![Günter Grass](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/4/5/1333629724717/G-nter-Grass-008.jpg)
'Günter Grass says he had not spoken out previously because his nationality forbade it: any German breaking the silence on the Israel nuclear programme may be accused of antisemitism.' Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe
The anti-war poem published by Günter Grass is a subtle but straightforward example of a tendency in Germany that the historian Dan Diner has called "exonerating projection": the relativisation of the Holocaust through the implicit equation of Israel with Nazi Germany. In the poem, What Must Be Said, the 84 year-old Nobel prize-winner who was a member of the Waffen SS as a teenager imagines himself as a "survivor" of an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran.
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