TWO STATES­

ONE NATION?
 Other books by Gunter Grass

THE TIN DRUM

CAT AND MOUSE

DOG YEARS

THE PLEBEIANS REHEARSE THE UPRISING

FOUR PLAYS

SPEAK OUT!

LOCAL ANAESTHETIC

MAX: A PLAY

FROM THE DIARY OF A SNAIL

INMARYPRAISE

IN THE EGG AND OTHER POEMS

THE FLOUNDER

THE MEETING AT TELGTE

HEADBIRTHS

DRAWINGS AND WORDS 19_s-4-1977

ON WRITING AND POLITICS 1967-1983

ETCHINGS AND WORDS 1972-1982

THE RAT

SHOW YOUR TONGUE

 ••

GUNTER GRASS

TWO STATES-
ONE NATION?

Transla tedfrom the German by

KRISHNA WINSTON with A. S. WENSINGER

A HELEN AND KURT WOLFF BOOK

HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, PUBLISHERS

San Dieoo New York London

 Copyright © 19� by Luchterhand Literaturwrlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
English translation copyright © 1990 by Harcourt Bra<·e )0\·anovkh, Inc.

All rights res<"rved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitt...d in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photompy, recording, or any
information storage and retrie\·al system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace Jovano,·i<·h, Publishers, Orlando, Florida )2887.

The excerpts from these works by Gunter Grass an• all reprinted by permission of Harcourt
Brace )0\·anovich, Inc.: Dog Years (Hundejahre), copyright © 1961 by Hermann Luchterhand
Vt·rlag, GmbH, English translation copyright © 196s hy Harcourt Brace JovanO\·kh, Inc and
Martin Se<·ker and Warburg Ltd.; "Mister, Mister" in four Plap. copyright © 196s by Verlag
Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, English translation copyright © 1967 by Harcourt Brace Jovano,·i<·h,
Inc. and Martin Se<·ker and Warburg Ltd.; From rhe Doary of a Snaol (Aus dem Tagebu<·h Einer
Schnecke), copyright © 1972 by IIermann Lu<·hterhand Verlag, English translation copyright
© 1971 by Harcourt Brace Jovanm ich, Inc; The Plebeoans Rehearse rhe Uprmna (Die Plebejer
Proben Den Aufstand), copyright © 1966 by I lermann Lu<·hterhand Verlag, GmbH, English
translation copyright © 1966 by Harcourt Brace Jm·anovich, Inc. and Martin Seeker and
Warburg Ltd.; Selwed Poems (G...dkhte von Gunter Grass), translat...d by Mkhael Hamburger,
English translation copyright © 1966 by Martin Seeker and Warburg Ltd.; The flounder (Der
Butt), copyright © 1971 by Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, English translation copyright ©
1978 by Harmurt Bra<·e )0\·ano,·ich, Inc.

Original titles: Deutscher Lastenausglekh. Wider das dumpfe l:inheitsbegot

Reden und Gesprache--and-Schreiben nach Auschwitz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grass GUnter, 1927-
(Dautscher Lastenausglekh, English]
Two states---<>ne nation?: against the unthinking damor for
German reunification/by Gunter Grass; translated from the German
and annotated by Krishna Winston with A. S. Wensinger.-1st ed.
p. em.
"A Helen and Kurt Wolff book."
Translation of: Deutscher Lastenausgleich.
ISBN o-16-192 27o-6
o. German reunification question (1949- ) 2. Conf...deration of
states--Germam·.
. I. Winston, Krishna. II. Wensinger, Arthur S.,
1926- Ill. Title.
DD2S7-2s.G66 1J 1990
94J.o87---<lno �-421 2 s

Designed by Camilla Filanda

Printed in the United States of America

First edition A 8 C D E
 CONTENTS

SHORT SPEECH BY A ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITAN

EQUALIZING THE BURDEN 8

MUCH FEELING, LITTLE AWARENESS IS

SHAME AND DISGRACE 30

THINKING ABOUT GERMANY 36

GERMANY-TWO STATES, ONE NATION? SI

THE COMMUNICATING PLURAL 62

WHAT IS THE GERMAN'S FATHERLAND? 76

OPEN LETTER TO ANNA SEGHERS 91

WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ 94

TWO STATES­

ONE NATION?
 SH O RT S P EECH BY

A R O O TLESS

C O S M O P O LI TAN

Shortly hefore Christmas, on my way to Liiheck from Got­

tingen, I was changing trains in Hamburg when a young
man approached me, practically cornered me, and called me
a traitor to the fatherland. He left me standing there with
the phrase echoing in my cars. Tht·n, after I had more or
less calmly hought myself a newspaper, he approached me
again, now with no mild threat hut the statement that it
was time to do away with my kind.
My initial anger I managed to shake off while still on
the platform, hut my thoughts kept returning to the inci­
dent as I continm·d on to Liibeck. "Traitor to the father­
land." The expression, pairt·d with the term "rootless
cosmopol itan, " ' helongs to the special vocabulary of Ger­
man history. Perhaps the young man was right when he
spoke that way in cold rage. Isn't it true t hat I don't give a

1. A tt•rm uS<·d by tlu· Right, in tht• thirtil's, to stigmatizl' (;t•rman l.. tiist intl'lll'c­
tuals, man�· of whom \\"{'f<' Jt·wish.
 T W O S T A T E S-Q N E N A T I O N ?

damn for a fatherland for whose sake mv

.;
kind should be
done awav
.
with?
The fact is, I fear a Germany simplified from two states
into one. I reject this simplHication, and would be much
relie\·t·d if it did not come about-either because we Ger­
mans finally saw the light, or because our neighbors put
their foot down.
I realize, of course, that my position will arouse pro­
test-or, worse, hostility-and I 'm thinking not only of
the young man in the Hamburg railroad station. These days
the Franlifurcer Al�qemeine Zeirun9 is making short work of
those it labels leftist intellectuals. The paper's publishers
aren't satisfied to sec that communism is bankrupt; they
want democratic socialism too to be defunct, including
Dubcck's dream of socialism with a human face. Our capi­
talists and communists have always had one thing in com­
mon: out of hand they condemn the Third Way. 2 That is
why any suggestion that the German Democratic Republic
and its citizens have finally achieved autonomy immediately
gets shouted down with statistics on the number of people
who have fled to the West. That a new identity, painfully
acquired over the course of forty years of suppression, has
at last asserted itself in a revolution - this is permitted to
appear only in small print. The headlines meanwhile create
the impression that what triumphed in Leipzig and Dresden,
in Rostock and East Berlin, was not the people of the GDR
but Western capitalism. And already they are cashing in.

2. A tt>rm used i n the GDR for a socialist altcrnatin· t o Stalinism.

2
 Short Speech by a Rootless Cosmopolitan
'
.

No sooner docs one ideology loosen its grip than an­

other swoops down and seizes the prey. The new instru­
ment of torture will be the market economy. I f you don't
toe the line, you won't get anything. Not even bananas.
No, I don't want an obscenely boastfu! fatherland fat­
tened by swooping down and seizing-though I have noth­
ing at my disposal to prevent the creation of this monster,
nothing except a few ideas. Already I fear that reunification,
under whatever subterfuge, IS inevitable. The strong
Deutschmark will sec to that; the Springer press conglom­
erate, with its mass circulation, now in concert with Rudolf
Augstein's flippant epistles in each Monday's Spiegel. will see
to that; 3 and German amnesia will do its part.
In the (•nd we'll number eighty million. Once more we'll
lw united, strong, and our voice-even if we speak softly­
will be loud and cl(·ar. En-ntually, because enough is newr
enough, we'll succeed, with our strong currency and after
formal recognition of Poland's western border, in subjugat­
ing economically a large chunk of Silesia and a small chunk
of Pomerania, and so once more- following the German
fairy-tale pattern-we will be feared and isolated.
I am already a traitor to this fatherland. Any fatherland
of mine must he more diverse, more colorful, more neigh-

I· Tht• pn·ss congloml'ratl' foundl'd l>y the consl'r\'atin· Axd Springer has among
its publications the daily [),. Weir and tlw tabloid daily 8•/d-/erruna. read h�· about
fin• million G.-rrnans on tht'ir way to work in thl' morning. With TV magazinl's,
women's magazim·s, family magazint•s, Sunday papers, an<I dailit•s, tlw nmglomeralt·
controls a large portion of tlw Wt·st (ll'rman prt•ss. Der Sp•eHel. editt·d by its foun­
der, Augstein, is llt·rmany's only wt•t•kly news magazint•. Its format is pattl'rrwd on
1ime, hut it spel'ialiZ<'s in tough inn·stigati\'l' reporting an<l critical commentary.

3
 T W O ST A T E S - O N E N A T I O N ?

borly-a fatherland that has grown, through suffering, Wiser

and more open to Europe.
It comes down to a choice between a nightmare and a
dream. Why can't we help the German Democratic Repub­
lic, through the institution of a just and long overdue equal­
izinH ?f the burden, 4 to achieve enough economic and democratic
stability that its citizens will find it easkr to stay home?
Why do we insist on saddling the idea of a German confed­
eration-an idea that could he acceptable to our neigh­
bors- with vague notions harrowed from the 1 848 consti­
tutional assembly at St. Paul's in frankfurt, or, as if we had
no other choice, with the model of a super-Federal Repub­
lic? Isn't a German confederation already more than we ever
dared hope for? An all-embracing unity, expanded territory,
concentrated economic power-is this tht• goal we should
pursue, or isn't all that far too much?
Since the mid-sixties, in speeches and articles I have
spoken out against reunification and in favor of a confeder­
ation. Here, once more, I will answer the German Question.
Briefly-not in ten points, but in f-ive:

1. A German conf(•deration puts an end to the postwar

relationship of the two German states, that of one foreign
country to anotht·r. It eliminates a vile harder that also has
divided Europe; at the same time it respects the concerns,
even fears, of Germany's neighbors by constitutionally re­
nouncing the goal of unifying into a single state.

4· Lasrenausaleich refers to legislation passed in postwar West Germany that levied a

tax on property that had survived the war, the proceeds going to help refugees and
expellees from the eastern provinces get established in the West .

4
 Short Speech b)' a Rootless Cosmopolitan
.
•

2. A confederation of two German states does not do

violence to the postwar evolution of either state. Rather, it
permits something new: an independmt togetherness. At the
same time, a confederation is sufficiently sovereign to fulfill
both statt.·s' obligations to their respective alliances, tht.•reby
reinforcing the European security concept.
3· A confederation of two German states dovetails bet­

ter with the current process of European integration than

does a single powerful state, since an intt.·grated Europe will
itself he confederate in structure and must therefore tran­
scend the traditional divisions into nation-states.
4· A confederation of two German states points the way

to a new, different, and desirable self-definition that would

include joint responsibility for German history. This under­
standing of cultural nationhood takes up where the efforts
of the St. Paul's assembly failed. It implies a modem, broader
concept of culture, and embraces the multiplicity of German
culture without needing to assert unity in the sense of a
nation-state.
)· A confederation of the two states that make up the

Gt.·rman cultural nation would provide an example for the

solution of differmt yet comparable conflicts throughout
the world, whether in Korea, Ireland, Cyprus, or the Middle
East-wherever one political entity has aggn·ssivdy estab­
lished honlers or seeks to extend them at the expense of
another. A German confederation could become a model to
emulate.

A few additional comments. A unified German state ex­

isted, in varying sizes, for no more than seventy-five years:
 T W O S T A T E S-U N E N A T I O N ?

as the German Reich under Prussian rule; as the Wcimar

Republic, pracarious from the outset; and finally, until its
unconditional surrender, as the G reater German Reich. We
should he aware-as our neighbors are-of how much grief
this unified state caused, of what misfortune it brought to
others and to ourselves as well. The crime of genocide,
summed up in the image of Auschwitz, inexcusable from
whatever angle you view it, weighs on the conscience of
this unified state.
Never before in their history had the Germans brought
down upon themselves such terrifying shame. Until then,
they were no better and no worse than other peoples. But
the megalomania born of their complexes led them to reject
the possibility of being a cultural nation within a federation
and to insist instead on the creation of a unified state in
the form of a Reich - by any and all means. This state laid
the foundation for Auschwitz. It formed the power base for
the latent anti-Semitism that existed in other places as well.
It helped provide an appallingly fi rm foundation for the ra­
cial ideology of National Socialism.
There is no way to avoid this conclusion. Anyone think­
ing about Germany these days and looking for an answer to
the German Question must include Auschwitz in his thoughts.
That place of terror, that permanent wound, makes a
future unified German state impossible. And if such a
state is nevertheless insisted upon, it will be doomed to
failure.
More than two decades ago in Tutzing the notion of
"change through rapprochement" was formulated; argued

6
 Short Speech by a Rootless Cos�opolitan
.

over for a long time, the concept eventually proved correct. 5

Hy now, rapprochement has become accepted policy. In the
G DR, change has occurred as a result of the revolutionary
will of the people. What hasn't changed yet is the federal
Republic of Gt·rmany, whose people have been watching the
events over there with a mixture of admiration and conde­
scension: "We don't want to tell you what to do, but . . . "

Already they are poking their noses in. Help - real

hel p - is given only on West German terms. Property, yes,
they say, but no "people's property," please. The western
ideology of capitalism, which aims to wipe out t·very other
kind of ideological ism, announces, as if holding a gun to
the East Germans' head: A market economv or else.
And who wouldn't put up his hands and surrcndt·r to
the blessings of one whose lack of human dt·cency is so
plainly outweighed by his strength and success? I am afraid
that we Germans will also let this second chance for sel f­
definition slip by. To he a cultural nation in confederative
plural ism apparently docs not satisfy us; and "rapproche­
ment through change" is asking too muc h - because it's too
expensive. Hut the German Question can't he solwd by
working it out in marks and pfcnnigs.
What was it that young man in the Hamburg railroad
station said? He was right. If sides must he drawn, let me
be numbered among the rootless cosmopolitans.

�· "Change through rappro<:h<·m<•nt" was put forward hy Egon Bahr in a J<jbj

speech in Tutzing. Bahr was pn·s• secretary to Chancdlor Willy Brandt and lwcam<'
one of the architects of Brandt's O.upol11ik.

7
 EQUALIZING

THE BURDEN

Twenty years ago Gustav Heinemann used the phrase

"troublesome fatherlands," and he mentioned one by name:
Germany.' The accuracy of his term is confirmed by recent
developments. Once again it looks as though our national
sanity is being swept away by a \van· of inchoate nationalist
emotion. With reactions that range from uneasiness to ter­
ror our neighbors are hearing Germans voice a recklessly
whipped-up longing for unity.
The real news threatens to be pushed into the back­
ground: the way the people of the GDR are fighting day by
day for their freedoms, chipping away, without violence, at
the bastions of a hated system. A process unique in German
history, because it is both revolutionary and successful. Other
matters, of secondary importance, thrust themselves into the
foreground. Some West German politicians push themselves

Speech gin·n at the German Social Demonatic Party (SPD) congress in Berlin,
December 18, 1989, published the next day in the Frankfumr Rundschau.
1. Heinemann was president of the l'ederal Republic of Germany from 1969 to
1974·

8
 Equalizing the Burden.

onto center stage and into the limelight. While the govern­
ment of the Federal Republic, led hy the minister of f-inance,
lifts the bash·t of goodies and glittering promises higher and
higher, urging the revolutionaries in the East to attempt
increasingly dangerous leaps, the federal chancellor keeps
trying to focus the world's att<·. ntion on himself and his t<·. n­
point program.
And this patchwork, presented in statesmanlike guise,
received applaus<.·. A few sensible suggestions blinded (W<>pk
to the underlying tissm· of contradictions and omissions
(prompted by the chancellor's election strategy ), to the fact
that once more the unconditional recognition of Poland's
western border was being withheld.
The following day brought a rude awakening. Tlw
hocus-pocus melt<·d away. Reality- the justi fied alarm of
Germany's neighbors, the result of long experience -caught
up with the West Gl·rman Bu ndestag. The "reunifi<.·ation"
bubble hurst, lwcause no one in his right mind and cursed
with ml·n10ry can allow so much pO\wr to be concentrated
in the center of Europ<.· again. Certainly not the former Al­
lies, playing victor again, nor the Poles, nor the hench, nor
the Dutch, nor the Danes. But neither can \H' Germans, for
in a mere seventy-h\'e years, under various t.·xecutors, our
unif-ied state filled the history hooks of the world with suf­
fering, ruins, defeat, millions of refugees, millions of dead,
and a burden of crimes with which we will newr come to
terms. No one m·eds a second edition of this unif1t.·d state,
and - regardless of how benevolent w<.� managl· to appear
now - such a prospt.·ct should newr again he allowed to
ignite the political will.

9
 TW O S T A T ES - . O N E N A T IO N ?

Let us learn instead from our fellow countrymen in the

GDR, who, unlike the citizens of the Federal Republic, did
not han· fn·edom handed to them, but rather had to wrest
it from an all-encompassing system -an accomplishment that
makes us, roll ing in wealth, look poor by comparison.
What justifies this arrogance of ours, flaunting its high­
rise glass fa<;;ades and export surpluses? What justifies this
know-it-all attitude about democracv, when we've earned, J

at most, a "C +" on the first f('\\" lessons? What justifies our
crowing over scandals across the border, when our own
scandals, ra nging from the .\'cue Hcimac to Flick and Barschcl
and the Sinkhole of Celie, still stink to high hean·n? 2 And
what justifies the high-handedness of a Helmut Kohl com­
pared to the modest wishes of the han·-nots over there?
Han· we forgotten or are we repressing-practiced as we
arc in repression-the fact that the burden of the lost war
weighed far more heavilv on th(• smaller German state than
� J

on ours?
This is how the GD R's prospects looked after 1 9H, and
the effects can still be felt todav: no sooner had the Greater
German svstem of tyranny lost its power than the Stalinist

2 • .\'tut flt�mar (New llomdand) was a housing program under the SPD revealed
by Dtr Sprtgtl to have bej?n usj?d by cj?nain mj?mbcrs of the pany and the trade
unions to linj? their own pockj?tS at the j?nd of Helmut Schmidt's tenurr as chan­
cellor. Frirdrich Karl Hick, head of thj? Flick Concj?m and thought to be the
wealthij?st man in G<·rmany. was charged in 1984 with bribing j?Conomics minister
Count Otto Lambsdorff in rj?tum for tax brj?aks wonh hundreds of millions of
marks. Uwe Barschd, thj? young and promising prime minister of Schlj?swig­
l lolstcin dj?Ctj?d in 1982, dij?d, prj?sumably of suicide, aftj?r a major political scandal.
Thj? Sinkhole of Celie: Celie is the s<·at of the Supreme Coun of thj? province of
Lower Saxony. In th<· fifties and sixties the court was notorious for shielding ex­
Nazis and prosecuting communists and socialists.

I 0
 Eq.ualizinB the Burden

system closed in, with new yet famil iar forms of tyranny.
Economically exploited by a Soviet U n ion that had previ­
ously hcen exploited and devastated by the Greater German
Reich, confronted immediately with Soviet tanks during the
workers' uprising in June 190, and finally walled in, the
citizens of the German Democratic Republic had to pay, and
pay and pay again, on their own behalf as well as on the
behalf of the citizens of the federal Republic. They unfairly
hore the brunt of the Second World War, which had been
lost hy all Germans.
So we owe them a good deal. What is called for is not
a patronizing short-term loan or a shrewd buy-out of the
"bankrupt G DR's assets," but rather a far-reaching equali­
zation of the burden - due immediately and with no pre­
conditions. A reduction in mil itary spending and a special
graduated tax levied on every citizen of the federal Republic
can finance the ;>aymcnt of this debt. I expect my party,
the German Social Democratic Party, to make this j ust,
overdue, and self-evident equalizing of the burden its own
cause and to present it as a top-priority demand in the
Bundestag.
Our fellow countrymen in the GDR arc exhausted, they
are in up to their necks, yet they continue fighting for their
freedom, inch hy inch. Not until they receive what they
deserve from us can they speak and negotiate with us as
equal partners about Germany and Germany, two states with
one history and one culture, two confederated states within
the European house. The prerequisite for self-determination
is complete independence, and that includes economic in­
dependence.

I I
 T W O S T A T E S- O N E N ATI O N ?

Once we rid ourselves of the illusion of reunification,

with its seductive but ultimately worthless rhetoric, it be­
comes clear that the contractual arrangement proposed by
GDR prime min ister Hans Modrow does indeed fit the ac­
tual situation as well as the more distant prospects. � U nder
such an arrangement, commissions with equal representation
from each state could settle the obvious problems in the
areas of transportation, energy, and postal sen·ice, and also
settle the equalizing of the burden that is incumbent on the
fRG and owed to the GDR. They could undertake the gradual
dismantling of the defense budget as a means to guarantee
peace. They could then coordinate den·lopment aid to the
Third World, a joint German responsibility. They could also
enrich Herder's concept of the cultur a l nation by infusing it
with new content. And, not least of all, they could halt the
destruction of the en\'ironment ' which in anv
'
case respects
no boundaries.
These and other efforts will, if succe-;�..ful, set the stage
for further Gem1an-German rapprochements and thus smooth
the wav toward a confederation of the two states. Hut con­
federation, if really desired, will require the renunciation of
a unified state in the sense usually implied by "reunifica­
tion."
U nification in the form of annexing the GDR would
result in irremediable losses: th(• citizens of the state that
was swallowed up would be left with nothing of their pain­
ful ly fought-for and won identity. Their history would fall

� - At a summit mt•eting with West German •hancellor Kohl in Lc·ipzig in 1989,

Modrow requested aid from th(' l'RG and ,·oiced r..ars about rcunili•ation. Ht·
demanded assurances on the bord('rs with Poland.

