Speak Out!

GUNTER GRASS believes in democracy. He disapproves of the German students on the Far Left as much as he does those on the neo-Nazi right, because both are trying to destroy Germany's democracy rather than strengthen it. In the series of speeches, open letters, and articles translated in Speak Out!, Grass presents his vision of what the German state should be, and his criticisms of West Germany as it is now.

The speeches begin in 1965, when Grass campaigned for Willy Brandt, mayor of Berlin, then attempting to become Chancellor. In an essay not reprinted in this book, Grass explained, "The writer can become the conscience of his nation when he throws over his desk for a while, and, as a citizen, engages in politics." As a campaigner for Willy Brandt, as a critic of Willy Brandt for allowing the Social Democrat Party to join in the Great Coalition with the Christian Democrats, Kurt Kiesinger's party, and as a president critic of Kiesinger, who took the Chancellorship with a Nazi past, Grass is acting as citizen and not as writer. He has not, however, thrown over his writing desk. The same man who wrote about the "bourgeois smug" and the Onion Cellar in The Tin Drum and about Germany's "economic miracle" and the meal worms in Dog Years is at work in these speeches. Even in the midst of the political area, he can't refrain from telling an occasional story-though quite consciously-for he is always aware that he is speaking as a citizen whose profession is telling stories.

He teases his listeners as he teased the readers of his novels: "This speech was conceived in Maryland, U.S.A., on the Atlantic coast. You may ask: Didn't this man have anything better to do amid dunes, billboards and deserted beach hotels than to meditate on conditions in West Germany? Why didn't he stick to his past and spend his time thinking up the usual stories?" But once he has justified his position on the platform, Grass moves on to serious and substantial criticism of German society and politics. He wants"Splinter Parties," those with less than five per cent of the vote, to be represented in the Bundestag, as they are not now. He wants the Chancellor to stop taking emergency powers in his hands. He wants the Communist Party to be given recognition and he criticizes the "Communist fear" that has motivated some political decisions. And, much as he hates the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, he prefers that they remain a political party rather than become an underground organization.

HIS MOSTviolent criticism is reserved for Kurt Kiesinger. An open letter to Kiesinger, written to him just before he took office, is reprinted in this book. In a later speech, Grass notes that Kiesinger never answered the letter. He damns Kiesinger not so much for his membership in the Nazi party from 1933 to the end, but for his gall in then, without any reference to his past, becoming leader of the West German Republic, which is supposedly trying to live down the past.

Grass points his finger at those who do not act when they should as well as at those who commit a crime. He scorns David Ben-Gurion for saving his friendship with Konrad Adenauer in the face of Adenauer's appointment of Hans Globke as a cabinet minister. Globke wrote the commentaries to the Nuremberg race laws, Grass points out. He agrees with the German students who hate Axel Casar Springer, the press lord who preaches violence, who is a "co-chancellor, who is accountable to no Parliament, who cannot be voted out of office, and who has set up a state within a state..." But he does not agree with the students of the German S.D.S. in their hatred of the West German democratic system.

How one evaluates Grass's viewpoint depends on one's interpretation of German history. The way he upholds democracy and criticizes the German Far Left can't be judged by American standards. Some of those opposed to Grass would say that it is foolish to believe that democracy will work in Germany now when it has failed miserably every time in the past. But Grass's answer is that German democracy has failed in the past because the German people left politics up to the politicians, were willing to give the Chancellor too much power, were not really interested in their democracy. If those faults can now be corrected, then democracy, which Grass considers Germany's most hopeful course at the present, can succeed. So naturally, he believes that working to strengthen democracy-partly by criticizing it-is more important than trying to destroy the imperfect democracy that now exists.

When Grass criticizes contemporary German society in his novels and plays (a new play concerning a leftist student and a bourgeois dentist just opened in Berlin), he is not always successful, either as writer or as propagandist. The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising is proof of that. But in these speeches, he bluntly and without false pretenses practises the involvement in politics by German citizens that he espouses.