今日德國需要怎樣的民族良心

FOR years I was frustrated, and a bit embarrassed, to admit that I didn’t much like the work of Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died Monday. He was, after all, Germany’s most acclaimed writer of the postwar era — not just our national poet, but for many Germans, our conscience. Yet he did not speak to me.

多年以來，每當我承認自己不太喜歡週一去世的諾貝爾獎得主君特·格拉斯(Guenter Grass)的作品時，我總是有挫敗感，還有點慚愧。畢竟，他是德國戰後時期最負盛名的作家——他不只是我們的民族詩人，對於許多德國人來說，他還是我們的良知。然而，他卻沒能引起我的共鳴。

His novel “Crabwalk,” published in 2002, was the first book I felt I didn’t have to finish. I was angry with myself. I took pride in finishing every book I started, and here was a novel I should have found impossible not to like: It dealt with memory, and the Nazis; it used the metaphor of the crab’s gait to show how Germans had to go backward to turn forward, not only with regard to what they had done as Nazis but also what the war had done to those who weren’t Nazis — and to their children, to people like me.

格拉斯2002年出版的小說《蟹行》(Crabwalk)，是第一本我覺得自己沒必要讀完的書。我對自己感到惱火。我一直爲讀完每一本自己開始看的書而感到驕傲，而且我本來絕不應該不喜歡這本小說：它關注的是記憶，以及納粹；它用蟹步的比喻，來闡述德國人不得不後退才能轉身前行，這不光涉及德國人作爲納粹所做過的事，還有戰爭對除了納粹之外的人的影響，以及對他們孩子的影響，比如我。

Yet his work didn’t work on me. The best explanation I could give myself back then for giving up on him was that I simply didn’t like his style.

然而，他的這部作品沒有打動我。我當時給自己放棄讀他的作品找的最好的理由是，我不喜歡他的風格。

I was able to pinpoint my frustration only when I met Mr. Grass in person. A couple of months ago he came from his home in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, to visit my newspaper’s office in nearby Hamburg. The conference room was packed: Everyone — editors, assistants, interns — all crowded in to see this living legend. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with mixed emotions about the man, the atmosphere was one of near complete adoration. It was the kind of secular worship that I expect no younger author will ever experience, even if he or she wins a Nobel.

直到我見到了格拉斯本人，我才明白了我沮喪的原因。幾個月前，他從位於波羅的海沿岸的呂貝克市的家，來到了位於附近的漢堡市的我們報紙的辦公室。會議室擠得水泄不通：編輯、助理、實習生，所有人都擠了進來，想要一睹這個活着的傳奇。儘管我不確定自己是唯一對此人懷有複雜情緒的人，現場洋溢着的幾乎全都是對他的崇拜之情。那是一種非宗教式的崇拜，我估計年輕一些的作家永遠不會有此體驗，即使得了諾貝爾獎也一樣。

Dressed in a red wool sweater and a thick tweed jacket and sipping white wine, Mr. Grass spent most of the time talking about himself, and how much his work as a public intellectual had influenced our paper, Die Zeit. The longer he spoke, the more clearly I felt what had always made me uneasy about him. And not just him, but the entire class of older left-wing German intellectuals that he represented.

格拉斯穿了一件紅色羊毛衫，外面罩着厚花呢外套。他抿着白葡萄酒，多數時間都在談論自己，以及作爲一名公共知識分子，他的作品對我們的報紙——《時代》週報(Die Zeit)——產生了多大的影響。他講話的時間越長，我就越清楚地感受到了他哪裏讓我覺得不對勁。這不光是他一個人，還有他所代表的所有老一代的德國左翼知識分子。

Your generation has had it pretty easy, I wanted to blurt out. You grew big in times when strong ideology and determined judgment counted more than the hard work of examining what is actually going on around us. The way you saw the world counted more than the way it actually was. And there was always a lot of self in your righteousness.

我真想對他說，你們那一代人取得成功太容易了。在你成長的時代，強大的意識形態和堅定的判斷，比努力研究我們周圍究竟發生了什麼更加重要。你如何看待世界比世界究竟如何運轉更重要。在你們的正義之中，總是有太多自我。

Today we know that ideologies aren’t realities. Writers and intellectuals don’t have that crutch; what is demanded of them, in the first place, is not moral judgment, but clearheaded analysis of our ever-accelerating world. Only in your time, Günter Grass, could you become a moral authority. Today, you would never make it.

