Handke Note [from the Synopsis of the Grass Poem Controversy]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2012/05/guenter-grasss-notorious-poem-poetics.html
However, SZ, the Suedeutsche is always game for a controversy, they did Handke’s Justice for Serbia back in 1993. Handke, surprisingly, fails to enter the fray [of the Grass controversy] in this instance. He did the time Grass revealed in Peeling the Onion in 2007 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, a tank gunner, small stature, good fit for cramped spaces, U-Boats. Handke strutted forth with the worst kind of self-righteousness, the newsfolk caught up with him in Spain [Handke had forgotten what he had learned from Milovan Djilas] ¡ esto es una vergüenza ! at that time everyone knew at age 17 what the SS was, where I felt I needed to point out that the 30 year old Handke at times seemed not to know what every normal 12 year old does.
Surprising hat with everybody and his cat chiming in on the Grass controversy Peter Handke did not. Journalists, knowing that Handke is always good for a sexy quote, did not get anything out of him until he and his buddy Luc Bondy started giving interviews for the mid-May 2012 premiere of Die Schoenen Tage von Aranjuez. Handke, a pretty bad liar, lied, not that unusual for him, but certainly so in an instance where a star was robbing him of some of his space in the firmament his featured place in the lime light, big time, internationally, the Grass story spread to India, Thailand, Japan.
Handke, when he finally replied to a query
whether he had read the
poem, said no, he was in Paris - as though my
kiosk-hound cannot find German papers or read the
translation in his
daily Le Monde! Handke’s companion during the
interview, Luc Bondy, had
read the poem and was dismissive. Handke was surprisingly
generous in recalling
a powerful Grass poem of 1966 at Princeton, but then
slighted Grass’s
intelligence… He did pretty much the same thing in two
different interviews, he
and his buddy began to look like the Bobsy Twins!
However, “the comeback kid” is back in good
graces, his press has been
good, deservedly so, for good work, if he has continued to
beat up women or
indulged in other nefarious proclivities we have not heard
about it, although wife Sophie Semin did look very sour in her recent Lillian Photo so why get
involved in a fray that is a lose lose proposition?
Attacking Grass Handke would
have found himself in the company of Joffe, Schirrmacher,
Nauman and
Reichs-Kanickel – second raters who have given him no end
of stupefying grief
over the years, Ranicki turns out to be the best of that
lot, sadly. Coming out
in defense – there was a plenty of that, but it would have
made news and not helped him. Thus “ta geule!”
Moreover, as evidenced by the controversy, the
last thing you want to
do as a German language author is become embroiled in a
dog fight that involves
anti-Semitism. Handke briefly compared the bombing of
Belgrade to Auschwitz, a
comparison rapidly apologized for, but which at the very
least demonstrated the
authenticity of his pain at the final form of the West’s
decimation of the 2nd
Federation.
Other major worthies of Grass’generation
and fellow Gruppe 47 members such as Enzensberger and
Jürgen Habermas have kept
their public mouths ta greule, so
far. Martin Walser noted, in passing, that Grass was
anything but an
anti-Semite, as did a lot of goyim and Jewish friends of
his also citing
the portrayal of the toy maker in The Tin Drum.
The most touching,
heart-breakingly so, was an aging German Jew who survived
by becoming an
enthusiastic Hitler Youth, even though, as he later found
out, both his parents
and his sister were killed by the Nazis. But he felt Grass
was right. http://www.badische-zeitung.de/leserbriefe-68/grass-hat-das-recht-zu-solch-einer-warnung--58301213.html
Occasionally, in that wasteland of officialeese,
a private voice peeks
through.
