Günter Grass is wrong - stanza seven

A further comment on Günther Grass’ poem “What has to be said” – in German “Was gesagt werden muss.”

Here is a rough translation of the seventh stanza of Grass’ nine stanza poem. (The context is the sale of a U-boat to Israel).

Why do I admit only now,

having aged and with the last drop of ink:

that the atomic power of Israel endangers

the already fragile world peace?

Because what might be too late tomorrow

must be said now;

especially because we – as Germans already burdened enough –

could become the subcontractors of a crime,

which is foreseeable, so that our complicity

could not be wiped out

with the usual excuses.

            Günter Grass is 84 and has already taken stock of his life. One could imagine that he relaxed as he composed this poem; perhaps he remembered his youth. And suddenly he admits more than he intended. He foresees that Jews, now part of a powerful state – whose vulnerability he cannot embrace – could unleash another war. When he joined the SS toward the end of the war, his mentors repeated as much ad nauseam. Horrified Grass puts down his pen and asks. “What exactly am I admitting?” The poem was therefore never written.

            Alas, the actual turn that Grass has taken is not reflective. It is self-righteous. The hard work of examining his prejudice against Jews, Israel, and the Pope is not done. He does not consider the interests of Israel, for example, its terrible burden because neighboring states deny Israel's right to exist. Nor is he really concerned with other states in the Middle East. His concern is with himself and Germany's worst history. Where he foresees, he is a false prophet of an unknown dawn. He projects on others what in himself he should mourn. -- In short, Grass is wrong.

         The German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranitzki, aged 91, called Grass' poem repulsive. While Grass is not an Antisemite, so Reich-Ranitzki, he targets antisemitic tendencies in parts of the population. Given the biographies of former SS, however, and even though Grass belonged to the third and youngest generation of them, what worries me is that many never gave up the SS paradigm. Rather, like Himmler toward the end of his life, they too masqueraded as honest brokers with seemingly humanitarian motives to deliver human rights to Israel's neighbors and Muslims generally.[1]

---

[1] See Peter Longerich, 2008 Heinrich Himmler Biographie. München: Siedler Verlag, p. 768-769. There is an English translation.

Günter Grass Is Wrong

A brief comment on Günther Grass’ poem “What has to be said” – in German “Was gesagt werden muss.”

The most serious problem with Günter Grass’ poem is that he rhymed into it a self-defense – namely, that he had to say what he said even though he would be attacked for Antisemitism. He is now in the unenlightened position that he has held throughout his celebrated life, namely that of not knowing why he, and what he thinks, is wrong. And that is bad.

Here is a roughly translated second stanza of his nine stanza poem.

It is the asserted law of meting out the first blow –

which could eliminate the Iranian people

that is subjugated by a braggart

and steered to participate in organized jubilation –

just because within their sphere of influence

the building of an atomic bomb is suspected.

Given that this comes from Günter Grass or, for that matter from any German, what strikes you as being wrong here?



To my mind it is first and foremost the thought that Iranians are innocent of their government. It is an excuse that some Germans used now and again. Was not Hitler a braggart and was not the jubilation at the Nuremberg rallies steered and staged? Even if it was, and it was, does that make its people innocent and less of a threat to those that they defined unjustly and unjustifiably as their “enemy”?



And does not Grass know that the Nazi leadership cultivated Persians (renamed Iranians in 1935) and Arabs precisely because Nazi leaders recognized an affinity with Iranians and Arabs founded on Antisemitism? – Grass, so it is said is a mere story teller. And I, so I am told, am a mere anthropologist. But I know that in the fall of 1937 Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974), the Reich Youth Leader, convinced of the power derived from the fusion of religion and militancy, travelled to Teheran and Bagdad specifically to discuss the national Arabic Youth Movement known as “el-Futuwwa.” And as one might expect, at the next Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg September 1938 a delegation of that organization was welcomed by Hitler.



Given this history – and there is much more of it – and given President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli rhetoric and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, no writer who prided himself as having assumed the historical responsibility for his country’s killing of Jews, could compose that stanza. – Grass could because he lacks any sense of clear and consistent ethics – and has refused the struggle to at least attempt to develop it.

Knowing Science, Knowing Transcendence

It's all about knowing. This is one answer to the question on my silly comic posted earlier. What is sinking in after the confusion of events this past month is this: what medicine knows, it knows well. This recognition is one solid and comforting answer to the meaning question. There is much that science and medicine does not know --- but what medicine knows, and this becomes visible when its practitioners work competently, it knows well. -- Doing a silly comic was part of the process of taking in the unexpected. For the first time I had the experience of laughing and crying, quite literally, at the same time.

There seems to be a sequence to the reovery process: first elation, a sense of awe, then utter gratefulness, then the realization that something serious has happened, then a sense of the silliness of it all, making fun of the unexpected, then the realization that training people to become responsible, competent, and humane individuals capable of doing their job well is what makes our educational efforts and our society valuable. Peculiarly clear too is the fact that all this took place within transcendence -- what Christian theologians like C. S. Lewis or Joseph Ratzinger or the prodigal C .E. M. Joad call the passion of Christ, or Christ's Torah, or the Sermon on the Mount, or moments of transport.

Cancer - A Steep Learning Curve

 

March 19, 2012

 

Karla Poewe's Blog: Gauck speaks for my generation.

Karla Poewe's Blog: Gauck speaks for my generation.: The ZDF interview below with President Gauck, Germany, is in German. One thing I must translate. He was asked about the Holocaust. His answe...