Guenter Grass Denounces Globalization as a New Totalizing Ideology

UPDATE: Well, the original title is wrong: Guenter Grass is not minimizing the holocaust by comparing Nazi Germany to globalization. And I should not call him crypto-Nazi scum.

But there is, still, something very wrong with claiming not that the neoliberal approach to economic reform is wrong, and that the analyses of people like me and my friends are flawed, but that we and I are the standard-bearers of a new totalitarianism. There is something very wrong with claiming that that the decision of the Social Democratic Party to push Harz IV is not a mistake, but rather a reflection of the Social Democratic Party's subservience to multinational capital.

Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic.

---

Well, well, well...

I find, in my New York Times this morning, this Nobel Literature laureate closing his article, "The Gravest Generation," with: "We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology... we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces."

I confess that I knew that there were Germans who asserted the moral equivalence (both "totalitarianisms") of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich and today's political-economic order--but I had (naively) thought that they were limited (in the past) to stooges of Stalin and ex-Nazis, and (in the present) to those who dressed in SS uniforms in the privacy of their bedrooms. And I had thought that even they stayed quiet around the anniversaries of the downfall of the Nazi regime: on this and other such anniversary weekends, attempts to minimize the crimes of the Nazis by false comparisons do rise from the level of lies to crimes. Consider:

• Grass's scorn for the "complacent official speeches [calling May 8] liberation day" and for the early post-WWII "spokesmen for the rhetoric of liberation... self-appointed anti-fascists" echoes Nazi scorn for the November criminals who had accepted that Germany lost World War I and tried to build the Social Democratic Weimar Republic.
• Grass's scorn for the "Federal Republic's almost unconditional subservience to the United States" echoes Nazi demands for a Germany freed from the chains and limitations of the Treaty of Versailles.
• Grass's scorn for the Bundestag--"our freely elected members of Parliament... no longer free to decide... lobbyists... multifarious interests... disharmony... Parliament is no longer sovereign... banks and multinational corporations"--is the classical fascist condemnation of the cretinism of parliaments: once the people's representatives are no longer the representatives of the people, you need to find alternative sources of legitimacy, like the Fuehrer Principle.
• Grass's scorn for establishment politicians who are the real enemy--"the threat to the state, or what should be regarded as Public Enemy No. 1, comes not from right-wing radicalism but rather, from the impotence of politics, which leaves citizens exposed and unprotected from the dictates of the economy."

But what creeped me out above all else were tow was one additional rhetorical move by Grass. In the first, he perversely asserts that Germany is in fact morally elevated above Japan, Turkey, Spain, France, and Britain:

Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere - I'm thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers - we have not shaken off the burden of our past...

The second is far uglier. The second It is ugly. It is an absence: Grass writes 2191 words. Not one of them contains the syllable "Jew." That cannot be an accident.

It was Hermann Goering who said, "A thousand years shall pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased." Yet here after only sixty Guenter Grass finds the particular Nazi animus against Jews not worthy of mention.

Crypto-Nazi scum.

[Jacob Levy has pointed out to me that the Soviet and East German narratives of the Nazis had no place for the Jews either.]

---

May 7, 2005
The Gravest Generation
By GÜNTER GRASS
Lübeck, Germany

TOMORROW, it will be 60 years to the day since the German Reich's unconditional surrender. That is equivalent to a working life with a pension to look forward to. It goes so far back that memory, that wide-meshed sieve, is in danger of forgetting it.

Sixty years ago, after being wounded in the chaotic retreat in Lausitz, I lay in a hospital with a flesh wound in my right thigh and a bean-sized shell splinter in my right shoulder. The hospital was in Marienbad, a military hospital town that had been occupied by American soldiers a few days earlier, at the same time as Soviet forces were occupying the neighboring town of Karlsbad. In Marienbad, on May 8, I was a naïve 17-year-old who had believed in the ultimate victory right to the end. Those who had survived the mass murder in the German concentration camps could regard themselves as liberated, although they were in no physical condition to enjoy their freedom. But for me it was not the hour of liberation; rather, I was beset by the empty feeling of humiliation following total defeat.

When May 8 comes round again and is celebrated in complacent official speeches as liberation day, this can only be in hindsight, especially as we Germans did little if anything for our liberation. In the initial postwar years our lives were determined by hunger and cold, the misery of refugees, the displaced and bombed-out. In all four zones occupied by the wartime allies - Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States - the only way to manage the ever increasing crush of the more than 12 million Germans who had fled from, or been driven out of, East and West Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and the Sudetenland, was to force them into our own cramped living rooms.

Whenever the question is posed, "What can we Germans be proud of?", the first thing we should mention is this essential achievement - even though it was forced on us. We had hardly become used to freedom when compulsion had to be applied. As a result, in both German states, huge long-term camps for refugees and displaced persons were avoided. The risk of building up feelings of hate was thereby diverted, as was the desire for revenge engendered by years of camp life, which, as today's world shows, can result in terrorism and counterterrorism.

Even then there were spokesmen for the rhetoric of liberation. So many self-appointed anti-fascists suddenly set the tone, so much so that one was entitled to ask: how had Hitler been able to make headway against such strong resistance? Dirty linen was quickly washed clean, with people being absolved of all responsibility. Counterfeiters were busy coining new expressions and putting them into circulation. "Unconditional surrender" was changed to "collapse." Although in business, law and in the rapidly re-emerging schools and universities, even the diplomatic service, many former National Socialists maintained their hereditary wealth, stayed in office, continued to hold onto their university chairs and eventually continued their careers in politics, it was claimed that we were starting from "zero hour" or square one.

A particularly infamous distortion of facts can be seen even today in speeches and publications, with the crimes perpetrated by Germans described as "misdeeds perpetrated in the name of the German people." In addition, language was used in two different ways to herald the future division of the country. In the Soviet-occupied zone, the Red Army had liberated Germany from the fascist terror all by itself; in the Western occupied zones, the honor of having freed not only Germany but the whole of Europe from Nazi domination was shared exclusively by the Americans, the British and the French.

In the cold war that quickly followed, German states that had existed since 1949 consistently fell to one or other power bloc, whereupon the governments of both national entities sought to present themselves as model pupils of their respective dominating powers. Forty years later, during the glasnost period, it was in fact the Soviet Union that broke up the Democratic Republic, which had by that point become a burden. The Federal Republic's almost unconditional subservience to the United States was broken for the first time when the Social Democratic-Green ruling coalition decided to make use of the freedom given to us in sovereign terms 60 years ago, by refusing to allow German soldiers to participate in the Iraq war.

THE question today, then, is have we dealt carefully with the freedom that we did not win, but was given to us? Have the citizens of West Germany properly compensated the citizens of the former Democratic Republic, who, after all, had to bear the main burden of the war begun and lost by all Germans? And a further question: is our parliamentary democracy still sufficiently sovereign as a guarantor of freedom of action to act on the problems facing us in the 21st century?

Fifteen years after signing the treaty on unification, we can no longer conceal that despite the financial achievements, German unity has essentially been a failure. Petty calculation prevented the government of the time from submitting to the citizens of both states a new constitution relevant to the endeavors of Germany as a whole. It is therefore hardly surprising that people in the former East Germany should regard themselves as second-class Germans.

The jobless rate is twice as high as in the former West Germany. West German arrogance had no respect for people with East German résumés. The mass migration, feared from the beginning, is happening now, daily. Whole areas of the country, its cities and its villages, are being emptied. After the Treuhandanstalt, the entity responsible for privatizing East Germany, had completed its bargain sales, West German industry and banks withheld the necessary investment and loans and, consequently, no jobs were created. Here, fine exhortations have been of little use. To right this skewed situation, only Parliament, the lawmakers, can help. Which brings us back to the question of whether parliamentary democracy is able to act.

Now, I believe that our freely elected members of Parliament are no longer free to decide. The customary party pressures are not particularly present in Germany; it is, rather, the ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests that constricts and influences the Federal Parliament and its democratically elected members, placing them under pressure and forcing them into disharmony, even when framing and deciding the content of laws. Consequently, Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It is steered by the banks and multinational corporations - which are not subject to any democratic control.

What's needed is a democratic desire to protect Parliament against the pressures of the lobbyists by making it inviolable. But are our parliamentarians still sufficiently free to make a decision that would bring radical democratic constraint? Or is our freedom now no more than a stock market profit?

We all are witnesses to the fact that production is being demolished worldwide, that so-called hostile and friendly takeovers are destroying thousands of jobs, that the mere announcement of measures like the dismissal of workers and employees makes share prices rise, and this is regarded unthinkingly as the price to be paid for "living in freedom."

The consequences of this development disguised as globalization are clearly coming to light and can be read from the statistics. With the consistently high number of jobless, which in Germany has now reached five million, and the equally constant refusal of industry to create jobs, despite demonstrably higher earnings, especially from exports, the hope of full employment has evaporated.

Older employees, who still had years of work left in them, are pushed into early retirement. Young people are denied the skills for entering the world of work. Even worse, with complaints that an aging population is a threat and simultaneous demands, repeated parrot-fashion, to do more for young people and education, the Federal Republic - still a rich country - is permitting, to a shameful extent, the growth of what is called "child poverty."

All this is now accepted as if divinely ordained, accompanied at most by the customary national grumbles. Worse, those who point to this state of affairs and to the people forced into social oblivion are at best ridiculed by slick young journalists as "social romantics," but usually vilified as "do-gooders." Questions about the reasons for the growing gap between rich and poor are dismissed as "the politics of envy." The desire for justice is ridiculed as utopian. The concept of "solidarity" is relegated to the dictionary's list of foreign words.

THOUGH we initially did not know what to do with our freedom when we were given it 60 years ago, we gradually made use of this gift. We learned democracy and in doing so proved star pupils, because after all we were incontrovertibly German. With the benefit of hindsight, what was crammed into us through lectures was enough to get us a reasonable end-of-term report. We learned the interplay between government and opposition, whereupon long periods of government ultimately proved arid. The much lauded and reviled generation of '68 produced a different kind of political leaders and ultimately also tolerance. We had to acknowledge that our burdens could not be cast aside, they are passed by parents to children and that our German past, however much we travel and export, comes back to haunt us. Neo-Nazis repeatedly brought us into disrepute. Even so, we felt that democracy was here to stay.

It had to withstand several challenges. After the debris had been cleared and disposed of in both German states, reconstruction in the East proceeded under the constraints of the Stalinist system; but in the West, it took place under favorable conditions. What retrospectively is called the "economic miracle" was not, however, the result of any individual achievement but was won by many. Included in that number are displaced persons and refugees, those who had in fact to start at square one in terms of material possessions. We must not forget the contribution of foreign workers, initially politely called "guest workers." In the rebuilding phase businessmen were exemplary in investing every penny of profit into job creation. The trade unions and businesses were clearly aware of the decay of the Weimar Republic, so they were forced to compromise and ensure social equality.

With so much toil and profit-chasing, however, the past was in danger of being forgotten. Only in the 60's did we meet the second challenge, when writers and then the student protest movement began to ask questions about everything that the war generation would sooner forget. The protest movement strove for revolution but was paid off with reform; without it, we would still be living in the claustrophobic fog of the postwar years under Adenauer.

The third challenge arose when the Berlin Wall fell. The two German states had existed for four decades more against than beside each other. As there was no willingness on the Western side to offer equal rights to the East, the unity of the country has so far existed only on paper. It was all done too hastily and without an understanding of what far-reaching consequences this haste would have.

Since then, the expanded country has stagnated. Neither the Kohl government nor the Schröder government succeeded in correcting the initial errors. Lately, perhaps too late, we have come to recognize that the threat to the state, or what should be regarded as Public Enemy No. 1, comes not from right-wing radicalism but rather, from the impotence of politics, which leaves citizens exposed and unprotected from the dictates of the economy. What is being destroyed, then, is not the state, which survives, but democracy.

