“What Must Be Said”: Günter Grass, My Book & Me
In 2006, Günter Grass’s confession that he’d been a member of the Waffen SS surprised me. But it didn’t depress me. It didn’t anger me. Grass seemed appropriately ashamed and regretful. I knew him to be an advocate for Germany’s recognition of its Nazi past. He wasn’t asking for my forgiveness, but he would have had it, anyway.
I’d read the closing words of his 2002 novel, Crabwalk, as a regretful but accepting acknowledgment of the lasting reverberations of this past, for all of us. Those lines—“It doesn’t end. Never does it end.”—moved me so deeply that I included them as one of two epigraphs for my short story collection, Quiet Americans. (The other epigraph, also from a Nobel laureate, is Imre Kertész’s “Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?”) My book is inspired largely by the histories and experiences of my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1930s, and by my preoccupations with that legacy. The suggestions of the Holocaust’s enduring presence in other people’s minds, souls, and history seemed to be encapsulated in these lines. In fact, Grass and Crabwalk received another mention in one of the book’s stories, as part of the narrator’s point about wartime sufferings endured by non-Jewish German civilians. (Which, I believe, remains valid.)
But now I have to look at the Grass epigraph differently. (more…)
