Local Anaesthetic by Günter Grass

First published:Örtlich betäubt, 1969 (English translation, 1969)

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: 1967

Locale: West Berlin

Principal Characters:

• Eberhard Starusch, a forty-year-old teacher of German and history
• The Dentist, who is currently treating Starusch’s prognathism
• Philipp Scherbaum, a student in Starusch’s class
• Vero Lewand, Scherbaum’s girlfriend, also a student
• Irmgard Seifert, a teaching colleague of Starusch

The Novel

As the forty-year-old bachelor Eberhard Starusch undergoes protracted treatment for a protruding lower jaw, he uses the sessions not only to deal with his dental problems but also to address a variety of present and past issues which are exceedingly painful to him. While part of the narrative consists of a straightforward reconstruction of his dialogues with the dentist, it is Starusch’s psychic projections of present and past events onto the screen of the television set which the dentist uses to distract his patients that lend the novel its characteristic filmic quality and surrealistic fluidity. Reality and fantasy intertwine as Starusch confronts the actual and the repressed, the pains of the present and the psychic wounds of the past, which intersect with and reflect German history and the contemporary political climate.

Starusch is a man profoundly unhappy with his life and plagued by festering psychic sores caused by past failures, the chief of which being the engagement broken off several years before by his fiancee, Sieglinde Krings. Although he feigns indifference, Starusch was profoundly angered and humiliated by Sieglinde’s rejection of him in favor of another man, and that anger now expresses itself in the form of murderous fantasies projected onto the blank television screen. Horrified by Starusch’s violent visions, the dentist provides the metaphorical link between the external action (the cleansing of Starusch’s teeth) and the psychic projections on the screen when he states:

Your tartar is your calcified hate. Not only the microflora in your oral cavity, but also your muddled thoughts, your obstinate squinting backward, the way you regress when you mean to progress, in other words, the tendency of your diseased gums to form germ-catching pockets, all that—the sum of dental picture and psyche—betrays you: stored up violence, murderous designs.

The theme of compensatory violence and obsession with past failures is also represented in the figure of Sieglinde Krings’s father. Modeled after the historical Field Marshall Schorner, Krings was one of Adolf Hitler’s most stubborn generals, always willing to fight to his last man but never willing to admit error or defeat. Upon his return from Russian captivity in 1955, General Krings spends most of his time staging mock warfare in a sandbox, a vain attempt to win lost battles. The introduction of General Krings into his novel is a clear example of Günter Grass’s intent to link the personal biography of his fictional protagonist with the broader context of German history and suggests that Starusch’s psychological mechanism of converting “calcified hatred” caused by past failures into fantasies of violent revenge might provide a key to the understanding of twentieth century German history. Would history have been changed, Starusch muses, if Hitler had not been denied admission to the Viennese Art Academy?

Among his present concerns, Starusch is most troubled, apart from his teeth, by the plans of his favorite student, Philipp Scherbaum, to douse his dog, Max, with gasoline and set him ablaze in front of the cake-munching ladies in Kempinski’s restaurant on Berlin’s fashionable Kurfurstendamm Street. Scherbaum wants to shock them into understanding the effects of napalm on living beings. He has already rejected the notion of self-immolation as ineffective; the sensibilities of the Berliners to human suffering have been dulled, but their love of dogs is legendary.

Although at Scherbaum’s present age of seventeen Starusch was himself the leader of an anarchist youth gang in wartime Danzig—familiar to readers of Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum, 1961) as the “Dusters”—experience and “the sadness of [his] better knowledge” have turned him into an opponent of genuine violence (his harmless fantasies in the dental chair notwithstanding). A reformist rather than a revolutionary, Starusch is determined to dissuade Scherbaum from an act which he views as futile and potentially self-destructive, but at the same time he admires his student’s unspoiled idealism and is not at all comfortable in disabusing him of it.

Scherbaum is no ideologue driven by a romanticized vision of the possibilities of revolutionary action but rather “a thin-skinned kid who feels the wrongs of the world, not only when they’re close to him, but also when they’re far away.” He is not the least bit interested in explaining the war in Vietnam in ideological terms. Instead, “he sees human beings burning and he’s made up his mind to do something about it.” Though Scherbaum’s radical girlfriend, Vero Lewand, accuses Starusch of having the effect of a “reactionary tranquilizer” on him, it is more accurate to view him as a kind of local anaesthetic, easing the pain while attempting to find a more appropriate response to its cause. With the help of the dentist and to the profound disappointment of Irmgard Seifert, who sees Scherbaum’s proposed action as redemption for the moral failures of her own youth, Scherbaum eventually drops his plan to burn his dog and takes on the editorship of the school newspaper instead. Though his editorials cannot cure the world’s ills in the short run, it is possible that they will contribute to the process of gradual reform. Still uncomfortable with the idea that this may indeed be all that is possible, Starusch notes in a kind of afterward from the perspective of two years later that he feels a fresh growth of tartar (hate, anger, frustration) on his teeth, and the novel concludes with the observation: “There will always be pain.”