I 2
 Equ"alizinB the Burden

victim to the mindless clamor for unity. And nothing would

be gained but a troubling abundance of power and the l ust
for more power. I n spite of all our assurances, even the
sincere ones, we Germans would become, once again, some­
thing to be feared. Our neighbors would draw away from
us with distrust, and the feeling of being isolated would rear
its head, giving rise to the dangerous self-pity that sees itself
as "surrounde<l by enemies . " A reunited Germany would be
a colossus loaded with complexes, standing in its own way
and in t he way of European integration.
On the other hand, a confederation of the two German
states and their explicit renunciation of a unified state would
further the integration of Europe, which itself will be con­
federative in nature.
As a writer to whom the German language means the
ability to transcend borders, I find, whenever I analyz<' po­
litical statements critically, that I come up against this dn·ad
either-or, ali-or-nothing prindple. Yet we do have a third
possibility for answering the German Question. I expect my
party to recognize this possibility and to make it a political
reality.
For decades the Social Democratic Party, because it re­
mains mindful of history, has been the architect and pace­
setter of a policy for Germany that is oriented toward peace.
Now that communist dogma has gone bankrupt, it becomes
clear- if it was not clear before- that democratic social­
ism has a future all over the world. I must confess that the
return of Alexander Dubcek to the political arena moved
me deeply, but it also confirmed me in my political thinking.
The transformation underway in Eastern and Central Europe

I 3
 T W O S T A T ES -
�- O N E N A T I O N ?

should give us social democrats new energy, which we need.

Too often our power to act has been paralyzed by the voic­
ing of doubts. The nineties demand that we manifest the
will to shape the course of political events. In our history,
the German social democrats have sometimes kept this will
under house arrest, yet often enough they have displayed it,
too-from August Bebel to Willy Brandt. Now, Hans-Jochen
Vogel, it is your tum. 4

4· Vogel was chainnan of the SPD at this time.

I 4
 MUCH FEELING ,

LI T TLE AWARENESS

A Conversation with Der Spiegel

( I 9 8 9 )

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Grass, twenty-eight years ago, on the day

after the building of the Wall, you wrote an open letter to
your fellow writer in the GDR, Anna Seghers. In it you
expressed your shock at seeing the Vopos, the People's Po­
licemen, and I quote: " I went to the Brandenburg Gate and
found myself face to face with naked power, which never­
theless stank of pigskin . " What feelings did you have on
November 9, 1989?

GRASS: I thought: A German revolution has just taken

place - without bloodshed, with a clear head, and appar­
ently successfully. This never happened hdore, not in our
entire history.

DER SPIEGEL: Th<' revolution was wrestt·d from the Com­

munist government by the wave of emigration through

first publish«.>d in Der Spre,qel 47, Nowml>c.>r 2o, 1989.

I S"
 T W O S T A T ES - O N E N A T I O N ?

Hungary, by the rush on the embassies in Prague and War­

saw. Without that pressure it never would have come about.

GRASS: The pressure was twofold. There was pressure from

the emigration and pressure from the protest rallies. Those
were crowds the likes of which had never been seen in the
streets of the GDR. On June 16 and 1 7 of •9B there were
only Ho,ooo people in the streets. That wasn't a popular
uprising but a workers' uprising. The event was falsified in
both parts of Germany - over there they said it was a
counterrevolution and here it was made into a popular up­
rising by Adenauer's linguistic fiat.

DER SPIEGEL: You don't seem altogether happy about this

revolution.

GRASS: The order in which the changes took place was \\Tong.

The internal process of democratization should have been

pushed further, before the opening of the borders was an­
nounced. The local elections should have been repeated. That
would have led to a restructuring of the GDR at a higher
level and given the opposition groups more room to maneu­
ver. They could have gained the practical experience in pol­
itics that many lack.
-

DER SPIEGEL: So you are ambivalent?

GRASS: Ambivalent in the sense that I am not sure that in

its present condition this smaller German state will survive
the open border. And I am afraid, too, that in the Federal

I 6
 Much Feelina, Liccle Awareness
.
.

Republic the clamor for reunification will erupt again, in the

absence of workable alternative models.

DER SPIEGEL: But according to the conservative interpreta­

tion, the Basic Law ' insists on reunification.

t;RASS: There's nothing about reunification in the Basic Law.

The preamble speaks of the unity of the Germans, and I'm
all in favor of that.

DH{ SI'II·.GI:I.: You're saying, then, that anyone who talks about
the reunification statute in the constitution simply does not
know the constitution?

t;RASS: . . . does not know the constitution or, if he knows

it, is speaking aga inst his own better judgmcnt.

DER SI'IH;I:I.: Which would vou assume in the case of Hel­

mut Kohl ?

t;RASS: I think the federal chancdlor doesn't know the con­

stitution. A quick reading of it would show him that tlw
concept of unity allows many things, makes many things
possible. More than these either-or demands, which haw
already wreaked such havoc in Germany. One side sticks
lazily to the status guo and says, " for reasons of security in
Central Europe the two-state arrangement must be pre­
served. " And the other side calls for reunification, with no

1. Das Grundaeseu, the constitut ion of West Germany.

I 7
 TWO STATES-ONE NATION?

regard for what the moment requires. But in between lies

the possibility of achie\·ing an accord between the two Ger­
man states. Such an accord would satisfv the German need
-

for self-definition, and our neighbors could also accept it.

Thus, no concentration of power in the sense of reunifica­
tion, and no further uncertainty from a two-state arrange­
ment, where one foreign country confronts another. Rather,
a confederation of the two states, requiring a new definition.
It doesn't help to look back to the German Reich, whether
with the borders of 1945" or 1 9 3 7 ; all that is gone. We ha\"e
to redefine oursel\"es.

DER SPIEGEL: But since the Wars of Liberation / a German

accord has always been understood to imply a nation, a
common state.

GRASS: Not at all. In 1848, at the constitutional assembly at

St. Paul's in Frankfurt, many different models were dis­
cussed. I prefer to in\"oke Herder's concept of the cultural
nation.

DER SPIEGEL: But the confederation idea doesn't haw an

immaculate past, either.

GRASS: How so?

DER SPIEGEL: Ulbricht's confederation plans of the fifties

and sixties scared the daylights out of the young Federal
Republic.

2. ThC' German t<'rm for th<' Napoll'onic Wars.

I 8
 Much ·Feelin 9, Liccle Awareness
.
•

GRASS: We'd be giving Ulbricht too much credit if in ret­

rospect we conceded that he came up with a workable plan.
Confederation exists in manv democratic states. The two
.I

German states also seem suited for confederation for other

reasons. In spite of certain difficulties, the federal principle
in the Federal Republic has yielded only positive results, and
I wish that in the GDR, too, the old provinces would re­
surface in the coming years.

DER SPIEGEL: Wouldn't your charge of laziness have to apply

to your SPD friend Egan Rahr, who did say, after all, " For
God's sake, let's not tamper with these two states"?

GRASS: Laziness is the last thing I would chargt· Egan Bahr

with; he used to be one of our most active minds. That's
where I begin to be critical. I think Rahr, too, was surprised
by this sudden development - which says nothing against
him. Following his "policy of small steps," he always con­
centrated on safeguarding each small success. That's why he
won't tamper with the existing two-state arrangement. But
reunification, even with the best intentions, will push us
into isolation. And when Germany feels isolated, we know
what the reaction is: panic.

DER SPIEGEL: But if the GDR were linked to us in a confed­

eration, wouldn't it become a satellite of the EEC?

GRASS: I refuse to see even·thing in black-and-white tC'rms .

.I o.;

On the one side, the completely ruined socialist-communist

economy; on the other, the- solid rock of capitalism. Ewn

I 9
 TW 0 S TA T E S - .0 N E N A T I 0 N ?

capitalism takes on different forms in different countries.

You can adapt capitalism to the GDR in a way that won't
result in total deformation and rejection of its culture, and
that won't give rise to new social unrest, perhaps with a
shift to the right, such as we've had here as a result of
misguided capitalist policies.

DER SPIE GEL: What can the GDR contribute to a confeder­

ation of the two German states?

(;RASS: Something that may have been noticed by anyone

who has spent time in th<· GDR, something we lack: a slower
pace of life, and therefore moore time to tal k with people. A
society of private niches - ! think Giinter Gaus coined the
phrase - has come into being; something reminiscent of the
3
Hiedermeier period, the way it was in Metternich's day.
Although it may disappear with the opening to the West
and to democracv . .

DER SPIHa:L: You don't seriously think that this anachronis­

..

tic Hiedcm1eier ambiance can hold its own against the con­
centrated economic power of the West?

(;RASS: In the process of focusing on the German-German

question, we lose sight of the real problems of the present.

l· A fomter foreign t•ditor of Der Spie9el and from 1974 to 1981 the representati\'t"
of th<' I'RG in East Berlin, Gaus was a dose associate of Willy Brandt's and a
proponent of Europ<·an detent<'. Riedermei<'r is a term <lt·rived from a cartoon
figure, Papa Biedt·rmeier, who embodkd the style of li\"ing adopted by the German
middle class after Mett<'mich imposed his "systt•m" of absolutist rult• on G!'rmany
and Austria in the wah· of the Napoleonic Wars. Tht• middle class withdrew into
domt•stic life, concentrating on frit•nds and family.

2 0
 ·
Much Feeling, Little Awareness
.
.

But in a matter of weeks and months they'll rem ind us of

their presence. for instance, the rapidly spreading destruc­
tion of the environment. The hole in the ozone layer won't
he made any smaller by a German rapprochement.

DER SPIEGL:L: To return to your personal feel ings: if you had

been in the B undestag the week before last, would you have
joined in the singing of the national anthem?

(;RASS: Probably yes. But with wry different thoughts from

those who began the singing. I would guess they had reuni­
fication in mind. Our anthem is already being inflated, and
that I must warn against, particularly when you consider the
words of the song, which still mean something.

DEl{ SI'IH;EL: You 're thinking of the third stanza?

GRASS: Yes. Un ity and J ustice and Freedom, those are prin­
ciples that apply to both states. The G DR can give us some­
thing, a h igher purpose. Are things all that wonderful here?
Does what our constitution says match what we have in
reality? Can a poor man, or one who isn't well-off, get his
legal point across and find justice in our courts? Can a man
obtain justice in the federal Republic without high-priced
lawyers? Doesn't inequity exist to a scandalous degree in
this rich land? Don't we have, therefore, cwry reason to
take the new, nonviolent, revolutionary idealism emanating
from the G DR and make it our own?

DER SPIEGEL: Learning from the GDR?

2 I
 TW 0 ST A T E S - .0 N E N A T I 0 N ?

GRASS: On the fourth of No\'ember on A lcxanderplatz I saw

all kinds of \'ery appropriate banners, most of them referring
to the situation in the GDR. But among them was one that
didn't apply just to the GDR: "Cut down the big shots,
sa\'c the trees. " We ha,·c big shots here, too. And trees, too,
that need to be saved. An all-German slogan, if you will.
1\·e seldom seen the problem of our dual existential situa­
tion so concisely put.

DER SPI EGEL: Are you afraid that the big shots in the Federal
Republic will become more ensconced and smug the worse
things are in the GDR?

<.;RASS: I'll give you one example: Mr. Lambsdorff, a man

with something of a record, chairman of a democratic party,
and not sicklied o'er with self-doubt of any kind. He wants
to sec big reforms in the GDR before he loosens the purse
strings. This man, with his past and his self-satisfied atti­
tude, was a big shot who had to be cut down so the trees
could he sa\·ed.

DER SPIEGE L: So far the GDR is the only German state where
socialism has been tried. The experiment now seems to he
coming to an end.

GRASS: But look at the conditions under which the experi­

ment took place. This little state has had to bear most of
the burden of the lost war. All those years, up to today.
That alone obliges us to provide assistance as unselfishly as

2 2
 Much Feeling, Little Awarene�s
.

possihle. The GDR had to rebuild under far more difficult

conditions than we did, under a centralized bureaucracy in­
capable of nmning an economy, under the hurden of Stalin­
ism, and without the Marshall Plan, and with far more
reparations to pay. The experiment failed for those reasons,
and for others.
But attempts are heing made within the GDR opposi­
tion- not only in the newly founded Social Democratic Party,
but also in the New forum and the group Democracy
Now - to develop democratic socialism. After all, there isn't
a shred of proof that the collapse of this economic system,
which improperly called itself socialism, has also put an end
to the experiment of democratic socialism in Germany. Such
a thesis has no basis in fact and is clearly directed against
the social democrats.

DER SPIE GEL: Does Giinter Grass the social democrat have
any explanation for the fact that the social democrats, of all
people, arc so speechless at this turn of events?

GRASS: I think the social democrats allowed their success­

ful "policy of small steps" to hlind them to developments
that arc really more leaps than steps. But the social
democrats arc no longer speechless. It was annoying that
for a while they were. Yes, the announcement that the
Social Democratic Party was heing reestahlished in the
GDR caused confusion at first, and was met with a lack of
understanding- "Must it be now?" or " I s this the right
moment?" The only ones who spoke were those with mis­
givings.

2 3
 T W 0 ST A T E s-
· - 0 N E NA T I 0N?

DER SPIEGEL: Hut how is it that a party like the SPD, which
after all has so many experts on Gennan affairs, bet so heavily
on the wrong horse - that is, on the SED, the communist
party of the G DR?

GRASS: I don 't see it that wav. I t was no mistake to maintain

J

contacts with the SED. I believe it is wrong to rely exclu-

sively on SED contacts instead of holding them in reserve
and at the same time offering sympathy and solidarity where
appropriate to support what is emerging and happening in
the country.

DER SPIHiEL: Apparently in shock at the end of the Ho­

necker era, Norbert Gansel coined the slogan "change through
maintaining distance." 4

GRASS: I don't think he would put it that way today. But

his critique was justified.

DER SPIEGEL: So the fact remains: the SPD doesn't have a

clear policy on Germany.

GRASS: The party established ties with GDR officials at the

right time, and then worked out something that was useful
not only for the SPD-SED relationship but also for the en­
tire population. Because of this jointly formulated document
it was easier for the opposition to define itself and to get
where it is today.

4· Norbert Gansel, a lawyer, since 1986 the head of the SPD party council.

2 4
 Much Feeling, Little Awarene�s
.

DER SPIEGEL: Helmut Kohl said the constitution of the Fed­

eral Republic didn't allow him to speak for all Germany,
and thus didn't allow him to recognize the western border
of Poland.

GRASS: In saying that, he denies Chancellor Willy Brandt's

right to have concluded the Warsaw treaties, treaties which
Kohl also invokes. He's buttering up the Christian Demo­
cratic U n ion, specifically its right wing. I t's fear of the
Republicans 5 that's preventing Kohl from uttering this long
overdue, liberating, and essential guarantee. A nd that's the
real scandal, because he won't get a second chance.
Something also should be said about the embarrassing
nature of the chancellor's trip to Poland. About the narrow­
mindedness of the man, his refusal to learn, his know-it-all
attitude - this man is simply unbearable as federal chancel­
lor. I don't know who advised him to visit the Annaberg;
the only positive thing is that the younger generation got
a belated history lesson by asking what actually happened
there. How Poles were shot by German free Corpsmen,
who were also active elsewhere. I don 't know what other
tasteless and insensitive actions will occur to Mr. Kohl in
the future. In this respect his behavior in office has been
consistent.

DER SPIEGEL: Why is it that intellectuals in the federal Re­

public have so little to say about the German Question?

�- Die Republrkaner. a radical right-wing group that came to prominence in the I'RG
in the late eighti('s.
 TW O S TA TES..-- O N E N A TI O N ?

GRASS: There's no simple answer. Manv factors mav be in-

, J

volved. The culture business in the Federal Republic diverts

a lot of energy; it's a well-funded business that seduces peo­
ple into self-absorption. Then there are certain trends that
have been particularly well received by the critics, for in­
stance, a self-absorbed literature, for which 'vou can cer-
tainly make an argument. It isn't likely writers will stop
focusing on themselves, and come to set.• tht·mseh-es instead
in the context of a society or historical movement, to see
themselves as contemporaries. That's how I see myself, as a
contemporary. Which is what has made me speak out again
and again, whether I wanted to or not.
J ust recently I recalled a talk I was invited to give before
the Bonn Press Club in the late sixties or earlv sewnties, J

and which aroused much opposition at the time. I t was

called "The Communicating Plural." I tried to formulate, in
words different from the ones I use today, a notion of how
the G DR and the fRG could coexist side bv side. In Head­
births I not only dealt with the Third World but kept return­
ing to what was on my own doorstep; in that book my idea
of the cultural nation was sketcht.·d for the f-irst time.

DER SPIE GEL : Besides you, only your colleague Martin Wal­

ser is kept awake at night by the topic of Germany. He

broods: "When I think of Konigsberg, I fi nd myself in a
,·ortex of historv that whirls me around and swallows me
n6
J

U
P·

6. Konigslx·rg. tht> birthplan· of Kant, fomwrly in East Prussia, since 1946 has been
Kaliningrad, a Russian city.

2 6
 Much FeelinH, Little Awareness
.
.

GRASS: That's too much feeling and too little awareness.

DER SPIEGEL: He thinks it's a feel ing for history.

GRASS: Well, of course, it's a pain that I , too, will carry

around with me all my life. Having an awareness of history
or developing it doesn't mean one has no feelings. When I
go to Gdansk and look for traces of Danzig, I 'm never free
of feelings. Which often leads to arguments, because j ust as
I speak out aga inst German chauvinism, I speak out aga inst
Polish chauvinism.
Hut I'm also proud that my hometown has sta rted
something. When I was in Gdansk aga in in 1 98 1, and my
graphic works were on exhibit, the mayor made a little speech
in German and said something like, "A son of our city has
achieved international renown. We arc proud of him." I
have these feelings, too, but it doesn't make me maudlin.
And this is where I 'd criticize Walser. Hut it's a good thing
that he expresses himself- even if I 'm of a different opin­
ion - and gets involved in the discussion and stirs up de­
bate. I prefer that to the stuffy silence of those who dodge
the subject altogether.

DER SPIEGEL: Hut this earned him an invitation from the

Christian Democratic Union to attmd its closed meeting in
Wildbad Kreuth, where he played Sch'!f�kopf with Theo Wai­
gel, who insists on the 19 3 7 borders. 7

1· Sch'!fikorf. a Gt•rman •·ani gam<'. Tlw word also mt·ans a li>ol. Tlw<Kior Waig<'l,
Wt•st GC'rman minist<·r of financC' sinn· 1<)89, l)('canw lead<'r of thC' cons<'rvatin·
CSU (Christian S<K·ial Union), tht· Jia,·arian branch of tlw CDU (Christian D<'mo­
natic Union). I k advocat<'d (lt·rmany's n·turn to tlw bonia, of ''H7·

2 7
 T W 0 STATES--
. 0 N E N AT I 0 N ?

GRASS: That's something Walser has to settle with himself.

What to me seems more problematical is that a writer with
a memory - a prerequisite for a writer-who in 1967 , at
the last meeting of Group 47 , demanded a boycott of the
Springer newspapers and worked hard for it, should be one
H
of the first to break the hoycott. That hurt me.
Of course, Walser has a right to change his mind. When
met him, he was a clever conservati,·e from Lake Con­
stance with a certain cautious leaning toward the Social
Democratic Party. During the student protests he edged
toward the German Communist Party, then pulled back again,
and now he's chatting with Waigd. There arc a few too
many unexplained twists there, and I don't l ike them. Much
of Walser's marvelously articulate spirit of contradiction is
now left in the dust; he's gone flat, maudlin, as happens
when intellectuals turn sentimental.

DER SI'JH;H. : The lack of interest in a national policy doesn't

bode well for your cultur a l nation.

GRASS: Well, it's different in the GDR. I 'm thinking of

Christoph Hein, for instance. And there are authors l ike
Erich Loest, who in the meantime have come to live in the
federal Republic. I could name a good number of writers
who, on the basis of their biography, their experiences either

8. Group 47 was a loose association of authors, critics, and publisht'rs brought

together b�· Hans Werner Richtt'r for yearly meetings, Jlro,·iding a forum for the
reading and discussion of new work. It functioned from 1947 to 19f>7 and t"Xt"rted
considerable influence on Gt"rman postwar literaturt".

2 8
 Much Feeling, Little Awareness
'
.

in one or the other or both states, arc certainly in a position

to lend content to the idea of a cultural nation.

DER SPIEGEL: Peter Schneider wonders about the post-Wall

future: "Can we exist without an enemy?"

GRASS: I think that at the moment the West is having trou­

ble living without the image of an enemy. I ndustry in the
West is reluctant to say good-bye to the whole armaments
program. For decades people felt threatened by the arma­
ments potential of the Soviet Union and the satellite coun­
tries - as they used to be called, and not without reason.
They justified rearmament that way, and it escalated. But
now that disarmament has begun over there, a response on
our side is lacking. We still insist on the necessity of NATO
in its present form. No transformation is taking place. Here
Gorbachev's saying fits: "He who arrives late is punished hy
life."

