Gunther Grass Remembered

These days, he is mostly known as a German scholar who hid his youthful membership in the SS while publicly affirming support of Germany’s left-wing Social Democratic party. But Jonathan Brent, editorial director of the Yale University Press, shows us in the September 8th installment of the Chronicle of Higher Education that Grass has long been ambivalent, at best about the nature of totalitarian governments.

Moreover, Brent has found that this ambivalence is alarmingly typical of students and can have disastrous global implications in the work of graduates. In 1987, Brent and Irving Howe got a chance to see Grass in action at a conference in Manhattan.

Grass declared his belief that the United States and the Soviet Union were “metaphysical equivalents.” Even more inexplicably, when Howe and Brent questioned Grass about this characterization, the latter claimed, “I never said that.”

Flash forward to this year. Now a visiting professor at Bard College, Brent asks his Soviet literature class to meditate upon a passage from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

In the excerpt, Solzhenitsyn’s fictional prisoner Shukhov reflects upon one particular day when “A lot of good things had happened.” For example, “He hadn’t been thrown in the hole” and “He hadn’t been caught with the blade at search point.”

“Without exception, the students who spoke up saw little wrong with the day in the Soviet gulag,” Brent writes of his students at Bard last spring. It should be noted that the college, which named one of its professorial chairs after convicted Soviet spy Alger Hiss, is hardly a right wing bastion.

For his part, Brent notes the danger of the attitude his students demonstrated when acted upon in post-graduate work. It is a point which cannot be dismissed.

“The alacrity with which the leaders of several Western Internet companies recently complied with the wishes of the Chinese government to limit search-engine results made available in China suggests how easily Shukhov’s gulag can come to seem a pleasant place,” Brent writes. “The fact that many Americans were outraged by the actions of the Internet companies signifies that certain core values within our culture remain vital—but they are in jeopardy.”

“As we begin a new semester, we need to consider: Unless young Americans can distinguish the ‘I’ from the ‘he’ from the ‘they’ when confronted with foreseeable but deeply compromising economic incentives, political advantages, or social conveniences, they truly will not know what is at stake or what to defend.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.