The Characters

Eberhard Starusch shares many biographical traits with the author, including date and place of birth, having experienced wartime captivity by the Americans, and an extended residence in the Rhineland following his release and before settling in West Berlin. More important, however, Starusch represents the political philosophy which Grass evolved in the late 1960’s, an extremely turbulent period in German politics. It is a philosophy of skepticism, commitment to the values of the Enlightenment, and such profound distrust of ideological systems and pat answers that, at least in Starusch’s case, it leads to a large measure of self-doubt and tends to express itself through an equivocating on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand approach. Starusch recognizes that nothing is ever simple or unambiguous, that contradiction and paradox are inescapable and that progress must be painfully slow. Nevertheless, the former radical gang leader whom experience has transformed into a moderate, reflective, middle-aged schoolteacher “in spite of everything regards himself as progressive.”

If Starusch is plagued by doubts about the correctness of his moderately liberal views, the dentist represents complete faith in the power of reason, science, and technology to ameliorate, if not completely eliminate, man’s pain. He has no patience with action lacking a rational basis, calling it “active stupidity” and comparing it with “the precipitate extraction of teeth, this mania for creating gaps that no longer hurt.” Progress may come only at a snail’s pace, but it is inevitable if pursued rationally. Thus, he supports the more mature Starusch (even as he works on his “wisdom” teeth) in the latter’s resolve to dissuade Scherbaum from his plan.

On the other end of the political spectrum from the dentist is Vero Lewand. She represents the view popular in some quarters of West German society, particularly in the late 1960’s, that society is too corrupt to be reformed and must be violently swept aside before any real progress is possible, even if there is no clear vision of the society that will replace it. Vero is used more as a foil for Grass’s devastating criticism of the radical left than as a serious rival for Scherbaum’s political soul, however, for Scherbaum speaks contemptuously of Che Guevara as “Vero’s pin-up” and notes that “she reads Mao like my mother reads Rilke.”

Irmgard Seifert, dubbed “the arch angel” by her students, is obsessed with the guilt she incurred as a teenager when, as a leader in the Nazi league of German girls, she helped to instruct young boys in the use of bazookas and denounced a peasant for refusing to allow military maneuvers on his land. Unable to come to terms with her past in any constructive way, she fails to regard her pain as “an instrument of knowledge,” as Starusch does, and she looks upon Scherbaum as a personal savior while investing his proposed sacrifice with redemptive significance. Although she means to encourage him with her verbal self-flagellation, Seifert ultimately helps to dissuade Scherbaum from his plan. The dentist proves to be correct in observing to Starusch: “Your colleague’s enthusiasm will suggest to your student what kind of supporters his action is likely to attract. The more she raves the harder it will be for him to light a match.”

Philipp Scherbaum represents extreme sensitivity and political innocence. When Starusch takes him to visit the scene of his proposed action, Scherbaum reacts to the sight of the fur-coated women gorging themselves against the backdrop of Kurfurstendamm Street, with its materialistic excesses, by vomiting uncontrollably. The irony of Scherbaum’s plight is apparent in his comment: “I’m not supposed to throw up, they are, when Max burns.” His protest against insensitivity presupposes a degree of sensitivity similar to his own.

While Starusch admires Scherbaum’s purity and innocence, he realizes that they are possible only because his ideals have never been tested against reality. In the real world, matters are never simply black and white but shades of gray, and compromise, the loss of political innocence, is always required for progress to be made. Neither Grass nor Starusch appears entirely comfortable with this truth, but there is no help for it: “There will always be pain.”

Serving as mouthpieces for particular philosophical positions and attitudes and presented to the reader solely through the eyes of Starusch, a most unreliable narrator, the characters in Local Anaesthetic clearly do not appear as fully developed, realistic human beings. Through all Grass’s caricaturing and distortion, however, important archetypal patterns of human thought and experience are recognizable.

Critical Context

After the overwhelming critical success of the Danzig trilogy which includes The Tin Drum, Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse, 1963), and Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years, 1965), Local Anaesthetic was not warmly received. Many critics longed for the comic and grotesque aspects of the earlier works and their baroque richness of plot, detail, and characterization. Whereas the earlier novels shared the theme of “coming to terms with the past” and allowed themselves a narrative view from below or outside society, Local Anaesthetic focuses on the present and places its characters within society. It is a reflection of the author’s concern and involvement with contemporary political questions and is best read in conjunction with his nonfiction political essays and speeches of the same period, Uber das Selbstverstandliche (1968; partially translated in Speak Out!, 1969).

To be sure, Local Anaesthetic lacks the dynamism of the earlier works, but that is hardly surprising in a novel in which one of the dominant themes is expressed in the line: “Keep up your dialogue with the boy. Dialogue prevents action.” To a considerable degree, the turning away from an obsession with the past toward the concerns of the present can be seen not only as representing the political maturation of the author but also as coinciding with that of West Germany. While never losing sight of the fact that the seeds of the present lie in the past, Grass’s novel seriously and imaginatively considers difficult questions which, though clearly tied to the West Germany of the late 1960’s, are certain to remain of interest to a wider readership.

Bibliography

Hayman, Ronald. Günter Grass, 1985.

Hollington, Michael. Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society, 1980.

Lawson, Richard H. Günter Grass, 1984.

Miles, Keith. Günter Grass, 1975.

Thomas, Noel. The Narrative Works of Günter Grass: A Critical Interpretation, 1982.