Günter Grass Poem Attacking Israel for Threatening Iran

Günter Grass Poem Attacking Israel for Threatening Iran Is Condemned in Germany

By ALAN COWELL

A screen shot from a German news site showing a copy of a controversial new poem by Günter Grass, published on Wednesday in the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Updated | 4:34 p.m. A new poem by the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass depicting Israel’s undeclared nuclear might as a threat to world peace drew wide condemnation from Jewish groups and commentators in Germany on Wednesday, showing the strength of enduring taboos in German public discourse about Israel more than six decades after the Holocaust.
In the poem, titled “What Must Be Said,” Mr. Grass, 84, asks why he has remained silent about Israel’s nuclear might — which Israel has never publicly confirmed — and concludes that he had been constrained by a broader fear of being judged an anti-Semite.
But with Israel threatening to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program, the German author writes: “Why do I say only now, aged and with my last drop of ink, that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow.”
He also complained that by supplying submarines to Israel, Germany risked becoming “a subcontractor to a foreseeable crime.” Israel has threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, arguing that they are being used to acquire the capability of building nuclear weapons. But Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. “I will no longer remain silent because I am tired of Western hypocrisy,” he said, according to an unofficial translation.
The publication of the poem in the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily newspaper recalled earlier moments when Mr. Grass, author of works like the novel “The Tin Drum,” which recounts Germany’s experience in the Second World War, has projected himself as an iconoclast. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.
But his moral authority, once unimpeachable among Germans, was greatly undermined in 2006, when he revealed that he had served during the war in Hitler’s Waffen SS unit. Mr. Grass has said he was drafted into the unit as a 17-year-old toward the end of the war and never fired a weapon. But his admission, coming after decades during which he urged Germans to come to terms with their Nazi past, raised awkward questions about why he had waited so long.
Germany’s relationship with Israel is complex, defined by many red lines drawn partly by inhibitions and guilt and partly by an acute awareness of the Holocaust, which is taught to every German schoolchild.
As soon as Mr. Grass’s poem was published, several German politicians, Jewish organizations and intellectuals expressed affront, saying that he had inverted geopolitical fact, casting Israel as a threat to world peace while Iran should be depicted in that role.
The Israeli Embassy in Berlin said Mr. Grass’s poem, coming as Jews prepare for Passover, recalled other accusations. “What must be said is that it belongs to European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration,” Emmanuel Nahshon, the deputy chief of mission, said in a statement poted on the embassy’s Web site. Today, he added, the Jewish state faces an existential threat from Iran.
In one verse of the poem, Mr. Grass claimed that Israel was threatening to annihilate the Iranians.

It is the claimed right to a first strike
that could wipe out an Iranian people
subjugated by a loudmouth and steered to organized jubilation
because the building of an atom bomb is suspected in their territory.

Denouncing the poem on the front page of another German newspaper, Die Welt, Henryk M. Broder, the author of “A Jew in the New Germany,” called Mr. Grass, “the prototype of the educated anti-Semite who means well toward Jews.”
“He is hounded by guilt and feelings of shame but at the same time driven to reconcile history,” Mr. Broder continued. (His article also incorrectly stated that the poem would also be published in The New York Times.)
As the German magazine Der Spiegel reports on its English-language site, although Mr. Grass “found support from the head of the German PEN chapter, Johano Strasser, who also warned against exporting German weapons to Israel on Wednesday in a radio interview,” there was widespread outrage.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany has called the poem an “aggressive pamphlet of agitation.” Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the German Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, told the daily Mitteldeutsche Zeitung that while Grass was a literary great, “he has difficulties whenever he comments on politics and is often wrong.” Polenz’s CDU colleague Philipp Missfelder said, “The poem is tasteless, ahistorical and demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the situation in the Middle East.”

One place that Mr. Grass’s poem was welcomed was in Iran. Press TV, Iran’s state-owned, English-language satellite channel, lauded the writer for “slamming the West’s hypocrisy over Tel Aviv’s nuclear arsenal.”
The Iranian channel’s report focused on Israel’s fleet of German-made Dolphin submarines, which can fire nuclear missiles. As The Lede reported last year, Israel already has three of the submarines, and two more are being built. In 2011, the German government agreed to spend nearly $190 million to help Israel purchase a sixth submarine.
The Press TV report also observed, “Israel is the only possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and it has never allowed inspections of its nuclear facilities nor has it joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty based on its policy of nuclear ambiguity.”
Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin, and Robert Mackey from New York.