Grass: It’s unusual in Germany for a sociologist and a writer to sit down together. Here, the philosophers sit in one corner, the sociologists in another, while the writers squabble in the back room. The sort of exchange we’re having here rarely occurs. But when I think of your The Weight of the World, or of my most recent book, My Century, I see that our work has one thing in common: we tell stories from below. We don’t speak over people’s heads or from the position of the victor; we are notorious, within our profession, for being on the side of the losers, of those excluded or on the margins of society.

In The Weight of the World, you and your co-authors managed to suppress your own individuality and focus on the notion of understanding, rather than that of superior knowledge—a view of social conditions in France that can certainly be applied to other countries. As a writer, I’m tempted to use your stories as raw material—for example, the description of ‘Jonquil Street’, where often third-generation metalworkers are now unemployed and shut out of society. Or, to take another case, the story of the young woman who leaves the countryside for Paris and sorts letters on the night shift. All the other young women there were recruited on the promise that, after a couple of years, they could fulfil their dream and return to their villages to deliver the post. This will never come to pass: they’ll remain letter-sorters. In these descriptions of the workplace, social problems are clearly evoked without recourse to slogans. I liked that very much. I wish we had a book like this on social relationships in our country. In fact, every country should have one. Or perhaps a whole library, gathering detailed studies of the consequences of political failure—politics having now been entirely displaced by the economy. The only question in my mind perhaps relates to the discipline of sociology in general: there is no humour in such books. The comedy of failure, which plays such an important role in my stories, is missing—the absurdities arising from certain confrontations. Why is that?

Grass: When I say humour, I mean that tragedy and comedy aren’t mutually exclusive; the boundaries between the two are fluid.

Grass: This is reflected in your book—the interviewer is often struck dumb by the reply he receives, so much so that he repeats himself or loses his train of thought, because what is being related is expressed with the force of inner suffering. It’s good that the interviewer doesn’t then intervene to assert his authority or force through his opinion. But perhaps I should elaborate a little on my earlier question. Both of us—you as a sociologist and myself as a writer—are children of the Enlightenment, a tradition which today, at least in Germany and France, is being called into question, as if the process of the European Enlightenment had failed or been cut short, as if we could now continue without it. I don’t agree. I see flaws, incomplete developments in the process of Enlightenment—for example, the reduction of reason to what is purely technically feasible. Many modes of its imagination which were present at the beginning—here I’m thinking of Montaigne—have been lost over the centuries, humour among them. Voltaire’s Candide or Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, for example, are books in which the circumstances of the time are also appalling, and yet the human ability to present a comic and, in this sense, victorious figure, even through pain and failure, perseveres. I believe that among the signs of a derailing of the Enlightenment is that it has forgotten how to laugh, to laugh in spite of pain. The triumphant laughter of the defeated has been lost in the process.

Grass: Dinosaurs . . .

Grass: I wasn’t saying that we live in merry times. The infernal laughter that literature can prompt is another way of protesting against the conditions in which we live. You spoke of a conservative revolution; what’s being sold today as neoliberalism is simply a return to the methods of nineteenth-century Manchester liberalism, in the belief that history can be rewound. In the fifties, sixties, and even in the seventies, a relatively successful attempt to civilize capitalism was made across Europe. If one assumes that socialism and capitalism are both ingenious, wayward children of the Enlightenment, they can be regarded as having imposed certain checks on each other. Even capitalism was obliged to accept and take care of certain responsibilities. In Germany this was called the social market economy, and even among Christian Democrats there was an understanding that the conditions of the Weimar Republic should never be allowed to return. This consensus broke down in the early eighties. And since the collapse of the Communist hierarchies, capitalism—recast as neoliberalism—has felt it could run riot, as if out of control. There is no longer a counterweight to it. Today even the few remaining responsible capitalists are raising a warning finger, as they watch their instruments slip from their grasp, and see neoliberalism repeating the mistakes of Communism—issuing articles of faith that deny there is any alternative to the free market and claiming infallibility. Catholics proceed in the same way with some of their dogmas, just as the bureaucrats of the Central Committees did earlier.

