Nuclear clarity

Gunter Grass’s connection to the SS shocked but it was his writing that got him into trouble

German Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gunter Grass during the Frankfurt book fair. Boris Roessler / EPA

Given Mossad’s famous feats of tracking down Nazis and taking them to Israel to face justice, one would think that Gunter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German author who has died at the age of 87, was banned from Israel over his SS exploits. But, it was not Grass’s membership of the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler’s notorious paramilitary organisation, but his recent writing that drove Israel to declare him persona non grata.

That was in 2012. The problem began with a poem Grass titled What must be said. In it, he outlined Israel’s vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and argued that it was these, not Iranian bombs, that posed a grave threat to world peace. Israel reacted with fury and claimed that the poem was written in the “tradition of blood libel”. In the convoluted world of Israeli statecraft, being a member of the SS was somehow a less serious crime than writing about Tel Aviv’s nukes. But it had to be said and Grass said it.