Günter Grass in 2006

The Death of Grass is the title of a 1956 apocalyptic novel by English writer Samuel Youd, under the name John Christopher. [In the US it was published as No Blade of Grass.] The premise is massive famine in the Far East due to a new strain of rice virus. The virus mutates quickly, affecting the staple crops of Asia and Europe such as wheat and barley – and all other types of grasses – threatening to engulf the entire planet in famine.

But this present essay is about the death of another kind of grass. Nobel Prize winning (1999) author Günter Grass died today. He is perhaps best known for his novel, The Tin Drum, but that is only a small part of his output.

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) in 1927 and died in Lübeck, Germany after a literary and political life that was seldom far from controversy.

The Tin Drum is the first book in a series that came to be known as the Danzig Trilogy (the others were Katz und Maus, and Dog Years). All three deal with the rise of Naziism as seen through the prism of the unique Free City of Danzig and the Vistula River delta. While the writing in Tin Drum was exceptionally good (and won him the Nobel), interpreting the meaning is not so easy. Much like The Master and Margarita by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, many of the references are opaque or arcane – and best understood by readers who lived through similar experiences. In other words, you had to be there. Nevertheless, this was an important piece of literature and an even more important political investigation.

His other significant work was [translated as] My Century. Published in 1999, it was the author’s revisiting of the brutal historic events of the twentieth century. Mostly written in short vignettes, he spares no one from his criticism.

Controversy raised its head again in 2012. On April 4 that year, his poem “What Must Be Said” was published in several European newspapers [and can be found below]. The poem expressed the writer’s concern about German hypocrisy for its delivery of a submarine to Israel, one capable of launching nuclear warheads against Iran. He hoped to raise public awareness and to put pressure on both Israel and Iran to allow an international authority free and open access to inspect the nuclear capabilities of both countries. Israel’s response was to declare him persona non grata.

Then, on April 26, 2012, Grass wrote a poem – called “Europe’s Disgrace” – that criticized Europe for its treatment of Greece in the sovereign-debt crisis that is still ongoing. He accused Europe of condemning Greece to poverty, the country “whose mind conceived Europe”.

While there are certainly German political actors who will be happy to see him gone, Günter Grass served as the conscience of Germany though a time when the country (and much of Europe) has been devoid of any conscience of its own.

What Must Be Said

Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What clearly is and has been
Practiced in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.

It is the alleged right to first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people--
Enslaved by a loud-mouth
And guided to organized jubilation--
Because in their territory,
It is suspected, a bomb is being built.

Yet why do I forbid myself
To name that other country
In which, for years, even if secretly,
There has been a growing nuclear potential at hand
But beyond control, because no inspection is available?

The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force--the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of "anti-Semitism" is familiar.

Now, though, because in my country
Which from time to time has sought and confronted
Its very own crime
That is without compare
In turn on a purely commercial basis, if also
With nimble lips calling it a reparation, declares
A further U-boat should be delivered to Israel,
Whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence

Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,
But as a fear wishes to be conclusive,
I say what must be said.

Why though have I stayed silent until now?
Because I thought my origin,
Afflicted by a stain never to be expunged
Kept the state of Israel, to which I am bound

And wish to stay bound,
From accepting this fact as pronounced truth.

Why do I say only now,
Aged and with my last ink,
That the nuclear power of Israel endangers
The already fragile world peace?
Because it must be said
What even tomorrow may be too late to say;
Also because we--as Germans burdened enough--
Could be the suppliers to a crime
That is foreseeable, wherefore our complicity
Could not be redeemed through any of the usual excuses.

And granted: I am silent no longer
Because I am tired of the hypocrisy
Of the West; in addition to which it is to be hoped
That this will free many from silence,
That they may prompt the perpetrator of the recognized danger
To renounce violence and
Likewise insist
That an unhindered and permanent control
Of the Israeli nuclear potential
And the Iranian nuclear sites
Be authorized through an international agency
By the governments of both countries.

Only this way are all, the Israelis and Palestinians,
Even more, all people, that in this
Region occupied by mania
Live cheek by jowl among enemies,
And also us, to be helped.

- Günter Grass, 2012

Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com.
 
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