What a dogged reading. Looks if nothing is going to happen. None of the character talks with himself to bring out any kind of insight. There is a parasitic dependence on the things without to have any movement in the story. It at times is a dog thinking and reasoning like a man and the other way for a man. What is the point if it is as uncertain and as non-starter as it appears, if not a sudden quirk or a twist in the story occurs, which makes it worth to continue?
Before you reach the middle of the book Gunter Grass begins to overwhelm with the brilliant way he uncovers the distress and consequences of the war under Hitler in the country. An elderly school teacher, a neighbor of the narrator Harry, who taught literature and writing methods, often by leaving them alone, to his students, besides other subjects, disappears for his crime of failing to celebrate the birthday of Hitler. He was charged with eating the candies the school administration has allocated for his students.
The cousin of the Harry named Tulla, who he fingers at times beside the daughter of the disappeared school teacher, Jenny, to check the depth of their holes–as he puts it, speculates that the teacher has been taken to a place from where a heap of freshly collected human bones have been dumped in open in their town, which foul the air of it all the time and attract a large number of rats and crows. Tulla brings a human skull from there to prove her point.
Sex scenes, more often than not, by Gunter Grass, are not the tenderest and delicate type. They are vicious, crude and occur like an act of sabotage. Taking a reader by complete surprise, besides the characters performing it. Similar can be said about the writing style. It makes things obscure in the way they are described in a convoluted language which often is difficult to get hold of. By keeping the going on a scene surprises by its sudden arrival, for it is shocking not only for what it is but also for the lucid and forth-coming language in which it is described.
One hopes the original German language edition reads better than its translation. Also that, a better translated version comes soon in English, which also cares about readability as well. For the subject is the most deadly war one has known; written by someone who fought it as well. Little other literature is available on this subject otherwise–from the side which lost it.
Tulla takes Harry and Jenny to a leech infested area and makes them attach leeches to their bodies and feed them till they are fully fed on their blood and become easily detachable. Then she collects those leeches and cooks them in a tin pot till they become a thick paste, then she eats it and asks them to eat it as well. Tulla thinks this is how her brother, somewhere fighting in France, might survive the war. But he is killed soon. In their early teens, these three characters try strange things to deal with the effect the war has created in their lives.
When, after his disappearance, the school teacher’s daughter is taken away by a middle-aged dance master and a probable Nazi official, who wants to keep her as a mistress while she learns dance in Berlin, she comes to knock at the door of Harry’s to say her goodbye. Harry and his parents do not open the door. But She and Harry continue to write each other till a long time later.
A Poignant and heart-breaking scene is when Harry, now inducted finally into the army at the age of sixteen, comes to say goodbye to Tulla, who is pregnant now at the same age by a person she never discloses. She is now working as a bus conductor to support herself. She wanted Harry to make her pregnant but he always declined this possibility. She offers him bundles of ticket as a souvenir with which he plays-with his fingers, just like a child.
It makes Tulla laugh. How the war was sucking in and destroying the lives of young children fills one with a profound sadness. A while ago, a bomb drops at a place where Jenny was performing and both her toes were amputated to end her dancing career. But the war was to last another three years. Tulla asks Harry to pay the bus fare for the distance he traveled with his modest luggage, before he leaves to join his duty in a war turning increasingly bloody.
The third and the last part of the novel deals with post war years in the country. Grass deals with so many trends in a desultory manner in the beginning. He picks technology, economy, politics and much more randomly and in an arcane language, without making any point clearly.
But soon he picks the people trying to practice a conscious collective amnesia to forget the bad memories of the war. But then a glass comes to the market for children of ten years of age, a time since the war has ended, which makes them see the past of their parents clearly. They see all the murders and other crimes which their parents have committed but never discussed. It leads to an epidemic of psychiatric diseases in the children using those glasses and many of them commit suicide.
But, some how, behind the religion, liberalism and progress, the society tries to hide from its past. The author sarcastically deals with the hypocrisy of the society to collectively forget a criminal past. It shows how neatly and effectively the author is capable of dealing with the things he really feels are important before he goes absent-minded again and talks about so many generalities in a language which is difficult to decipher.
