Grass’ powerful poem

Editorial

Günter Grass, perhaps Germany’s most noted contemporary writer and the 1999 Nobel laureate in literature, penned a poem this month that reminds us art can still have a global impact.

Perhaps “art” is an overstatement. While it probably sounded more melodic in the original German, Grass’ poem is really a political screed. In “What Must Be Said,” Grass depicts himself, the poet, as one of the only people in the world with the courage to stand up and speak out against Israel.

It is a psychosis shared by many with Grass’ political bent – to shriek so loudly about being silenced and to crow so proudly about their courage in standing up to the global Zionist onslaught that they can’t hear much of the world screeching with them. To them, their cause is so just and the offences so evil that nothing short of the most-shrill language is justifiable, and anything short of a unanimous worldwide cyclone of fury is silence.

The shrieking directed at Israel is so massively disproportionate and irrational in the context of world events that to observe this hysteria and hear nothing, as Grass does, verges on a form of social madness.

The narrative of victimhood in Grass’ poem is telling and familiar. The victims are, first and foremost, downtrodden heroes like himself who dare to speak. Almost secondarily, the victims are the Iranian people who, under Grass’ artistic licence, are under threat of extinction by a maniacal Israel. The inversion here is absolute, given that it has been Iran’s leaders who have repeatedly threatened to eradicate Israel and Israelis, not the other way around.

In assuredly the most unoriginal stanza of his recent masterwork, Grass raises that most familiar of red herrings, and succeeds in a perverse way to undermine his own message: “The verdict of ‘anti-Semitism’ is familiar.”

Of course, that’s it. Millions of people are being prevented from criticizing Israel because they fear being wrongly accused of antisemitism. Never mind that the accusation is false and, therefore, should not have the intended sting. Never mind that antisemitism exists only in the devious Jewish mind as an accusation intended to silence the justice-seeking people of the world, despite what the simplest Google search or switch of the TV channel reveals.

The incriminating evidence is the poem itself. It is a confession from a former Waffen-SS conscript that serves as almost a textbook personification of a German and European social psychology phenomenon in which Israel is condemned in terms that defy all reason. Depicting Israel as worse than the Nazis provides post facto justification or, at least, exoneration, for the deeds of earlier generations. Or, in Grass’ case, his own deeds during the Holocaust.

This psychological analysis may be simplistic and the evidence is admittedly circumstantial. However, when an old Nazi recasts himself as the hero of freedom while the freest country in the Middle East is recast as a Nazi regime, reasonable people should smell a contrast that is, well, poetic in its artistic perfection.

The history is not irrelevant. It is a part of Grass’ identity, just as the Germans with whom he grew up were also subject to propaganda that depicted the tiny population of Jews as a powerful threat, far beyond numerical possibility, seeking to destroy all things German. The theme of Jewish power seeking to destroy relies on ancient ideas of supernatural Jewish power and modern ideas of financial and political Jewish power. Only these sorts of ideas could allow a man like Grass – and millions like him – to believe he is a lone voice in the wilderness confronting the hegemonic silencing power of the Jews.

“What Must Be Said” is a magnificent poem in this respect only: it is a meta-narrative that reads like fact to those who subscribe to Grass’ ideology; to those with self-awareness and a critical historical eye, it is the surest proof that the poem, its author and those millions who laud its message are so massively misdirected by their moral compass that they exactly invert victim and perpetrator.

If people like Grass are in fact being subject to attempted silencing, perhaps the perpetrator is not us, but themselves, perhaps it is a tiny moral whisper in their own souls, crying like real heroes for them to be quiet.

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