“And one more thing…”
…says Gunter Grass. As a 17-year old, he was drafted into the Waffen SS in the last stage of the war. Until this announcement, his version was that
in October 1944 he was drafted into an antiaircraft unit near Danzig, now the Polish port of Gdansk, where he was born in 1927; that he was wounded in April 1945; and that the following month he was captured by American forces, who held him prisoner until April 1946. Further, he had always admitted a share of guilt for the past.Is it a betrayal of memory, or more? Keep in mind that Grass was six years old in 1933 when Hitler first came to power. Here’s Rushdie’s defence. And John Irving.“I belonged to the Hitler Youth, and I believed in its aims up to the end of the war,â€? he told The New York Times in an interview in 2000.
But in his new autobiography, “Peeling the Onion,� he explains that, when he was 15, eager to escape his family, he volunteered to join the submarine fleet but was rejected. Two years later he was drafted into the army, and, he writes, when he arrived in Dresden he discovered he had been assigned to the 10th SS Panzer Division, known as Frundsberg.
While he claims never to have fired a shot, Mr. Grass admits that at the time he saw nothing wrong with the Waffen SS and that he understood the truth about Hitler’s genocidal policies only during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.
But the silence is baffling in the face of Grass’s own themes. Mark Sarvas points out that a reassessment of Grass’s legacy is called for:
We’re not suggesting - as some commentors seem to think - that he should be punished for youthful mistakes or for having been a Nazi (although it’s scarcely a fait accompli that he shouldn’t). We are saying that the sheer, naked, breathtaking hypocrisy here is inarguable. This cuts to the heart of what one requires of one’s moral exemplars, self-appointed or otherwise. A certain amount of consistency seems a minimum; at the other extreme, being outrightly two-faced for a period of 60 years seems ample grounds to merit reassessment of Grass’ place.Grass’s Nobel lecture might be a good place to start:
The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end. Only then could post-war literature in German justify applying the generally valid “To Be Continued …” to itself and its descendants; only then could the wound be kept open and the much desired and prescribed forgetting be reversed with a steadfast “Once upon a time”…
Left to my own devices, I would have followed the laws of aesthetics and been perfectly happy to seek my place in texts droll and harmless.
But that was not to be. There were extenuating circumstances: mountains of rubble and cadavers, fruit of the womb of German history. The more I shovelled, the more it grew. It simply could not be ignored. Besides, I come from a family of refugees, which means that in addition to everything that drives a writer from book to book – common ambition, the fear of boredom, the mechanisms of egocentricity – I had the irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recapture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least re-conjure it. And this obsession kept me going. I wanted to make it clear to myself and my readers, not without a bit of a chip on my shoulder, that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion, that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature in all its grandeur and pettiness: the churches and cemeteries, the sounds of the shipyards and smells of the faintly lapping Baltic, a language on its way out yet still stable-warm and grumble-rich, sins in need of confession, and crimes tolerated if never exonerated.
Rushdie balances the contrary opinions well. This is clearly not a revelation that needs the man to be ostracised or whose role as a moral compass needs any reduction. Of course the silence is baffling and the explanation will also very likely be buried in pain that Grass must carry. It is impressive how we readily apply a valid value (hiding the fact of being in the Wafen SS is not the honest thing to do for a writer whose work lies in the foundation of that period in German’s history) to passing value- judgement on Gunter Grass’s behaviour. Why each of us sometimes does things we are ashamed of, and regret, and how we deal with their discovery is deeply personal. He is Gunter Grass, novelist, not the Pope. Let him be, his is the greatest pain.
Comment by Glass Half Full — August 19, 2006 @ 3:58 am
Thanks for adding your views. I agree with much of what you say. Calls for ostracising the man are stupid and vengeful. But I wouldn’t agree that his role/contribution needs no reassessment. I can see this revelation as one more step in his project of shovelling the “mountains of rubble” of German history - but just as he has to come to terms with the fact of it, so do we. Oh, and I don’t understand what you mean when you say “He is Gunter Grass, novelist, not the Pope.” Why would one have different ways of looking at their actions?
Comment by Uma — August 19, 2006 @ 4:51 am
Real life once again trumps art.
Gunter Grass - the man - must be forgiven. Whether Gunter Grass the writer should be forgiven is another matter.
Comment by km — August 19, 2006 @ 1:43 pm
“it is very impressive and moving to see an old man finally coming to terms with his past.�
i agree with that reaction..
i attended a grass lecture once - that was twenty years ago and he seemed very old then. he answered the silliest questions, after his talk, with great patience.
it’s difficult for us to understand how anyone from that time and era..comes to terms with what they had done or not done, in my view. i think the period should be reassessed. the people, probably, were just like us.
Comment by kuffir — August 19, 2006 @ 8:20 pm
You are right, he does need to and will be re- assesed. That is inevitable. About Popes and novelists: The Pope is infallible. The novelist is human. Grass gives us a moral message but made no claims to infallibility. Lets be gentle on the messenger, he is but one of us, a fellow human. The Pope, on the other hand gives a moral but uncompromising message: Judge Popes ( of any religion) harshly!
Comment by Glass Half Full — August 21, 2006 @ 11:12 am