5. Blasphemy and sacrilege in the novel of magic realism: Grass, Bulgakov, and Rushdie

John Irving once called Grass’s The Tin Drum the greatest novel by a living author. To this day, Grass’s book remains one of the most important works of literature for the construction of postwar German identity. As a writer, Grass traditionally sides with the oppressed, with society’s marginalised figures. His novel is, among other things, a literary treatment of the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, resulting in the persecution of asocials as ‘life unworthy of life’, their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and their marginalisation in the Adenauer period. Grass’s Tin Drum is the story of Oskar Matzerath who refuses to grow up during the Nazi regime. Oskar literally stops growing at the age of three and through his child-like actions of drumming and screaming glass to pieces, protests against the adult world that surrounds him. After the war, he transforms from a child who does not want to grow into a grotesquely deformed dwarf, whose hump is symbolic of Germany’s ugliness, of the burden of history that Germany carries upon its shoulders. The Tin Drum reflects all those paradigms of the carnival with its potential of blasphemy and sacrilege that Bakhtin outlines in his monumental study Rabelais and his World. All three authors, Grass, Rabelais, and Bakhtin, react through their works to the oppressive regimes of their times, the rule of Charles V in Rabelais, Stalinist Russia in Bakhtin, and the Third Reich in Grass. For Rabelais, Bakhtin, and Grass, the spirit of carnival with its emphasis on the grotesque signifies the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. A fascinating parallel between Bakhtin and Grass, one that makes it impossible to read The Tin Drum without thinking of the Russian critic, is that both writers critique the official discourse of a regime that appropriates folk culture for its oppressive politics and for rejecting and killing undesirable individuals. While Bakhtin uses theory, the theory of blasphemy to attack Stalinism, Grass attacks German conservatism more directly through fiction. While for obvious reasons, the more muted criticism of Stalinism by people like Bakhtin and the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov was levelled entirely at the State, Grass’s most blasphemous scenes are levelled against the Church in Germany, specifically against its silence during the Nazi period.

The difference between aboriginal peoples and pagan societies, which manage to wed the forces of chaos with the forces of order, and Christianity, which started separating these two principles by distinguishing between Jesus and Satan, becomes interesting within the context of Grass’s novel, which reflects this pagan union of the Apollonian and Dionysian sphere. It does this by merging in Oskar Matzerath the figures of Jesus and Satan, of victim and fascist. Oskar can never be just one: the dividing line of any dialectic is blurred in this book and, like all archetypal tricksters, Oskar finds himself on the threshold between two domains. The trickster's typical location in European culture is the marketplace, and as Bakhtin tells us in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this was the place in which curses, profanities, and oaths reigned.^[2] While the sacred was reserved for the church, the profane reigned outside of church, primarily in the marketplace. Pro-fanum translates into ‘before the temple’. In early modern European culture, the grotesque became most visible in the marketplace, a place not only of multicultural interaction but also a venue for all sorts of groups that later became increasingly segregated from society: gypsies, transient musicians, exotics of doubtful origin, freed slaves, midgets and giants.^[3] Yet with the formation of the bourgeois class, socially inferior classes in marketplaces and fairs increasingly became the ‘object of the respectable gaze’^[4] by which the bourgeois class was able to confirm its own superiority. Particularly, the slave from the colonies, the dwarf, and the pig were displayed and celebrated at the fair because of their low status. Alongside with their segregation within the forming nation-state, slaves and dwarves then became increasingly banished from church.^[5] Oskar’s presence in church is in itself a violation of the sacred realm through the profanity of his grotesque body and all his body stands for, as opposed to one of his counter images, the classical body of the athlete on the cross, who is flexing his muscles and expanding his chest over the main altar of the Danzig Sacred Heart Church. In addition, Oskar repeatedly violates this physical division between the sacred and the profane by taking profane language and actions into church. As a culture of shame and guilt, Germany in the 1950s had its areas of silence — the Nazi crimes, the Holocaust and euthanasia. A central moment of breaking this silence about the Holocaust, in which Oskar accuses the church, that sacred domain opposed to the grotesque, of its passivity in the face of Nazi atrocities, occurs when he gives the Jesus figure his drum and tells him to use it, as a way of protesting against what is happening on the political stage at the same time. This is a double disruption of the sacred, both in the sense that Germans in the 1950s did not want to hear about the Holocaust and the war, and in locality, the desecration of the sacred ground.

