who is Günter Grass, if anyone?
The question cannot be answered with any certainty. Grass has stated–and it appears to be true–that the book is not simply a roman à clef. And it inherits from Der Butt the fiction of reincarnation, of multiple simultaneous existences, which would in any case cloud and complicate any simple allegorical relationships. One of the poets, Georg Weckherlin, Milton’s predecessor at the English court, has, like Grass, been involved in political matters, in the advising of heads of state. But it is for the swashbuckling Christoff Gelnhausen (Grimmelshausen) that Grass seems to have reserved the most sympathy, though the narrator specifically denies an identity with him. He is the one who provides (stolen) goods to care for the poets’ welfare and who often enough cuts through with his native wit the entangled knots of their philosophical disputes. He later becomes the author of Simplicissimus which does for the Thirty-Years’ War what Grass’s Danzig novels do for World War Two. He is also the
