Günter Grass y el comercio mundial de odio y mentiras

octubre 7, 2006 | 1 Comentario

Cuando estalló el escándalo Günter Grass, el verano pasado, comencé considerándolo una víctima inocente del Terror de Estado. Algunos matices de su entrevista original con la Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) establecían un paralelismo entre nazis y comunistas que algo tenía de revelador. El corresponsal en Berlín del Times londinense aportaba matices inquietantes.

 

Su nueva polémica con la FAZ es algo todavía más turbio, y se confunde con el comercio mundial de la mentira más cínica sobre los crímenes más odiosos. La crítica del Times Literary Supplement [TLS, 27 sep. 06] destruye mis últimas ilusiones. Ian Brunskill deja al descubierto el rostro más torcido de un personaje moralmente siniestro.

 

A título de recordatorio:

 

Times Online. September 27, 2006

Grass’s added ingredient

Ian Brunskill

Günter Grass
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel
480pp. Seidl. 24 euros.

For me”, Günter Grass told his biographer Michael Jürgs, “my own biography has only ever been interesting if taken together with historical currents, turning points, transitions and ruptures such as 1945.” This is less of a limitation than it would have been for many authors, for as Jürgs observed, Grass’s biography might be seen as a whole German history in itself; that is why it was so important to get it right.


As we now know, neither Jürgs, in the readable Life of Grass he published in 2002, nor Grass himself, in his statements over the years, got it right in one small but crucial respect. Last month, on the eve of publication of the autobiographical Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), Grass gave an interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which it emerged that, far from serving in the Wehrmacht, or as a young Flakhelfer on air-raid duties, as he had previously (if not entirely consistently) led his readers to believe, he had briefly, in the last months of the war, been a teenage member of the Waffen SS.

For Grass’s critics the revelation was a gift, and Grass’s critics have never been in short supply. The ubiquitous loudmouth with the abrasive manner and bushy plebeian moustache, who for so long had rubbed fastidious noses in unwelcome historical truths, was now found to have been concealing an unwelcome historical truth of his very own – for more than sixty years. The late historian Joachim Fest declared that he “wouldn’t buy a second-hand car from this man”. Others suggested that Grass’s career was over, that he should give back or be stripped of his Nobel Prize for Literature and his honorary citizenship of Gdansk, that his opinions on moral and political matters were henceforth worthless, and that even the works that made his name were now devalued and would have to be read in a more sceptical light. Many seemed ready to believe that Grass had timed his revelations as a publicity stunt, in a cynical attempt to shift a few more books.


For the cultural commentator and Spiegel journalist Reinhard Mohr, a prominent selfappointed spokesman of the generation of Germans who came to maturity in the 1970s, there was more at stake. Just as the world had seemed to be growing accustomed to a younger, more confident Germany, and a younger more confident Germany was growing accustomed to itself, here yet again was the miserable spectacle of distinguished elderly Germans caught up, and caught out, in wrestling with their hideous past. Mohr felt scorn and revulsion, and not just for Grass himself: “Grass’s generation is a poisoned generation, a generation living with schizophrenia. On the one hand they have completed a radical political and intellectual reckoning with the Nazi regime; on the other they are incapable of articulating in similarly clear and unmistakable terms their own acknowledged feelings of shame and guilt, which are often diffuse and ambivalent. They would rather regard themselves as victims of an unjust public opinion”.

One leading member of that older generation who spoke out in Grass’s defence was the writer Martin Walser, whose own views have diverged significantly from those of his former associate in the Gruppe 47, not least on such subjects as German Unification and remembrance of the Holocaust. He thought it little wonder that Grass had remained silent until now: “We certainly don’t have a climate here that encourages people to give a frank account of themselves or to speak in unconstrained fashion about what they experienced. It’s a poisonous climate of suspicion and defamation”.

As for Grass himself, asked in a television interview why he had concealed the truth for so long, he made little attempt to defend himself. “It lay buried within me. I can’t really give a precise reason. It has always occupied me, I was always conscious of it, and I thought that what I had done as a writer, as a citizen of this country – all of it signifying the opposite of what had shaped me in my early years during the Nazi era – I thought that that was enough”. If people wanted to judge him, then let them judge. But first they should read his book.

Indeed they should, and not just for the insights it offers into how he has lived his life and made his art. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel is one of Grass’s most accessible and engaging works. It tells the story of his formative years, the two decades from roughly 1939 to 1959, from a childhood in wartime Danzig, through the terrors of war and the chaos of post-war new beginnings to the publication of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and the sudden, surprising breakthrough to international fame.