In a way he expiates alone for the scores of unacknowledged sins committed by the society he belongs to. There are not many writers courageous enough to take up such a thankless task, though many other countries have perpetrated no less horrendous crimes on mankind than the Nazi violence.
On the contrary, all the efforts in literature mostly have been to make that past obscure enough, so that any future inquiry is preempted. In it not only the writers from the side of the perpetrators, but also a few from the victims’ side, too have contributed.
It makes one’s heart bleed for the pathos of the writer of this novel.
Archive for the ‘Investigative journalism’ Category
Dog Years by Gunter Grass : It makes one’s heart bleed for the pathos of the writer of this novel.
August 21, 2020The Tin Drum: A novel by Gunter Grass; Coming to terms with history through fiction
May 1, 2010It is heartening that this book is available in English. The author has already been rewarded with a nobel prize and lives a secluded life apparently, only giving an occasional interview in English to BBC- beyond the German. The writer also attracted a lot of controversy when he admitted a few years back of his Nazi connection. So, like all great writers he remains an enigma to all.
The book is phenomenal and brilliant, for it tries to capture through fiction the life in Germany just before and after the war broke out. This Gunter does through a character Oskar who is about to reach his teens but has decided not to grow beyond three years. He is dwarfish or gmomish and shatters his drums when he is angry by beating; or glasses around him through his screams: sometimes to steal from a shop, with the help of an accomplice, at others to just express his anguish. He, apparently grown up, narrates the story of his younger age, from a mental asylum where he has found the refuge. So it is mostly through symbols, that the author builds a powerful character.
Oskar is a product of a bad mothering by a promiscuous and glutonous woman, who indulges him by never stopping his destructive drum-shattering or glass-breaking. Oskar often leaves her behind to her lover, whom he suspects of being his father, to go out beating his drum in anguish, at their secret hide in a hotel. She pays for the glasses or the drums Oskar destroys. She kills herself by over eating when she is pregnant for the second time, leaving the Oskar, the drummer boy, almost orphaned. A spoilt child he is, he is anguished more at the loss of his mother. There is no one to indulge him anymore, while he apparently resents the mere sympathy he receives from some of the people for becoming a motherless young boy. Both: his suspected and presumptuous fathers, a Polish and a German, offer him almost no help. His legal or presumptive father though, mostly tried earlier to entertain his mother by cooking food for her and tolerating the presence of her Polish lover, when she was alive. His suspected father, Jan Bronski, later got excecuted while he was out only to help Oskar repair his drum, as he and thirty other people were founnd defending the Polish post office from a Nazi attack, where he worked, and France did not come to defend the Poland, author notes, in spite of the treaty. Oskar keeps the guilt secret while he recoves from a sickness in the aftermath of this incident.
A few friends Oskar made become victims of different tragidies. One of them, Herbert, dies while trying to make love to a statue in a museum, while another, a jewish Toy-shop owner, who supplies him drums, disappears in the hands of Nazis. A mutual friend of Oskar and Herbert, ..’Meyn, who is an SA man, who drank gin all day and played trumpet too beautifully for words’, before he joined the SA and was seen burning a synagogue of the town, comes to mourn the death of Herbert and reaches for the gin bottle after a long time and played the trumpet too beautifully for words. But being a Nazi he was denied sympathies at the funnerel and he returns to his apartment to kill his four pet cats. He was expelled for this cruelty against animals by the Nazi party. Oskar is truly alarmed at the loss of his toy-seller friend and worries if the world is going to remain toyless in future. These poignant discription crisply sum up the situation the writer tries to depict. There is very little of the literature available in English, by a German author, which tried to deal with the genesis of the rise of Nazism and the consequent world war. This book is a very brave attempt by Gunter Grass, to deal with this subject, which still creates strong reactions within Germany and beyond. He has done it with remarkable style which does not get lost even in the translation. Though the details in the books are at times tiresome and alien, particularly when a reader is not aware that the author is talking about a town that German occupied during the war and currently is in Poland; but they are authentic and deserve the attention of the people who are interested in the authors like Gunter Grass. He is a very celebrted author but less read than he merits, perhaps.
