A German poem that caused global turmoil
“During his long literary career, Günter Grass has been many things. Author, playwright, sculptor and, unquestionably, Germany’s most famous living writer. There is the 1999 Nobel prize and Grass’s broader postwar role as the country’s moral conscience – albeit a claim badly undermined in 2006 when it emerged that the teenage Grass had served in the Waffen SS. But at the ripe old age of 84, Grass has triggered a furious row with a poem criticising Israel.”
Article and English translation of the poem (c) THE GUARDIAN, 2012
Photo: Graeme Robertson
Original version of the poem (in German) (c) SZ, 2012
delirium clemens 
7 April 2012 at 20:03
Grass’s poem is only a poem in as much as it has poetic line breaks. It lacks rhythm and rime. It also isn’t any good as Agit prop. He might have been better of writing an op-ed, he would have the opportunity to be more differentiated and less parochial. During one of the many interviews he has given since the poem blew up, Grass has mentioned that he ought to have specifically mentioned the current Israeli Netanjahu government which is the one that is pleading for a first strike. The German reaction to the poem is nearly universally negative, but never substantively addresses Grass’s main point. He is accused of anti-Semitism, his having been drafted into the SS toward the end of the war, his not having fessed up to it until much later in life are held against him. One grave matter keeps re-appearing: the mistranslation of Aminijad’s comment about the State of Israel. In Persian, so friends tell me, it is in the passive voice and means as much as “the State of Israel will disappear”, there is not threat. Israelis are understandably hysterical, they have a demagogue for a leader. The Israel lobby in the US are the Neo-Cons who would wish nothing more than an attack on Iran, Israel has been a three billion dollar a year US aircraft carrier int the Middle East for many decades. If it takes a lousy poem by G. Grass for a discussion to ensue in Germany with its unsettled conscience, so much the better.
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