A TALK WITH GÜNTER GRASS
When Gunter Grass, the distinguished German writer, paid a visit to the United States last October, we arranged for an informal taped discussion between him and two of our editors, Michael...
...82 A TALK WITH GONTER GRASS...
...If we go too far in the other direction, we could easily seem to be indifferent to what is happening to our intellectual friends in Russia...
...IH: Left-wing intellectuals like ourselves, democratic socialist intellectuals, are always in trouble...
...There is some similarity between the kind of puritan Communism I have seen in the Soviet Union and elsewhere and the American Way of Life...
...At the same time the Nixon administration will not say one word about Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov...
...The big businessmen are saying, Let's do business between Western private capitalism and Eastern state capitalism...
...No, you have to show how reactionary the Communist parties are...
...With this kind of voter initiative there was a possibility to do something in areas where people in the party itself could not work...
...I really don't know how they can even achieve economic reform while stifling popular opinion...
...GG: When Willy Brandt was in Israel, he was very careful, and I think he was right, not to visit the occupied territories...
...But we found a way to reach them, to educate these rather conservative people, who didn't want Strauss, and so on...
...IH: Let me push that problem a little further...
...And if there is some trouble coming, what they call trouble, they don't know any other way to react than the Stalinistic way...
...I think, for now, we can be in favor of both—because I don't think we have pushed the Russians at all as far as they should and can be pushed on these issues...
...From time to time they try in the economic sector, because it doesn't work very well...
...It was a way of making a point: friendly to Israel but standing apart from its policy on the occupied territories...
...I have been trying to follow a bit the developments inside the SPD, and particularly the emergence of the (very radical) Young Socialists (the Jusos) as a force in the party itself...
...But it seems that young people still have what I call religious emotions...
...What you want is basic democracy...
...I think this might bring some new vitality to the Social Democracy...
...We don't want this...
...The question can be put in a simple way, is it possible for a young person to fall in love with a snail...
...Look how marvelous life is— speak about love—don't speak about death...
...Were they suspicious...
...It has been my experience in Germany that dipomats in the foreign office, who ten years ago were speaking and thinking only in terms of cold war, now are friendly toward the Soviet Union and now don't want to make any trouble...
...And then it seems as if we say, "Well, look, stop, Don't go so fast...
...Sometimes I feel that many young people turned to the New Left rather than to our kind of politics because they wanted something that was not reasonable, but rather something extreme, with a kind of religious intensity...
...When, for instance, we send a right-wing Social Democratic mayor to Kiev and he meets with the mayor of Kiev, they will drink their vodka together and see the same problems, the same technological and business problems...
...How were you received by the old-line party apparatus, the old Social Democrats...
...These are the questions you have to ask, then you will see if these people are speaking about socialism...
...We succeeded in showing some Catholics that, as Christian people, they ought to vote Social Democratic, because a Christian interested in Christian social issues will find more in the Social Democratic program than in the Christian Democratic program...
...When Gunter Grass, the distinguished German writer, paid a visit to the United States last October, we arranged for an informal taped discussion between him and two of our editors, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe...
...Could you tell us something about the kind of reception you got while you were involved in politics in the election campaign...
...We are not able really to satisfy those kinds of hungers...
...MH: I would like to raise a sort of related question...
...It was the first time that Communist reformers did show possibilities of reform within the Communist system, without the danger of what they always call counterrevolution...
...Then, after the student protest had come to an end, a lot of young people didn't want any more—dropped out of politics...
...And Ithink the concept of detente means seeing the other side perhaps merely as an opponent, and not as an enemy...
...What do you think of it...
...In your book you write a great deal about your experiences while campaigning for the Social Democrats...
...It will only be possible, really, if our commitment to democracy is more than a formal one, and if the Eastern part of Germany, too, will accept the basic principles of democracy...
...In the beginning, the people we reached were what we call `Bildungsburger"—intellectual, "cultured" bourgeois people who read books...
...And what was it like when you came in contact with workers, what kind of response did you get there...
...I would like to get your estimate of this New Left trend within the German socialist movement...
...GG: In the beginning, in '45, a lot of old Social Democrats thought that whatever they didn't organize themselves couldn't work...
...But we think that what did take place is interesting enough to be printed, even though it is only a fragment of "A Talk With Gunter Grass...