The Catholic Church in particular is the target of Grass’s satire. As Günter Lewy has shown, the Catholic Church silently supported the Final Solution, while it followed the general public in its outcry against the practice of euthanasia.^[6] The main reason for the Catholic Church's protest against euthanasia was that here Germans were killed while the Final Solution targeted the Jews, who had killed Jesus Christ.^[7] In 1939, Archbishop Gröber argued that because the Jews had killed God, Christianity was not to be regarded as a product of the Jews but was ‘in the most intimate union with the Germanic spirit’.^[8] This appropriation by the German church of Jesus into its own ranks is reflected in Grass’s Aryanisation of the Jesus figure à la Leni Riefenstahl. Grass’s church scenes exhibit some of the most offensive passages in the book by conflating sacred images with what Bakhtin calls the material bodily lower stratum, as Catholicism never ceases to inspire Oskar with blasphemy. In picaresque fashion, Oskar mutters commentaries on the Mass while moving his bowels, he equates Jesus with his philandering father Jan Bronski, he touches the little Jesus figure’s penis, his watering can, as he calls it, thus giving himself a massive erection, and he sits on the Virgin Mary’s thigh. In the marketplace, Bakhtin argues, ‘the most improper and sinful oaths were those invoking the body of the Lord and its various parts, and these were precisely the oaths most frequently used’.^[9] Oskar’s drumming, and especially the drumsticks, belong to a series of phallic symbols. Being dactyls like the Tom Thumb figure himself that Oskar is partly modelled on, these are grotesque images of potency that contrast starkly with Jesus’s own flaccid penis as a symbol of the church’s political impotence. These carnivalesque images subvert the authority of the church, conflating the theme of the Holocaust with folk humour.

Oskar’s blasphemies turn into crime when he steals nativity figures from numerous churches. In these later church scenes, Oskar uncrowns the church Jesus by adopting his name as the leader of a street gang and by sawing him off along with the other two figures, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. He has his ‘disciples’, the gangsters named the Dusters, perform Catholic rituals such as genuflections by the holy-water font or enact an impromptu Mass and invoke the ite missa sunt, a line that was also the object of derision in the medieval Feast of Fools, where it was converted into the threefold braying of an ass performed by the priest.^[10] We can see to what extent Grass’s book from 1959 is steeped in these early cultural traditions of Europe. In synchrony with other tricksters who muddy high gods and ‘are made in and for a world of imperfections’, in which they ‘do not wish away or deny what seems low, dirty, and imperfect’,^[11] Oskar’s blasphemies in church challenge religious idealism and indict the church’s silence towards the Nazis’ practice of euthanasia, of the killing of the physically and mentally degenerate, of doing away with what seemed to them low, dirty, and imperfect. This union between the church and the totalitarian state is explicitly addressed in Grass’s equation of the classical body of Jesus and the perfect Aryan body, the athletes of the 1936 Olympics and Jesus’s blue eyes, and the equation of the holy cross and the swastika. Oskar questions Jesus as a culture-hero and concludes that he, Oskar, is a more genuine Jesus than the other, for at least Oskar drums resistance to the Nazis with his tin drum. His actions seem to imply the question: Where was God during the Holocaust? Where were Jesus’s miracles then? Moreover, Oskar’s second form of protest, his desire to scream glass to pieces in church, could be read as a form of protest against the broken glass during Reich Crystal Night and the church’s silence.