“Each sixth kindergarten child has a speech deficit” announced the Monday headlines on the front cover of the Berlin’s Tagesspiegel. The subtitle reads: despite immense investment in Berlin’s kindergartens, there is very little improvement. The biggest problem is in NeuKoelln [the neighborhood with the largest number of migrants in the city].

The opinion page, with the cover “speechless,” describes the “problem” even better:  directing the responsibility to “education politicians,” the anonymous writer says: even after many years of visiting the Kindergarten (it is free from age 3 in Berlin, and heavily , wonderfully subsidized otherwise), more than 3,700 children of Berlin, one year before they go to school, have significant speech deficits.  Among children with “non German Origin” the number is 34%. That op-ed ends with the sentence: “now time presses: society cannot afford to give up even one of these children before school begins.”

This makes me think of the classic catholic definition of Limbo, of the newborn that dies before they even get baptized by the church, but also about the excellent ethnography by Haim Hazan, the Limbo People—where he talks about the liminality of the elderly in a Jewish old age home in London. There I learned how time is organized to exclude them, over and over again, from partaking in what is otherwise life by, most significantly, obliterating the future, which in turn helps them ‘cope’ with the end of life.

Back to the Tagesspiegel article: The reader is led to conflate a child’s ability to speak at all with that ability as it is measured by the German test in the German language. The reader is also morally implicated as speechless, herself, facing the disappointing outcomes in language-abilities despite the investment. Then, proposes the newspaper op-ed, after we approach families with “remote education” problems, after we let their children register to the kindergarten when they are one year old and after we qualify teachers to better serve their needs, we need to direct our gaze to the families— “things go wrong there” (in direct translation from the German). Where do things go wrong?

We happen to be one of those families, so I can write about what a very privileged version of two “white” academics experience with a child at this age. Our five years old son speaks three languages and about a year ago was deemed as having “speech deficits” in German. We, then living in a part of town that has the least problem, in the former East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, were also asked whether we heard of autism and very sensitively—that perhaps the problem is inherent in our language. Perhaps we do not speak clearly some consonants with which our son had issues.  From this we also learn that unification is finally a success story: the former East isn’t inherently a problem unless it is also poor, added Die Welt on the issue.

A few months later, we switched to a multi-lingual kindergarten across town in the former West Berlin that speaks all the languages (Hebrew, German, English) that our son speaks. We went Jewish, basically.

He loves it, but about two months ago we were summoned to the kindergarten and told that he has both speech and also social issues, that perhaps something is wrong with his brain and that he’ll possibly need another kind of school. Professionals should test him. We agreed and they did, four times, and found that the child is quite intelligent and likes to play on his own and do math. The doctor who tested our son first was perhaps the most telling. He showed culture-specific pictures that our son then needed to describe. The best example was a picture of an old man carrying a sack with round figures inside. On the right hand side was an apple tree, the left- a flower garden. Our son said—in the backpack there are flowers. The medical doctor, a cool looking guy a little bit older than me, told our son that in Germany many kids say that this the man is carrying a sack of potatoes. He then looked at me and said—perhaps your husband, the philosopher, would be able to explain your son’s answer.

It was indeed an existential question for us all (I, the sociologist, wanted to explain under which circumstances I am spoken to like that and my son fails to recognize the core of the local culture, but remained silent). The doctor then asked what we heard earlier—perhaps in your language there is no L and Sh. Then, confused, I said- but I just told you we speak English (and Hebrew). When we agreed that it would be best for our child to stay another year in the kindergarten, he asked me “will you send him there”?

I said of course. He is very happy in the kindergarten. I then heard: “well, some people with migration background (we do not name the monster “migrant,” mostly because the child in question is often third generation German born) when they hear that the child will not go to school [in the year dictated by their date of birth] say that it is too hard for them to send them anywhere.” I assured him that this will not be the case and thought what kind of a threat, and an assumption, it is on our working hours?

The unintelligibility of the migrant as a total other is so severe, so pronounced, that Berlin tries time and again to save the children from this fate, and fails. This ‘deficit’ is described in terms in language as such, and never in terms of potency, of multi lingualism. Without language these families have no history, or the wrong one. In the US and in the migrant country I come from, Israel, I know many people—some of whom teach in universities—that have no one mother tongue. But that never made their parents suspect in the way it does in Berlin. Our solution was to let the professionals assess the child, intervene, and make sure that we stay powerful enough when it comes to the definition of the situation. I cannot imagine what a less recognizably “western” mother goes through when she is first approached with stigmata—she is not catholic, she does not have Goffman and the Limbo People (even if she read them, she is not heard anyway) and she perhaps does not have time to read the newspaper articles in the very same Tagesspiegel that reveal that boys can get cured of autism.

Upon boarding the flight back last Wednesday night from NY to Berlin I picked up the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), finding on its first page a picture of Guenter Grass, holding a pipe. The headline read “Ein Aufschrei” (An outcry): Guenter Grass warns of a war against Iran: “the literature Nobel Prize Laureate’s claims that Germany should not provide Israel with Submarines.”

I did not read the poem, “What Must Be Said” on the flight (being busy with two young children and recurring attempts to sleep), but thought that, from that headline, I would support an outcry against attacking Iran. I like poetry making the first pages of centrist (left-leaning) newspapers, and as for the pipe and the submarines, they are signs of older times, part of performing memory in Germany around Grass who is identified with the pipe, the 68’ers and Germany’s underwater adventures, and its declared commitment to Israel’s security. So be it. But now I have my concerns about the not very good poem and about the controversies surrounding it.

