning (four contributors of the present volume are affiliated with British universities, one contributor hails from a Canadian institution) in a variety of courses that run the gamut from those in German Studies and Comparative Literature to those with a focus on race and gender, the Holocaust, and Film Studies. Unsurprisingly, the essays, which have been carefully edited by Monika Shafi, who also contributed a useful survey of German editions and those of English translations of Grass’s novel as well as an overview of pertinent secondary literature, offer a considerable range of approaches and thematic emphases that are intended to facilitate students’ access to a notoriously difficult text rather than to advance new readings. But the volume’s emphasis on providing instructional tools does not necessarily detract from its significance as a contribution to the continuing scholarly debate about Grass’s masterpiece; particularly the articulation of conflicting views on the part of various contributors attests to the fact that even fifty years after its publication The Tin Drum does not yet seem to have attained the standing of an uncontested classic. The (not cross-referenced) disagreements among the authors of various articles also tend to compensate for the inevitably repetitive references to specific textual passages, figures, themes, and so on. The eighteen contributions are subdivided into four sections. In the first of these, «Historical Contexts,» Julian Preece draws attention to Grass’s depiction of the «recent German history of the Nazi period» in general and that of the city of Danzig and the formerly German Eastern territories in particular rather than to the novel’s «literary artistry» (16). In a somewhat similar vein, Todd Kontje explores the novel