Headbirths of The Germans are Dying Out by Gunter Grass

By 1979 when he wrote Headbirths, Günter Grass had completed his acclaimed Danzig Trilogy and The Flounder. The first book of the trilogy, The Tin Drum, had been made into a film which had just won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. He had not yet won his Nobel Prize but he was a well established writer and had entered the film world too. At this moment he must have had the confidence and financial security to write about whatever subject mattered most to him.

Headbirths is not so much a novel, as ideas and options for a novel, or preferably a film, on birth rates; low in Germany, high in China and India. The main protagonists are Harm and Dörte Peters, a school-teacher couple from northern Germany. They are no longer so very young and they continually circle around the question; yes-to-baby, no-to-baby? This does not make them sound very exciting and indeed they are not. Both are trapped in earnest consideration of population statistics, economic inequality and an ongoing court case that may cancel or permit the construction of Brokdorf nuclear power station, near where they live at the mouth of the Elbe. But the baby question is the most important and they aim to resolve it by visiting India (or China? or Bali?) over the long school holidays to see at first hand the population bomb in action. Since we are never actually in the novel (or film) but only hear about Grass’s ideas for it, we are introduced to Sisyphus Tours like this: “Bent on an information-gathering vacation, our teacher couple sign up with a travel agency whose prospectus promises ‘reality-oriented tours’.”

Headbirths appears fragmentary and unfinished but it contains a vast amount of material, like an energy bar. All the social-political-cultural topics of the late 20th century are crammed into its 120 pages and I must compress it still further to 4000-odd words. One way is to simply list the ingredients.

Günter Grass.

In some parts, including the framing first chapter, Grass writes in the first person, explaining how he came to write the book. A real journey to China and the Far East on a lecture tour organised by the Goethe Institute led to an epiphany when he was nearly run down in Shanghai by one or several of the 950 million Chinese on bicycles. Despite seeing similarities between the Germans and the well organised and efficient Chinese, he is oppressed by the vast and diverging difference in the size of their populations.

The Teachers.

At the centre of the book are the school-teachers Dörte and Harm Peters. Grass creates them as representatives of his time and his readers. They met at a sit-in against the Vietnam war ten years ago and are now fully qualified teachers with civil servant status. Both teach at the Kaiser Karl School. They have a cat but no child. They don’t make things easy for themselves. The child is always present.

Out of consideration for the film’s casting director, their appearance is not specified except for one detail; Dörte must have Baltic blond hair (I don’t know either) and Harm must be ash blond. But their characters remain free to be sculpted and Grass the ex-stonemason can’t leave them alone. He has an artist’s compulsion to round them out and give them life, so they promptly start undermining the ideas they are supposed to represent.

The Wall.

The Berlin Wall, The Great Wall of China, The Atlantic Wall and a hypothetical radiation wall to keep teeming migrants out of Germany all feature in this book. At one point Harm tells his pupils that a migrant wall would never work, because walls never do. Harm explains that the Great Wall never did China any good. It’s one of those moments when I wish Grass would step in and give the children more of a say. One of them could ask “So why did the Chinese build and re-build their wall, didn’t they notice that it was useless?” The question is never asked because the hierarchy of knowledge is clear. Dr Wenthien instructs the teachers and they instruct their pupils, the future German citizens. The only time we are allowed to step out of the German education hierarchy is when Grass appoints himself dictator for a year.

In 1979 many Germans were keen on reunification but Grass was against it. He advocated the unification of culture between the two Germanys, while maintaining separate political systems that might be swapped between East and West every ten years. His ideas didn’t catch on. But if walls don’t work, why pull down the Berlin Wall or take any other position on the issue? This question is never resolved.

Nicolas Born.

Headbirths is dedicated to Nicolas Born who died just before the book was completed. Grass describes a happy time in the 1960s when, with Born and other writers, he would take the train from Friedrichstrasse to East Berlin, to meet writers from the other side. Convening in bugged flats, they would read drafts of their new work and argue over ideas. Recollections of Born, his quiet workmanlike manner and his long-lined poems, are full of nostalgia. Later we learn that the writers who they used to meet in the East were eventually allowed to move to the West. The writer’s group tried to keep up its meetings but, now that they were all living on the same side of the wall, the arguments had lost their zest.

There is a weird moment near the end of the book when Grass tells us that Born “died of cancer (so they say) on December 7, 1979” so he didn’t quite make it to the new decade. Why shouldn’t it have been cancer? We are also told about the famous far-left activist Rudi Dutschke who died on December 24 of the same year, from complications arising from an assassination attempt ten years earlier. There seems to be a hint of conspiracism creeping in here. Are we supposed to believe these deaths are linked, or to blame pollution for Born’s death?

The Nazi past.

