German author Guenter Grass dies | Hacker News Reader

German author Guenter Grass dies

bbc.com

197 pointssigna1158 comments

The Günter-Grass-Haus published this poem from his work "Fundsachen für Nichtleser"

  Mit einem Sack Nüsse
  will ich begraben sein  
  und mit neuesten Zähnen.
  Wenn es dann kracht,
  wo ich liege,
  kann vermutet werden:
  Er ist das,
  immer noch er.

I don't think it's available in English, and I'll add my own translation here. I hope that's not too presumptuous. I've done some translation, but translating poetry is difficult.

  With a bag of nuts
  I'd like to be buried
  and with the freshest of teeth.
  When there is gnashing
  where I lie,
  one can surmise:
  He's at it,
  still he.

Can you provide some interpretations of the poem, especially the context or the environment which it was written in?

I'm hardly qualified to comment on any specifics. I'll only go as far as saying that Grass wasn't well-known for his love of snack food, and I interpret the poem as referring to his being argumentative, even beyond his lifetime. Maybe someone else can chime in.

There's a phrase in German language, "eine harte Nuss zu knacken haben", literally "to have a hard nut to crack".

Maybe that means that he'll be cracking nuts (problems) even after he's buried?

I think it's more aimed towards his tendency to go against the (left) mainstream of his day and start fights - he argued for a delayed or stopped reunification of West and East Germany, he often criticized people for not dealing with their Nazi past thoroughly enough (which bit him when he disclosed his own previously secret Nazi past just a few years ago), he always worked in politics (mostly supporting the SPD).

"Wenn es dann kracht,"

you can also translate as

"where there's a fight"

so there's a bit of a double-meaning here - "krachen" means that there's noise from his crushing nuts, but it can also mean that there's a conflict [1]

[1] http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/krachen "(umgangssprachlich für streiten)"

I tried to convey this with gnashing, which is also something that literally happens when you chew nuts as well as idiomatically when you fight, when you gnash your teeth out of anger.

I didn't even think of that, that's a very different take on the poem, and possibly a more appropriate one, thanks!

I would agree with that idea. The bag of nuts may represent the issues he has concerned himself with over the years or they may be future issues in need of a solution. Grass has always been very outspoken, very political and, more often than not, provocative. I believe he is writing about his legacy. He is convinced that his works will outlast him and that he will continue to have an impact through them even after this death. One could even go a step further and argue that he is saying his works are him (or at least his essence) and therefore he will continue to live on. The sounds coming from the grave may either represent the cracking of nuts, meaning solving the issue or they may represent the sound of fighting over said issues stimulated by Grass' ideas.

I'd translate the last two lines slightly different:

  With a bag of nuts
  I'd like to be buried
  and with the freshest of teeth.
  When there is gnashing
  where I lie,
  one can surmise:
  It's him,
  still him.

That's what I had originally, but I felt that the pronoun being the first and the last word in the last sentence (and second-to-last/last line, respectively) was significant enough that I wanted to keep it in, even at the cost of being non-grammatical.

I love this community...:)

"er ist das" also sounds exactly like "he eats that".

Woah, completely missed that. Then, "he's at it" captures slightly more of that meaning as well. Still incredibly hard to translate while trying to stay succinct.

I'd like to quote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's obituary [0]:

  Es gibt kein anderes Buch in unserer Sprache, das in der
  jüngsten Epoche der internationalen  Belletristik von
  vergleichbarer Präsenz war – und damit an die Seite
  der allerersten Hervorbringungen unserer Literaturgeschichte gehört,
  also an die Seite von Goethes „Werther“, von Fontanes „Effi Briest“,
  Thomas Manns „Buddenbrooks“, Kafkas „Prozess“, Döblins „Berlin 
  Alexanderplatz“ oder Musils „Mann ohne Eigenschaften“.

Which says, that there was no other book [than The Tin Drum] in German language that had a comparable presence in the last epoch of international belletristic.

It then puts Grass alongside Goethe, arguably the greatest honor a German (or really any) writer can ever get from the feuilleton.

[0]: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/autoren/ein-na...

His poem "What Must Be Said" is a wonderful commentary on Israel and the threat it poses to world peace. He talks about how the West has turned a blind eye to Israel's development of nuclear weapons because of its collective guilt. He argues that this must stop.

Here it is (translated): https://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/a-legitimate-tran...

He may have a point but I can think of less controversial figures than Grass to make it.

The poem conveniently omits an important point - that Israel has never called for Iran's destruction whereas Iran has repeatedly called to "wipe Israel off the map." Anyone who equates Israel and Iran on this issue is either ignorant or biased, possibly both.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/10/26/ahmadinejad/ http://video.foxnews.com/v/3704646723001/irans-supreme-leade...

