Roundtable on Günter Grass’s “Was gesagt werden muss” (What Must Be Said)

Introduction to the Roundtable

The contributions that follow were presented at the GSA meeting in Milwaukee in the autumn of 2012, commenting on the publication of Günter Grass’s poem, “Was gesagt werden muss,” that had taken place six months earlier.¹ They are therefore responses to the immediate controversy provoked by the poem and to the international political situation to which it refers. Yet this lack of historical distance is surely not a shortcoming. In this case at least, proximity has not diminished objectivity. What we have before us is not journalism in the pejorative sense: merely of the day, without any broader perspective. On the contrary, each of the four contributing scholars brings a rich apparatus of concepts and arguments to bear on the poem, the author, and the controversy. The contributions demonstrate in fact how much scholarship can bring to the table of contemporary debate—if scholars would only make the effort to do so. In this era in which a crisis of the humanities is constantly invoked, it is salutary to see how scholars can successfully contribute to public discussion by addressing a topic of urgent current concern. Was gesagt werden muss is that scholars can, evidently, find a public voice. Another name for this is the public humanities: stepping out of our specializations to join the debates of the day. Each of the four contributors demonstrates what we as historians or as scholars of literature can bring to the public sphere in order to display the real importance of the humanities.

Each of the contributors builds on his or her own expertise. First, historian Jeffrey Herf places Grass’s text squarely in the political landscape defined by both the Iranian threat to eliminate Israel and the German and international left’s hostility to Israel. His suggestion is that Grass is evidently prepared to witness a second Holocaust, as if in old age he were returning to the Waffen-SS of his youth. How much of this is a residual Nazism and how much a new, left-wing anti-Semitism? For Herf, the scandal of Grass’s poem is its blood libel, its willingness to accept the eradication of Israel on the premise that Israel is ultimately at fault: a deeply antisemitic motif. In addition, Herf demonstrates convincingly Grass’s consistent incapacity to think clearly about nuclear strategy, neither today nor during the missiles debates of the 1980s.

Agnes C. Mueller shows how difficult it is to read Grass’s poem as a poem. Does it qualify as literature only because of the name of the author? It lacks any of the formal features that characterize modern (or postmodern) prose poems or political poems. Grass simply fails to measure up to Brinkmann or Grünbein or Enzensberger, Fried or Brecht. Yet, devoid of poetic integrity, his controversial text nonetheless aspires to a distinctive sort of productivity, the production of Günter Grass himself, with his “last ink,” as an authoritative male author. The text announces his claim on a position of superiority over all others, especially those who can no longer write about the Holocaust. The victims are gone, but Grass survives, and he claims the last word in an act of ugly egocentrism.

Richard E. Schade redirects the focus away from the text to the author Grass in order to evaluate the affair within the framework of his literary and political production and the wider field of German authorship. Schade introduces a telling account of the response of Martin Walser, an author with a similar blind spot to his own antisemitism. In addition, this contribution supplies an important document, a circular letter in the wake of the publication in which Grass dismisses the criticisms he has faced as empty insults, in order to defend his own posturing, with no self-reflection or consideration of his critics’ concerns.

Stuart Taberner concludes the discussion with yet another approach, treating Grass and his writing as indicative of a certain type of public intellectual, the self-appointed conscience of the nation, who is nonetheless deeply out of touch...