From Germany to Germany by Günter Grass Today, swamped by a faltering economy and floundering politicians, it is refreshing to remember the almost naive optimism that touched millions as the Cold War ended and Germany finally healed itself nearly quarter of a century ago. Now that we are gloomy, how uplifting to think of all those smiling faces, dancing and singing as the repressive East German regime crumbled. Wasn't that how it was? Not if you were Günter Grass, Germany's Nobel Prize-winning author, whose diary from shortly after the fall of the Wall in November 1989 to the aftermath of the first elections across the reunited Germany reveals a man tormented by the possibilities for catastrophe in reunification. This, of course, is the enormous benefit of contemporaneous accounts of our past - a past whose events are, as the sediment of time settles over them, fixed and fossilised as "history." So it is extraordinary to read of Grass's uncertainty that unification will even take place, when in retrospect one can imagine no other outcome. Then, as its inevitability becomes evident to him too, it is equally strange to read, in page after page, of his despondency about the whole process. Part of this is understandable. Grass cannot but interpret an outpouring of German rejoicing as an exhibition of German triumphalism. This he sees as a symptom of resurgent German nationalism, and hence to be regarded with the utmost suspicion, if not outright fear. "I have a powerful premonition of disaster," he writes. What is harder to appreciate for a reader in 2012 is his outraged conviction that West Germany is "annexing" East Germany just as Hitler had annexed territories half a century earlier. Grass notes with despair the eagerness of East Germans to come to the West, or their longing to get their hands on West German cars. These he regards as base capitalist urges. Grass is happy to confess to a gloomy nature, but it is his sanctimoniousness that makes him tiresome. Worse, the diary itself is so laden with references to figures obscure to the non-German specialist that constant reference is required to the cast list of characters at the end. To work, a diary should not require constant flicking to the endnotes; the entries should establish a comprehensible and enjoyable momentum of their own. Much more interesting than Grass the political voice of doom is Grass the creative writer, and it is this voice that salvages the book. For threaded throughout the entries are his musings and ruminations about a new novel - which would be published in 1992 as The Call of the Toad. Its themes of identity, mutable borders and the arrival of capitalism in Eastern Europe are necessarily shaped by the events the writer witnesses in his travels of 1990. From Germany to Germany contains delightful insights into the process of crafting a novel. In one memorable passage Grass describes The Call of the Toad as "my refuge during the breaks in the action. My bottled up longing to return to pacing without interruption in front of my desk, muttering to myself, chewing on sentences until they taste just right, whether my pipe is cold or warm. Seven months in, on August 1, he reveals that "there might just be time before the end of the year to get the first sentence [of The Call of the Toad] right." In the end he does better than that, getting down a draft of the novel's entire opening page. Not burdened by the author's fretful presence, this fictional passage is both relief and reminder, evidence that the most compelling and enduring evaluation of the complexities of reunification is likely to have come from the pen of Günter Grass the novelist, not Günter Grass the diarist. From Germany to Germany by Günter Grass, tr by Krishna Winston 272pp, Harvill, t £13.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £15.99)