Storm continues over Grass’ Israel poem
Günter Grass, Germany’s most famous living writer, tried on Friday to quell the growing controversy over a poem critical of Israel that he published this week, saying that he did not mean to attack the country wholesale but only the policies of the current government. However, three days of worldwide debate, including a stinging personal rebuke from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, show no sign of subsiding.
The nine- stanza, 69- line poem, What Must Be Said, appeared on Wednesday on the front of the culture section of the Munichbased newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Mixing lyrical turns of phrase with discussions of the need for international supervision of both Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs, it bluntly called Israel a threat to world peace for its warnings that it might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. By supplying weapons to Israel, including submarines, Germany risked being complicit in “a foreseeable crime,” Mr Grass wrote.
“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?” his poem asks. “Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow.”
In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung published on Friday, Mr Grass said he did not mean to attack Israel, but Mr Netanyahu’s policies. “I should have also brought that into the poem,” he said. Several leading publications reacted to the poem by calling Mr Grass an anti- Semite, while others dismissed it as nonsense. Israel reacted with widespread condemnation and fury. Mr Netanyahu issued a statement on Thursday calling Mr Grass’s comparison of Israel and Iran “shameful,” saying that it said more about Mr Grass than about Israel.
“It is Iran, not Israel, that is a threat to the peace and security of the world,” Mr Netanyahu said. “It is Iran, not Israel, that threatens other states with annihilation.” Long a self- proclaimed conscience of the German nation, urging Germans to confront the Nazi past, Mr Grass was branded a hypocrite after he revealed in 2006 for the first time that he served in the Waffen- SS at the end of World War II, when he was 17. Referring to that admission, Mr Netanyahu said it was “perhaps not surprising” that Mr Grass “cast the one and only Jewish state as the greatest threat to world peace and to oppose giving Israel the means to defend itself.” By arrangement with the New York Times