“Speak Out!”—Günter Grass as an International Intellectual

Abstract

The political engagement of Günter Grass, Germany's most significant contemporary writer is by no means limited only to German affairs but has for decades also extended across a broad spectrum of international issues. This study thus centres on the question, hitherto only touched on in the research literature, of Grass's profile as an international intellectual. It primarily deals with his critical attitude towards the United States of America, Israel, and the project of European integration, where it emerges that Grass's public interventions are directed above all against the misuse of political power, as perpetrated for example by the USA during the Cold War or later in Iraq. At the same time, Grass has, at an international level, taken the part of those who have fallen victim to power-centred politics, those who are discriminated against, those who have been forgotten, such as the fatwa-threatened Salman Rushdie, the endangered Israeli population during the Six Day War and the first Gulf War, and the European ethnic group the Roma.

¹ Article translated by Graham Frankland.

Notes

¹ Article translated by Graham Frankland.

² Cf. for example Preece 153–57; Mayer-Iswandy 106–28; Neuhaus 107–19.

³ Willy Brandt, whose birth name was Herbert Frahm, adopted his second name when he was forced into exile by the National Socialists.

⁴ In 1992, Grass demonstrated in a particularly forceful way how necessary this attitude was with regard to the xenophobic attacks on asylum seekers in Germany. While spending summer on the Danish island Møn, Grass left his literary refuge in order to publicly oppose the scandalous persecution of foreigners: “My usual retreat into the manuscript and its baroque network of escape routes lay buried. Drastic things were afoot” (Grass “Rede vom Verlust” 362).

⁵ Cf. Sütterlin. In a speech at the same New York event, Grass attacked the social injustice of the American system and cast doubt on the “American way of life”. According to Grass, whoever today still considers this to be a “viable path must be enough of a hypocrite to be able to ignore the adjoining slum districts, and worldwide hunger” (Grass “West-östliches” 175). The result was what Salman Rushdie has described as the “heavyweight prize fight between Saul Bellow and Günter Grass” (Rushdie “The Pen”). The catalyst for this was some remarks from Bellow, who in his speech to the writers’ Congress claimed that the Enlightenment-inspired libertarian founding ideas of the United States had, on the whole, been successfully put into practice. In the subsequent discussion Grass cast doubt on the viability of the “American Dream” described by Bellow by alluding to the people of the South Bronx who possessed neither home nor food nor the freedoms cited by Bellow (McDowell). Bellow considered himself to have been misunderstood, he was merely describing the situation of the majority in the USA and it was not his intention to justify America's role as a superpower (Bellow).

⁶ Cf. McDowell; Oesterle 129.