I am not an authority or even an in-depth student of Günter Grass’ work but I remember reading The Tin Drum when it was first available in translation, and rolling on the bed with exuberant laughter as the protagonist, Oskar’s grandfather slips under the voluminous skirts of Ms Bronski who’s roasting potatoes. He not only escapes from those about to catch him but busies himself doing things which as a decent Indian I’m too shy to mention. Grass could be uproariously funny and deadly serious at the same time. How often we forget that Grass was one of the earliest contemporary writers to use what we now call magic realism.
With that first novel, Grass broke the silence about Germany’s terrible Nazi past and was seen as the conscience-keeper of the country. The Tin Drum was not a war novel like All Quiet on The Western Front or From Here to Eternity . It was an oblique take on the madness that consumed Germany in the Hitler years. It would be wise to remember that by and large, exceptional fiction does not come straight to the point. It weaves a magic web by telling a compelling story while slyly making its point through metaphor, symbolism, fantasy and other means. If the author’s any good, he lets the story and the characters grab you while slipping in his message or world-view surreptitiously. Fortunately, Grass was not alone. Heinrich Boll and others joined his quest to come clean.
Decades later in 2006, by an ironic twist of fate, it came to light that the conscience-keeper had withheld some facts, and that too about his own role during the war. The ikon, it was discovered, had feet of clay. He had been, as a matter of fact, a member of the German armed forces since the age of 16 and at 17 was a full-fledged member of the 10th SS Panzer Division, Frundsberg. There was a hue and cry. The critics tore into him. The curious thing was that it was Grass himself who decided to divulge his long-hidden secret. I am sorry but I have a kinder view of what Grass did in his teens. There’s no denying that Hitler had a mesmerising effect on most of his countrymen, especially on youngsters. Do we really know how you and I might have reacted? I am not buying into up-righteousness that turns up in hindsight.
Now let me reveal that Günter Grass is my decoy here. One has to decode The Tin Drum and the other two novels from the Danzig trilogy to get at the meaning and message at their core. Not a very easy task really. On May 8, 1985, exactly 40 years after Germany surrendered, President Richard von Weizsäcker gave one of the most sincere, lucid, and introspective speeches that any but any head of a state has ever given. Forget the perpetually prevaricating George Bush, or have-it-every-which-way Obama; forget Churchill, Roosevelt, even Lincoln, and certainly let me not invoke the current leadership in India. Barring Gandhiji, I don’t think any other political leader has had the courage, wisdom, and vision evinced by President Weizsäcker. I was planning to claim that I was the great ghost-writer of the President’s speech and read it out to you but all these good Germans here would have caught me with my pants down. All I can say is that the speech has been translated into English. We Indians too have committed unpardonable genocidal crimes. I’m not referring to the Partition, but the Sikh massacres in 1984, the wholesale butchering of Muslims in Mumbai after the 1992 bomb-blasts and the ghastly four digit murders of the same people in Gujarat in 2002, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. Forget the leaders, can you and I own up to our silence and apathy and that most infamous of sentences, ‘They had it coming’?
I will quote just one paragraph from the former President’s speech: “All of us (Germans), whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by the past and liable for it. The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital to keep alive the memories. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or undone. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity of their past, is prone to new risks of infection.”
I can’t forget that line: anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Read the speech, please.
And now to my own talk. The good traditional Indian that I am, I will take a very brief seven-and-a-half hours to deliver it. My initial thought was to write a sequel to President Weizäcker’s speech. After the holocaust, the Israelis coined the memorable phrase ‘Never again’. It took an Israeli philosopher-historian called Yehuda Elkana to ask the most relevant question after the Israeli mantra, ‘Never again’: ‘Never again for whom? Just for the Israelis or for the whole world?’ I was going to explore the monstrous Israeli conduct, genocide really, of their Palestinian compatriots with the full backing of the United States. It would seem that the only thing that experience teaches us is for the former victim to commit the same appalling crimes again. But I decided against it because there was something even more urgent and universal that I wanted to talk about, but with the same thrust. Apathy as complicity or as Kayla Jean Mueller, who was most likely murdered by ISIS said so memorably, “Silence is participation in the crime.”
