Breaking Down the Walls: The European Library Project

Abstract

In the last lines of the poem “Transatlantische Elegie,” the poet Günter Grass relies on the figure of a very special kind of librarian to convey historical and cultural redress of Germany’s Nazi past: “Hear the legend from over there: / There was a thousandfold librarian, / who preserved the literary legacies / of those whose books had gone in flames back then.”¹ The poem recounts a meeting with German emigrants whom Grass met during a social gathering in New York City in 1965. In the poem’s earlier stanzas, his new acquaintances—Jewish and non-Jewish Germans who fled to the United States during the Third Reich—find expression primarily through interrogation. Germany seems as distant as their memories associated with it: “How does it look over there?” they ask, “And your young people? Do they know? Do they want to?”… “Should one go back?”² Grass’s lyrical I responds with a report of things getting better, and he mentions the upcoming national elections in the Federal Republic of Germany in September 1965.