I missed remarking on the death of Günter Grass last week, death and taxes being just a little too much for me. As long as the Soviet Union existed, Grass was a welcome and intelligent voice, definitely “left” but never in the least willing to go along with the “Old Left” notion that the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equivalent evils, much less the Trotskyite notion that the blemishes on the phiz of the Soviet Union were the fault of capitalism itself, which obstinately refused to collapse, the way it was supposed to. Grass clung pretty proudly to his Enlightenment roots, seeing their abandonment by romantic Germans as the ugly root of fascism.
Sadly, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the ruin of Günter. As a balance wheel to the Soviets, America was necessary, but with the Soviets gone, that meant Capitalism Triumphant! America everywhere, and Europe nowhere! Like so many European intellectuals, he simply couldn’t imagine a world that wasn’t guided by Europe, and, ultimately, people like himself. The European literary imagination, to which he made no small contribution, was his universe. There was no way he could see outside it, no way to see how cramped, defensive, and reactionary that imagination has become.
Grass’s disgust with America’s triumph was so great that it drove him away from the Enlightenment, and he’s had plenty of company. To an unfortunate extent, European thinkers disdain science and economics. They fear the empirical. They want essence to precede existence, which is another way of saying that they want to know the answer before they ask the question. Because how else can you be sure that you’ll get the answer you want?
The icing on the cake, which surely nobody needed, proved to be the revelation that the passionate anti-fascist had been a member of the supremely fascist Waffen-SS, a Nazi’s Nazi. In 2012, he was so stupid as to write a grievously anti-Semitic poem, “What Must Be Said.” I wrote a post on that banality, which I’m reprinting below. Grass made a few decent points in his poem, but he made a couple of very bad ones as well, and the overall tone is deeply unattractive. When you’re a former member of the Waffen-SS, writing poems about Israel is almost always going to be a bad idea.
For Günter Grass, who, while attempting to shoulder the burden of history, falls frequently though not continuously on his broad German arsch
Back in high school—waaaay back in high school—I read Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Eighty-five percent of it surely went over my head, but the remaining 15 percent impressed me. A few years later, I essayed The Dog Years. I missed about 95 percent of that one, so I never made it to the end. But I never had any doubt that Günter Grass could write.
But, some fifty years later, it’s also clear that Günter can hold a grudge. After the collapse of communism, it quickly became clear that Günter and his fellow European leftists would and could never forgive the U.S. for being “right”—that verdammt capitalism worked, and their beloved socialism did not. Gottverdammt! Gottverdammt!
Yeah, it’s tough to lose. I know the feeling. But at some time you’ve got to move on, and the Euro-losers won’t. The latest unnecessary squeezing of Euro-leftist sour grapes is Günter ’s very unfortunately titled poem “What Must Be Said,” and it must be said that the title gives the whole thing away. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, anything titled “What Must Be Said” would far better be titled “What Should Not Be Said,” because what’s going to follow is a bilious outflow of bad taste and bad faith.
Günter, it must be said, does not disappoint. In the classic manner of a high-flown German, he gets all his facts wrong, because facts are not important. What is important is truth! He begins by charging that Israel is plotting the nuclear annihilation of some 70 million Iranians, a lie so stupid that no one heretofore has been stupid enough to allege it. He then says that he has kept silent about this “truth”—which is not a truth—because he is a German. He says “I am bound [to Israel]/ And wish to stay bound,” but he has a strange way of showing it—claiming that Israel wants to annihilate Iran, which is not true, and that Israel’s nuclear weaponry constitutes a threat to world peace, which is also not true.
Grass does make one good point—that if Iran must constantly submit to inspections of its nuclear facilities, why not Israel? The constant harping on the right on the “existential threat” to world peace constituted by the non-existent Iranian bomb is as absurd as Günter ’s poem. Günter Grass: very largely, but not entirely wrong.
Afterwords
It is the constant duty of European intellectuals not to deal in facts, which they regard as beneath them. They detest vulgar empiricism, which ties one to the mundane, and which ensures that all judgments will be provisional, when what is wanted is the grand gesture, the world historical moment. They have found no substitute for “the Revolution.” It is particularly embarrassing for left-wing Germans, who simply as Germans have enough to be embarrassed about, that East Germany was one of the very worst examples of what “the Revolution” can lead to—a police state fully as repulsive as Nazi Germany itself. And still they shovel through the muck and manure of Marxism, hoping to find something rare and fine. Give it up, guys! There’s nothing there but shit!
