April 8, 2012
German poet, Günter Grass, awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, was declared a persona non grata by the Internal Affairs Minister of Israel, over his poem, ‘What Must Be Said,’ which denounced Israel’s nuclear program and aggression toward Iran. Grass, then 84, said he had kept silent on the issue for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic. Grass had spent decades pushing his country to confront its Nazi past. In 2006 he announced that he had served in the Waffen SS division; although he was only 17 years old when the war ended in 1945, the admission, coming so late, tarnished his legacy.
