Grass

Simmi and I have been discussing Günter Grass this morning. I love that the internet allows us to do that. A friend can have a thought at some point in the evening or night, e-mail me about it and then, in spite of being 8 hours behind, I can respond when I wake up, then for a while we get in synch.

I'm sure I have mentioned Grass before. Last year I read a novel by him, 'Im Krebsgang'(Crabwalk) which I thought was brilliant. We don't tend to get an insight into the lives of ordinary German people during the war. In this book, we get a multi-layered view of the lives of members of a family both towards the end of the war and in the modern day.

When we were in the sixth form at school, our German teacher took us to London to see both Günter Grass and Siegried Lenz reading from their own work. Didn't understand a word of it then, but I was awed anyway.

Now Günter's in a spot of bother. At the age of 79 he has announced that he was drafted into the Waffen SS at the age of 17. The Times, Thunderer, upholder of journalistic standards hohoho, thinks he should be stripped of his Nobel prize and all literary merit. When you read stuff like this, you can't help wondering whether the journo has some kind of angle.
'Is he Jewish?' asked Kevin,
'Hmmm..Oliver Kamm...could be,' said I
An e-mail flies across the magic field.
'Don't think so,' says Simmi, and offers a few reasons why she thinks not, which results in us having a side convo about something and someone else.
Then I looked at the Guardian and get quite a different and well-reasoned point of view from American writer John Irving.
I tend to agree with his ideas here, for pity's sake, it's almost like no-one realised Grass was German until he told us. Joining the Waffen SS is not the same thing as personally supervising the activities of the gas chambers, it was just something it was hard to avoid if you were that age at that time, in that country.

Had things turned out differently...well, things would have turned out differently.

One of the things Irving is taken to task over by the commentators, is that he expresses the opinion that Grass is a soul-searcher. I think many writers are. Even just bloggers. I know that I am a constant and continual soul searcher. The trick is to walk the line between introspection and self-obsession.

I will steer myself away from that and get briefly onto the topic of a different kind of grass. My dog-walking took on an even more obsessive turn before Brady was returned to his parents. I realised that I was not only scooping his poop, but also picking up bits of litter and even eyeing up the thistles and dandelions poking up through the mulch around the bushes. I caught myself. I stopped. Sad, so sad.