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Title: On Writing and Politics 1967-1983 by Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Ralph Manheim ISBN: 0-15-169969-0 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: July, 1985 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95

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Summary: A great writer's incidental autobiography
Comment: As German philosophy ceased to have any significance in the intellectual vacuum that followed the destruction which had a tendency to increase as the world neared the end of World War II, but problems in the twentieth century were as political as ever, there was plenty of reason to wonder if a famous German writer might have some clues about what was going on. I might have read this book a long time ago, when Nicaragua was a political concern in the United States, as I remember the approach which Gunter Grass took to this problem in "Superpower Backyards," written in 1982, with an English translation in "The Nation," March 12, 1983. After the Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua and Grass spent eight days there, he started his article with a Mexican saying, "My poor Mexico, how far you are from God, and how close to the United States!" (p. 149). Grass was born in Danzig in 1927, lived in West Berlin, and "Spiritually as well as geographically, I felt closer to the Solidarity movement in Poland. Actually, as I see now, Solidarity and the Sandinistas have much in common. Poland's fears of intervention by the Soviet Union have their counterpart in Nicaragua's fears of intervention by the United States." (p. 149). In 2003, the geopolitical picture has changed in some places, the catastrophe which Russia would like to end in the area around Chechnya is much more persistent than the hijacked airplane attacks suffered in the United States on September 11, 2001, but there is still some fear of new attacks that signals a lingering intellectual connection between what is in this book and American intervention elsewhere in the world.

Flying into Managua with a layover in Miami gave Grass an opportunity to rent a car and look for "two of the training camps for Cuban exiles and Somocistas south of Miami Beach. One of them was hidden behind mounds of garbage; the other was behind a fence with a metal sign on the gate reading "FBI area." The penalty for unauthorized entry is ten years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine." (p. 152). There might still be Cubans in training there, hoping to lead Cuba to democracy any year now, when the inevitable finally happens. As recently as June 8, 2001, U.S. federal court sentenced five Cubans to 15 years and up to two life sentences for espionage for monitoring the actions of groups in Miami which have caused the deaths and injury of hundreds of people. The last page of this book would inspire the German government to help Nicaragua develop its agriculture. "Will the government in Bonn understand (and why not?) that if we help Nicaragua we help ourselves? Or will it obey the wishes of the superpower-ally and get out the cudgel for Cuba--a familiar reaction which can club to death anything, not just the Sandinista revolution but also one's own thoughts?" (p. 157).

The introduction by Salman Rushdie was written at least three years before Rushdie became the object of a million dollar reward, and long after Rushdie read THE TIN DRUM in the summer of 1967. The state of mind of "exiles, refugees, migrants" (p. x) is called "a triple disruption: he loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behavior and code is very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own." (p. xi).

The first half of ON WRITING AND POLITICS is about what great authors have done. Alfred Doblin, Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Schiller are mentioned on the road to a very modern understanding of "Schiller's purpose was to make the Thirty Years' War intelligible as a clearly structured whole. One event followed from another. His ordering hand disclosed relationships, looked for meaning. More than once, Doblin deliberately smashes this whole construct to bits for the sake of reality." (p. 11). "THE TIN DRUM in retrospect or The Author as Dubious Witness" (pp. 25-30) explains the author's great success, though "after one night in the custody of the Paris police I was overcome by a positive longing for the West German police--we left Paris soon after THE TIN DRUM was published (and left me), and moved back to Berlin. . . . Since then I've found it harder to write." (p. 30). The chapter "What Shall We Tell Our Children?" is on the great poet, Heine. "Heine remains a stumbling block to the Germans. His witty seriousness and laughing despair are beyond them. I do not except myself, for when, soon after the end of the war, young and hungry for hitherto forbidden literature, I read Heine's `Rabbi of Bacherach' for the first time, . . ." (p. 83). As a writer, Grass sees the complicated side of complexity. "The success of `popular' enlightenment has never been more than skin deep. Demonstrably as television series" (p. 88) exhibit entertainment values, . . . "they are quite incapable of disclosing the complex `modernity' of genocide and the many-layered responsibilities at the root of it. Basically, Auschwitz was not a manifestation of common human bestiality; it was a repeatable consequence of a network of responsibilities so organized and subdivided that the individual was conscious of no responsibility at all." (p. 88) For skinheads, 88 equal HH, as in *Heil Hitler,* the contrary idea which is close to the center of this book. Later Grass confesses that in November 1938 "I was eleven years old and both a Hitler Youth and a practicing Catholic." (p. 89). "I never, up to the beginning of the war, heard a single prayer in behalf of the persecuted Jews, but I joined in babbling a good many prayers for the victory of the German armies and the health of the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler." (pp. 89-90). Now he can safely complain about "The many-faceted moral bankruptcy of the Christian West." (p. 90).