Mich schmerzt und ekelt mein Land, dessen Sprache ich anhänglich liebe.
(I am pained and disgusted by my country, whose language I love faithfully)

This was one of Günter Grass's last books, something between a historical novel, a memoir, a monograph on the German language, and - as the subtitle has it - a declaration of love to the words of that language. In classic Grass fashion, poems are inserted here and there in the prose text, and he has also done the cover artwork and the lithographs that introduce each chapter.

The narrative hook on which the whole book hangs is the story of the major scholarly dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. Work on this was started by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1838 after they and five other professors were dismissed from their academic posts in Göttingen for protesting against the ruling prince's decision to abolish the constitution of the state of Hanover, but it was 1854 before "A" to "Biermolke" appeared and 1960 before they were all the way through the alphabet.

The book is arranged alphabetically in chapters lettered A-F, K, U, and Z - Grass obviously realised, just as the Grimm brothers did, that he wasn't advancing fast enough to get through the whole alphabet in his lifetime. There's a lot of alphabet-play in the book - Grass loves riffing on the alliterative structure of the dictionary, and sometimes he just lets that run away with him to see where he will end up. But he's also writing a story about Jacob and Wilhelm: Whilst looking over the brothers' shoulders and walking with them in Berlin's Tiergarten, Grass feeds us interesting titbits from their work and from the authors they cite, reflects on the times they were living in, and picks out words and experiences from his own life that mirror theirs.

As we'd expect, the brothers' role as collectors of folk-tales matters to Grass almost as much as their work as Germanists - after all, several of his best-known novels were structured around stories from their collections. Bettina von Arnim flits in and out of the text as well - she and her brother had worked with Jacob and Wilhelm on the fairy-tales and Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and they remained friends later in life. Bettina's lobbying seems to have been largely responsible for the brothers being offered posts in Berlin after they had to leave Göttingen.

Building on the story of the "Göttingen Seven" also gives Grass the foundation for the other major thread of this book, that of the writer's duty to engage with current politics. He's proud of the Seven for the stand they take against the king, and of course has no problem finding parallels for the apathetic failure of their fellow academics to support them. He's in a little bit more trouble where the motivation for the protest is concerned, though: the Seven objected not because withdrawing the constitution was an arbitrary exercise of power, but on the grounds that they had sworn an oath to uphold it. Grass points out that this is a really dangerous justification: the only oath he ever had to swear was one of allegiance to Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, something he certainly doesn't feel bound by. Launching out from this, he compares the Grimms' attempts to maintain the pose of apolitical scholars to Bettina's wild forays into every conceivable region of social and political affairs, and to his own lifelong dedication to saying the things Germany least wanted to hear. Sometimes wrong (rather more often than he admits here, if the truth be told...) but never quiet.

But mostly this is a book about the joy of words, and there can be few modern writers who enjoyed the scope and range of words in the German language and its dialects more than Grass did, and even fewer who had his gift for sharing that joy. ( )