Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-2012

Günter Grass writes a poem about Israel:

Lyrical sorrows for a part of the German state ideology

The author, who has already written a lot of poetry for Germany, says what, in his view, “must be said.” In a short text he describes as a poem, Grass lets the readers of several major European newspapers, which readily open their pages to the Nobel Prize winner, share in the artistic-civic anguish of a prominent person who can No Longer Remain Silent on the subject of a looming Israeli attack on Iran: He laments the uncontrolled “nuclear potential” of the State of Israel, fears a “first strike” from Jerusalem that “could destroy the Iranian people” who are “enslaved by a demagogue,” castigates German submarine deliveries to Israel and the “hypocrisy of the West” in the face of the threat to the “already fragile world peace” posed by the “land of Israel,” to which the poet is “bound” and “will be bound.” Strictly speaking, however, he laments less the reality of the war-fraught situation than the tribulations of his literary soul, the pain to his lyrical self: “Why am I silent, silent for too long ..., ... why do I forbid myself ... Why have I kept quiet until now … Why do I say this only now ...” By means of vivid repetition, he portrays his inner turmoil – and in doing so, faithfully fulfills his calling as a German poet who, in coming to terms with himself, also wants to artistically reflect the state of his nation’s soul in his work. This is how he justifies the fact that only now, with his “last ink,” is his truth bursting out of him in his German nationality, which is “marked by a blemish that can never be removed.” He foresees the “verdict of ‘anti-Semitism’” against his literary intervention and bravely accepts it because peace, especially “world peace,” is worth it. And because he can no longer avoid getting involved in the debate over the justification of a war that is on the agenda; consequently, about whether the Israelis are permitted to do what they are preparing to do; and whether Germany and “the West,” which are obligated actually to Good in the world and Israel’s properly understood interests, would do well to support it. As a patriot and man of letters condemned by history to solidarity, Grass suffers publicly from the special relationship with the country that is once again making friendship so difficult for him. The objective view of the increasingly fierce competition for power between Israel and its allies and Iran is therefore not that of the morally agitated artist: he does not want to know about imperialistic aims and calculations; he takes the world of ideological reasons for war to be the real reasons and, in all poetic freedom, resorts to some hyperbole out of the old nuclear war scenarios of the Cold War to paint in vivid colors the drama of the moral legal situation that bothers him so.

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Even an old Nobel Prize winner can’t get away with this. As ludicrous as it may be to interpret his literary soul-searching as a political statement, official Israeli policymakers refuse to tolerate any doubts whatsoever about the justice of a potential Israeli strike against Iran and besiege the German poet with a week-long broadside of a higher caliber, omitting none of the gems of the freedom-loving discourse of the Christian-Jewish tradition: surely, he should go live over there – in this case, Iran; he is a kind of hate preacher against “the state of Israel and its people”; intellectually, he is still wearing the SS uniform he was dressed in at the age of seventeen; he is, therefore, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite “in the European tradition ... of accusing the Jews of ritual murder before Passover” (the latter according to the Israeli ambassador in Berlin). In the spirit of this combative analysis, Grass is banned from entering Israel and, as persona non grata, no longer permitted to enter a country whose right to exist he so scandalously questions with his poetic meddling in Israel’s right to wage war.

Israel, like any state capable of it, has always used violence to define the scope of its rights, including its right to exist, which is why in times past it confiscated the land from the Arabs who lived there, committed the requisite atrocities against the resident population, and never fails when looking back at its atrocities to present itself as the imperiled defender of its just claims. None of this is very special: hardly any significant modern nation came out of its founding stages or its path to greatness without major massacres of troublesome population groups – usually with the tacit acquiescence, if not direct orders, of God Almighty. The most powerful nation today, in order to become God’s own country, wiped out a whole useless indigenous population except for a few vestiges, and at the same time consumed entire African populations for the country’s capitalist development without ever having to bring itself to more than a feeble sorry on the basis of its national road to success. This has not been the case for Israel, which, by its own telling, is still not quite finished with its founding: The state is still too small and the aggrieved neighbors around it still too powerful to deal with all the open questions in the long term, especially those concerning the content and scope of its own right to exist. This is the material which the quoted ambassador refers to when he complains that Israel’s “right to exist” has been “publicly questioned since the day it was founded ... and this is still the case today, even though we want to live in peace with our neighbors in the region.” (SZ, April 5-6, 2012)

