Günter Grass’ Bombshell Poem “What Must be Said”

i got this print in germany while working on grass' novel The Flounder

Two months ago today the Nobel-Prize winner published a poem in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that elicited some thoughtful remarks:

Günter Grass is a NAZI. Günter Grass is an anti-Semite. Günter Grass is odious. Günter Grass has committed a mortal literary sin. Günter Grass has propagated blood libel. Günter Grass is persona non grata in Israel. 

Not since Heinrich Heine's "The Silesian Weavers" earned jail time for anyone caught with the poem on their person ("A curse on God, King, and Fatherland!") has a poem drawn such attention.

The poem has three basic threads of thought. The first is about why the poem’s persona has remained silent about a country he hesitates to name because of his own country’s guilt vis-à-vis that other country. The second is about the threat of nuclear weapons in the Mideast, about Israel’s nuclear capabilities and Iran’s potential nuclear capability, and about a threatened strike by Israel against Iran. The third is about the morality of supplying a German-built submarine to Israel.

First thread:

Why, however, was I silent until now?

Because I thought my ancestry,

afflicted by a never-to-be-overcome stain,

requires that this fact never be spoken as truth

about the land of Israel to which I am bound

and want to remain bound.

Second thread:

It is the asserted right to a first strike

that could eliminate the Iranian people

enslaved and made into organized celebrants

by a mouthy hero because in his realm an

atom bomb is supposed to be in construction.   

Third thread:

. . . my country . . .

is to deliver an additional submarine

to Israel, whose specialty

is to have the capability of directing annihilating warheads

to where the existence of a single atomic bomb is unproven,

though fear wants to provide the proof . . .

Why does the persona break the inhibitions of thread one to assert what he sees as the facts of thread two in order to hinder the business transaction of thread three?

Only thus can all find succor, the Israelis and Palestinians,

and beyond that, all people who live densely packed together 

as enemies in these 

regions occupied by insanity

and finally we too.

What will be the punishment for doing so?

. . . the verdict “anti-Semitism” is understood.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung! This eight-syllable word with its hanging and rising consonants (four g’s! htblt!), this single word that might translate as an overcoming of or a coming to terms with the past, raises a powerful question: how might the German language be remade as a tool of reason and peace and humanity after having been a blunt perpetrator of Nazi ideology? The answers are legion and their names are Günter Eich, Ilse Aichinger, Heinrich Böll (Nobel Prize), Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass (Nobel Prize), Peter Handke, and so on. 

Grass once argued that “Adorno’s claim that after Auschwitz no more poems could be written has provoked so many misunderstandings that the following interpretation ought to be appended, at least tentatively: poems that have been written after Auschwitz will have to submit to being measured by Auschwitz.”

Measuring his own silence and then his own desire to speak by that standard, Grass’ persona says what he thinks must be said. He says it carefully, almost torturously, bending and twisting his sentences and lines to say it with strong nuance.

He says it in the context of six decades of literary work that includes The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, Local Anesthetic, The Flounder, and other works that investigate ideologies and mythologies and lies perpetrated by the German language (and by extension by all languages and even by himself: "I am skeptical even of my own skepticism"). My analysis of some of these can be found HERE and HERE.

And now, because he has dared to utter the word "Israel," he is suddenly and certainly a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a persona non grata.

The furor is telling, indicative of a coercive herd mentality, of "accepted ideas" a la Flaubert, of a level of intelligent public discourse that has gone extinct.

In 1996 Peter Handke ran into a similar buzz saw when he published, also in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, his long essay A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (the English version, in my translation, Viking, 1997). Like Grass, Handke was concerned about the use of language, of rhetoric, of silence. Like Grass, Handke was branded an unregenerate and dangerous enemy of democracy. While Grass’s sin is anti-Semitism, Handke’s was being a Serbenfreund, a friend of the Serbs. Like Grass, Handke was accused of saying what any reader of his text knew that he hadn’t said. In The New Republic, for instance, the German writer Peter Schneider, like many others elsewhere, accused Handke of denying the massacre at Srebrenica. Because he couldn’t or wouldn’t read, Schneider ignored explicit passages of the text: “’What, are you trying to help minimize the Serbian crimes in Bosnia, in the Krajina, in Slavonia, by means of a media critique that sidesteps the basic facts? . . . You aren’t going to question the massacre at Srebrenica too, are you?’ ‘No,’ I said.”

How does one argue the merits of a text, of an argument in words, with zealots who don’t care what the text says? How does one argue with zealots who demand that there be no argument? How does one break silence when silence is demanded?

For my fairly literal translation of the poem as well as Michael Roloff’s comprehensive (and amazing) collection of links to responses to the poem (and to a second poem Grass published about Germany's relationship to the Greek financial meltdown), see the hundreds of comments to this earlier post. 


Michael Roloff has a most thoughtful summary discussion of the controversy HERE (scroll down just a bit to find the colorful essay).