Grass treats – has always treated – the conventions of literary reminiscence and historical recollection as suspect and flawed. Autobiographical truth, he has said before, all too easily gives way to “the old literary lies”. The past is elusive, memory play tricks, the self of narrative is a stranger to the self who writes. This, rather than the shiftiness more hostile critics might be inclined to suspect, may explain why, in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Grass seems often to be concerned less with events themselves than with the difficulties involved in recalling and recounting them. Not the least of those difficulties, in Grass’s case, is that so many of these events have been recalled and recounted by him before. Key episodes here will be known already to anyone who has read almost any of Grass’s work. Even the central metaphor, of peeling the onion of memory, layer by layer, is one he has previously used to describe his compulsive literary reworking of the material of his life.

But if this memoir evokes once more a familiar world, it does so in scenes of marvellous vividness. From the claustrophobia of respectable poverty, the young Günter is sent out by his mother to charm or shame the customers of the family’s grocery store into paying at least some of their debts. Learning fear under fire, he hides in a wood, caught between the advancing Red Army and the German field police who are hanging suspected deserters from every tree. Wounded in April 1945, hospitalized, then captured by the Americans, he ends his short war without firing a single shot. In a prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria, he takes an abstract cookery course – one with no food – where a master chef extracts flavour from nothing and serves up glorious visions, rolled and stuffed and sauced; this last episode, itself a banquet conjured with nothing but words, is Grass at his earthy, flamboyant best.

Released from captivity in April 1946, he eagerly embarks on peacetime life driven by three great hungers – for food, for art, for girls, not necessarily in that order, and sometimes all at once. He finds work as a potash miner, an apprenticeship as a monumental mason, then classes in drawing and sculpture in Düsseldorf. He is reunited with his parents and sister, refugees who have lost all they possessed. He meets his first wife, the Swiss ballet student Anna Schwarz. There are nights of dancing, jazz, poetry readings in smoke-filled rooms. In 1954, his mother dies, aged fifty-six.

Everywhere Grass is eager to point out parallels, to explain how real people, places and events turned into characters, settings and scenes, and how in the process their reality was transformed. He shows just how much of his life went into his work, but he also attempts to show how the young man who lived that life became the man who wrote those early books – and the man, different again, who writes this one now. It is the story of a life given up to fiction, and it suggests that fiction, for Grass, may always have offered the greater truth.

The narrative, not least in the account of the teenager’s war service and experience of combat, is full of imprecisions. The writing, often so exuberant, is on occasion oddly tentative and constrained. Words fail. Memory falters. Uncertain recollection gives way to what seems like fantastical whimsy, in an encounter with a fellow POW in whom Grass wants us to see a young Joseph Ratzinger, or a jam session with an ageing Louis Armstrong. But as an attempt to consider what it means to recall the past, the whole convinces and coheres. Despite the frequent evasions, there is no sense, on the central question of his Nazi past, that the author is using the lacunae of memory and elisions of narration as an all too easy means of exculpating himself.

Grass knows perfectly well what he did, and what he did not do. As a boy, he was a fanatical Nazi, completely convinced both of the justice of the cause and of the likelihood of victory almost to the very end. He has made no bones about that. At the age of fifteen he tried to volunteer for U-Boat service, but was turned down as too young. Assigned first to fatigue duties with a work company, he was eventually called up for military service around the time of his seventeenth birthday. On arrival for training he discovered that he was joining not the Wehrmacht but the Jörg von Frundsberg armoured division of the Waffen SS.


Most of this seems plausible enough, forgivable even. The historian Hans Mommsen has explained that by late 1944 the Waffen SS was a far cry from the fanatical volunteer elite of its conception. As soon as Grass was of an age to be called up, his obvious zeal for the cause, demonstrated already in his precocious attempt to join the U-Boats, would have been enough to single him out as a possible recruit to a division by now desperate for whatever fighting material it could get. Even the current secretary of the Frundsberg’s old comrades association has supported the picture Grass paints in his memoir, of a force in tatters, no longer an effective combat unit in more than name.

Grass makes no excuses. If he could honestly say that he “didn’t know”, it was only because he chose not to ask. By the time he gives us his account of his own wartime experience here, he has already told us the stories of a schoolfriend’s father, a staunch Social Democrat who listened in secret to the BBC news each night; of an unpopular schoolmaster who disappeared one day, probably denounced by a pupil; of a boy in his work company who, as a Jehovah’s Witness, was persecuted for his refusal to bear arms and his insistence that “we don’t do that sort of thing”. Whatever the seventeen-year-old Grass did, he knows – and knew even then – that there were alternatives. The guilt and shame have stayed with him.


Has his late confession done what Grass’s detractors hope and his admirers fear? There will be some who don’t see why it should or how it could; Christa Wolf, though supporting Grass as he once supported her, cannot have been alone in saying: “He was never a moral authority for me”. Others, paraphrasing Brecht, may pity the land that needs moral authorities like these. Nevertheless, if the controversy surrounding publication of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel has indeed dented Grass’s reputation as conscience of the nation, Praeceptor Germaniae, moralische Instanz, then that may be no bad thing; not even for him.