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Grass, thank you for talking with us.

2 9
 SHA ME AND DIS G RACE

On the Fiftieth Anniversary cif

the Outbreak cif War
( 1 9 8 9 )

One who rummages through the garbage heap of the past

comes upon banalities. On September 1, 1 939 I was an eleven­
yt·ar-old hunting for bomb fragments in the Danzig suburb
of Neufahrwasser, where the harbor was located. And when
I couldn't find any, I traded something - ! no longer re­
member what -for one of those jagged pieces of metal from
the bombs dropped by German dive bombers over the Wes­
terplattc, the Polish military enclave within th<.· territory of
the free State of Danzig.
That was how the war hcgan for me at home. I remem­
ber late summer days warm enough for swimming, and the
weatlwr held, even though the Baltic beaches remained off­
limits because of the fighting that continued on the Hcla
peninsula. The war arrived suddenly, literally out of the dear
blue sky, and it was over soon, later to be referred to as the
" Polish Campaign. " Oh, yes, an uncle of mine, who had
participated in the defense of the Polish Post Office, was

Speech, first published in Siiddeursche 7.mune (Munich), September 2 , " �89.

3 0
 Shame and Disgrace
.
.

shot after a court-martial; but we didn't talk about that in

the family.
This short war-like other campaigns later on that \Wre
not so short - entered my experience in a strikingly one­
sided way with the help of the German newsreels. After
endless columns of prisoners and shots of horse cadavers
among bombed artillery emplacements, the newsreels sup­
plied my uncomprehending mind with cuts from a victory
parade never shown again. Units of the Wehrmacht and of
the Red A rmy marched one after the other past a German
and a Soviet Russian general ; both generals saluted.
Poland was doubly beaten : a weak state, with inadequate
leadership and an army infatuated with tradition but woe­
fully ill-equipped, she collapsed under the blows of two
modern military powers, the Wehrmacht striking first in a
surprise attack and the Red A rmy mopping up. After that,
the liquidation of the Polish elite and eventually of the Polish
people developed, as planned, into a matter of routine. Be­
tween 1 9 3 9 and 1 946 the population shrank from thirty-five
million to twenty-four million. Estimates place the number
of Poles and Polish Jews who d ied in the war, were mur­
dered, or starved to death, at close to seven million. Yet the
attempt to murder a people who had seemed conquered and
beaten to begin with did not prevent the Polish resistance
from organizing right after Septemlwr 1 9 3 9. Soon it spread
throughout the country. Evm after the Warsaw U prising
collapsed, the resistance continued.
Today, after fifty years, we remember the suffering of
the Poles and the disgrace of the Germans, and find that
there still remains, no matter how harshly we were pun-

3 I
 T W O S T A TE S - O N E N A TI O N ?
•

ishcd, more than enough guilt, and time has not sweetened
this sediment, a sediment t hat cannot be washed away with
fine words. Even if someday a major new effort is made to
right this wrong, the shame will remain.
Shame and sorrow. Because the crime brought into the
world by us Germans resu lted in further suffering, further
injustice, the loss of homelands. Millions of East and West
Prussians, Pomcranians, and Silcsians had to leaw their
birthplaces. This burden cannot be equalized. The war cost
those Germans more than it did other Germans. This im­
balance made many of the older generation bitter; some are
bitter to this dav .
.I

In 194� I , too, lost an irreplaceable part of my origin:

my hometown, Danzig. I , too, took the loss hard. Time and
again I had to remind myself of the reasons for it: German
arrogance and disdain for human beings; German blind obe­
dience; that German hubris which in defiance of all legality
proclaimed an ali-or-nothing as its will, and in the end, when
everything lay buried in suffering, refused to acknowledge
t he nothing.
And refuses to this dav. Hence mv speech on shame and
.I .I

disgrace. For the shame is added to when West German

politicians have the gall to conjure up, before a predisposed
audience, the German boundaries of 1 9 37 . They seck to ap­
pease the voters on the far right. Thus Poland's western
border becomes the subject of loose talk. As if Poland were
not feeling shaky enough at the moment. So we take advan­
tage of Poland's weakness. So Poland faces humiliation again
at the hands of the Germans. So a German cabinet minister

3 2
 Shame and Disarace
.
.

and party chairman is allowed to slough off shame and take

disgrace in stride. '
Sunday spet·chcs of this sort, calculatingly delivered to
refugee associations, haw a history of their own: during the
fifties and sixties they formed part of a pol itical ritual which
irresponsibly and stubbornly n·fused to recognize the origins
or accept the consequences of a war begun and lost by the
Germans. " Peaceful reacquis ition" and "right to a home­
land" were the slogans then , repeated so often that they
became empty flourishes. Millions of Poles had to leave Vilna
and Lemberg after the loss of Poland's eastern provinces to
the Soviet Union ; they were resettled in Danzig and Hres­
lau , 2 where they could talk about their "right to a home­
land" all they liked.
Reminders of the agn·ements reached by the victorious
Allies at Yalta and Potsdam did no good . Incorrigibly, de­
fiantly the banners continued to dedare "Silesia will stay
German!" As if that provinct', the object of bloody battles
between Prussia and Austria over the centuries, hadn't con­
stantly changed rulers; as if Danzig, before it lwcamc Prus­
sia's in the third partition of Poland, hadn't grown rich under
three hundred years of Polish rule and kept its Ha nseatic
character. That all happmed before Europe organized itself
into nation-states, thereby providing the pretext for new
wars born of the nationalism that sprang up everywhere.
The bacillus of nationalism remains virulent in hance, Ger-

1. A reference to Thcodor Waigd. s._.,. pag<' 2 7 .

2. Vilna, L<·mlx·rg, and Brcslau arc now Vilnius, Lvov, and Wrodaw.

3 3
 T W O STATES-O N E N A T I O N ?
.

manv,
J
and cquallv
J
in Poland. Polish nationalists, whose
Polishness has degenerated into a pious arcanum, still talk
tht·msclves into believing that the former eastern German
provinces are ancient Polish lands that they have won back.
Apparently this type of tunnel vision, which makes a virtue
of ignoring the facts of history, persists in Poland as in Ger­
manv ..

Still, in spite of bitter opposition, this unreal debate was

laid to rest in December 1 970, or so one was allowed to
hope: the signing of the German-Polish treaty in Warsaw
recognized Poland's western border. And because Willv
L '

Hrandt, chancellor at thl· time, was well aware of tht· his-

toric significance of this long overdue acknowledgment of
the facts, h<> had in his entourage, among others, two writ­
ers. Siegfried Lenz and I were there when a document valid
und<>r international law sealed the loss of our homeland. 3
We had long since accepted this loss; we had learned to live
with it. Manv of our books dealt with it and its causes. And
yet, when \H' hoard<>d the plane to Warsaw, it was not with
glad anticipation but with feet of lead. Hut then Willy Hrandt
went dmm on his knees on the spot where the J<>wish gh<>tto
had been under German rule, and it became clear that the
murder of six million Jews, planned and carried out by Ger­
mans - this crime and the extermination camps of Ghdno,
Trcblinka, Auschwitz, Hirkenau, Sobibor, Hclzec, and Mai­
danek - could not be rectified, and our loss of a homeland
seemed insignificant.

I· l .enz was born in th<· East !'russian r.·gion known as Ma,uria, one of th<• h·rri­
tori<·s assigm·d to Poland in 194�·

3 4
 Sllame and Disgrace
.
.

A few days after the signing of the German-Polish treaty

came the first strike by the workers in the Polish Baltic
shipyards. The militia opened fire on the workers. So the
beginnings of the movement that would come to be called
Solidarity a decade later go back to December 1 97 0.
Since then Poland has had no peace. Martial law struck
down the hopes of the people. Governments came and went;
only the shortages were constant. Even today, shortages are
accompanying the defeat of the old system and the desper­
ate efforts of a new government, a government that was at
least somewhat democratically elected.
Poland needs help, our help, for we still owe a debt to
Poland. But not the sort of help that dictates conditions,
that forces Polish weakness to taste German strengt h, that
makes shameful, boastful speeches like the one given re­
cently by the Ra,·arian politician Thea Waigel. September 1
should provide him with ample reason to eat his words,
words that can bring onlv m isery in their wake. Whoever
.._ - .I

calls Poland's western border into qul·stion is inciting to

breach of treaty. Whoever speaks that way, whoever still
speaks that way today, is acting shamefully and dragging us
into disgrace.
THIN K ING A B O U T G ER MANY

From a Com'ersation with St ifan Heym

in Brussels

<.;RASS: The Gem1ans han- always had trouble defining them­

sdn's as a nation. Hefore Hismarck got his turn and unified

the country politicall�·, creating in the process the concept
of a Gem1an nation, exhaustive debates on the subject took
place at St. Paul's in frankfurt. If you look them up, you
will find interesting notions, some of them formulated by
Gem1an writers, Uhland for instance, which gi n· precedence
to the concept of the cultural nation as against the politi­
cal nation. Certain!�· times ha,·e changed, and with them
the definition of culture. Hut if w<.· recognize that we in
Germany have twice failed with our political idea of a na­
tion, to our grief and that of our neighbors, it might make
sense to revert to the other idea, which was never reallv
.I

tried.

Th<• discussion took plan· Nowmber 2 1 , 1984 (on th<· occasion of the twenty-fifth
annin·rsa�· of the founding of th<• GOt•the Institute) and was published unabridged
in Berlin!Brussds 1984-o © Gunter Grass and Stefan lfeym. l le�m, no"elist and
·
essa� ist , emigrated to the United States in 19J l , sen·ed in the army, and returned
to the GDR in 1 9p.

3 6
 Thinking about Germany

Especially since it's become clear that one can divide

everything geographically, politically, economically, yet cul­
ture, that most delicate entity, resists division most stub­
bornly. Take literature, for example. I t can be demonstrated,
to my own surprise, that the GDR hasn't succeeded in
creating its own national literature. Despite the indifft·rence
in the West and the years of cultural isolationism, it hasn't
been possible to stifle the interest in what is going on across
the border. for a decade or more there's been a clear dia­
logue between one book and another, without any collusion,
without specific publishing programs, let alone a joint cul­
tural policy. The authors simply fell into conversation with
each other, behind the backs of the prevailing policies.
Therefore the fact that the two of us are sitting here
today is really no surprise. Government officials in compa­
rable positions in one state or the other would have more
trouble getting along, even on questions of language. We at
least know that a German literature existed long before the
federal Republic and the GDR. Basically a truism, but one
that many politicians, who consider their respective states
the be-all and end-all, refuse to recognize. So I believe that
culture, augmented by our common history, can provide a
sufficiently solid foundation for us to redefine the concept
of nation, down to the practical details.
People on this side probably aren't aware that for years
there's been a dispute between the two German states over
the so-called Prussian Cultural Holdings. What speaks against
joint administration of these Prussian Cultural Holdings? Point
by point, something shared, something all-German, could

3 7
 T W 0 S T A T E S -'0 N E N A T I 0 N ?

evolve, without a concentration of economic or even mil i­

tary power in the center of Europe.
And if, as Stefan Heym has thought and stated, the
two states were successful in living up to their political
responsibility in the center of Europe and toward neighbor­
ing states, that for me would be sufficient as the basis for
a new concept of nationhood. Hy common political re­
sponsibility I mean this: afh·r the experience of two world
wars started hy Germany, both states have an obligation
to prevent future wars, to contribute more than other
countries to the reduction of tensions, the tensions first of
all in their own house, between Germans. And I could imag­
ine a dialogue developing between the two states, maybe
first in the area of culture, which would he an casing of
tension, so that our neighbors would stop fearing, as they
do now, a new concentration of power in the center of
Europe . . . .

I I EYM: Well , GUnter Grass, I don't believe the German

Question can he unraveled by way of culture. The reason I
don't believe it is that culture in the GDR is viewed as part
of the ideological superstructure and of ideology, which, as
you know, is a monopoly of those in power. So obstacles
will crop up if you come along and want to create a certain
unity or uniformity on the basis of culture. Of course one
should work toward it, of course one should have joint cul­
tural events, the joint publication of hooks. I 'm happy to
hear that two books of yours will finally he appearing in my
country, and I 'm happy that our leaders have recognized
that this won't topple the GDR. And if someday they rec-

3 8
 Thinkin9 about Germany
' .

ognizc that Heym's hooks won't topple the GDR either,

mayhe they'll puhlish them too . . . .
You have articulated something very important, that
is, the question of war and peace and what that has to do
with the two German states. One t hing is sure, and here I
have to agree with the frenchman who said he loved
Germany so much that he was glad there were two of
them . . .
I t's like this: neither of the two German states hy itself
is in a position to start a war now. Hut both German states
together can work toward keeping the peace. And here I'd
like to say something in praise of our GDR and its leaders ­
and that's rare for me. You see, Honecker announced that
he doesn't like having missiles in the GDR one hit. And he
said that he's prepared to hring the territory of the GDR
into a nuclear-free zone. I haven't heard anything of the sort
from Helmut Kohl yet. And if that could come ahout, it
would he a hig step forward for us. It would be a start at
defusing the distrust - the entirely justified distrust - of the
Germans and certainly of the Germans unitt-d. After all, what
sort of people are tht'S(', really? I brought something along ­
the only thing I plan to read aloud - that Thomas Mann
wrote ahout the Germans:

The German concept of freedom was always di­

rected outward. This concept of freedom meant t he
right to he German, only German, and nothing else,
nothing heyond that. It was a protest-ridden con­
cept, self-centered defensiveness against anything that
might circumscribe and limit racial egotism, tame it

3 9
 T W O S T A T ES - O N E N A T I O N ?

and put it at the service of the community, of man­

kind. A stubborn indi\·idualism directed outward, it
tolerated internally a distressing lack of freedom,
immaturity, unthinking subsen·ience.

I 'd l ike you to remember these last three things, because

they crop up all too often - even today, in the GDR as in
the federal Republic. And these human beings, we must try
to change them. They ha,·e to become free, learn to think
critically, and when that happens, a second big chunk of the
distrust of the Germans will be removed, those Germans
whom people always picture standing at attention.
I 'd also like to describe something I saw in Gottingen. I
\'ltas looking at the display of a bookstore at the station,
where they had a series of very handsome picture books,
German Landscapes, and all those German landscapes weren't
German anvmore. Thev'd been lost bv Hitler. One of the
. . .

volumes had the title Breslau, a German Cicy. As long as you

still run into things like that, you can't complain when peo­
ple don 't trust the Germans. . . .

GRASS: I think only one who has lost his native city or his
homeland through the fault of the Germans can speak spe­
cifically on this point. The loss remains a loss, but it must
be accepted. I t's one of the reasons I chose to become active
in politics, in addition to my ·writing and sculpting and graphic
art- to support the Social Democratic Party when the party
began to work i n that particular direction. And I went to
Warsaw along with Siegfried Lenz when the German-Polish

4 0
 Thinking about German1.

treaty was signed; Lenz was from East Prussia, I from Dan­
zig. We took all kinds of abuse for it, but that was to be
expected.
Hut today we hear polit icians making noises like: "No
one said this border has to be recognized for all time. " And
wh<:'n the present chancdlor doesn't whistle them back,
something has to lw said. Again we hear those phrases from
the fifties and sixties about "peaceful reunification within
"
the bord<.·rs of 1 9 3 7 , hord<.• rs that included East Prussia,
Sil<:'sia, and Pomerania. With statements like these, no won­
der th(' Poles arc feeling apprehensive again.
True, we'n· had a number of political leaders who r<.' ­

alized that we can make progress in German-German affairs

only if we did what decency demands with regard to the
Poles. It was Germans and the Soviet Union, the Third Reich
under H itler and the Soviet U nion, that entered into a pact
at the expense of Poland. Poland lost her eastern provinces
and was generally shifted westward, as a result of which the
Germans lost their eastern provinces. These arc the geo­
graphical facts, and it is true that they had terrible conse­
quences, including an expulsion of Germans that was cruel,
with unnecessary atrocities that are partly understandable
but nonetheless atrocities. It is an incontrovertible fact that
German actions made Poland lose her eastern provinces, which
in turn encouraged chauvinistic movements (the counterpart
to German chauvinism) that clamored for a Polish border as
far west as the Elbe; that's how bad it was. We created
these facts, we must acknowledge them, and we did ac­
knowledge them through a treaty.

4 '
 T W O STATES-ON E N AT I O N ?

But I would l ike to say add a few words in response to

your j ustified doubt that a nation can be defined in terms
of culture.

I IEYM: Defined it certainlv can be, but docs that definition

.I

carry any political weight?

GRASS: Well, both German states established in 1 94� have

been crassly materialistic. So culture plays a validating or an

ornamental role, or at least is supposed to play such a role.
I ts explosive force hasn't heen recognized. Yet some entirely
different development may make us look to culture once
more. By the way, this doesn't apply only to the two Ger­
man states. With rising unemployment- the result of eco­
nomic and technological changes - human existence can no
longer define itself exclusively through work. Other chan­
nels will be needed. And it may turn out that culture,
understood in some new wav, can offer such a channel, thus
.I

playing a role that goes far beyond those validating or or-

namental functions attributed to it in Germany.
And when I said there was a rapprochement, a dialogue
between the two German literatures, I didn't mean that a
nation-culture concept should result in uniformity. I t's my
belief that German culture has always derived its strength
from its diversity. J ust as federalism is a political tradition
in Germany that shouldn't be abandoned. Yes, it makes cer­
tain negotiations difficult, but cultural federalism in the Fed­
eral Republic has its advantages. And if there were such a
thing in the GDR, it would be to the advantage of the
GDR. There matters have been simplified Prussian-style, surely

4 2
 Thinking about Germany,
.

not to the benefit of culture. If we could get a joint cultural

effort going now, one that draws on the diversity within
both countries but also on the differences between the two
regions, that would be a great gain for culture.
There are also differences behveen northern and south­
ern German literature, differences in origin and in structure.
And there are political differences to this day - for instance,
the boundary formed by the Main River- that in some cases
go deeper than the division between the GDR and the t-:ed­
eral Republic. So we have various political strands, each \\ith
its own ramifications, and I think this kind of open discus­
sion of culture would yield a definition of nationhood that
would allow for diversity without necessarily leading to uni­
fication . . . .
There's something else, too, and that concerns not only
me; I could say this for Siegfried Lenz and Horst Hienck and
many other auth(.rs who lost their geographical home. With
the help of l iterature liwy have accomplished something that
politicians seldom accomplish: the rescue of provinces and
cities that are lost for good - through the re-creation of
places and people in periods of convulsin· change, of failure
and of ruin. I n this way writers salvage something that lives
on and continues to develop, which to my mind has greater
value than the politicians' attempts to conjure up with rhet­
oric what no longer exists, as they invariably do at meetings
of refugee associations.
I experienced that in the fifties with my grandparents,
who never really arrived in Ltineburg, where they lived, be­
cause they were still sitting on their suitcases. Konrad Ad­
enauer promised them time after time: "Vote for me, and

4 3
 T W O S T A T ES -" O N E N AT I O N ?

you 'II return to your old home." So thesc people didn't l'Ven
try to settle in thl· West. They kept thinking - with the
Korean War at their backs and the Cold War in front of
them - that soon they would be going home.
You know, I always thought my Kashubian aunt was
right. When urged to go to the West, she shook her head
and said, " I n the West it's better, but in the East it's nicer."

I I I:YM: To get back to th<.· subject of culture. I don't think

we can soln- this thing through culture alone. My dl•ar col­

league, you mention those forces in thl· �ederal Republic
that keep \'eering to the East. This happens, of course, be­
cause you han· a social order that not only tolerates it but
l'H'n encourages it.
You spoke of 194�. of coming to terms with the past.
For me it was rather different: I lost mv homl' in 1 93 3 , thcn
-

in 1 94� came hack in an entirely different role, as a con-

queror, and saw the whole thing from a different angle, and
also the danger.
The question is: Wher<.· did this split come from? How
did it come about? You and I were discussing it earlier to­
day, and you said it Wl'nt back to 1 94�. I'd say it goes a
little farther back. In 1 944 I was an American officer inter­
rogating captured German officers. And a staff major said to
me, "You Americans arc crazy - why are you smashing our
whole a m1y ? You're going to need us, and \'cry soon, against
the Russians." So here was a political idea already full-blown
that later found expression, in a somewhat different form,
in the division of Germany.