In the taxi ride back home, we heard discussions in all news channels (as the driver browsed from one to the next) about Grass’s anti-Semitism, which perplexed me. We read the poem at home and were underwhelmed. Thomas Steinfeld noted in the SZ on Wednesday night, it is not Grass’s first poem. Actually, the first published one made him join group 47 in 1955, and his poetry has always been full of exaggerations. Exaggerations are part of the poetic form, we are reminded, and Grass went wrong here, as he erred about, for instance, “trying to save the collapsing GDR from the German Federal Republic.”

I would like to focus a bit on the language of the lyrical prose, preserving and highlighting parts of it that have been overlooked, like the discussion of comparable moral standing and silence, and the performance of national memory narrative.

In the German (and Israeli) discussion following Grass’s poem, the focus has been on the attack on Israeli atomic policy, on Israel’s moral superiority in the Middle East and on Grass’s statement that Israel is a threat to world peace. Since we are dealing with a poem, we ought to also consider the form and language of the poem. Silence (Schweigen) is repeated five times, concealment (Verschweigen) twice, and the formulation “what must be said” and speech (Rede) three more times. Barring or forbidding (Untersage) once. “Outspoken truth” once. Mr. Grass here liberates himself from a long, allegedly nationally imposed, silence about Israel. This silence, he maintains, is due to the threat of being called an anti-Semite, which he is ending now because “tomorrow might be too late.” But here I focus on the performance of national narratives by Grass, about the discourse of silence. It resembles the opening of Foucault’s History of Sexuality about the repressive hypothesis that creates and marks more discursive mechanisms affording speech and control of speech about sex.

What is the role of writing about breaking the silence? How can a Grass poem stir such discussion? Stephen Evens wrote for the BBC:

“In the years after the war, Guenter Grass’s writing gave him a status of Conscience of the Nation, and in a nation which takes its soul-searching very seriously indeed […] For more than 60 years after the war, he showed a zeal and what seemed like a searing honesty in the way he berated those who refused to admit their own dark pasts. But this reputation was dented when it emerged in 2006 that he had kept quiet about his own past as a member of the Waffen-SS (a branch of the military under the direct control of the Nazi party). Even then, he was not universally discredited. Some took this as evidence of the complexity of the psyche of the man (and by implication of the nation).”

With this reputation it is easier to understand the context of the discussion in the German press and how easy it was for the Israeli press to also pick up on the stained, repressed past of Grass as a Waffen SS member.

Concerning the content and form of talking about silence, Grass is actually onto something quite disturbing here, as Michael Naumann, the former culture minister under the Red-Green coalition of Schroeder, recognized in an article on Monday in the Tagesspiegel. Namely a way of speaking, which I heard time and again in reaction to the Holocaust Memorial, often from right-wing radicals, but also from other Memorial visitors: they are not allowed to say what they think about Israel. Israel stands, at least for these actors, for the Jews. Naumann declares the “Poem” (quotation marks in the original) a moral and political scandal. He asks: what motivates Grass? What speaks through him? And he answers:

“…once, just once, to have a vacation from the German ‘responsibility history’; once, just once, to shout at the Jews that they can also be perpetrators; once, just once, like Martin Walser did, to withdraw from the memory the photos, handed down to us, of the concentration camps […] but this exactly we have already heard. What, for the sake of God, speaks there in Guenter Grass?”

Who picked up on the poem’s language? The AJC (American Jewish Committee) condemned using the verb “Verbrechen” or “perpetrator” to describe Israel’s security policy. Westerwelle, the German Foreign Minister wrote yesterday in the popular Bild that positioning Israel and Iran on the same moral level is absurd.

The Left party, historically connected to the SED (the former ruling party in the GDR), supported Grass, providing the only outspoken supporter of his views.

As for German Jewish symbolism and the timing of the poem’s publication, Haaretz reports:

“Emmanuel Nahshon, a diplomat at the Israeli embassy in Berlin, said the allegation – just before the Jewish feast of Passover – that Israel wanted to wipe out the Iranian people belonged to a European anti-Semitic tradition of accusing Jews of ‘ritual murder.’ ”

Meanwhile, a cartoon in Haaretz shows two young men on a roof with their garden of marijuana plants, and one guy is saying to the other “I thought Grass was already banned.” Haaretz’s editorial reacted to Yishai’s declaration of Grass as persona non grata by stating that he “just wrote a poem” and people are free to express their views. What I find interesting about the drama following the publication is the talk about formerly understood taboos: “What Must be Said” is Grass’s reaction to his compulsion to stay silent because of Germany’s responsibility toward Israel after the Holocaust.

All in all, it must be seen as something positive that so much attention and interest has come to light from the publication of a poem, however weak in content and form. At the same time, it is worthwhile to mention and recall just how weak it in fact is. Perhaps the most important lesson in this episode, however, has not to do with the poem itself so much as the way we (in speaking about it, or in neglecting to do so) extend underlying narratives about the political significance of silence and speech, about certain subjects (the Holocaust, Israel, nuclear power and weaponry), in certain places. Or, indeed, anywhere.