{"id":40571,"date":"2015-04-15T00:45:53","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T04:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=40571"},"modified":"2015-04-15T03:12:02","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T07:12:02","slug":"nobel-prize-winning-writer-gunter-grass-described-as-germanys-moral-conscience-passes-away-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=40571","title":{"rendered":"Nobel Prize Winning Writer Gunter Grass Described as Germany\u2019s Moral Conscience Passes Away at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

By STEPHEN KINZER<\/strong><\/p>\n

G\u00fcnter Grass<\/strong><\/em>, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner whom many called his country\u2019s moral conscience but who stunned Europe when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, died on Monday in the northern German city of L\u00fcbeck, which had been his home for decades. He was 87.<\/p>\n

His longtime publisher, Gerhard Steidl, told reporters that he learned late Sunday that Mr. Grass had been hospitalized after falling seriously ill very quickly. The cause of death was not announced.
\nMr. Steidl said he drank his final schnapps with Mr. Grass eight days ago while they were working together on his most recent book, which he described as a \u201cliterary experiment\u201d fusing poetry with prose. It is scheduled to be published in the summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was fully concentrated on his work until the last moment,\u201d Mr. Steidl said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass was hardly the only member of his generation who obscured the facts of his wartime life. But because he was a pre-eminent public intellectual who had pushed Germans to confront the ugly aspects of their history, his confession that he had falsified his own biography shocked readers and led some to view his life\u2019s work in a different light.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass came under further scrutiny in 2012 after publishing a poem criticizing Israel for its hostile language toward Iran over its nuclear program. He expressed revulsion at the idea that Israel might be justified in attacking Iran over a perceived nuclear threat and said that such a prospect \u201cendangers the already fragile world peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poem created an international controversy and prompted a personal attack from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Grass later said that he had meant to attack Israel\u2019s government, not the country as a whole.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

He was propelled to the forefront of postwar literature in 1959, with the publication of his wildly inventive masterpiece \u201cThe Tin Drum.\u201d Critics hailed the audacious sweep of his literary imagination. A severed horse\u2019s head swarming with hungry eels, a criminal hiding beneath a peasant woman\u2019s layered skirts, and a child who shatters windows with his high-pitched voice are among the memorable images that made \u201cThe Tin Drum\u201d a worldwide triumph.<\/p>\n

In awarding Mr. Grass the Nobel Prize in 1999, the Swedish Academy praised him for embracing \u201cthe enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them.\u201d It described \u201cThe Tin Drum\u201d as \u201cone of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass was a playwright, essayist, short-story writer, poet, sculptor and printmaker as well as a novelist, but it was as a social critic that he gained the most notoriety, campaigning for disarmament and broad social change.<\/p>\n

By the end of the 20th century, however, his uncompromising antimilitarism and his warnings that a unified Germany might once again threaten world peace led some of his countrymen to criticize him as a pedantic moralist who had lost touch with real life.<\/p>\n

The revelation of his Nazi past led to accusations of hypocrisy. He revealed it himself, days before a memoir, \u201cPeeling the Onion,\u201d was to be published. Mr. Grass had long said that he had been a \u201cflakhelfer\u201d during the war, one of many German youths pressed to serve in relatively innocent jobs like guarding antiaircraft batteries. But in an interview with the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, he admitted that he had in fact been a member of the elite Waffen-SS, which perpetrated some of the Nazi regime\u2019s most horrific crimes.<\/p>\n

