8
PARTISAN REVIEW
that Russia and America are equally bad; and he lumps the failings of
West Germany and East Germany. Generally, he equalizes the faults of
capitalism and the evils of what he calls "socialism." And while he em–
phasizes, quite properly, the horrors of Nazism, he plays down those of
Stalinism.
Gulag
is scarcely mentioned. Grass also makes no distinction
between America and the more highly developed welfare state of West
Germany.
Why, we might ask, does a man with his abilities make such ama–
teur political mistakes? One of the reasons, I might venture to say, lies in
the overwhelming and paralyzing guilt to which he consigns the entire
German nation and in the guilt he takes upon himself. As an adolescent,
Grass tells us, he was a member of a Nazi youth organization, and he
served patriotically but in a subsidiary role in the German army. Such
personal motivations, we know, have a strong influence. But should not
Grass be aware that guilt cannot be inflated into a political worldview?
Nor does it explain his conflation of Russia and America.
Clearly, there are other factors. For an echo of Marxi t ideas can
be heard in Grass's thinking. His insistence, for example, that he has no
fatherland - an important point in his position against unification - re–
minds one of Marx's statement that the workers have no fatherland. And
his arguments against unification repeat themes favored by the left before
Gorbachev and the demise of Marxism and socialism in the East. Still, the
question persists as to why someone like Grass holds these opinions even
now, as the later pieces in the book indicate. Perhaps some explanation
can be found in the fact that while the basic doctrines of Marxism and
communism have experienced historic refutation, no new radical doc–
trines, other than the trendy causes now occupying the space of radical–
ism, have arisen to take their place. Hence the genre of goodwill but
muddled thinking keep people in the political mode they grew up with,
and which they have come to think of not only as the radical mind but
also as the moral and political avenue to the future. Grass, for example,
still talks of democratizing socialism in Russia. Inertia, which is usually
thought of as a conservative force, also acts to keep outworn radical
ideas going.
w.
P.
