But the reading was a mere amuse-bouche for the main course: a tense, gritty Q&A between Grass and Amos Elon, an Austrian-born, Israeli-raised historian. The 80-year-old author kneaded his hands and tapped his feet, recalling his blind faith in Nazism. “If I look back to myself,” he said, “I was a stupid young boy with a head filled with stories.”
The audience roared and clapped when Elon paraphrased Grass’s analogy from his 2002 novel, Crabwalk. “German history is like a blocked-up toilet, the more you flush, the more it comes up again. Some would say that this is what happened to you,” Elon said. Grass’s fumbling Adenauer jokes were not sufficient to relax the crowd, some of whom were less than satisfied by his answers. “Poor Germans!” scoffed one woman after Grass described the frigid winter of 1946–7 that prevented his enrollment in art school.