A mental asylum is the safest place to be, when the society is collapsing around you and a war is going on. Seeing the world theough an eye of a three year old is another security. Growing up is precarious. More so, with the sexual awakening of Oskar through a slightly older girl Maria, a sister of his late friend Herbert, who assists his presumptive father Matzerath at his shop; which the author has described using symbols like respberries, fizz powder, mashrooms and growing up an eleventh finger. The eleventh finger that could not read or write but signs for him. This pleasure does not last long, as Oskar discovers Maria actively copulating with Matzerath, unlike as with him, as she prtended to be asleep when Oskar sleeps with her. But there is a consolation for him, that he has beaten Matzerath once again, in impregnating Maria just by more than a week. Oskar takes satisfaction in the fact that Matzerath could not impregnate his mother either, and he is a son of Jan Bronski, the charming Polish man executed by the firing squad. The pregnancy of Maria made Matzerath marry him and she becomes his step mother. This comes as a shock to the reader lulled by symbolic erotic details, that flow in a poetic language, of the Oskar’s sexual awakening. Once again Oskar has been wronged totally.
When Maria comes to visit him at the mental asylum, Oskar puts the fizz powder in her left hand and puts his saliva on it and urges her to lick it, like she used to do earlier. Maria looks genuinely shocked and hastily leaves in tears. The death of Stalin is hinted at, in the meanwhile, in their conversation.
Before Oskar had unsuccessfully tried to abort the child of him Maria was bearing by once causing her fall and then by trying to stab her protruding belly. Oskar has an affair with a woman in his neighborhood, in order to forget the venella smell of Maria, whose husband was a gay as per Oskar, who later commits suicide. He describes the faminine smells of different women with symbols and passion. Without any remorse, Oskar goes on living a life that is as blighted emotionally as it was physically; giving the world what it has given him. In a way his life is a story of survival and continuation of his beliefs in spite of others. He does not end up looking a considerate and kindly person. But there is not enough reasons to blame him for what he made of himself, if one thinks that Oskar was not particularly a decent man.
As a literature this book may remain a masterpiece for a long time to come, and an inspiration for the people who think a good work of art is the medicine of the troubled souls.
Tell me no lies: Investigavitive Journalism and its trumphs: An analysis
May 6, 2007Tell me no lies: Investigative journalism and its triumphs. Edited by John Pilger; Published by Vintage 2005. This book is an excellent collection of articles by some of the well-acclaimed journalists. ‘Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue’ Pilger quotes Oscar Wilde, in the beginning of introduction of his book. Disobedience, in this case, to not accept the official explanation of the matters that may have involved hundreds of thousands of human casualties in a far away country in one case; or the loss of US Presidency for a candidate by a few thousand votes in another case, particularly when tens of thousands of voters have been recently taken off the list for being accused in felony, from a constituency that was the stronghold of the party of the loosing candidate.
And, also, apart from the disobedience, a determination to go alone, risking ones life, finding the genesis of the events and the true magnitude of their consequences, far away from where the officials expect one to be and deep enough into the matters to bring out the hitherto-unspeculated perspectives about a matter, with enough evidences, to make the people think if all is not well with the matters of the state.
The ruling politicians of a powerful nation might have their own compulsions that, retrospectively, appear a callous disregard of the worth of human lives, to act in a way that resulted in a war or a serious conflict thousands of miles away, creating the consequences they might not have foreseen. When details to that effect are exposed by the intrepid journalists, the human tragedies caused by the wrong judgements of a few powerful people may look like a vindication of everything that the human society is not meant to be. Hopefully, the exposure of such nature will help the people see that many of the tragedies around us are man-made and could be avoided if the things are considered in more thorough and empathetic way.
The matters may appear serious when it becomes apparent, through the work of the investigative journalism, that the machinery of the government was also involved in covering up some of the facts about an incident that resulted in thousands of human casualties: lest the true magnitude of the ignorance of the politicians ruling the nation with unprecedented power and influence gets exposed.
