Grass --- say it ain't so...
Hmnn... Another Lefty comes clean... It's getting to be a long list.
We all condemned the drunk demagogue Joe McCarthy. I still do.
But the Venona Papers revealed that if there weren't "commies under every bed, there were lots more than we knew. (We did a Think Tank program on it. See our website via PBS.org. (I think.)
Liberal icon I.F. Stone --- still revered by many on the Left --- turned out to be on a Soviet retainer!
He lived right in the middle of media gulch in DC --- "Forest Hills."
Ben
The last man they expected to have an SS secret
Günter Grass
NI_MPU('middle');
It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon 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 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 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 Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times 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 to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame 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? “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 post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, 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 Schönhuber 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 complete 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.
Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
His revelations 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 an icon 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 lad 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.
On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, 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.
have an SS secret
Günter Grass
NI_MPU('middle');It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon 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 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 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 Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times 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 to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame 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? “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 post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, 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 Schönhuber 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 complete 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.
Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
His revelations 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 an icon 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 lad 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.
On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, 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.
The last man they expected to have an SS secret
Günter Grass
It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon 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 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 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 Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times 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 to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame 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? “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 post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, 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 Schönhuber 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 complete 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.
Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
His revelations 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 an icon 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 lad 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.
On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, 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.
Comment from Annonymous "You seem to imagine more interest in Grass than exists."
Maybe. He was very influential in "Old Europe."
Ben
We all condemned the drunk demagogue Joe McCarthy. I still do.
But the Venona Papers revealed that if there weren't "commies under every bed, there were lots more than we knew. (We did a Think Tank program on it. See our website via PBS.org. (I think.)
Liberal icon I.F. Stone --- still revered by many on the Left --- turned out to be on a Soviet retainer!
He lived right in the middle of media gulch in DC --- "Forest Hills."
Ben
The last man they expected to have an SS secret
Günter Grass
NI_MPU('middle');
It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon 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 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 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 Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times 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 to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame 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? “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 post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, 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 Schönhuber 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 complete 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.
Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
His revelations 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 an icon 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 lad 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.
On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, 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.
have an SS secret
Günter Grass
NI_MPU('middle');It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon 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 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 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 Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times 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 to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame 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? “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 post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, 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 Schönhuber 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 complete 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.
Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
His revelations 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 an icon 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 lad 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.
On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, 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.
The last man they expected to have an SS secret
Günter Grass
It’s enough to make an old man cry. Just days before publication of his long-awaited autobiography entitled Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass, bleeding heart icon 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 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 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 Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times 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 to carry out the customary process of tattooing conscripts’ blood group on their arms.
Grass has not exactly tried to justify his long silence about his experience in the war, but given the rather lame 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? “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 post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, 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 Schönhuber 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 complete 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.
Against that must be set the oblique discussion in his most recent book, Crabwalk, of the possibility increasingly open for discussion, but long and vociferously denied by Grass himself, that Germans were not only perpetrators of Nazi crimes but at least occasionally also victims.
Crabwalk dealt with a Soviet submarine’s sinking of the passenger ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic in January 1945. When it went down the Gustloff was hopelessly overloaded, primarily with women and children, and its loss remains the worst ever maritime disaster with some 10,000 killed, six times more than the number who died on the Titanic.
The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.
His revelations 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 an icon 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 lad 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.
On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.
At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).
In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, 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.
Comment from Annonymous "You seem to imagine more interest in Grass than exists."
Maybe. He was very influential in "Old Europe."
Ben
Another comment:
And why not just let the comments flow? What are you afraid of?
Answer: I have not rejected a single response yet.
Ben
posted by Ben Wattenberg at 7:09 PM
1 Comments:
You seem to imagine more interest in Grass than exists.
Post a Comment
<< Home