When the German Reich unconditionally surrendered 60 years ago, a system of power and terror was thereby defeated. This system, which had caused fear throughout Europe for 12 years, still casts its shadow today. We Germans have repeatedly faced up to this inherited shame and have been forced to do so if we hesitated. The memory of the suffering that we caused others and ourselves has been kept alive through the generations. Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere - I'm thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers - we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as a challenge.

We can only hope we will be able to cope with today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology. As conscious democrats, we should freely resist the power of capital, which sees mankind as nothing more than something which consumes and produces. Those who treat their donated freedom as a stock market profit have failed to understand what May 8 teaches us every year.

Comments

[Antonio Manetti]

I read the Gunter Grass piece when it first appeared and reread it again after your post.

Your deconstruction of it as the work of a crypto-nazi seems way off base to me. How do you justify that in light of his past writings?

Antonio

[dilbert dogbert]

In the best of all possible worlds, Brad could have taken his points directly to Gunther and asked: This is the way I read the translation from German; This is what these paragraphs mean to me as a highly educated American. Is my understanding correct?
At that point there could have been a real dialog and a real understanding, if that is possible.
Slow to anger and patient in listening.
Damm it is still raining!!

[Oskar Shapley]

I protest! Godwin's Law!

Brad's quoting is biased and totally out of context.

For example:

* "" So many self-appointed anti-fascists suddenly set the tone, so much so that one was entitled to ask: how had Hitler been able to make headway against such strong resistance? ""

It's obvious that Grass is asking where they were when they had a chance to prevent evil.

* "" Dirty linen was quickly washed clean, with people being absolved of all responsibility. Although ... many former National Socialists maintained their hereditary wealth, stayed in office, ... continued their careers in politics, it was claimed that we were starting from "zero hour" or square one.""

- all I'm reading here that Grass is condemning a too shallow denazification.

* ""A particularly infamous distortion of facts can be seen even today in speeches and publications, with the crimes perpetrated by Germans described as "misdeeds perpetrated in the name of the German people." ""

- did you notice? He wants you to read between the lines: deeds perpetrated BY THE GERMAN PEOPLE"

"" What retrospectively is called the "economic miracle" was not, however, the result of any individual achievement but was won by many. [...] *** We must not forget the contribution of foreign workers, initially politely called "guest workers." ***

- contemporary neo-Nazis have staged many attacks against foreigners in germany. Grass is speaking out against their xenophoby.

"" Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere - I'm thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers - we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as a challenge. ""

- Grass is affirming that Germany is not going to shake off and hide it's past, just like several other nations have done. ( Japan in China, Turkey in Armenia, etc. )These countries are arguing that, what the victims are calling genocide, was merely a collateral outcome of the war events. Germany has accepted the guilt.

Now, if Grass was writing "we have not YET shaken off the burden of our past" - that would be a serious issue.

[John Emerson]

"Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere - I'm thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers - we have not shaken off the burden of our past".

Almost all the Germans I meet in the US, most of them born after the war, have lived with guilt all their lives. None of them make excuses. As far as I know, this is not true of Turks or Japanese. On that point I think that Grass is correct.

Brad should retract his epithet at least.

[No Preference]

I wish you had waited before starting this thread, Brad. You badly misread Grass's article.

Consider these excerpts from Grass's article"

". . .Those who had survived the mass murder in the German concentration camps could regard themselves as liberated, although they were in no physical condition to enjoy their freedom."

. . .

"We had to acknowledge that our burdens could not be cast aside, they are passed by parents to children and that our German past, however much we travel and export, comes back to haunt us. Neo-Nazis repeatedly brought us into disrepute."

Your first bullet point about Grass's view of immediate post-Nazi Germany completely distorts what he actually said, which was:

" . . . Even then there were spokesmen for the rhetoric of liberation. So many self-appointed anti-fascists suddenly set the tone, so much so that one was entitled to ask: how had Hitler been able to make headway against such strong resistance? Dirty linen was quickly washed clean, with people being absolved of all responsibility. . . . "

This is a condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of Germans who pretended they had nothing to do with Hitler, not a critocism of those who made peace.

If I were you I would utter a silent apology and delete this thread.

[Sean Matthews]

I think your reading is a bit harsh.

Grass is just a grumpy old man with a not very sophisticated (he would disagree) idea of political economy. And anyway, shooting your mouth off about stuff where you have no idea is a traditional bad habit of Nobel laureats (the physicists do it too).

I suppose that there is a slight problem in that Germans are more likely to take writers seriously as general sages, but I wouldn't get worked up about it.

P.S. I live in Germany - but I am sufficiently pissed off with Muntefehring at the moment than I don't have time to get worked up about Grass.

P.P.S., I remember reading an exchange between Isaiah Berlin and Gershom Sholem bitching about Hannah Arendt once, and Sholem remarked scornfully that the only people who were influenced by Arendt where 'writers [i.e. *literary* intellectuals], not real thinkers': I think there was a streak of misogynous nastiness to the exchange (and Sholem is himself difficult for someone like me to take all together seriously), but nevertheless I think of this remark whenever I read writers of fiction shooting their mouths off about stuff other than literature.

[Bruce Wilder]

I read the Grass piece very carefully, after seeing Brad's piece, and I, too, think Brad is way, way off-base on this one.

German domestic economic policy is currently the subject of a lot of grumbling, for good reason, and Grass's rhetoric may be a trifle opaque, but it is not, imo, meant to be at all cryptic.

As for the reference to "guilt" being carried thru the generations in Germany, and not so much in other countries, I think Grass is referring to an established fact. Japan was never forced to confront its atrocities in the way Germany was, and continues to foster denial in the educational system. Turkey never acknowledges what it did to the Armenians. I don't know that Belgium worries much over what its King did in central Africa. Grass embraces remembrance as a positive "challenge", which is quite different from asserting moral superiority.

I see nothing to object to, in Grass's piece, except, possibly, the omission of a reference to Jews and antisemitism. That omission does not trouble me, though, I can understand why it might trouble others.

[ogmb]

Your worst post ever, Brad. By a long shot.

[steve jennings]

you lost the plot there Brad. I suspect that your precis tells us more about you than Grass.
steve

[daisycolorado]

Excellent post Brad.

Absolutely one of the best I have ever read here and quite unexpected. I read the Grass piece yesterday and felt like I needed a shower afterwards. Lots of moral equivalency which is why Europe finds itself so lost today.

[Anciano]

I like your blog, but you are way off base here. One message is to stop and think before giving the blink- automated- response saerving only our genes' interest (quoting from the Robot's Rebellion, a clumsy attempt to make us aware of the fact that evolution rewarded quick instinctive responses). Now, The Turks have much to be ashamed of vis a vis Armenians, but in fact they did not kill many women and children who were raised as Muslims. The Nazi ideology- Goldhagen is right that most Germans adored Hitler and already had an exterminate the Jews mentality before the Nazis came in- did not allow for redemption of Jews even by conversion to Christianity. Grass ironically notes how many Germans trumpeted their new found anti-Nazi credentials after the War. Among them was the much admired Pastor Niemoller- yes, he wrote a cute thing about First they came for the socialists... but this man begged to be released from prison in 1939 so that he could join the German military fighting for the fatherland and the fuehrer (he had been a U-Boat commander in WWI, he wrote to Grand Admiral Raeder offering to serve "in any capacity"). Grass does not tell us that he was never anti-semitic. I say that Grass is much more honest than Niemoller, and that the Japanese have done much less in facing up to their wartime atrocities than the Germans. I give Grass an A- and Brad an F.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E3DF1F3AF937A15757C0A9659C8B63

April 24, 2003

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; German Angst Erupts, Dwelling on Victimhood
By RICHARD EDER

CRABWALK
By Günter Grass

Günter Grass is sharp-tongued and keen-witted and needs nobody to speak for him. Locating the nub of his 50-year quarrel with the fudgelike historical consciousness of his fellow Germans, though, there's a temptation to recall George Santayana's ''Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.''

In ''The Tin Drum,'' ''Cat and Mouse'' and elsewhere, Mr. Grass has treated Nazism as a poison not administered and swallowed but systemic, and never surely overcome. If his is an enlarging vision, it is that he writes from the inside out. His ''j'accuse'' has dry inklings of a sardonic ''je m'accuse.'' His acrid clarity stakes out its own sector of the national character, contiguous to the fudge zone.

''Crabwalk'' is a fresh story by a weary writer, a lean story rendered in a voice that had shown signs of growing swollen. Something has invigorated its author.

It is an issue much taken up in Germany during the last few years: Did the writers and intellectuals, out of guilt over the horrors committed by their country, lag in exploring the wartime suffering of its own population? Was the country, destroyed by aerial bombardment and invading armies, silenced from shame about its destruction of others? Has the silence further twisted a people's already twisted confrontation with history? There have been recent books about the destruction and the silence. Earlier this year W. G. Sebald's meditation appeared in English; one or two critics suspected him of shading German guilt in some way by speaking of German suffering. That was wrongheaded. Except for Primo Levi, no writer has explored the nightmare of totalitarian violence more deeply.

Among some Germans, though, the debate released a sewer-gas bubble, one that has always seemed ready to race up from the depths. It is the sense of national victimhood, something that played its part in World War I and took hideous shape in defeat and the subsequent rise of Hitler.

Mr. Grass's novel deals with German wartime suffering, mainly in its account of the 1945 Baltic sinking by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship carrying thousands of refugees from the Russian advance. Far more stingingly, it deals with the sewer gas.

Not often has a title been so apt. ''Crabwalk'' does more than name a book; it is the book. It refers to the contortions of the German psyche faced with its recent past. It refers to Mr. Grass's sideways advances and retreats. It refers to the very means by which he writes: placing the story in the mouth of a narrator employed by an older writer (Mr. Grass), who admits he ought to have written about German pain but still can't bring himself to do so.

''Never,'' he tells the narrator, ''should his generation have kept silent about such misery, merely because its own sense of guilt was so overwhelming, merely because for years the need to accept responsibility and show remorse took precedence, with the result that they abandoned the topic to the right wing. This failure, he says, was staggering.''

Crablike, then: a narrator, Paul Pokriefke. He is a demoralized mess, a journalistic hack. Tulla, his mother, considers him a failure; so does his wife, who left him; so does his grown son, Konrad. Pokriefke shares their opinion, and yet -- a Grass-like trope -- only those with no illusions about themselves have any hope of seeing life with even a minimum of honesty.

He struggles to emerge from an inherited whirlpool, fed by Germany's contradictory and lethally misdirected historical certainties. Tulla's working-class parents were unquestioning Nazi believers. Tulla, living in East Germany at the end of World War II, becomes an unquestioning Stalinist.

She locks the memories of her Nazi childhood in a mental attic; after reunification it is not long before she is transmitting the contents to Konrad, a studious Internet addict. Soon he is running a neo-Nazi chat room, one of whose topics is a revanchist use of the Gustloff sinking.

Upon this loom Mr. Grass weaves a dextrously complex and engrossing narrative. One evidence of the dexterity is that he accomplishes it through Pokriefke's stumbling, eventually winning, perplexities.

The loss of about 9,000 lives in the Gustloff torpedoing is a prime instance in the politically charged debate about German victims, but it also has an organic link to the novel. Tulla was one of the survivors; her graphic account to young Konrad is the grievance -- human after all -- out of which history's inhuman grievances murderously grow.

Pokriefke crabs in all directions, mostly fascinating. He tells of the 1936 assassination of the Nazi organizer in Switzerland -- after whom the ship was named -- by David Frankfurter, a Jewish refugee. It tells of Frankfurter's time in a Swiss prison, from which he was released to emigrate to Israel. It tells of the Soviet submarine's practice dives.

