European Zeitgeistlyrik: Peace Poems (Satis Shroff)

LAST TRAM TO LITTENWEILER (Satis Shroff)

(Quo Vadis, Deutschland?)

Midnight at Bertold's Brunen,

I boarded the last tram to Littenweiler.

Tired young people, school-kids

Disco, tavern, cinema and theatre visitors.

I sat opposite a blond German

And read Hanif Kureshi's

"London Kills Me."

A short African, a Bantu in jeans

Came, stood and turned his back.

An elderly, thick-set German skin-head

Covered with a cap and walkman,

Walked in with a sardonic laughter

Boisterous, obnoxious and high on alcohol.

The world was his stage.

He glared with his stone-blue eyes

At the African in the corner and said:

"This Boy is in the wrong place here.

Finish him off with a Kalashnikov

Rat-tat-a-tat! You'll see it soon

Wir werden es euch zeigen!"

The proud German in Bermudas

Laughed like a madman.

Our Teutonic Hero was not in the psychiatric ward

But in a crowded public Strassenbahn.

A so-called civilized German,

Grown angry, wild and inhuman.

What had the poor African done?

He'd asked perhaps for asylum

Or was perhaps a scholarship-holder

At the invitation of the German government.

The tram was full

But not a sound of protest was heard.

A silence that appeared like death.

Silence was consent.

Or was it angst?

The tram reached the Stadthalle

And the German became nastier.

Where was the civil courage of the Freiburger?

What was the use of buttons:

´Jeder ist ein Ausländer?´

What were silent protest marches

Worth the next day?

Or a Rundtisch talk?

Why light candles to mourn a dead alien?

Silent, passive witnesses to new tragedies,

Akin to the horrid infernos,

Of Hoyerswerda, Mölln and Solingen.

Everytime I hold a fork and knife

At breakfast, lunch and dinner

I'm reminded of the shame of Solingen.

The loud-mouthed skinhead identified himself

With a wrong pride, pomp and glory.

A glory that cost 40 million lives

A spirit of plunder and murder

On helpless, disabled, gypsies and Jews.

The Jews have left for safer shores,

Now the new-Jews are the foreigners.

As the tram reached the Lassberg Terminal

The bald-headed German swayed

And uttered loud and clearly:

"I LOVE MY FATHERLAND!"

Not once, but thrice.

He went reeling to a waiting bus

With his Vaterland's repertoire.

A country where the dead have fear

Where the alien's agony and angst abides

Quo vadis, Deutschland?

MENTAL MOLOTOVS (Satis Shroff)

When Hoyerswerda burns

They discuss about the asylum-seekers.

Peaceful, righteous Germans go

In the streets with candles.

When a house burns in Mölln

They discuss about bringing back

Soldiers from the dangers of Somalia.

At the Turkish funeral in Solingen

The Chancellor keeps away

And avoids thus

Rotten eggs and tomatoes

That might come his way.

When the trial comes

The skin and neonazi has a lot of hair.

He wears a two-piece suit,

Ties a tie around his neck

And looks oh-so-respectable.

He peers into the cameras

With clear blue eyes and says:

"I'm innocent and a victim

Of the modern industrial society".

And withdraws his statement.

The judges are lenient

And the neo gets off on bail

Gestures with his middle finger

And quips:"Leck mich am Arsch!"

As he speeds away in a car,

Only to reappear with a Molotov

Like the Sphinx again.

"Ausländer Raus!

Deutschland den Deutschen!"

These are the slogans

making the rounds in the nineties.

The old black and white flag

From the Third Reich

Raises no eyebrows

At soccer stadiums, streets and pubs.

It's fashionable again

To throw mental Molotovs

At blacks, browns, yellows

And all non-Teutonics

At cocktails, chats,

Stammtisch and in the streets

Against anything alien.

"I don't like foreigners

I'll kill you", says a drunk

In broad daylight at the Bahnhof.

Please don't ask me

How it feels

To be a non-Teutonic

In Deutschland.

HOPE HEALS (Satis Shroff)

Unto you that fear my name

Shall the sun of righteousness

Arise with healing in his wings

(Malachi)

Bridges of peace, friendship and togetherness

Are built on mutual respect,

Tolerance and Miteinander.

