Introduction

The publication and reception of “Was gesagt werden muss” (“What Must Be Said”), the controversial “poem” that Günter Grass disseminated on April 4, 2012, inSüddeutsche Zeitung,La Repubblica, andEl Pais, paradigmatically illustrates diverse and crucial issues surrounding the German memory of the past. Immediately following its simultaneous appearance in several European publications, this text provoked passionate responses from notables in German politics, academia, and the public arena, precipitating widespread commentary in ways that poems, even political poems, usually do not. The reasons for the intense attention seem obvious: Germany’s most illustrious writer, often considered the Germans’ moral conscience