G�nter Grass Worries About the Effects of War, Then and Now

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Tuesday, April 8, 2003
Günter Grass Worries About the Effects of War, Then
and Now
By ALAN RIDING

LÜBECK, Germany, April 1 — For Günter Grass, as a
German and a writer, there is no escaping history. His
first and best-known novel, "The Tin Drum," published
in 1956, was set around World War II, as was "Dog
Years," another of his best. His latest, "Crabwalk"
(Harcourt), now published in English, recalls a
maritime tragedy early in 1945.

Yet Mr. Grass, 75, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in
Literature, is not a man consumed with the past. The
history he evokes is history's shadow on the present.
"The Tin Drum" forced Germans to confront Nazi
specters they were eager to ignore; "Dog Years," the
cost of the German economic miracle. And so it is with
"Crabwalk," in which Mr. Grass implicitly concludes
that the time is ripe to acknowledge that some Germans
were also victims of World War II.

Just as "The Tin Drum" shook Germans in its day, when
"Crabwalk" was published in Germany early last year,
Mr. Grass was again seen to be breaking a taboo. Since
then, the debate about Germans as victims has been fed
by publication of "Der Brand," or "The Fire," Jörg
Friedrich's best-selling history of the Allied bombing
of German cities.

[...]

In "Crabwalk," Mr. Grass addresses two other
long-buried wartime memories, that of Germans who were
expelled from or fled territories once under Nazi
occupation and, more specifically, the sinking by a
Soviet submarine of a German ship carrying thousands
of German refugees. As always, though, he is most
interested in the impact of a distant memory on
attitudes today. And he warns here of the dangers
posed by repressed memory.

The Wilhelm Gustloff, the converted German cruise ship
torpedoed in the Baltic Sea on the night of Jan. 30,
1945, was carrying perhaps as many as 10,500 people,
most of them refugees fleeing the Red Army's advance
into the German enclave around Danzig (where Mr. Grass
himself was born in 1927), now the Polish city of
Gdansk. Fewer than 1,250 survived what was arguably
the worst maritime disaster in history, yet at the
time neither Moscow nor Berlin admitted it had
happened.

"After the war, it was a taboo subject in East Germany
because it was a taboo in the Soviet Union," Mr. Grass
said. "In West Germany, it was possible to speak of it
and some documentary work was done, but not in a
literary form. In general, it was the first
responsibility of Germans to speak about German
crimes. The question of German suffering was of
secondary importance. No one really wanted to speak
about it."

No one, that is, except extreme rightist groups, which
not only dwelled on the Gustloff victims, but also
kept alive the story of the real Gustloff, a German
Nazi leader in Switzerland who in 1936 was murdered by
a young Croatian-born Jew, David Frankfurter. That
same year, Hitler named the new ship after the Nazi
"martyr" and ordered a monument to Gustloff built in
his hometown, Schwerin.

In his book, "scuttling backward to move forward" like
a crab, Mr. Grass traces the lives of Gustloff and
Frankfurter until their fatal meeting in Davos on Feb.
4, 1936, and he records how Alexander Marinesko, the
Soviet submarine commander, came to sink the Gustloff.
But he also creates a fictional refugee and survivor,
Tulla Pokriefke, and follows her life to this day.

[...]

"One of the many reasons I wrote this book was to take
the subject away from the extreme right," Mr. Grass
said, lighting his ever-present pipe. "They said the
tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It
was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible
result of war. It was not a planned act."

He does believe, however, that the Allied bombing of
German cities was criminal because it had no military
objectives. "We started the first air raids of this
kind," he said, "killing a city, with Guernica in the
Spanish Civil War. Rotterdam, Coventry, Liverpool and
London followed. Then it was done to us. What we
started came back to us. But both are war crimes."

He said he also believed the bombing was
counterproductive. "The Allies tried to break the
resistance of the German people by killing hundreds of
thousands of people, but the resistance grew," he
said. "Like today with the Iraqi people. Perhaps many
of them hate Saddam Hussein, but they will defend
their country because of this bombing. It's so
stupid."

The Iraq war is very much on his mind. He has spoken
out against it, but his anger is directed at President
Bush and what he calls Mr. Bush's "fundamentalist
singing." 

"In his language, he is close to Osama bin Laden," he
said. "Both are always speaking about God. Both are
sure that God is on their side. This man Bush is a
danger to his own country. He is destroying the image
of the United States for years."

Mr. Grass said that after Sept. 11, 2001, he asked
himself why so much hate was directed at the United
States and the West. "It's not enough to hunt down
terrorists," he went on. "What's needed is a gigantic
Marshall Plan to help countries where people are so
poor there is no life possible. That is the only way
of reducing terrorism. After the war, Europe had the
Marshall Plan, but there is no room in Mr. Bush's
thinking for that. The greatness of the United States
is lost."

[...]

But politics and literature are never far from his
life. He said he welcomed Mr. Friedrich's book about
the Allied bombing. But he agreed less with W. G.
Sebald's essay, "Air War and Literature," published
here in 1999 and in English this year, in a collection
called, "On the Natural History of Destruction." Mr.
Sebald, who died in 2001, argues that postwar German
writers ignored German suffering during the war. "The
novels of Henrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen deal with
these things," Mr. Grass said. "If I had met Sebald, I
would have asked him, `Why don't you write a book
about it?' "

More worrying to Mr. Grass is that, since German
unification, a different past has resurfaced. "We
thought in Germany, `My God, the cold war is over,
let's stop this discussion of the war, we have been
doing it for years and years,' " he said. "But then we
have terrible right-wing attacks on foreigners, even
here in Lübeck, where a refugee hostel near the harbor
was firebombed. History comes back."

This was certainly on Mr. Grass's mind when he wrote
"Crabwalk," yet many older Germans may have overlooked
the novel's darker message. "I received many letters
thanking me," he recalled. "They said: `You found the
words. We were thinking about it, but we were unable
to express ourselves.' " Perhaps some of these readers
never reached the last page of "Crabwalk," where Mr.
Grass offers his final thought on German history.

"It never ends," he writes. "Never will it end."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/08/books/08GRAS.html?th

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more
http://tax.yahoo.com