44
 Thinking about Germany
. .

So that's how it came about, unfortunately. And today

we have to confront the problem. The question is: How?
How can these two social orders - let me usc this term
rather than states - forge a real link between the two Ger­
man peoples?
I t's perfectly clear: you wouldn't want to impose on the
entire German people capitalism as it really exists in the
Federal Republic - you know why I say "really exists " ­
with its unemployment, its drugs, its Barzels. ' B u t neither
would you want to impose socialism as it really exi�ts, with
its Wall and its frustrations and so on and so on. We'll have
to find something that comes out of the two, we'll have to
make usc of elements from both: the good things about
social ism - and there are all sorts of good things about it ­
and the things worth preserving in the West, too. They
were always portrayed as capitalist by our side, hut they're
also simply human, no? Individual initiative, freedom to travel,
etc. All that has to be kept.
I t would be presumptuous of me to give a prescription.
I 've only just begun to think about how such a Germany
should look. And I know that many other people arc think­
ing along the same lines. In the fal l of 1 98 3 there was a
series of speeches in Munich that dealt with this subject. 2
It's remarkable that all this is coming to a head now. Cer­
tainly it has something to do with what we said earlier, that

1. Rainer Rar�d was one of the strong<·st opponents of Willy Brandt's ('Oalition
gm·ernment ( 1969- 1 974).
2. Thl· period of int<·nse debate and prot<'st that preceded the stationing of l'l·rsh­
ing missiles with nudt"ar warheads in the f<'deral Republic.
 TWO STAT ES-O N E N AT I O N ?

both German populations feel threatened and arc saying,

"We don't want to be reunified in death."
A last question in this connection. I f I say, "What kind
of Germanv?" should it be a Gcrmanv, for examJ>Ie, that has
- -

no forests left? A Germany that's completely barren? A Ger-

many that's not worth living in anymore? The forests arc
dying because of socialism, of course - 1 was in the Ert.
Mountains, a sight I wouldn't want anyone to have to sec.
I drove over a bridge ncar Hernburg, and the \·\'hole river
looked like shaving cream. Hut shaving cream is relined in
comparison to the stuff floating around in that water. So
economic activity in socialism creates just as much pollut\on
and environmental destruction- which it shouldn't, that's
not why we haw socialism -as economic activity in capi­
talism, and we haw to put an end to this if we want a
hcalthv
/
Germam·,
-
a rl'tmified Germanv
-
that Wl' can leave
with pride to our children and their children. Hut I 'm
preaching again, it's disgusting . . .

GRASS: I 'd really like to avoid the word reunification, be­

cause it implies a return to what existed before. And a po­

litically reunified Germany, leaving aside the question of the
borders of 1 9 37, is something I don't consider desirable. Even
if i t weren't a threat, it would be seen as one, and would
accordingly subject us to pressure and vigilance.
But if we speak of a confederation in the center of Eu­
rope, a confederation within a federated Europe, I see this
model as having a future. A federated relationship between
the two German states would also make possible a relation-
 Thinkin9 about Germany
. .

sh ip to Austria, for example, that would alter nothing in

Austria's status quo. Maybe we'll eventually come around to
saying, " Well, the Austrians didn't make such a bad choice
after all with their State Treaty. � Perhaps we should try
something along those l incs - bl·tter late than never. " I 'm
not afraid of the word Finlandization - 1 have tremendous
n•spcct for the Finnish people, and I think it's pretty shabby
that in the fRG, of all countries, people usc the word pe­
joratively, as a tenn of contempt. This little country, with
its very long border with the Soviet Union, has preserved
its independence and demonstrates daily a kind of democ­
racy that certain democrats in the federal Republic could
tah· a lesson from. In other \vords: I think we have to begin
with the old proposals- from the Rapacki Plan to the Palme
4
Plan - for a nuclear-free Europe, proposals that can always
be enlarged, and work out a solution for Gennany. Such a
solution, in my opinion, should be based on the cultural
concept of nationhood, which will not require fXllitical unity.
This concept, in the spirit of Egon Bahr's "change through
rapprochement," would pennit the federation of two Gl·r­
man states, each of which now has a history of its own, a
history we can't simply erase, brief though it is. And their
other, longer history could also provide a basis for their
relationship.

I · The Austrian Sraal.<�-crrraa. sign..d with th.. Soviet Union in '9H. commits Austria
to military m·utrality.
4· In 1 ' H 7 Polish minista of for<'ign affairs Adam Rapacki presented a plan to the
UN Gem·ral Assembly calling for an atom-bomb-free zone in Europe. In 1980 Swt·d­
ish prime minister Olaf Palme established a commission that worked for European
disarmament.

4 7
 T W O S T A T E S _::_ O N E N A T I O N ?

HEYM: What you propose is certainly worth discussing,

and we shouldn't let this dialogue break off- it should be
continued in a different place, and not necessarily only by
writers.
The funny thing is that these days writers in West
Germany, just like' us in East GC'rmany, an· being called
upon to represent some position, to bC'comC' role' models,
which is precisely what we don't want. What do we do,
after all? We write novels, and I hope those novels are con­
sidered good. But we have no right to pose as anything
more than ordinary citizens-and yet wC''re constantly called
upon to do that. I wish the politicians, who are actually
paid for this, would relieve us of the job of thinking through
new de,·clopments. I wish they would take up the basic
issues for a change, and speak about them in public, too.
Not that we writers should withdraw from public life,
but people shouldn't expect more of us than we can de­
liver. . . .

liRASS: And there's another factor. It sounds as though this

idea l'n- expressed so often now is my own, when in fact I

see myself as part of a tradition; I see us both as part of a
tradition. The German writers of the Enlightenment ended
up in opposition to their local rulers not j ust for reasons of
the Enlightenment, but also as patriots. The enlightened pa­
triotic definition of Germanv had to do with culture and a
.I

unity that contradicted the local rulers' desire for separa­

tism. The tradition persisted from Lessing to Heine and e\'en
to Biermann. I used to visit him occasionally while he still
.I
 Thinkin9 about German� ,

lived on Chausseestrasse , and he struck me as a direct de­

scendant in precisely this respect. 5 The same thing happened
to me during those discussions we had in East Berlin in t he
seventies. Every six or eight weeks a few writers from West
Berlin would go over, and we would meet our East Berlin
counterparts in the apartments of various people, read
manuscripts to one another, and discuss, among other things,
the difference's in the way lyric poetry was evolving in the
two German states, and what came across from the manu­
scripts - or didn't come across, as the case might be. Some
of the criticism was pretty harsh.
I t's certainly true that we have' no mandate to function
as spokesmt.'n on political mattt.'rs. Rut it's also true that as
writt·rs in Germany we'n· had C'xperiences- and it was al­
ways the writers who were drin·n out of the country first.
They would predict bad den·lopmt.'nts wry early on, but no
one ewr listened to them. . . .
And maybe I could correct one' small poi nt. Because' of
the division of Europe, we like to talk about WC'stern and
Eastern Europe. And usually, when WC' talk about Europe,
we mean only W<'st<'rn Europe and have no i<ka - 1 think­
how hitter that makes people in Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Poland.

HEYM : And the Soviet Union.

�· Wolf Biermann, author and sing<"r of political ballads, lived on Chauss<·estrasse

in East Berlin. He was banned from publishing in the GDR and en-ntually expa­
triated.

4 9
 TW O STATES-" O N E N AT I O N ?

GRASS: And the Soviet Union, of course. That's Europe too,

and belongs. And in Prague people don't think of themselves
as being in Eastern Europe, but in Central Europe. Maybe
that needs to be said in a city like Brussels.

� 0
 G ER MANY - TW O S TA TES ,

O NE NA TI O N ?

The title of my lecture is a question, "Germany - two states,

one nation?" and I 'd like you to take it as a given that the
question of nationhood in Germany is older than the history
J J

of the two states of the G(•rman nation. German history, as

far hack as we can trace it, has always had a hard time
putting the concepts of " fa tlwrland" or "Nation" or the
"German State" in concrete tem1s.
Since I don't plan to perfom1 a historical crahwalk, which
would mean beginning with t he Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation , and also because my lecture would he a
crashing bon· if I set out to portray the history of German
separatism as an ahsurdist cabinet of distorting mirrors, I
must he content to refer you to my speech "The Commu­
nicating Plural," which I delivered in May 1 967 before the
Honn Press Cluh.

Sp•·•·<·h delin-red at a seminar sponson·d by the hi<·dri<"h 1-.lwrt h>Undation in

Bergneustadt, Ma�· 2 1 , 1 970, and first puhlished in [),. .\'rur Gr.<rll<chafi ( Bonn), Jul�·/
August 1 970.

S' I
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

At the time I wanted to show how inept the Germans

have heen at defining themselves as a nation, and how con­
vulsiwlv thev succumbed to nationalism when the)' finally
" J "

imposed nationhood on themselves in the form of a myth

that was nothing more than a cult of tyranny. At the time
I wanted to show that t he federal st ructure of Germany,
with its tendency toward separatism, should serw as the
hasis for all attempts to endow the idea of the German
nation with a new content that would not depend on myth.
I saw the two states of the German nation as possibly exist­
ing in a confederatin· relationship. I made a distinction he­
tween German unitv and a Gem1an accord. .German unitv,
" J

histor�· teaches us, causes local crises in the center of Eu-

rope to mushroom into supraregional conflicts involving much
of the world. German unity has so often proved a threat to
our neighbors that we cannot expect them to put up with
it anymore - not even as a theoretical goal. On the other
hand, a German accord can be worked out, prm·ided it re­
frains from positing unity. I ndeed, to go even further, pro­
vided it understands that the renunciation of unity is a sine
qua non.
The notes for this speech were jotted down in transit:
at the SPD party congress in Saarhrucken, then on a trip to
Prague, where I was confronted with the sorrO\\'S of the
Czechoslo\'ak nation.
It became clear to me there that the Czechoslovak peo­
ples, too, in their natural di\'ersity and autonomy, had a
crushing unity imposed on them just at the moment when
a democratic accord was beginning to coalesce among the
Czechs, the Slovaks, and the many minorities.
 Germany-Two States, One N,l!tion?

I t is essential to look at Germany from the outside nO\Y

and then, this self-absorbed country that tends all too easily
to view itself as absolute. The Prague Spring, tinged with
melancholy, provided a gloss to Gustav Heinemann's com­
ment, "There are troublesome fatherlands. One of them is
Germany. "
Because the trip back to Herlin by way of Zinnwald and
Dresden was punctuated with delays dictated by bureau­
cratic precision, it afforded me ample opportunity to ask
questions of citizens of the G DR, some in uniform, some
not . . . .
My travel impressions, gathered in Saarbrticken at flood
stage, among Whitsuntide tourists in Prague, and between
Zinnwald and Herlin, conveyed a picture of a moder­
ately troubled and only subliminally hopeful nation. I t often
seemed to me as though a leaf-green weather frog was being
observed from several angles at once, with the observers
agreed that neither fine weather nor a downpour was on its
way. '
Notwithstanding the fact that the opportunities to re­
duce tension in Central Europe have been V{'ry l imited over
the past twenty years , the federal Republic's foreign and
Gennan policies, especially under Konrad Adenauer, seemed
to be based on the impossible. The vague promise of re­
uniting the Gennan Reich within the borders of 1 9 3 7 al­
lowed such excessive hubris, expectations, and illusions to
accumulate, that any future policy to reduce tension, includ-

1. Thl" trl"<' frog, som<"timcs k<"pt in a glass with a littl<" laddC'r and US<"U to for<"cast
W<"athl"r, is colloquially known as a "weath<"r frog" in German, and the term is
soml"timl"s applied to a ml"t<'orologist on radio or tdevision.

s 3
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

ing the policy presently practiced by the Brandt-Schecl gov­

ernment, can prove successful only when the term "politics
of renunciation" no longer stirs people up. 1
Our task is to eliminate from the catalog of political
impossibilities this demand for reunification within the bor­
ders of 1 9 37. Now that even the Christian Democrats sav .!

only in pri,·ate what Adenau<·r often verbalized, the real dif-

ficulties begin- with the call for a territorially more modest
yet still impossible reunification of the two German states
that took shape after 1 949, separate and mutually exclusiw
states.
There can be no unification of the GDR and the Federal
Republic on West German terms; there can be no unifica­
tion of the GDR and the Federal Republic on East German
terms. What blocks such a unification - such a concentra­
tion of power- is not only the objections of our neighbors
in Eastern and Western Europe, but also the fact that these
two social svstems are mutuallv exclusive .
.! •

And even if the capitalist society in the West were to

evolve, under long-term social democratic rule, toward in­
creasing codetermination, the western brand of democrati­
cally codeterminati,·e socialism would find itself irreconcilably
at odds with the non-democratically controlled state capi­
talism of eastern socialism. It is easier to picture economic
and technical accommodation between traditional private
capitalism and traditional state capitalism than accommoda­
tion between social democracv and communism .
.!

2. l'erzrchrpolirrk denott•s a willingness to renouncf' all claims to the tf'rritories lost

aftf'r World War II.
 Germany-Two States, One Nci�ion?

Two years ago in Czechoslovakia, when a first attempt

was belatedly made to give centralized communism a dem­
ocratic basis and legitimation, the invasion by the five Warsaw
Pact powers and the Soviet U nion's assertion of its power
revealed the limits of communism's self-definition. Central­
ized communism, as conceived by Lenin and consistently
developed by Stalin, permits no democratization - u nless it
begins to question its own dogma, which means also its own
power.
In other words, when we speak today of tvvo German
states of the German nation, we have to recognize not only
the territorial and political division, but also the incompati­
bility of two existing German social realities.
Shouldn't official recognition and therefore the normal
relationship of one foreign country vis-a-vis another be the
logical outcome of such considerations? This would seem to
make sense. And why do we Germans even need a danger­
ous term like nation anymore, when our nation is divided
territorially, politically, and socially?
I believe that the traditional form of official recogni­
tion - meaning a transformation of the divided nation into
two foreign countries - will only exacerbate the crisis in
Central Europe, by perpetuating the conflict between the
power blocs that results from an obsolete fixation on the
nation-state. I t will double German nationalism and pull
the rug out from under the policy of detente in Europe,
because two nationalisms will produce twice the unrest, twice
the demands for unification, and a permanent crisis in the
center of Europe. Official recognition of the CDR, with its
implied acceptance of two sovereign states confronting each
 T W 0 S T A T E S - 0 N_E N A T I 0 N ?

other, could lead to the Victnamization of Germany. Wt•

hope that the reasonableness and the interests of the neigh­
boring peoples will prevent such a thing from happening.
We do not need another Korea or Vietnam.
I nstead, let the two German states, with their differ­
ences and contrasts, confer a new meaning on the old con­
cept of nationhood by on>rcoming the traditional conflict­
ridden notion. To be sure, the new concept of a nation and
its growth depends on the solution of problems that were
unknown to the old kind of nation, now destroved and ne,·er
-

to be restored.
In his twenty-point program the federal chancellor out­
lined problems that can be tackled right now, and solved
only by both German states. I want to try to sketch out
several other problems, tasks that point toward the future
and may sound utopian today.
The first task I would set the two states of the German
nation is a thorough inquiry into their recent past. The GDR
and the Federal Republic are the successor states of the
Third Reich; neither of the two states can bluff its way out
of that, for the consequences are binding on both. When
Willy Rrandt and Willi Stoph, as representatives of their
respective states, visited both the site of the Ruchenwald
concentration camp ncar Erfurt and a monument to anti­
fascism in Kassel, it meant far more than the usual political
ritual, because both politicians were obliged to acknowledge
German history-a continuing obligation. I f this new nation
wants to haw a clear understanding of itself, it must carry
the bankruptcy of the old nation on both shoulders.
 Germany-Two States, One Nafion?

The second task I would set the two states of the Ger­
man nation I will call responsible cooperation : to promote
detente in Europe and give concrete form to the previously
empty phrase "peaceful coexistence. " The Federal Republic
and the GDR, as partners in the North Atlantic Alliance and
the Warsaw Pact, have duties on their doorstep, Eu ropean
duties. The desirability of gradually disarming the two blocs
has been much discussed. The two German states could set
an example, and thus give meaning to the new concept of
nationhood.
A third task, resulting from the foregoing, would he
the cooperation of the two states in the area of peace and
conflict research. Where if not in Germany docs one ha,·e
sufficient reason, where if not in Berlin docs one have the
ideal place to test and d<.·velop this new discipline in an
environment of perennial conflict, especially since up to now
the communist and the democratic perspectives have as­
cribed different and even contradictory meanings to war and
peace?
A fourth task for the two German states of the German
nation would be cooperation in providing aid to the coun­
tries of the Third World. The Federal Republic and the
G D R are industrialized states; so they have an obligation,
like all the other industrialized states, to pursue a policy of
development that rejects the neocolonialist power politics of
the old blocs. When the Federal Republic and the GDR
begin to carry out jointly designed development projects ­
whether in Africa or South America - the concept of "two
states of the German nation" �ill have transcended old-stvle
J

r; 7
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

nationalism and emerged as a model that can help other

divided nations resolve their own conflicts. . . .

I have a nightmare vision of a postwar generation that

grows up in the traditional straitjacket of nation-statehood
simply because the new idea of the two states of the Ger­
man nation fails to reach the public. Even when I try to
explain to my twelve-year-old sons how the old nationalism
continues to make its pn.·sence felt, and how important it is
to see our Gennan nation as an entity with specific tasks to
perform in the areas of society, economic dt·velopment, and
peace-keeping, I realize how great the national vacuum is,
and how quickly it might be filled again by the demagogues
who arc always waiting in the wings. The nationalist stew
of vore mav haw gone sour, hut it still finds takers.
' '

Education, therefore, should he gh·en top priority, and I

would like to stress its importance before this group.
The situation in tht· other Gennan state is far more
troublesome, because it is far more rigid. The GDR had to
undergo a rapid, almost seamless transition from National
Socialism to Stalinism without the slightest opportunity for
establishing a democratic image of itself. J ust as the federal
Republic under Adenauer dedicated itself to the principles
of separatism and autonomous statehood, the East Gennan
Communist Party imposed a restoration of the nation-state
modeled on Prussia, which at least made sense in geograph­
ical tenns. So it's hardly surprising that neighboring Poland
took the GDR for the successor state to Prussia.
The Federal Republic's claim to be the only legal rep­
resentative of Gennany and that useless and costly instru-
 Germany-Two States, One I:Jacion ?

ment, the l lallstein Doctrine, 3 did much to perpetuate and

exacerbate the GDR's sense of inj ury at not being recog­
nized. No one should be astonished when the GDR ex­
presses its desire for official recognition with such childish
vehemence, seemingly deaf to any arguments. Nor did this
insistence on recognition, in combination with the country's
relative economic strength, win sympathy for the GDR within
the Eastern Rloc. Units of the National People's Army took
part in an occupation of Czechoslovakia that awakened
memories not only in that country but in the other Warsaw
Pact powers as well. Memories for which all Germans bear
responsibility.
Well fed but in strangely ill-fitting clothes, clothes styl­
ishly tailored on one side, old-fashioned on the other, the
two states of the German nation confront each other­
awkwardly, because subconsciously they sense how domi­
neering their movements app(•ar to their neighbors, who have
reason to be nervous.
In the past year, progress in democratic thinking has at
least begun to hdp the Federal Republic work toward a new
understanding of itself and of its political obligations in the
center of Europe. Since G ustav Heinemann became presi ­
dent and since Willy Brandt a s chancellor has been setting
the political course, people abroad -more than in the country
itself-have credited the Federal Republic with greater

)· The Hallstein Doctrinl', formulated in the fifties by Walter Uallstein, a senior

official in the foreign ministry under Adenauer, statt"d that official recognition of
the GDR by other countrit"s would he construed as an unfriendly act toward the
FRG.
 T W O S T A T E S - O N F. N A T I O N ?

democratic maturity. The terms so long applied to us- the

German thirst for n·,·enge, militarism, nco-Nazism- are losing
their credihilitv.
Yet this positi\'e change in the overall image of the Fed­
eral Republic has not yet proved transferable to the GDR,
where it might alle,·iate the old obsessions. fear of the social
democratic alternatiw is such an integral part of Stalinist
communism that any hint of change is strenuously resisted ­
because each change in the status quo displaces a dogma
whose validitv de1)ends on things staving as thev are .
.I .I "-.: .I

Since the social-lilwral coalition gon·rnmcnt in the Ft·d-

eral Republic adopted its new policy toward Germany and
the East, and C\'t'r since the concept of "two states of the
German nation" was proclaimed, e\·cn though politically it
still lacks suhstann>, tht�re has been much talk about a "stony
.I

path," a "dry stretch ," a "difficult task for the coming de-
cade. " The pt·ople who issue such cautions arc not exagger­
ating. History docs not make leaps. When it dot'S try leaping,
it quickly falls hack: progress goes a step at a time.
I have tried to point out the difficulties and the contra­
dictions. But my attempt to \'iew the concept of "two states
of the German nation" from a different perspective would
remain narrow, and trapped in German esotericism, if I failed,
in concluding, to call the whole thing into question by al­
luding, however briefly, to world politics and the current
trends, which seem utterly irrational.
In terms of foreign or domestic policy, the United States
of America and the Soviet Union arc no longer in a position,
ideologically or morally, to play the role of custodians of
order or world policemen within their spheres of influence.

6 0
 Germany-Two States, One Nation ?

Having too many far-flung interests and responsibilities cre­

ates cracks in the confidence of the two major powers. They
become frazzled, touchy, occasionally faint-hearted, then
strident. The role of the People's Republic of China was not
foreseen in the drama they are acting out. We do not know,
and can hardly dictate, the part reason will play in world
politics in the future. The contribution we can make, by
which I mean the tasks now before the two states of the
German nation, should from here on be always on the side
of reason, reason in the sense of the European Enlighten­
ment - precisely because Germany has time and again been
the bridal bower of irrationality. Unless of course we reject
this fine European tradition and mind lessly follow the ora­
cular sayings of our political weather frogs.