It tells of the Nazis' original use of the Gustloff on Strength Through Joy vacation cruises for workers. Tulla's parents went on one; rosy-memoried, they pressed to board the Gustloff in the later evacuation from a Baltic port, when two other ships were available. Both of these survived. Mr. Grass's historical irony is many-layered.

Pokriefke gives a moderately graphic account of the sinking. (Mr. Grass instructs him to go easy on the melodrama.) He notes that 900 of the passengers were not refugees but naval personnel. Several thousand, on the other hand, were children. Historical judgment, too, is many-layered.

Such distinctions are drawn, as well, by Konrad on his Web site. He is no thug, but a studious researcher advancing, as he sees it, a diligence for truth; one of the truths being that Germany has been maligned; another, that Jews were unsuitable for mixing with Aryans and better off in Israel. He admires Israel.

The most powerful and daring part of the book, in fact, is the extended daily discussions between Konrad and a chat-room visitor using the pseudonym David, who pursues the anti-Nazi argument with a scholarly precision equal to Konrad's. Their contradictory passions join them. They become virtual friends.

''Virtual'' is the key. The shattering point is the ability of the Web to lift words and ideas into an empyrean free of real human consequences. When near the end the two decide to meet, the virtual becomes real with results whose tragedy is exceeded only by the towering irony that Mr. Grass has so spectacularly achieved.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Grass is saying that the German mind deals neither with its past nor its future, and that corrupted rhetoricians have filled both vacuums. In this, of course, it is identical with the United States, as well as every other country. While Grass has never been as astute politically as he is psychologically, he indicates a grave danger on the near horizon. The real story of this piece is that we are heading into a time of enormous job volatility plus wealth concentration, and more people are hurting. We should listen very closely, and figure out what to do about it. We are going to be hearing lots more like it, and lots much worse, including some very dangerous demagogy from our own shores no doubt. Brad your recent piece with Stephen Cohen, "Shaken and Stirred" in the January number of The Atlantic Monthly, is a fresh and illuminative step in the right direction.

[CapTVK]

Gunter Grass, a crypto fascist!? I read the article myself and I cannot see nor imagine on how Brad came about to this unintelligible position on Grass's "crypto facism". Earlier posters have already pointed out what Grass was trying to say, about the current position and role of Germany in the world 60 years on, so I won't add to that.

I can only say that Brad totally misread or misunderstood the article and rushed in with his own view. The critic too often thinks he does not have to be a reader as well a judge.

There's a lesson with bitter irony here.

[ogmb]

A supporting opinion from another crypto-Nazi and Holocaust minimizer:

"[Karl] Popper showed that fascism and communism had much in common, even though one constituted the extreme right and the other the extreme left, because both relied on the power of the state to repress the freedom of the individual. I want to extend his argument. I contend that an open society may also be threatened from the opposite direction -- from excessive individualism. Too much competition and too little cooperation can cause intolerable inequities and instability.

Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. Unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system -- which, however imperfect, qualifies as an open society -- is liable to break down."

His name? George Soros.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/soros.htm

[Stefan]

Speaking as both a German and an American, I have to agree with the other posters. Guenter Grass can in no conceivable earthtly way be called a "crypto-Nazi scum" or be considered any sort of right-wing apologist; he has, on the contrary, always been a strong anti-fascist voice within Germany. Your post reads as if it was written in the heat of the moment; I think you should let this lie for a day and then come back to it, because you've committed a rather fundamental misreading of what Grass said.

For example, "Grass's scorn for the Bundestag--'our freely elected members of Parliament... no longer free to decide... lobbyists... multifarious interests... disharmony... Parliament is no longer sovereign... banks and multinational corporations'" is not actually "the classical fascist condemnation of the cretinism of parliaments: once the people's representatives are no longer the representatives of the people, you need to find alternative sources of legitimacy, like the Fuehrer Principle,"; it is, by contrast, a call for power to be taken back from the unaccountable special interests and returned to the people themselves, a call for democracy rather than dictatorship.

[John Emerson]

I have a feeling that Brad was responding to some imagined piece Grass might have written even if Gore had been elected and reelected.

It's a hard pill to swallow, but George W. Bush and what he's done and still might do, plus what his heirs will end up doing, is now what represents the US to the world.

[bob mcmanus]

"I can only say that Brad totally misread or misunderstood the article and rushed in with his own view."

Remember the vehemence of Brad's attack on Barbara Ehrenreich? I do. Or maybe the thread about outsourcing? And then reread the Grass piece looking at the parts attacking globalization and classical economics. Brad saves his worst moments for those on his left.

[ch2]

Brad, don't know what bee stung you, but you gallopped way off the track. You should have written the post and slept on it.

[The Angry Irishman]

Well, Brad, you seem to be all up in a dander about this statement:

"Compared with other nations which have to live with shame acquired elsewhere - I'm thinking of Japan, Turkey, the former European colonial powers - we have not shaken off the burden of our past..."

But Grass actually has a genuine point here. The Germans ritually examine their WWII past and express regret about it (even though German history is far, far more than WWII and even in the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of Germans that we *know about*-- the White Rose Society, Stauffenberg and his buddies, Willy Brandt, and so on-- stood up to and fought the Nazi regime). When have you heard the British do the same thing for all the atrocities they committed against Ireland, their African colonies, India, the native Americans?

An Indian friend of mine mentioned that the British slaughtered something like *40 million* Indians in the 19th century in retaliation for Indian rebellions, wrecked the Indian economy, burned down Indian fields and refused to allow Indian farmers to grow their own crops or sell them at market (too much competition for the corrupt British carpetbaggers, you see). The British almost exterminated the Tasmanians in Australia by giving 40 acres and a mule to any two-bit bloke who shot up some natives and brought some scalps, while nearly obliterating the aborigines and the Maoris in the same way. The British have almost singlehandedly ruined the civilization of the Negritos in the S. Pacific. Is this one of these "imperial accomplishments" the British are so proud of?

The Brits (literally) made black slaves in Jamaica eat feces if they took a bite out of the sugarcane they were whipped into harvesting, and beat countless thousands of them to death. The Brits were one of the earliest to start up concentration camps in the Boer War to kill those Boer and African women and children who kept getting in the way of British diamond-miners. The British began the era of terror-bombing against the Iraqis in the 1920s, utterly wiping out many villages of the Kurds who dared to rebel. Then, of course, there are the Irish, against whom the British perpetrated too many massacres and atrocities to count since the 1500s. There are more-- somebody in a similar thread referenced an old Guardian article by Maria Misra if you want the rest of the story in all its disgusting angles http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,761626,00.html

I would point out that the Germans had their little spell of madness in the 20th century for a rather brief period in a long history in which they've been either peaceful or fighting for their own independence from invading armies (e.g. Napoleon and the 30 Years' War combatants), and contributed an awful lot of great art, science, ideas and technology to society, perhaps more than any other country on a per capita basis. A few among many examples: Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, Roentgen, Siemens, Koch, Daimler, Benz, Hoffman (the aspirin guy), plus all those other Germans who basically founded much of modern chemistry, physics, medicine and engineering. Without the work of the Germans, you'd probably still be scraping out a subsistence living as a chimney sweeper while moaning and whining about your incurable gout.

Yet the Germans still focus extensively on and admit guilt for that one rather brief period of the 20th century when they really went violent, and during a period of global economic crisis at that. The British in contrast went on a sustained binge of tremendous violence against Irish and dark-skinned people for over two centuries, and when they didn't have the excuse of a domestic economic crisis at home.

The only way to escape being brutalized by the British was to smash them in battle, which the Afghans, Tibetans, S. Americans and Egyptians were able to do in the 1800s-- otherwise you, your village and your country would be pillaged relentlessly by the British while they'd boast about "spreading freedom and the free market" or some dreck like that. In fact it was only native resistance that ultimately destroyed the British Empire, as e.g. the Egyptians, Burmese and Yemenis whipped British forces in the 1940s-1960s who tried to reestablish power. (In fact if there is one thing the Japanese did right in the midst of their own WWII atrocities, the Japs did whack the British pretty hard at Singapore in '42, which gave the nationalists in the British and French Asian colonies enough room to mobilize and demolish the British and French when they tried to return to establish rule there.) And unlike the Germans, the British have never fully faced up to it and admitted their guilt for it. Perhaps Grass really does have a point here, far more of one than you seem apt to acknowledge.

[Colin Danby]

I was going to make the point that Brad's reading seemed uncharitable, hasty, and in places really weird, but I see others have done that.

I think someone writing in the NYT who talks about "the mass murder in the German concentration camps" in the second paragraph and "inherited shame" in the penultimate paragraph can assume an educated audience who knows what that means.

Grass' piece is a critique of the last 60 years, both in terms of the way the Germanies were established after WWII (in a way he thinks avoided taking adequate responsibility for the past) and the way reunification has been handled, which he thinks has been uncaring. These are both rather commonplace critiques! Linking the two critiques together as Grass does may seem tendentious without further argument, and sure, there's a certain clumsiness to the essay as a whole, but the argument is not completely silly and hardly deserves the bit about "Crypto-Nazi scum."

Brad can we rethink?

[Altoid]

Count me among those who think Brad is really, really offbase here. His bile evidently flared at the point where he thought Grass said that Hitlerian totalitarianism and modern capitalism were moral equivalents. But Grass doesn't say this at all, as many posters have already pointed out. On the contrary, his position here about capitalism is very close to that of the late Pope.

The only possible connection between Hitlerism and modern political economy that could have set Brad off is an occult one that had to be in his mind already, if I can psychologize. I'll venture it with the caveat that I'm not a Holocaust-era specialist.

Grass's final point is that once we start thinking of human beings as only things which consume and produce, anything inhuman is possible. Where's the Naziism in that? It can only be found in one view of the Nazi slave economy and Holocaust which, I believe, holds that the regime's ideological view of humans was very close to what Grass says, and that its essential logic was close to capitalist logic-- that in large part it treated humans purely as economic elements-- including as raw materials.

If that's what Grass was alluding to, he was hinting at where things could end up. He wasn't saying we're there, not by a long shot. But he is pleading to put politics and *political* economy back in the driver's seat, where it had always been for Germans, rather than to pretend that economic processes are autonomous.

I have reasonably good fascist-bullshit detectors for an American, and I don't think that's offensive at all.

[Altoid]

Addendum: what bob mcmanus said.

[Nick Williams]

Have any of the commenters addressed the fact that Grass doesn't say the word "Jew" a single time in his piece? Brad was most incensed by that lapse, and yet none of the commenters is bothered by it. I agree with everyone that "crypto-Nazi scum" is over the top, but there is something bizarre going on in Grass's essay, even if it is only conveyed by suggestion, and Brad is right to point it out. Why does he only allude to Germany's "shame" and "past" in the vaguest terms possible? Why not state exactly what he means?

[konrad]

For someone who knows has followed the (admittedly sickening) German "Kapitalismusdebatte" during the last few weeks, and knows who Grass is and what he represents in Germany, there's nothing cryptic or apologistic about Grass's point. On the contrary, he - rightly - says that all commemorative speeches today (no matter how often you find the word "Jew" in them) can only sound hollow unless you are willing to draw and follow the lessons from the past (now, you're probably right to disagree over what these lessons should be). In Grass's view, the greatest danger to democracy in Germany today is that lawmakers hide behind (in Grass's opinion) imaginary economic necessities instead of reclaiming the primacy of politics over the economic imperatives and defending the constitutional principle of social responsibility of capital ownership ("Eigentum verpflichtet", Art. 14(2) GG). As weird as all this may sound to most Americans, it just represents the consensus that underlay post-WWII democratization in West Germany and the "Social Market Economy". This is clearly not a commemorative speech - Grass may just have thought that the 8th of May would be the right occasion to make this point.

[Altoid]

konrad, thank you. That's sort of what I thought might be going on.

