Grass’s Poem “Was gesagt werden muss,” or, the Last Hurrah of the Aging Author

Obviously, Grass’s 2012 poem “Was gesagt werden muss” has caused a huge political controversy, not only in Germany but also across the world, and few of us would disagree that the political sentiments it expresses may be reckless, even irredeemable. Indeed, the poem seems to suggest that Israel might soon become responsible for a regional and even global conflagration of catastrophic proportions while simultaneously appearing to play down the existential threat to Israel’s survival posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.¹ Some have gone so far as to accuse Grass of gross antisemitism—a judgment I do not subscribe to, even as I perceive a blind spot in his attitude toward Jews (and indeed his Jewish characters) throughout his career—whereas as others have simply been astounded by his political naïveté and apparent deafness to nuance or the sensitivities of Middle East politics.²

But I want to focus here not so much on the politics of the poem as on its construction of Grass as a public figure. This is an aspect of the poem that has been more or less ignored in the course of the (understandable) furor that followed its publication in Süddeutsche Zeitung, La Repubblica, und El País in April 2012, and rapid translation and re-reproduction in other print media and across the Internet. Who is the Günter Grass who presents himself in this poem? And why does he seem so intent on provoking the kind of overwhelming response that he surely must have known would inevitably follow his intervention? And, related to this question of Grass’s self-presentation: Why is the poem so self-evidently (self-consciously?) bad? Does Grass intend this? And why would he intend this?

I think the first thing to note in this context is the overwhelming response the poem provoked globally. Scholars, unsurprisingly, have tended to focus on the criticism Grass received in the columns of “serious” newspapers and on the more elevated television news programs. And certainly there was a range of responses, from close textual analysis of the poem’s “psychology,” for example, Frank Schirrmacher’s dismissal of the piece as a “Dokument der ‘imaginären Rache’ einer sich moralisch lebenslang gekränkt fühlenden Generation”³ (a document of ‘imagined revenge’ of generation that has spent a lifetime feeling morally maligned) to more “political” readings such as Henryk Broder’s assertion that it is no more than an attempt to redirect Grass’s own “Schuld- und Schamgefühle”⁴ (feelings of guilt and shame) relating to his belatedly admitted Waffen-SS service, to Jeffrey Herf’s perhaps justifiable moral outrage in The New Republic.⁵ Elsewhere, the poem was discussed in more general terms as evidence (or not) of the power of literature to intervene in contemporary affairs.

But we should not ignore the fact that just a few days after it was published, the poem generated more than 200,000 hits on Google and there were thousands of tweets on Twitter. So, Grass—the then eighty-four-year-old German writer—was most discussed not in the relatively rarefied formats of the international news media, but in those most modern and (for most people) most easily accessible of all public spaces, that is, in the Internet and the new social media.

So, an immediate question might be: What is the role of the public intellectual in an age in which the Internet and social media have fundamentally changed the nature of the public sphere? How does a politically-engaged writer like Grass position himself in an era in which his privileged access to the public sphere is no longer automatic? In short, Grass’s poem interests me to the extent that it reveals something about his posture as a public intellectual, reacting to the changing nature of public discourse. (Here, I’m using posture in the sense elaborated by Jérôme Meizoz: the way in which a public intellectual stylizes him- or herself for public consumption, as it were.⁶ But Bourdieu would be another obvious point...