Top writer admits to Nazi past
Correspondents in Berlin
14aug06

IT'S enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass, bleeding-heart figurehead of the German Left, has confessed he was once a member of the Nazi SS.

The revelation by the Nobel prize winner, now approaching his 80th birthday, has shocked Germany's literary and cultural world. It was Grass first and foremost who insisted the Germans "come clean" about their history and that his own generation should not try to pose as "victims" of Hitler's National Socialist ideology.

Now the great advocate of facing unpalatable truths has lived up to his own standards, but a little late.

The revelation came in an interview with Germany's respected conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and while it is certain to boost interest in his forthcoming autobiography it has done immeasurable harm to the writer's squeaky-clean reputation.

Grass now says that, although he had told the truth to his wife, those he deceived included his own children and his biographer Michael Jurgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich.

Jurgs said yesterday: "I'm deeply disappointed. If he had come clean earlier and said he was in the SS at 17 no one would have cared, but now it puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us."

It had long been known that Grass, who was only 18 when the war ended, had served in the armed forces and been wounded. But until now he had gone along with the story that he had been drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in his native Danzig.

The truth, he now admits, is that he volunteered to join the U-boat fleet, "which was every bit as crazy", but was turned down and drafted instead into the 10th SS Panzer Division "Frundsberg", part of the Waffen SS.

"By that stage," he insists, "the SS were taking anybody they could lay their hands on." He escaped lifelong identification as an SS member only because by late 1944 the regiments were no longer organised enough to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts' blood groups on their arms.

Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his war experience but given the rather weak explanation: "My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write this book. In the end, it simply had to come out."

But he has not got off lightly. In a separate commentary, the FAZ lashed out at him for hypocrisy, recalling in particular his outspoken and now sanctimonious-sounding condemnation of the 1985 visit by chancellor Helmut Kohl and president Ronald Reagan to Bitburg cemetery, where not only American soldiers but also Waffen SS men were buried.

"Wouldn't the debate have been more honest if we had known that one of those blind followers of the SS had grown up to be, like him, a famous champion of freedom and democracy?" the paper said.

"We're not talking about guilt or crimes here. Grass was still little more than a child," the FAZ added, noting that at least the great author never pretended to have been part of the anti-Nazi resistance and admitted that he believed in Hitler right up until the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

But Grass has hidden behind his wall of silence in the postwar discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth.

Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schonhuber, now leader of the far-right Republikaner party, published his autobiography Ich War Dabei (I Was There), which insisted former members of the elite units were unfairly stigmatised.

The debate was heated because Schonhuber made the point that the Waffen SS were exclusively military units, effectively a branch of the regular army, rather than convinced Nazis.

Grass's belated revelation will mean a revaluation of the career of a man who made himself famous for saying the reputation of Germany would forever be linked with the word Auschwitz.

It will also fuel the row between Poland and Germany over a new Berlin exhibition dedicated to the worldwide fate of people driven from their homes by ethnic cleansing, concentrating on Germans expelled from what is now Polish territory in 1945.

Grass is, above all, celebrated for his evocation of Danzig during the early days of the Nazi regime in The Tin Drum, the 1957 novel that made his name overnight. Yet Danzig is now Gdansk and, since the days of Lech Walesa and the 1981 Solidarity strikes in its shipyards, as important a symbol in Polish culture as it once was in German.

Grass was born in Danzig in 1927 and his father, whom he described as "a typical opportunistic fellow traveller" joined the Nazi party in 1936.

At the end of the war, in circumstances that will now have to be re-examined, Grass ended up as an American prisoner of war.

In one of the most titillating snippets from the forthcoming autobiography, he recalls meeting and becoming friendly with a rather shy 17-year-old called Joseph who was also in the Bad Aibling prisoner-of-war camp.

"I wanted to be an artist; he wanted to go into the church," Grass recalls. He is unable, however, to confirm whether the lad was, indeed, Joseph Ratzinger, who admits to having been in the same camp and is now Pope Benedict XVI.

In 1957, Grass joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Boll, dedicated to exposing and overcoming Germany's Nazi past and bringing a new start to literature and society in general.

It is certain that his admission into the group would have been far more complicated had he admitted to being a former Waffen SS recruit. Arguably, his conversion would have made his contribution all the more valid and important, but the mere fact could at that time have proved an insurmountable barrier.

But the publication of The Tin Drum and its sudden, unexpected global success changed everything. Grass became the voice of the new German literature, surpassing all his contemporaries.

Its hero Oskar Matzerath, who stopped growing at the age of three in a perverse reaction to everything that was going on around him and forever after beat his childhood tin drum in fury, became a difficult, sinister leitmotif for stunted, emotionally damaged German society.

Grass's insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.

