[3] The poem was first published on 4 April 2012 by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, La Repubblica and El País, triggering four days later the declaration by Eli Yishai, the Israeli Minister for the Interior, that Grass, who had visited Israel in 1967 and 1971,[4][5] was now persona non grata.
"[7] and answers it with "because my heritage, which is forever burdened by an unclearing stain, prohibits, to deliver this fact as a spoken truth to the state of Israel, to which I feel ... and want to stay connected".
[6] Yishai said: "Grass's poems are an attempt to guide the fire of hate toward the State of Israel and the Israeli people, and to advance the ideas of which he was a public partner in the past, when he wore the uniform of the SS.
[12] Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman criticized the "egoism of so-called Western intellectuals, who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people on the altar of crazy anti-Semites for a second time, just to sell a few more books or gain recognition" and demanded that European leaders condemn the work.
Primor added that there is no anti-Semitism in Grass's work, that his publications have been opposed to Nazism, and that it is a mistake to link the poem to his membership of the Waffen-SS, given that he repudiated Nazi ideology.
"[6] The Iranian deputy culture minister, Javad Shamaqdari, offered effusive praise of the poem in a letter to Grass: "I have read your literary work, highly responsible both from a human and historical point of view, and I found it extremely timely.
[16][17] Hamid Dabashi, who teaches literature at New York's Columbia University, argued that the poem's importance lay in the context of the author being ostracized by the content of his own work: "The daring imagination of Günter Grass' poem—a heroically tragic act precisely because the poet is implicated in the moral outrage of his own poem—is significant precisely because it captures this German and by extension European logic/madness of colonial conquest and moral cannibalism.
"[15] In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki called Grass's text "a disgusting poem", opining that its sole purpose was to cause a scandal and draw attention to himself, and that he knew attacking Jews would achieve this.
[20] An Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor, Itamar Yaoz-Kest, published a poem in response, entitled "The Right to Exist: a Poem-Letter to the German Author", which addresses Grass by name.
This is seen as referring to the Samson Option, Israel's alleged deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a "last resort" against nations whose military attacks threaten its existence.
[24] On 7 April, someone in Göttingen wrote "shut your mouth" in red paint on a sculpture commissioned and donated by Grass to commemorate free speech.
"[27] Journalist Larry Derfner wrote: "Günter Grass told the truth, he was brave in telling it, he was brave in admitting that he'd been drafted into the Waffen SS as a teenager, and by speaking out against an Israeli attack on Iran, he's doing this country a great service at some personal cost while most Israelis and American Jews are safely following the herd behind Bibi [Netanyahu] over the cliff.
[28] In the same newspaper, Anshel Pfeffer argued that: "Logic and reason are useless when a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less, does not understand that his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualifies him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began.
"[26] On 11 April, in an article for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Grass compared the ban on his entering Israel to his treatment by dictatorships in Myanmar and East Germany.