Yup, of course this is no coincidence. The "poem" is straight-out antisemitic. Old habits die hard, after all Grass had an SS history (that he forgot to mention over decades).

[Edit] It's kind of obvious, but I'll say it since this is often missed by those applauding Grass for his late poem: If Israel wanted to destroy Iran, it had already done so, given its nuclear power. Instead, Israel has (so far successfully) used that nuclear power defensively to keep its neighbor countries from trying to destroy it.

That is just profoundly wrong. In the 80s he stated that a country which was responsible for something like the Holocaust did not deserve to be re-unificated. It seemed that he had his fair share of issues with his past, that is we he himself decided to come out with it.

What exactly is wrong? Sure, he decided to come out with the truth about his past, but it was kind of late. I'm not sure I see the connection between my post and your reply.

Either what he is saying is right, or it is wrong.

If it is right, he could eat babies for lunch and it would be right.

If he is wrong, he could be the creator of the universe and all within it and still be wrong.

Please stop with this ad-hominem nonsense.

Let me translate what I said / meant, then: What Grass was saying is wrong, and by the way it didn't surprise me given his shady history.

Hindsight is 20/20. Grass likely joined the SS as he'd been drafted to do labor (and IIRC the Nazis weren't nice to those who tried to draft-dodge). He didn't fire a shot, committed no atrocities, and went on to criticize Nazi and bourgeois culture. Dismissing the poem as antisemitic without explaining how it's antisemitic is just a lazy, cheap shot.

He joined the Waffen-SS in 1944 at the age of 17. The Waffen-SS was totally not the same as the SS.

Ahmadinejad never said that, though ironically it was an Iranian news agency that mistranslated him.

He was talking about three previous regimes that had fallen: the Shah of Iran, the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein, saying that they had "vanished from the page of time", he expressed the hope that the regime that "occupies Jerusalem" would likewise "vanish from the page of time", at no point did he say that Iran would "wipe Israel off the map" The actual speech is relatively innocuous so the warhawks had to spin hard to make it into a direct threat.

Now, Khamenei has apparently threatened Israel directly (via Twitter back in November) but he has also issued fatwas against the use and production of nuclear weapons calling them a crime against humanity and Allah. Consistency, much? The difficulty in judging these comments is telling what are threats and what is theatre.

BTW, Vice-Premier Shimon Peres did threaten Iran just after the Ahmadinejad brouhaha:

"The president of Iran should remember that Iran can also be wiped off the map." -- The Jerusalem Post (2006-05-09).

Taking stupid comments like those as direct threats is how pointless, tragic wars get started.

Meanwhile, it's perfectly OK for Netanyahu to keep threatening to bomb Iran: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/02/brief-history-...

It's perfectly OK for the US/Israel to attack Iran's industrial infrastructure with a virus: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/ (an act that Obama said would be an "act of war" if done to the US)

It's perfectly OK for Israel to kill Iranian nuclear scientists: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/US-pressuring-Is...

And it's perfectly OK for people like John McCain (who came this >< close to becoming POTUS) to sing about bombing Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg

But hey, Ahmedinajad says one sentence that's dubiously translated, and that's not OK.

> the threat it poses to world peace

Some poeple are living in an alternative reality. Wars have been and are taking place all over the place without Israel's involvement. World peace doesn't exist, so the idea that Israel would threaten it is maniac.

Since this is a hacker crowd where data should count for something, consider that the entire Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948 so far caused less than half as many deaths as the current Syrian civil war, let alone the Iran-Iraq War or the Iraq invasion.

So, claiming this nation of 7 million that is smaller in size than Lake Michigan to be "posing a threat to world peace" is pathetic, and frankly says much more about Grass than Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

How about we rephrase your sentence a little:

So, claiming this group [Al-Qaeda] of several thousand that is smaller in size than a football stadium to be "posing a threat to world peace" is pathetic, and frankly says much more about the US military than al-Qaeda.

Still agree with me? Size has absolutely no relation whatsoever on the ability to threaten something, particularly when said party has nuclear weapons.

Of course I agree. Al Qaeda doesn't have the capacity to really threaten world peace except by provoking a shortsighted response, which they did.

But the comparison is meaningless anyway. AQ is not a nation, it's an organization with a certain ideology. It's not comparable to a country, like Israel, which is a collection of various ideologies and worldviews.

While I agree with you, I think what is claimed it that Israel and AQ are unique in their potential for destruction ("threaten world peace") not necessarily their previous actions in that regard.

If that is the case, comparing their body count is almost meaningless.

That's ridiculous. In what way is it unique? Nukes are more likely to be used in a Pakistan-Indian conflict and now that the cold war is over there's no chance of a regional war spiralling into WWIII.