6 I
 THE C O M MUNICA TING

P LURAL

Speech bifore the Bonn Press Club

( 1 9 6 7 )

Ladies and Gentlemen,

More than a month ago, at well-organized pompes Ju­

nebres, history was conjured up in this land: Konrad Ade­
nauer's final farewell to his supporters and opponents offered
an occasion for placing a milepost, a milepost that only the
fond and foolish think will never be dislodged. How did Die
Welt put it? "The chancellor is dead. A myth is born. "
W e know this kind of birth announcement. The Ger­
man people likes its history presented as colossal fate on the
wide screen. From the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest to the
penitential pilgrimage to Canossa and on to the falsification
of the events of J une 1 7, • 9B . we are rich in bombastic
disasters. They form a thick sediment of dates in our school­
books. So long as we know when the Thirty Years' War
began and when it ended, all is well. Friedrich Schiller tells

Ddi\'cred May 29, 1967, under the title "Should the Gcrmans Form One Nation?"
First published in SUddeursche Zeirung (Munich), May 29, 1967.

6 2
 The Communicating Plu{al
.

us all about Wallenstein; and j ust to make sure we form the

right associations, German television broadcasts a Wallenstein
performance the day after Adenaucr's death: history even a
child can grasp. The ravens on duty over the Kyffhauscr.
The Old Man in the Sachscnwald. They light Hindcnburg
lamps for us, which are supposed to function as reunifica­
tion candles, stifling debate and raising morale. '
I n fluenced by such stagecraft, the citizen may well pic­
ture history as a broad and mighty stream. Today it is my
pleasure to swim against the current of that stream. I call
my talk "The Communicating Plural. "
I want t o challenge a host o f firmly entrenched answers
by raising the question of nationhood. I want to express the
self-evident, even if the self-evident should sound, to some
cars, revolutionary . . . .
The nation issue, then. Do the Germans make a nation?
Should they make a nation?
As usual, we have trouble with our terminology. For
instance: what do we really mean by reunification? Who
should be reunited with whom, and under what political
conditions? Docs reunification mean restoration of the Ger­
man Reich in the borders of 1 9 37 ?
There are still sleazy politicians around who foster this
sort of hubris. For over a decade, and actually to this day,
every German whose vote was desired was promised reuni-

1. Th<· ra\'ens o n duty refer t o the k·gend o f Empt·ror Friedrich Barbarossa, who
was suppos<"<l to bt· buried in the Kyffhauser Mountain. The "old man in the
Sachsenwald" is the Iron Chancdlor, Otto mn Bismarck. Adenauer was also re­
ferred to as "tht> old man." Paul mn H ind<·nburg, president during the Wt>imar
Republic, allowed himsdf to bt· maneu\'ered into appointing l l itler chancellor.

6 3
 T W O STA T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

fication in peace and freedom. Nota bene: in the borders of

1 9 37, and in peace and freedom.
Absurd as it may sound, this flurry of political counter­
feiting was accepted by the voter as legal tender. We were
ruled without interruption bv a partv that even todav can-
• .I .I

not tell us plainly and directly what reunification means,

who is to be reunited with whom, and under what political
conditions, and how to evaluate the factors that resulted in
the dismantling of the Reich, the shrinking of the Reich's
territory, and the division of what remained. I nstead we
were offered crude anti-Communism, with a talent for
headlines that reduced Konrad Adenauer's poverty of
expression to the level of nineteenth-century German fran­
cophobia. The Russians were to blame for everything. for
all other problems the magic word reunification served as a
stopgap.
Yet the word can be understood quite differently. At
the tim<.· of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,
the Gem1ans could point to a unity of the Reich, though it
was a mystical, not a political, unity. Then, from the begin­
ning of the religious strugglt.�s in the sixteenth century, or
at least from the conclusion of the Peace of Westphal ia, the
Roman Empire of the German Nation was divided into two
religious and hence also political camps. Yes, at first Prot­
estantism was an issue for all Germans, but Protestantism
could never be an issue for an emperor who at the same
time was king of Spain. The Counter Reformation won out
in the south and west of the empire; the north and east
remained Protestant, except for regional pockets. The Main
boundary remains politically significant: the three-hundred-
 The Communicating Plu;al

year-old antagonisms between Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein

go deeper than the recent ideologically based antagonism
between Mecklenburg and Lower Saxony. Yet we should
not forget that the division we confront today was in the
making long before • 94 S" . From the vantage point of the
Rhineland, there was always an East Elbia. East of the Elbe,
people said (and still say), things were (and still arc) Prus­
sian, Protestant, and thus pagan, in short, communist. The
war caused by us and the subsequent cold war, which both
Germanys knew how to wage well below the freezing point,
transformed the East Elbian border in people's minds into a
fortified wall between the two states. I t seemed truly gro­
tesque when Konrad Adenauer, a confi rmed West Elbian,
though he had achieved his highest aspiration by forging a
separate federal Republic, nevertheless spoke of "reunifica­
tion in peace and freedom. " His death made the bankruptcy
of his policy visible: reunification is a word devoid of mean­
ing, and we must eliminate it if we wish to keep our cred­
ibility.
But what do we put in its place?
New traps for voters, new counterfeits?
Is the House of Springer to extract its new all-German
doctrines of salvation from the conjunction of Mars and
U ranus, from a favorable double sextilc of Jupiter and the
sun with Venus and Mercurv?
J

We arc familiar with this department-store catalog, in

which the same dreary old items are dusted off and pre­
sented in new displays. We are encouraged to hope for
the collapse of the communist system, if not tomorrow,
then the day after tomorrow. Even China has to become
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N AT I O N ?

a villain in th<· name of reunification. And every few years,

for our all-G<·rman constipation, we ar<' given a Europe­
enema.
Allow me to outline what is possible and what impos­
sible in the way of a German nation. Because a gap has
formed between our tendency toward fragmentation into
small states and our tendencv toward nationalist hubris. The
'

time has come to put things bluntly.

Hrst of all: anyone who speaks of Germany today must
know that in this centurv two Germam·s - first the Kaiser's
. '

Germany, then National Socialist Germany- began world

wars and lost them. . . .

furtlwm10re: our inability to learn from a lost war, even

to realize that we lost the first and also the second war for
wry good reasons, accounts for our inept, irrational policies
in the aftermath. This ignorance is summed up in what has
become a popular expression: We don't want to acknowl­
edge.
The acknowledgment of our guilt has been reduced to
irrelevant, belated, ritual expressions. We have lost the big­
ger picture. We fiddle with a policy that was wrong from
the outset . . . .
What has to happen in this country before political con­
clusions can be drawn from political givens?
Have we lacked good advice, sound counsel?
The advice has been giwn repeatedly, yet in vain. Let
me quote you a passage from the last chapter of Golo Mann's
History C!f Germany Since 1 789. The chapter is titled, signifi­
cantly, " Les Allemagnes," the Germanys. Here Mann com­
pares the two Germanys:

6 6
 The Communicating Plu��Yl

[The GDR] ofticialdom sees the GDR as a new state.

Although it makes clumsy, sentimental attempts to
establish l inks with certain episodes in German and
Prussian history, it regards the German Reich as dis­
solved, and must do so because otherwise its state
would have no legal basis. Th<·refore it is very ready
to recognize the federal Republic; it advocates the
theory of "two German states . " The federal Repub­
lic docs not do this. It is not prepared to recognize
the GDR and regards i tself as the representative of
the German Reich which exists de jure and must be
restored de facto.

What has happened since 1 949 has led West Ger­

many away from rather than towards this theoretical
standpoint; the federal Republic has developed a
strong identity which is not that of the Reich. The
focal point of its foreign policy is not the whok of
Germany but t he Rhineland and southern Germany.
An all-German foreign policy would have necessi­
tated an Eastern policy, and the federal Republic
had no such policy. 2

h this year of 1967 we can say that the politics of strength

led to the Soviet zone's consolidation in the form of the
state known as the GDR. The federal Republic's claim to
be the sole legitimate representative of the German people,

2 . Golo Mann, The Hisrory of Germany Smce 1 789. trans. Marian Jackson (New York,
Washington: l'raeg<"r, 1 968), p. n 2 .
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N AT I O N ?

or the fiction that it is the legitimate sucn·ssor to the "Reich"

within the borders of 1 9 37, simply demonstrates the schizoid
nature of this policy, a policy that claims to he all-German
hut in reality pursues separateness. The policy of "all or
nothing" has permitted us to harvest the nothing without
losing face.
Yet the initial situation of divided Germany after the
capitulation was not unfavorable. After the cancellation of
the Morgenthau Plan, after the ebbing of Stalinism, both
parts of Germany had several opportunities to take respon­
sibility for the consequences of the lost war, working to­
gether or in tandem, and to win back the trust of their
neighbors, who had been t heir enemies. Both Gennanys frit­
tered away the capital the victors had imested in them; one
Gennanv revived Stalinism and isolated itself, while the Fed-
,

eral Republic had an even better opportunity and failed to

seize it: all the mileposts of the Adenauer era, from re­
armament to the Hallstein Doctrine, violated the preamble
of the Basic Law. Thus both provisional states were consoli­
dated, and today we have two Gennanys. The fact that our
people have grown accustomed to this situation and at the
same time react to it hysterically proves that we Germans
are in no condition to form one nation.
For the structure of t he two German states is naturally
federative. In both states this federative structure is con­
finned by law. Article 1 of the GDR's constitution still reads:
"Germany is an indivisible democratic republic; it rests upon
the individual provinces, the Lander . . . " But this federalism
has been able to express itself fully only in the Federal

6 8
 The Communicating Plur�

R<:>public; the GDR presents a unified Prussian face and tries

to blur the existing differences, for instance between Meck­
lenburg and Saxony. Yet federalism- meaning the legal re­
lationship of separate parts co each other, wich each oth<:>r,
and, in the civic scnse, Jor each other, offers the only suit­
able basis for the two German states. Until now, they have
lived only a.qainsc each othn. And so the tradition of dualism
has been carried to the point of division .
Only seldom, and then under duress, has Germany been
a unified national bloc overriding the control of its individ­
ual provinces. On the other hand, German history t<:>aches
us that the fed<:>ral structure of our country has repeatedly,
and to this day, driven us to separatism. At th(' time of the
French Revolution, whil<:> France was pioneering the nation­
state, one thousand seven hundred eighty-nine German ter­
ritorial entities were plying their absolutist small trade. hen
Napoleon's project, the simplification of th<:> German map,
entailed the establishment of thirty-six separate states within
the German confederation after the Congress of Vienna. I t
took the Prussians and their extreme methods t o achieve
unity, with results that arc well known and l ikewise ex­
treme. We never mastered mod<:>ration. So bC'tween nation­
alism and separatism lies the only real possibility for us,
seldom tried: confederation, that is, an economically sound
and politically and culturally fl<:>xible linkage of the prov­
inces. It could be a pacria for us; but already, again, the
image begins to blur. . . .
Since this new German separatism in the form of two
states has been making two completely separate histories, a

6 9
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

generation has grown up seeing itsdf as citizens of the Fed­

eral Republic on the one hand, and of the GDR on the
other. Citizens who do not know much about each other.
Two different educational svstems have intentionallv edu-
, '

catcd this generation away from each other. During the fif-
ties th(• mutual alienation of the two German-speaking states
became so rigid and ideological that in the Federal Republic
people, to the question, "Is Walter Ulbricht a German?"
answered without hesitation, "No!" Non-Germans in both
East and West say, with good reason, "Why shouldn't there
be two states, if the Germans themselves arc so determined
to have it that wav?"
'

In this connection I 'd like to mention an cssav bv Arnulf

' '

Haring that appeared in A ugust 1 96 2 and remains pertinent

today: " Patriotic Question Marks . " The essay ends with a
provocation in the form of a paradox: "Any rapprochement
in Germany is predicated on the recognition of its clivi-
.
SJOn.I ,
Let me expand on that. A confederated Germany is
thinkable only in conjunction with the n·cognition of the
facts - that is, the lost war which we must pay for, its
consequences, and the federative nature of the two states.
It will take patience and political clearheadedness to bring
about such a confederation. It will take the recognition,
at long last, of the Oder-Neisse border, which recognition
should be declared an advance concession toward a peace
treatv
./
.
In both German states the prerequisites are still lacking
for thc- achievement of this goal. Neither the GDR's Prus­
sian-Stalinist concept of the state nor the Federal Republic's

7 0
 The CommunicatinB PluJiJI

half-confessed nostalgia for the old Confederation of the

3
Rhine is a suitable starting point for the confederation of
the two German states. A nightmare is already in the mak­
ing, and , like many German nightmares, it carries the threat
of becoming reality: it docs not seem so unlikely that in the
sewntics the strong Prussian-Stalinist wing in the GDR may
r<•ach an accord with the increasingly powerful nationalist­
conservative wing in the Federal Republic -at the expense
of l iberal federal ism, of social democracy. German national­
ists on the right, together with rightist Stalinists, could give
birth to a monstrosity of a nation. We can only hope that
this will he prevented hy the Germans' growing insight into
themselves.
We must learn to sec that there is no inherent positive
value in the idea of nationhood.
W c must recognize that the French nation rests on his­
torical givens that we lack. Switzerland, on the other hand,
is an example of a confederation that docs not preclude a
sense of nationhood.
In spite of all the ideological rigidity on both sides of
the border, and without the usual envious staring at other
models - whose centralized structure should be a warning
to u s - we should pursue instead a policy that makes
regression to the notion of a nation-state impossible. A pol­
icy that avoids the empty word reunification and att<.·mpts,
rather, a gradual rapprochement, whose goal would be a
confederation of two German provincial alliances.

l · A league of German principalities formed in 1 8o6 under the protection of Na­

pok-on; its members indudtxl Bavaria, Wilrttemberg, Saxony, Westphalia, and Raclen.

7 I
 T W O STATES-O N E N A T I O N ?

On May 6, 1 947 the first and last postwar conference of

all the Gennan prime ministers took place in Munich, chaired
by Lud\\ig Erhard, then prime minister of Bavaria. That same
day a conflict arose m·er the agenda, and the five provincial
heads from the Soviet zone walked out. If a policy of rap­
prochement is to he rt>instituted twenty years later, it will
be important to remember that failed conference of May
1 947 and the reasons for its failure. At the same time, the

Bundestag and Volkskammer ddegates should be mindful

that both the GDR constitution that was finally adopted and
our Emergency Decrees 4 are n<.·w evidence of separatist ten­
denci<.·s.
l ien· is my thesis: since our fundamental disposition in­
dicates that we are not suited to forming a nation-state,
since experience has taught us -and our cultural multiplic­
ity confim1s - that we should not fonn a nation-state, we
must recognize federalism as our best chance and last chance.
Neither as one nation nor as two in conflict can we guar­
antee our neighbors to the cast and th<.· west any security.
Poland and Cz<.· choslovakia would find a fed<.·ralized GDR
fa r less sinister as a neighbor than the present G DR, cen­
tralized successor to the Prussian state.
And the federal Republic would han• to recognize the

4· The Emergency Decrees, promulgated in May 1968 hy a two-thirds majority of

the Bundestag and unanimously appro\'ed hy the prm·incial legislatures after many
years of heated dehat(\ wen· \'iolently opposed hy student and worker groups, in
particular during the period of political and domestic unrest that followed the
student uprisings of 1 967. The decr("CS were seen as se\'t'rdy limiting certain ci\'il­
rights pro\'isions of the Basic Law, in the name of "law and order" and "national
scrurity."

7 2
 The Communicatin B Plurq/

other state officially and relinquish its claim to be the sole

representative of the German people. At the same time it
would have to urge the GDR to provide constitutional guar­
antees of the hegemony of its individual provinces. This would
he a precondition for federal cooperation among the ten
provinces of the h·deral Republic, including the province of
Herlin, and the five provinces of the GDR. In this confed­
eration of two states, provinces with Christian democratic,
social democratic, and communist governments will have to
work together. I n I taly and france people take for granted
the often cacophonous concert of opposing parties; the same
thing should become routinely accepted among the Ger­
mans. Political opponents who until now unconditionally
excluded each other will have to get used to holding talks.
The deliberative body of this confederation might meet al­
ternately in Leipzig and frankfurt/Main. I t will have no lack
of tasks before it. One will he to disarm two standing ar­
mies, a step at a time. Another will be to finance joint re­
search projects and economic dewlopment projects with the
monies that are thus freed up. Another will lw to eliminate
the political penal system in both confederated states. An­
other will he to institute joint negotiations directed toward
a peace treaty.
I t is imperative that a beginning be mad<.· ; time is not
on our side. We should be able to persuade our western
and eastern neighbors of the desirability of this confedera­
tion of two federal German states, especially as such a rap­
prochement does not mean reunification but instead will
promote detente between East and West and contribute to

7 3
 T W O STATE S-O N E N A T I O N ?

a future European solution, which will certainly be federal

in character.
Unity, hoth European and German, does not depend on
political unification. Germany has hem unified only under
duress, and always to its own detriment. Unification is an
idea that runs counter to human nature; it restricts freedom.
Whereas unity means a free decision made by many. The
Gt·rman nation should come to mean the coexistence, in
harmony and collaboration, of the Bavarians and Saxons, the
Swabians and Thuringians, the Westphalians and the Meck­
lenhurgers. Germany in the singular is a calculation that will
nen·r balance; as a sum, it is a communicating plural.
I haw had the temerity to speak of these things to you,
German reporters long familiar with the fictions as well as
with the real possibilities of national policy. It may he that
in the ensuing discussion a bag of facts will he emptied; then
each person can call out his favorite facts. We have come
to rely on the safety of facts to support our various posi­
tions - in the absence of a general agreement as to who
and what \\"t' are. Though I , too, hy now greet misunder­
standings and nen willful misi nterpretations as old acquain­
tances, I would still l i ke to ask you to reexamine your own
\"iews, to reexamine them , no matter how many facts you
as reporters ha\"e at your fingertips, in the larger context of
the German lack of self-awareness.
We don't know whether it was Goethe or Schiller who
said this, hut let me quote in closing - for Mannheim and
Jena, for Weimar and Frankfurt- the following couplet from
the "Xenien":

7 4
 The CommunicatinB PluraJ .

GERMAN NATIONAL CHARACTER

To form yourselves into a nation, Germans,

you hope in vain;
Form yourselves, rather, as well you can,
into freer beings. 5

�. In the Musenalmanach fur das Jahr 1 797. Goethe and Schiller published a series of
"Xenien," satirical distichs on contemporary literature and politics.

7 �
 WHA T IS THE G ER MAN ' S

F A THERLAND ?

"What Is the German's fatherland?" is the title of my speech,

and it also is the beginning of a poem that I 'd like to share
with you:

What is the German's fatherland?

Is it the Prussian's land, the Saxon's land?
Is it on the Rhine, where the vineyards bloom?
Is it on the Belt, where the seagulls swoop?
Oh, no! no! no!
His fatherland needs greater scope!

What is the German's fatherland?

Is it the Bavarian's land or Styrian's land?
Is it where the Marsian's livestock grazes?
Or where their iron the Mark fol k raises?
Oh, no! no! no!
H is fatherland needs greater scope!

Speech for the national election campaign of 1�6�, first published separately under
the same title (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1 �6�).

7 6
 What Is the German 's Fatherland?
.

What is the German's fatherland?

Is it the Pomeranian's land, the Westphalian's land?
Is it where the sands of the north dunes blow?
Is it where the Danube's waters How?
Oh, no! no! no!
His fatherland needs greater scope!

What is the German's fatherland?

Come, name for me this mighty land!
Is it th(• land of th(• Swiss or of the Tyrol?
Such a land and people would please me well.
But no! no! no!
His fatherland needs greater scope!

What is the German's fatherland?

Come, name for me this mighty land!
It must he Austria, no doubt,
So rich in honor and victorious rout?
Oh, no! no! no!
His fatherland needs greater scope!

What is the German's fatherland?

Come, name for me this mighty land!
As far as the German tongue resounds
And from God in heaven song abounds:
There it must he!
That, noble German, belongs to thee!

That is the German's fatherland,

Where an oath is the touch of hand to hand,

7 7
 T W O STATE S-O N E NAT I O N ?

Where loyalty from a man's eye does dart,

And love resid(•s in everv
,
heart -
There it must be!
That, noble German, belongs to thee!

That is the German's fatherland,

Where the glitter of foreign lands is scorned,
Where every frenchman is a bitter foe,
And en·n·
.
German a friend we know '

There it must he!

Let the whole of Germany belong to thee!

Let the whole of Germany bdong to thee!

Oh, God in Heaven, our guardian be,
And fill our hearts with German valor,
That we may love it in goodness and honor.
There it must be!
Let the whole of Germany belong to thee!

Despite appearances, this hymn was not cooked up m the

Ministry for All-German Affairs; the poet was called Ernst
Moritz Arndt, and a statue of him stands in Bonn. ' When I
was in school, I had to learn this unique thing by heart. I
certainly hope the memory banks of our newest voters are
not being clogged \\ith such multi-stanzaic nonsense. Though
if they read Karl May's Blue-red Methusalem, 2 in the last chap-

1. Ernst Moritz Arndt ( 1 7 69 - 1 86o) was a prolific writer whose German nationalism
was sparked hy opposition to Napoleon.
2. Karl May ( 1 842- 1 9 1 2) was a best-selling author of travel and ad,·enture stories
for young people. Most are set among the American Indians or desert Arabs.

