August 20




GERMANY:

A Prisoner of the Nobel


A DIDACTIC play attempts to explain what man must do to make the world
better and life more rational; a tragedy shows that life will never be
rational and the world will never be good. Long before Bertolt Brecht,
German culture was enamored with parables about the triumph of reason. Yet
man is a tragic being, irrational and divided within himself, and so it is
an enthralling spectacle when a life charted as a didactic play
unexpectedly reveals a tragic aspect.

When Gunter Grass confessed that he was in the Waffen SS as a young man,
the cheap suspicions poured forth: Oh, hes publishing a new book, said the
people interviewed on the street. Hes doing it for the marketing.

Famous people fall under such permanent suspicion that even their failures
are no longer perceived as authentic. Mr. Grass is supposed to have
engineered the very destruction of his career so as to promote it. But
this is not about book sales for Mr. Grass, so much as it is about
rescuing his lifes work and the persona that he took such pains to shape.

The postwar German milieu made political demands on a writer above all
else. Reading interviews in the German press from the 1950s to the late
70s, it is amazing to see that writers were seldom asked about their
books, but rather asked insistently about Richard Nixon and rearmament,
about Willy Brandt and Leonid Brezhnev, about everything in the headlines
of the day.

In this climate, authors like Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Lus Borges
remained practically unknown, and even Samuel Beckett was revered only
because it was suggested that his plays warned against nuclear war. Yet
Gnter Grass, the irreverent storyteller whose erotically coarse passages
shocked the public and who, according to his own accounts, was at first
not at all interested in politics, suddenly strove to assume Thomas Manns
recently vacated position as the iconic German epic novelist even at the
price of becoming a different writer.

What kind of writer would Mr. Grass have become in another land? The
question is fascinating but unanswerable. He wrote electoral addresses and
poems praising the Social Democratic Party, intervened almost weekly in
political quarrels, had a decent opinion about everything, and became the
opposite of the anarchistic demon Oskar Matzerath in his novel The Tin
Drum.

The creator of a child who refused to grow up took on a grandfatherly
disposition with dismaying rapidity, in his public appearances as much as
in his prose. His early Danzig Trilogy ranks among the masterpieces of
20th-century literature. The Rat, however, his novel-treatise on feminism
and environmental protection, and his respectable panorama of stories, My
Century, are works that even his greatest admirers find difficult to
defend.

Ambitious like most good writers, Mr. Grass must have had his eye on the
Nobel Prize from early on. He knew he deserved it. The question of why he
remained silent for so long about his past is in fact easy to answer: one
visit with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was sufficient for Borges
never to receive the prize. Would someone who had served in the SS stand a
chance?

And then came the prize in actuality. His achievement attained, Mr. Grass
was faced with the problem of his posthumous reputation. It must have been
clear to him that after his death, journalists, some with the most malign
intent, would set themselves to work, and that sooner or later one of them
would find out. And what would his lifes work look like in hindsight then?

An author, world-famous, yet in possession of a secret that he knows will
come to light one day and cast a shadow over everything he has
accomplished what material for a novel! Were he a literary character, Mr.
Grass would only now really become interesting; but no longer as the
protagonist of the Brechtian fable that he would have gladly seen as the
story of his life. This new story sounds more like Fyodor Dostoyevsky or
Graham Greene above all, like Henrik Ibsen, the dramatist of living a
lie.

Mr. Grass did the only thing he could to pre-empt the loss of his
reputation. He went public, choosing not to leave the destruction of his
moral authority to the professional revealers, but rather to assume the
task himself.

Naturally, Mr. Grass will no longer be who he was. His participation in
Hitlers elite corps could have been seen as youthful foolishness, but his
silence over so many years is another matter. And naturally, there are
consequences for Germanys image in the world. When even the most outspoken
German moralist wore the uniform of murderers, one might ask whether there
is a single guiltless German in this generation.

And the answer to this question is that involvement in the Nazi system,
even among the youngest Germans of the time, was more widespread than we
have previously wanted to perceive, and many aspects of the eras crimes
even now lie buried in silence. They are crimes that few books chronicle
so well as The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years.

Later, Mr. Grass changed, and his novels changed, too, becoming didactic
and colorless. These weaker books, along with the image of the model
democratic author, will be effaced by the passage of time. His earlier
novels, however, which tell of the deep corruptibility of human beings, of
the coexistence of mendacity and greatness and of the infinitely complex
nature of guilt, will be with us for as long as people read books.

(source: Op-Ed; Daniel Kehlmann is the author of the forthcoming novel
Measuring the World. This article was translated from the German by Ross
Benjamin; New York Times)


************************



The Fictions of Gunter Grass


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 Gnter 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 at home, What
did you do in the war, Daddy? failed to obey his own injunctions! This
moralizing critic of German prosperity has greatly enjoyed his own and
seems to be advertising his new autobiography with some usable dark news!
Now, at 78, he turns out to have been a Waffen SS-man thats right, the
military branch of the notorious Nazi corps that played an important role
in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Shocking, and so enjoyable!

