Stone Mass

When Umberto Eco was asked which woman from the history of art he would like to have dinner with, he named Uta von Naumburg. The narrator of this story, Nobel laureate Günter Grass, feels the same way. During a writer's tour in East Germany in the late 1980s, he finds her, the most beautiful woman of the Middle Ages, along with eleven other donor figures in the Naumburg Cathedral. And since anything is possible on paper, he invites all those after whom the artist created realistic sculptures in the 13th century to dinner in his garden. He is particularly fond of the girl who was the model for Uta. In a bold leap through time, she appears before him in the squares of Cologne, Milan, or Frankfurt. The narrator falls in love with her so deeply that he follows her everywhere and eventually even allows himself to be used for a rather risky task. This story, originally conceived as a chapter for the book "The Onion of Memory," was recently discovered in the archive by Grass's longtime collaborator Hilke Ossolinski, but mentions of these figures had been made earlier: on separate pages of manuscripts in Grass's archive, in working plans, in a group of sculptures in the studio, in lithographs. Now, after the author's death, this novella, illustrated with the author's graphics, has come to light.