The semi-official public sphere of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the Jewish religious community, and the journalists who specialize full time in monitoring political correctness in Germany, specifically the fulfillment of German-Jewish-Israeli obligations, and the definition and condemnation of intellectual anti-Semitism, as well as the popular old and neo-fascist Jew-hate among the German masses, strike the same chord. It also attaches great importance to a clear decision on the question of who actually started the aggression because it is easy to identify an anti-Semite by the answer to this question. The translation of every imperialist interest into the childish question of who actually started it is in good hands with these people, who have developed a surefire criterion for exposing racist sentiments. In any case, historical hindsight must make it clear that if anyone believes that “the founding of Israel is the actual aggression against which the Palestinians and ultimately Ahmadinejad are rightly defending themselves,” they must be accused of hostility to Jews by Henryk Broder if they are not, like Grass, the “prototype of the educated anti-Semite” (Der Spiegel, 15/2012). And at the moment, there is no room for doubt anyway: it is not Israel but Iran that threatens peace. “The text [of the Grass poem] is irresponsible and a distortion of the facts ...” (D. Graumann, Chairman of the Central Council of Jews, SZ, 5/6/2012)

That’s why the general public sphere with its various major media outlets does its part by giving the right spin to the once again distorted facts. For their fixed standpoint on the side of Israel, they do not need the religious-cultural-historical-political solidarity with the Jewish state that the German Jewish communities cultivate. Once again, they assure themselves of the correctness of their likewise predetermined partisanship by taking a fact-based political view of the world from the responsible standpoint of German imperialism and the Western world order and its values. This confirms the starting point that the aggressor is Iran and the “crazy leader there” (Der Spiegel, ibid.), who deserves this psychiatric diagnosis because he questions Israel’s use of the Holocaust as its main ideological justification. This makes the efforts to force Iran to capitulate on the nuclear issue, ultimately at the price of war, appear to be dictated by geopolitical common sense. Whether Iran already has a bomb, will soon have one, or is about to get one – in any version, this would cause the “balance of power between Iran and its Sunni neighbors” (SZ, April 10, 2012, representative of many) to get completely “out of control” – meaning, obviously, our control, the West’s – so that the Saudis and the Turks might soon have nuclear weapons as well, which certainly can’t be good for us. And it is also doubtful whether the Muslims, with their “religious-ideological ornateness,” could deal with the “law of deterrence” as free from ideology as we did during the Cold War ...

So one meets the literary man of principles – who wants to raise questions of law and justifiability in the run-up to a war on account of his national-moral stomach ache – with a partisan, imperialist assessment of the situation that makes the aged wordsmith’s concerns seem out of touch with reality: Given the “balance of power” in the region, the “danger to the world’s security architecture” (Foreign Minister Westerwelle, SZ, April 5/6, 2012) posed by Iran and the relevant nuclear non-proliferation regime, Iran must be contained at all costs. As for Israel’s current threats of war, one can still certainly have a split opinion on the advisability of an attack. But if one ascribes to Iran the intention of pursuing its own downfall with a nuclear attack on the strongest military power in the region and the absolute protégé of the superpower, then Israel “cannot be denied the right to think these scenarios through to the last consequence – and to look for a defense against them.” One has to accuse fans of the principle of equality who want to grant “Israel’s enemy the same right to the bomb” of overly “simplistic thinking” that just doesn’t fathom “complex strategic scenarios,” although in the present case it is obvious that more equal treatment in matters of weapons will make “the world” as we want it “no safer” (SZ, ibid.), because this kind of security requires the insecurity of Iran.

These types of lectures, which take Grass’s statement as an upside-down political assessment of the situation in order to ensure that the public has the correct view of things in the Middle East, are still among the more polite ways of handling his moral intervention. A segment of the public sphere, which Grass not unjustifiably sees as “government coordinated” given his experiences with media outlets that freely commit themselves to their collaborative partisanship out of a sense of responsibility for the nation, does not get bogged down in objective questions about the correct world order. The concerted cultivation of the enemy image of Iran, often from Israel’s standpoint, quite naturally gives rise, in the run-up to a potential war, to a standpoint that targets Grass as a serious case of deviation from a compulsory national position and searches for motives in the abysses of his psyche and his poetic craft: How can someone put Israel and Iran on the same moral level! First he conceals his SS past and now he wants to lecture us! Has he perhaps not come to terms with this past psychologically? Is he suffering from self-hatred, or is he trying to justify himself at the expense of the Jews? Does he recite his anti-Semitism as a poem because he is too cowardly to write an essay in which he would have to make an argument? And then his poetry is so bad! And so perfidious: with subtext, associative appeals, lyrically fraudulent labels and things like that, he robs the Jews’ words – survivors, footnotes of history – and uses them in his anti-Jewish document of revenge! (For real: Schirrmacher, FAZ, April 5, 2012)