[Wat Tyler]

With all due respect, this is a terrible post. Grass is not a 'crypto-Nazi': he's a social democrat. It's a relief to see some people in America still appreciate the difference. It's astounding that this outrageous slur comes after a lecture on 'moral equivalence'. Looking on the bright side, it appears to have endeared you to the Europe-is-lost brigade.

[Otto]

Need to think about this.
But on one point:
"Grass's scorn for the Bundestag--"our freely elected members of Parliament... no longer free to decide... lobbyists... multifarious interests... disharmony... Parliament is no longer sovereign... banks and multinational corporations"--is the classical fascist condemnation of the cretinism of parliaments: once the people's representatives are no longer the representatives of the people, you need to find alternative sources of legitimacy, like the Fuehrer Principle."

This is off base. Of course one can criticise any parliament for its behaviour: the routine and all pervasive criticism of Congress for its behavior is not necessarily facist in its implications. More importantly, the criticism of Weimar's parliament was that, more or less like the US Congress or a state legislature (pick your favourite), it was an open scrum of contending interests without leadership. But the Bundestag / Parliament of Germany today is in fact a passive body to the leadership of the Chancellor in the same way that De Gaulle's Fifth Republic is a leadership democracy compared with the open assembly government of the French Fourth Republic. Whatever the government wants (after consultation with selected interests behind closed doors) it gets (leaving aside tax and pension reform, where the Bundesrat or upper house exercises an active say). In other words, and stating things a bit simply, the whole German political system, like all contemporary European political systems, has already taken on board a democratic solution of sorts to the pre-war version of the "cretinism of Parliaments" critique.

[John Emerson]

"Have any of the commenters addressed the fact that Grass doesn't say the word "Jew" a single time in his piece?"

The "crypto-Nazi scum" part got our attention. Quite rightly. I might have thought about what Brad said otherwise.

[Oskar Shapley]

After some rethinking,

1. Brad is wrong on calling Grass a crypto-Nazi.

2. Brad is right in pointing out that Grass is abusing the memory of the victims of Germany (Jews and gentiles) by saying that contemporary capitalism and globalisation is like nazism. Well, it is not. Loosing a job, or getting payed less is not the same as dying.

3. Re: "Nazi animus against Jews not worthy of mention" : I think that Grass is not mentioning the Jews in order not to spoil his metaphore and to avoid being accused of what I wrote in point 2. He's itching to draw a comparison between expansionism, a totalitarian society and the 'ideology of profit'. He wants to say: "this is like Nazism, this is like the politics of Hitler, why did no Germans speak out against Hitler, I must speak against it now".

4. Grass does not want to mention the Jews, because that would immediately destroy his metaphore (in the eyes of his readers): 'capitalism is totalitarian like nazism'. After all, whatever you think about consumerism, it has no common points with the Holocaust, except the industrial organisation. But it's, well, totally different. As a consequence the readers would immediately reject his comparison, because the cognitive dissonance would be to strong.

Conclusion: Both Grass and Brad are guilty of violating Godwin's Law.

5. Grass is talking about a 'Nazism-lite': without the Holocaust. Brad is assuming that one should always mention the Holocaust, because it is the most important (worst and defining) part of Nazism.

Let me just say that there is a weak (really weak) argument for the separation of two issues: the Holocaust (crimes against humanity) and German expansionism (crimes against peace). The first could have happened domestically without the second. Without the second there would be no Liberation Day and this is the context to which Grass is referring. The immediate victims of the wars of aggression were not specifically Jews, but other European nations.

(The argument is weak, because most of the killed Jews lived outside of the Reich, in Poland and Russia. Crime 2 reinforced crime 1.)

[ogmb]

"Have any of the commenters addressed the fact that Grass doesn't say the word "Jew" a single time in his piece?"

More evidence that by the end of the second paragraph Brad's brain was already on the fritz so he could not decipher the following qualification:

"Those who had survived the mass murder in the German concentration camps could regard themselves as liberated, although they were in no physical condition to enjoy their freedom."

Of course Günter Grass must've meant all concentration camp survivors *minus the Jews*, crypto-Nazi scum that he is.

[Matt McIrvin]

The Angry Irishman:

"An Indian friend of mine mentioned that the British slaughtered something like *40 million* Indians in the 19th century in retaliation for Indian rebellions,"

Do you have a cite for this? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, but the number is much, much higher than ones I've seen listed elsewhere.

[Colin Danby]

Thanks Konrad -- this helps a lot with context.

I quite agree there's a problem in GG's tendency to rely on an oversimple dichotomy of economy versus humanity -- a loosely-theorized package of consuming, producing, capital, and profit on one side, and everything caring and good and solidaristic on the other. But it's a pretty common rhetorical move. There *should* be ways to engage well-intentioned if sloppy thinking without completely melting down.

I also don't get the impression that GG is arguing that capitalism or markets are evil in themselves, but that a national politics which is too interested in "toil and profit-chasing" and "which leaves citizens exposed and unprotected from the dictates of the economy" is evil. This strikes me as a pretty run-of-the-mill socialist sentiment.

And Nick, I really don't find "the mass murder in the German concentration camps" to be "the vaguest terms possible" especially since, as umpteen people have noted, one of Grass' major themes is the importance of assuming and thinking about responsibility.

[tante aime]

Not mentioning Jews in a diatribe against Capitalism, is the moral equivalent of not mentioning Gays in Bushco's latest eucharist on the Virtues of Democracy and Freedom.
I guess as long as no one comes out of Africa with photos, and the bodies of gays don't pile up outside the morgues, we can all look the other way as we go about our business.

[one stray cat]

I usually appreciate you analytical abilities Brad, but this time you're way out of line. The man built his entire career on expressing German guilt for the Nazi regime. Then you accuse him of the exact opposite.

He criticizes the ineffectuality of his government and therefore he must support the Fuehrer Prinzip? I didn't realize that if your German, Nazism is the default political theory. I guess if had the nerve to criticize journalists, he must be secretly in favor of a Ministry of Propoganda?

Moreover, I don't know what it's like in your neihborhood, but in mine we don't lightly call someone "crypto-Nazi scum." His family might read that. You should be ashamed and you should apologize.

-A long time but now hesitant fan

[pebird]

Brad:

I have to agree with the commenters here - I think your criticism is way off-base and "crypto-Nazi scum" is something an ideologue might say, not a reasoned critique.

Re-read the essay when the bile has settled down.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9904EFD91E31F936A35752C1A9669C8B63

The German Question
By James J. Sheehan

TOO FAR AFIELD
By Gunter Grass.

When Gunter Grass won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, he titled his acceptance speech ''To Be Continued,'' which was a tribute to the great 19th-century novels that were published as serials and to mankind's unending need for stories and storytellers. For more than four decades, with 11 novels, a dozen plays and 40 books of poems, essays, travel writing and political polemic, Grass has testified to his conviction that writers, by giving us ''mouth-to-ear artificial respiration,'' help keep humanity alive.

The relationship of literature and life is a recurrent motif throughout his major work. In ''Too Far Afield,'' as in all his novels, the line between fact and fiction is indistinct; real and imaginary people and events interact within the same fictional space. Among the many artists and writers, living and dead, who make an appearance in the novel, the most significant is Theodor Fontane, the great realist and ironist, a journalist and historian who late in life became one of his country's leading fiction writers and who is the hero's literary double and the author's source of innumerable allusions. The book's title comes from Fontane's 1895 novel, ''Effi Briest,'' written a century before ''Too Far Afield,'' when its author was about Grass's age; but the most relevant of Fontane's works is ''Jenny Treibel'' (1892), a novel set in Berlin after the national unification of 1871 and the basis for Grass's many comparisons of 1871 and 1989.

Like his first great successes, ''The Tin Drum'' (1959), ''Cat and Mouse'' (1961) and ''Dog Years'' (1963), ''Too Far Afield,'' which was published as ''Ein Weites Feld'' in Germany in 1995, deals with ''the German question,'' that painful intrusion of the past into the present that remains a part of Germans' national consciousness. As always, Grass is interested in how the past inundates the lives of ordinary people as they try desperately to swim with or against history's treacherous tides. But ''Too Far Afield'' treats this familiar theme from a different perspective. Unlike the early novels, which were about children or adolescents, this one is about people nearing the end of their lives; it is about growing old rather than growing up.

''Too Far Afield,'' now translated by Krishna Winston, lacks the extraordinary imaginative energy that sometimes seemed to pop the buttons of ''The Tin Drum'' or ''Cat and Mouse.'' This is a quieter, gentler book, its tone more ironic, its pace more measured, its structure more cohesive. It is, nonetheless, a rich and complex book, far more interesting and accessible than the prolix, self-indulgent novels Grass published in the 1970's and 80's. It is the work of a seasoned craftsman, certain of what he wants to do, completely in control of his gifts.

The principal characters are two men in their early 70's. Theo Wuttke, known as Fonty because of his fascination with and resemblance to Fontane, was once a journalist for the Nazi air force and then a traveling lecturer for a minor East German cultural organization; he eventually becomes an employee of the Treuhand, the institution in charge of privatizing East German enterprises after the collapse of the Communist state. His companion, foil and occasional nemesis is Ludwig Hoftaller, a professional spy and police agent who made his career under a variety of regimes.

The emotional and geographical center of the novel is Berlin, since 1945 the symbol of Germany's division, now being slowly knit together after the fall of the wall. Wuttke is a great walker, alert to the city's changing moods and cultural temperature, aware of how history has marked its topography and altered the names of its streets, knowledgeable about the islands of repose offered by its parks and lakes. Berlin is as important for ''Too Far Afield'' as Dublin is for Joyce's ''Ulysses''; readers of each book would be well served by a city map to help them find their way through the novel's dense urban landscape.

As they move through the city, Wuttke and Hoftaller also move back and forth in time. The narrative shifts, sometimes seamlessly, from the present (that is, 1989-91) to the characters' youth in the Third Reich, their lives in East Germany and back to the revolutions of 1848, the wars of national unification of 1866-67 and the first decades of Bismarck's German empire. Wuttke's own memories fuse easily with what he knows about the career of his hero Fontane. At the same time, Hoftaller, sometimes reconstituted as a 19th-century policeman named Tallhover, remains a perennial, often sinister element on the historical scene, ready and willing to serve whoever is in power. The narrator, who helps the reader make sense of this jumble of experience and memory, is an unnamed representative of the Fontane Archives in Potsdam, who regards Wuttke as both a fellow researcher and a source of firsthand information about Fontane.

The novel's blend of past and present is nicely captured in the building where Wuttke works: built in the 1930's to house the Nazi Air Ministry, it was taken over by the East German security services and then, after 1989, by the Treuhand. Here we find one of the novel's most arresting metaphors in the shape of an old-fashioned elevator called a ''paternoster,'' which Grass describes as ''a chain of cabins in constant motion, passing turning points in cellar and attic, rising and falling, never stopping, gently rattling, not without suppressed groans and sighs, yet as reliable as -- well, all right, as a prayer wheel.'' The paternoster represents Grass's belief in history's circularity, its capacity to repeat itself as it carries its passengers on their daily rounds through a cycle of revolution and repression, war and peace, national fragmentation and unification. The elevator's eventual destruction (the building itself survives) expresses those anxieties about the end of history that have become increasingly apparent in Grass's work since ''The Rat,'' his 1987 novel about ecological disaster....

[SQ]

If DeLong is too harsh and categorical, that still leaves us with the question of Grass. (DeLong certainly isn't the first to raise questions about where Grass is coming from.) His is at a minimum a strange and unsettling op-ed. There is indeed a resemblance between his attitude to the FRG and the Nazi depiction of the Weimar Republic. But I find it more ambiguous than DeLong does. For example, while Grass engages in political paranoia and has little use for normal democratic politics, he does not in any visible way embrace the Leader Principle, or even hint at it. He doesn't seem to let his free-floating discontent land him at that particular destination, and arguably, he's starting from somewhere else to begin with. Just don't ask me where.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/books/chapters/0427-1st-grass.html?ei=5070&en=cd286988847ad2a4&ex=1115697600&pagewanted=all&position=

'Crabwalk'
By GÜNTER GRASS

WHY ONLY NOW?" HE SAYS, this person not to be confused with me. Well, because Mother's incessant nagging...Because I wanted to cry the way I did at the time, when the cry spread across the water, but couldn't anymore...Because for the true story...hardly more than three lines...Because only now...

