SOURCE: Demetz, Peter. “Martin Walser: Analyzing Everyman.” In After the Fires: Recent Writing in the Germanies, Austria, and Switzerland, pp. 349-61. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Demetz provides an overview of Walser's life and career through the publication of The Swan Villa and discusses his overall contributions to German letters and culture.

There are many labels used in dealing with Martin Walser, who was once among the angry young men and is now approaching his early sixties. Critics speak about the radical, if occasionally loquacious, intellectual of the independent Left, the regional writer loyally attentive to the lives of simple people on the shores of his native Lake Constance, or the sharp-eyed analyst of the way in which industrial society deforms and paralyzes those drawn into competition for money and power. Other issues are perhaps less frequently considered, as for instance whether or not...