In contrast, the trustees of Germany’s solidarity with Israel in practice, the nation’s politicians, are almost exceptionally polite in dealing with the distinguished artist: A middle-ranking FDP official notes that Grass is, after all, only a “writer. Politically, I’ve always thought Grass a fool” (SZ, April 10, 2012), while this was promptly followed at its party conference with a “commitment to Israel’s right to exist,” which is an “indispensable constant of a liberal foreign policy” (SZ, April 23, 2012). One SPD member dismisses Grass’s remarks partly as “rubbish,” another no longer wants electoral support from him, while the higher-ups, Nahles and Gabriel, express their distance from Grass in measured words, but also their continued appreciation for him: “We owe Grass a great deal...” (Gabriel, Der Spiegel, 16/2012)

The government, in particular the Chancellor, remains silent. Through her spokesperson, she refers to the constitutionally guaranteed “freedom of the arts. And the freedom of the federal government not to have to comment on every work of art.” (SZ, April 5/6, 2012) And why should she? The free public does all the work for her!

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Discussants from all camps leave no doubt that there is so much public uproar in Germany surrounding the little work of poetry because it touches on the relationship with the Jewish state and not because it questions the nation’s imperialist interests. It is probably true that “a poem from Spain would not have garnered the same attention” (SZ, April 10, 2012): the “attention” is based on the German-Israeli “special relationship” (SZ, ibid.) from which the entire heated discourse originates.

These evidently highly sensitive and vulnerable political ties were defined by both states after the Second World War in ideologically complementary ways: Germany appears here initially as the legal successor of the war-losing and Jew-murdering fascist state, on the one hand, and as a democratically purified polity and all-around positive counter-model that is distinct in every respect from its legal predecessor. Israel went from the Zionist land grabbing project and biblical legal claims of its founding era to the ideal legal successor of all the Jewish victims of the Nazis and seized on, of all things, the mass extermination of the Jews as the general justification for its warlike program of completing the imperialist regional construction site of Eretz Israel. The fact that, according to the logic of the question of guilt, this title could hardly have justified anything other than maybe ceding a part of Germany to survivors and descendants of the Nazis’ victims, but surely not the liability of the Palestinians, has never bothered the states involved. Least of all Germany, which got out of the matter quite cheaply with its material “reparations,” paid out of the petty cash of its “economic miracle” and the ostentatiously shame-faced contrition of the morally defeated war loser which was soon needed again as a freedom-loving capitalist frontline state in the new East-West confrontation.

Of course, German national pride suffered significantly more from the retrospective condemnation of the fascist extermination business. To attest as a people to total moral deviance – that, for patriotic sensibilities, is in the long run an absurdity. Here, first, the “generation of 1968” and a Federal President Weizsäcker had to come along and explain to the Germans that the end of the war was not actually a defeat, but rather a liberation of Germany; here the perpetrators and accomplices had to first reach retirement age and the younger generation – “blessed with late birth” – had to inherit the legacy of history before Germany could begin climbing the ladder from defendant to judge of its own history by passing such a negative verdict on itself that its rehabilitation looked credible. This is how the nation of delinquents managed to certify its own miraculous democratic re-socialization, and Germany since then has recommended itself around the world as a paradigm and – in all modesty – role model for the world.

Since then, the moral legacy of the Nazi past has functioned – when necessary and for optional use – as a justification and mandate for a special responsibility of Germany, which, as the democratic executor of the Third Reich’s estate, is uniquely qualified to stand up for the democratically true, good and beautiful around the world against the totalitarianism of the right and the left and, by virtue this national calling, belongs within the inner circle of authorized signatories of a freedom-based world politics.