We must talk about the symbols

Of tyranny in your villages, towns and cities.

On Memorial Day we gather with earnest faces,

To honour and remember the people

Whose names are engraved on stones,

Who died in the two World Wars.

The suns and husbands have fallen,

But a new ghost raises its ugly head again,

The Neonazis who work for

The Bundesnachrichtendienst.,

Who receive money for their incompetence,

In Thuringen, Saxony,

Hessen and Lower Saxony.

The lesson of faschism taught us

Never to combine

Police with the secret service,

For it would be akin to the Gestapo,

The Geheimen Staatspolizei.

The sixteen secret services in Germany

Cannot coordinate and cooperate.

Since thirteen years have we given

Neonazis a free hand,

Who robbed banks,

Executed Turkish and Greek migrants.

The constitution makes it possible:

Germany for the Germany,

All aliens out!´

Long live the Freedom of Speech.

But prithee, where is the protection

Of the migrants and underdogs

Of the society?

Is a new holocaust in the offing?

The laxness of the governments,

Past and present,

Is astounding.

Yet there is no way

But the path of peace and togetherness.

The ewig gestrigen and the neos

Are still licking the wounds of war,

Wounds that won´t heal,

For they are infected with hate anew,

With brown-propaganda.

War has always been ugly and brutal.

The widows of the on-going krieg in the Hindukush,

The survivors who don´t understand their own world,

After the trauma of Vietnam, Irak, Afghanistan.

When the NATO sirens are tested,

The air vibrates with a monstrous noise.

Fear makes the olde soldier´s heart beats faster,

His pulse races and he almost chokes.

The memories and the fury of war overwhelm him.

Who will restore the faces we´ve adored?

Love, faith, togetherness and peace

Haven´t been lulled to sleep.

We still hear the clarion call

To the dangers of war,

To the hoarse shouts

Of the Neos in the streets,

Who strut and fret,

And believe Auschwitz was a lie.

A silence treads like cloudy shadows,

Among the people of Germany.

Hope hasn´t abandoned us yet,

Despite the petite victories of the rightists,

In Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

The people in these lands

Think otherwise.

In every good person there is a bad part,

In every bad person there´s a good trait,

Like ying and yang.

We can only appeal to humans,

Hope and pray for peace,

That the old wounds shall heal,

Between humans in this world.

Freiburg bombed in World War II

The Agony of War (Satis Shroff)

Once upon a time there was a seventeen year old boy

Who lived in the Polish city of Danzig.

He was ordered to join the Waffen-SS,

Hitler´s elite division.

Oh, what an honour for a seventeen year old,

Almost a privilege to join the Waffen-SS.

The boy said, "Wir wurden von früh bis spät

Geschliffen und sollten

Zur Sau gemacht werden."

A Russian grenade shrapnel brought his role

In the war to an abrupt end.

That was on April 20, 1945.

In the same evening,

He was brought to Meissen,

Where he came to know about his Vaterland´s defeat.

The war was lost long ago.

He realised how an ordinary soldier

Became helpless after being used as a tool in the war,

Following orders that didn´t demand heroism

In the brutal reality of war.

It was a streak of luck,

And his inability to ride a bicycle,

That saved his skin

At the Russian-held village of Niederlausitz.

His comrades rode the bicycle,

And he was obliged to give them fire-support

With a maschine-gun.

His seven comrades and the officer

Were slain by the Russians.

The only survivor was a boy

Of seventeen named Grass.

Günter Grass.

He abandoned his light maschine-gun,

And left the house of the bicycle-seller,

Through the backyard garden

With its creaky gate.

What were the chances in the days of the Third Reich

For a 17 year old boy to understand the world?

The BBC was a feindliche radio,

And Goebbels´ propaganda maschinery

Was in full swing.

There was no time to reflect in those days.

Fürcht und Elend im Dritten Reich,

Wrote Bertold Brecht later.

Why did he wait till he was almost eighty?

Why did he torment his soul all these years?

