Grass compares government to Stasi, drawing new ire from minister who banned him

Günter Grass on Wednesday compared the Israeli government to the Stasi, the infamously ruthless secret police of the Communist German Democratic Republic, further angering an already peeved Jerusalem.

Grass’s first public response to the Interior Ministry’s decision to bar him from Israel drew an immediate response from Interior Minister Eli Yishai. Grass, as an ex-SS volunteer, should know all about “dark regimes,” Yishai said, but his Stasi parallel was “mistaken.”

“If Grass is interested in putting down his pen and no longer writing anti-Semitic poems, I will be happy to explain to him — in a neutral country — why a German who volunteered to serve in the SS under the Nazi Heinrich Himmler does not have the right to enter the country whose people he tried to exterminate,” Yishai said.

Earlier Wednesday, Grass published a scathing op-ed in Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the same paper that earlier this month published a controversial poem in which Grass accuses Israel of endangering world peace, comparing Yishai to Erich Mielke, who headed East Germany’s Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi, from 1957 to 1989.

“It happened to me three times that a country forbade me to enter: The German Democratic Republic, know as GDR, started, at the behest of the minister for state security security, a man called Mielke,” the German author wrote.

‘I still see myself as irredeemably connected with the Land of Israel’

The second time that he was barred from entering a country was in 1986, when he wasn’t allowed to visit Burma. “In both cases, common practice in dictatorships prevailed,” Grass wrote.

“Now it is the interior minister of a democracy that punishes me with a travel ban whose reasoning for the mandatory measure that he imposed is reminiscent — according to the tone of it — of Minister Mielke’s verdict.”

On Sunday, Yishai said the 84-year-old Nobel laureate would be barred from entering Israel, as his works “are attempts to incite hatred towards the state and the people of Israel, and in doing so, promotes the ideology to which he gave expression when he wore the SS uniform.”

Earlier this month, Grass – who had served in the Waffen-SS toward the end of World War II – published a poem in which he bashed Israel for endangering world peace by threatening to annihilate the Iranian people. His poem immediately drew harsh condemnations from German and Israeli intellectuals and politicians. But even many people critical of Grass’ poem considered Yishai’s decision to ban Grass from entering Israel ill advised.

In Wednesday’s article, Grass wrote that Yishai would not be able to prevent him from “keeping alive my helpful memories of several Israel trips.”

“I still see myself as irredeemably connected with the Land of Israel,” he wrote, recounting conversations and discussions he had here with Israeli friends.

“The GDR no longer exists,” Grass wrote. “But as a nuclear power of uncontrollable extent, the Israeli government understands itself as independent and is until now not accessible for any reprimand. Only Burma allows for a small hope to grow.”

Responding to the criticism, Yishai struck back at Grass.

“Undoubtedly, Grass, as a former member of dark regimes, knows how to identify them. But his claim is mistaken this time,” Yishai said Wednesday night. “[Israel is] a smart and calculating regime, which is proud of its country, its strength and its Jewishness.”