7 8
 What Is the German 's Fatherland?
.

ter they will find a merry gathering of men in their cups

who tell us, in several-part harmony, what the German's
fatherland is. Hut with the help of this song and the scene
from Karl May we can imagine what a satisfying tidbit this
poem must have been at merry songfcsts, graduation parties,
and other occasions, from Wilhelm's times to Adolf's, and
how it fed nationalist hubris. Hut we do Ernst Moritz Arndt
an i nj ustice if we blame him for the subsequent perversion
of his song, which was written out of the enthusiasm left
over from the Wars of Liberation. And I am grateful to this
literary colleague, who lent his name to so many German
secondary schools, for posing the question so intriguingly.
What is the' German's fatherland? . . .
I am afraid I will disappoint anyone who thinks that
after such a running start I mean to come up immediately
with proposals for reunification, or that I know how to ful­
fill Konrad Adenauer's campaign promise to the refugees
from the East: "You 'II all get back to your old homes!"
Since I 9 H. when the Treaty on Germany was signed,
and during our Wall-building period, the government of the
Federal Republic has proved successful in perpetuati ng Ger­
many's division, to the short-term advantage of the fRG
and the lasting detriment of our fellow countrymen in the
G DR. As far as those provinces arc concerned to which
Ernst Moritz Arndt alludes indirectly - Si lesia, Eastern
Pomerania, East Prussia - ! , who come from those parts,
can only gnash my teeth and beat my breast, and speak the
truth: We let those provinces slip through our fingers; we
gambled them away; we lost them in taking on the world.
Ernst Moritz Arndt's poem " What is the German's Father-

7 9
 T W O S T A T E S - O N !: N A T I O !': ?

land ?'' has become shorter. Though not so short that we

have to be worried. Perhaps the next government of the
federal Republic will include realistic-minded politicians who
will know how to conduct negotiations based on a peace
treaty, because the Allies disagreed at Potsdam and Yalta on
the fate of Stettin and the Lausitz Point.
On Sundavs Seebohm bellows his claims to the Sudeten­
land in the cars of a horrified world. 3 Mv fellow countrvmcn
. .

from Danzig even maintain a shadow senate in Lubeck that

for years now has been promising old folks from Danzig and
the Werder region that one day the free city of Danzig will
exist once more. Lies and c�·nicism directed at old people
who have never managed to feel at home in the West, who
han· kept that broad, slow speech that is like spreading
butter on bread. for vcars such rhetorical bubbles have taken
-

the place of a constructive foreign policy. Let me say it

again: If we really care about Stettin and the Lausitz region,
we should find the courage to delete Konigsberg and Bres­
lau, Kolberg and Schneidemiihl as geographical entries in
our song "What Is the German's fatherland?" But that doesn't
mean we should dissolve the refugee associations and forget
those provinces that once were German. By all means, let
us put a stop to the expensive refugee rallies where political
functionaries grow fatter. In their place I wou ld propose
serious research on dying dialects and - 1 am not afraid of
supercilious smiles- the establishment of well-planned, \'ita!

J· l lans-Christof Seebohm was an early and longtime l·abinet member, minister of

transportation under both Adenauer and Erhard between 1 949 and 1966. Before
that he was al·tin� in politks in Lower Saxony. Beginning in 1 9�9 he was chief
spokesman for the Sudeten-German Pro,·incial League.

8 0
 What Is the German 's Father}and?

cities with names like New Konigsberg, New Allenstein, New

Breslau, New Garlitz, New Kolberg, and New Danzig.
Let us be founders of cities! We have room in the Eifel
region, in the Hunsrtick area, in the Ems territory, in the
Bavarian Forest. We have no lack of underutilized areas that
could be developed in this realistic way. I would be glad to
do my part toward laying the cornerstone for the city of
New Danzig, and it need not be on the Baltic. Do I hear
someone saying utopia? Nothing of the sort. Here the ques­
tion "What is the German's fatherland?" \\'ould be ansvvered
concretely. It will take good sense and a dose of pioneering
spiri t - the kind the German emigrants to America dis­
played when they founded Hamburg, frankfurt, and Berlin
in the Midwest - to recowr not lost provinces but the es­
sence of what was once the German's fatherland.
A fter the war the glassblowers and glass jewelry manu­
factu rers of the city of Gablonz in the Sudetenland provided
an example of this pioneering spirit when they founded the
city of New Gablonz in southern Germany. Our land is rich
enough to risk founding such new cities. I see modem, boldly
planned cities going up, and since Germany now has a shortage
of universities and other institutions of higher learning, they
can become centers of research and scholarship. Architects
could try new approaches that would get us out of our
urban-planning stalemate. I see traditional industries like those
in Breslau, Danzig, and Konigsberg becoming established.
And perhaps even the dying dialects - Gerhart Haupt­
mann's Silesian and my beloved Danzig Low German -will
experience a renaissance, grotesquely mixed with Frisian and
Bavarian accents.

8 I
 T W O S T A T E S- O N E N A T I O N ?

A thousand sociologists shake their heads. Shouts of "Too

late! " - "Should have been done ten vears ago ! " - " He's
' "

4
nuts! " The word Verzichtpolitiker rears its ugly head. I see
graying Riders to the East drawing those SA daggers that
had heen carefully oiled and put away: they want to can·e
me into the usual rootless cosmopolitan, the stereotypical
communist. And perhaps the social democrats I cherish so
dearlv will sav "Thanks, hut no thanks" to such ammuni-
• .

tion. Hut for me the important thing is to answer that old

question of Ernst Moritz Arndt's: "What is the German's
fatherland?" I sav: Whaten·r we make of it. Whatever val­
ues we place first: the utterances of tank division com­
mander Guderian, or the courageous speech by the social
5
democratic Reichstag deputy Otto Wds. After so many lost
wars, after blitzkrieg ,·ictories and battles of encirclement,
after all the horrors we han- been capable of, W{' should
finally let reason, moderation, and our fatherland's real tal ­
ent triumph - the talent for scholarship, which once flour­
ished and then was increasingly repressed. The choice is
ours.
In New York, on May 8 , I saw parts of the East Hedin
victorv parade on American tel{·\·ision. The Tclstar Earlv Hird
. '

made this possible. I saw the People's A rmy marching in

snappy formation . Shades of Prussia. In U lbricht's realm a
corrupt tradition was being shamelessly preserved. Looking

4· One who believes in the "politics of renunciation."

�- Heinz Guderian was the commander of H itler's armored divisions and an im­
portant military strategist. Otto Wds in March 1 9 B delivered a speech explaining
why all ninety-four sodal democratk delegates intended to vote against a consti­
tutional change that would allow Hitler's government to rule for four years \\ithout
the assent of the Rekhstag.

8 2
 What Is the German 's Fatherl,a nd?

fearsome but also comical, like any ovcrinUated power, the

army marched past. A ltogether a picture that could easily
make one forget that this would-be state calls itself the "Peace
Camp. " 0 great bearded Marx! What have they done to
you tht·re? I n what prison would you be locked up today?
T\venty years after the unconditional surrender of a
country that called itself Greater Germany, there I was sit­
ting in a New York hotel room, staring at the screen and
seeing this same unnatural Hailing of the legs that had cre­
ated the rhythm of my youth. That, too, is the German's
fatherland. Hut is it only that? Anyone who l ives in Berlin
knows that the majority of our countrymen in the GDR
give this Prussian-Stalinist variation on the goose step a wide
berth. Last fal l I spent a few days in Weimar. Let's not talk
about the ridiculous congress held there to keep alive the
old popular Marxism. During the intermissions I could take
a break from defending Kafka, J oyce, or our "degenerate
artists," as Mr. Erhard recently chose to call them, against
hidebound functionaries and all-German Philistines. I seized
these occasions to look around me.
He who has cars, let him hear. The hour is late. Our
countrymen over there, to whom the soapbox orators refer
as "our brothers and sisters," are prepared to write us off.
They know the score. They listen to western radio stations.
The language we usc, from "all-German concerns" to the
solemn cliches trotted out for the seventeenth of J une, in­
cluding the refrain, " Let the whole of Germany belong to
thee," has worn out their ears. Without beating around the
bush and with a slightly mocking tone they offer a blunt
summary of fourteen years of West German reunification

8 3
 T W O STA T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

policy. People said to me, "Your Adenauer, he knew per­

fectly well what he was doing. Reunification wasn't in the
cards. That would have meant an all-German social demo­
cratic government. Resides, we're not Catholic."
You can take this statement and refine it and add all
sorts of qualifiers, ami take the ifs and the buts into account,
and put the blam<.' on the Allies or on the wicked Russians,
just as you please, but anyone who is sick and tired of self­
deception, anyone who is willing to take a national inven­
tory, using his head and an accurate memory, and who asks
himself the question "What is the German's fatherland?"
will soon recognize that the same shouters and crusaders
who want to bring the Sudetenland and Gleiwitz home into
the Reich have actually been engaged in secretly -and not
unskillfully-selling out our fatherland, renouncing all claims
to Dresden and Magdeburg, Weimar and Rostock.
Let us look back: on J une 1 6 and 1 7 , 1 9 B a German
workers' uprising occurred in East Berlin and the Soviet
occupation zone. In its most powerful moments- when it
bcgan on Stalinallee and when it failed - it clearly bore so­
cial democratic traits, and caused Walter U lbricht's dicta­
torship to totter, if only for a few hours. The GDR
government called the workers' uprising a fascist putsch at­
tempt, and thc West Germans called it a popular uprising,
though it can easily be shown that the bourgeoisie and the
peasants, the civil servants and the intellectuals, with a few
laudable exceptions, stayed home. I t was the German work­
ers who took the initiative, the workers from Henningsdorf,
Buna, Leuna, Halle, and Merseburg who took the risk, while
we trivialized their desperate, moving, and finally tragic ef-
 What Is the German 's Father/�.nd?

fort into a national holiday. That, too, is the German's fa­

therland: a moment of truth that lasted two days, and a lie
that has grown fatter and fatter over the course of t·wdve
years. Where is the youth, and where is my burned gener­
ation, who should know better, where are they, that they
swallowed this lie without a peep? Don't say, "That's news
to us, we knew nothing about it. " You readers of SpieHel
and Pardon, you subscribers to konkrel and Ciris, you frater­
nity students and nonfraternity students, don't shrug your
shoulders and say, "What difference docs it make whether
it was a workers' uprising or a popular uprising, it didn't
do any good anyway." Our countrymen, who stand ready
to accuse you, will not let you off that easily, because it was
impossible not to have heard - unless a person stuffed his
ears with lottery tickets, vacation plans, and "no experi­
ments." 6
On J uly 1 , ' 9 5"3 . when the seventeenth of J une was des­
ignated the " Day of German Unity," a relatively unknown
B undestag delegate from Berlin, Willy Brandt, gave a tough
speech. Brandt was the first to warn against falsifying the
workers' uprising. Allow me to quote a rather long passage
from this great speech, which has lost none of its validity.
Brandt said:

Anyone who still believes that he can call into ques­

tion the democratic and national integrity of the
German workers' movement and of German social

6. "No experiments" was the- slogan of the CDU during the campaigns of Erhard
and Kurt Georg Kiesinger; it implied that one should not rock the economic and
political boat, as the SPD proposed to do.

8 s
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

democracy thereby becomes responsible for bringing

about yet another division in our people.
The illusions in foreign policy in the past few
years, the lack of n·alism can be laid at the door of
those who did not include negotiations between East
and West in their calculations. I should add that we
see a great danger in the fact that the major powers
are still not negotiating for a solution to the German
Question. German politics must do nothing to in­
crease this danger.
There is no solution other than a peacefu l solu­
tion to the German Question. There is no possibility
for a solution other than through negotiation. We call
for more active im·olvement, more decisiveness in
the struggle for Gt>rman unity in peace and freedom.

Thus spoke the unknown delegate in 1 9 0 , and thus speaks

the mavor
.I
of Berlin, Willv Brandt, to this dav.
- .I
Back then
his words fell on deaf ears. Will he be heard todav? Back-

then party politics and fear of the communists put blinders

on many. Are we prepared today, from the position of
strength our d<.·mocratic constitution gives us, and now that
we arc self-confident and mature at last, to meet our polit­
ical opponent in prolonged, step-by-step negotiations? Or
must more decades pass during which the Bundeswehr and
the People's A rmy confront each other, as if such confron­
tation were the last word in wisdom? The Bundestag elec­
tions on September 19 will ans\'l.'er the question of what the
German's fatherland is today and will be tomorrow. Our
fellow countrymen, from whom Ulbricht still withholds free

8 6
 What Is the German 's FatherltJhd?

elections, will be- watching us as we- vote-. I hope that anyone

who still hesitate-s to exercise- his right to vote- will consider
how many of the worke-rs who rose- up in J une- 1 9 B against
injustice and dictatorship would love to vote in his place-.
Don't pass it up lightly, our hard-earned right to vote!
I outlined this speech in J une, in America. There-, on
various university campuse-s, at the- usual receptions, during
discussions in hotel lobbies, where-ver I met German emi­
grants, I found myself thinking about that grotesque school
poem we owe to Ernst Moritz Arndt. They, too, the injured
and embittered, the quiet one-s who lost their powe-r of speech
in ' 3 3 , the shy ones who haw forgotten their native tongue
over the years, the old profe-ssors asking about Heidelberg
and Gottingen, the- businessmen who still re-member Leipzig
and hankfurt with fondness, all of them whom we miss
today, inhabit a province without borders, a province- that
is scattere-d all ove-r the world, a province that painfully, and
often against their will, constitutes the German's fatherland.
In the last few years the German e-migrants have often
enough had filth thrown at them - if only as a way of
smearing Willy Brandt. This filth is provided free of charge
by the te-am of Kapfinger and Strauss7 to all those- inter­
e-sted, includ ing the venerable federal chancellor. If the spir­
itual province of the German emigrants is not to be lost to
our fatherland, too, the citizens of the federal Republic and

1· l lans Kapfingt•r was an editor and puhlish<'r in Passau, Bavaria. l lis Baycrnkuner
was notorious for propagating l'Xtrcml' right-wing vil'WS. hanz Josef Strauss, his
crony, was for many years the leading political figure in Bavaria, wfound<'r of the
CSU and its g<'neral SC'l"retary and then chairman. A staunch opponent of Brantlt's
Osrpoliuk.

8 7
 T W O STATE S-ON E N AT I O N ?

especially the youth will have to stop the verbal barrage that
Joseph Goebbds set in motion. To be talking still about
"degenerate art," Mr. Erhard, is a new slap in the face to
those painters, writers, and composers who were persecuted
and proscribed, who died or survh·ed, who stayed here or
emigrated. Paul Klee and Max B<.>ckmann, Alban Berg and
Kurt Weill, Alfred Dahlin and Else Lasker-Schiiler were driven
out of this country, Mr. Erhard, by the very formula you
parrot, which makes you doubly irrcponsible. hen if you
arc not endowed with insight and artistic scnsihility, at least
a sense of shame should restrain you from using the lan­
guage of the National Socialists. With its "execution" and
"eradication," with such linguistic monstrosities as "fol kish"
and "degenerate," that language l<.>ft us a depressing legacy
that should not - should never again - be the German's fa­
therland.
Let me make one last attempt to answer Ernst Moritz
Arndt's question. In New York, getting a sense for that
province of German emigrants I 'd like to sec included in the
German's fatherland, I wrote this "Transatlantic Elegy":

In a mood to smile, with success, my little dog

always at my heel.
On the road in the land of Walt Whitman, with
light luggage.
Swimming unfettered between conferences, carried
bv
J
the current of talk.
During breaks, as long as clinking icc cubes speak
their mind to glasses,
it touches you and names its name.

s s·
 What Is the German 's Fatherlqnd?

In New Haven and Cincinnati, questioned

by emigrants,
who back then, when our intellect emigrated,
could take along nothing but language,
and still spread the multitude of tongues with
Swabian, Saxon, Hessian, good-naturcdly stroking
each word,
in Washington and New York they asked me,
warming their whiskey with their hands:
How docs it look over there?
Do people still say - ?
And your young people?
Do they know? Do they want to? One hears
so little.
Shyness stretched out these questions,
and they remembered with caution,
as if to spare someone's feelings:
Should one go back?
Is there still room for the likes of us?
And won't my German - I know it's
old-fashioned-
Tip people off that I . . . for so long .
And I replied, warming my whiskey:
I t's gotten better.
We have a good constitution.
Now, finally, my generation is stirring.
Soon, in September, there'll be elections.
And when I suffered from lack of words,
they helped me
with their emigrated language, still beautiful.

8 9
 T W O STATE S-ON E N AT I O N ?

Hear the legend from over there:

There was a thousand-fold librarian,
who preserved the literary legacies
of those whose books had gone up in flames,
back then.
He smiled conservatively and wished me luck for
September.
 O P EN LE T TER TO

ANNA SEG HERS

Herlin, August 1 4, 1 96 1

To the President
of the German Writers' Union
in the G DR

Dear Frau Anna Seghers:

Yesterday I was startled awake by one of those sudden

operations so familiar to us Germans, with tank noises in
the background, radio commentary, and the usual Beetho­
ven symphony. When I did not want to believe what the
radio was serving up for breakfast, I went to the Friedrich­
strasse station, went to the Brandenburg Gate, and found
myself face to face with naked power, which nevertheless

First publish<·d under the title "And What Can the Writ<·rs Do?" in Die 7m ( l lam­
burg), August 1 8 , 1 96 1 . s.,.ghers was a no\"elist who spt·nt the H itler years in !'ranee
and Mexico, then n·turned to l;ast Berlin in 1 947 and served until 1 97 8 as president
of th.- Writers' Union.

9 I
 T W O S T A T ES - O N E N A T I O N ?

stank of pigskin. The minute I find myself in danger, I be­

come overanxious, l ike all once-burned children, and have
the tendency to cry for help. I groped around in my head
and heart for names, names promising help; and your name,
revered Frau Anna Seghers, became the straw I do not want
to let go of.
I t was you who after that never-to-be-forgotten war
taught my generation, or anyone who had cars to hear, to
distinguish justice from injustice. Your book The Screnth Cross
formed me, sharpened my eye, so that I can still recognize
a Glohke or a Schroder in any disguise, en'n when they call
themselves humanists, Christians, or activists. The anxiety
felt by your protagonist, Georg Heisler, communicated itself
to me once and for all; except that the commandant of the
concentration camp is no longer called Fahrenberg but W al­
ter U lbricht, and he presides over your state. I am not Klaus
Mann, and your spirit is diametrically opposed to the spirit
of the fascist Gottfried Benn, and yet, with the presumptu­
ousness of my generation, I refer you to the letter Klaus
'
Mann wrote to Gottfried Benn on May 9 , 1 9 3 3 · For you
and for myself let me transform those two dead men's ninth
of May into our living August 14. 1 96 1 . Up to now you have
been the epitome of resistance to violence; it is impossible
that you should fal l prey to the irrationalism of a Gottfried
Benn and fail to recognize the violent nature of a dictator­
ship that has scantily yet cleverly wrapped itself in your

1. Klaus Mann, eldest son of the writer Thoman Mann and a prolific writer himself,
sharply rebuked the Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn for supporting Hitler and
National Socialism.

9 2
 Open Leccer to Anna Seghers , ·

dream of socialism and communism, a dream I do not dream

hut which I respect, as I do any dream. . . .
Please do not tell me to wait for the fu ture, which, as
you know, being a writer, is resurrected hourly in the past.
Let us stick to today, August 1 4, 1 96 1 . Today nightmares in
the form of tanks are parked at Leipzigcr Strasse, disturbing
all sleep and threatening citizens while claiming to protect
them. Today it is dangerous to live in your state, and it is
impossible to leave your state. . . .
I want to make this day our day. I want you, as a woman
at once weak and strong, to arm your voice and speak out
against the tanks, against this barbed wire that seems to
he perpetually manufactured in Germany, the same barbed
wire that once provided the concentration camps with
security . . . .
This letter, revered frau Anna Seghers, must be an "open
letter." I am sending you the original by way of the Writers'
Union in East Berlin. I am sending a copy to the daily Neues
asking them to publish it, and a second copy to
Deucschland,
2
the weekly Die Zeit in Hamburg.

Seeking help, I send you best regards from

Gunter Grass

2. The Neues Deutschland is the official party organ in East Berlin. n,. 7eir is a highly
respected intellectual weekly newspaper, left of center in its editorial policies.

9 3
 WRI TING A F TER

A U SCHWI TZ

A writer, asked to give an account of himself, which means

of his work, would have to evaporate into that ironic dis­
tance in which everything shrinks if he wished to avoid dis­
cussing the time period that has marked him, shaped him,
kept him immobilized in erroneous contradictions (despite
various changes of seen�), and made him a witness. As I
title this lecture "Writing after Auschwitz" and now look
for a place to begin, I know I am hound to disappoint. My
topic is too demanding. LC't the attempt he made, however.
Since I was invitC'd by a university and am spt·aking spe­
cifically to students, thus finding myself face to face with
the innocent curiosity of a generation that grew up under
conditions entirely different from my own, let me first go
hack a few decades and sketch the circumstances in which
I found myself in May ' 94S"·
When I was seventeen years of age, living with a hundred

Spt-ct·h given February 1 J at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe llniwrsity in Frankfurt

am Main.

