Source: Spiegel International

A Commentary by Sebastian Hammelehle

Never in the history of postwar Germany has a prominent intellectual attacked Israel in such a cliche-laden way as Günter Grass with his controversial new poem, “What Must Be Said.” The Nobel Prize laureate has delivered a lyrical first strike against Israel.

“What Must Be Said” is the title that Günter Grass chose for his poem. It begins with the words: “Why have I been silent, kept quiet for too long, about what is obvious.” The poem, which was published in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on Wednesday and which has already provoked considerable outrage, deals with Grass’s silence on Israel and the threat of military conflict between Israel and Iran. It’s also about Germany supplying weapons to Israel, and about the relationship between Germans and Israelis. It’s about a subject, where the title alone, “What Must Be Said”, implies an unpleasant flippancy: the flippancy of breaking taboos.

“What must be said” is a thinly veiled version of another phrase that Germans who don’t hold a Nobel Prize for literature like to use when they’re sitting around in the pub, setting the world to rights. It can be loosely translated as: “There’s no law against saying that…”

Yes, there’s no law against saying these things — except that there is an unwritten law in Germany against saying certain things, particularly given the country’s difficult history. And so Grass, a few lines after he has posed the rhetorical question about why he has kept quiet, gives an explanation for his previous reticence. He felt under a “constraint,” he writes — a constraint that “promises punishment if it is flouted.”

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