Word: nazi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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GUNTER GRASS believes in democracy. He disapproves of the German students on the Far Left as much as he does those on the neo-Nazi right, because both are trying to destroy Germany's democracy rather than strengthen it. In the series of speeches, open letters, and articles translated in Speak Out!, Grass presents his vision of what the German state should be, and his criticisms of West Germany...
...citizen, engages in politics." As a campaigner for Willy Brandt, as a critic of Willy Brandt for allowing the Social Democrat Party to join in the Great Coalition with the Christian Democrats, Kurt Kiesinger's party, and as a president critic of Kiesinger, who took the Chancellorship with a Nazi past, Grass is acting as citizen and not as writer. He has not, however, thrown over his writing desk. The same man who wrote about the "bourgeois smug" and the Onion Cellar in The Tin Drum and about Germany's "economic miracle" and the meal worms in Dog Years...
...represented in the Bundestag, as they are not now. He wants the Chancellor to stop taking emergency powers in his hands. He wants the Communist Party to be given recognition and he criticizes the "Communist fear" that has motivated some political decisions. And, much as he hates the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, he prefers that they remain a political party rather than become an underground organization...
...MOSTviolent criticism is reserved for Kurt Kiesinger. An open letter to Kiesinger, written to him just before he took office, is reprinted in this book. In a later speech, Grass notes that Kiesinger never answered the letter. He damns Kiesinger not so much for his membership in the Nazi party from 1933 to the end, but for his gall in then, without any reference to his past, becoming leader of the West German Republic, which is supposedly trying to live down the past...
...once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...