Life & Wisdom Quote by Gunther Grass

Grass nails the modern paradox with a line that sounds like a diagnosis and an accusation at once: the world has been wired for disclosure, yet disclosure has curdled into numbness. The opening claim, "Information networks straddle the world", carries the triumphalist cadence of globalization-era tech talk, but he immediately flips it into menace. "Nothing remains concealed" is less a celebration of transparency than a warning about the end of privacy, secrecy, and even the productive silences societies need to think.

Then comes the sharper twist: "the sheer volume of information dissolves the information". Grass isn’t arguing that facts are false; he’s arguing that facts can be rendered socially useless. Overload becomes a solvent. When everything is available, nothing is metabolized. Attention, not truth, becomes the scarce resource, and power migrates to whoever can manage the flow - platforms, states, headline factories - rather than whoever can best justify a claim.

The final sentence, "We are unable to take it all in", widens the blame from institutions to the human sensorium itself. There’s a self-implication here: the reader is not just a victim of the torrent but complicit in the reflexes it trains - scrolling, sampling, reacting. Coming from Grass, a novelist steeped in postwar Germany’s battles over memory, guilt, and public narrative, the subtext stings: a society can drown in documentation and still fail at understanding. Total access doesn’t guarantee reckoning; it can be a way to avoid it.