From Germany to Germany: Journal of the Year 1990 by Günter Grass (Translated by Krishna Winston); Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany by Cees Nooteboom (Translated by Laura Watkinson) - review by Carole Angier

Carole Angier

Post-Wall Angst

From Germany to Germany: Journal of the Year 1990

By

Harvill Secker 288pp £15.99)

Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany

By

MacLehose Press 400pp £20
 

Günter Grass and Cees Nooteboom are grand old men of European literature, and we should be grateful to Harvill Secker and MacLehose Press for bringing us their responses to a key event in European history: the reunification of Germany. However, I warn you that I crawled out of Roads to Berlin, in particular, exhausted and only occasionally enlightened. 

Grass is more engaging, because he is more engaged. This is not just because he is German, whereas Nooteboom is a Dutch observer passing through; it is to do with their natures as writers. Nooteboom dismisses his own early novels as escapism, implying that he has changed. He has, but

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