Günter Grass on lying – in the Paris Review, 1991:

INTERVIEWER Do you think your novel Die Rättin suffered somehow in English because the title had to be The Rat and therefore did not convey that it is a female rat? “The She-Rat” would not have sounded right to American ears and “Rattessa” is out of the question. The reference to a specifically female rat seems so fascinating, whereas the genderless English word rat conjures up everyday images of those ugly beasts that infest the subways.

GRASS We did not have this word in the German language either. I created it. I always try to encourage my translators to invent. I tell them, If this word doesn’t exist in your language, create it. Actually, for me it has a nice sound, she-rat.

INTERVIEWER Why is the rat in the book a female rat? Is that for erotic or feminist or political reasons?

GRASS In The Flounder it’s a male. But as I get older I see that I’ve really given myself over to women. I will not change that. Whether it’s a human woman or a rat—a she-rat—it doesn’t matter. I get ideas, you see? They make me jump and dance, and then I find words and stories, and I begin to lie. It’s very important to lie. It makes no sense for me to lie to a man—to sit with a man, together, telling lies—but with a woman!

INTERVIEWER So many of your books, like The Rat, The Flounder, From the Diary of a Snail, or Dog Years, center on an animal. Is there some special reason for that?

GRASS Perhaps. I have always felt we speak too much about human beings. This world is crowded with humans, but also with animals, birds, fish, and insects. They were here before we were and they will still be here should the day come when there are no more human beings. There is one difference between us: in our museums we have the bones of the dinosaurs, enormous animals that lived for many millions of years. And when they died, they died in a very clean way. No poison at all. Their bones are very clean. We can see them. This will not happen with human beings. When we die there will be a terrible breath of poison. We must learn that we are not alone on the earth. The Bible teaches a bad lesson when it says that man has dominion over the fish, the fowl, the cattle, and every creeping thing. We have tried to conquer the earth, with poor results.’

Read the article here.

The woman, human or rat, makes Grass -and he is probably no exception – jump and dance.

The she-rat, well, those were the days.

Around the same time Buruma wrote in NYRB: ‘I thought of Günter Grass, who, with the lugubrious look of a wounded walrus, complained night after night on television that nobody would listen to him anymore. His constant invocation of “Auschwitz” as a kind of talisman to ward off a reunited Germany had the air of desperation, the desperation of a man who had lost his vision of Eden. His Eden was not the former GDR, to be sure, but at least the GDR carried, for Grass, the promise of a better Germany, a truly socialist Germany, a Germany without greed, Hollywood, and ever-lurking fascism.’

Where Grass shows up the air of desperation is never far away, but he managed to energize the desperation.

I interviewed Grass in 2013, see here, only in Dutch. Almost no mention of dancing in 2013, except that Ingeborg Bachmann was a great dancer.

Perhaps according to Grass lying and dancing was more or less the same.

The name of Grass is rarely mentioned these days, that’s a pity.