Then you have another breed of journalists, who score a victory in times of peace by uncovering the accounts of corruption among the governments’ businesses and that of the people who benefit from it. A situation that often builds up to the extent that only a war could cover it any longer- that finally takes place. These journalists help others see that a given war was not resulted due to the Geo-strategic considerations alone, but was to hid the excesses of a corrupt state as well.
In the situations in which the investigations, as reported in this book, are done, the lives of the journalists are often on line, whether they discover the true consequences or the real genesis of a war; or an another scandal that uprooted a political group from power to establish another through apparently fair but deeply flawed methods.
For instance the second article of this remarkable book portrays a situation in which an Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett goes to Hiroshima to cover the damage caused by the A-bomb, while other correspondents were going to Missouri for covering the surrender ceremony of Japan in World war II, as the officials expected and led them to. The bombs were dropped, Burchett writes, to cause the surrender of Japan just in time to avoid Russia attacking Japan by the deadline given by it on Aug 8, 1945, though the war had been practically won. But also Burchett highlights that a war winning attack was needed too, to also preempt the possibility of Japan fighting forever from its bases in occupied China. Though there were reports in Russia that Japan was ready to surrender. So the questions remains if the only ever use of A bomb was avoidable in WWII.
Some of the Japanese people accepted the enemy war correspondents, Burchett, armed with a small gun, with some hostility, while others, like the policeman near Hiroshima, who helped him to send his dispatch in which Burchett famously wrote the headline:
‘I write this as a warning to the world’
on 6 Sept 1945, in Daily Express. The officials of allied forces, who tried to play down the after-effects of the A-bomb even after Burchett reported them, could not contemplate that someone will go to Hiroshima within a month to report the same truthfully and first hand. So Burchett’s dispatch didn’t make him popular with the authorities. George Walker, an another correspondent of Chicago Daily News did the same on Nagasaki, but his reports were never published as he sent them through the Allied Occupying Machinary, as they censored it, while Burchett’s report made him a celebrity.
In the introduction of the book, John Pilger also goes on to illuminate how the governments of the USA or Britain do not provide information on their policies on a (possible) war. Then he goes on to collect the marvelous pieces of investigative Journalism by twenty-nine Journalists on the issues ranging from the aftermath of the allied victory in Germany and Japan, to the Middle East conflict and the war in Chechnya.
John Pilger’s own reporting, in one later article of this book, from post Khamer Rouge Combodia, in “Year Zero”, offers chilling details of the destruction and death perpetrated by Pol Pot. He also brings to light the complicity of the USA, Britain, China and the United Nations, in turning a blind eye to the massacre perpetrated by Khamer Rouge that eliminated one fourth population of Combodia. Pilger reports the British SAS troops training the Khamer militia along the Thailand border and Pol Pot living a cozy life in Pattaya. And the British PM making a statement ‘…there are reasonable Khamer.’ The people of Combodia have still not forgotten and forgiven Khamer Rouge, he reports.
Marhta Gellhorn reports in the first article of the book ‘Dachau’, the details of Nazi doctors sterilizing or doing medica1 experiments on Jewish prisoners. There are also the gory details of the concentration camps and the gas chambers. Dachau is a place where German army surrendered unconditionally in WW II.
‘The menace of MecCarthyism’ is from a broadcast by Edward Murrow, who emphasizes how the vital information are censored by the government during a war or an anticipated war like situation. Such lack of information limits the civil liberties and a lack of informed debate does not help in dispelling the hostilities among the people divided ideologically, as during the cold-war years. This article is important in the present context, when the world is fighting a global war on terrorism and civil liberties have been unprecedentedly curtailed in many nations across the globe.
In the “American way of death” Jessica Mitford exposes how the funeral business exploits the emotional distress of the people who have lost someone of their family. Making a funeral lavish may compensate a little for some of the mistreatment the departed soul had received from someone mourning for him or her, is what the funeral industry promotes, Mitford reports. “Through the looking glasses” by James Camroh is an account of the Vietnam war. It is amazing how the people hid during the day and worked at night in Northern Vietnam, to avoid Aerial raids.