The deaths due to the Arab-Israeli conflict have nothing to do with the potential consequences of Israel's nuclear weapons. Likewise, the small population and small landmass doesn't reduce the threat. If anything, it increases the threat, because Israel has a much smaller capability to withstand conventional war than any other nuclear-armed country.

Consider that Israel's stockpile, while unknown, is estimated to be larger than Pakistan's and India's combined, and that it is surrounded by enemies rather than merely being bordered by some as is India and Pakistan. Those two are a major threat to world stability and a likely source of a near to medium term nuclear war. We're really lucky that Israel's enemies have not managed to get their shit together since 1973 on the wiping-out-the-Jews front, because if they did or do, it could easily turn into a seriously devastating conflict.

Former Nazi criticizes the Jewish state. Shocker.

I somehow completely missed an incredible cultural Icon. The NYT flashed this as "Breaking News", and it's sitting here at 62 points in less than an hour - and I had absolutely no idea who Guenter Grass was, until I started reading the news.

Spooky - it's like I slipped in from an alternate plane of reality.

That's the beautiful thing about literature. One can catch up by simply reading!

No, I'm afraid one can never catch up. There's just too much to read. My stack of unread books gets higher every month. Sigh.

1Q84?

Read 'The tin drum' about 10 years ago. Didn't get a lot of it but I remember getting very fascinated with it. Kind of like Murakami but I found Murakami easier to read. Time to read 'The tin drum' again.

R.I.P Mr grass.

I quite enjoyed the "Tin Drum" but I admit that I lost a bit of respect for the man when it was revealed he had worked for the Stasi.

Still, it is a great loss of a great writer.

He didn't work for the STASI, he volunteered for the Waffen SS.

> Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In May 1945, after service as a soldier in the Waffen SS, he was taken prisoner by U.S. forces and released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, he began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass

The current official version is that he volunteered for submarine service, was rejected there, then drafted into Waffen SS.

> He didn't work for the STASI, he volunteered for the Waffen SS.

He volounteered for the Kriegsmarine, but that was in 1944 when Reich was in full retreat in the east, and so he was pulled into Waffen SS ranks instead.

He worked for the Stasi? I think you have this completely wrong: the Stasi observed him. Maybe you mean that he was briefly a member of the Waffen-SS at the end of the war?

I think you're mixing some things up here. He never worked for the Stasi, on the contrary, he was under their observation since 1961.[1]

He was, however, a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS in his youth, though he claims to never have fired a shot. The fact that he chose to make this public only very late in his life (and many years after he had receiced the Nobel prize) is what is really problematic, in my opinion.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass#Beobachtung_d... (the English article doesn't mention it, hence the German version)

i never understood this part: how could he hide his Waffen-SS membership for so long? He would have had a highly visible tatoo on his left arm; well, maybe he got rid of the tatoo somehow after the war or something like that.

I thought I read something about him having worked for Stasi but I am clearly mistaken or at least can't find anything about it now.

Still the point I was trying to make is that the man and the writer are different and if Mr. Grass worked for the SS instead of Stasi that doesn't make him any better as a man, does it?

Toward the end of the war, the SS meant something very different from before the war. Mr. Grass didn't "work for" the SS; He was conscripted into an SS combat unit after volunteering for service with the regular war department.

I don't have much of an opinion either way of Mr. Grass, but I don't think volunteering to fight in the Army as a teenager reflects negatively on his character.

> I don't think volunteering to fight in the Army as a teenager reflects negatively on his character.

I believe criticisms were leveled at him mostly for not disclosing that he served in the SS until 60 years after the fact (despite Nazi criticism being a common theme in his writing).

Well you are certainly free to think that but I disagree with you.

When you join the army you are also joining what that army stands for. If you were a communist, certainly joining the US Marines would not be high on your priority list, would it?

Unfortunately having an opinion seems to be met with downvotes here at HN which is unfortunate for such a otherwise pleasant group of people.

The Tin Drum is an amazing book and it influenced a lot of fiction - from Midnight's Children to A Prayer for Owen Meany. Some of his shorter books are a little more accessible (Cat and Mouse or Crabwalk, for instance). I found Grass' perspective on WWII and German history to be particularly valuable, since he was a young German (of Polish origin) who had to reconcile with his own participation in the Nazi regime.

If you haven't heard of Günter Grass, this is a great movie based on his book 'Die Blechtrommel':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Drum_(film)

Loved the film. Haven't read the book.

The same day as Eduardo Galeano. It's a very sad day indeed.

Ah, very sad to hear that. I wrote my BA thesis about his use of metaphors in "Open Veins of Latin America". A very interesting read, and looking back, I quite enjoyed working with it.

I really enjoyed his book My Century, where each chapter covers one year of Germany, 1900-1999.

His book the Tin foil drum is still warmly remembered in my heart.

I never understood why he's considered noteworthy but apparently many people thought what he did was important. RIP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com