EDITOR: The poem which has done its job…
Now, more thana week after Grass first published his poem, the issue still rocks Germany, and Israeli politicians and their media sidekicks are all aflame. What can they do to Grass? He is 80, and had all the fame he could want, so now he can afford to be disliked by Israel and the German yeah-sayers of Philo-Zionism. That he has only said what everyone knows fora long time, does not make it any better for him. The truth cannot be told.
Guenter Grass’s Israel poem stirs German debate: BBC
By Stephen Evans
BBC News, Berlin
To people outside Germany, a furore about a mere poem might be hard to understand.
In Britain or the United States, poets opine and some of the people may listen – and then usually they move on.
The chattering class might chatter a little louder, but the great sweep of politics is rarely changed.
But in Germany, artists are taken very seriously and few more than Guenter Grass.
It is not just his Nobel Prize, but the way his novels reflected Germany’s Nazi past with brutal clarity. They were like mirrors that revealed the true face to those brave enough to look at themselves.
That’s why the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize, citing his courage in “recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them”.
Searing honesty
In the years after the war, Guenter Grass’s writing gave him a status of Conscience of the Nation, and in a nation which takes its soul-searching very seriously indeed, particularly because the Holocaust and the other crimes of the Nazis provided so much material through which to search.
For more than 60 years after the war, he showed a zeal and what seemed like a searing honesty in the way he berated those who refused to admit their own dark pasts.
But this reputation was dented when it emerged in 2006 that he had kept quiet about his own past as a member of the Waffen-SS (a branch of the military under the direct control of the Nazi party).
Even then, he was not universally discredited. Some took this as evidence of the complexity of the psyche of the man (and by implication of the nation).
With this background, the poem “What Must be Said” was never going to be a passing work of whimsy, filling space on the arts pages but not troubling the rest of the newspaper.
It is a poem which concentrates on Israeli nuclear weapons as the prime danger in the Middle East.
Iran is mentioned (“subjugated by a loud-mouth”, as the poem says). But it is Israel which is the focus (“It is the alleged right to the first strike that could annihilate the Iranian people”).
And he criticises Germany for selling submarines to Israel which could be used in this “first strike”.
It is this one-sided concentration which has brought the fiercest criticism within Germany.
The chairman of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Ruprecht Polenz, said that Grass “has difficulties whenever he comments on politics and is often wrong”.
Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said: “Putting Israel and Iran on the same moral level is not ingenious but absurd”.
The truly biting criticism is that Guenter Grass is displaying a sophisticated anti-Semitism.
‘One-sidedness’
On this argument, his fault is not that he criticises Israeli government policy but that he criticises it especially hard without doing the same to others (like Iran).
This alleged one-sidedness amounts, according to Henryk Broder of Die Welt, to “educated anti-Semitism”.
The literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who survived the Holocaust, called the poem “disgusting”, adding, “Iran wants to wipe out Israel, and Guenter Grass is versifying the opposite”.
After the poem’s publication, Guenter Grass went on television and defended himself.
“I expected dissent,” he said “particularly because the fact that Israel is a nuclear power is still treated as a taboo”.
But: “I didn’t expect the reactions to be directed at my person rather than my arguments, and I didn’t expect them to be so insulting and venomous, culminating in the accusation of anti-Semitism. Such a massive condemnation, to be pilloried in such a way – that is something I have never experienced before”.
One of the accusations against the writer is that he cites Israel as the likely first striker in a nuclear conflict.
He replied to this: “Excuse me, if you attack a nuclear plant with conventional missiles you run the risk of a nuclear catastrophe”.
All this matters very much in Germany as it wrestles with its own past – and so it matters in the rest of the world too, because Germany is an economic giant which is finding its feet.
In 2008, Chancellor Merkel addressed the Israeli parliament and declared that the security of Israel was central to German foreign policy.
It has been a given in Germany that it would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel.
What Guenter Grass has done is to open up debate on that relationship.
Poems do matter, particularly this one, in Germany and in Israel.
Germany official: Israel’s reaction to Grass’ criticism ‘exaggerated’: Haaretz
German Health Minister criticizes Nobel laureate for his controversial poem, saying it was sad to see that someone experienced post-war Germany ‘remains marked by so much prejudice and stubbornness.’
A minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s German government has described as “exaggerated” an Israeli visa ban on Nobel Literature laureate Gunter Grass, a report said Monday.
“I cannot imagine that Mr. Grass has any interest in showing up in Israel after the explicit criticism he has faced in Germany,” said Daniel Bahr, the health minister, in an interview to appear Tuesday in the daily Die Welt.
The minister, who also criticized Grass, was apparently not speaking for the government. He is a senior member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a junior partner in Merkel’s cabinet. Die Welt issued a summary to other media in advance of publication.
Grass is persona non grata in Israel, Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced Sunday after Grass criticized the country in a poem.
Attacking Grass, Bahr said it was “sad to see that someone who has experienced all the controversies of post-war Germany remains marked by so much prejudice and stubbornness.” But he called the visa ban an “utterly exaggerated” response, Die Welt said.
