Catalogue Raisonné. Bd. 1, Die Radierungen; Bd. 2, Die Lithographien

Gunter Grass. Catalogue Raisonne. Bd. 1, Die Radierungen; Bd. 2, Die Lithographien. Ed. Hilke Ohsoling. Gottingen: Steidl, 2007. 607 pp.; 741pp. euro98.00 each, hardcover. Grass's readers know of his Doppeltalent, since the dust-jacket of each of his novels presented an image of the author's creation. The strident drummer of Die Blechtrommel is an icon of world literary culture and others define a rich and idiosyncratic iconographie imagination - from the flounder oi Der Butt to the crabs of Im Krebsgang, from a smug cat to a rat hurrying across the cover. The fish pictured the mythic protagonist, the crabs represented the scuttling narrative. The feline's Iron Cross introduced the reader to the text's central motif, the rodent's ardent dashing spoke of the vitality of a survivor. The hand grasping the quill pen on the dust-jacket of Das Treffen in Telgte, whUe strictly speaking not a self-portrait of Grass, impUcitly depicted his truly intermedial artistic energy. Grass's own hands are as refined as that one on the etching: "Ein schreibender Zeichner ist jemand, der die Tinte nicht wechselt." (Grass, "Bin ich nun Schreiber oder Zeichner?") With this in mind, the two-volume Catalogue Raisonne, reprinting 653 graphic works in chronological order along with numerous sketches and studies for the final state, supersedes all previous catalogues of Grass's representational art - In Kupfer, auf Stein (1986), for example. Volume one itemizes etchings from 1972 on, volume two lithographs from 1975- when he commenced work in that medium - to 2007, a visual record of astounding productivity. As is conventional, each item is named, given a provenance and the edition is cited - for example, "30 romisch numerierte Exemplare in Rotelton I/XXX - XXX/XXX" (vol. 2, p. 682). WhUe the detaUed information in both German and English is not necessarily significant to every literary scholar, the care taken to document the works is of importance to the art collector. Grass's artistic legacy is here taken seriously, a corpus not aU Grassforscher have routinely taken into fuU account. The volumes were released in October 2007, the result of a massive editorial and printing project that came to term in time for the artist's eightieth birthday. In that sense, the volumes are implicitly celebratory in nature and the fact that Grass's personal assistant, Hilke Ohsoling, was charged with the painstaking task underlines the intentionality informing their production. Her office is located in Lubecks GunterGrass-Haus, both a gallery and one of the city's premiere cultural sites, accurately termed a "Forum fur Literatur und bildende Kunst" (see Artinger & Wiskirchen, eds. Wortbilder und Wechselspiele, 2002) . The splendidly produced oversized volumes are thus a credit to Grass, to Ohsoling, to the publisher and to the Hansestadt. …