The words still don't come easily. This person, who doesn't like excuses, reminds me that I'm a professional: had a way with words at a young age, signed on as a cub reporter with one of the Springer tabloids, soon had the lingo down pat, then switched over to the Tageszeitung, where Springer was the favorite whipping boy, later kept it short and sweet as a mercenary for various news agencies, and eventually freelanced for a while, chopping and shredding all sorts of subjects to be served up as articles: something new every day. The news of the day.

True enough, I said. But that's about all I know how to do. If I really have to settle my own historical accounts now, everything I messed up is going to be ascribed to the sinking of a ship. Why? Because Mother was nine months pregnant when it happened, because it's sheer coincidence that I'm alive.

And already, again, I'm doing someone else's bidding, but at least I can leave myself out of it for the time being, because this story began long before me, more than a hundred years ago, in Schwerin, the ducal seat of Mecklenburg, nestled amid seven lakes, priding itself on postcards of its Schelfstadt district and a castle bristling with turrets, and outwardly left unharmed by the wars.

Initially I didn't think a provincial burg that history had crossed off long ago could attract anyone besides tourists, but then the starting place for my story suddenly acquired a presence on the Internet. An anonymous source was posting biographical information, complete with dates, street names, and report cards, a treasure trove for someone like me who was under pressure to dig up the past.

I'd bought myself a Mac, with a modem, as soon as these things came on the market. For my work I need to be able to snare information wherever it may be wandering around the world. I got pretty good at using the computer. Soon terms like browser and hyperlink were no longer Chinese to me. With a click of the mouse I could haul in stuff that I might use or might end up throwing in the trash. Soon, out of idleness or inclination, I began flitting from chat room to chat room, also responded to the most idiotic spam, checked out a couple of porno sites, and after some aimless surfing finally landed on sites where old unregenerates but also freshly minted neo-Nazis were venting their venom on hate pages. And suddenly-entering the name of a ship as a keyword-I clicked my way to the right address: www.blutzeuge.de. In Gothic script the "Comrades of Schwerin" were strutting their stuff. Something about a martyr. Dredging up the past. More ludicrous than disgusting.

In the meantime it's become clear which martyr is meant and what he's supposed to have shed his blood for. But I'm still not sure how to go about this: should I do as I was taught and unpack one life at a time, in order, or do I have to sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working my way forward fairly rapidly? Only this much is certain: Nature, or to be more precise, the Baltic, said yea and amen more than half a century ago to everything that will have to be reported here.

First comes a person whose gravestone was smashed. After getting through school-the commercial track-he apprenticed at a bank, finishing up without attracting undue attention. Not a word about this phase on the Internet. On the Web site dedicated to Wilhelm Gustloff, born in Schwerin in 1895, he was celebrated as "the martyr." The site did not mention the problems with his larynx, the chronic weakness of the lungs that prevented him from proving his bravery in the First World War. While Hans Castorp, a young man from a good Hanseatic family, received orders from his creator to leave the Magic Mountain, and on page 994 of the novel was left to fall as a volunteer on Flanders Field or to escape into a literary no-man's-land, in 1917 the Schwerin Life Insurance Bank took the precaution of shipping its industrious employee off to Davos in Switzerland, where he was supposed to recover from his illness. That locale's remarkable air restored his health so completely that death could get at him only in another form; for the time being, he did not care to return to Schwerin and its lowland climate....

[derrida derider]

A truly appalling post - Brad, I'm sorry but you've just sunk in my estimation. And if you don't post an apologetic response to these comments you will sink further.

Enough about the "crypto-nazi scum" bit - I disagree with a lot in Grass' article but there's nothing that remotely deserves that abuse. What I found to be a new low is that someone is held to be anti-semitic because they *don't* mention Jews!

Brad, the Holocaust was a terrible, terrible crime. But 22 million Soviet citizens also died. A quarter of the Polish population died. Romanies were wiped out of Central Europe as thoroughly as Jews.

None of that diminishes in any way the wickedness of the Holocaust - but it does mean that you're not necessarily anti-Semitic if you make a passing reference to Nazi crimes and fail to specifically enumerate the Jews.

[ogmb]

Honestly, if I didn't know Brad better, if someone had just forwarded the post to me and pointed out that it was written by the chair of the Political Economies of Industrial Societies program at a respected American university I would feel compelled to sent it to his Department chair and question the moral competence of the author to lead such a program. Yes, it is that awful.

[Richard Cownie]

Grass is a giant. Prof DeLong is out of his area
of expertise and his attack is absurd. So now any
German who writes 3000 words without mentioning
the Jews explicitly is a crypto-fascist ?

Penance: read Grass's novels and report back.

Next up: Solzhenitsyn not 100% happy with
capitalism - must be a Stalinist ...

[Adams]

The Swedish Academy credited Grass' first novel, "The Tin Drum," with restoring honor to German literature "after decades of linguistic and moral destruction." The academy said the book "comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them."

In the emotionally-repressed years that followed the war's end, Grass' unflinching stories of Germans who cooperated with the Nazi terror were greeted as courageous and wise. “The Tin Drum," published in 1959, became one of the most admired and revealing allegories of guilt and complicity.

Grass has ...been criticized for rarely including overt references to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jews in his catalogue of German crimes. …A scholar of German literature wrote in a recent book that Grass' works virtually ignore the experiences of Jews. Undaunted, Grass has repeatedly called for Germany to build a full-scale Holocaust museum; no such institution exists in the country.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, … he argued that …(a) united Germany, …was "doomed to failure" because "our unified state filled the history books of the world with suffering, ruin, defeat, millions of refugees, millions of dead and a burden of crimes which we will never be able to throw off."

Once cherished by his fellow citizens, Grass became a thorn in his government's side. In recent years, Grass has sharply criticized Germany for its treatment of the country's large Turkish and other foreign populations. When Germany began deporting Eastern European refugees in the mid-1990s, Grass warned that "we have all become passive witnesses, once again, to a barbaric act – this time a barbaric act backed by democracy."

And as Germany moved to re-establish itself as an equal among nations, shucking its cloak of guilt and remorse, Grass found himself marginalized in the country's intellectual circles and ridiculed in the mainstream media. The mass circulation daily Bild decreed that "Grass does not love his country and does not know the people for whom he is writing."

But Grass remains unapologetic, saying "I believe it is a good thing that a writer does not sit on the side of the victors."

The above quoted from Marc Fisher, Washington Post, Thursday, September 30, 1999

Crypto-fascist scum? Brad cannot have read the Danzig trilogy, and seems to have been taken in by the growing German nationalist ridicule of Grass, caused by his unrelenting criticicism of mankind's (and especially his country’s) past and present inhumanity to man.

Grass despises isms that destroy human lives. Perhaps he may be excused for criticizing government when it is sold on the open market and becomes a caricature of democracy. Don't we read Brad's blog to watch him tear his hair out over the same travesty (semi) daily?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/books/chapters/0427-1st-grass.html?ei=5070&en=cd286988847ad2a4&ex=1115697600&pagewanted=all&position=

'Crabwalk'
By GÜNTER GRASS

Aleksandr Marinesko was born in 1913, in the port of Odessa, on the Black Sea. The city must have been magnificent at one time, as the black-and-white images in the film Battleship Potemkin demonstrate. His mother came from Ukraine. His father was a Romanian, and had signed his papers "Marinescu" before he was condemned to death for mutiny. He managed to flee at the last minute.

His son Aleksandr grew up near the docks. And because Russians, Ukrainians, and Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians, Turks and Armenians, Gypsies and Jews all lived there cheek by jowl, he spoke a mishmash of many languages, but must have been understood by his youth gang. No matter how hard he tried later on to speak Russian, he never quite succeeded in purging his father's Romanian curses from his Yiddish-seasoned Ukrainian. When he was already a ship's mate on a trading vessel, people laughed at his linguistic hodgepodge; but in later years many must have discovered that there was nothing to laugh about, no matter how comical the U-boat commander's orders may have sounded.

Let's rewind to an earlier period: at seven, young Aleksandr is said to have watched from the overseas pier as the last White Russian troops and the exhausted remnants of the British and French troops that had been sent into the fray fled Odessa. Not long after that he saw the Reds march in. Purges took place. Then the civil war was as good as over. And several years later, when foreign ships were allowed once more to dock in the harbor, the boy is supposed to have shown persistence and soon real skill at diving for the coins that elegantly dressed passengers tossed into the brackish water....

[david]

Awful. I hope you wrote this without thinking. This kind of vituperative crap against the left enables the politics you despise.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E6DC1731F93AA25751C1A96F958260

December 19, 1999

A Cloud of Witness
By Peter Gay

MY CENTURY
By Gnter Grass.

When Gnter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, many of his faithful readers, including this reviewer, greeted the news with pleasure and relief: at last! For four decades, Grass has been shaking up the German literary establishment with his unconventional poems, plays, novellas, novels short and long -- mostly long. A gifted draftsman as well, he has drawn striking covers and illustrations for his books. Ever since his first novel, ''The Tin Drum,'' exploded over German readers 40 years ago, he has secured a vast audience -- and not just in Germany -- that is often delighted, at times irritated and above all surprised by his playful fictions. At the time, German literary critics, astonished at ''The Tin Drum,'' clearly the most important novel to come out of postwar Germany until then, grasped at adjectives to characterize the story of a malevolent dwarf who literally refuses to grow up as a way of opting out from the hell his countrymen have created around him. They called the book picaresque or surrealist, and indeed, it was a Bosch-like canvas in words. But whatever reviewers settled on, they knew that they had a first-rate talent on their hands.

Since then, Grass has employed his formidable imaginative powers to traverse the literary landscape, but he has always remained recognizably himself, his voice booming, earthy, sexually explicit, often angry. A censor in the antique Roman sense, he has portrayed his countrymen as complicit in the Nazi regime or obscenely indulging themselves in their newly found prosperity after their defeat in 1945. Nor did the so-called German Democratic Republic remain unscathed. In his best-known play, ''The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising'' (1966), he raised some uncomfortable questions about the attitude of Bertolt Brecht, then the big gun of the East German theater, toward rebellious workers.

An eminently political animal, Grass has consistently situated himself on the independent left. But he has never been a slave to any line; not even his favorite political home, the Social Democratic Party, has secured his unwavering loyalty. In the 1970's, he put his credo at its most antiutopian by drawing a snail on a plate, with a caption to suit: ''Progress is a snail.'' In 1990, as the pressure to unify the two German states, East and West, grew overwhelming and irresistible, Grass spoke for a tiny minority of free spirits, objecting to reunification on the ground that after Auschwitz Germany did not deserve to recreate itself as a major European power. His protest was drowned in the general enthusiasm, but he had had his say.

Deploying his prodigious talents by moving from experiment to experiment, Grass has taken considerable risks....

[Thomas T. Schweitzer]

Brad, I am a devoted fan of your website, but I must, with regret, join the long list of dissenters to this thread. Make it a rule not to be so quick on the draw, and count to 100 before you fire off your sudden emotional reactions. In this instance you were dead wrong and your mail was not worthy of you.

Tom Schweitzer

[JR]

Brad, you clearly don't have a clue this time. Here are some facts that might help you.

