Živé sochy

Günter Grass (1927–2015), a German writer, sculptor, and visual artist, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1999), wrote *Living Statues* in August 2003. The fragment was discovered among Grass’s papers by his longtime collaborator Hilke Ohsoling, and the previously unknown text was published by Steidl in 2022; it is therefore not included in the 2020 comprehensive edition of Grass’s complete works, the Neue Göttinger Ausgabe. The story begins with a guided tour of the statues in Naumburg Cathedral, where the legendary Margravine Uta in particular fascinates the narrator so much that he begins to imagine the characters and events of her era—and not only that, this Uta eventually merges into his present-day experiences as well. When he witnesses a modern tourist attraction in which young people dressed as historical or biblical figures stand motionless like statues in public places, the features and fate of “his” Uta begin to be projected—as in a cinematic double exposure—onto one “living statue,” dressed precisely as the medieval Uta. He later meets the young woman who portrayed Uta in front of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and learns quite a bit about her real life...

The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.