Adam Krzeminski on Günter Grass and the gerontocracy

Adam Krzeminski, Germany expert for the Polish weekly "Polityka", sees the Grass debate "not only as an ingenious marketing strategy for Grass' new book 'Beim Häuten der Zwiebel' (Peeling Onions) but as a sequel in the process of exorcising Germany's past." Krzeminski comments that many are using the book to attack Grass and the entire generation of left-wing liberal intellectuals while others have simply had enough of the gerontocracy. "But without a doubt this is also about a more acute problem: the end of the authority of the so-called great intellectuals, the patriarchs who have served their time as moral and political authorities. It's precisely this aspect of the Grass debate that the right-wingers don't see – all they see in it is an opportunity to attack the leftist 'luxury liberals' while many young publishers in Germany are using it to deconstruct the old Federal Republic of Germany. Both Poles and Germans have other accounts to settle with Grass."

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