Posted on 08/23/2006 7:55:38 PM PDT by aculeus
For many of the postwar decades, Günter Grass was above all fortunate in his enemies. In West Germany, these enemies took two forms. The first was the large number of citizens who were queasy about the recent past, and the second was the smaller number of citizens who were not so queasy. To the first, Grass could address himself in a high moral tone, calling for an honest appraisal of history and for an accounting with the silence and complicity that had marked the era of National Socialism. This represented, among other things, a demand that parents be candid with their children. To the forces of the German right, on the other hand, or with those who did not take easily to the admission of guilt or shame, he could address himself more forcefully. I believe that it was when partisans of conservative Chancellor Konrad Adenauer referred to Socialist challenger Willy Brandt as "the Norwegian bastard" (because he was of illegitimate birth and because he had worn the Norwegian uniform while fighting against Hitler's soldiers) that Grass decided to become an active campaigner for the Social Democrats. I once heard a conservative writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine refer disdainfully to Grass himself as a man who looked as if he'd recently dismounted from a shaggy pony that had come from the Mongolian steppes. I felt myself obliged to defend him from this innuendo.
For all this, one was never able to suppress the slight feeling that the author of The Tin Drum was something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Oohh ... cat fight. Bookmarking.
LOL
bump for when I'm sober
BFWIS
"And suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945, and titling it (in the same lineage of his many books about dogs, rats, snails, fish, and other beasts) Crabwalk."
Crabwalk? Dang. That brought to my mind the eels in Tin Drum. /shivers
( No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo!)
Yes, but an amusing, stinking, drunken hypocrite.
Bump.
bump
"Let those who want to judge, pass judgment," Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.
What you said.
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