Grass’ poem, “What must be said,” claimed Israel was preparing a first strike to “wipe out the Iranian people” as it attempts to derail Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The novelist, 84, is widely regarded as Germany’s greatest living writer.
Renate Kunast, co-leader of the opposition Green Party in parliament, criticized Grass for his refusal to recognize that Israel was threatened by Iran, but she also deplored Yishai’s move.
“It means everyone will end up discussing the ban instead of Grass’s views,” she told DPA.
Israel is deeply concerned about Tehran’s nuclear program, coupled with repeated vows by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
Speculation has been growing in recent months that Israel intends to launch a military strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities, to end, or at least retard significantly, Iran’s drive toward atomic weapons.
Grass has been furiously attacked in Germany over the poem. Early Saturday, someone daubed graffiti on a sculpture in the city of Gottingen commemorating free speech which Grass commissioned and donated. The red paint called on him to “shut your mouth.”
Interior Minister declares Gunter Grass persona non grata in Israel: Haaretz
Yishai condemns the German Nobel laureate for his controversial poem, published last week; Lieberman warns against how ‘small seeds of anti-Semitic hate can turn into a large fire that harms all of humanity.’
By Ophir Bar-Zohar and Barak Ravid
Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Sunday that German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass is a persona non grata in Israel, after Grass published a poem last week which was highly critical of Israel and its policies.
Yishai harshly condemned Grass’ poem, and said that he is declared a persona non grata in Israel for wearing SS uniform in the past.
“Grass’ poems are an attempt to guide the fire of hate toward the State of Israel and the Israeli people, and to advance the ideas of which he was a public partner in the past, when he wore the uniform of the SS,” Yishai said. “If Gunter wants to continue publicizing his distorted and false works, I suggest he do it in Iran, where he will find a supportive audience.”
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman also issued a harsh condemnation of Grass’ poem on Sunday, during a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti.
Lieberman said that Grass’ poem is the expression of “egoism of so-called Western intellectuals, who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people on the altar of crazy anti-Semites for a second time, just to sell a few more books or gain recognition.”
Lieberman called on European leaders to condemn statements that could possibly influence public opinion toward anti-Semitism. “We have witnessed in the past how small seeds of anti-Semitic hate can turn into a large fire that harms all of humanity,” said Lieberman.
In his poem, which was published in several European newspapers last week, the 85-year-old author claims that Israel’s nuclear reactor – and not Iran’s – presents a threat to world peace. Grass’ poem calls for Germany to cease supplying Israel with submarines, and warns against an Israeli strike on Iran.
Grass’ poem entitled “What must be said” drew strong criticism from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well. “His declarations are ignorant and shameful and every honest person in this world must condemn them,” Netanyahu said.
In an interview published in Germany on Saturday, Grass claimed that his poem was meant to target the current Israeli government, not the country as a whole. “It’s that which I criticize, a policy that keeps building settlements despite a UN resolution,” said Grass.
Israel has reacted with hysteria over Gunter Grass: Haaretz Editorial
German author Gunter Grass, a Nobel laureate for literature, did no more than write a poem. The State of Israel, through its interior minister, reacted with hysteria.
Author Gunter Grass sees the State of Israel as a threat to world peace. He believes Israel is armed with nuclear weapons, and is threatening Iran as the Islamic Republic looks to obtain a nuclear arsenal.
After the poem he published to this effect in the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung last week drew extensive criticism, he asked to distinguish between the state and its government. It’s not Israel that worries him, he said, but the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The reactions to Grass’ claims focused on the man, not on his positions. Naysayers recalled his past as a soldier for the Third Reich – a past he concealed until late in life. Interior Minister Eli Yishai hurried to declare Grass persona non grata. Should he land at Ben-Gurion International Airport and hand his passport to the immigration control officers, he will be hurriedly escorted by burly policemen to the first Lufthansa flight back to Frankfurt – or, even better, to Munich, as befits someone who once followed der Fuhrer’s orders.
The emotions can be understood, but it’s hard to accept the overreaction. When the interior minister says, “If Gunter Grass wants to continue to distribute his false and distorted works, I suggest he do so from Iran, where he’ll find an appreciative audience,” he doesn’t even detect the irony in his words. Because it’s precisely his decision not to let Grass enter Israel because of a poem he wrote that is characteristic of dark regimes like those in Iran or North Korea.
The combination of declarations against Israel and a past as a Nazi soldier is an explosive combination that invites sharp reactions. But while Benjamin Netanyahu’s remark describing Grass’ work as “ignorant and shameful declarations that any fair person in the world must condemn” can be accepted as part of the public debate, Yishai’s use of his governmental authority is not legitimate. Any protest should be expressed within the democratic-liberal framework, which allows every person to express his views – provocative though they may be.
Grass, a Nobel laureate for literature, did no more than write a poem. The State of Israel, through its interior minister, reacted with hysteria. It seems that at issue is less an undesirable person than an undesirable policy.