Grass: A capitulation to the economy is taking place.

Grass: Maybe this is also due to the fact that socialistic or social-democratic parties have themselves in part believed the thesis that the demise of Communism means socialism has vanished too. They have lost their faith in the European labour movements, which have existed for far longer than Communism. Parting with one’s own tradition is a form of surrender, that leads to accommodation with such self-announced laws of nature as neoliberalism. You mentioned the strikes of 1995 in France. In Germany there were minor attempts to organize the workers, which were subsequently forgotten. For years I’ve tried to tell the unions: you can’t only attend to the workers while they’re working; as soon as they lose their jobs they fall into a bottomless pit. You must set up a Europe-wide union for the unemployed. We complain that European unification is taking place only on the economic plane, but what’s lacking is an attempt on the part of the unions to break out of the national framework into a form of organization and mobilization that would transcend frontiers. The slogan of globalization lacks the needed riposte. We remain confined to the national sphere, and even in the case of countries bordering each other such as France and Germany, we are not in a position to take up successful French experiments, nor can we find equivalents in Germany and elsewhere, with which to make a stand against global neoliberalism.

In the meantime many intellectuals swallow everything. But all you get from such swallowing is indigestion, nothing more. You have to speak out. This is why I doubt one can rely on intellectuals alone. While in France people still talk constantly of ‘intellectuals’—at least, this is how it seems to me—my German experience tells me that it would be a mistake automatically to link being an intellectual with being on the Left. The history of the twentieth century offers several counterexamples: Goebbels was an intellectual. For me, being an intellectual is no guarantee of quality. I can only offer guesses as to the situation in France, but in Germany, there are people who in 1968 believed themselves far to the left of me, and who I now have to wrench my head to the right even to see—to the radical right, to be precise; Bernd Rabehl, a former student leader, moves in those kind of circles now. That’s yet another reason to treat the term ‘intellectual’ critically. In fact, The Weight of the World demonstrates that working people who have been unionized their whole lives have far greater experience in the social sphere than intellectuals. Today, they’re either unemployed or retired; no one seems to need them any more. Their strength remains entirely unused.

Grass: At the same time, however, you would have to appeal to intellectuals sympathetic to neoliberalism. I’ve noticed that there are one or two within this capitalist-neoliberal sphere who, either on account of their intellectual disposition or their training in the Enlightenment tradition, are beginning to doubt a little whether the untrammelled circulation of money around the globe, this madness that has broken out within neoliberalism, should go unopposed: for example, mergers without sense or purpose that result in two or three, or ten thousand people losing their jobs. Stock markets reflect only maximization of profits. We need a dialogue with these doubters.

Grass: My understanding of narrative fiction was always—or to be accurate, from The Tin Drum onwards—that it should tell a story from the point of view of people who do not make history, but to whom history happens: victims or culprits, opportunists, fellow-travellers, those who are hunted. This I derived from the German literary tradition—after all, what would we have known about daily life during the Thirty Years’ War if it had not been for Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus? I am sure there are comparable cases for France. If we rely only on the documents of historians, we certainly learn a great deal about the victors; but the story of the losers is as a rule written inadequately, if at all. Literature functions here as a kind of stopgap, stepping in when necessary to give people without a voice the chance to speak. This is also the starting point for your book.

But you were referring to television, which—like all grand institutions—has developed its own superstitions: ratings, whose dictates must be obeyed. That’s why conversations like this one are seldom if ever shown on the major channels, but rather appear on ARTE. Even this discussion was turned down at first by Norddeutscher Rundfunk, before Radio Bremen—sly, as the small tend to be: this is the comic aspect of such affairs—slipped in, and brought us together round a table in my studio.

The panel discussions of the fifties and sixties have given way to the talk-show. I never take part in talk-shows—the form is hopeless, it yields nothing. Amidst all the blathering, the person who wins out is the one who talks longest or most completely ignores the others. As a rule, nothing of note is said because the moment anything becomes interesting, or issues come to a head, the anchor changes the subject. Both of us come from a tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages, of disputation. Two people, two different opinions, two sets of experiences that complement each other. Then, if we really make an effort, something can come of it. Perhaps we could make a recommendation to this Moloch, television: to return to the proven form of critical dialogue on a particular theme, as in a disputation.

