A brief comment on Günther Grass’ poem “What has to be said” – in German “Was gesagt werden muss.”
The most serious problem with Günter Grass’ poem is that he rhymed into it a self-defense – namely, that he had to say what he said even though he would be attacked for Antisemitism. He is now in the unenlightened position that he has held throughout his celebrated life, namely that of not knowing why he, and what he thinks, is wrong. And that is bad.
Here is a roughly translated second stanza of his nine stanza poem.
It is the asserted law of meting out the first blow –
which could eliminate the Iranian people
that is subjugated by a braggart
and steered to participate in organized jubilation –
just because within their sphere of influence
the building of an atomic bomb is suspected.
Given that this comes from Günter Grass or, for that matter from any German, what strikes you as being wrong here?
To my mind it is first and foremost the thought that Iranians are innocent of their government. It is an excuse that some Germans used now and again. Was not Hitler a braggart and was not the jubilation at the Nuremberg rallies steered and staged? Even if it was, and it was, does that make its people innocent and less of a threat to those that they defined unjustly and unjustifiably as their “enemy”?
And does not Grass know that the Nazi leadership cultivated Persians (renamed Iranians in 1935) and Arabs precisely because Nazi leaders recognized an affinity with Iranians and Arabs founded on Antisemitism? – Grass, so it is said is a mere story teller. And I, so I am told, am a mere anthropologist. But I know that in the fall of 1937 Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974), the Reich Youth Leader, convinced of the power derived from the fusion of religion and militancy, travelled to Teheran and Bagdad specifically to discuss the national Arabic Youth Movement known as “el-Futuwwa.” And as one might expect, at the next Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg September 1938 a delegation of that organization was welcomed by Hitler.
Given this history – and there is much more of it – and given President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli rhetoric and Iran’s nuclear ambitions, no writer who prided himself as having assumed the historical responsibility for his country’s killing of Jews, could compose that stanza. – Grass could because he lacks any sense of clear and consistent ethics – and has refused the struggle to at least attempt to develop it.
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