The Nazis loom over this book in a way that only fully makes sense with the benefit of hindsight. In 1979 Grass could write about those accused of collaboration with the Nazis: “I will not judge. A dubious stroke of luck, my birth year of 1927, forbids me to condemn anyone. I was too young to be seriously put to the test.” He goes on to tell us that, had he been born 10 years earlier, his place of birth and social class would make it very likely that he would have been a Nazi. But in 2006 it came out that Grass had not been born quite late enough. In the last year of the war he had volunteered for the U-Boat service, where he would have been stationed in one of the fortified bunkers on the Brittany coast, known as the Atlantic Wall. In fact, he was turned down by the navy and recruited into a Panzer unit, where he served through the retreat from the East until captured by the Americans.

The Liver Sausage.

As a present for his old school friend Uwe, who he expects to meet in Bali, Harm buys from his local butcher “a kilo of course, homemade, lightly smoked liver sausage in natural casing” which he has vacuum sealed in plastic and carries in his hand luggage on the journey East. The sausage endures multiple indignities as it is stored among the beer bottles in a hotel fridge, investigated by suspicious officials and taken to addresses where Uwe is supposed to live, but is never found.

Just when it seems that the undeliverable, plastic-sealed liver sausage is a too-crude symbol of low fertility, Grass tells us that it is “a fact and not a headbirth.” I don’t know whether to believe him or not but apparently the German Ambassador to China had requested the sausage and Grass, as a Goethe Institute lecturer, was its courier:

“Maybe certain Prussian virtues, which might also be called Chinese virtues – punctilious punctuality, for instance – are worth reviving; for by the time we got back from Asia, Ambassador Wickert (under an impressive letterhead) had already thanked Butcher Köller for the coarse, lightly smoked liver sausage; as I, in turn, thank him for his plot-fostering idea …”

This passage also explains why Grass finally chooses India and Bali as Dort and Harm’s destinations. China is not enough of a contrast to Germany. The mystical and messy elements that the plot needs are missing in China. The teachers hear from Wenthien that: “the Indians – oh, well. All they can do is multiply. Fifty-seven thousand babies a day. Every month a million more Indians. The Chinese ought to introduce their order. They actually encourage one-child marriages in the People’s Republic.”

By the end of the book the liver sausage has still not found a home and returns to Germany in Harm’s luggage. Its rotting condition is unmistakable and there is a suggestion that even the plastic casing is failing to keep the stench in. On the way back from the airport Harm takes the sausage from his suitcase and flings it at an election poster, but hits the wrong one: “For you Franz Josef! – Sorry Helmut …”

Nuclear power.

Brokdorf nuclear power station is perhaps the best option that the teachers have for a common foe that unites them. At the start of the book Brokdorf is quiet. Construction has paused as a result of a court order and weeds are beginning to grow over the site: “Five years ago Harm and Dörte came here to protest. Here they might almost have brought themselves to use force. Now and then they come here to be rejuvenated.” The trouble is that Harm is now backsliding: “On the one hand, nuclear power plants represent an incalculable risk; on the other hand, only the new technology can guarantee the standard of living to which we are accustomed.”

Personal note: Environmental protests were popular family days out in the seventies. There is a photo of me marching through my local town as an eight year old child, carrying a placard against a new airport “Rabbits not Runways”. The event was such a success that we went to another protest the same year against nuclear power, with “The only safe fast-breeder is a rabbit.” I guess I liked rabbits. Of course I had no idea what I was protesting against. It was half a lifetime before I looked at the question again and decided that nuclear power was actually quite a good idea.

Five years ago Dörte and Harm were united by Brokdorf, but no more: “Dörte just can’t help having these varying fears for the future: ‘If we ourselves have no future to look forward to, how, I ask you, can you expect a child, our child …’ Harm waxes cynical ‘Fast Breeders Bar Offspring! That could be a headline in Bild-Zeitung. And who’s going to pay for our pensions when we get old?”

Soon after the book was finished, construction at Brokdorf resumed. Power was generated until 2021 when it was shut down as part of the phase out of German nuclear power.

Dr Wenthien.

Employed as a guide by Sisyphus Tours, Dr Wenthien is a guru who speaks all languages and knows everything, including the secrets of his client’s hearts. He has “a senescent baby face. His watery gaze suggests the long view. A sort of God figure in nickel-rimmed glasses.” Gathering his small travel group together, he “tends to air his world view every evening over a glass of orange juice”, telling them that “Unfortunate and in need of Western help as these people may seem, this is where the future of our planet will be decided.”

Dr Wenthien is a kind of facilitator who can help you with anything, but you really don’t want to get too close to him. He can quote statistics on protein deficiency in India, or explain the religious rites of the Parsis, or suggest to Dörte, when she is in a yes-to-baby mood and Harm is not cooperating, that one of the gentle Balinese youths, always loitering at the hotel gate with their Suzukis, would make a perfectly satisfactory father. She selects one and heads for the beach on the back of his Suzuki, but changes her mind at the last moment.

