Which Germans support Gunter Grass?
I've written a couple of times about the ongoing outrage here over Gunter Grass, the German novelist and self-confessed Waffen SS member (one of the many things I learned from reading the article I am about to discuss), who wrote a poem accusing Israel of seeking to exterminate Iran(!) and blaming all of the world's problems on the Jewish state.Benny Weinthal is an Israeli journalist who is currently writing from Germany. In this piece for Fox News, he looks at German reaction to the outrage surrounding Grass. It's not pretty.
An online survey conducted by the German edition of the Financial Times revealed that 57% of the respondents found Grass’s “theses about Israel” correct. Only 8% percent of the roughly 22,000 respondents found his statements to be either “anti-Semitic” or “insane.”I know, I know. Online polls are self-selecting and tend to be dominated by the extremes, but...
Germany’s national television ARD showed 51% percent of its online respondents saying they “completely agree” with Grass.
How is it possible for a man with such baggage to enjoy support from so many Germans?
Germans of almost all political colors show an alarming hatred of Israel.So do Grass' views reflect mainstream German thought, or don't they?
In 2011, a think tank affiliated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party issued a report revealing that 47.7 percent of respondents agreed that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” A BBC poll in 2007 showed that a staggering 77 percent of Germans harbored anti-Israel sentiments -- numbers higher than those of any other country in Europe.
Grass’s principal parliamentary support came the German Left party deputy Wolfgang Gehrcke, who serves as the party’s foreign policy spokesman.I think we can safely say that after 70 years, the Germans still don't know how to respond to the Holocaust and do so with a mixture of continued anti-Semitism on the one hand, and shame on the other. Perhaps this sums it up best:
He said Grass has the “courage” to say what is silenced. In the past Gehrcke has participated in pro- Hamas and pro-Hezbollah rallies and has compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
Unsurprisingly, the Left Party has struggled over the years to recognize Israel’s right to exist. While the anti-fascist Left party spokesman celebrated Grass, the extreme right-wing fascist party—the National Democrats (NDP)—also praised the author. Günter Grass has earned credit for his “liberating break of a taboo” by criticizing the “aggressive Jewish state,” wrote the NPD Saxony state politician Jürgen Gansel.
German debates over anti-Semitism after the Holocaust have traditionally been anchored in guilt and shame, and in that department, Grass is no anomaly. The German writer and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder neatly captured this phenomenon in his 1975 play “Garbage: The City and Death,” in which the character Hans von Gluck bemoans, “And it’s the Jew’s fault, because he makes us feel guilty because he exists. If he’d stayed where he came from, or if they had gassed him, I would sleep better.”Read the whole thing. Not unlike many other countries in Europe, anti-Semitism in Germany is not dead. It has just found a new focus.
Which may help to explain Grass’ peculiar obsession with Israel. Henryk M. Broder, a best-selling German author and critic of Grass, argues that the debate has transformed Germany’s Nazi-era slogan “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”’ into “Israel Is Our Misfortune.”
Commenting on Grass on the front page of the large daily Die Welt during the first week of the mushrooming row, Broder said Grass is “the prototype of the educated anti-Semite who means well toward Jews. He is hounded by guilt and feelings of shame but at the same time driven to reconcile history.”
...
The Grass debacle has prompted Marieluise Beck, a Green Party deputy in the Bundestag, to quote the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex’s quip that “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Labels: anti-Semitism, Gunter Grass
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:43 PM
6 Comments:
Carl, "an alarming hatred of Israel"? Why is this a surprise"?
I think that little has changed in Europe since 1945. Yes, until recently, it hasn't been politically correct to express hatred toward Jews/Israelis openly. However, the true feelings of most Europeans are now socially acceptable. Keep in mind that European children, over the age of 5 in 1945, are now adults, aged 65 or older.
They were heavily influenced by their parents, and in turn, they've influenced their own kids, most of whom are now adults. Distrust and/or outright hatred of Jews is, sadly, a constant among most Europeans.
Nothing has changed, or is going to change, significantly. A little bit of guilt shortly after World War II, may have kept the worst hatred in check, temporarily. Those days are long gone.
There is no solution to this hatred in my opinion. It's part of the human condition. The only hope is that Israel will maintain its relative strength among its neighbours. It would also help, I suspect, if she were to gain a reputation as unpredictably ruthless.
It seems to me that Jews/Israel need much less of being "a light unto the nations", and a lot more of being feared by all.
Carl, "an alarming hatred of Israel"? Why is this a surprise"?
I think that little has changed in Europe since 1945. Yes, until recently, it hasn't been politically correct to express hatred toward Jews/Israelis openly. However, the true feelings of most Europeans are now socially acceptable. Keep in mind that European children, over the age of 5 in 1945, are now adults, aged 65 or older.
They were heavily influenced by their parents, and in turn, they've influenced their own kids, most of whom are now adults. Distrust and/or outright hatred of Jews is, sadly, a constant among most Europeans.
Nothing has changed, or is going to change, significantly. A little bit of guilt shortly after World War II, may have kept the worst hatred in check, temporarily. Those days are long gone.
There is no solution to this hatred in my opinion. It's part of the human condition. The only hope is that Israel will maintain its relative strength among its neighbours. It would also help, I suspect, if she were to gain a reputation as unpredictably ruthless.
It seems to me that Jews/Israel need much less of being "a light unto the nations", and a lot more of being feared by all.
The final gasp of German hatred before that whole generation dies out and Holocaust denial becomes the official policy of Germany and most of Europe.
Dear Carl in Jerusalem,
let me try to enlighten you just a tad.
Grass accuses the Netanjahu government of planning a first strike [pre-emptive], a matter that is not in dispute. N. was just here in the USA seeking immediate backing from Obama. He was told to bide his time but got a load of bunker busting bombs. The fact that the Netanjahu government has been planning a first strike has been known for years, and indeed such a first strike could mushroom into who knows what. I believe it is the Israeli government treatment of the Palestinians that ha s earned it the unfavorable opinion, of course not only of a lot of Germans. As to Grass and the SS, he was drafted at age 17 in 1944, and so served only a few months. If you said no you would be shot, o.k. For this see Massies piece on Grass in the London Telegraph. In general, it is a good thing to read and quote from a poem before commenting on it. http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2012/04/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said.html contains daily updated links the 100 + different positive and negative positions taken on the Grass anti-war poem controversy. I myself am doing a summary that may be done by the end of the week. However, it looks as though this might get to be a bigger story than just Grass and his poem.
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Summa
However your thoughts and the articles of faith of all the Grasses in the world have maintained with 100% absolute certainty that the Evil Jews (tm) will bomb the peaceful peaceloving Persians of peace, tomorrow, 8am local time no exceptions bet the farm it's a stone lock. And they've maintained this with a straight face even, for the last 15 years nonstop. At some point even Sy Hersh has to be forced to admit that not only is he WRONG, he's simply projecting so as to concoct a reason for a new Holocaust he can live with.
But Grass's objection has little if anything to do with Iran. It has to do with the fact that Germans can never forgive the Jews for not having been obliterated out of recorded history. That the record of the Reich's evil still exists and they were condemned by their own words and deeds. That is the shame Grass can't accept. So he has to make the Jew the Eternal Jew in order to reconcile his own actions with how the world views them. Any fool can see that Grass is implying
"See, we weren't so wrong after all to try to wipe them all out. Now see what they've done!!!"
So de-Nazification was a success then.
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