Word: grasse
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...winter of 1944-45--when the Red Army swept through Eastern Europe--millions of refugees were forced to flee west as the doomed Wehrmacht fought with an almost demented bravery to defend them. It is as an act of recovering German suffering that Crabwalk, the new novel by Gunter Grass, is worth reading. "We have a right to mourn our dead," Grass said to me when I visited his home earlier this year, "despite the crimes that we committed...
...Grass had long wanted to write about the Wilhelm Gustloff, he says, partly because his own family could easily have been on the ship. His mother was never able to talk to him about what she experienced when the Russians moved into Danzig. "There is no family in Germany that did not learn some kind of lesson from the two World Wars," says Grass. In Crabwalk, a character based on Grass--himself a man of the left--laments the "staggering failure" of the left's silence in the face of such misery. That silence is ending...
...Grass in his home village of Behlendorf, a place of neat, brick-built farms an hour's drive from the city of Hamburg, whose elegant solidity looks rooted in the ages. In truth, Hamburg is a phoenix. In 1943, wrote the German novelist W.G. Sebald in On the Natural History of Destruction, a set of 1997 lectures recently translated into English, the British bombed Hamburg so heavily that a fire storm "lifted gables and roofs from buildings, tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches." The absence of any body of literature discussing...
...recent past, Germans both inflicted and endured terrible suffering. With that history, it seems strange to say that Germans are lucky, but in one sense, they are. War is all around us, and yet it is untouchably distant. But Germans, says Grass, "understand what war means." Wars may be necessary, even just. But a nation that has lived through one knows that they are never good. --With reporting by Ursula Sautter/Bonn
...longtime colleague and friend P.K. Nair, former director of India's National Film Archive - adjourn to Adoor's house for lunch. Over dessert in the director's spacious office Nair gently points out that one of the core images in Shadow Kill - wind rustling through fields of lush grass - may be a cinematic cliché. Adoor does not take this as constructive criticism...