今天，我們知道了那些意識形態並不是真實事物。如今的作家和知識分子沒有那種柺杖；他們的首要責任不是道德判斷，而是對我們這個加速變化的世界的敏銳分析。只有在你們那個時代，君特·格拉斯，你才能成爲一個道德權威。在今天，你永遠也做不到。

I wanted to say all of this, in front of my enraptured colleagues. But I didn’t dare.

我當時很想把這番話說給我興奮的同事們。但我不敢。

Someone once said that the days in which politicians decided the fate of entire nations over a glass of whiskey are gone. But so are the days when writers could sit down and divide the world into good and evil through the haze of a tobacco pipe, as Mr. Grass and other members of Gruppe 47, a writers’ group formed to renew German literature, did so famously in the 1950s and ’60s.

有人曾說過，政治家們在喝一杯威士忌的功夫決定整個國家命運的時代已經過去了。然而，作家們坐在那裏叼着菸斗，在煙霧繚繞中把世界按善惡劃分的時代，也一去不復返了。衆所周知，格拉斯和47社(Gruppe 47)的其他成員上世紀五六十年代就是這麼做的。47社是爲振興德國文學而成立的作家組織。

To say that this is a healthy development does not mean to slight their achievement. World War II left Germany without a moral compass; writers like Mr. Grass, Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz provided it. The country needed intellectual leaders who epitomized certainty, however vain they came across.

這是一種好的變化，但這麼說並不是在貶低他們的成就。第二次世界大戰讓德國失去了道德指南針，格拉斯、海因裏希·伯爾(Heinrich Böll)和齊格飛·藍茨(Siegfried Lenz)等作家拿出了它。這個國家當時需要知識領袖，他們代表着確定性，無論他們顯得多麼自負。

There are times when moral rigor is needed, but they pass. And yet Mr. Grass was never able to move beyond them. Worse, he seemed to believe that, as the nation’s conscience, the rules he applied to others didn’t apply to him.

有時候，道德上的嚴苛是必須的，但那個時代已經遠去了。然而，格拉斯卻沒有走出那個時代。更糟糕的是，作爲民族的良知，他似乎認爲，應用於其他人的規則不適用於自己。

In 2006 he revealed, just before the release of his much-awaited memoir, that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the most murderous branch of the Nazi war machine. He maintained that he never fired a shot himself, but nevertheless his confession had a disturbing anticipation of impunity to it. Did Mr. Grass believe that being declared Germany’s most important contemporary writer outweighed the fact that he had been active in one of the worst Nazi organizations?

2006年，就在格拉斯備受期待的回憶錄出版之前，他透露自己曾加入黨衛軍，即納粹戰爭機器中最殘忍的那一部分。他堅稱，自己一槍未發，不過，他的坦白中包含了對於免責的期待，這讓人不安。格拉斯是否認爲，被認定爲德國最重要的當代作家，比他曾是最惡劣的一個納粹機構的成員的事實更重要？

He seemed to take his moral superiority for granted, even as he drifted farther from the mainstream. In 2012 he didn’t just publish a poem — “What Must Be Said” — accusing Israel of endangering world peace; he seemed to believe he spoke for all of Germany when he did.

他似乎習慣了自己在道德上的優越感，即使他已經和主流漸行漸遠。2012年，他不僅是發表了一首詩——《一定要說的話》(What must be said)——指責以色列威脅世界和平；他似乎還認爲，自己代表了所有德國人的心聲。

He took the same tone at our meeting in Hamburg, when he accused the European Union and NATO of provoking war with Russia. Sitting face to face with Mr. Grass, I decided to clothe my unease in a question. Did he not think that a war was already going on, sparked by an illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine?

在漢堡的會面中，他用了同樣的口氣，指責歐盟(European Union)和北約(NATO)挑起了與俄羅斯的戰爭。坐在格拉斯對面的我，決定借一個提問委婉表達自己的不安。他難道不認爲戰爭已經開始，而且是俄羅斯非法入侵烏克蘭觸發了戰爭嗎？

Mr. Grass didn’t answer. Instead, he made some broader remarks on Russia and the West. But there was no reason to be disappointed. I felt, clearly, that I came from a different Germany. And that it was all right if he had the impression that I had not spoken to him at all.

格拉斯沒有回答這個問題。相反，他說了一些有關俄羅斯和西方的大道理。不過，我沒有什麼好失望的。我清晰地感到，我和他來自不同的德國。如果他感覺我們完全無法溝通，那也無所謂。