...Or if somebody is kicked out, who is protecting him...
...A lot of people asked him why he was doing that...
...For Willy Brandt, too, it is very difficult to function politically in Southern Germany, in the Catholic milieu...
...They still have religious hungers, and when they can't express them in traditional religious terms or through religious institutions, they tend to divert them into politA TALK WITH GONTER GRASS 81 ical channels...
...One of them is this, that we are living in a time when the traditional religions aren't very strong, and don't function very well, especially among young people...
...And we did something the party had not been able to do—we reached people who had never been in contact with the Social Democratic party, had never attended Social Democratic party meetings or come out for the SPD in elections...
...But my only answer is that I am against all "final goals" because they are religious, like paradise in heaven and like paradise on earth, and they are all puritan...
...this is a Holy Alliance that I don't want and that you don't want...
...Then in '69, and in the last election much more, we made contact with workers, and for the first time with Catholic workers...
...Nixon and Mr...
...But what I am getting at is that it puts us in a very ticklish position...
...We have to continue to look critically at their system, and I'm afraid that the leaders of the Soviet Union and the leaders of the various Communist parties in the East are prisoners of their own system...
...And we wrote informative material especially for these Catholic workers who had been in the left wing of the Christian Democratic party, but no longer saw the possibility of doing anything there...
...of utilizing whatever bargaining position the Western nations have in trying to maximize the right of persons in the Soviet Union to emigrate, the right of dissent, etc...
...This doesn't exist in the Communist world...
...In Germany the situation is really curious...
...But whenever they try, immediately questions come from the cultural sector, or from other parts of the hierarchy, and then they go back again to their old, tight ways...
...And it can happen to all the friends of this new peace politics and possibility of coexistence that, if they ask questions about cultural substance and about what is going on in the Soviet Union and various other East European countries, they will get this answer: What you are doing is making a cold war...
...The Christian Democrats do not present a valuable opposition...
...MH: Let me raise a question, Gunter—partly in terms of your critique of some aspects of the West German Ostpolitik—about the question of detente and of freedom in the Soviet Union...
...If we go too far, say along the line of the Jackson Amendment, we can easily seem to be favoring retreat to the Cold War...
...Then Nixon and Kissinger, and others, they go and make a deal with the Russians...
...When this happens, it seems to me, people of our politics are in trouble...
...And these questions must be raised by the left wing of the Social Democratic party...
...It is not only a formal question...
...They all tell people, You have to be happy...
...They always push people to be happy...
...For example, you gave out a statement in Germany, I understand, expressing some hesitations along the lines of your remarks now, andthis seems to have had some effect, because Willy Brandt —though he is the head of the state and he had to be diplomatic and cautious—did say something that indicates concern for the intellectuals in Russia...
...Were they friendly...
...And I'm always saying to leftwing Social Democrats, Don't allow the right wing of our party to stress only the formal differences between Communists and Social Democrats...
...And so I'm afraid that they will not be able to reform their own system...
...In other words, it is as if with every policy we are pointing out complications, advocating modifications, caution...
...The three of us obviously are in favor of both—detente, and freedom in the Soviet Union...
...The Social Democratic party in West Germany, to begin with, is more Protestant than Catholic—and reaching Catholic workers was a new thing...
...I am against this because it draws a picture without knowledge of the human being, without knowledge of the paradoxical misconstructions in that human being...
...80 A TALK WITH GUNTER GRASS This, I believe—this politics of detente restricted to economic concerns—is Metternich politics...
...Is there a point at which you have to choose between the two...
...And my impression is twofold...
...Most of them were conservative...
...Now everywhere in Europe people are saying, The Cold War is over, let's be friends...
...We need good relations between the Soviet Union and the Bundesrepublik, they say, because we need to do business with them...
...Or are we selling out our tenets of free cultural activities and of tolerance, of the kind of social freedom we need and want in both parts of the world...
...Are you not afraid, is my question, that the big businessmen from the countries of the West and the big businessmen from the state capitalist countries of the East agree in saying, Control by workers is not a good thing...
...What its rulers don't realize is that they need open criticism, that they could only profit from it...
...On the one hand, it seems to be a positive thing that young radical socialists for once are not breaking off and forming some extraparliamentary opposition, but are trying to work within the party and through democracy...