Grass: We should avoid falling into a posture of complaint, however. We have always been in the minority, and what is astounding when you look at the course of history is how great an effect a minority can have. Of course, it has had to develop certain tactics, particular ruses, to make itself heard. I see myself, for example, forced as a citizen to break a fundamental rule of literature: ‘don’t repeat yourself!’ In politics you have to repeat and repeat, like a parrot, ideas you know to be correct and proven as such, which is exhausting—you constantly hear the echo of your own voice, and end up sounding like a parrot even to yourself. But this is evidently part of the job, if one is to find any listeners at all in a world so full of different voices.

Grass: But still as a minority.

Grass: Well yes, the room for manœuvre is limited. Something else now occurs to me which I find surprising: I never thought the day would come when I would have to demand a greater role for the State. In Germany we always had too much state, that stood above all for order. There were good reasons to bring the influence of the State under more democratic control. But now we find ourselves swinging to the other extreme. Neoliberalism has adopted the deepest aspiration of anarchism—naturally without the slightest ideological resemblance to it—namely, to do away with the State altogether. Its message is: away with it, we’ll take over from here. In France or in Germany, if a necessary reform is to be carried out at all—and I’m speaking of reforms rather than revolutionary measures—nothing can happen until private industry’s demand for lower taxes is met, and the economy approves. This is a disempowerment of the State of which anarchists could only dream, and yet it is taking place—and so I find myself, as probably do you, in the curious position of trying to ensure that the State once again assumes responsibility, regulates society once more.

Grass: Just to make sure we don’t misunderstand each other: neoliberalism, naturally, only wants to do away with those activities of the State that impinge on the economy. The State ought to muster the police, to enforce public order—these are not the business of neoliberalism. But if the State is deprived of its power to regulate the social sphere, and of responsibility for those—not only the disabled, children or the elderly—who are excluded from the process of production or not yet involved in it, if a form of economy spreads that can escape any sort of accountability by flight forward into globalization, then society must intervene to restore welfare and social provision via the State. Irresponsibility is the organizing principle of the neoliberal vision.

Grass: The fascination with Jünger and Heidegger among French intellectuals is an example of the kind of thing that amuses me, since it turns all the clichés France and Germany nourish about each other upside down. That the foggy thinking which had such fateful consequences in Germany should be so admired in France, is a rich absurdity.

Grass: I’d like to return to the story about Liebknecht. In the family of the story it was traditional for the son to be taken along. This was already the case in the years of Wilhelm Liebknecht, and continued in Karl Liebknecht’s time: the son would sit on the father’s shoulders listening to a mass orator. What mattered to me was that, on the one hand, Liebknecht was arousing youth for a progressive movement, in the name of socialism—and at the same time the father, in his enthusiasm, doesn’t notice that the boy wants to get down from his shoulders. When the son pees on his neck, the father beats him, even while Liebknecht is still speaking. The authoritarian behaviour of this socialist father towards his son leads the latter to enlist when the First World War breaks out—and thus ends up doing exactly what Liebknecht warned against. This is not a twist I make explicitly, but rather one that becomes clear as the story unfolds—and which occurred to me during the process of writing the story.

To return to the esteem in which Jünger and Heidegger are evidently held in France: perhaps it would be more useful for French intellectuals to take note of thinkers of the German Enlightenment. If you had Diderot and Voltaire, we had Lessing and Lichtenberg, who was incidentally very witty, and whose boutades should appeal more to the French than anything in Jünger.

Grass: In My Century I portray a professor who, during his Wednesday seminars thirty years later, reflects on how he responded to events during 1966–68 as a student. Back then he came out of a philosophy of the sublime along Heideggerian lines, and this is where he ends up again. But in between, he’s given to surges of radicalism and becomes one of those who publicly expose and attack Adorno. This is a very typical biography for this period, for which 1968 is now a shorthand.