 

 

fighting words
Snake in the Grass
The pompous, hypocritical hucksterism of Günter Grass.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006, at 12:00 PM ET

For many of the postwar decades, Günter Grass was above all fortunate in his enemies. In West Germany, these enemies took two forms. The first was the large number of citizens who were queasy about the recent past, and the second was the smaller number of citizens who were not so queasy. To the first, Grass could address himself in a high moral tone, calling for an honest appraisal of history and for an accounting with the silence and complicity that had marked the era of National Socialism. This represented, among other things, a demand that parents be candid with their children. To the forces of the German right, on the other hand, or with those who did not take easily to the admission of guilt or shame, he could address himself more forcefully. I believe that it was when partisans of conservative Chancellor Konrad Adenauer referred to Socialist challenger Willy Brandt as "the Norwegian bastard" (because he was of illegitimate birth and because he had worn the Norwegian uniform while fighting against Hitler's soldiers) that Grass decided to become an active campaigner for the Social Democrats. I once heard a conservative writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine refer disdainfully to Grass himself as a man who looked as if he'd recently dismounted from a shaggy pony that had come from the Mongolian steppes. I felt myself obliged to defend him from this innuendo.

For all this, one was never able to suppress the slight feeling that the author of The Tin Drum was something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite. He was one of those whom Gore Vidal might have had in mind when he referred to the high horse, always tethered conveniently nearby, which the writer/rider could mount at any moment. Seldom did Grass miss a chance to be lofty and morally stern. But between the pony and the horse, between the stirrup and the ground, there stood (and stands) a calculating opportunist.

During the 1980s, Chancellor Helmut Kohl came up with a well-turned but somewhat shady phrase. "The grace of late birth," as he put it, was what had saved many people of his generation from taking part in atrocities. This exemption, which came up again recently when Josef Ratzinger's early membership in the Hitler Youth was disclosed, has applied for over half a century to Grass himself. He was 6 years old when Hitler became chancellor, and thus never had to answer any questions about what he did in the killing fields to the East and the South. To say that he took full advantage of this privilege would be to understate matters. So his decision, in his current ripe and honored state, to admit to teenage membership of the Waffen SS, requires a bit more justification than he's been able to offer so far.

The German right is of course highly incensed, and now accuses the man who lectured Germans for so long of being not just a hypocrite but a huckster: uncorking the hideous revelation to enhance the sale of his latest memoirs. Full of acrimony as this charge may be, it has some inescapable truth to it. Grass was one of those who dragged the Nazi period into everything, including into discussions where it did not belong. When German reunification finally occurred after 1989, he referred to it with scorn as an Anschluss whereby the West had annexed the former "German Democratic Republic." When challenged on the absurdity of this, he wielded the truncheon of moral blackmail and said that, after Auschwitz, his critics had no right to speak about history. At a discussion in a Berlin theater at about that time, I heard him defend these propositions and felt that I was listening to a near-perfect example of bogus pseudo-intellectuality. By this stage, he had already become something of a specialist in half-baked moral equivalences. At the PEN conference in New York in the mid-1980s, for example, he had sonorously announced that conditions in the South Bronx put the United States on a par with the Soviet Union … I didn't like being lectured by a second-rater then and I like it no better when I discover I was being admonished by a member, however junior or conscripted, of Heinrich Himmler's corps d'elite.

It also deserves to be added that this hectoring tendency became more extreme as the quality of his own writing declined. (If you doubt me, try reading The Flounder.) And, in still more recent years, Grass has been maneuvering to catch the wave of feeling that says—in one tone of voice or another—that Germans were victims, too. Not just victims of Hitler, you understand, but victims of Russian and British and American violence. Some of this literature, most notably W.G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction, is respectable both in its reasoning and in its temper, but other bits of it—such as Jörg Friedrich's The Fire and the associated self-pitying campaigns in tabloid papers such as Bild—are, well, not so respectable. And suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945, and titling it (in the same lineage of his many books about dogs, rats, snails, fish, and other beasts) Crabwalk. If any other author had tried this, at least until recently, he would have been hauled back into line by Grass with a loud and belching reminder that Auschwitz forbade any such sentiment.

Grass' many defenders have not asked themselves the question that needs to be posed, which is: Has he at last decided to appeal to the new German readership that is, so to say, a bit fed up with hearing about how dreadful the Nazis were? If this admittedly rather cynical suggestion has any merit, then at least his recent boring writings and operatic confessions would, in combination, make perfect sense. But they would also make absolute nonsense of his previous career as a literary policeman and a patroller of the line of taboo. "Let those who want to judge, pass judgment," Grass said last week in a typically sententious utterance. Very well, then, mein lieber Herr. The first judgment is that you kept quiet about your past until you could win the Nobel Prize for literature. The second judgment is that you are not as important to German or to literary history as you think you are. The third judgment is that you will be remembered neither as a war criminal nor as an anti-Nazi hero, but more as a bit of a bloody fool.