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PARTISAN REVIEW
of Vassily Aksyonov and Allen Ginsberg, two who spoke in the heat
of that moment. The Russian emigre asked his German colleagues
"to think twice before making parallels between the U. S. and the
U.S.S.R."; the American poet addressed his fellow writers as "mem–
bers of the so-called free world," whose freedom is dependent on the
exploitation of others. One wondered at the relative value attached to
freedom: supernal in the case of the Russian emigre, who had lived
in a totalitarian state; called into question by the American poet, for
whom the utopian or visionary imagination is a going concern. Or
was there at work that week a kind of moral longing that Ginsberg
exemplified: so strong an urge to denounce oppression that it went
around looking for oppression to denounce? Was it a matter of per–
verse envy? Do the "members of the so-called free world" envy the
victims of political repression, whose experience of deprivation and
danger is so much more dramatic than their own metaphysical
"alienation" ?
One thought again and again of Grass and his South Bronx
battle cry - in part because, feeling at home on center stage but also
feeling quite agitated, with every day he seemed to up the ante on his
argument. By Thursday, in the context of "The Utopian Imagina–
tion," he was wondering out loud whether capitalism is any better
than gulag communism. Grass denied it later, but dozens of report–
ers , several of them armed with microcasette recorders, heard him
answer his own rhetorical question by saying: "I don't think so ." This
was the dogma of moral equivalence at its purest form; and what
it entailed was a blind eye toward the East. Nor was Grass alone
among the German writers present in keeping the discussion fixated
on the depredations of American capitalism; Ensenzberger and Peter
Schneider joined in. This tendency gave rise to a great deal of off–
the-record speculation. One ingenious theory held that the burden of
guilt for the Nazi past supplied a secret subtext to Grass's South
Bronx-equals-gulag gambit.
If
the South Bronx is no better than the
gulag, and the gulag is not much worse than the death camps, doesn't
this somehow let the Germans off the hook, at least a little? A more
poetic interpretation of things could be inferred from Peter Schneider's
panel presentation, which dwelled on the image of a divided Ger–
many, bisected by opposing missiles. Was this not a geopolitical meta–
phor for the splitting of the atom?
One was haunted by Grass's physical appearance, journalistic
descriptions of which illustrated Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The eye evidently made what it wished of Grass's hunched posture,
