Günter Grass criticises refugee treatment from beyond the grave

Günter Grass laments that Germans who were once refugees themselves now display the same level of intolerance towards incomers that they once encountered. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Philip Oltermann in Berlin

Monday 31 August 2015 - The Guardian

For much of his lifetime, he was the personification of Germany’s moral conscience, with literary interventions on anything from postwar guilt to the Israel-Palestine debate. And it appears that even his death in April this year hasn’t dimmed Günter Grass’s determination to provoke debate.

In his last ever book, published in Germany at the end of last week, the Nobel prize-winning novelist and poet issues a beyond-the-grave warning about rising vitriol towards refugees. One of the poems in Vonne Endlichkait (On Finiteness) laments that Germans who were once refugees themselves now displayed the same level of intolerance towards refugees that they themselves once encountered.
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