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| Gunter Grass and the Left's Red Flags |
| 2015-04-15 |
A few days after September 11 I saw a quote from Gunter Grass on a Manhattan lamppost. In those dark days, the lampposts and walls that weren't covered in missing persons posters were decorated with the hysterical pamphleteering of the left urging us to blame ourselves for the attacks. The quote has long since been lost to memory, buried under smoke and ash, a green parrot perched on an empty staircase and crowds thronging on foot across the bridge. The quote itself, like the latest Grassian screed, does not matter. Grass, like Gandhi and King, was one of the favorite go-to guys for the left's sticky sheets of paper. When you want to write a suicide note, then you reach for a line from Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, but when you want to write a national or civilizational suicide note, there's always Gunter Grass. As a writer, Gunter Grass is a blacksmith, hammering together graceless and shapeless lumps that aren't good for much except hitting people over the head with leaden angst and guilt. Being a bad artist or writer, a shameless egotist who hammers his own pedestal and waits for the adoring crowds to gather, does not make one a Nazi, though Gunter had been a Nazi. But it doesn't help either. Neither does the resentment over the war poorly fitted into a pacifist t-shirt which hangs over the paunches of the German and Japanese left. That adds a vindictive tone to their denunciation of American, British and Israeli warmongering. Grass, like so much of the German left, saw Nazis everywhere but in the mirror. The only lesson that he and his comrades had drawn is that they were wrong to march right, when they should have marched left. It did not occur to them that they should not have been marching at all and that the marching under red banners was the whole problem to begin with. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #2 Agree with you there. The Tin Drum, my all time favourite book. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2015-04-15 18:12 |
| #1 Nonetheless, 'The Tin Drum' and 'Dog Years' were great literature. The latter told the story of the war through the eyes of Hitler's dog, Blondi. |
| Posted by: borgboy 2015-04-15 16:26 |