Perhaps exaggerated who accused Günter Grass hypocritical when in 2006 it became known that he had been a member of the military forces of Nazism. It was 1944: Grass was 17, came from a Catholic family who lived in the former Free City of Danzig and the future writer had nothing else to do at the height of war. In an article published in The New Yorker in 2007, Grass recalled the time: “There was no pressure from above. Nor do I feel the need to mitigate guilt for, say, doubt the infallibility of the Führer with my desire to volunteer (…) The service was not voluntary but compulsory for kids my age, but what we experienced as a release of our school routine and we accepted their undemanding drills “. In February 1945 Grass began his work in the soldier. He said he did not shoot once; there is only certain that he was wounded on 29 April of that year, shortly before the fall of Berlin, was discharged. The great soldier Grass, more fond of fine arts weapons, was three shallow months in the military.
Of course, there were those who criticized one of the moral beacons of Germany, who had tried to rescue the memory of the war through his numerous novels and poems, he had had dealings with Nazi glebe. In his village, which by then was called Gdansk, asked that his condition was withdrawn born in those lands. His biographer said it was “the end of a moral institution.” A conservative lance journalist told the newspaper Der Spiegel: “After 60 years, this confession comes a little late. I do not understand how someone who for decades has emerged as a moral authority, a very smug indeed, could express this. ” But perhaps the most plausible explanation, which does not sound justification or excuse, gave the writer John Irving: it is impossible to judge the whole life of a person for something that happened in his youth
As it happened to them. many Germans, Grass was part of a huge movement that saw nothing wrong with his overwhelming patriotism. It would be easy to judge, now, acknowledging all errors Nazi era, that Grass was part of a fundamental machinery of horror. By then it was much harder (and more so in wartime) recognize the faults of a government that had seized all the means at its disposal to precisely hide those misfortunes. It was three months and Grass retired, was captured by US forces and released in 1946. Since then, with the own hobby to recover the time gone through the combination of paragraphs and paragraphs, Grass was devoted to literature.
He was part of a literary group whose extensive German name (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) in Spanish means something like “deal with the past”. Discuss with him. Face him. Come to terms. In short: give your good slap. At the end of the fifties he published a book of poetry and three plays, but was recognized by the English-speaking world and the rest of the West (or that strange hint in history called the West) by The Tin Drum, his first novel, after initiation of a trilogy completed by Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. The three novels might well be summed up with the concept that gave the Swedish Academy on Grass in 1999, when he handed the Nobel Prize for Literature: “In his excavation of the past Günter Grass goes deeper than the rest and unearths the convoluted roots of good and evil. ” In the same statement, there is a phrase from Dog Years sounding summary of his philosophy: “While God was still at school, in the heavenly court had the idea to create the world with his classmate, the talented imp “. The commentary is accurate; There subterranean forces, which atrabancan over the fate of humans, combined endlessly. In the first chapter of The Tin Drum, a mentally ill describes how her grandmother and grandfather met. His grandfather was a fugitive; chased by a couple of gendarmes (tall and skinny), he (low and wide) decides to hide under the skirts of a woman who sews potatoes. It is the fire, is the sweat is burning weeds around. Nestled among the foothills, and in an arbitrary home, hunted man decides to pull his pants down and make love to the newly known. The mental patient described the act as well, with subtlety: “… my grandmother, who was there as if rooted, throwing sighs, withdrew the pupils under eyelids so let see the whites of the eyes and recited the names cachubos all the saints … “.
In his political commentaries, however, had more emphasis Grass and approached the obvious. As Ossip Mandelstam, who wrote in the early years of the Russian Revolution a poem against Stalin, though less lyricism, Grass published in 2012 a political poem accusing, by name, to Israel to become a nuclear power and unbalance “world peace already brittle”. He wrote in that poem of 68 verses, entitled What to say: “For there to say / what tomorrow could be too late, / and that -suficientemente incriminated as Germans / we may be complicit in a crime / that is predictable, so our share of the blame / could not be extinguished. ” There were those who said it was an anti-Semite and Nazi past was revealed incessantly in this lyrical statement. There were those who said staff had taken as an innocent collision with the Israeli public. Exaggerated. Few, however, perceived the essential: it was a lousy poem
.
No comments:
Post a Comment