Günter Grass, Germany's most famous living author and the 1999 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, sparked outrage in Germany on Wednesday with the publication of a poem, "What must be said," in which he sharply criticizes Israel's policies on Iran.
"Why did I wait until now at this advanced age and with the last bit of ink to say: The nuclear power Israel is endangering a world peace that is already fragile?" Grass writes in the poem. The 84-year-old also criticizes the planned delivery of submarines "from my country" to Israel, a reference to Germany's plan to deliver Dolphin-class submarines to Israel that are capable of carrying nuclear-armed missiles. At the same time, Grass also expresses his solidarity with Israel.
In the poem, published by Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and other European dailies on Wednesday, Grass also calls for an "unhindered and permanent monitoring of Israel's nuclear potential and Iran's nuclear facility through an international entity that the government of both countries would approve." It is widely believed that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, although it has never been proven.
In response to the publication, the Israeli Embassy in Berlin issued a statement offering its own version of "What must be said." "What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder," the statements reads. "Earlier, it was Christian children whose blood the Jews allegedly used to make their unleavened bread, but today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state allegedly wants to annihilate. What also must be said is that Israel is the only state in the world whose right to exist is openly doubted. That was true on the day of its founding and it remains true today. We want to live in peace with our neighbors in the region. And we are not prepared to assume the role that Günter Grass is trying to assign to us as part of the German people's efforts to come to terms with the past."
'A Tendency Toward Megalomania'
Others have also reacted. The Central Council of Jews in Germany has called the poem an "aggressive pamphlet of agitation." Ruprecht Polenz, the chair of the German parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee and a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, told the daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung that, while Grass is a literary great, "he has difficulties whenever he comments on politics and is often wrong." Polenz's CDU colleague Philipp Missfelder said "the poem is tasteless, ahistorical and demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the situation in the Middle East."
Grass, however, has found support from the head of the German PEN chapter, Johano Strasser, who also warned against exporting German weapons to Israel on Wednesday in a radio interview.
The German newspaper Die Welt, which apparently got an advance copy of the poem, published a response on Wednesday by Henryk Broder, a journalist at the newspaper who is the country's most prominent Jewish writer. The Berlin-based polemicist, who himself is famous for his outspoken views, attacks Grass in an editorial. "Grass always had a problem with Jews, but it has never articulated it as clearly as he has in this 'poem'."
He writes that "Grass has always had a tendency toward megalomania, but this time he is completely nuts." He also criticizes Grass for claiming in a 2011 interview with Israeli journalist Tom Segev that 6 million German soldiers were "liquidated" by the Soviets after World War II. The figure is extremely controversial as it hints at a direct comparison with the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Grass, Broder writes, "is the prototype of the educated anti-Semite, who is well-meaning when it comes to Jews. Haunted by feelings of guilt and shame and also driven by the desire to settle history, he is now attempting to disarm the 'cause of the recognizable threat.'"
'The Same View as Ahmadinejad'
The last time Grass made headlines in earnest was back in 2006, when he revealed for the first time in his autobiography, "Peeling the Onion," that, as a 17-year-old near the end of World War II, he had served as a member of the Waffen-SS. The author came under intense criticism at the time. Many accused him of having concealed the fact that he had been a member of the SS for decades, even as he publicly criticized others for their Nazi pasts time and again. Some at the time alleged he had lost his authority as a moral figure.
Wednesday's poem is not the first time Grass has come out with critical views of Israel. In a 2001 interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, he offered his own solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Israel doesn't just need to clear out of the occupied areas," he said at the time. "The appropriation of Palestinian territory and its Israeli settlements are also a criminal activity. That not only needs to be stopped -- it also needs to be reversed. Otherwise there will be no peace."
Welt journalist Broder alleges the statement is "no less than a demand for Israel to not just cede Nablus and Hebron, but also Tel Aviv and Haifa." Just like Hamas and Hezbollah, Broder alleges, "Grass does not differentiate between the 'occupied areas' of 1948 and 1967." By calling the "appropriation" of Palestinian territories a "criminal act," Broder claims, Grass shares the same view as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,825712,00.html
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Entitled What Must Be Said and published on Wednesday in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the lyric warns of a looming Israeli aggression against Iran. It argues that Germany should no longer deliver nuclear submarines to Israel that might carry "all-destroying warheads".
Grass also takes aim at Germany's reluctance to offend Israel – reproaching himself for "my silence" on the subject, and acknowledging that he will inevitably face accusations of antisemitism.
