BAHNHOF
lOS
and Sickle or the Stars and Stripes. Consequently the voice of the
Monster may in future have a sound quite unlike Adolf Hitler's
screeching falsetto. It will more likely sound like Milquetoast or Walt
Rostow. The old brown and black shirts have been bleached white. And
in
their white shirts the new men fly to the U .S. for honorary degrees.
Gunter Grass is maintaining that the answer to Erhardt
is
Brandt.
I have seen this mentioned in the American press. But how many
Americans know of Pastor Martin Niemoeller's declaration, "Tasks of
Politics in 1965," in which he recommends the spoiling of as many
ballots as possible in this year's elections as a protest against the mere
pretense of democracy which in his belief is the federal system? True,
even in Germany an attitude like Grass's gets more public attention
than one like Niemoeller's.
Public
attention. Western Germany is to a
large extent a publicity operation, staged, as it were, by the Chamber
of Commerce. When in New York, Erhardt told of having sat in the
ruins of the Nuremberg Stadium back in 1945 with his "good friend
Henry Luce" and telling the good Henry there was one way in which
Germany could be rebuilt and that was by free enterprise. Today
Krupp is the richest man in Europe. And the social democrats are as
eager as ever to prove themselves no different from non-social democrats.
Gunter Grass is clutching at a straw, but who wouldn't, when there
is nothing else to clutch at? Or is there? Peter Weiss thinks there is.
He has clutched at the Russian bear itself and must now find out if
(as an artist at any rate) he can survive a bear hug. The encounter has
been a curious one to watch, and one did literally watch it, as it, or
significant moments of it, was shown on East German TV. On the little
screen one saw Weiss telling the East Germans that
their
understanding
of his Marat-Sade play was the right one. In other words, Marat is the
hero, and Sade the villain. Funnily enough, this was not what Weiss
had told the presumably Communist director of the West Berlin pro–
duction, Konrad Swinarski. But meanwhile some months passed, and
those months seem to have marked the conversion of Weiss, if not
to
Communism, then to Fellow-Traveling. He now says one must choose
between East and West and he has chosen the East.
Can anyone over thirty-five confront the politics of Grass on the
one hand or of Weiss on the other with other than a despondent feeling of
deja
vu?
Why should a solution be found in the Social Democrats of
1965 any more than it was in their predecessors of 1914 or 1933? And
why should the East Bloc be embraced at the very time
it
has shown
itself not to be a bloc at all? And just following the time when we learned
that the outrages of which the Soviet regime had been accused during
the Stalin years actually were committed?