There is a touch of Dr Faustus about Wenthien. It is clear that Grass has doubts about whether he wants to be in the same political tribe as Wenthien.

Sisyphus.

The Myth of Sisyphus, as re-told by Albert Camus, is the story of a man condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again at the end of every day. To Camus this absurd, unending task might become heroic, possibly even meaningful, through an act of will. Those who don’t believe in a divine purpose to life often find this vision appealing. Certainly, it appealed to Grass “I saw the cheery stone roller as a man who encouraged us to roll stones in vain, to scoff at punishment and damnation – so then I found myself a stone and was happy with it. It gives me purpose. It is what it is. No God, no gods can take it away from me …” He confesses to having some doubts about its identity: “what is my stone? The toil of piling words on words? The book that follows book that follows book? Or the German uphill task of securing a bit of freedom for stone rollers (and suchlike absurd fools).”

Unfortunately, the name Sisyphus has also been adopted by Dr Wenthien’s agency for its novel brand of slum tourism. The risk of masochism and the misery market is ever present. Grass has experienced it himself on the Goethe Institute tour “In the morning we’d visit some slum, at noon we’d rest in an air-conditioned hotel, in the late afternoon visit Buddhist temple grounds, in the evening listen over drinks and snacks to a report drawn up by some experts about a famine-stricken region two hundred miles distant …”

However, he keeps faith with the cheery stone roller. Speaking in his imagination to his dying friend Nicolas Born, Grass says “I regard Harm and Dörte as heroes. To be sure, the stones that have been foisted on them aren’t so very big, but even in flat country their up-and-downhill itinerary is absurd. I’ll introduce them to you. Dörte may appeal to you; especially her ‘somehow’ sentences – ‘We’ll get it done somehow!’ – should meet with your indulgence.”

The Dictator.

There is a section near the middle of the book where Grass rants against the existing politics until he tails off like this (the dots … are in the text) - “If we confined ourselves to our real needs … If everyone took only what … If no one consumed more than … If I, provided that … In other words, if democratic methods won’t do the … If democracy turns out to be inadequate …”

Then the solution strikes him: “Try my hand as dictator.” Grass is a reasonable chap so he moderates his ambition: “For only a year. That would be enough for me.” And he lays out his policies:

On defence: “Since I’m not a pacifist I would not, as dictator, have to abolish the Bundeswehr, but I’d convert it into a mobile army of partisans, with which any army of occupation would have to reckon in the long run. Women and children would be obligated to serve in this partisan army, as would domestic animals, Grandma and Grampa, …”

On energy: “I’d relieve the energy problem by means of edicts cutting all electric current at night and barring auto traffic from the cities. Furthermore (all dictators like their little jokes), I’d reintroduce the nightcaps formerly worn in Germany and unequalled for sleeping in unheated bedrooms. I wouldn’t be surprised if power cuts and nightcaps proved to be just the thing to transform the decline in the German birthrate into a population explosion.”

On education: “I would abolish compulsory education, unmiseducated children, spurred by an uninhibited love of reading, would soon again be spelling their way through thick books. Again we’d have itinerant tutors and the attendant romances. … Educational concepts, old and new, … study target, pedagogy, didactics, curriculum ... would all be forbidden.”

Clearly Grass cannot sustain a political programme for more than a couple of sentences before twisting it into fantasy and comedy but these really are the issues that he cares about: “For the present, I confess, I’m satisfied with these few improvements, especially since Harm Peters is waiting impatiently to have the say and to be the great dictator – ‘if only for one short year.’ “

The imagined film has been relocated to Bali, where Dr Wenthien has arranged a trip to the volcano in the centre of the island. The rest of the group have gone off to lunch, leaving Dörte and Harm in a crater alone: “Harm tests the acoustics of the theatre under the cloudringed peak. ‘I, Harm,’ he cries, ‘have come to declare war on you spirits and demons! I will exterminate all superstitions.”

But Dörte, who has recently taken to leaving small offerings in local shrines, is not so pleased with this talk: “’Harm’, she cries, ‘please! We’re guests here. You’ve always been such a tolerant sort. You might make the volcano angry. Can’t you liberate somebody or something else? You know, the oppressed and downtrodden, or the poor divided fatherland. Come on, Harm, give it a try. If you had the say in Germany. As a dictator, of course, since it’s all over with democracy anyway.’” So, Harm is set up to imagine himself a dictator.