He muses: "Why do I only speak out now/Aged and with my last drop of ink:/Israel's nuclear power is endangering/Our already fragile world peace?" He supplies his own apocalyptic answer: it must be said because "tomorrow might be too late".
Grass also calls for "unhindered and permanent monitoring of Israel's nuclear facility and Iran's nuclear facility through an international entity". Ultimately, he suggests, this would help everybody in this "delusional" region, including the Germans – or "us", as he puts it.
Hardly surprising, then, that Grass's controversial late lyric has provoked indignation. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, led the attack on Thursday, asserting: "Günter Grass's shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran ... says little about Israel and much about Mr Grass." Netanyahu described Iran as "a regime that denied the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel". He added: "It is Iran, not Israel, that is a threat to the peace and security of the world."
Netanyahu's attack then became more personal: "For six decades, Mr Grass hid the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen SS.
"So for him to cast the one and only Jewish state as the greatest threat to world peace and to oppose giving Israel the means to defend itself is perhaps not surprising."
The Israeli embassy in Berlin took the format of Grass's poem and flung it back at him: "What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder." It concluded that Grass's ill-judged broadside sprung from Germany's own guilty conscience – "part of the German people's efforts to come to terms with the past".
German politicians from both left and right have traditionally been supportive of Israel, for obvious historical reasons. Several have criticised Grass, describing his work as "abominable", "irritating" and "over the top". The bestselling Bild, a paper better known for its topless models, complained of "confused poesie". And writing in Die Welt, the Jewish writer Henryk Border dubbed Grass "the prototype of the educated antisemite". He added, for good measure, that Grass was "completely nuts".
All this forced Grass to offer his own pained reply. In an interview with North German Radio, the author complained on Thursday that the tone of the criticism "didn't just concentrate on the contents of the poem" but amounted to a scurrilous campaign to say that his reputation "had been damaged for all time". He added: "The old cliches are used. And to a certain extent they are damaging."
Some commentators, however, offered a more convincing critique: that Grass wasn't antisemitic, but simply didn't know what he was talking about. True, the Nobel prizewinner describes Iran's leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a "bigmouth", or "Maulheld". But otherwise, critics say, he offers a less than convincing analysis of the situation in the Middle East – failing to acknowledge, for example, Iran's regular threats to wipe Israel out. Instead Grass raises the unlikely spectre of Israel "annihilating" the Iranian people – using a German verb, auslöschen, which comes dangerously close to evoking the Holocaust.
"The poem is more interesting to Grassologists than to stragetic analysts," the Israeli historian Tom Segev, who has met and interviewed Grass, told the Guardian. Segev called the lyric "rather pathetic".
He said it was "idiotic" to describe the writer as an antisemite, but said Grass would be better served expending his last ink on a different creative project. "He's a great writer. He's 84. I hope he uses his last drops to write a good book." He added that the writer appeared to have "some inner psychological need to be accused wrongly", adding: "He's almost wishing people to say he's an antisemite."
The most interesting commentary, arguably, came from the Süddeutsche Zeiting, which published the poem – German title Was gesagt werden muss – in a supplement. Grass had been writing poems since 1955 but his late ones weren't really poems at all, Thomas Steinfeld observed, and instead resembled pleas, complaints, or angry letters to the editor. Of one lugubrious chunk he writes witheringly: "The only lyrical things here are the arbitary line breaks." Undoubtedly, the poem's portentous tone doesn't help the reader; an opinion page piece might have served Grass better.
Interestingly, Steinfeld suggests that the award of the Nobel prize for literature in 1999 may have contributed to Grass's latest political intervention. The prize transformed Grass from a national figure – "Germany's preceptor" – to an unashamedly global one – "a custodian of world politics". He argues that Grass is the only winner who feels the urge to comment on global affairs. Gabriel García Márquez has not become a literary-political representative of South America, he notes, nor has JM Coetzee become the voice of South Africa, or Derek Walcott that of the Caribbean. Nor has Grass, it might be added, written a poem on Greece, a crisis nearer to Germany's doorstep and wallet.
Grass last attracted this much attention back in 2006, when he revealed in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, that he had briefly served as a 17-year-old in the Waffen SS at the end of the second world war. The admission in itself wasn't remarkable: many other teenagers of his generation were forced to join the SS as the war entered its chaotic final phase. What irritated was the fact that Grass had taken so long to admit this – an inexplicable delay for someone who blamed others for their Nazi pasts and was seen to personify national atonement and self-criticism.
