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Monday, April 13, 2015 Gunter Grass and the Left's Red Flags Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren't covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge. The...

Günter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner whom many called his country’s moral conscience but who stunned Europe when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, died on Monday in the northern German city of Lübeck, which had been his home for decades. He was 87. His longtime publisher, Gerhard Steidl, told reporters that he learned late Sunday that Mr. Grass had been hospitalized after falling seriously ill very quickly. The cause of death was not announced.

Nobel prize-winning German author Günter Grass, declared persona non grata by Israel over a poem saying the country threatened world peace, has published another work, this time praising a man jailed for leaking Israeli nuclear secrets. In one of a collection of 87 new pieces, Grass hails whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison for leaking Israeli nuclear secrets to a British newspaper, in a poem entitled "A Hero in Our Time". He describes former nuclear technician Vanunu as a "hero" and a "role model", according to extracts published by the German news agency DPA. Earlier this year,...

Israeli poet Itamar Yaoz-Kest, a Holocaust survivor, has penned a public "letter-poem" in reply to the "poem" in which German Günter Grass accused Israel of "endangering the already fragile world peace." The letter-poem was published on journalist Ze'ev Galili's blog, in Hebrew, under the name: "The Right to Exist: a Poem-Letter to the German Author." It addresses Grass, who has admitted to being a member of the Waffen SS during World War II, by name. The "letter-poem" starts thus: Danger, I want to be a danger, I want to be a danger to the world, so that after my destruction,...

FReepers have helped me out in the past when I asked about the Frugivores (which I had begun to think only I had ever heard of). Now I'm hoping someone can satisfy my curiosity on a topic both fascinating and gross. Perhaps you remember the old half hour PBS Dick Cavett Show. This is the show where he would spend the time chatting with some intellectual cult figure (eg, Norman Mailer, Richard Gilman, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, etc.). Back in the old days of Carson and Letterman (when he was really funny) I used to stay up later than I...

....Fest's book, in its description of his family's difficult life in Berlin, also testifies to the absolute trivialization of the Nazi era (and demonization of America) present in blogs seeking to create a category of Good Americans, comparable in their submissiveness on Iraq to the so-called Good Germans who went along with Hitler. Superimpose this episode from "Ich Nicht," for example, against all those crushing terrors and pressures for political conformity in American suburban life in 2007: Fest's father, Johannes, is out of a job as a school principal because he will not sign a statement of allegiance to the...

Gunter Grass’s journey from the Nazi frontlines to the vanguard of anti-Americanism. In his voluminous political writings throughout the years, Gunter Grass always insisted that his role, as an artist and an intellectual of note, was to remind Germany of its profound national shame -- the Nazi era -- and “keep the wound open.” But earlier this month it emerged that for over sixty years the Nobel Prize-winning novelist had been concealing just such a wound from public view. Grass stirred worldwide controversy when he admitted that he had been a member of Hitler's notorious Waffen SS in the final...

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...

The hypocrite always wears a halo. He walks in the light of his own goodness, encircled by the clarity of illuminated virtue. His dark secret is hidden from sight so he can enjoy popular applause for his undiminished radiance. So it is with Nobel Prize-winner Gunter Grass, moralist-in-chief of German letters, controller of the German conscience. He demanded that all Germans "come clean" about their past as the only way to atonement. He was the advocate for remembering and taking full responsibility for personal actions. He beat a tin drum to death. So it was stunning news that now, at...

Op-Ed Contributor INDIGNATION, it seems, is the most gratifying of all emotions. Nothing is quite so soothing as the feeling of superiority over sinners who have committed offenses that we are sure to be innocent of and that allow us to purse our lips in disdain: another giant with feet of clay! I have been drawn to these sober reflections by the Günter Grass affair. So this scourge of hypocrites has shown himself a hypocrite, too! This breaker of German taboos had a taboo of his own! This teacher of generations of young Germans, who taught them to ask freely...

Dear Günter Grass, First: why an open letter? I have never written one before, whereas you have written dozens. You are, so to speak, Europe's leading man of open letters. I admit that the idea of turning the tables on you did appeal to me. But there is another, more personal reason for my decision to address you in this way. In a newspaper interview about your autobiography, "Peeling the Onion," you have admitted after 60 years, that you belonged to the Waffen SS. I want to make you aware of my feeling of betrayal — a feeling I believe...

Nobel laureate's memoirs sell out after SS confession By Lee Glendinning and agencies The publishers have brought forward the release date and German bookshops are struggling to keep up supplies. Such is the demand for Gunter Grass's autobiography, which has stunned Germany with revelations that the Nobel-prize winning novelist once served in Hitler's Waffen SS as a teenager. Grass, 78 - regarded by many as Germany's moral arbiter - recounted the secret shame that has weighed upon him for decades following his involvement in the elite military force, in a pre-publication interview with a German newspaper last weekend. His admissions...