Germany: Günther Grass continued to attack Israel to the end

Günther Grass, the moral conscience of Germany, knew that sooner or later the facts, which he had kept hidden from the public and from Michael Jürgs, his biographer, would come out. To save his reputation, he knew that it was much better to disclose the fact and and give his own interpretation of the events.  Historian Joachim Fest summed it up in 2006: “I do not understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as the nation’s bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then admit that he himself was deeply involved. I don’t know how he could play this double role for so long.”
 

Benjamin Weinthal writes in the Jerusalem Post:

German novelist Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum, an epic treatment of the Nazi era, died on Monday at the age of 87, his publishers said.  [...]  A seasoned left-wing campaigner, he was a towering figure in West Germans’ efforts to keep the door open to their communist-ruled neighbors in the East during the Cold War.

Yet Grass opposed hasty reunification after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and hoped a new generation of German authors from the East would nourish their work on “western arrogance.” [...]

Not even 12 when war broke out, Grass was forced like other youngsters to join paramilitary organizations, and entered the Hitler Youth at 14.   Drafted into a Waffen-SS tank division in 1944, he experienced the full horrors of war, when more than half his company of mostly 17-year-olds were ripped to pieces in three minutes of shelling.  But the fact that he did not reveal this part of his history until 2006 brought accusations that he had been hypocritical when attacking others for failing properly to face up to Germany’s Nazi past and cost him some of his moral authority.

For Israel, Grass was a highly controversial author and public intellectual.  In 2012, Grass penned a poem titled “What must be said” for Munich’s liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, accusing Israel of planning to launch a nuclear attack on Iran to “extinguish the Iranian people.”  His poem earned him a ban on traveling to Israel, which Grass compared to his treatment by East Germany’s Stasi.

“Why do I say only now...  that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which it may already be too late to say tomorrow,” he wrote in the poem, which was criticized by some in Germany as anti-Semitic.  Grass blamed Netanyahu as “the man who damages Israel the most.”

When asked by Spiegel magazine “Do you believe him when he [Grass] writes in his poem that he feels 'connected' to the State of Israel?” the German- Jewish historian, Michael Wolffsohn, said “I have never believed him. He was never a friend of the Jewish people – this is a myth he constructed himself. During his very first visit to Israel, on the occasion of the first German-Israeli culture week in 1971, he already acted like a bull in a china shop, and lectured the Israeli audience on historical and moral issues.”

Grass’s anti-Israel poem prompted criticism from leading politicians in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party.  Philipp Mißfelder, a Christian Democratic Union and foreign policy spokesman in the Bundestag, said “the poem is tasteless and unhistoric and shows a lack of knowledge about the situation in the Middle East.”

The general secretary of the CDU Hermann Gröhe said he was horrified over the tone of the poem and that Grass misjudged completely that Iran is determined to obtain nuclear weapons.

Grass did not renounce the views contained in his poem and in subsequent interviews continued to attack the Jewish state.

In 2003, three years before he disclosed his membership in the Waffen-SS in an interview with the German daily FAZ, he wrote a Los Angeles Times piece arguing that president George W. Bush and his government “are diminishing democratic values.” He further compared US policies with al-Qaida. More.

The New York Times wrote in 2006: "The reaction in Germany to this admission has been one of disbelief and indignation: not that a teenager should have been recruited into the Waffen SS as Hitler struggled to avoid defeat, but that the country’s most prominent writer should have hidden this while hectoring others for their political and social sins from the comfort of the moral high ground. “I do not understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as the nation’s bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then admit that he himself was deeply involved,” Joachim Fest, a prominent historian and biographer of Hitler, told the newspaper Bild. “I don’t know how he could play this double role for so long.”