9 4
 Writina qfrer Auschwitz , ·

thousand others in a n American prison camp out under the

open sky, in a foxhole, I was famished, and because of this
I focused, with the cunning born of hunger, exclusively on
survival - otherwise I had not a dear notion in my head.
Rendered stupid by dogma and accordingly fixated on lofty
goals: this was the state in which the Third Reich rdl·ased
me and many of my generation from our oaths of loyalty.
"The flag is superior to death" was one of its l ife-dl·nying
certainties.
All this stupidity resulted not only from a schooling
knocked full of holes hy the \Var- when I reached fifteen,
my time as Lu ftwaffe helper lwgan, which I mistakenly wel­
comed as liberation from school - it was, rather, an on·r­
arching stupid ity, one that transcendl·d differences of class
and religion, om· that was nourished hy German compla­
cency. I ts ideological slogans usually began with "We Ger­
mans an· . . . ," "To lw German means . . . ," and , finally,
"A German would never . . . "
This last-quotl·d rule lasted even beyond the capitulation
of the Gn·ater German Reich and took on the stubborn
force of incorrigibility. for when I, with many of my gen­
eration - leaving aside our fathers and mothers for now ­
was confronted with the resul ts of the crimes for which
Germans were responsible, crimes that would be summed
up in the image of A uschwitz, I said : I mpossible. I said to
myself and to others, and others said to themselves and to
me: "Germans would never do a thing l ike that."
This self-confirming Never was even pleased to view it­
self as steadfast. I n response to the overwhelming n umber
of photographs showing piles of shoes here, piles of hair
 T W O S T A T E S- O N E N A T I O N ?

there, and again and again bodies piled on top of each other,
captioned with numerals I could not grasp and foreign­
sounding place names -Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz­
there was one ready answer, spoken or unspoken, but al­
ways firm, whenever American educational zeal forced us
seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds to look at the documen­
tary photos: Germans never could have done, never did do
a thing like that.
hen when the Never collapsed ( if not earlier, then with
the Nuremberg Trials), the former Reich Youth Leader Bal­
dur von Schirach declared that we, the Hitler Youth, were
free of responsibility. I t took several more years before I
began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot
be repressed or come to terms with. The insistent concrete­
ness of those photographs- the shoes, the glassl'S, the hair,
the corpses - resisted abstraction. Even if surrounded with
explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
Since then, much timt· has passed. Certain historians have
been busy digging up facts and figures to make this "unfor­
tunate phase in German history," as they call it, a valid
academic subject. Yet no matter what has been admitted to,
lamented, or otherwise said out of a sense of gu ilt -as in
this speech - the monstrous phenomenon for which the name
Auschwitz stands remains beyond facts and figures, beyond
the cushioning academic study, a thing inaccessible to any
confession of guilt. Therefore it remains impossible to grasp,
forming such a divide in human history that one is tempted
to date events before and after Auschwitz.
And in retrospect a persistent question confronts the
writer: How was it possible to write-after Auschwitz? Was

9 6
 Writing C!fter Auschwitz , '

this question posed merely to fulfill a ritual of contrition?

Was the agonized self-searching of the fifties and early six­
tics no more than a literary exercise? And docs the question
even matter nowadays, when the very idea of literature is
heing challenged hy the new media?
Back to the stupid, unwavering adolescent. Come to think
of it, he wasn't so stupid and unwavering. Because despite
the shortness of his schooling he had had a few teachers
who taught him, more in secret than openly, aesthetic val­
ues, artistic sensibility. The woman sculptor, for example,
assigned to teaching as her compulsory wartime service, who
notin·d the schoolboy constantly drawing and slipped h im
exhibition catalogs from the twenties. At considerable risk,
she shocked and infected him with the work of Kirchner,
Lchmhruck, Nolde, Beckmann. I clung to that. Or it clung
to me. In the face of such artistic provocations the certainty
of this H itler Youth hegan to waver, or, rather, it did not
waver hut softened in one spot, and let in other kinds of
egocentric certainties - the unthinking, unfocused , yet in­
tense, hold desire to he an artist.
from the age of twelve, I could not he dissuaded from
this- not hy the paternal pointing to a more solid profes­
sion, not hy the difficult times later on: ruins everywhere,
and noth ing to cat. My youthful ohscssion kept its vitality,
survived unharmed - again, unwaveringly - the end of the
war, then the first postwar years, and even the currency
reform, which wrought changes all around.
And thus the choice of career was made. A fter an ap­
prenticeship as a stonemason and sculptor, I went to study
sculpture, first at the Academy of Art in Di.isseldorf, then at

9 7
 T W O S T A T E S- O N E N AT I O N ?

the School of Hne Arts in Berlin. Yet these autobiographical

data do not say much, except perhaps that my desire to
beconw an artist showed - vou might say
J J
an admirable, but
"

I would say, in retrospect, a questionable singleness of pur-

pose: admirable, perhaps, because the decision was made
quite simply, despite my parents' reservations and without
regard for material security, but still qm·stionable and in the
end not admirable at all, because my artistic development,
which soon led by way of poet!")· to writing, aga in pro­
ceeded unwaveringly, not wavering ('\'('n in the face of
Auschwitz.
No, my path was not chosen in ignorance, for in the
meantime all the horrors had been brought to light. Never­
theless my path led me blindly, with a purposeful blindness,
past Auschwitz. After all, there were plenty of other sign­
posts. Not the sort that blocked one and caused one's step
to hesitate. The names of previously unknown authors lured
me, seized possession of nw: ( )()blin, Dos Passos, Trakl,
Apollinaire. The art exhibitions of those years were not self­
stylized displays by bored professionals ; instead, they opened
up vistas of new worlds - Henry Moore or Chagall in DUs­
seldorf, Picasso in Hamburg. And travel became possible :
hitchhiking to I taly, to sec not only the Etruscans but also
spare, earth toned pictures by Morandi.
-

As the ru in s increasingly vanished from view, and though

people all around resumed weaving according to the old
pattern, it was a t ime of radical change -and of the illusion
that one could build something new on old foundations.
I devoured book after book. Addicted to images, I de­
voured pictures, drawings, without any plan, obsessed with

9 8
 Writin9 cifter Auschwitz •
.

art and its methods. As a once-burned child, I found it

sufficient to oppose - more out of instinct than on the basis
of arguments - the first federal chancellor, Konrad Ade­
nauer, the nouveau-riche nonsense of the developing "eco­
nomic miracle," the hypocritical Christian restoration, and
rearmament, of course, and of course Adenauer's secretary
of state Globke, his expert in East German intelligence,
Gehlen, and other obscene deputies of the master politician
from the Rhineland.
I recall Easter marches organized to protest the atom
bomb. Always there, always in opposition. The obstinate
horror of the sen·nteen-year-old who had refused to believe
the atrocity stories had given way to opposition on general
principle. In the meantime the real dimensions of the geno­
cide were now demonstrated in volumes of documentation,
and the anti-Semitism of one's vouth was exchanged for
' �

philo-Semitism, and one defined oneself unquestioningly and

without risk as antifascist. Hut I, and manv
-
of mv
J
genera-
tion, did not take t he time to think through fundamental
questions, questions dictated with Old-Testament sternness,
questions like: Can one do art after Auschwitz? Is it permis­
sible to write poems after Auschwitz?
There was the dictum bv Theodor Adorno: "To write a
'

poem after Auschwitz is barbarous, and also undermines our

u nderstanding of why it has become impossible to write
poems nowadays. " Since 1 9 5" 1 a book by Adorno had been
available-Minima Moralia: R�ficcrionsfrom a Damaaed Life, where
for the first time, to my knowledge, Auschwitz was seen as
a great divide, an irreparable tear in the history of civiliza­
tion. Yet this new categorical imperative was promptly mis-

9 9
 -

TW O STATES - O N E N A T I O N ?

understood to be a prohibition. A prohibition like other stem

prohibitions standing in the way of the t hirst for change and
the belief, apparently undamaged, in the future. An uncom­
fortable imperatiw, off-putting in its abstractness, and easy
to circumn·nt.
Hefore people took th(• time to examine Adorno's re­
marks within the context of the reflections that preceded
and followed them, and thus to realize that they were not
a prohibition hut a standard to be met, n·sistann· to them
had alreadv consolidated. The abbreviated Adorno state­
ment, that no poem should be written after Auschwitz, was
refuted in a similarly ahbre,·iated and unthinking form, as if
enemies were exchanging blows. Adorno's prohibition was
declared barbarous; i t asked too much of human beings; it
was inhumane; after all, life, no matter how damaged, had
to go on.
My reaction, too, based on ignorance - on hearsay
only- was to oppose it. feeling myself in full poSS('SSion of
my powers, of my unique talents, I wanted to give them
free rein, to prove them. Adorno's prohibition struck me as
unnatural, as if someone had had the godthefatherly audac­
ity to forbid birds to sing.
Was it defiance again or my old unwavering certainty
that led me to dismiss Adorno so quickly? Didn't I know
from personal experience \\'hat had horrified me and now
haunted me? Why not put aside, if only for a short while,
my sculpting, and impose a Lenten fast on my lyrical imag­
ination, that greedy lodger within me?
Today I suspect that Adorno affected me more strongly
than I could admit at the time. Something had been stirred

1 0 0
 Writing cifier Auschwitz , ·

up in me, and despite my resistance a control had been

placed over me. The freedom of creativity, thought to be
unlimited, a thing not won but handed to us, had come
under surveillance.
Leafing through my writings, to see what that art stu­
dent, apparently obsessed only with art, was up to, I find a
poem written during those years; it was published in final
form in 1 960, in the poetry volume Gleisdreieck, but should
really have appeared in my first book, Die Vorziige der Wind­
hiihner. It is called "Askesis," and is a programmatic poem,
expressing the feeling of grayness that to me is still basic:

The cat speaks.

A nd what does the cat say?
Thou shalt draw with sharpened pencil
brides of shade and shade of snow,
thou shalt love the color gray
and be beneath a cloudy sky.

The cat speaks.

A nd what does the cat say?
Thou shalt be clad in the evening paper,
clad in sackcloth l ike potatoes,
and thou shalt turn this suit year out year in,
and in a new suit never be.

The cat speaks.

And what docs the cat say?
Thou shouldst scratch the navy out;
cherries, poppy, bloody nose

I 0 I
 T W O STA T E S-O N E N A T I O N ?

thou shalt scratch out, that Hag

...
as well,
and daub geraniums with ash.

Thou, the cat goes on to say,

shalt live on kidneys, spleen and li\·er,
lung
...
that's out of breath and sour,
on urine of unsoaked kidnevs
old splet.·n and tough Ji,·er
out of a gray pot: live on that.

And on the wall, where earlier without pause

the ruminant green picture chewed its green,
thou shalt write with thy sharp pencil
this: Askesis; write: A skt·sis.
That's what the cat savs: write Askesis. 1
.I

I haw quoted these fin· stanzas to you not to feed the

Gt·rman literature professors' delight in interpretation, but
because the poem, I hdit·,·e, gives an indirect answer to
Adorno's imperatiw by setting l imits to its own undertak­
ing, in the form of a circumscribing reflex. lkcause en·n
though I, along with many others, had misunderstood Ador­
no's impt·rative as a prohibition, its signpost, marking the
di,·ide, was still clcarlv visible ..I

All of us, the young poets of the fifties - let me name

Peter Riihmkorf, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, also lngcborg
Bachmann- wcrc aware, some clearlv,
.I
some vagudv, that .I

we belonged to the Auschwitz generation - not as crimi-

1. Se/ecred P<H!m>. trans. Michad Hamburg(•r and Christoph('r Middl('ton ( Harcourt

Bracl" Jo\"ano\"ich, 1 977 ), p. 4 l·

I 0 2
 Writing cifrer Auschwitz •
'

nals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals. That in

our biography, therefore, among the usual dates was written
2
the date of the Wannsee Conference. But we also knew
this much: that Adorno's imperative could be refuted, if at
all, only by writing.
But how? from whom should we learn? From Brecht?
Benn? The early Expressionists? What tradition should we
adopt, what criteria? The minute I picture myself as a young
poetic talent next to the young Enzcnsberger and Riihmkorf,
I realize that our headstart - and talent is nothing but a
headstart - was playful, artistic, art-infatuated to the point
of artificiality, and would probably have played itself out in
a manner not worth mentioning if we had not had leaden
shackles placed on us at the right moment. One of those
shackles, which we wore even as we refused to wear it, was
Theodor Adorno's imperative. I took my course from his
signpost. And that course called for renouncing color; it
called for gray in all gray's endless shadings.
It meant abandoning absolutes, the black and white of
ideology, it meant showing belief the door and placing all
one's bets on doubt, which turned t•verything, even the
rainbow, to gray. But this imperative yielded wealth of an­
other sort: the heartrending beauty of all the shades of gray
was to be cclebratcd in damaged language. That meant haul­
ing down one's Hag and daubing the geraniums with ash .
That meant drawing with sharpened pcncil and scrawling
on that wall, where "earlicr without pause the ruminant

2. At the Wannset• Conference, held January 20, 1 942, tht• National Socialists met
to plan tht· "final solution" of tht· Jt·wish Qut>stion.

I 0 J
 T W O STA T E S - O N E N AT I O N !

green pictun· chewed its green," Askesis as my watch­

word.
So away with the blues of introspection, the piling up
of metaphors, the infection with Rilkesque vagueness, and
polished literary chamber music. Askt·sis meant distrust of
sing-song sounds, of th(• lyrical timelessness of the nature
worshipers who in the fifties cultivated their garden patches
and supplied the schoolbooks with value-free constructs of
meaning, rhymed or unrhymed. Askesis also meant selecting
a point of ,·it.·w. hom this insight dates my commitment (it
was during the argument between Sartre and Camus) to
Sis�·phus, the happy boulder-pusher.
At the beginning of 1 9B I changed locales and teachers.
Nothing to it: from Di.issddorf, the capital of the economic
miracle just then breaking out, to Berlin, by inter-zone train.
A heap of poems, my chisels, a dean shirt, a few books and
n·cords - that was my luggage.
Berlin, smashed but already occupied by ideologies again,
seemed to revive from crisis to crisis; it sprawled flat be­
tween mountains of ruins. Emptied squares, in which the
wind swirled twisters of debris. Brick dust between one's
teeth. Arguments about everything. Representational versus
nonrepresentational art: Hofer on one side, Grohmann on
the other. Over here and over there: here Benn, there Brecht.
Cold war by loudspeaker. And yet the Bcrlin of those years,
for all the shouting, was a place as silcnt as the dead. Time
had refused to be speeded up. The "damaged life" was still
a reality not obscured by discount offcrs. In Berlin there
was no patience for flirting with thc unspeakable. My last

1 0 4
 Writin9 �er Auschwitz , .

imitative finger exercises were corrected by a stern rubber

eraser. Here, things wanted to be called by name.
In quick succession, away from the modeling stand and
drawing board, I turned out my first independent poems,
verses that performed their acrobatics freestyle and without
a net, so to speak. I also wrote dialogues, brief one-act plays.
One of them later became the last act of a four-act play
titled Miscer, Miscer. This is how it begins:

The oucskircs <if che cicy. An abandoned buildin9 sire. Piles

C?f flTOI'el, scl:!ffoldinn. Bollin is scandin9 on a morcar pail.
He looks expeccanclj• in che direction C!f che cicy. Sprac and
Slick approach slowly.

SPRAT: Mister?

SUCK: Mister, aintcha got a thing?

SPRAT: Yeah, mister, give it here.

SLICK: Aintcha? J ust one?

SPRAT: Hey, mister.

SUCK: You deaf?

BOLLI N : No!
SLICK: Only one, mister.
BOLLIN: I ain't got nothing.
SPRAT: Take a look. Maybe you got sumpin.

BOLLIN: Such as what?

SPRAT: J ust a thing.

BOLLIN: What kind of a thing?

SPRAT: Everybody's got sumpin.

I 0 )
 T W O ;., T .t., T £ :', - O " E !' .... T J O !' ?

SUCK: \\n\ wouldn't \'0\J?

. .

BOLU" : Take m�· ''':ord for it, kids, I b.wen 't.

And three �'f'NS. bter, in the spring of 1 95"6- l'm still srud�ing
�lprure v.ith Karl Hanung-my fir5t book of poems. and
drawmg� appean., "ith quatra-ins such a!. thi!. one:

GAS:\G

In our �u1burb
A toad is sitting on the gas meter.

It lx-e4thes in and out

So V."t" can cook..

Toda� I as£. m�·!-:!df: h. that the kind of poem, the kind of

dialogue it wa!. permi!.sible to write after Ausch,\itz? Otd
dx· illlf.Jerati\'e for a..<.l:.esi.<. ha,·e to res.uh in such an anorexk
fonn � I v.-a!- JlO\\ twen� -etgbt �'ear!. oM, but for the time
being I couJdn 't do more th4.n this, OT anything diff.e.-e.nt.
:\nd I read m�· poem!. and ont'-act pb�·s, at the mt<eting!.
ci Group 47 , "nich in the person ()f Ham Werner Richt·er
regula.rl�· imitt-d me, the he-ginner, from the falJ of ' 9 H on .
Man�· of the manus;cnpts re4d there were more outspoken
than mioe. Some of them att� National Soci..a l ism, as if
to mak.e up for io!.{ time., uoamihiguousl�·, \\ith the help of
pCJ5;tti' e heroes. Tht- lad:. of amblgui·�· m.ade me nervous.
Such hel.ated antifascism had the !IOUnd of a requ!t"ed ex.er­
rne, contonni s;t in a timt- of ahjoct conformism, hence dis-

� hour ,o.,, tr.II'L� �� .'4attht-iln ap,d .-\ li!!lltt- Will.....n fHarc:owt Jilr.K't" & World,
• 'fW7 1, r� •4f>- •47

I 13 6
 Wrwna cifrer .iuschwitz •·

honest, and positivel�- obscene when compared Yoith the real

resistance to National Socialism, a resistance which, though
doomed to failure and patheticall�- we<tk, had left real traces.
These first experiences with literature and what goes on
around it caused me to regress. I was seventeen again. The
end of the war. The unconditional surrender. Imprisoned in
foxholes. Photographs shoYoing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, bones.
My stubborn refusal to beliew it. And turning the counter
back even farther: fifteen, fourteen, thirteen �-ears old.
Campfires, flag drills, shooting practice with small-caliber
weapons. The dull routine of school interrupted by ,-aca­
tions, ,.,.-hiJe the news came i.n special bulletins. Certainl�-:
schoolbo�- defiance, boredom during Hitler Youth exercises.
Stupid jokes about the part�· big'\'igs, who dodged service at
the front and were mockingI�· called "golden pheasants."
But resistance? Not a trace, not even the stirring of resis­
tance, not even in the most fleeting thoughts. I nstead, ad­
miration for milital'} heroes and a persistent min<lless creduli�­
that nothing could put a dent in. An embarrassment even
todav.
How could I think to capture resistance on paper ten
years later, ascribing antifascism to myself, when "writino
# � # 0

after Auschwitz" had shame, shame on e\·e�- white page as

its prerequisite? Rather, what emerged from the fifties ,.,.as
opposition to the scale of new false notes, to the fac;ade-art
flourishing all around, to smug gatherings of complacent
Philistines - if some of them had kno\m nothing, guessed
nothing, and now presented t�ernselves as children seduced
bv demonic forces, the others had alwan been against it. if
. . -

not out loud then at least in secret.

I 0 J
 T W O S T A T E S-O N E N ATI O N ?

A decade of lies that even today haw market value, but

a decade, too, of momentous decisions. Rearmament and
the German Treaty were t he kev words here. Two German
' '

states were coming into being, tit for tat, each zealously
trying to be the model pupil in its respccti\'e political bloc,
each delighted at being fortunate to count itself among the
victors. Divided, yes, but united in the perception of having
survived one more time.
Yet one element did not fit into this picture of hostile
twosomeness. On J une 16 and 1 7 , 1 9n , the workers were
on the march in East Berlin and Leipzig, in Halle, Ritterfcld,
and Magdeburg. The streets belonged to them until the So­
viet tanks came. A strike on Stalinallee (Stalin had died the
previous March) grew into an uprising, which took a sad
course, leaderless and carried out only by workers. No in­
tellectuals, no students, no professionals, and no church leaders
joined in, only a few members of the People's Police, who
were later court-martialed and shot. And yet this German
workers' uprising, to which Albert Camus paid his respects
from Paris, was covered up-made into a counterrevolu­
tion over there, and over here, by the words of the liar
Adenauer, into a people's uprising and an excuse to create
a holiday.
I watched it. From Potsdamer Platz I saw tanks and
human beings face off. A decade later, an eyewitness of that
brief confrontation, I wrote a German tragedy in complex
form- The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprisinn -complex because
integrated into the play were Shakespeare's Coriolanus and
Brecht's Coriolanus adaptation, as well as his position on the

I 0 8
 WricinB C!.fier Auschwicz , .

sen·nteenth o f June. Hut complex, too, because the reality

of the street -a leaderless uprising- contradicts the reality
of a theater rehearsal, which is dedicated to raising revolu­
tionary consciousness, particularly that of the working class.
And complex, furthermore, because the head of the theater
on whose stage the tragedy takes place is never unambigu­
ous -or is unable to he. When, near the end of the play,
he finally decidt·s to write a letter of protest to the first
secretary of the central committee - at the time, Walter
U lbricht - he is opposed by an actress, Volumnia, and his
dramatic adviser Erwin:

VOLUMNIA takes the paper awayfrom him: Why read this

pussyfooting document aloud? Three succinct para­
graphs. The first two are critical; you say the mea­
sures taken by the government, in other words the
Party, were premature. In the third, something makes
you proclaim your solidarity with the same people
you attacked in the first two. Why not come out
for Kozanka in the first place? Because they'll cross
out the critical paragraphs and trumpet the solidar­
ity until you die of shame.

