UniBrow

Rule No. 30:

In walking, the highest place in most countries seems to be on the right hand, therefore, place yourself on the left of him whom you desire to honour; but if three walk together, the mid place is the most honourable; the wall is usually given to the most worthy if two walk together.

From an interview Gunter Grass gave to The Paris Review in 1999. You have to shake your head at some of it, given what we know now.

INTERVIEWER

What made you turn to reading and writing … rather than, say, to sports or some other distraction?

GRASS

As a child I was a great liar. Fortunately my mother liked my lies. I promised her marvelous things. When I was ten years old she called me Peer Gynt. Peer Gynt, she said, here you are telling me marvelous stories about journeys we will make to Naples and so on . . . I started to write down my lies very early. And I continue to do so! … 

INTERVIEWER

What lies have given you the greatest pleasure?

GRASS

Lies that do not hurt, which are different from lies that protect oneself or hurt another person. That is not my business. But the truth is mostly very boring, and you can help it along with lies. There is no harm in that. I have learned that all my terrible lies really have no effect on what is out there. If, several years ago, I had written something that predicted the recent political developments in Germany, people would have said, What a liar!

…

INTERVIEWER

In From the Diary of a Snail, you combine contemporary politics with a fictionalized account of what befell the Jewish community of Danzig during the Second World War. Did you know that the speechwriting and electioneering you did for Willy Brandt in 1969 would become material for a book?

GRASS

I had no other choice but to go on that election campaign, book or not. Born in 1927, in Germany, I was twelve years old when the war started and seventeen years old when it was over. I am overloaded with this German past. I’m not the only one; there are other authors who feel this. If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that. That hasn’t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice. In the fifties and the sixties, the Adenauer period, politicians didn’t like to speak about the past, or if they did speak about it, they made it out to be a demonic period in our history when devils had betrayed the pitiful, helpless German people. They told bloody lies. It has been very important to tell the younger generation how it really happened, that it happened in daylight, and very slowly and methodically. At that time, anyone could have looked and seen what was going on. One of the best things we have after forty years of the Federal Republic is that we can talk about the Nazi period. And postwar literature played an important part in bringing that about.

INTERVIEWER

The Diary of a Snail begins, “Dear children.” This is an appeal to the entire generation that grew up after the war, but you are also addressing your own children.

GRASS

I wanted to explain how the transgression of genocide came about. Born after the war, my children had a father who drove off to campaign and give speeches on Monday morning and did not come back again until the following Saturday. They asked, “Why do you do this, why are you constantly away from us?” I tried to make it clear to them, not only verbally, but in what I wrote. The incumbent chancellor at that time, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, had been a Nazi during the war. So I was not only campaigning for a new German chancellor, but also against the Nazi past. In my book I didn’t want to stick merely to abstract numbers–”so and so many Jews were murdered.” Six million is an incomprehensible number. I wanted it to have a more physical impact. So I chose as the thread to my story the history of the Danzig synagogue, which stood in that city for many centuries until it was destroyed during the war by the Nazis–Germans. I wanted to document the truth of what happened there. In the final scene of the book I relate this to the present; I write about my preparations for a lecture given in honor of Albrecht Dürer’s three hundredth birthday. The chapter is a melancholy reflection on Dürer’s engraving Melencholia I and the effect melancholy has had on human history. I imagine that a culture-wide state of melancholy would be the correct attitude for Germans to have toward the Holocaust. Repentant and mournful, it would be informed by some insight about the causes of the Holocaust, which would carry over to our times as a lesson.

INTERVIEWER

This is typical of so many of your books, focusing on some aspect of wretchedness in the current world situation and the horrors that seem to lie ahead. Do you mean to teach, to warn, or to incite your readers to some kind of action?

GRASS

Simply, I do not want to deceive them. I want to present the situation they are in, or one they may look forward to. People are disconsolate, not because everything is so awful but because we as human beings have it in our hands to change things, but don’t. Our problems are caused by us, determined by us, and it behooves us to solve them.

It’s possible that by the time you try to link to these hysterically funny videos made for Microsoft by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant (of The Office), they’ll already be gone, because Microsoft never intended for them to be seen off campus. The company has already pressured YouTube to remove them–which is too bad. Gervais, in character as David Brent, is in fine form indeed.

There’s also a link to a Times of London article about the whole kerfuffle.

Rule No. 29:

When you meet with one of greater quality than yourself, stop, and retire, especially if it be a door or any straight place to give way for him to pass.

To me, Gunter Grass is the author of Dog Years, a book I took on vacation with me seven or eight years ago, snatching it off the shelf at the last second on a whim. Today that astonishing book constitutes my foremost recollection of that vacation, pleasant as it was otherwise (not to mention richly deserved). For some reason I haven’t been moved since then to read anything else by Grass, possibly because I haven’t wanted to spoil that pearl of an experience with a book of his that I might like less. Who knows. But now this business about Grass acknowledging 60 years after the fact his (compulsory) wartime service in the Waffen SS is bad and depressing, not because he served (he had no choice) but because he kept quiet about it for all this time while industriously hectoring and scolding his countrymen for refusing to own up fully to their responsibility for the Nazi period. (There’s more than a whiff of this in Dog Years, to be sure.) And then of course the dramatic disclosure comes just as Grass is about to publish a memoir containing his account of this chapter in his life. Predictably and, it seems, deservedly, Grass is being ground to a fine mulch in the German media and elsewhere for the hypocrisy of his decades of silence and the cynical calculation evident in the timing of this revelation. A piquant example from this side of the Big Pond is this piece by the Hitch, who sums it up this way:

“Let those who want to judge, pass judgment,” Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.

But this affair is also depressing to me as an American. Our own cultural scandals seem so trivial in comparison, so saturated with entertainment-industry orchestration. The Germans have Gunter Grass and their agonizing coming to terms with a dark past. We have Mel Gibson and Ann Coulter and James Frey. Objectionable (in varying degrees) as the latter three figures are, deserving as each is of severe comeuppance, you can never quite shed the feeling that talking about them is an indefensible waste of time and spirit.

YouTube really is a miracle. I trolled around in there yesterday more extensively than I ever have before and found, among other things, a clip from the debate between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal at the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention–the famous exchange that ends with Vidal calling Buckley a “crypto-fascist” and Buckley calling Vidal a “goddam queer,” then threatening to punch him in the face. I’d always wanted to see it. The quality of the video is so poor, unfortunately, that it’s not really worth watching. Maybe somebody else will post a better clip someday.

But this is a true masterpiece of toe-curling tension: Richard Nixon chatting and joshing with the TV crew in the Oval Office just before going on the air to announce his resignation.