October 20, 2000

'Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Günter Grass writes in a crowd. He is watched, he has said, by "too many dead." Watched as one from a generation of Germans he describes as too young to have been Nazis but too old not to have been formed by the Nazi regime.

So when the novelist and highly political intellectual was confronted with the prospect of imminent German reunification, he and his past balked. A unified Germany might once again become an aggressive Germany.

Grass saw history entirely in terms of an