Grass, Günter. From the Diary of a Snail. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, 310 pp. Translated from the original German by Ralph Manheim. Originally published in German as: Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke. Neuland, Germany: Luchterhand, 1972, 368 pp. Also translated into several other languages.

The book From the Diary of a Snail is two integrated stories told by the celebrated German writer Günter Grass, followed by a 25 page essay on Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. The first story is a series of messages by Grass to his children about his participation in the 1969 West German federal election campaign that resulted in Willi Brandt’s election as Chancellor. The second, a fictional story, is on the theme of Germany’s guilt for the persecution of Jews told through the life and activities of the character Hermann Ott, a Mennonite teacher from the Danzig area who helped Jews. After helping them he fled to a rural area a few kilometres outside of Danzig and hid in the basement of the bicycle shop owned by Anton Stomma. As with his usual writing style, Grass crams his pages with names of persons, places, and events of the campaign and with details of snail species and of disruptions, disasters, and deaths befalling German Jews. With these two interwoven stories Grass encapsulates many themes for which he is well known.

For Grass, progress and political change should come at the pace of a snail - slow and careful. He seems to describe Willi Brant and his Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands: SPD) as being like a snail. Grass used a dairy he kept during the campaign to compose the entries for From the Diary of a Snail. Entries are in the form of talks to his children to inform them about what was going on. As he himself writes, he is liable to go off on tangents, ruminating on all sorts of topics. Many of these topics are relevant to the campaign and centre on the dynamic forces of conflict and change in post Second World War divided Germany. Grass is a masterful storyteller and one wonders how much fiction is mixed in with this dairy writing.

The constant setting in Grass’s many fiction works is his home city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) and its surrounding Vistula Delta country side. Here in his youth he encountered Mennonites with their peculiarities and he places them in several of his novels. Mennonites in Grass’ works are usually only in the background but in From the Diary of a Snail its principle character, Herman Ott, is Mennonite. The identification of Ott as Mennonite is noted only in a couple of places in this work but Ott’s Mennonite characteristic is his supportive connection with Jews.

Though some critics have called this a book about a "Good German" who helped Jews in the Nazi regime, it is important to note that the novel’s principle characters, Ott’s hosts Anton Stomma, his daughter Lisbeth, and Hermann Ott, are not Germans. The Stommas are Slavic Kashubians with an ambivalence to Germans. They take a serious risk in hiding Ott and in not turning him over to the Nazis. Also, the work’s principle character Hermann Ott is noted to be of Dutch Mennonite background. Though Dutch Mennonites had been in the Danzig area since the mid 1500s when it was Polish, eventually they immersed themselves in the German language and cultural environment of the area. Mennonites in Poland / Prussia had their own churches, villages, and communities, and though they had lived in the Danzig are for 400 years they considered themselves separate from both Poles and Germans. Grass notes this in several novels. Mennonites sought the right to have their own churches and the right not to be conscripted into the Polish and then Prussian armed forces. For a time those governments entered into special agreements with them. An example of this is mentioned by Grass who notes: "And in 1780 the Prussians even had to make our exemption from military service official." (page 156). However, Danzig Mennonites developed a love of German language and culture and in the late 18th century gave up speaking Dutch and took up the German language and in the late 19th century even gave up their nonresistance stance.

Mennonites, like Jews, have had to endure waves of persecution and discrimination and for centuries often had amical relations with Jews. A small number of Jews in the Danzig area even joined the Mennonite Church. For these reasons it is natural to think that a Mennonite teacher would assist and help Jews to escape, for Mennonites have a long history of fleeing persecution.

Apart from the link of this theme to German guilt, the other link with Grass' electioneering is the snail. The character Hermann Ott, as a biology teacher, is interested in slugs and snails and gets several of his Jewish students to become interested in them as well. From his students Ott earns the alias Dr. Doubt (Dr. Zweifel). Of course, Grass is preserving the metaphor of slow and ponderous progress, and it works well. Ott manages to help most, but not all Jews in his area to escape. After the War he and Grass follow up on what happened to them. With the aid of a snail of unidentifiable species, he manages to cure his host’s daughter, Lisbeth, of debilitating melancholy, resulting from the death of her lover and son. After the war Ott marries her. This theme of melancholy in the fictional story of Ott enables Grass to tie in his essay on Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I to conclude this work.

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Author(s)	Victor G Wiebe
Date Published	December 2016

MLA style

Wiebe, Victor G. "From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke) (Novel)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. December 2016. Web. 19 Apr 2024. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=From_the_Diary_of_a_Snail_(Aus_dem_Tagebuch_einer_Schnecke)_(Novel)&oldid=141878.

APA style

Wiebe, Victor G. (December 2016). From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke) (Novel). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 19 April 2024, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=From_the_Diary_of_a_Snail_(Aus_dem_Tagebuch_einer_Schnecke)_(Novel)&oldid=141878.

From the Diary of a Snail (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke) (Novel)

Cite This Article

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