In view of the threat “of the extinction of the Iranian people”, the Nobel Prize laureate notably insists that Berlin should refuse to supply submarines to Tel-Aviv, arguing that Israeli nuclear capability is “a danger to the fragile peace in the world”. At the same time, the writer offers less detailed criticism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he simply describes as a “loudmouth”. 

Grass, who shocked Europe with the 2006 revelations of his involvement in the Waffen SS, explains that fear of the “habitual verdict of anti-Semiticism” led him to remain silent for too long.

In Germany, controversy immediately followed the publication of the text, which featured on the front pages of three national dailies, including Die Welt, which headlined: “Günter Grass, the eternal anti-Semite”. The star columnist of the Berlin daily, polemicist Henryk M. Broder remarks –

Grass is the prototype of the educated anti-Semite, who is well-meaning when it comes to Jews. Haunted by feelings of guilt and shame and also driven by the desire to settle history, he is now attempting to disarm the 'cause of the recognizable threat.'

The Berlin daily is referring to a bill that the Estonian Minister of Defence is hoping to have adopted in March. According to the text, all those who took part in the fight against the Soviet Union during the Second World War will be granted the status of “freedom fighters,” which includes Estonian members of the SS.

Previous attempts to push through the bill failed in 2006 and on 2010. This time around, "majority support appears to guaranteed,” reports TAZ. The Russian embassy in Tallinn has described the bill as “blasphemous,” while the German Green Party has criticised a "retrospective justification of the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler’s henchmen in the Soviet Union."

The text of the bill implicitly targets the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, and the 1.2 million Armenians (two thirds of the Armenian population under the Ottoman Empire) who died in the course of officially sanctioned deportations and massacres. The bill, which will have to be approved by the French Senate and for a second time by the French parliament before it becomes law, has provoked the ire of Ankara, which has recalled its ambassador and threatened France with diplomatic and trade reprisals.

In Le Point, columnist Pierre Beylau deplores what he describes as a self-interested manoeuvre to attract more votes in the run-up to next year’s presidential election:

Is it really the time to raise the long-standing issue of the 1915 genocide, which no one serious actually contests? Obviously this is a vote-getting initiative backed by MPs for whom Armenian support may prove crucial. Acting to please a lobby, they have no qualms about the risk of causing considerable diplomatic and economic damage.

For French diplomacy in the Middle East "the power struggle with Ankara is absurd," adds Le Monde. However, the daily notes that the main problem rests in the nature of the bill itself:

It is not the role of the legislature – which has support in this regard from the Elysée – to say what is history. In recent years, French officialdom has come to adore the judicialisation of history, voting in memorial laws that make negationism a crime. But these measures are pointless. They do not even relieve the pain of those see their past (…) ignobly re-written so that it can be denied.

For its part, news website Mediapart interprets the quarrel in the light of the history of France and Turkey, two modern nations that have been marked by the influence of founding fathers — General de Gaulle and Mustapha Kemal — who continue to influence their respective political elites.

Both France and Turkey suffer to varying degrees from the same national pathology: an incapacity to cope with the loss of past grandeur; a desperate desire to hold on to a supreme saviour who protected the motherland with an ironclad mythology; a refusal to take an inventory of history, and to sort through it so as to acknowledge mistakes and crimes.

In Turkey, in the English version of the daily Zaman, columnist Bülent Keneş launches a direct attack on the French president: “By introducing bans to one side of the debate about a controversial issue that must be settled by historians and just ahead of the presidential elections, he showed everyone what democracy à la Sarkozy is.”

Given his now-well-established interest in creating dogmas via political and legal means over controversial incidents of the past, he should have turned a critical eye to France’s unquestionable colonial past instead of peering into Turkey’s dubious history. Banning views and ideas that may be voiced against a so-called “genocide” to which Armenians were allegedly subjected to in 1915, even before offering an official apology for the bloody massacres France had committed in Algeria until the very recent past, i.e., the second half of the 20th century, as well as for the French mass killings in other African countries, Indochina and in the French colonies in the islands could only be expected from a mealymouthed jester of French politics called Sarkozy.

In Milliyet, Mehmet Tezkan argues that the French President “has two reasons why he wants this law to be approved:”

One is a political investment in Armenian votes. The second is to damage relations with Ankara. Relations between Sarkozy and Erdogan are not good at all. From now on, all ties will be cut. Sarkozy's plan is to alienate Turkey from the EU with such manoeuvres.

