RUTHFULLY YOURS

As for Germany’s most famous living novelist, Günter Grass pretty well consorts with the paradigm, The Tin Drum having established him as a major literary and political voice of the twentieth century. Admittedly, subsequent books like Dog Years and The Flounder were notable achievements. But absent the beating of The Tin Drum, the callithumpian parade of Grass’ works in the public arena would have been far less spectacular. He cannot be dismissed as a one-shot Johnny, but his oeuvre arguably does not justify his inflated réclame. Indeed, for some time now, he has been living off the interest from the capital he invested in his heyday. Sadly, Grass lost it long ago.

This has not prevented him from generating considerable controversy with the publication in the German daily Süddeutschen Zeitung of an anti-Israeli poem titled What Must Be Said (Was gesagt werden muss). As Sebastian Hammelehle informs us in Der Spiegal Online, the German expression “what must be said” connotes the conversational cliché “There’s no law against saying that…”, which would appear to carry the same smarmy patina in our culture as “Some of my best friends are Jews.” Thus Grass does not hesitate to assert in the poem that Israel is a country “to which I am bound.” The lie is so palpable as to be embarrassing.

Similarly, Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, points out that Grass’ use of the word Überlebende (survivor) “to describe his situation and the plight of Germans in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran,” is disingenuous. “Traditionally, the word “survivor” is associated—in a German-language context—with Jewish survivors of the Shoah.” Schirrmacher believes that Grass, who in his youth was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, is engaged in a duplicitous attempt to “make peace with his own biography.”

It must be said that, whatever his motives and talents may be, Grass is obviously not a poet and What Must Be Said is demonstrably not a poem. The language of the piece is scarcely even workmanlike, fishtailing between the unctuously pulpiteering and the colorlessly prosaic. There is nothing about this dismal effort that says “I have to be a poem.” Had it been written as a short prose essay with a heavily propagandistic slant, there would have been no detectable difference. The thing has no literary merit whatsoever; to put it bluntly, it is an execrable piece of fustian.

The same must be said of the sentiment the “poem” expresses, which, as Hammelehle puts it, constitutes a “lyrical first strike” against the Jewish state. Except that there is nothing lyrical about a flat and pompous verbal eructation riddled with lies, false assumptions, evasions and catarrhal flecks of disinformation.

“It is suspected,” Grass writes, that “a bomb is being built” in Iran. Anyone who has observed the unfolding of events—the latest report of the IAEA, the tunneling of bomb-proof nuclear laboratories in a mountain near Qom, the inflammatory statements of Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatening the annihilation of Israel, the perfecting of solid-state long-range ballistic missiles, and the apocalyptic nature of Shi’a Twelver theology which advocates the unleashing of world conflict to hasten the return of the Hidden Mahdi—knows there is no question of suspicion. It is, rather, a near-absolute certainty.

When Grass opposes the sale to Israel of a German submarine “whose specialty consists of guiding all-destroying warheads to where the existence/Of a single atomic bomb is unproven,” he is indulging once again in a species of mendacity. The clear implication is that Israel is contemplating a nuclear first-strike against Iran, which is as far from the truth as the canard that the Holocaust never happened. Israel may be contemplating a pre-emptive conventional attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Israel’s nuclear arsenal is geared to second-strike retaliation. And regarding Grass’ contention that the existence of an Iranian atomic bomb is “unproven,” the circumstantial evidence that the mullahs are amassing a thermonuclear potential is overwhelming.

Further, when Grass argues that “the nuclear power of Israel endangers/The already fragile world peace,” he is so profoundly divorced from reality as to render him clinically non compos. It is the nuclear power of rogue states like North Korea and Pakistan that endangers world peace, pathological entities governed by unstable ruling councils in thrall to incendiary ideologies that threaten us all. And, barring intervention, they are soon to be joined by a radical Shi’ite state committed to nothing short of hegemonic violence.

Defaming Israel as a “perpetrator” of “recognized danger” and urging it to “renounce violence,” when such admonitions would properly apply to the Palestinians, Hezbollah and Iran, places Grass squarely in the camp of the lunatic Left—where, in fact, he has been malingering for much of his activist career. And when he affirms that he is no longer silent because he is “tired of the hypocrisy of the West,” he reveals himself as not only ignorant and self-infatuated, but as a prime example of the hypocrisy he denounces. For the brief that he mounts in his poem mirrors almost precisely the conduct of the West vis à vis the Jewish state. There is precious little sunlight between them.

One might feel sorry for Günter Grass were he not so dangerous, exploiting his reputation—even if it is based on one undoubted success—to foster a deception that encourages the enemy who schemes not only Israel’s, but our demise as well. It is no surprise that Iranian Deputy Culture Minister Javad Shamaqdiri has eulogized Grass’ poem as a “literary work of human and historical responsibility [that] warns beautifully.” What must be said is that Günter Grass is a pitiable specimen of bad faith and muddled thinking who sounds current, given that he parrots the Leftist line, but is actually superannuated. From the perspective of his actual writing, the Grass was greener in the far distant past; today, to quote a genuine poet, John Keats, it is withered sedge where “no birds sing.”

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