Words to the Germans: An Open Letter to Chancellor Kiesinger
Grass, Günter
Giinter Grass, the famous writer, who urged the German Social Democratic party not to participate in the "Great Coalition," sent Kurt Kiesinger, the new Chancellor, the following...
...But the consequences and the shame will be ours to bear...
...for the majority of my generation's fathers lost their best years in consequence of such miscarriages of judgment...
...For surely you ought to know that, in this divided country which lives without a peace treaty, the office of a Federal Chancellor must never be filled by a man who once before has acted in defiance of reason and has served crime, while others were perishing because they followed the path of reason and resisted crime...
...The responsibility will be yours...
...I am passionately interested in politics...
...People like me...
...We reprint this moving letter, which has been widely circulated in the German press...
...Globke [Adenauer's assistant, who had written a gloss on the Nuremberg Laws] done enough damage...
...What will our schools' history classes look like from now on...
...I was a successful Governor in the State of Baden-Wiirttemberg...
...Shall I accept...
...If you allow the office of the Federal Chancellor to be burdened by your grave past, then I ask you, what arguments will be left to the young people of this country who wish to answer the party of yesterday, which is today rising from the dead as the NDP (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutsch 25 lands...
...Are we to allow Ulbricht, the unreconstructed Stalinist, to point his fingers at us...
...How are we to be true to the memory of the tortured and murdered resistance fighters, of the Auschwitz and Treblinka dead, if you, then a fellow-traveler, now dare direct German policy...
...Yours respectfully, Gfinter Grass (Printed, with permission, from the Aufbau...
...You, Mr...
...I would be able to understand...
...Giinter Grass, the famous writer, who urged the German Social Democratic party not to participate in the "Great Coalition," sent Kurt Kiesinger, the new Chancellor, the following lastminute appeal...
...Kiesinger, are not my father...
...My dear Mr...
...I hope you have a son who resists your pernicious decision...
...But if you, my hypothetical father, were to ask me, your hypothetical son: "I have been asked to be the Federal Chancellor...
...Suppose you were my father and I asked you to explain your portentous decision of 1933...
...Translated by Henry Pachter...
...Kiesinger, joined the Nazi party in 1933 as a grown-up man and only the surrender of the Reich finally relieved you from your membership...
...Then your hypothetical son's answer would be: "Precisely because you are passionately interested in politics, and just because you are ambitious in foreign affairs, you have to decline...
...I always felt an ambition to deal in foreign affairs...
...Is there no one in the Social Democratic or Christian Social and Christian Democratic parties—not one man untainted enough to hold the office of Federal Chancellor...
...So it is left to me, one man speaking for many, to voice at the last minute my indignant protest...
...Has not Mr...
...I belong to that generation whose fathers, the men of your generation, wittingly or unwittingly participated in the crimes committed since 1933...
...Allow me to speculate for a moment...
...You, Mr...
...I am forced to believe that the Social Democratic party has failed to remember the courage of Otto Wels [its chairman at the time of the Weimar Republic...
...Kiesinger: Before you are elected Federal Chancellor tomorrow, I venture a last attempt, before the widest public, to make you see reason...
...I know that many German families have been able to overcome this schism between the two generations: the fathers have re-oriented themselves and the sons have forgiven...
...Common decency should tell you not to appoint yourself a resistance fighter as an afterthought...
...for it should have been its business to ask you the question that I now ask...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