Grass, who was an active Social Domocrat and speech-writer for Willy Brandt (no, he's not an ivory tower novelist with no understanding of politics), was one of the few Germans who spoke out against unification with the East in 1989. He believed- correctly, as it turned out- that Helmut Kohl's plan of a unified currency at a one-to-one exchange rate would wreck the economy of the East. He also believed- correctly, as it turned out- that the inexperience of Easterners with free civil and political society would make it impossible for them to compete unless they were given time and assistance to make up the lost years since the war. As he said in an interview in 2003, "We had the Marshall Plan, freedom, a mild occupation. They had the Soviet Union."

If you read the piece again, you will see that a major theme is the failure of the Federal Republic to integrate the East, to extend democratic reforms there, and to provide job creation and decent living standards for Easterners. This is not an issue Americans care about or even know about but it is a central issue of German politics.

The second major theme concerns the current program of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and the ruling Social Democrats. Called Agenda 2010, it is a deep retrenchment of the German post-war social compact, along the lines begun in the UK by Margaret Thatcher and continued by Tony Blair. Unemployment is up, health care coverage down, incomes in real terms down, profits up, income inequality up. Grass views Agenda 2010 as a betrayal of the values of the post-war Social Democratic party. Again, Agenda 2010 is a central issue to Germans but Americans have never heard of it.

Grass's error in his article was to assume that Americans know and care about countries other than their own. DeLong's ridiculous response shows that we don't. We see "Germany," we think "Holocaust," and if any German presumes to talk to us about something other than Jews- well then, he's a Nazi.

[Roger Keeling]

I'll join the chorus here.

Brad, a LOT of the posters above are names I recognize from here and elsewhere. Very, very smart liberals who -- I'd bet dollars for doughnuts -- generally admire your writing. Certainly I do: I quote you frequently, and am forever forwarding your blog's URL to friends ('You gotta see this! Brad DeLong takes on [fill in the blank] and nails the truth again!').

Yet when I read this posting, I -- literally -- slumped back and said out loud, "Man, he needs to get his meds adjusted." You've just completely mis-understand what Grass is saying. You've called him a fascist, which is so harsh it should never be used lightly (precisely why it took me so long to finally begin referring to the rightwing movement in the U.S. as neo-Fascist). And in this case, the truth is almost exactly the reverse: he's a humanist, very much in opposition to all things fascist. In particular, I see no evidence that he (in any way!) is trying to minimize the horrors of the Holocaust. I really don't think it's necesssary for a German writer in 2005, every single time he writes about WWII, to explicitly discuss the mass murder of Jews. Grass alludes to it, and clearly expects educated people to know what he's alluding to, and that's plenty enough.

I don't know if the poster above is right -- that what set you off was his attack on unrestrained capitalism. But if this IS what set you off, I think you need to rethink the matter. In Washington, today, our democracy is absolutely under seige (or, perhaps, has been all but annihilated) by the presence of 70,000 or so business lobbyists ... sleazebags who NEVER actually consider what might be right (scientifically, politically, economically, humanistically), but ONLY consider what will best advance the narrow financial interests of their employers. Against them there is simply no genuine counter-balancing force, and the result of that is plainly visible in the wretched nature of the decisions we see coming from Capitol Hill these days. Sounds to me that Grass believes much the same has happened in Germany. I don't find that a very radical idea. Mainstream thinking of the Progressive Era and New Deal is more like it.

So now you've heard it from a load of friends, people who normally cheer you on. Brad, you really need to consider a heartfelt retraction and apology here. You just plain got this thing wrong, top to bottom.

[konrad]

"Grass's error in his article was to assume that Americans know and care about countries other than their own."

I should point out that the text was actually written for a German audience and published in the German weekly "Die Zeit" and read by Grass on the public radio stations Radio Bremen and NDR.

http://www.zeit.de/2005/19/01___grass_teil_1

[Jeffrey Miller]

Calling people names like cyrpto fascist (clearly false in the case of Grass) - isn't that something people like Anne Coulter do? Call other people nasty names and make outrageous claims, rather than engage in a reasoned debate?

I'm very disappointed in Dr Delong.

It does make me wonder as one commentator suggested above if the real reason cause of Dr Delong's fury is not Grass's skepticism about the benefits of gobalization.

[biklett]

Glad this is filed under 'Utter Stupidity.' Your worst post ever.

[konrad]

Sorry for this long post, but as a German (born in '79 for that matter), I am quite sensitive to accusations of latent Nazism (maybe because we take them seriously), so I would like to react to a couple of posts by other people on this thread:

"There is indeed a resemblance between his attitude to the FRG and the Nazi depiction of the Weimar Republic."

The essential (but obvious) difference is that the Nazis polemicized against the Weimar parliamentary system in order to destroy it while Grass polemicizes against actual Germans' attitude toward their democracy in order to save it.

"Brad is right in pointing out that Grass is abusing the memory of the victims of Germany (Jews and gentiles) by saying that contemporary capitalism and globalisation is like nazism"

The only way in which he is likening them is in their potential to destroy democracy and freedom, not their underlying motives or their possible consequences on humanity. His punchline seems to be something like "this day should teach us that democracy is always vulnerable so that we have to be alert and willing to defend it" (even against lesser evils than Nazism, if you will).

"As a consequence the readers would immediately reject his comparison, because the cognitive dissonance would be to strong."

I think you are absolutely right about this one. Grass is perfectly aware that once he starts elaborating on the Holocaust, he could only continue with ritualized and politically correct expressions of regret which would completely overshadow his point that democracy is still and again at danger, which is IMHO fully legitimate once you accept his view of the risk globalization poses to the sovereignity of the people.

"Grass is talking about a 'Nazism-lite': without the Holocaust. Brad is assuming that one should always mention the Holocaust, because it is the most important (worst and defining) part of Nazism."

Grass is obviously talking about Nazism as it was, and he can safely assume that his listeners on Radio Bremen know the rest of the picture. Grass sounds much like he's even warning of *reducing* Nazism to the Holocaust alone because this would move the German experience with totalitarianism to the realm of the unimaginable and unspeakable, relieving us from the burden of drawing any consequences from it.

[Anciano]

I don’t want to stomp on Brad because I enjoy this blog and have learned from it. I simply want to point out that the word fascist has lost all meaning, just like the words liberal, conservative, and racist. Crypto-fascist is even worse although I used that phrase back in the 60s and 70s. I’m a white man who attended segregated Texas public schools. Our 9th grade English class, the honors section, read Cry the beloved Country. Now you tell me that this is a simple world. Don’t preach to me about racism.
I’m quite concerned about this minuteman phenomenon. I have relatives on both sides of the border, including a few Anglos that I could call fanatical scapegoaters. I know that Latinos clean the toilets and do work that few Americans will even consider. At the same time, I think that illegal immigration should be drastically reduced. With the modern world and the sincere but misguided religious right, there is no way in hell that a 9th grade public school class could read any controversial book, let alone that book by Alan Paton that I remember 50 years later. I've seen gangs of whites jump blacks and beat them up and I've been on the receiving end of that same treatment. When I think of what we Americans have done wrong and our problems here, I see no need to preach to Germans, let alone to Grass.

[Palo]

I'm glad your readers are no dumb groupies, Brad. I read your post and was very dissapointed on your german estereotyping. I'm glad others already said all that needed to be said about your piece. Never expected such a miopic, slanted, prejudging writing from you.

[Barry Freed]

I wish to add my name to the list of those who are appalled and dismayed by Brad's post. And I remember, as does Bob McManus (who I'm glad to see commenting with more frequency here and elsewhere) a marked vehemence in Brad's attacks on Barbara Ehrenrecich, still, this goes far beyond that by a long-shot. I have nothing to add that hasn't been ably put by a number of commentators above.

Brad, please consider these very numerous, articulate, and well-reasoned objections as an invitation to you to re-join the reality-based community. Your voice is a valued one indeed.

[billy]

Brad, can you explain, please, when and how is it acceptable for a commentator to use metaphor and history as a framework for analysis? Is the simple act of recognising the echo of past horrors in current affairs necessarily a moral judgement at all?

I ask because i believe the key to your rant is the phrase "moral equivalence".

Post 9/11 US cultural commentary is replete with arguments based on this most nebulous of concepts. To my mind, it is a unique construction in that it seems to occupy an equally prominent position in the canon of both the P.C. obsessives and the right wing nut jobs. Both sides regularly write off any attempt at nuanced anlysis that they don't like by spreading the slime of "moral equivalence" over it.
In the case of Grass' commentary, it seems that nazi germany is a partricular hot button for you, and your knee-jerk reaction to the subject is to condemn out of hand any article that does not include reams of apologetic self-flagellation about Jewish suffering.

[Ralph Squillace]

Yep, Brad, you just blew chunks all over the web. You're right, as several have pointed out, that Grass's discussion of this "totalitarianism" is wrong and was made in an indirect way most probably to avoid having to make the point directly, because it would be laughed out of court. That said, your response was... one of the least reasoned pieces I've ever seen, and was right next to unstable.
If you don't like socialists, fine; just say it and get it over with.

[Richard Cownie]

>Grass's discussion of this "totalitarianism" is
>wrong

Look at the the current Republican/corporate
kleptocracy in the USA, where laws are effectively
written by unaccountable corporate lobbyists, and
merely rubber-stamped by the elected
representatives. And look at the effect that is
having on working people - falling real wages,
high unemployment, increasing healthcare costs,
erosion of all safety net programs. It may be
too much to call that "totalitarianism", but it's
pretty damn awful. And Grass sees Germany going
down the same path, and warns against it.
The problems are especially clear in Germany
because it really is "Two Nations" separated by
geography and history as well as different
economic circumstances.

If his words seem too strong, that may be an
artefact of inaccurate translation.

Grass' point that Germany has confronted (and
been forced to confront) its past to a much
greater extent than other nations is the plain
truth. Japan notoriously rewrote its history.
English schools prefer to teach the glories of
Waterloo, Trafalgar, and El Alamein rather than
the pointless machine-gunning of thousands at
Omdurman or the fire-bombing of Dresden. In the
USA you learn a lot more about Teddy Roosevelt
charging San Juan Hill than the brutal suppression
of Philippine nationalism.

Most countries have skeletons in their closets:
Germany keeps theirs out in the open.

[P.M.Lawrence]

The others have already said most of what I would have done, so here's what's left.

It won't get better if you keep picking at it.

It's a false dichotomy to conclude from the correct statement that our representatives have drained all meaning from democracy, that there remains only dictatorship. A great many variants of libertarian - some honestly, some not, some naively, some not - are trying to find alternatives that avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Of course if the time ever came to act you'd have to pick sides, but that too is forced upon you. Just think of all the well meaning people on both sides on the civil war, not knowing whether to plump for king or parliament.

P.S., the British are definitely not to blame for what happened to North American Indians. In fact it was British policy that would have helped them that gave more incentive to the rebels, who were actually responsible for those things. And much of the rest of British imperialism is grossly understood, no doubt from coming at the subject with a stereotype - the same stereotype that says that what the USA is doing now isn't like that, so it can't be imperialist.