By then some knew that he had understated his role during the war, but his revelation of SS membership came as a great shock.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a weight on me,\u201d said Mr. Grass, then 78. \u201cMy silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote the book. It had to come out in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the memoir, he reflected on the vagaries of conscience and memory. \u201cWhat I had accepted with stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut the burden remained, and no one could lighten it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although he was conscripted into the SS in 1944, near the end of World War II, and was never accused of participating in atrocities, the fact that he had obscured this crucial part of his background for decades while flagellating his fellow Germans for cowardice set off cries of outrage.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoral suicide,\u201d said the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. The playwright Rolf Hochhuth said it was \u201cdisgusting\u201d to recall that Mr. Grass had denounced President Ronald Reagan and Chancellor Helmut Kohl for their 1985 visit to a cemetery in Bitburg where Waffen-SS soldiers were buried, while hiding the fact that he had been in the SS himself.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass\u2019s defenders argued that his social and political influence had been highly positive for postwar Germany, forcing the country to face its Nazi past and atone for it. He might not have been able to play that role, they said, if he had been forthright about his own background.<\/p>\n

With his mane of black hair and drooping walrus mustache, bifocals slipping down his nose and smoke curling from his pipe, Mr. Grass was almost a caricature of the postwar European intellectual. His books were all but inseparable from his public persona, giving him a unique position in German public life that endured for more than half a century.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Tin Drum\u201d became one of the most widely read modern European novels. It also made Mr. Grass a leading spokesman for a generation barely old enough to have recalled or participated in Nazi crimes.
\nThe book\u2019s hero, Oskar Matzerath, possessing the mind of an adult, wills himself at the age of 3 to stop growing. Thereafter he expresses himself only by pounding one of many toy tin drums he carries constantly and shrieking so piercingly at important moments that his voice shatters glass.<\/p>\n

As the book unfolds, the Nazi army invades Poland, and later the Soviets push them out. Oskar discovers odd forms of sexuality, joins a troupe of dwarves who entertain German troops, and becomes an engraver of tombstones. After the war he joins a jazz band, but decides on a quieter life. He allows himself to be convicted of a murder he did not commit, is judged insane and committed to an institution, where he writes the memoir that becomes \u201cThe Tin Drum.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oskar was viewed as representing a German nation so morally stunted that it could not find the courage to prevent Nazism.<\/p>\n

At one point Mr. Grass writes: \u201cThere was once a grocer who closed his store one day in November, because something was doing in town; taking his son Oskar by the hand, he boarded a Number 5 streetcar and rode to the Langasser Gate, because there as in Zoppot and Langfuhr the synagogue was on fire. The synagogue had almost burned down and the firemen were looking on, taking care that the flames should not spread to other buildings. Outside the wrecked synagogue, men in uniform and others in civilian clothes piled up books, ritual objects, and strange kinds of cloth. The mound was set on fire and the grocer took advantage of the opportunity to warm his fingers and his feelings over the public blaze.\u201d<\/p>\n

An intense antinationalist, Mr. Grass viewed his country with emotions that could flare into fear and hatred. Some critics said that the purposely small and weak Oskar Matzerath symbolized what he wanted for Germany.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s and \u201970s, much of Mr. Grass\u2019s work dealt with the German themes of disillusionment, the militaristic past and the challenges of building a post-Nazi society. His greatest successes of the period were \u201cCat and Mouse\u201d (1961), about a man whose unusually large Adam\u2019s apple forever sets him apart from the rest of humanity, and the Joycean \u201cDog Years\u201d (1963), which analyzes three decades of German history and suggests that the country has not progressed much. These two novels, together with \u201cThe Tin Drum,\u201d make up what Mr. Grass called his \u201cDanzig Trilogy.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he was writing these works, Mr. Grass also campaigned and wrote speeches for Willy Brandt, who was one of West Germany\u2019s dominant politicians from 1957, when he was elected mayor of Berlin, to 1974, when he stepped down after five years as the country\u2019s first Social Democratic chancellor.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass later demonstrated against the deployment of American nuclear missiles in Germany, denounced the German arms industry, and quit the Social Democratic Party, the Berlin Academy of Arts and the Lutheran Church, which he had joined as a teenager after renouncing Roman Catholicism. He criticized both the Lutheran and the Catholic hierarchies as \u201cmoral accomplices\u201d of Nazism.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass was a tireless defender of Fidel Castro\u2019s government in Cuba and embraced Nicaragua\u2019s left-oriented Sandinista government in the 1980s. Yet he described himself as an opponent of revolution who viewed \u201chumane socialism\u201d as the ideal society.<\/p>\n

