http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,druck-825818,00.html
GUNTER, ANOTHER BASTARD WHO IS A NOBEL PRIZE WINNER… THIS FROM THE NYTIMES:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/gunter_grass/index.html
“…. since the 1960’s he had come to represent the conscience of a country with much to lament. But in 2006 the author stunned Germany and the world by confessing that he had a buried past. In his autobiography ‘‘Peeling the Onion,’’ he revealed that he had been drafted into the Waffen SS in the final months of World War II. It was an admission for which he was widely condemned because he had kept his Nazi service a secret for more than 60 years while urging other Germans to confront their painful histories.”
Never in the history of postwar Germany has a prominent intellectual attacked Israel in such a cliche-laden way as Günter Grass with his controversial new poem, “What Must Be Said.” The Nobel Prize laureate has delivered a lyrical first strike against Israel.
“What Must Be Said” is the title that Günter Grass chose for his poem. It begins with the words: “Why have I been silent, kept quiet for too long, about what is obvious.” The poem, which was published in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday and which has already provoked considerable outrage, deals with Grass’s silence on Israel and the threat of military conflict between Israel and Iran. It’s also about Germany supplying weapons to Israel, and about the relationship between Germans and Israelis. It’s about a subject, where the title alone, “What Must Be Said”, implies an unpleasant flippancy: the flippancy of breaking taboos.