[ralph]

Hmmm. I don't quite get your post, Richard. I thought I'd written that Brad went off the deep end, although Grass does get dangerously close to implying that capitalism is the next totalitarianism, an argument with which I disagree. But I don't see you arguing that he is **right** there. In fact, you concede the point:
>>It may be too much to call that "totalitarianism", but it's pretty damn awful.<<
Now, let me post back at you: I agree with you. Corruption IS awful; crimes committed have been and continue to be horrible. But if totalitarianism means anything, which is debatable, it doesn't mean that systems are corrupt and people kill people. That's just human history. The word must mean much, much more than that.
And Brad's reading of Grass is also, in my opinion, nuts about what Grass says about Germany's facing up to its past. I, too, think he's basically right about those countries. I, too, think this country also either ignores or insufficiently attends to the crimes of its past and the degree to which those crimes were involved in its expansion and prosperity.
But the issue is about Brad's reading of Grass, and on that note, I reread the column and noticed something. Grass says, "today's risk of a new totalitarianism." So, first, Grass doesn't even say capitalism is "totalitarianism." If you wanna get precise, Grass can get off on this count. And while you're right, it could be a translation problem, my translation of the passage:

"Dass wir der gegenwärtigen Gefahr eines neuen Totalitarismus, für den weltumfassend die zuletzt verbliebene Ideologie steht, gewachsen sein werden, ist nur zu hoffen." (from the nicely provided http://www.zeit.de/2005/19/01___grass_teil_1)

might be something like, "We can only hope that we are awake to/aware of/up to the challenge of the present danger of a new Totalitarianism..." But I'm no German scholar. Point is, the translation of that part is almost certainly correct, or rather our loose verbiage in these comments is probably more imprecise than the translation. :-)
And yet, Grass is clearly, even in the German, implying that today's cultural hegemony of capitalism **could** potentially be the totalitarianism of future, especially because it's so well funded. If your point is that this **could** be true, I'm with you. But it remains too much to call it "totalitarianism", because it isn't.
Finally, did you note that Brad's citation left off the last part of the historical "owning up" argument? Grass said:
"...we have not shaken off the burden of our past. It will remain part of our history as a challenge." It seems to me clear that he means it as a challenge not to let such things ever happen again, a fair enough comment. But Brad really, really, doesn't like Grass's politics for some reason, and I'd rather have Brad say why, up front, and argue, rather than call him names. It's unbecoming.

[konrad]

Dick,
it's really sad that you can't take Brad's Advanced Macro or Economic History courses at Berkeley to revise your opinion about his *really* excellent and encouraging teaching style.

[Todd_the_one_handed_economist]

Sorry to add a little econ in the discussion, but I couldn't resist. The essay states:

"It (reunification) was all done too hastily and without an understanding of what far-reaching consequences this haste would have.
Since then, the expanded country has stagnated."

In a few places causality is implied. But fortunately we have a comparison, albiet not perfect, with Germany's neighbor.

Consider what happened after France absorbed Andora back in 1990 (and hardly anyone noticed....)

France's GDP/capita (ppp) increased 11% in the 1990s from $19,900 to $22,400 in 2000 dollars. Germany, under its weight of reunification, increased 10% moving from $20,400 to $22,900 over the 1991-2000 period.

Looking at 2000 - 2004, France's 1.8% GDP growth does in fact scream past Germany's plodding 1.1% annual growth rate. If looking at the past three years, France is less impressive at 1.2% annually but still ahead of Germany's .6%% annual growth rate.

Grass should look to the France-Andora reunification effort and note the amazing similarities in growth before attributing Germny's slowdown to its own unique reunification process.

Anyway, sorry for the interruption. Back to the over-the-top reactions to DeLong's over-the-top post...

[Your leftist conscience]

Maybe when Brad finally calms down he'd like to address the multitudinous suffering his beloved neoliberalism has brought to both the developed and the developing world, and the corrosive effect it has had upon democracy nearly everywhere it has touched. Fat chance, though that was in some sense Grass' point.

[Todd_the_one_handed_economist]

My point wasn't clear enough? OK, for those a little slow on the uptake: see, France DIDN'T actually absorb any country yet had an amazingly similar growth profile to that of Germany which DID absorb a country.

Maybe I should type in really large font to make it obvious?

[Barry Freed]

I don't know Todd, but when I note the handle under which you've posted and your bizarre comparison of Andorra, I really have to ask: Are you a closet philatelist?

[b]

Brad, next time please take your meds before posting.

Thanks

[todd_the_one_handed_economist]

Can someone explain why my comparison is "bizarre" , "insane," etc? Grass argues that reunification has broughht about Germany's stagnation. I show that despite France not taking over anything (not even Andorra ,which I bet could put up a great resistance) has ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME RATE OF GROWTH OVER THE PAST 15 YEARS.

Sorry, I don't think I can put it in 24-font here. That was the best I could do.

[ash]

I think 'crypto-communist' would be more accurate than 'crypto-nazi' unless you want to discuss the socialist (not democratic, not egalitarian in the Marxist sense) leanings of Nazism.

Seriously, this sounds an awful lot like 'he's a Kraut, he must be a Nazi' which is too goddamn close to 'he's a Jew, he must be part of the Bolshevik world conspiracy'.

For my taste anyways.

ash
['Oy.']

[Oskar Shapley]

"bizarre, insane",

You should have left out the bit about Andora. With a population of 67,000 (2000) it's simply insignificant.

But a decade-long comparison of France with Germany is a good idea.

[MarcinGomulka]

ralph has a goood point here,

the translations is imperfect. German is complex language with many nuanced words. The original text sounds much softer. Some key parts of the original, which the American reader would not understand in the proper context, have been removed.

Consider this lost bit:

""Anstelle der Sozialverpflichtung des Eigentums gibt sich Profitmaximierung als Grundwert aus.""

"In place of the Social Responsibility of Property, Profit Maximization poses as the basic value.""

sich als Held ausgeben - pose for a hero
sich als jemand ausgeben - impersonate sb

The term "Sozialverpflichtung des Eigentums" is obvious to anyone who knows what the "Soziale Marktwirtschaft" is. Much more was removed.

The following part:

"gegenwärtigen Gefahr eines neuen Totalitarismus, für den weltumfassend die zuletzt verbliebene Ideologie steht."

was translated as:
"today's risk of a new totalitarianism, backed as it is by the world's last remaining ideology."

I would translate it as:
"present danger of a new totalitarianism, for which worldwide the last remaining ideology [symbolically] stands."

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E3DF1F3AF937A15757C0A9659C8B63

April 24, 2003

German Angst Erupts, Dwelling on Victimhood
By RICHARD EDER

CRABWALK
By Günter Grass

Günter Grass is sharp-tongued and keen-witted and needs nobody to speak for him. Locating the nub of his 50-year quarrel with the fudgelike historical consciousness of his fellow Germans, though, there's a temptation to recall George Santayana's ''Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.''

In ''The Tin Drum,'' ''Cat and Mouse'' and elsewhere, Mr. Grass has treated Nazism as a poison not administered and swallowed but systemic, and never surely overcome. If his is an enlarging vision, it is that he writes from the inside out. His ''j'accuse'' has dry inklings of a sardonic ''je m'accuse.'' His acrid clarity stakes out its own sector of the national character, contiguous to the fudge zone....

[john c. halasz]

So is this Week II of the Bradford DeLong Smackdown?

[lise]

There is only respect and love for Brad DeLong, but there is as well such respect and love for Gunter Grass. These are wonderful compassionate thinkers, and we can well continue to affirm this. Passages from "Crabwalk" are precious. Thank you, Dear Anne.

[Michael Resing]

Paranoia? If this article was written by a non-German, what would your take be? You are seeing way to much between the lines.

[Pancho Villa]

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~kennyz/madonna_lyrics/madonna.html#holiday

[gordo]

Since I've seen no responses to ogmb's astute dismantling of the "He didn't mention Jews--must be a Nazi!" thesis, I conclude that the only remaining quibbles with Grass stem from his equating capitalism and Nazism.

Of course, Grass does no such thing. What he's saying is that the deprivations caused by unrestrained greed are the greatest present threat to democracy. He gives us the example of midcentury West Germany, when fascist impulses were restrained and prosperity nurtured by adherence to the Social Contract. Refugees were granted shelter in homes rather than camps, taxes were raised to create a modern welfare state, and the goal of full employment was actively pursued.

Grass points out that the end of German fascism as a political force was by no means a given--Nazis remained in positions of influence, and many Germans immediately began to attempt a national hand-washing, absolving themselves and their countrymen of any responsibility for the Nazis' atrocities. One can argue whether or not Grass is correct when he says that the present Ayn Rand economic ethic threatens to re-launch the horror of totalitarianism, but a close reading of his essay reveals that he is definitely not equating capitalism per se with Nazism.

One last point--"Nazi" is perhaps the filthiest epithet one can throw at a person. Nazis are beyond racist, beyond anti-semite, and beyond totalitarian. They believe that the human race should be purged of all non-whites, all non-Christians, and all dissidents. When he hurls this epithet at Grass, Mr. DeLong makes himself as ridiculous as Ward Churchill.

[JR]

Brad's misunderstanding of Grass is on the same plane as Felix, ogmb etc's misunderstanding of Todd the One-Handed Economist. We're in Emily Latella country today.

[enfant terrible]

Brad,

What were you smoking before reading Grass?

[JK]

"...on this and other such anniversary weekends, attempts to minimize the crimes of the Nazis by false comparisons do rise from the level of lies to crimes."

So, tell us, what is the appropriate sentence? How should the new statute be drawn up?

[cynic]

I agree with most of the above...pretty bad. What I find interesting is the balance and erudition of many of the readers of the blog. Tell him when he is right and let him know how wrong he is when he is way over the top. This attack is so way over the top that I wonder if there is some previous bad blood we do not know about.

[Richard Cownie]

ralph: good post, I'm basically with you.
If I were to attempt a definition of totalitarianism,
it might be a system in which the ruling power
attempts to control all aspects of people's lives
to further the goals of the state. I think
Grass is pointing out that our current capitalism
could evolve into a similarly controlling and
dehumanizing system in which corporations are
the ruling power (echoes of Mussolini's "corporatism") and profit is the all-consuming
goal.

Brad might find that a hugely misguided or even
offensive viewpoint, but it isn't directly
comparing the *current* state of capitalism
with Nazism.

On the point of accepting guilt, it occurred to
me that Abu Ghraib (and even more, the subsequent
whitewash) would be unthinkable in present-day
Germany. So in that sense, yes, they do have a
moral superiority.

[Nicholas Mycroft]

I will avoid piling on except by implication. There is a wonderful piece in last week's -New Yorker- about Douglas Feith in which Jeffrey Goldberg, with the most sweetly scientific irony, shows that Feith, surrounded by books, is a poor reader, and that even when repeatedly prodded he cannot imagine that his misreadings could possibly teach him something about himself or about what he and his ilk have wrought.

Brad is a good reader, but even the best of readers do well to assume that at any moment they may be engaging in misprision, and that after catching themselves in the act they can learn from rereading how they have misread.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050509fa_fact

[Ragout]

In a number of posts, Brad has consistently denounced as fascists those who scorn representative democracy.

Grass does that repeatedly, writing "is our parliamentary democracy still sufficiently sovereign as a guarantor of freedom of action to act on the problems facing us in the 21st century?" And Grass's annswer is no: "our freely elected members of Parliament are no longer free to decide."

Grass implies that he'd like to replace representative democracy with something better, as in his praise of the "generation of '68." Brad's point, I think, is that there isn't anything better.

[JR]

Oh, and by the way, it was not Goering who said, "A thousand years shall pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased." It was Hans Frank, who had been Governor General of Poland. Frank said this at his trial at Nuremberg, where he was convicted and hanged. Frank's defended himself by admitting a German collective responsibility while denying personal participation in the most serious offenses:

DR. SEIDL: Did you ever participate in the annihilation of Jews?

FRANK: I say "yes;" and the reason why I say "yes" is because, having lived through the 5 months of this trial, and particularly after having heard the testimony of the witness Hoess, my conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have never installed an extermination camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally has laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought against Jewry for years; and we have indulged in the most horrible utterances-my own diary bears witness against me. Therefore, it is no more than my duty to answer your question in this connection with "yes." A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/04-18-46.htm

[Jacob T. Levy]

I don't understand "crypto-Nazi" in the slightest.

"Crypto-Communist" would have made much morse sense to me.