Well, SS-boy really. As far as we know and the autobiography, we hope,
reveals all Mr. Grass did not volunteer to join these future mass
murderers but was drafted. And we do know that he was only 17 at the time.
These were the months, in the spring of 1945, that the Nazis knew that the
war was lost, and when they, as one says, scraped the bottom of the barrel
for more troops. Yet the storm over his long silence about his youthful
sin has secured Mr. Grass, as he predicted, an international storm of
disapproval.

He has been asked to relinquish his Nobel Prize in Literature and his
honorary citizenship of his birth city, Polands Gdansk, once Danzig. And
Charlotte Knobloch, who presides over the sadly shrunken Jewish population
in Germany that was once, before Hitler, half-a-million strong, commented
that this revelation has devalued his frequent political interventions
into absurdities.

As a Jew who grew up in Nazi Germany in the years leading up to World War
II, I can understand her rage. But I think that whatever Mr. Grass has
said in election campaigns (usually as a loyal Social Democratic speaker)
or in his powerful novels, all essentially on the present or the recent
past, retains its value.

Fortunately, some commentators have been less hysterical. Most notably
Ralph Giordano, a German writer and, by the way, a Jew, has noted that Mr.
Grass was only 6 when Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germanys
chancellor. (The overused phrase seizure of power badly distorts what
happened around Jan. 30, 1933, the date of the Fhrers accession. A coup d
tat would have been bad enough; that Hitlers appointment was perfectly
legal only makes it worse for German history.) And Mr. Giordano has asked,
reasonably enough, What else could he have done during that time in the
face of the Nazis all-powerful propaganda apparatus? And answers his own
question: Nothing.

This is not all that needs to be said about this affair. With his 1959
novel, The Tin Drum, and its two successors (together known as the Danzig
Trilogy), Mr. Grass established a body of work unequaled in his country
for half a century. It is not that a public personality should get a free
ride simply for being famous, let alone popular. Herbert von Karajan may
have been an outstanding conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but this
would not erase the fact that he joined the Nazi party twice these were
the acts of an adult, after all.

The uncomfortable question that remains for Mr. Grass is this: Why did he
keep this interlude as a servant of the regime so tight a secret? If, as
we are told, his wife was the only other person whom he informed, then the
Grasses made a huge mistake. If he had come out of the Nazi closet
earlier, say, in 1959 with his triumphant novel just published, people
would have understood, and his own life would have been easier.

I am not Mr. Grasss analyst, nor have I ever met him. But it seems to me
that he failed to come forward all these years simply because he was too
ashamed. And if I am right, the affair will have a useful consequence: it
will be a reminder, more than 60 years later, that his country had a great
deal to be ashamed of.

(source: Op-Ed; Peter Gay, a professor emeritus of history at Yale, is
the author of the forthcoming Modernism: The Lure of Heresy; New York
Times)




SWITZERLAND:

Swiss court declines to hear gypsy case vs IBM


Switzerland's supreme court has declined to hear a case against IBM
brought by a gypsy organisation alleging the computer giant helped the
Nazi slaughter in World War Two, a Geneva lawyer said on Friday.

Henri-Philippe Sambuc, counsel for the group behind the case, told Reuters
he had been informed by the court that it could not proceed with a hearing
because it would violate Switzerland's statute of limitations.

Under Swiss law, criminal offences can be prosecuted only within 10 years
of the time they are alleged to have been committed. IBM has consistently
denied it was responsible for the way its machines were used by Germany's
Nazi rulers.

"We have not yet had the legal reasoning behind this decision. We expect
it in the next few weeks," said Sambuc, who represents a body called Gypsy
International Recognition and Compensation Action (GIRCA).

There was no immediate comment from the court, the Lausanne-based Federal
Tribunal. The Lausanne ruling cannot be appealed.

Once the full ruling was received, GIRCA would decide whether to relaunch
the case against IBM, which gypsy bodies say aided the Nazis by selling
them punch-card tabulating machines, under the law of another country,
Sambuc said.

GIRCA filed the case after a book published in 2001 asserted that the
punch-card machines -- the computers of the period -- helped the Nazis
organise the mass murder of gypsies, Jews and others more efficiently.

Historians of the Holocaust estimate that 500-600,000 ethnic gypsies were
killed in death camps across Europe, alongside six million Jews.

The case was originally brought on behalf of five plaintiffs who lost
family members in the killings. It was brought in Switzerland because IBM
had its European headquarters in Geneva during World War Two.

Sambuc said he had argued that the case should be heard under
international law established at the time of the post-war Nuremberg trials
of Nazi leaders, which provided for no statute of limitations for crimes
committed by the Nazis.

"I do not know why the court rejected my argument," he said.

(source: Reuters)