Finally, Ali Bayramoglu writing for the daily Yeni Şafak points out:

According to the current interpretation of the 301st article of the Turkish Penal Code, it is a crime to say "there was an Armenian genocide". In France, it is a crime to say "the Armenian Genocide did not take place". Can we not realise that both attitudes restrict freedom of thought… and prevent both sides from questioning themselves? The French law will cause will major damage.

In the columns of the same newspaper, the internationally renowned philosopher writes of “the need to save the dignity of democracy,” and describes outgoing Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou as “the archetype of a politician who came a cropper attempting to bridge the widening rift between financial experts and citizens; [between] the systemic imperatives of unbridled financial capitalism – which politics has untethered from the real economy – and the electorate’s complaints about empty promises of social justice."

In the context of a crisis that has made it impossible to sit on the fence, Habermas argues that the politicians should clearly explain the situation and restore power of decision to citizens: “this is not only a question of democracy, but also a question of dignity."

He continues: "the Greek disaster should act as a warning against the post-democratic strategy adopted by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. The concentration of a power in the hands of an inner circle of government leaders who impose their agreements on national parliaments is not the way forward": what is needed is a new European constitutional process with an integral role for citizens…

Other commentators have been quick to respond to the philosopher’s article, notably Spiegel Online’s star columnist, Jan Fleischhauer, who furiously accuses Habermas to be "the latest heavyweight among a number of well-meaning German intellectuals" to have  joined “the camp of hysterics with a penchant for the apocalypse”.

"In his account of the euro crisis, politicians have been crushed by the economy to the point where they have become zealous underlings of financial capitalism. […] But when it is time to make concrete demands, Habermas runs into the same problem as the one encountered by the Occupy Wall Street activists, who, like him, have nothing to say except that wealth should be redistributed in some way. In truth, the sole aim of all of this rhetorical effort is to absolve politicians of their responsibility, so that they are free to implement their policies undisturbed."

Noting that the new law could lead to dissolution of the party, the Bratislava daily also recalls that no high-ranking Communists – neither Vasil Bilak, who signed the letter of invitation to the armies of the Warsaw Pact in 1968, nor the head of State Security, Alojz Lorenc – have ever been put on trial. SME is all the more sceptical as it considers that “the justice system is still run by (former) members of that party that organised state terror.” In the 2010 elections, the KSS received 0.83% of the vote.

The Czech Republic, on the other hand, seems headed towards more flexible legislation. The Health Ministry announced that it is preparing a drug law that would allow marijuana to be considered as a medical drug. It could be prescribed to those with serious health conditions; those undergoing chemotherapy, or suffering from multiple sclerosis or a terminal illness, for example. "The marijuana will be cultivated by the State or imported from abroad," says Czech daily MF Dnes, explaining that the hemp could be cultivated directly by the State or by private establishments under licence. It could also be imported from the Netherlands, which, due to current legislation, is the most probable solution. It remains to be seen, the paper notes, how the new "medicine" will be made available only in pharmacies and via medical prescription and not on the black market.

Opponents argue that more restrictive legislation will only cause the “abortion underground” to flourish. Officially, only 538 legal abortions were carried out in this country of 38 million inhabitants in 2010, but unofficial statistics from the Federation for Women and Family Planning estimate the number of Polish women who have an abortion at over 100,000 annually. This means, writes Newsweek Polska, that existing legislation, in place since 1993, which allows a pregnancy to be aborted in only three cases (rape or incest, serious risk to mother’s life or health, or permanent and irreversible damage to the foetus) “practically doesn’t work”. Recent poll shows that the Polish public is split almost evenly on the issue, with 45 percent supporting legal abortion and 50 percent in favour of an absolute ban.

If the SVP plan were implemented, Switzerland’s population would increase by 17 million (it currently stands at 7 million) with Stuttgart becoming its largest city. “We should facilitate integration of these regions which are suffering under the rule of the European political class that has no interest in them whatsoever. Their citizens have been looking jealously at our self-governing state and long for a democracy with human face”, explain SVP politicians.

The Swiss authorities have not commented on the proposal which nevertheless caused much glee in the German embassy in Bern. Its employees are said to have been wondering when the Swiss will “start demanding access to the sea”. Their good humours disappeared at seeing the results of a poll conducted by the Swiss weekly Weltwoche. It showed that 63% of nearly 1,800 German, Italian and Austrian polled living in the border regions said they were in favour of joining Switzerland. Hardly surprising considering the fact that salaries in Switzerland are much higher than in, for example, Germany and that Germans already constitute a majority of lecturers at many Swiss universities.