Why didn´t he tell the bitter truth,

About his tragi-comical role in the war

With the Waffen-SS?

He was a Hitlerjunge,

A young Nazi.

Faithful till the end.

A boy who was seduced by the Waffen-SS.

His excuse:

Ich habe mich verführen lassen."

The reality of the war brought

Endless death and suffering.

He felt the fear in his bones,

His eyes were opened at last.

Grass is a figure,

You think you know well.

Yet he´s aloof

And you hardly know him,

This literary titan.

He breathes literature

And political engagement.

In his new book:

Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln

He confides he has lived from page to page,

And from book to book.

Is he a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

Dr. Freud and Mephistopheles,

In the same breast?

Grass belongs to us,

For he has spent the time with us.

It was his personal weakness

Not to tell earlier.

He´s a playwright, director and actor

Of his own creativeness.

His characters Oskar and Mahlke weren´t holy Joes.

It was his way of indirectly showing

What went inside him.

Ach, his true confession took time.

It was like peeling an onion with tears,

One layer after the other.

Better late than never.

Works by Günter Grass: Surrealist poems Die Vorzüge der Windhühner 1956, grotesque plays Hochwasser 1956, Onkel-Onkel, Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo, Die bösen Köche 1957, original novel Die Blechtrommel 1959 (The Tin Drum), poems and drawings Gleisdreieck 1960, Hundejahre 1963, Die Plebjer proben den Aufstand 1966, Büchner Prize 1965, illustrated poems Ausgefragt 1967, third novel örtlich betäubt, play Davor, 1969 gesammelte Gedichte1971, Maria zuehren 1973, Liebe geprüft 1974, wie ich mich sehe 1980, ,fourth novel Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke 1972,a study of melancholy Melancholia I, lengthy novel Der Butt1977, Das Treffen in Telgte 1979, Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus 1980, Widerstand lernen, Politische Gegenreden 1980-1983, Aufsätze zur Literatur 1957-79 in 1980.Beim Häuten der Zwiebeln 2006.

Peace and War

It's Volkstrauertag

Death through war,

Gewaltherrschaft,

Go through your mind.

It's 2009,

Peace at last?

The victims of wars,

Memorials with mourning choirs,

Weeping war widows, orphans,

Wreaths and flowers for the dead.

The fire brigade stands at attention.

Uniforms,

Stiff humans

With eyes moving,

To take in the mourning.

In Freiburg-Kappel we sing

A Russian song,

To remember

The sons and husbands of Freiburg-Kappel

Who didn't return.

Ninety years ago,

The Constitution of Weimar.

Germany's Fundamental Laws,

Proclaimed sixty years ago.

The ugly Berlin wall

Fell twenty years ago.

The Second World War,

Began seventy years ago.

Alas, young Teutonic widows

Still cry today

In Germany,

For young husbands

Who died

And still die,

In the killing fields

Of the Hindukush,

There's a war

In far off Afghanistan.

The grandfather died

For a totalitarian regime.

The grandson dies today

For a democratic idea.

We Germans train the police

In the Hindukush.

What happens when they run

Over to the Talibans?

Islam binds the people

In the Hindukush.

What have we to offer?

Is war capitulation,

Against the forces of evil?

People who are beaten, tortured

When their ethnicity

And genes differ,

When people with illness or disability,

Are meted injustice,

Stamped as 'unworthy of life.'

There are those who faced

A firing squad,

When they defied

The rule of power,

Clutched to their beliefs,

Their pure conscience.

You can't change the past.

What has happened,

Has happened.

Don't close your eyes

To the hoary past,

Lest you be blind

To the present,

And the future.

It's not the Third World,

Where ideologies,

Fundamentalists,

Terror

Find their breeding grounds.

Rightist ideology

Is still mushrooming,

In the streets of Berlin,

Vienna and Bern.

The 'others' are still

Being terrorized,

Beaten, stabbed and kicked

In broad daylight.

Freedom and forgiveness,

Within and without,

Where art thou?

He who searches

Finds hope,

Tolerance,

Empathy

And dignity,

For there are enough

Righteous, honest,

Spiritual people with integrity

Who care about others.