Philip Oltermann - Günter Grass criticises refugee treatment from beyond the grave
For much of his lifetime, he was the personification of
Germany’s moral conscience, with literary interventions on anything from
postwar guilt to the Israel-Palestine debate. And it appears that even his
death in April this year hasn’t dimmed Günter Grass’s determination to
provoke debate.
In his last ever book, published in Germany at the end of
last week, the Nobel prize-winning novelist and poet issues a beyond-the-grave
warning about rising vitriol towards refugees. One of the poems in Vonne
Endlichkait (On Finiteness) laments that Germans who were once
refugees themselves now displayed the same level of intolerance towards
refugees that they themselves once encountered.
Millions of Germans displaced from east-central Europe after the
end of the second world war, Grass writes in the poem entitled Xenophobic, were
met with cries of: “Go back to where you came from!” when they tried to settle
in other parts of Germany. “But they stayed,” the author continues, and applied
the same rejection to foreigners who came from far further afield.
The poem concludes on a hopeful note, suggesting that there
will be a point where those “who have always been natives” will come to
recognise their own strangeness in others. With uncanny timing, Grass’s posthumous work was published
in the same week as Germany has seen a fraught debate on whether refugees from
north Africa and the Balkans shouldn’t be seen in the same category as “native
German” refugees.
In a talkshow last Thursday, prominent columnist and blogger
Sascha Lobo had suggested referring to refugees (Flüchtlinge) as
“displaced people” (Vertriebene) instead. One of the other members of
the panel, Bavarian interior minister Joachim Herrmann, described Lobo’s
proposal as “an affront”.
Germany has seen a spate of arson attacks on refugee
shelters this year. In the 12-month period to June this year, the country has
received 296,710
applications for asylum, more than any other EU member state.
But the refugee crisis is not the only political subject
Grass tackles in his final collection of poems and prose sketches, most of them
illustrated with the author’s own drawings. Mutti is an angry
attack on Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who “says nothing with a lot of
words” and is trapped by profit-seeking lobbyists who “blackmail her,
mafia-like”.
Grass, an active supporter of the Social Democrats in his
lifetime, bemoans his party entering a coalition with Merkel’s Christian
Democrats. He writes: “She can do it with everyone, until they are milked dry/
and hang creased and limply over a clothes hanger.”
In On Monetary Transactions, he casts a critical eye on
“financial jugglers suffering from addiction to profit”, but also on public
intellectuals rushing to pronounce a post-monetary era, in which “conkers” and
“seashells” take the place of hard cash.
While Pope Francis moralises about the end of money, Grass
wryly notes, the debt mountain is growing by the hour, “some day in November it
burst through the cloud ceiling”.
In another short text Grass laments that the internet has
alienated people from problems in the real world. He writes: “The bombs that go
off daily in Iraq and the corpses lined up underneath sheets are only pretend
dead and copies of real computer games; the crime scene that is Gaza merely a
newspaper hoax that raises a laugh among billions of users, another shitstorm.”
In the eyes of many Germans, Grass’s status as the moral
conscience of the nation was undermined by his 2006 admission that he had as a
teenager been a member of the Waffen SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party’s
paramilitary force. If Vonne Endlichkait has largely gained
positive reviews so far, it is also because the political moralising is offset
by more personal reflections on mortality.
There is a poem about his struggles with a hearing aid,
reflections on the sound of his own cough and a prose piece on how Grass scares
his grandchildren with his last remaining real tooth, illustrated with a
scarecrow self-portrait. In one frank passage, the writer turns his trademark pipe
into a symbol for impotence in old age, writing: “I go about my business with a
stuffed pipe but without matches. In other words: my virility, the old
busybody, has given up the ghost. Only lust is still sticking around, or
pretends to be.”
