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A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren’t covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge.
The quote itself, like the latest Grassian screed, does not matter. Grass, like Gandhi and King, was one of the favorite go-to guys for the left’s sticky sheets of paper. When you want to write a suicide note, then you reach for a line from Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, but when you want to write a national or civilizational suicide note, there’s always Gunter Grass.
As a writer, Gunter Grass is a blacksmith, hammering together graceless and shapeless lumps that aren’t good for much except hitting people over the head. Take his latest masterpiece which has for a brief shining moment gotten people outside Germany and Sweden to mention his name in conversation. You don’t have to know German to recognize that, “Es ist das behauptete Recht auf den Erstschlag der das von einem Maulhelden unterjochte” is not exactly Die Lorelei. In a fitting irony the author of the Tin Drum has a tin ear.
Like Die Lorelei’s protagonist, Gunter Grass writes about being filled with unnameable emotions, but instead of seeing water nymphs combing their hair while ship captains ram their boats into the rocks, Grass is attempting to impress audiences with his bold struggle against Jewish accusations of bigotry to forewarn us about the threat of the Jewish state.
Netanyahu does not look much like a Rhine Maiden, but there is something about the Jewish state that drives European leftists to crash their ships against the rocks more reliably than any water nymph. No sooner does Israel buy a German submarine, than Gunter Grass leaves off staring at the Rhine Maidens to write a screed denouncing the Jews and their submarines.
Grass is a worse poet than Hitler was a painter and in an asymmetrical competition, the Fuhrer would have to edge out Gunter. But as writers they are both equally bad. “Was Gesagt Werden Muss” is a sort of compressed Mein Kampf, chronicling Gunter Grass’ own Kampf in a more concise form. It reeks of the same stylistic inadequacies, the stench of self-righteousness mingled with self-pity. Like Hitler’s postcard paintings, it is exactly the sort of tacky art that a Nazi would make.