When Grass saw Willy Brandt (for whom he had campaigned) as Federal Chancellor in 1970 kneel in atonement at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, there is no doubt that he knew what real moral authority was, and where it came from; and that he knew he could never claim anything quite like that himself. Brandt was a living embodiment of heroic resistance to Hitler; Grass owed such influence as he had acquired to the eloquence and energy with which he exploited his literary fame. Perhaps that is why, in involving himself in the social and political questions of the day, Grass was generally at pains to make clear that – unlike many of his predecessors in a land that has sometimes taken its authors more seriously than they may have deserved – he spoke and acted not as Dichter or Denker, looking down from the cultural heights, but as concerned, committed Bürger: Citizen Grass.


There was an element of affectation here. But perhaps not any more. Beim Häuten der Zwiebel is the story of a life all written out. After reading it, after seeing how its author, obsessively, through six decades, has turned life into art and then back again, it is hard not to feel that, even as he was addressing the nation, Grass was really engaged in an endless conversation with himself. Mario Vargas Llosa, an author whose political engagement has been if anything even more active than Grass’s own, put it well. Asked about the controversy, the conservative Peruvian novelist was succinct, but not unsympathetic. This, he said, has been all about “people’s image of the author that Grass has desperately tried to be for his whole life: one who expresses his opinions on every issue, and for whom life – as literature – adapts to one’s dreams and ideas. A man for whom the writer is the absolute number one, simultaneously entertaining, teaching, giving orientation and guidance. Dear Günter Grass, we have blissfully carried this fiction around with us long enough. It’s over now”. We’ll see.

Posted in Literaturas, Culturas, Terror, Industrias culturales, Alemania, Personajes, Crítica literaria, Nazismo | [PRINT] | Trackback


Comentarios

1 Comentario

  1. maty, octubre 7, 2006 - 10:42 pm
    Usando K-Meleon K-Meleon 1.0 en Windows Windows XP

    Hablando de nazis, comunistas y… el postcomunismo:

    LIBERTAD DIGITAL (EFE) Asesinan a Ana Politkovskaya, periodista muy crítica con Putin, en su casa de Moscú

    La libertad de expresión, especialmente para aquellos periodistas críticos con Vladimir Putin, sigue siendo una de las grandes deficiencias de la pseudodemocracia que se ha instalado en la Rusia de la era postsoviética. Este sábado la periodista Ana Politkovskaya, una de las informadoras más críticas con la política del Kremlin, fue asesinada en su domicilio en Moscú. Politkovskaya, que había sido amenzada por los servicios secretos rusos, es autora de libros como “La Rusia de Putin”, “Terror en Chechenia” o “La guerra sucia”. La policía, que encontró una pistola y cuatro casquillos de bala en el ascensor, busca a un joven de estatura media y complexión delgada, que llevaba sobre la cabeza una gorra de béisbol negra.

    En unos meses, el frío invierno y la creciente necesidad europea del gas ruso… silencio.

    *********************************************************************************************

    antorcha.net Una temporada en el infierno, por Arthur Rimbaud (novela en HTML)

    Antaño, si recuerdo bien, mi vida era un festín en el que se abrían todos los corazones, en el que todos los vinos hacían torrentes.

    Una noche, senté a la Belleza sobre mis rodillas. - Y la encontré acerba. - Y la injurié.

    Me armé contra la justicia.

    Y escapé. ¡Oh hechiceras, oh miseria, oh aversión, es a ustedes solamente que confié mi tesoro!

    Logré diluir en mi espíritu toda esperanza humana. Sobre todo júbilo, para estrangularlo, hice el salto cauteloso de la bestia feroz.

    Llamé a los verdugos para morder la culata de sus fusiles mientras perecía. Llamé a los flagelos para ahogar con arena, la sangre. La desgracia fue mi dios. Me revolqué en el barro. Me sequé con el aire del crimen. Aposté con la locura.

    Y la primavera me brindó la risa repugnante del idiota.

    Pero, cuando estaba casi por decir adiós, resolví buscar la llave que me abriera las puertas del festín antiguo, donde quizás recuperaría el apetito.

    La caridad es esa llave. - ¡Esta afirmación comprueba que estuve en un sueño!

    Permanecerás como una hiena, etc … exclama el demonio que me corona con duermevelas tan amables. Consigue la muerte con todos tus apetitos, y tu egoísmo y todos los pecados capitales.

    ¡Ah! He tenido demasiado: - Pero, querido Satán, se lo suplico, ¡tenga la pupila menos irritada! Y esperando esas vilezas que se retrasan, para usted que ama en el escritor la ausencia de facultades descriptivas o instructivas, le arranco algunas hojas ominosas de mi carnet de condenado.

    Vale la pena echar un buen vistazo al resto de libros que han colgado en la red.

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