Read online at www.archive.org
Headbirths or the Germans Are Dying Out describes a young couple’s agonizing over whether to have a child in the face of a population explosion and the threat of nuclear war.
They are visiting Shanghai, immersed in a jungle of bicycle riders, when "[we] were suddenly hit by an idea, a speculative reversal: what if, from this day on, the world had to face up to the existence of nine hundred fifty million Germans [which was China's population at that time], whereas the Chinese nation numbered barely eighty million, that is, the present population of the two Germanys ...
... In the midst of the cycling multitudes we were seized with terror. Is such a thought possible? Is such a thought permissible? Is such a world conceivable, a world inhabited by nine hundred fifty million Germans, who, even if the rate of increase is kept down to a bare 1.2 percent, will nevertheless multiply to something over one billion two hundred million Germans by the year 2000? Could the world bear it?"
While Grass's ironic and witty little book - it's a mere 136 pages - mainly explores the German mindset regarding culture, progress, national and global politics, birth rates, literature, and much more, the question it posed as to whether a world with over one billion two hundred million Germans in it would be conceivable, has since been answered by the Chinese who numbered 1.4 billion in 2020 and have begun to throw their weight around almost as much as an unreformed Germany once did.
Watch this ABC FOUR CORNERS documentary
Headbirths was written in late 1979, shortly after Günter Grass returned from a trip to China, and translated into English by Ralph Manheim, the same who had also translated "Mein Kampf" in 1943.
