Grass, poetry and slanders

The publication of a poem by the German writer Günter Grass, following the delivery of a submarine to Israel by Germany, has led to the Israeli government banning him from travelling there.

I should first of all declare an interest: Grass is probably my favourite writer.  That is mainly based on his earlier writings  - from The Tin Drum in 1959 to The Rat in 1987. I find his later novels a bit artificial and have never been a fan of his poetry (which appears throughout all his novels). What Must Be Said is aside from literary considerations politically unbalanced in its approach to Israel and Iran.

Having said that, it is a slander to claim - as the Israeli government has in banning him from the country - that Grass, a longtime supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, is a Nazi or anti-semite because he served in the Waffen-SS in World War II. Grass was also accused of hypocrisy after he spoke about his war service in 2006 ahead of the publication of his memoir Peeling the Onion. But to say that he is in the same category as the ex-Nazi officials who became politicians and businessmen in post-war West Germany because as a seventeen year old he was conscripted into a Waffen-SS tank regiment and fought as a gunner on the Eastern Front is ridiculous.  Criticise his latest poem by all means but don't argue that he has got anything to admit or atone for because of what he did as a teenage soldier.

The Lancaster bomber and me

I watched the BBC programme Bomber Boys last night, in which the actor Ewan MacGregor and his brother, a RAF pilot, looked at Bomber Command in World War II, and in particular the Avro Lancaster bomber.

I've got several personal connections to the Lancaster bomber. A.V.Roe was born in Patricroft, Eccles where my grandad grew up and set up his aircraft company in Ancoats, Manchester where some of my Mum's family lived. The Lancaster was test flown at Woodford Aerodrome in Cheshire, not far from my home town of Stockport. My grandad also worked as a toolmaker at the Metro-Vicks engineering factory in Trafford Park which during the war switched production to making parts for the Avro Lancaster. As a child in the 70's and 80's, I made models of pretty much all the American, German and British aircraft of World War II, including the Lancaster. I have also seen the last remaining flying Lancaster at airshows at Woodford.

Ewan MacGregor and his brother discussed the impact of the RAF's area bombing tactics in last night's programme, travelling to Germany to meet survivors of the 1943 Hamburg raid which killed over 42,000 in a firestorm and the similar attack on Dresden in 1945 in which an estimated 25,000 people perished. I find it difficult to imagine any circumstances where the indiscriminate bombing of civilians might be morally justifiable. The MacGregor brothers clearly struggled too in balancing their admiration for Avro's engineering achievement in building the Lancaster and the undoubted bravery of the young men who flew them with uneasiness when presented with evidence of the death and destruction they wreaked on the ground. 

Life and Fate

I've just ordered a copy of Vassily Grossman's novel Life and Fate from Amazon and am looking foward to reading it. It's set in part at Stalingrad, one of the decisive battles of World War II which Grossman witnessed as a journalist at the front.                   

At Stalingrad at the end of of 1942 around  three hundred thousand German troops were encircled by the Russian army. After a siege which saw massive bombardment of the city, starvation and brutal street to street fighting, about a hundred thousand German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Russians in February 1943 and transported to labour camps. Of these, just five thousand ever saw Germany again, only being released in 1955 after Stalin's death.

I was reminded of a trip I made to the small Bavarian town of Aying during a holiday to Munich last summer.  Aying is a small, pretty place just south of Munich which is known for its brewery. In the square is a war memorial, three sides of which are dedicated to those killed in World War I and II. The final side though contains the names of dozens of inhabitants of this small town who died "in other places than the field of battle" in the late 1940's and early 1950's in Stalin's labour camps.

It's no surprise that thousands of German soldiers fought on at Stalingrad after their officers had surrendered, knowing that they had a choice between a quick death in battle or a slow one in captivity.