“Non-official” historiography in Gunter Grass's “My century”

In his novel “My Century”, Günter Wilhelm Grass opposes his own portrayal of history to the so-called ‘official historiography’ (“schräg entgegengesetzt zur offiziellen Geschichtsschreibung”). The purpose of the present paper is to consider the historiographical discourse in this novel. The author’s logic comprises the following: firstly, to detect how a historical event is represented; secondly, to focus on the narrator’s status; finally, to analyze the interconnection between the event and the narrator in the narrative structure. The conducted research brings forward the following results. The text of the novel introduces almost all the major political, economic, and cultural events of the German history of the 20th century. It is important to point out that a separate small private episode is usually highlighted, while the main event is actually hidden. The episode marks the event without disclosing its contents and meaning. Next, there is no internal causal link between the events, they are connected by a simple listing of calendar dates and ‘spatial sequence’ (A.V. Mikhailov’s term). And it is observed that the image angle of the event is set by the narrators. There are about one hundred of them and each has their own social status, age, and character; and their own viewpoint of the event. All these viewpoints are deliberately mismatched and do not coincide. Disputes, quarrels, conflicts constitute a repetitive storyline. The interconnection between the event and the narrator is created by some architectonic features, such as, in the first place, the narrators’ preconception, as there are neither indifferent people nor outside observers, they all are dragged into what is happening and are personally involved in it; and in the second place, there is а chronotopic narrative organization where the event of narration includes several temporal and spatial outlooks, but is realized in the late 1990s. Thus, the past and the present intertwine into a live and actual connection. The author comes to the following results. The historical discourse in the novel is based on the consistent destruction of the meta-narrativity of ‘official historiography’: the picture of the past is not complete, but fragmentary; not only one viewpoint of history (ideologically unified) is presented, but a multitude of contradictory and at the same time, equal opinions; not the “great” personalities and names are involved in the event, but each of its contemporaries, which means that historical responsibility is also something that everyone has to deal with; “official” historiography produces ready-made knowledge and guides the reader to its passive consumption; in contrast with this, “non-official” historiography puts the reader in the initiative center, where the reader has to complete the picture of history independently, has to learn different points of view and search for his own, define his involvement / non-involvement in what is happening. In conclusion, the author notes the originality of “My Century” among other novels by Günter Grass.