Günter Grass dies at age 87
- By Heiko Khoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 14, 2015
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Original film poster of "The Tin Drum", an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Günter Grass. |
Like many Germans, he campaigned for the nation to break away from its Nazi past in the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to the more radical student protestors of the late 1960s, Grass advocated for the gradual improvement of society. He became politically engaged as a supporter of the Social Democratic Party and worked with Chancellor Willi Brandt, one of Germany's most popular and radical Social Democratic leaders of the post-1945 era.
Grass stood up to condemn the way how the present-day united German state was created after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He believed that German reunification imposed a form of colonization on East Germany, disempowering the people by transferring all economic and political power to the West German state. As a consequence of the inequities in Germany's reunification process, bitterness and division between East and West Germany continues today.
Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1999. When he wrote about his teenage war experience in the SS tank regiment in his autobiographical novel "Peeling an Onion," published in 2006, media circles accused him of hypocrisy. They alleged that his decade-long campaigns against former Nazis in power and authority was hollow, but their accusation was based on rather feeble foundations.
Even in old age, Grass's pen was able to create big political waves. In 2012 he wrote a poem called "What Must Be Said" attacking the German state for supplying submarines capable of launching nuclear weapons to the Israeli government. Grass shattered the German taboo on speaking out against Israel, condemning what he saw as their arrogant threats against Iran. Germany's post-war generations were encouraged to assume responsibility for the Holocaust, so consequently few German political and cultural figures dared to criticise Israel. His poem unleashed an international storm of protest. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu railed against what he called, "Günter Grass's shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran." Politicians and journalists in Germany and around the world joined in with squeals of indignation against Grass's poem. But how many modern poets can provoke such a global political controversy?
As Grass's strength waned, he kept his mind active. He continued writing by hand and typing his work on an old fashioned typewriter, shunning the modern communications technology that he blamed for alienating people from each other. Grass was a determined fighter for peace and social justice and a man who was able to penetrate into the psyche of our times.
The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm
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