When Günter Grass’s long-awaited ‘unification novel’ Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield) was published in 1995, the media furore that surrounded it was intense. It was widely felt that the author – with a 780-page book that wends its way across some 150 years of German history as its largely male, ageing characters meander through former Prussian/East German territories – had created a literary work that was aesthetically and politically out of step with the forward-looking times. Such opinion can be understood as a resurgence of the programmatic attempt, led by the journalists Ulrich Greiner and Frank Schirrmacher at the beginning of the decade, to declare as passé the kind of overtly socio-politically engaged writing associated with such ageing writers as Günter Grass and Christa Wolf. There was, however, also a distinctly personal element to much of the polemic. Not only had Grass taken an unpopular stance on unification that had made him enemies across the political spectrum during the unification period, he had also been falling out of favour with leading literary critics since the mid-1980s. With publications such as Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986) and Zunge zeigen! (Show Your Tongue!, 1988), his work was judged to be becoming ever more whimsical in style and overly didactic in its political message, suffering, in short, from Grass’s outmoded sense of his own importance. If there was one thing that was not new in the united Germany, it was the idea that Grass, as both a cultural and political icon, was old.

In fact, Grass’s literary output since the mid-1980s, from Die Rättin through to the autobiographically styled Die Box (The Box, 2008) and Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland (Travelling from Germany to Germany, 2009), merits being collectively considered as a body of ‘late writing’, in the Shakespeare-scholar Gordon McMullan’s definition of the term. McMullan explains that while late writing is generally associated with the end of an author’s career and thus the proximity of death, it is most useful as an aid for interpreting the author’s wider significance when applied to a certain manner of reading – late writing is a category that is invoked retrospectively by those evaluating a writer’s work. Whatever the author may think he or she is doing at the time, lateness can be construed within both his or her person and work by others, and this can happen quite independently of biological age. With this, ‘late style’ as discussed by Theodor Adorno in 1937 and, more recently in 2006, Edward Saïd is above all a literary-critical construction, an approach to interpretation forwarded by cultural critics that pertains to the way an author’s positioning in relation to his or her era is perceived. Although his overall argument is a little different to McMullan’s, Saïd also makes the artist’s relation to the era central to his description of late style as ‘in, but oddly apart from the present’. In other words, an author’s late work may be characterised by a kind of quirkiness, a peculiarity of style or theme that deviates from dominant trends whilst at the same time refusing to be declared irrelevant to them, and this leads critics to construct arguments about its relationship to the cultural epoch. Specifically, in Saïd’s late twentieth-century construction of lateness, late work is modulated by a mixture of nostalgia, melancholic leave-taking, and obdurate ongoing self-assertion, and readers are likely to perceive within it a certain doggedness, wilful difficulty and a tendency towards deliberately unresolved contradiction.