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This is the sense in which Germany cultivates the memory of the mass murder of the Jews. And this special German culture of remembrance can’t simply be equated with the anti-fascism which the left, for example, upholds in critical remembrance of Nazi Germany. The official anti-fascism that has become at home in Germany focuses quite pointedly on rebuking the extermination of the Jews: the essential and ultimately sole significant meaning and purpose of the German far right that came to power is supposed to be the extermination of the Jews. What remains to be criticized about Germany’s war against the rest of the world – apart from the devastating defeat – is above all the murder of the Jews. The emphasis on the monstrosity of the murder of the Jews, the singularity of the crime, the absolutely exceptional character that is attributed to it because of the way it was committed, defines German fascism as a unique outrage that not only prohibits any comparison with other historical wrongdoings, but also – ultimately – deprives it of any explanation. Anyone who even calls to mind the other atrocities of the Nazis and their political justifications draws suspicion to himself for disrespectfully downplaying the Holocaust and has to be decisively criticized by democrats, the victims and their descendants. Because this officially certified fascism, so tidily demarcated and historically pigeonholed, establishes the only acceptable anti-fascism: anti-anti-Semitism as a non-negotiable democratic state doctrine whose representatives therefore immediately suspect anyone who does not share it of being an anti-Semite.

So this kind of bourgeois anti-fascism represents a key component of the German national ideology which, as a political mode of the new democratic Germany, was designed to lead its domestic patriotism out of the moral trap of the post-war period and to ideologically point the way for the nation: toward the role of an activist of international political morality, an “international power for a better world” (SZ, ibid.).

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This national self-interpretation has its point of reference in Israel. Solidarity with Israel is declared a permanent component of the national ideological infrastructure, and in relations with Israel the history of the German persecution of the Jews is held to be the reason for Germany’s special responsibility for Israel, its political circumstances, and its state existence. Four years ago, in an address to the Israeli parliament, the Federal Chancellor proclaimed “Germany's special responsibility for the Jewish state. This historical responsibility of Germany is part of my country’s reason of state. This means that Israel’s security is non-negotiable for me as German Chancellor. And if that is the case, then these must not remain empty words in the moment of truth.” (quoted from SZ, April 10, 2012)

By invoking this principle – “reason of state” – the Chancellor articulates an essential identity of interests between the two states on the issue of national “security”: Israel’s security interests should be “non-negotiable” for Germany, i.e. removed in advance from any calculated haggling, which otherwise quite self-evidently constitutes the usual content of inter-state relations. In fact, the commitment thereby assumed includes an unconditional partisanship, settled prior to any negotiation, which should already be the basis and starting point for political interest trade-offs. With the explicit unconditional support of a foreign state, a fundamentalist solidarity is pronounced that nationalists otherwise only know in relation to their own nation: When it comes to one’s own nation, one does not question what acts of violence are necessary to protect its right to exist – i.e., its power and its wealth – from its competitors; one commits them as a statesman or a citizen in the hope of success. One only has to be reproached – like Germany – after losing a war.

The Chancellor makes it quite explicit that the related partisan special relationship with Israel and the adopted role of guarantor for its “right to exist” is objectively equivalent to a war alliance when she emphasizes that her assurance of unquestioning support for Israel also applies “in the moment of truth.” By and large, the Israelis tolerate this kind of rehabilitation of the German moral compass on their terms, which are quite compatible with the high-sounding fundamentalism of the Germans: they put the stress on accountability over responsibility and the voluntary acceptance of debt over guilt; after all, one can always use cheap submarines. In any case, there is fundamental agreement on the elegant line of reasoning that Palestinians and Iranians have to suffer setbacks because the Germans killed a lot of Jews.

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As serious as German statesmen are about the German-Israeli “friendship,” which is celebrated in self-conscious humility as a routine component of official acts of state and testifies to modern Germany’s responsible and sovereign engagement with its history, one doesn’t have to be a military expert to know that the solemnly invoked war alliance could by no means guarantee Israel’s extensive security needs or its demanding “right to exist” “in the moment of truth.” Germany would simply be overwhelmed by the practical redemption of this “part of its reason of state,” namely, by waging war in the region to make good on its promised guarantee to its state friend. The mendacity of the practical side of German-Israeli solidarity is known to everyone involved, all of whom offhandedly take it for granted that Germany is certainly not planning on deploying Bundeswehr battalions or its air force to the Middle East in the event of a war with Iran. And also that Israel would also hardly be interested in the practical military activation of Germany’s pledge of unwavering partisanship beyond financial, technical and diplomatic support. As is well known, Israel bases its military plans and imperatives on a real war alliance with the American superpower, in which the common interest in keeping down Iran and maintaining an American-Israeli dominated regional order is actually intended to be practically enforced in war, unlike the German security guarantee.