...That is, to what extent was there a kind of anti-intellectual suspicion of you among workers, or to what extent did they feel good to have another friend, Gunter Grass, the writer—and did they say, We must work with him as well as we can...
...Well, there is a big difference between Willy Brandt and Richard Nixon, because Willy Brandt really cares about such things and Nixon doesn't...
...You want to see questions coming out from the base of the party, and discussion and communication...
...they are still repeating the old arguments of the Cold War period—arguments very easy to shrug off...
...But maybe that is what the role of intellectuals should be...
...Both don't want it...
...This system is built 79 as a hierarchic tower, ruled exclusively from the top, with commands coming down from the Central Committee to the base of the party, that is, the mass of the people—and no questions are permitted to come from that base...
...On the other hand, I find some aspects of their opposition very disturbing— for example, what I take to be their position on Israel, which is a rather sharp position, very critical of the Israelis and without any understanding of what is at stake there—and their stand on some other questions, too...
...I think that this is one of the reasons we did win these two last elections...
...And when, somewhere in Central Europe, perhaps in Germany, people ask me, Do you see any chance of German reunification?, I say that it's only possible if both systems change— the systems in West and in East Germany...
...And there we reached new people, new kinds of people who did not care for the SPD yet were responding to social democratic ideas...
...Brezhnev meet, they look like friends who understand each other well— perhaps too well— and I'm afraid of this understanding between the Nixon mentality and the Brezhnev mentality...
...There is great danger in what I would call Metternich politics, the kind of "Heilige Allianz" that really is very unholy indeed...
...And they were very surprised to find that what some students, intellectuals, and artists did was wellorganized and very successful...
...And now the friends of the Social Democrats, and Social Democrats who helped Willy Brandt, and the Social Democratic party itself, they have to play opposition...
...They didn't want to enter the party directly and work in it...
...When Mr...
...But we said to them, Hold on, be patient...
...And I have the feeling they know that they need it, but they see no way to get out of this prison that they've built around themselves...
...How did they feel about you...
...IH: I read your new book The Diary of a Snail, and a lot of it is very close to the things that Mike and I believe in...
...In a way it is stupid for a powerful country like the Soviet Union to mistrust its own people...
...But I think it is still early enough to heed a warning— and also to give the other side, the Soviet Union, the feeling that they, themselves, have to do something about the conditions in the East...
...And we also began to reach a lot of women, Catholic women, who now were changing their mind and were voting Social Democratic for the first time...
...But do you think there comes a point when one may have to make a choice between detente and peace—and internal dissent, the right to emigrate, etc...
...This is a danger that is coming...
...During the period of the Cold War, both sides were treating each other as enemies...
...We could not find a way of continuing it...
...you have to ask the basic political questions...
...GG: You see, just now, at the moment, you will not read one word in the Soviet newspapers about Watergate...
...As for the Young Socialists I always say to them, You have to carry out this struggle with the Communists not in a defensive way, as Social Democrats always do—always saying, Excuse me, we are not Communists, we are Social Democrats...
...But let me raise a different question...
...The discussion, based on a common political outlook, began in a leisurely way, and then, suddenly, Grass was called away for personal reasons...
...During the years of the Cold War we were saying, Make peace, don't push the Cold War the way you are pushing it...
...But when a left-wing Social Democrat like Johann Stefan comes and asks, What if a worker wants to change his work place, wants to go to another factory—is he able to do it...
...Don't push the deal so hard and watch out a little bit...
...Let's try again...
...My question is, where do we draw the line...
...GG: That is difficult to say—so long as they don't know how erotic a snail can be . . . I tried to describe that in my book...
...GG: I would like to go back a little bit in time...
...Most of the time we worked in little towns where the Social Democratic party is very small and badly organized, and there was a great possibility for us to help, to accomplish something...
...But just because the kind of approach that you advance, that is to say, a more militant and more left-wing version of social democracy, just because it is reasonable, can it satisfy the semireligious hungers, the apocalyptic needs of young people...
...I think there was a way in Czechoslovakia, during the Dubcek Spring...
...I see two questions here...
...And now a lot of politically engaged young Catholics were coming along— and we could help...
...This is a bad kind of agreement...
...They have to ask the new questions: Is it possible to follow a politics of detente that is restric: ted merely to economic matters...
...Don't disturb our new politics...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
