Ever since its founding after World War II the German Federal Republic, to gain acceptance into the family of “western democracies,” while denouncing Hitler and his most famous henchmen, almost completely restricted condemnation to the horrifying annihilation of the Jewish people while distorting or ignoring the earlier, intense fascist attacks against the Left, especially the Communist left, which so often ended with a noose or a guillotine. Largely forgotten were also Nazi crimes against almost every country in Europe, beginning in Spain in 1936-1939 and climaxing in the killing of an estimated 27 million people of the USSR. In fact, a large number of the perpetrators went unpunished or regained influence and prosperity. Meanwhile, the policy-makers built up connections with any and every Israeli government, including large financial support, often in the form of armaments (like submarines). But since such support served as evidence that Germany had “overcome its past,” total, blind approval must never ever be questioned and was given a special new stature as “basic state principle” (Staats-raison). As Jewish life gradually returned to Germany this taboo was extended to an official, repeated rejection of “anti-Semitism.” In general this should and would be greatly welcomed – except that it was directed more and more against anyone, including Jews (denounced as “self-haters”) who disapproved of Israeli policy or evidenced any sympathy and solidarity for those – the Palestinians – who had for untold centuries cared for their gardens and olive trees and established a rich culture and whose repression was largely banished from the media of the ”western world.”
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is ...
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