Pliger, in the introduction of the book, also explains how a few rich Moguls are eating the smaller players in media and silencing the differing voice of the debates. The typical case, he says, is that of Australia, which has ‘….the distinction of the most concentrated press ownership in the western world.’ He appreciates the independence of a government owned media like BBC, which has given a voice to the sentiments of millions, on issues differing with the different countries. He also discusses how the Moguls like Rupert Murdoch are trying to silence a voice like BBC, by trying to influence the politicians in power.
‘The Vietnam war was a vulgar demonstration of the strong against the weak!’ Was the judgement of Seymour Hersh, who in the article “The Massacre at My Lai” gives the account of how 500 civilians, mostly elderly, women and children were killed by US troops in one incident. This piece displays the horrific scenes when a war goes dirty and wrong.
In the ‘Lowest of the low’ German journalist Guntur Wallraff, disguised as a migrant Turkish laborer, describes the subhuman condition in which the migrant laborer illegally work in German industries and the abuses they are subjected to. The publication of this work led to 13000 criminal investigations in Germany in late 1980s.
“The Timor papers’ by Brian Toohey and Marian Wilkinson, reveals how Indonesian occupation of Portugese East Timor in 1975 was allowed to succeed by the USA and Australian government, which caused 2,00,000 deaths of the E Timorese people.
“Exposing Aparthied’s Death squads” by Max Du Preez and Jacques Pauw gives the details how they ran, ignoring daily death threats and once bombing of its office, an African language newspaper for four years in Apartheid Africa. A newspaper that exposed the assassinations and destruction caused by the Death squad of the regime, the existence of which was routinely denied by the Authorities. The newspaper was bankrupt due to legal battles into which it was trapped by the regime and closed down when Nelson Mandela came to power after Apartheid was done away with. Some of the leaders of those death squads were later tried in the court and others were given amnesty by Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Desmond Tutu.
Paul Foot, a British Journalist, who in an instance through his investigation ensured the innocence of four accused, who had already confessed the crime under torture, of the murder of a newspaper boy in London; in “ The Great Lockerbie Whitewash” argues that the prime earlier suspects of the sabotage of Panam flight 103, Iran and Syria, were let off hook, and Lybia was made a ‘Pariah’ to punish it in various ways, by the USA and British governments, purely for geopolitical reasons; in the context of an impending war with Iraq. Paul maintains that the lone Lybian accused was falsely punished on flimsy grounds.
‘Terrorist’ article taken from the book of Robert Fisk named ‘Pity the Nation’ exposes how hundreds of elderly civilians, women and children were massacred in one attack in an area from where the PLO militia had already fled, by Christian Phalangist, an ally of Israel, after they were taken prisoner, after Lebnon was attacked by Israel. Pilger argues that this book of Fisk “..ended the moral immunity that Israel had exploited in Europe, if not in the United States.”
“The secret war against miners” by Seumas Milane exposes how a British newspaper like Daily Mirror falsely instigated a defamation campaign against a trade Union leader of mineworkers named Arthur Scargill, while the ruling Thatcher government “… was planning to run down and sell off the British Coal industry.” The use of state machinery to forge documents and discredit an honest union leader to preempt the likely protests against a government policy is revealed in this article; that also exposes ‘…The incestuous relationship between the intelligence services and section of the media…’ in Britain.
“The Thalidomide Scandal: Where we went wrong?” by Phillip Knightley is an account of the failure of Journalism in investigating the matters that involve powerful transnational pharmaceutical companies. “The Upside-down world” by Uruguay born Eduardo Galeno is an eloquent criticism of the existing world order and the US’s domination in it. But this article falls short of giving an alternative of the same.
This book is a collection of many more such articles that helped to demystify the officially held explanations about various vital matters of historical importance. It is a blessing that such reports, as collected in this book, are allowed to publish in one part of the world, because in many other parts the critical or deferring voices against what is mainstream are silenced using various means. Freedom of speech could not be achieved overnight, it is a perpetual persistence to find the truth, preempting the designs of those that want to hijack it, by using different pretexts. In this cause this book of Pilger helps a great deal.
April 30, 2007.
WOW ! World Of Words. 