The Floundering

It's a little late to be blogging about the Gunter Grass affair, I know, but here goes (tune in tomorrow for an analysis of the McGovern campaign - I think old George has a real shot):

It's the lies that hurt, Mr. Grass (ask fellow Nazi Youth-er turned Pope, Jumpin' Joe Ratzinger, to explain sins of omission to you). We have enough subtlety in our historical imaginations to understand that a 17 year old kid who gets conscripted isn't exactly a war criminal.

At least I hope we do.

I've got a family member doing his second tour in Iraq. He doesn't want to be there, but he doesn't have a lot of choice. He wasn't conscripted, but he was a poor kid without a whole lot of options who signed up as a way to make a life for himself. Not to kill people. I sure as hell don't blame him for the war.

I don't blame Gunter Grass, either.

How many 17 year olds have the insight and the courage to face almost certain death standing up for what's right? Not many. Precious few adults do, either. And anyone who says they do without having been put to the test is fooling themselves.

One often hears people asking why there weren't more protests in Germany. Why more people didn't intervene to stop their Jewish neighbors from being taken to the camps. This is a dangerous line of questioning: by making it a question about German behavior, we ignore the fact that it's really a question about human behavior. It allows us to imaginatively quarantine the problem and to escape self-examination.

First of all, it ignores the fact that the Resistance movement started in Germany and continued throughout the war. But it also ignores a deeper question: what do any of us do in the face of abused power? What did Americans do to prevent the abduction of our ethnically Japanese neighbors? As it turns out, they weren't being sent to death camps (they were just being illegally detained and despoiled of their property. That's all), but no one knew that for sure.

Our military knew about the death camps, but didn't bomb the railroad tracks that carried Jews to slaughter, slavery, and torture. It wasn't in the "war effort."

We know that our ethnically Arab neighbors are being spied on and illegally detained and possible tortured. How many of us are putting our lives on the line to secure their safety?

Not me. I sign a few petitions and then have a self-satisfied nap. It's hard work being an activist.

Quarantining the questions allows us to escape responsiblity. Quarantining the questions allows us to become morally complacent.

So, Mr. Grass, knowing that you were a conscripted soldier for 4 months when you were 17 might have kept you from getting a Nobel - then again, it might not - but it wouldn't have kept you from having a literary career.

Paul de Man wrote moony articles about the Nazis in Belgian newspapers. This discovery has in no way diminished his reputation.

Martin Heidegger, a man who was already powerful and influential enough to do some good, chose not to do good. Instead, he used the expulsion of Jews from their university posts to advance his own career.* Despite the pleadings of friends and former colleagues like Karl Jaspers, Heidegger never repudiated his Nazi sympathies; he was a dues-paying member of the Nazi party until the end of the war. And who is one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century?

Here's a hint: it ain't Karl Jaspers.

Yeats, Pound, Eliot - all had Fascist leanings of one sort or another.

So, this revelation wouldn't have hampered your career at all, Mr. Grass. What it could have done - and here's the rub, as the man says - it could have strengthened your political voice over the last few decades.

You had an opportunity to bear witness.

As the self-appointed and often smug conscience of German politics, imagine how your voice could have been amplified if people knew your story. You could have shown how dangerous and immoral systems can swallow up the lives and agency of decent people. How not every decent person has the clarity and fortitude and morally prescient whimsy of Oskar Mazerath. Who had the distinct advantage of being fictional.

Your indictment, too, quarantined moral responsibility. It remained: what was wrong with all those passive Germans? Your honesty could have elevated the discourse from one of blame to one of ethical discovery - you could have led us to a harder truth than we wanted, but one that we needed.

When you criticized the Christian Democrats for their petit bourgeois ideology, imagine how you could have vitalized your message by demonstrating where such ideas can lead.

When you criticized Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan's unsettling trip to Bitburg, imagine how much more resonant your censure would have been with your living example of how bad actions by leaders can spread, contaminating whole cultures. How bad leadership inculpates the innocent.

You had an opportunity to show what was at stake.

But you didn't. You kept quiet, and now when people ask about it, you impatiently tell them to read your book. This looks like nothing so much as a publicity stunt, a cynical way to move the merch.

*thanks to an alert reader, enowning, I have emended this post to correct a factual error.