Saturday, April 21, 2012

Must Anything Ever Really be Said

A while ago when I was on some random tangent, I ran into an article on CNN.com, about Nobel Literature Laureate, Guenter Grass, being banned from Israel in response to a poem he wrote, Was gesagt werden muss or What Must be Said.  The poem essentially calls for Germany to stop being on a major guilt trip for the Holocaust since it was so long ago, and giving Israel a free pass for anything it wants to do, which he indicates will soon mean attacking Iran with nuclear weapons.  He wrote this poem right after Germany sold Israel a 6th Dolphin class submarine, which are alleged to be capable of carrying nuclear warheads.  Along with more evidence that dolphins are evil.

Of course, it led to a lot of people throwing fits since well, he's German, and was kind of (fine not kind of) a member of Waffen-SS as a teenager in WWII, which he'd previously left out of his memoirs and speaking about his past, until essentially being forced to.  Thus, people have said that it's hypocritical for him to tell Germany to face their past when he refuses to face his.  At the same time, many people, inside and outside of Germany are starting to share his view that Germany should no longer handicap itself because of mistakes people's grandparents made.

Here are a couple link to a translations of the poem.  One has it in only English, and the other site has a plethora of languages, including Arabic.

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