blueprint news: In Memoriam Guenter Grass

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

In Memoriam Guenter Grass

Guenter Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16, 1927, and died on April 13, 2015, in Lübeck.

"What Must Be Said" (German: "Was gesagt werden muss") is a 2012 prose poem written by Guenter Grass, a poem discussing an alleged threat of annihilation of the Iranian people. Grass exposes his fears that Germany's delivery to Israel of a sixth Dolphin class submarine, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, might facilitate an eventual Israeli nuclear attack on Iran, and thus involve his country Germany in a foreseeable crime.

The poem was first published on 4 April 2012 by the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), La Repubblica (Italy) and El País (Spain), triggering four days later the declaration by Eli Yishai, the Israeli Minister for the Interior, that Grass, who had visited Israel in 1967 and 1971, was now persona non grata.

At that time, I volunteered to provide independent translations of the disputed Grass poem into the English and French language and published them in a blogspot of "blueprint news" that was titled Israel - German Submarine Delivery Raising Protest. Via an external link these translations are still available from the Wikipedia page which is dedicated to the original version written by Guenter Grass. Useless to mention that lots of people from all over the world came to read my translations. And when I noticed that Grass died the day before, I found again an impressive list of visitors to "blueprint news" and who could be identified just on the day Guenter Grass died.

What else to say about his worldwide recognition, even though there were many who blamed him for obscuring his own past during World War II when he served in the Waffen-SS while he was still a very young man with few experience of life.