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The Existentialist Legacy: Sisyphean Struggles in Albert Camus’ La Peste and Günter Grass’s Die Rättin

In the course of his career, Günter Grass repeatedly invoked the works of Albert Camus, above all the 1942 essay “Le Mythe de Sisyphe” (“Der Mythos von Sisyphos”). This article examines Camus’ influence on Grass, arguing that Grass validates his own political and literary efforts, beginning in Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972), as part of a productive Sisyphean struggle. Yet the legacy of Sisyphus in Kopfgeburten (1980) and Die Rättin (1986) shifts, increasingly being framed as a persistent humanistic effort to oppose consumerism, nuclear armament, and environmental destruction. Comparing Camus’ novel La Peste (1947) with Die Rättin, the article underscores the evolving views in Europe on politics and writing, biology and mortality, as well as technology and the environment. Whereas Camus is concerned with existential suffering in an absurd universe and imagines a heroic savior-protagonist, Grass addresses more specific political concerns, blaming humanity — including the ineffectual narrator of Die Rättin — for endangering life on the planet.