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Dec 27, 2014loudem rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
Part history, part fiction, this book is squarely anti war; or if it is not, reading it will show how truly absurd war is. The atrocities depicted in this book, the lost of 10,000 souls, given or take a few thousand, is mind boggling. But what Grass wanted to say in this book is quite foreign to me. This is a discussion amongst Germans. We are only witness to this. Germans have it etched in their collective memory. I gather it is quite difficult to find a just balance. In the end it's not all white or black. They cannot just wipe an entire part of their history. Things have to be acknowledged, accepted. The guilt has to be atone. Evil will always surface somewhere. But today we are so immune to violence, war, and injustice with TV and the Internet, that we've all become too complaisant. We do not differentiate between News, Film, or Video. It all have become eye candy to our disconnected selves.