He denounced repression in Soviet-bloc countries and attacked governments run by religious fundamentalists, but his criticism was often accompanied by denunciations of Western and especially German capitalism. In opposing the first Persian Gulf war, for example, he focused his anger on his own country, accusing German companies of arming the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce again, it is Germans who are designing and producing poison gas factories,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cThis is where you really see the German danger. It isn\u2019t nationalism, and it isn\u2019t reawakened neo-Nazis. It is simply the unchecked lust for profit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of Mr. Grass\u2019s books are phantasmagorical mixtures of fact and fantasy, some of them inviting comparison with the Latin American style known as magical realism. His own name for this style was \u201cbroadened reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cG\u00fcnter Grass\u2019s books present surprising and extremely contradictory combinations of opposites,\u201d the Russian-German writer Lev Kopelev wrote in an essay on the occasion of Mr. Grass\u2019s 65th birthday. \u201cMinutely detailed presentations of real things and scientifically precise descriptions of historical events are melted together with fairy tales, legends, myths, fables, poems and wild fantasies to produce his own special poetical world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass was renowned for his wide-ranging tastes. He was an epicure who favored hearty peasant food, and his work carries the aroma of home-cooked dishes like smoked goose breast and roast pork with sauerkraut and caraway seeds, the preparation and consumption of which he described in loving detail.
\nHis fascination with animals was reflected in book titles like \u201cThe Flounder\u201d and \u201cFrom the Diary of a Snail.\u201d He was a jazz lover, once worked as a jazz musician, and collaborated on \u201cO Susanna,\u201d an illustrated book on jazz, blues and gospel music published in 1959.<\/p>\n

Some critics hoped Mr. Grass would produce a monumental novel encompassing all the great themes that have tormented Germany through its history, and felt betrayed when he did not. Many of his later works were met with both critical and popular indifference.<\/p>\n

The dominant German literary critic during most of his career, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died in 2013, called him \u201cgreatly overrated.\u201d Mr. Reich-Ranicki once appeared on the cover of the magazine Der Spiegel ripping apart a copy of a Grass book he especially loathed, \u201cToo Far Afield,\u201d a 1995 novel centered on two men in their early 70s roaming Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall as they ponder Germany\u2019s past and present.<\/p>\n

After the wall was breached in 1989, Mr. Grass argued against German unification on the ground that a people responsible for the Holocaust had forfeited the right to live together in one nation. He suggested that East and West Germany remain separate for a time and then join a loose confederation of German-speaking states.<\/p>\n

\u201cAuschwitz speaks against even a right to self-determination that is enjoyed by all other peoples, because one of the preconditions for the horror, besides other, older urges, was a strong and united Germany,\u201d he said in a 1990 speech. \u201cWe cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and \u2014 to our benefit! \u2014 has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, \u2018Now we finally know ourselves.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

G\u00fcnter Wilhelm Grass came of age on a continent torn by hatred. He was born in Danzig on Oct. 16, 1927, to a German father and a mother who was a Kashubian, a Slavic ethnic group with its own language and traditions. Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, was then a free city under the control of the League of Nations, but its population was mostly German and loyal to the Reich. It was the first territory seized by the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II.<\/p>\n

The author and critic Morris Dickstein wrote of the city: \u201cOne of the world\u2019s most frequently besieged and contested cities (as Mr. Grass loves to emphasize), Danzig during the 1930s was a symbol of Germany\u2019s lost territories and a focus of Nazi agitation. By the end of the war it was buried in rubble with all its German population driven out. It is a truism to say that except for Southerners like Faulkner, who inherited the consequences of the Civil War, American writers have a relatively undeveloped sense of history. But even among Europeans, Mr. Grass was well situated to learn how history buffets and battles local dreams and individual lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