This means that Germany is pursuing its interests and calculations in the region on the ideal basis of its fundamentalist pledge of friendship with the imperiled Jewish state and on the actually existing basis of the conditions set by the Israeli-American military alliance. As a leading European power in this important arena of world order, Germany brings itself into play by offering its ability to provide valuable mediation services on the basis of its special bond of loyalty with Israel and its traditionally good relations with the Arab world. Reservations regarding the policies of Germany’s Israeli friends which refer to German concerns about Israel’s well-understood interests are mostly disregarded, so that sometimes German foreign policy does not do much more than follow Israeli guidelines for the “peace process” in the Middle East from the sidelines. For Germany, which is constantly being dealt out by the dominant players in the arena, the USA and Israel, yet always keen on exerting influence, its “special relationship” with Israel in the context of its practical policy represents a condition of its attempts to get dealt in, which it accepts and takes into account in the political struggle for imperialist positions in the region and seeks to exploit in the pursuit of its policies on the ground.

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The top-class ideal definition of the German “solidarity with Israel” is by no means invalidated because of this. This just causes the democratic parties and their publicists to quite collectively smack down even a contribution like that of the old versifier Grass as a shared task of national morality. On the basis of this binding consensus, it explicitly wants to cast aside his anxiously moralistic criticism and his deeply personal woe that our Israeli friends sometimes put a strain on our friendship and with it our unconditional partisanship, which of course they are owed.

The official united front – which sees even in such solidarity-tinged concerns a relativization of a core tenet of Germany’s pro-Semitic state morality – is met by an apparently growing incomprehension which is spreading outside the pro-government newspapers, but documented by them on the occasion of the Grass affair on the letters to the editor pages: A civic incomprehension regarding the nationalistic anomaly of an unconditional solidarity bonus for another state without any obvious advantage for Germany. This now mature imperialist civic consciousness does not come from an old or neo-fascist hostility to Jews, nor does it know why it should really be anti-Semitic, but also does not understand why a nation with global interests like Germany should allow its options in power politics to be limited by a binding bias in favor of Israel just because of Hitler and ancient history. For a modern audience that writes letters to the country’s prestige newspapers, that doesn’t match the role that Germany now occupies as a competent co-arbitrator of good and evil in international politics, and that role can only be undermined if it makes an exception for the State of Israel, which is expressly not supposed to have the criteria for good inter-state behavior applied to it. And this audience also does not want to understand why such a misguided, backward-looking, fundamentalistic commitment, which is detrimental to Germany’s power and interests, should not be criticized, or why the self-justifications of official policy about Germany’s past should be accepted as a brake on German global policy for all time.

An academic researcher on foreign policy makes a well-intentioned suggestion in an article on the 67th anniversary of Surrender Day: to ensure that Germany no longer shirks its responsibility in future wars because of its past, but can shine – as the world supposedly expects it to – by “actively standing up for the values on which we built ourselves after 1945,” “no longer ducks out of the big security debates,” and in the future also “takes risks for the good,” the Germans should “let go of their mistrust of themselves” and “forgive themselves.” (SZ, May 8, 2012) So far, the idea does not seem to be meeting with much approval anywhere: German politicians and the public at any rate currently consider their official democratic anti-fascism in the form of valid anti-anti-Semitism, even in view of the notorious inclinations of the masses, to be in no way superfluous as a lodestar in the heaven of national values, a European-German world power. And the educated letters to the editor writers in the SZ, FAZ, and Der Spiegel have already long ago forgiven themselves and Germany anyway. Did Grass want all that?

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Even this audience, which takes Grass’s poem as an opportunity to demand more imperialist ambition from Germany without anachronistic scruples and defends him on this account, has ultimately misunderstood the great poet and his little work as a contribution to current Middle East policy in particular and to the course of world politics in general. That, as Grass surely knows, is a fate that is sometimes inevitable for artistic works: he really wants, as previously mentioned, to talk primarily about himself and his lovely concern whether he, vicariously on behalf of his compatriots, can really continue to unconditionally support the Jewish state in the light of what he sees as the danger of the extermination of the Iranian people coming from Israel. Whether or not it rhymes, this is not so much a political contribution in that sense, but for all intents and purposes an art: one relates a whole population-exterminating war to one’s own delicate moral sensibility – and then, when one can no longer bear it, simply cranks out a poem.