The analysis of the comparative histories of East and West Germanies-- the posited equivalence between them, except when the West is being blamed for the condition of the East-- is appalling. And it shows a disdain for the reality of the accomplishment of constitutional parliamentary democracy. Postwar West Germany built one of the world's most robust constitutions and constitutional states-- a liberal democratic order that outlasted the French Fourth Republic, that puts the chaos of Italy's government to shame, and that was far more genuinely democratic than Japan's de facto one-party state for forty-odd years. To build this out of the ruins of a genocidal totalitarianism that itself gained credibility because of the weakness of an earlier democratic constitution seems to me one of the greatest accomplishments of the century. And that West Germany became an anchor of the EEC/EU as well as NATO-- a force for peace and stability and freedom in Europe-- adds to the accomplishment.

But in Grass' eyes, because West Germany, and now Germany, has been/is capialist and allied to the United States, it can't be morally very impressive.

That this isn't Nazi doesn't mean it's not dreadful. I think Brad's right to see Grass as caring more about the critique of liberalism than about the value of constitutional democracy-- and it's true that this has been a poisonous combination in Germany.

[JR]

Ragout, Grass implies no dislike of representative democracy. The "generation of '68" is a reference to (among others) Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who had been a revolutionary, became a leader of the Green Party, and is now the most popular politician in the country. What Grass is saying is that Germans had learned democracy by rote, like "star pupils," and made a genuine commitment to it only after the turmoil of 1968. The article is filled with similar sardonic wit and allusive references- fruitful terrritory for a hostile and apparently ignorant reader like DeLong.

[anne]

A fine portrait:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,909605,00.html

March 8, 2003

Shaper of a Nation's Conscience
Jonathan Steele reports - Guardian

Pipe between teeth and apron firmly tied, Günter Grass crunches across the gravel from his remote two-storey farmhouse to the barn where his creative muses visit him. Grass the sculptor works in a big-windowed studio at one end of the restored building. The latest clay model, of an embracing couple, is taking shape on a plinth in the centre of the airy space. Grass the writer operates in a larger, darker, altogether gloomier room. He stands at a wooden lectern to compose his scripts in longhand or paces around the largely bare room mulling over the right word. Proud of his origins as a draughtsman, he says he likes the direct contact between hand, pen and paper. After frequent crossings-out and re-drafts he sits at his portable blue Olivetti typewriter to compose a legible version for his editors. "I've resisted the personal computer," he grins.

At 75, Germany's most famous living writer is still a restless man. Politically engaged for most of his life, Grass's current energy is focused on the crisis over Iraq. It has led him to sign several anti-war appeals and write others himself. He sculpts for relaxation, he claims, but his models are sent to a metal-caster in Munich who makes them into bronzes for sale.

He is often called Germany's conscience because of his persistent agitation over what he considers the unfinished business of de-Nazification as well as other causes, from environmental degradation to Third World debt relief. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's refusal to join George Bush's crusade to topple Saddam Hussein has made Grass openly proud of his compatriots and the ruling elite for once. "Every family in this country has the experience of two world wars, two lost wars, massive destruction, millions of dead, cities in ruins. People's mentality has changed. Every generation has to face this and its consequences," he says.

He rejects the explanation, often used outside Germany, that he and other Germans have become pacifists. The more accurate picture, he argues, is that Germans do not rule war out as a last resort but they have learned to think especially carefully before rushing into it. Grass finds it ironic that Germany was persistently urged by its western allies during the cold war to grow out of its status as a political dwarf. Yet when it stands up, as Schröder has been doing over Iraq, it is denounced. Grass's new position within the German mainstream is a rare experience. From the day his first novel, The Tin Drum, appeared in 1959, with its surreal and mocking take on Nazism and the petit bourgeois milieu in which Hitlerism thrived, Grass's typical stance has been that of a public gadfly, provocative, non-conformist, forcing his compatriots to examine themselves and their past, and enjoying the controversy he aroused.

Eva Figes, the writer who came to Britain on the eve of the war as a Jewish refugee child from Berlin, knew immediately that The Tin Drum "was the book the postwar generation was waiting for. It coped with the tragedy of the Third Reich with huge energy and scope. It was inventive, macabre, funny and tremendously important." None of his dozen subsequent novels has achieved the same fame, though every new publication has been a major event in Germany. When Grass won the Nobel prize for literature in 1999, the award committee specifically mentioned The Tin Drum. They praised Grass's "cheerful destructiveness" and "creative irreverence".

"His restless productivity is phenomenal. Since winning the Nobel prize he's unassailable. He's become a classic in his own lifetime," says Hans Christoph Buch, a novelist and regular contributor to Germany's liberal weekly, Die Zeit. "He used to be very ambitious and sometimes aggressive. Now he's slightly more relaxed, which is good." Buch admires Grass as a "citizen", a term of praise in a country where docility and conformism have allowed authoritarian governments to do great damage. "He's always open and honest. He's not a tactician or an intriguer."

Wolfram Schütte, the veteran literary critic of the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, uses the same noun. "I've been more negative than positive about Grass's work over the years. We had rather tense relations. But Grass used to argue that democracy allowed him to open his mouth, and he would always speak out as a citizen. I respect him for that. He's spoken out far more than any other recent German writer."

Grass's latest novel, Crabwalk, is one of his boldest books. Fêted in the magazines and on talkshows when it came out in Germany a year ago, it was an instant best-seller. Its central theme is the silence of suppression. The narrative focuses on "Germany's Titanic", the torpe doing in the Baltic by a Russian submarine in January 1945 of a converted cruiseliner, the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was packed with refugees fleeing from East Prussia and the Nazi-occupied Baltic states in advance of Soviet troops.There were a few hundred German troops on board but most of the 9,000 who died were women and children.

Their fate, along with that of the millions of "Vertriebene" (expellees) who were forced at gun-point to abandon ancient and well-established German communities in Poland and Czechoslovakia, is the biggest neglected story of the second world war and its aftermath. Although organisations of expellees emerged to plead their case, mainstream Germany as well as foreign governments ignored them because their plight cast Germans as victims. Many individual expellees joined in this collective suppression and did not even tell their children what had happened. A film about the Gustloff came out in the 1950s but was quickly forgotten. Ironically, the issue died completely after the treaties with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia, which Chancellor Willy Brandt signed in the early 1970s. The better government-to-government relations were, the harder it was to discuss the subject of what had happened to Germans in eastern Europe....

[Antoni Jaume]

Jacob T. Levy,

"I think Brad's right to see Grass as caring more about the critique of liberalism than about the value of constitutional democracy"

My reading of Grass text is not that it is a critique of liberalism, but on the taking of real power by non representative agents that are not bound by constitutional democracy.

DSW

[Barbara]

Crypto-nazi scum? Gunter Grass? Brad, I think you title gives away your bias: it equates all inward-directed criticism by any German that does not explicitly mention and denounce the Holocaust in terms understandable to a non-German reader, as "minimizing the Holocaust." Perhaps Grass thought, obviously wrongly, that his whole oeuvre and career would be better known. Analogies are always imperfect, and if he had explicitly stated that "such and such is just like the Holocaust" we'd have reacted in probably justified outrage, but he didn't say that. He didn't even come close. It would be far preferable for you to critique what he did say than to throw dirt at him for what he failed to say. Your views end up being something along the lines of: No German can say something I disagree with by drawing (obviously very nuanced) parallels to their own history without me overlooking the substance of their argument and accusing them of minimizing the Holocaust, and therefore, being a Nazi in spirit if not outright declaration. Just a really confounding reaction to the article that I didn't understand.

[JR]

omgb, what are you mad about? You yourself said that this is Brad's worst ever- ie he misunderstood Grass. Then you misunderstood Todd-the-ohe, who was making a joke about Andorra. Lighten up, man.

[taylor]

Brad DeLong, you are a professor at Berkeley? Good grief. How could you so badly misread Grass's piece? I pity any student who submits an essay to you.

[Ellen1910]

Let's not forget Brad's a DLC'er, and Grass has gored Brad's ox.

Brad will never live down having been a part of an administration that handed the government over to the drug companies and the telecommunications industry.

We're just witnessing the return of the repressed.

[Mike]

Brad's post is a great example of what occurs when you "go with the moment". Or immediately post something reflecting your feelings after having just read or heard something.
Grass' final paragraph was something I found to be surprisingly asinine coming from one so bright. I can understand why Brad felt the need to address it. But agree that Brad went off the rails in pursuing the rest of Grass' piece as if it were all as poorly thought out as was his last paragraph.

MS

[Keith M Ellis]

"Maybe when Brad finally calms down he'd like to address the multitudinous suffering his beloved neoliberalism has brought to both the developed and the developing world, and the corrosive effect it has had upon democracy nearly everywhere it has touched. Fat chance, though that was in some sense Grass' point."

This is the real context in which Brad wrote this post. It was a reckless response to Grass which really wasn't a response to Grass—it was a response to people like the above commenter.

In fairness to Brad and directing some criticism to many of his critics here, I'll point out that it's often the case that many harshly critical responses to Brad's posts are as egregious misreadings as Brad commits here...often on the very same general point in contention. Critics often argue that Brad's support of capitalism is crypto-somethingorother and is in bad-faith (or is at least from a position of smug privilege and is thus morally suspect).

People like the commenter I quote above, I think, absolutely refuse to comprehend that someone like Brad could fervently support neoliberal economics as a matter of progressive morality comparably to how they themsleves fervently *oppose* neoliberal economics as a matter of progressive morality. In a very real sense, these two leftist positions are incomprehensible to each other and thus assumptions by each of bad-faith (or willful ignorance, or dupery) by the other are almost inevitable.

[JR]

ombg, you're still not getting it. Todd's point was that the economic performances of France and Germany were not dissimilar - he doubts that the unification of Germany had the effects that Grass is asserting. The business about Andorra was a joke (when someone says "Andorra" you should know right away it's a joke) - My point was that DeLong missed everything that Grass is saying. Of course, I don't think you should be imprisoned for missing the Todd's funny joke, but I don't think DeLong should go to jail either- although I do think he should apologize nicely.

[Ellen1910]

So Keith, can you explain how neoliberals' support for imposing copywrite and trademark restrictions on third-world countries in order that the former can maintain their high status as symbol analysts (i.e., Brad de Long and his friends) can be defined as leftish?

[JR]

Jeez Louise, ogmb -- Brad drives me nuts from time to time but he's not generally in bad faith. This attack on Grass is so unpersuasive - only an ignoramus would call Grass a Nazi - that I'm persuaded it's the result of profound ignorance, not malevolence. You, on the other hand, conclude that he must be evil, not merely stupid. But I get the sense (e.g., the sneering reference to "this Nobel Laureate"- the one fact that is presented in the Times) that he's never even heard of Grass. Perhaps he's confusing him with Dario Fo or something. (Wait, no!! I'm not accusing Fo of being a Nazi= it's a joke!) Maybe he'll enlighten us-

[sureshm]

I am not discounting the possibility that Grass is a "crypto-nazi" (whatever that means) but I am concerned that Brad's case for using this term is weak. Labelling someone a "nazi" is a serious charge, particularly when made by someone of Brad's standing and it bothers me that the case is more-or-less based on one article which itself can be read very differently than the way Brad reads it, judging by the reactions on this forum.

Careless usage of terms like "nazi" and "anti-semite" not only weakens one's own case but more dangerously, strengthens the hand of the neo-nazis and anti-semites who will pick out such instances to use in their propaganda. Please do be careful, Brad.

[Oskar Shapley]

Rethinking it all again,

I believe everyone of us has missunderstood Grass's article. We all did, because Brad has pushed our thinking in the wrong temporal direction.

Guenther Grass is not talking about the time of the World War II, which ended on May 8th, 1945. He is talking about the post-war era which started on the same day.

There was no Holocaust after the war. Grass is not mentioning any Jews, because he is talking about a different issue.

The issue is the post-war division of Germany, which has brought the Ossies (East-Germans) into the Soviet camp and causes economic trouble to the present day.

This is the context of the article, but as non-Germans we all were unable to see it immediately.