Grass, Gaarder and Germany's past cast a shadow over the Literary Festival Berlin, writes Eva Bourke
Poet and novelist Michael Krüger recited Allen Ginsberg's sprawling poem Howl in German translation at the sixth International Literary Festival Berlin this month. On 11 successive nights throughout the festival, the great Beat poet's furious and eloquent condemnation of the "moloch" America rang out from the loudspeakers in the cafe of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, declaimed by visiting writers from 11 different countries in their respective languages. Although this year's focus was on francophone literatures and brought many writers from the former French colonies, the Caribbean, Africa and south-east Asia to Berlin, Howl was the festival's disturbing signature tune.
The Berliner Festspiele building housing the "temporary republic of writers" is an open-plan concrete and glass structure that resembles a literary hothouse. True to their stated "strategy to overpower by sheer abundance" and "challenge and confuse by means of a heterogeneous mixture of literatures and styles", the organisers put together a staggering programme of around 200 events with 120 writers performing and taking part in discussions. Many great names were represented - Édouard Glissant, Shashi Tharoor, Doris Lessing, Isabel Allende, Gao Xingjian and many more - along with many less well-known writers.
Glissant, poet and postcolonial cultural theorist from Martinique, spoke of the magnetic link between the artist and the "song of the universe". He conjured up a vision of artistic beauty as an invisible and secret vessel in which all differences are contained and dissolved. In his notion of "Creolisation", diverse languages and histories meet in a meandering stream of words, symbolical of the world's lost magical unity.
In contrast to that pleasant notion, the recent controversies surrounding Günther Grass and Jostein Gaarder - the belated revelation by Grass in his autobiography that he had been a member of the SS for a few months at the age of seventeen, and Gaarder's ill-judged and vicious diatribe against Israel - which overshadowed the festival, are inextricably linked to the dark side of German history.
EVEN IN THE wake of the World Cup, the most euphoric and amnesia-inducing spectacle staged in the country since the ill-fated Olympics of 1972, the German past has a way of rearing its ugly head. For one short summer it had been permissible to wave the flag, wear the colours and sing the anthem. Now Grass, the famed and revered writer, Nobel Prize recipient, party political worker and moral conscience of Germany, had destroyed it all. Some young writers reacted angrily, calling it an octogenarian conspiracy. For 60 years the past had dominated the public debate. Was there nothing else to talk about, they asked?
Grass himself never satisfactorily explained why he had waited so long to "come out" publicly, although friends and family had always known and he had never concealed the fact that he believed in Hitler until the end of the war. The reactions among writer-colleagues and journalists ranged from disappointment to disgust, but many, especially foreign authors, came to Grass's defence. Updike called his accusers hypocrites and Rushdie found the controversy repulsive.
The obligatory and rather low-key discussion at the festival in Berlin had nothing new to add. Whether Grass kept quiet in order not to jeopardise the Nobel Prize, or confessed as a publicity stunt at the exact moment when his book was about to be launched, will probably always be an object of speculation. Much more revealing was the Berliner Zeitung's front-page photograph of Grass, taken after his reading at the Berliner Ensemble. The author is standing with bowed head and arms spread out wide towards his fans in a gesture of pleading and surrender, looking for all the world like a 78-year-old boy with a bad conscience.
On the other hand, Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World, does not appear to have any sense of having trespassed when he published an attack on Israel in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten in August. Even now, after many angry reactions, he still defends this shoddy piece of writing couched in the language of the Old Testament as a "waking call" to Israel. Using the royal "we" throughout the article, he states that "we" no longer recognise Israel because it has "massacred its own legitimacy with its unscrupulous war and repulsive weaponry". He ridicules the idea of a special relationship with God: "We don't believe in the notion of a chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's Chosen People is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism."
There were hecklers and shouts of "anti-Semite" when Gaarder arrived on stage in Berlin. Although he had previously stated that he would no longer discuss the matter, he attempted an incoherent self-defence, but after roughly 20 minutes of turmoil the majority of the audience, who had come to hear Gaarder read, began to clap until the hecklers were forced to leave.
In Grass's case one would wish that he had not kept silent for so long - and in Gaarder's that he had only kept his mouth shut.