I was in the middle all of these events. The student protests were justified and necessary, and have achieved more than the spokespeople of the pseudo-revolution of 1968 would have liked to admit. The revolution did not take place, there was no basis for it, but society did change. In From the Diary of a Snail, I describe how I was jeered when I said that progress is a snail. It is of course possible verbally to make a great leap forward—they were more or less Maoists—but the phase you have leapt over, namely the society lying underneath you, is in no hurry to catch up. You make the leap over society and are then surprised when its conditions strike back, and call it counter-revolution—in the inveterate lexicon of a Communism that even then was teetering. There was little understanding of all this.

Grass: Usually it was sons from well-off families that projected onto society conflicts with their fathers which they had never been able, or never dared to play out, because then the money would run out.

Grass: In Germany and Scandinavia, during the seventies there was a growing awareness that if the economy were allowed to continue exploiting natural resources as it was doing, the environment would eventually be destroyed; the ecological movement came into being. But socialist and social-democratic parties concentrated, as before, solely on traditional social questions and bypassed ecology altogether, or else viewed it as antagonistic to their demands. Left trade unionists, who were otherwise progressive in every respect, believed jobs were at risk as soon as ecological issues were raised—an outlook that persists to this day. If we expect the Right, the neoliberal side to use their intellect and come to their senses, then the same should apply to the Left. It must be understood that ecological issues cannot be separated from issues of work and employment, and that all decisions have to be environmentally sustainable.

Grass: In our country, Schroeder’s wing of the SPD see themselves as modernizers, dismissing everyone else as traditionalists—which is, of course, crazily reductive. Neoliberals can only gloat when they see social democrats and socialists in Germany and other countries running aground on such meaningless definitions.

Grass: So far as the Nobel Prize goes: I managed to live quite well without it, and I hope I’ll be able to live with it. Some said ‘Finally!, others ‘Too late’, but I’m very glad it reached me at an advanced age, well beyond seventy. If a younger writer, let’s say around thirty-five, were to get the Nobel, I imagine it would be quite a burden, because expectations would then be so high. Today I can relate to it ironically and nonetheless be happy about it. But that exhausts the theme as far as I’m concerned.

I believe we should be making offers that cannot be easily ignored. Large television companies are also at a loss in their misguided cult of ratings. We should help a bit to put them in the right direction. The same is naturally true of the relationship between Germany and France, who have fought and spilled each other’s blood almost to the last drop, whose wounds from world wars and wars going back to the nineteenth century can still be seen, and who have made all sorts of rhetorical attempts at reconciliation. There one suddenly realizes that it is not just the language barrier that divides us, but other dimensions that are less acknowledged. I have already referred to one of them: the fact that we are not even in a position to recognize the shared European process of the Enlightenment. Matters were different before nation-states became so dominant. The French took notice of what happened in Germany, and vice versa; Goethe translated Diderot, for instance, and there was a degree of communication between groups in the two countries, both minorities struggling to spread Enlightenment, against their respective censorships.

It’s time to re-establish these connexions. All we have to hand are the ideas bequeathed to us by the European Enlightenment—and by the failure of its subsequent developments. There is no alternative but to reform the Enlightenment with the methods of the Enlightenment, revising it wherever that proves necessary. Although we are right to decry neoliberal dominance and the areas of its irresponsibility, we should also consider what we have got wrong in the process of European Enlightenment. As I have already said, capitalism in its late form and socialism in its rudimentary form are both children of the Enlightenment, and somehow they need to come together at a single table again.

Grass: What you are proposing is a utopia. It would amount to a fundamental reform of the union movement, and we know how difficult it is to shift that apparatus.

Grass: I view this more sceptically. We are both now at an age where we can promise to go on speaking out as long as our health permits, but this is a limited amount of time. I don’t know what the situation is like in France—I assume not much better—but among the younger generation of German writers I see little inclination or interest in continuing the Enlightenment tradition of speaking out, of getting involved. If there is no-one to relieve us, in the best sense of that word, then this part of a good European tradition will be lost.