G\u00fcnter joined the Nazi children\u2019s organization Jungvolk at the age of 10. Like many Germans of what came to be known as the \u201cflakhelfer generation,\u201d he later claimed to have done no real service to the Nazi war effort.<\/p>\n

Among them was Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI. After the war ended, Mr. Grass and the future pope were prisoners together in an Allied camp at Bad Aibling. Mr. Grass later remembered Mr. Ratzinger as \u201cextremely Catholic\u201d and \u201ca little uptight,\u201d but \u201ca nice guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

After returning to civilian life, Mr. Grass was drawn to art and poetry. He joined a loose but influential circle of critical intellectuals known as Group 47. Encouraged by other members of the group, among them the writers Heinrich B\u00f6ll and Uwe Johnson, he decided to abandon what some said was a promising career in sculpture and devote himself to literature.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass lived in Paris during the late 1950s and wrote \u201cThe Tin Drum\u201d in a basement apartment there. It earned him worldwide acclaim, as well as accusations of blasphemy and pornography in Germany. Some said he was irresponsible to use a stunted child to represent victims of Nazism. Others were put off by the child\u2019s ability to escape the doom the Nazis had decreed for the physically handicapped, and by his seeming misunderstanding of rape by soldiers as a gift to lonely women. Twisted sexual relationships wind through the book, including the stunted boy\u2019s first mistress marrying the man who may be his father.<\/p>\n

The book was banned in Communist countries, including Poland, meaning that it could not legally be read in Gdansk, the city where it was set.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Tin Drum\u2019s\u201d fame grew after the director Volker Schl\u00f6ndorff made it into a vivid movie, which won the 1979 Academy Award for best foreign language film. None of the more than two dozen works Mr. Grass published over the next half-century approached its impact on the European consciousness.<\/p>\n

Some critics found the increasingly apocalyptic books Mr. Grass published after the 1970s repetitive and self-righteous. Others complained that his relentless activism had overwhelmed his identity as a writer.
\n\u201cHere is a novelist who has gone so public he can\u2019t be bothered to write a novel,\u201d John Updike wrote. \u201cHe just sends dispatches to his readers from the front line of his engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass\u2019s marriage in 1954 to Anna Margareta Schwarz, a Swiss dancer, ended in divorce in 1978. He is survived by his second wife, Ute Grunert, an organist; four children from his first marriage, Laura, Bruno, Franz and Raoul; two stepsons from his second marriage, Malte and Hans; two other children, Helene and Nele; and 18 grandchildren.<\/p>\n

After the revelations of his Nazi past, Mr. Grass found defenders among his American friends. One was the novelist John Irving, who assailed the \u201cpredictably sanctimonious dismantling\u201d of Mr. Grass\u2019s reputation \u201cfrom the cowardly standpoint of hindsight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou remain a hero to me, both as a writer and a moral compass,\u201d Mr. Irving wrote. \u201cYour courage, both as a writer and as a citizen of your country, is exemplary \u2014 a courage heightened, not lessened, by your most recent revelation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Grass described himself as \u201cnot a pessimist, but a skeptic.\u201d He vigorously rejected the view that artists should devote themselves to creating rather than agitating. That view, he once said, leads to a self-censorship that delights \u201cthe powers of church and state.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing is more pleasing or less threatening to them than that game of the self-satisfied artist called l\u2019art pour l\u2019art,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the end, it is only about color, sound and language as ends in themselves. Nothing is called by its true name, and therefore no censorship is necessary<\/p>\n

Courtesy:New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By STEPHEN KINZER G\u00fcnter Grass, the German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner whom many called his country\u2019s moral conscience but who stunned Europe when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II, died on Monday in the northern German city of L\u00fcbeck, which had …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Nobel Prize Winning Writer Gunter Grass Described as Germany\u2019s Moral Conscience Passes Away at 87’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40571"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40571"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40572,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40571\/revisions\/40572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}