On tax reform there is not much difference between Harm and Grass: “Dörte is enthusiastic. ‘Heil Harm!’ she cries. But when I try to transfer my edict abolishing compulsory education to Dictator Harm, Schoolteacher Dörte protests violently: ‘That’ll put us back centuries. Only the privileged classes will benefit.’” Author Grass makes no comment but moves swiftly on to the topic of defence. He allows himself to be convinced when both Dörte and Harm reject his project for a mobile partisan army calculated to demoralize any occupying power. They argue that: “The partisan concept goes against the grain of the German people. Rather than survive by guile underground, they would prefer to die, if need be, in open combat.”

This preference recalls the opening scene of The Tin Drum, where a small man, fleeing for his life across a muddy field, finds a large peasant woman sitting on a pile of potatoes. He hides under her skirts and, while she misdirects the pursuing soldiers, “He went that way”, he is founding the family that will populate the Danzig Trilogy. As a son of Danzig, I think Grass can see the advantages of both the “lie low and breed” and the “stand up and fight” strategies. This is enough to give him an outsider’s perspective when Harm, from a blasted tree in the lava field, reaches the climax of his dictator’s speech:

“The German people of both German states resolve of their own free will to start dying out immediately, happy in their irrevocable, social-security-sanctioned decision – yes, happy, because of the benefit they are conferring on mankind. […] In seventy years the German people will cease – with joy in their hearts – to exist. […] The vacuum thus arising will be given over to nature. Forest and heath will gain space. The rivers will sigh with relief. At last the German question will have found an answer in keeping with the German character and its penchant for self-sacrifice.”

Of course, Dörte does not like this any better than his mocking of the volcano gods. So the yes-to-baby, no-to-baby argument goes on.

The Zeitgeist.

I’m cheating a bit here because the word zeitgeist is never used in this book but I notice that Margaret Atwood moved to Berlin at about this time to write The Handmaid’s Tale. She had started the story in 1981 and given it up, deciding that the idea of the US evolving into a patriarchal theocracy called Gilead was too implausible to sustain. She tells in her autobiography that Berlin at the time was mainly inhabited by young men and angry old women. The women had been widowed in the war and the men were avoiding the draft. There were very few children around. Perhaps she had read Headbirths and was inspired by this passage about the 1980 election campaign:

“Percentages were being argued about. The Christian opposition was attacking the government for preventing the Germans from multiplying properly. Citizen production, it was claimed, was stagnating, and Socialist-Liberal mismanagement was to blame. The German nation was threatened with extinction.”

Atwood (why no Nobel?) started from the same reality and created Offred, the Handmaidens and the Commander. Her story is far more compelling than Headbirths because the state of Gilead makes a credible and frightening enemy. There is no decent enemy in Headbirths, neither Franz Josef Strauss nor Brokdorf nuclear power station are worthy enemies.

Conclusion.

Headbirths can be read as a satire on just the sort of people who would read books by Günter Grass and vote for the party he supported. I’m sure it was not intended that way, but given the novelist’s compulsion to round out his characters and to confess truths, the possibility of this interpretation is unavoidable. His frustration with the Germans is sometimes explicit: “They always insist on being terrifyingly more or pathetically less than they are.” At other times he is deeply fond of his characters, especially Dörte. Towards the end of the book Grass puts himself into a scene where he goes with Dörte to the court to witness the Brokdorf decision:

“A wet, cold day. She had excused herself from school. The peasant’s educated daughter. Later in the midday break, we talked. Possibilities crackled between us. But that would only have taken our minds off the big thing: the trial.”

This book was written in 1979 and the date is important, as Grass often reminds us in the text. He is peering forward in his imagination into the 1980s, or as Harm Peters likes to call it, George Orwell’s decade, but he finds that he is no more of a seer than anyone else. Omniscience was possible for the author of stories set in Danzig in the 1930s. Past, present, and future could coexist in a magical-realist blend Grass called the “pastpresenture” and it served him well. But when it comes to writing a book set in the present, the future is foggy and he cannot see past the upcoming election contest between Helmut Schmidt of the Social Democrats and Franz Josef Strauss of the Christian Democrats.

On the other hand, perhaps the election results of 1980 were not so important. Grass did see fifty years into the future. German pedagogy worked. In the story it is plain that Dörte will never have more than one child and in real life the German fertility rate has averaged around 1.5 ever since. Dörte and Harm’s pupils have obediently answered “Atomkraft?” with “Nein danke” and the last German reactor was shut down in 2023. Dörte’s vague but hopeful sentences have continued to resonate. Facing a wave of refugees from Iraq and Syria into Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel said “We can do this” and allowed them to stay in Germany.

I think Günter Grass wrote Headbirths to answer this question: “Is low fertility an accident or a feature of my political tribe? After all, I have six children in real life. I fancy Dörte, the peasant’s educated daughter. I’m sure if I was a younger man I could persuade her to have my children. What the hell is wrong with you, Harm!”

I don’t think he finds an answer, but the question persists.