HOSS: Here, underneath the original, I have a copy.

Blessed be carbon paper.

ERWIN: Those things are locked up in the archives;

they get published with your posthumous papers when

it's too late.

1 0 9
 ·1 W ( J � T A ·1 '" � - () N 1·. N A ·r I 0 N ?

vc Jl.liMNIA: AIJ(I lt�gends will grow up. Det·p down

he was again�t. Or dt·c.·p down lw was f(,r. That's
the way he spoke, but his ht·art-hm, what about
hi� hc•art? 1-:vl'rybody will have his own inll·rpn·ta­
tion: ('ynical opportuuio;t, home-grovvn ideali�t; all l1e
rt=ally ('art•d ahout was theatt·r; hl' wrote and thought
f(,r tlw pcoplt·. What people? Spt·ak out. Gin· them
.l pic·ce of your mind or knuckle· under. And dovetail
your �<·ntc.·m·es, tlon 't leave an opening li.Jr thf•ir scis­
�or1>.

BO��: No o1w will n·nsor me.

V<>LUMNIA: Dnn 't he: childish. You know pt:rft'Ctly

wdl you're going to b<" n1t.

I:RWIN: And c·ven unn1t it's lf.c·blt·. L>id you n=ally

writl" this? It's fee·ble, it's t'lllbarrassing.

B< '��: Like the subject matter. Do you want me to

write: I congratulate the· meritorious murderers of

the peopl<:·. Or I congratulate tlw ignorant survivors
of a li·eble uprising. And what congratulations will
rea<.·h the dead? And I, capahl<" of nothing but small,
t:mharrassc·tl words, stood on the sidt·lines. Masons,
railroad workers, welders and cable windf•rs re­
mained alom·. 1-luus<'.·wives didn't hang back. Even
sornt� of the Vopus th re w oiJ their bdts. They'll be
court-rnartial�d. In our camp tht·y'll add new wings
to the: prisons. And in tht' Western camp, too, lies

I I 0
 WrititW c!frer Auschwit:tt •

will bt·conlt' ofticial truths. Thc- f.·u:t• of hypocrisy

will n·hearsc in a display of mourning. My larst�t.'ing
t•yt· st•t's national rags falling to half-mast. I can lwar
wholt• platoons of orators sucking the: word "fret·­
dom" t'mpty. I can st·e tbt• yt·ars hohhling hy. And
aftt•r the 1:1tal caleruJar lt·af has hc·en pluckt:d tt·n or
twdvt· times, tlwy'll takt• to cdebrating tbt• sevt:n­
h"t•nth with lwc:r orgit•s as tlwy cdd11·att·d the: i{attlr.
of St•dan in my cbildboml. In dw Wt""st I st:t• a wdl­
li:·d nation picnicking in tlw grct�n. What's ld"t? Bot­
tlt:s draim·tl in cdt•bration, sandwich papt•rs, ht·c..·r
corpst•s and rt·al corpst:s: f·(,r on holidays tht: trallit·
takes its met·d of corpses. But lwrc, aft<·r tt:n or
twdve y<·ars, the prisuns will vo m i t up tbt• wn·ckage
of this uprising. Accusation will run rampant, ad­
dn·ss and mail a thousand pa ckages of guilt. We've
got our packagt' n·ady. Hand� the orilJinal and cc11�r 10

Liuhenncr and Podulla. KindJy play tht� mt•sst·ngers. The

original to the C<·ntral Com1nitl<'t.'; tlw copy to frit ·nds
in dw Wt·st f(,r saft:kt•t·ping.

I'ODlii.I.A: Boss, tht•y'll say wt·'re sitting on the- fc:nn�.

HOSS: Answt'r, wlt.lt lwttt•r st•at haw you to ofli:·r?'1

This play stuck in the craw of the critit·s in both East and
Wt�st wlwn it premit•rt:d in January 1966 at tht• Schillt·rtlwa-

4· 1he 1'/eheiCIIL< R.-lrear.w.• tire IIJ'"'""ll· Iran•. R.tlpb Manlwim (H.tr<·our1, Bran· .mtl
World, t<JM>), p. ro·,ff.

I I I
 TWO STATES-ON E N A T I O N ?

ter in Berlin. Over there it was dismissed as "counterrevo­

lutionary," over here as an "anti-Brecht play." It soon
disappeared from the theaters. But encouraged by the pres­
ent revolutionary developments, the author now places a bet
on the longevity of his Plebeians.
But I am getting ahead of myself. The twenty-fi,·e-year­
old witness of June 1 7 , 1 9 B had not yet reached the point
where he could react by writing directly. Things of the past,
losses, his origins, shame still clung to him. It was not until
three Jvears later, when I moved from Berl in to Paris, that
the distance from Germany enabled me to find the language
and the breath to write down in fifteen hundred pages what
was necessary for me to write, in spite of and after Ausch­
witz. Driven by the recklessness that is specific to the pro­
fession, and by a persistent writing frenzy, I completed­
without interruption, though in several versions, in Paris
and then Berlin after mv return in 1 96o - The
J
Tin Drum, Car
and Mouse, and Dog Years.
No writer, I would assert, will undertake a major epic
without being pushed, provoked, and lured by others into
that great avalanche zone. In Cologne, when I was passing
through, it ,,·as Paul Schalliick who gave me the push to
write prose. The provocation came from the current pen·a­
sive, even official, demonization of the Nazi period- ! wanted
to illuminate the crime, bring it into the open- and I was
lured into continuing, after relapses, by a diffic ult, almost
inaccessible friend, Paul Cclan, who understood sooner than
I did that the first book, with its 7 3 0 galloping pages, did
not tell the whole story, but rather that this profane epic
onion had to be unpeeled layer by layer, and that I must

I I 2
 Writing cifter Auschwitz'

not take a break from the peeling. He gave me the courage

to include fictional characters like Fajngold, Sigismund Mar­
kus, and Eddi Amsd - not noble but ordinary and eccentric
Jews - in the petty-bour_geois world of my novels.
Why Paul Celan, for whom words became increasingly
spare toward the end of t he fifties, and whose language
and existence were narrowing into a fuguelikc strctto? His
help was never given directly, but was slipped into sub­
ordinate clauses during a walk in the park. His encourage­
ment and intervention affected Don Years more than The Tin
Drum - for example, at the beginning of the fairy tale near
the end of the second part, when a mountain of bones i s
piled up next to t h e Kaiserhafen antiaircraft battery, which
mountain is fed by the Stutthof concentration camp near
Danzig:

There once was a girl, her name was Tulia,

and she had the pure forehead of a child. Rut
nothing is pure. Not even the snow is pure. No
virgin is pure. Even a pig isn't pure. The Devil never
entirely pure. No note rises pure. Every violin knows
that. Every star chimes that. Every knife peels it:
even a potato isn't pure: it has eyes, they have to be
scooped out.
But what about salt? Salt is pure! Nothing, not
even salt, is pure. It's only on boxes that it says: Salt
is pure. After all, it keeps. What keeps with it? But
it's washed. Nothing can _be washed clean. But the
elements: pure? They arc sterile but not pure. The
idea? Isn't it always pure? Even in the beginning not

I I 3
 T W 0 STAT E S - 0 N 1: N A T I 0 N ?

pun·. Jesus Christ not pure. Marx Engels not pure.

Ashes not pure. A mi th<· host not pun·. No idea
stays pure. Even the flowering of art isn't pure. And
the sun has spots. All geniuses menstrual<'. On sor­
row floats laughter. In the h<·art of roaring lurks
silence. In angles lean compasses. But tlw circle, the
circle is pu re!
No dosing of the circle is pun·. For if the circle
is pure, then the snow is pure, the virgin is, pigs
are, Jesus Christ, Marx and Engds, white ashes, all
sorrows, laught<·r, to the l<·ft roaring, to the right
silence, ideas immaculate, wafers no long<·r hlecd<·rs
and geniuses without efflux, all angles pure angles,
piously compasses would describe circles: pure and
human, dirty. salty, d iabolical, Christian and Marx­
ist, laughing and roaring, ruminant, silent, hoi)·. round
pure angular. And the hones, white mounds that
were recently lwaped up, would grow immaculately
without crows: pyramids of glory. Hut the crows,
which arc not pure, were creaking unoikd, even
yesterday: nothing is pure, no circle, no bone. And
piles of hones, lwapcd up for the sake of purity, will
mdt cook boil in onk·r that soap, pure and cheap;
hut even soap cannot wash pure. 5

With the novd Dog rears - which, I don't know why, must
parade its unwiddiness in the shadow of The Tin Drum hut

�- f>oa !'ears, trans. Ralph Manlwim ( l larmurt Bran• & World, 1 96n, pp. 29�- 296.

I I 4
 Wming C!ftcr A usch witz • '

has remained dear to its author, and not onlv for that n·a- ,

son - my prose projects were completed for the time being.

Not that I was exhausted; hut I heliewd that I had written
mvsdf fn'(' of somethinu, something that was now behind
� b �

me, not settled , to lw sure, yet dealt with.

Last summer Hessian State Radio gaw nw the oppor­
tunity to read th(• entire Tin Dru m aloud, over the course of
twelve ('Venings, to an aud i(•nce in G<>ttingen. A great strain
to takC' upon mysdf, hut I had the pleasure, as I reread tht·
hook, of looking over the shoulder of the young writer and
seeing how lw turned an idea from a play that nev('r got
written into the epilogue of the Polish Post Office, the house­
of-cards chapter. And seeing where the term " fizz powd('r"
first insisted on being remembered. And recalling which vis­
itors to Paris had heard the first dra ft of which Tin Drum
chapters - Walter Hollerer aga in and again; and how little
he was disturbed by the periodic reports of tlw death of the
novel.
Thirtv
"
vears later, it is easv
" J
for me to say
"
that later
everything became more difficult. Bored with itsel f, fame
stood in the way. l�riendships fell apart. Reviewers panting
with specific expectations insisted that my sole subject should
be Danzig, only Danzig, with its flat and hilly environs.
Whenever I turned to the present, whether with The Plebeiam
or with prose again - /_oca/ Anaesthetic and from the Dimy ?[ a
Snail- or if I got involved in a German election campaign,
down to all the provincial details, and took an active role in
politics as a citizen, their judgnwnt was sure to fall: He
should stick to Danzig and his Kashubians. Politics has brought

I I 5'
 T W O STATES-O N E N A TIO N ?

nothing hut ham1 to writcrs. Goethc knew that. And other

such schoolmasterly admonitions.
But writing after Auschwitz could not and cannot he
dealt with so solicitously. The past casts its hard shadows
over prcst·nt and futurc terrain - I later coined the term
"pastprescntfuture" and tried out that concept in Diary C?f a
Snail. I nspired by Heine's fragment, "The Rabbi of Bacha­
rach," I wanted to describe the history of the Danzig syn­
agogue congregation up to its liquidation- once again digging
up the past - but I also had a mission in the present: the
1 969 election campaign was clouded by an agreement that a
former National Socialist would he acceptable as chancellor
for the Great Coalition. And there was a third narrative
b·cl : laying the foundation for an essay on Albrecht Durer's
copper engraving "Mclencolia 1 ," an essay to be titled "On
Stasis in Progress." The form of this diary, set therefore in
the present, past, and future, was dctermincd by my chil­
dren's questions:

"Where art• you off to again tomorrow?"

"Castrop-Rauxel . "
"What arc you going t o do there?"
"Talktalktalk."
"Still the same old S . P . D . ?"
" I t's just beginning. "
"And what'll you bring us this time?''
"Myself, among other things . . . "
. . . and the question: Why those streaks on the
wallpaper? ( Everything that backs up with the tripe
and coats the palate with tallow.)

I I 6
 Writin9 qfier Auschwitr. '

Because, sometimes, children, at table, or when the

lV throws out a word (about Biafra), I hear Franz
or Raoul asking about the Jews:
"What about them? What's the storv?" .I

You notice that I falter whenever I abbreviate.

can't find the needle's eye, and I start babbling.
Because this, but first that, and meanwhile the
other, but only after . . .
I try to thin out forests of facts before they have
time for new growth. To cut holes in the ice and
keep them open. Not to sew up the gap. Not to
tolerate j umps entailing a frivolous departure from
history, which is a landscape inhabited by snails . . .

" Exactly how many were they?"

"How did they count them?"

It was a mistake to give you the total, the multidi­

gitate number. It was a mistake to give the mecha­
nism a numerical value, because perfect killing aroust·s
hunger for technical details and suggests questions
about breakdowns.

" Did it always work?"

"What kind of gas was it?"

Illustrated books and documents. Anti-Fascist me­

morials built in the Stalinist style. Badges of repen­
tance and brotherhood weeks. Well-lubricated words

I I 7
 T W O STATES-O N E N A T IO N ?

of repentance. Detergents and all-purpose poetry:

"When night fell on·r Germany . . . "

Now I'll tdl you (and go on telling you as long as

the election campaign goes on and Kiesinger is
Chancellor) how it happened where I come from ­
slowly, del iheratdy, and i n broad daylight. Prepara­
tions for the universal crime were made in many
places at the same time though at unequal speeds;
in Danzig, which before the war did not hdong to
the German Reich, the process was slowed down,
which made it easier to record later on. . . .6

In this book, which appeared in Germany in 1 97 2, the def­

inition of my profession is asked for, and the reply is given:
"A writt·r, children, is someone who writes against passing
time. " Which means that the author sees himself not as
independent of time or cncapsulatt·d in timelessness, hut as
a contt•mporary. More, that he exposes himself to vicissi­
tudes, gets involved, and takes sides. The dangers of such
involvement and side-taking arc known: the writer's objec­
tivity may be lost; his language is tempted to l ive from hand
to mouth; the narrowness of present circumstances may prove
confining to his imaginative powers, which arc accustomed
to run free; he risks getting out of hreath.
Possibly because I was aware of the dangers of my de­
dared contemporariness, I was already secretly writing an-

6. From rhe Drar.Y '!f a Snarl. trans. Ralph Manheim ( Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
' 9Hl. pp . 1 1 - 1 2.

I I 8
 Writin9 cifcer Auschwitz • '

other book-hehind my own back, as it were- while doing

the first draft of the snail diary, while on the road in the
election campaign, making speeches and listening to myself
making speeches. It \Vas a hook that allowed me to unreel
history backward and send the language to fairy-tale school.
As if I had wanted to recover from the snail and from the
programmatic slowness of my snail-party, I began - no sooner
than the diary had appeared, and I had savored another
election campaign through to the first computer projection
of the outcome - with the preliminary work on another
epic tome, "/he Flounder.
What does this hook have to do with my topic, "Writ­
ing after Auschwitz"? It deals with food, from harley gruel
to cutlet in aspic. It deals with surpluses and shortages, with
gluttony and gnawing hunger. It deals with nine or more
cooks and the other truth of that fairy talc "The Fisherman
and H is Wife": how man in his desire for mastery always
wants more, wants to be faster, climh higher, how he sets
himself final goals, works for the final solution, is "at the
end . " "At the end " is the title of one of the poems that
impede the flow of prose in The Flounder, either to summarize
or switch onto another track:

Men, who with that well-known expression

Think things to the end
and have always thought them to the end;
men for whom not possibly possible goals
but the ultimate goal - a society free
from care -

I I 9
 T W O STATES-O N E N A T I O N ?

has pitched its tent beyond mass graves;

men who from the sum of dated defeats
draw onlv
.I
one conclusion: smoke-veiled
ultimate victory
over radically scorched earth;
men who at one of those conferences
held daily since the worst proved to
be technically
ft·asible
resolve with masculine realism on
the final solution;
men with perspective,
men goaded by importance,
great exalted men ,
whom n o one a n d n o warm slippers
can hold,
men with precipitous ideas followed
by flat deeds -
have we finallv - wc wonder - seen
.I

7
the last of them?

Ht·re, if not sooner, I notice that tht· topic of my talk keeps

forcing me to give an account of mysdf, even when a story
like Meeting in Telgce speaks for itself. The backdating of
Group 47 , that literary non-club to which I owe much, could
ht' undertakt'n dfortlessly, was even child's play.
The situation was different with a book that was sup­
posed to ring in Orwell 's decade, the eighties: Headbirchs-

1· 1he Flounder. trans. Ralph Manheim (Harcourt Brace jO\·anO\·ich, • •nS), pp. 9�-
96.

I 2 0
 Writina cifter Auschwitz .
.

or the Germans are Dying Out. As with the Flounder, in the

chapter "Vasco Returns" it is no longer Europe, or the dou­
ble Germany, and certainly not Danzig-Gdansk that is tht�
measure of all things. Rather, it is the ever more rapidly
growing and increasingly impoverished population of Asia
and the so-called north-south differential that pressure the
narrative to make utopian leaps. Because even from the per­
spective of China, I ndonesia, and India, our old continent
shrinks to the size of a toy, the "German Question" finally
reveals its third-rate status, and the literature that was wrested
from the a ftermath of Auschwitz again becomes question­
able.
Where can l i terature still find an outlt.'t if the future has
already bet·n dated, the terrible statistical bottom l ine cal­
culated? What is left to narrate if the human race's capacity
for destroying itsdf and all other life in a multitude of ways
is proven daily and practiced in computer simulations?
Nothing. Yet the atomic sel f-annihilation, which might come
at any hour, relates to Auschwitz and expands the "final
solution" to global dimensions.
A writer who reacht·s this conclusion - and from the
beginning of the eighties the renewed arms race points to
such a conclusion- must either make silenn· his impera­
tive, or else - and after three years of abstinence I began to
work on a novel again- try to give a name to this human
possibi lity, self-annihilation.
The Rat, a book in which "I dreamed I had to say good­
bye," was an attempt, then, to continue the crippled project
of the Enlightenment. But the Zeitgeist, and with i t the
highly paid jabbering of a culture business mightily pleased

I 2 I
 T W O STAT ES-O N E N AT I O N ?

with itsdf, refused to be needled. Art fairs pushing one an­

other from the market, overdirected theatrical pcrfor­
mann's, and the gigantomania of provincial tycoons who have
recently discovered art arc features of the eighties. The en­
tertaining hustle of mediocrity and its talkshow hosts, who
can say absolutely anything hut arc not allowed to pause,
lest they fall into shocked silence -all this dynamic mind­
lessness d id not begin to stumble until, beyond the pale of
this doubly fortified prosperity, the peoples of Eastern and
Central Europe rose up, one after the other, and gave new
meaning to old-fashioned words like solidaritv and freedom.
� '

Since then something has happened. The West stands

naked. The cry over there, "We are the people," found no
echo on'r here. "We are already free," people here said.
"We alreadv have evervthing, the only thing
� " 1,...: �
missing is unitv.''
" .I

And thus a thing that )·estt.-rday raised hopes and brought

Europe into focus becomes twisted into German aspirations.
Once a_g ain the call is heard for "all of Germany."
Since I have given my lecture the ponderous title "Writing
after Ausch,,itz," and have dra\\TI up a literary balance sheet,
I want - in closing - to confront the break in civilization
epitomized by Auschwitz with the German longing for re­
unification. Auschwitz speaks against every trend born of
manipulation of public opinion, against the purchasing pmver
of the West German economy - for the hard currency of
Deutschmarks even unification can be acquired - and yes,
even against the right to self-determination granted without
hesitation to other peoples. A uschwitz speaks against all this,
because one of the preconditions for the terrible thing that
happened was a strong, unified Germany.

I 2 2
 Writing cifcer Auschwitz

Hy themselves not Prussia, not Bavaria, not even Austria

could have developed the methodology and the will for or­
ganized genocide, and implemented it; it had to be all of
Germany. We have every reason to fear ourseh·es as a unit.
Nothing, no sense of nationhood, however idyllically col­
ored , and no assurance of late-born benevolence can modify
or dispel the experience that we the criminals, with our
victims, had as a unified Germany. We cannot get around
Auschwitz. And no matter how greatly we want to, we should
not attempt to get around it, because Auschwitz belongs to
us, is a permanent stigma of our history - and a positive
gain! It has made possible this insight : Finally we know our­
selves.
Thinking about Germany is also part of my literary work.
Since the mid-sixties and into the present continuing tur­
moil, there have been occasions for speeches and essays.
Often my necessarily cutting remarks ha,·e struck my con­
temporaries as excessive interference, as extraliterary med­
clling. That is not my concern. Rather, I am left with a sense
of inadequacy after completing this thirty-five-year balance
sheet. Something remains to be said that has not yet been
put into words. An old story wants to be told altogether
differently. Perhaps I will succe(·d in this task. My speech
has to find its end, hut there is no end to writing after
Auschwitz, no such promise can be made - unless the hu­
man race gives up on itself completely.

I 2 J