For some, this detail means that Grass forfeited the right to comment on the Jewish state. Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wisenthal Centre, described him as "totally compromised" and added: "The tin drum he is banging is not the one of moral conscience but of deep-seated prejudice against the Jewish people." This is one view.
In fact Grass's critical opinions on Israel have surfaced before. In an interview with Spiegel Online in 2001, he described the "appropriation" of Palestinian territory by Israeli settlers as a "criminal activity", adding: "That not only needs to be stopped – it also needs to be reversed."
It is certainly true that Germany's relationship with Israel is a problematic one, with the Holocaust taught in schools and the issue of historical guilt never far beneath the surface.
According to Constanze Stelzenmuller, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, it is hardly surprising that Germany has a moral obligation to the state of Israel, given the country's past. "The German government has been very clear about this," she said. Berlin has already supplied it with three Dolphin submarines, with two more being built, and a sixth in the pipeline.
But, Stelzenmuller says, Berlin has not been inhibited from criticising Israel, especially on the issue of Israeli settlements, last mentioned by Germany's defence minister two weeks ago. Of Grass, she said: "There's always been an anti-Zionist tendency in the European left, including in the German left. It isn't pretty. Many modern thinkers on the centre-left deplore this."
Amid the criticism, a few voices came forward to defend Grass – the author, after all, of The Tin Drum, the great German novel of the second world war and the rise of Nazism. "It's got to be possible to speak openly without being denounced as an enemy of Israel," said Klaus Staeck, the president of the Berlin academy of art. He called the "reflexive condemnation" of Grass as an antisemite inappropriate, and insisted that Grass was merely expressing his concern about developments in the Middle East. "A lot of people share this worry," Staeck added.
Predictably, Iran warmly welcomed Grass's poem. Press TV, Iran's state-owned English-language satellite channel, hailed it as a literary sensation. "Never before in Germany's postwar history has a prominent intellectual attacked Israel in such a courageous way," it said. "Metaphorically speaking, the poet has launched a deadly lyrical strike against Israel."
The Press TV report also observed: "Israel is the only possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and it has never allowed inspections of its nuclear facilities nor has it joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty based on its policy of nuclear ambiguity."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/05/gunter-grass-israel-poem-iran
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Гюнтер Грасс написал стихотворение, в котором раскритиковал политику Израиля, проводимую руководством страны в отношении Ирана. Стихотворение в среду опубликовано в немецкой газете Sueddeutsche Zeitung, а также в газетах New York Times, итальянской La Repubblica и испанской El Pais, и вызвало настоящий скандал в Германии. Критиковать евреев в Европе фактически запрещено, как бы справедлива эта критика не была, сообщает РИА Новости.
"Почему я говорю только сейчас, постаревший, последними чернилами: атомная держава Израиль ставит под угрозу и без того хрупкий мир во всем мире", – пишет Грасс в стихотворении под названием "Что должно быть сказано". Кроме этого, 84-летний писатель в тексте требует организовать "постоянный контроль" не только над иранскими ядерными объектами", но и над израильским ядерным потенциалом, и критикует запланированные поставки подводных лодок из Германии в Израиль.
"Я не могу больше молчать, потому что лицемерие Запада встало мне поперек горла, — признается Грасс. — Теперь можно надеяться, что от оков молчания освободятся и другие и призовут виновника видимой опасности отказаться от насилия". При этом в начале стихотворения автор знаменитый немецкий писатель пишет, что тот, кто об этом заговорит, подвергнет себя опасности, так как в Европа практически всегда по таким поводам выносится вердикт "антисемитизм".
Президент Центрального совета евреев Германии Дитер Грауманн мгновенно откликнулся на публикацию Грасса и подверг ее жесткой критике, назвав "агрессивным памфлетом", передают Вести.Ru. "Грасс выдающийся автор, но отнюдь не выдающийся специалист по Ближнему Востоку", — добавил он, отметив, что достойно сожаления такое стремление Грасса "демонизировать Израиль".
Как и предполагал сам Грасс, в европейских и еврейских СМИ тут же началась его травля. В опубликованном в газете Die Welt комментарии некий публицист Хенрик М. Бродер заявил, что "у Грасса всегда были проблемы с евреями", и, по его мнению, писатель является "прототипом образованного антисемита"...
http://rusk.ru/newsdata.php?idar=54179
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