Hank Kalet

Finally got around to reading Sunday’s Week in Review section of The New York Times and I wanted to point out two opinion pieces on the controversy surrounding the German novelist Gunter Grass and his admission, in advance of the release of his memoirs, that he had serves as a 17-year-old in Waffen SS Frundsberg Panzer Division under the Nazis. The admission has caused a firestorm of criticism in Germany, where Grass is viewed as (in Time’s words) the nation’s “most ardent advocate of full disclosure and penance.”

Daniel Kehlmann in “A Prisoner of the Nobel” says that Grass’ reputation has taken a hit, but that the novelist understood the condequences of hiding his past, which is why he finally volunteered the information.

When Günter Grass confessed that he was in the Waffen SS as a young man, the cheap suspicions poured forth: “Oh, he’s publishing a new book,” said the people interviewed on the street. “He’s doing it for the marketing.”

Famous people fall under such permanent suspicion that even their failures are no longer perceived as authentic. Mr. Grass is supposed to have engineered the very destruction of his career so as to promote it. But this is not about book sales for Mr. Grass, so much as it is about rescuing his life’s work and the persona that he took such pains to shape.

He goes on to say later in the piece that Grass was trapped in a German literary culture that required more of novelists and other writers, making political demands that might seem unusual here in a country that can sometimes turn artists who make political statements into pariahs. His novels and his public persona demanded a certain comportment that would have been at odds with such a revelation.

And then there is the matter of Grass’ ambitions:

Ambitious like most good writers, Mr. Grass must have had his eye on the Nobel Prize from early on. He knew he deserved it. The question of why he remained silent for so long about his past is in fact easy to answer: one visit with the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was sufficient for Borges never to receive the prize. Would someone who had served in the SS stand a chance?

So Grass did what he finally had to do:

Mr. Grass did the only thing he could to pre-empt the loss of his reputation. He went public, choosing not to leave the destruction of his moral authority to the professional revealers, but rather to assume the task himself.

Naturally, Mr. Grass will no longer be who he was. His participation in Hitler’s elite corps could have been seen as youthful foolishness, but his silence over so many years is another matter. And naturally, there are consequences for Germany’s image in the world. When even the most outspoken German moralist wore the uniform of murderers, one might ask whether there is a single guiltless German in this generation.

And the answer to this question is that involvement in the Nazi system, even among the youngest Germans of the time, was more widespread than we have previously wanted to perceive, and many aspects of the era’s crimes even now lie buried in silence. They are crimes that few books chronicle so well as “The Tin Drum,” “Cat and Mouse” and “Dog Years.”

Later, Mr. Grass changed, and his novels changed, too, becoming didactic and colorless. These weaker books, along with the image of the model democratic author, will be effaced by the passage of time. His earlier novels, however, which tell of the deep corruptibility of human beings, of the coexistence of mendacity and greatness and of the infinitely complex nature of guilt, will be with us for as long as people read books.

Similarly, in his op-ed essay “The Fictions of Gunter Grass,” Peter Gay attempts to get past the hysteria — there have been calls that he relinquish his Nobel Prize, for instance — reminding people that Grass’ involvement was not voluntary — he was drafted into the SS — and that it has to be viewed within the context of German history. Hitlar was appointed chancellor and did not take over in a coup. His rise was greeted with a general societal acclimation and he did not have to rule, as Stalin did, through terror. The vast majority of Germans supported him, his war effort and all the other ugly and evil things he did.

Ralph Giordano, a German writer and, by the way, a Jew, has noted that Mr. Grass was only 6 when Adolf Hitler was invited to become Germany’s chancellor. (The overused phrase “seizure of power” badly distorts what happened around Jan. 30, 1933, the date of the Führer’s accession. A coup d’ état would have been bad enough; that Hitler’s appointment was perfectly legal only makes it worse for German history.) And Mr. Giordano has asked, reasonably enough, “What else could he have done during that time in the face of the Nazis’ all-powerful propaganda apparatus?” And answers his own question: “Nothing.”

This is not all that needs to be said about this affair. With his 1959 novel, “The Tin Drum,” and its two successors (together known as the “Danzig Trilogy”), Mr. Grass established a body of work unequaled in his country for half a century. It is not that a public personality should get a free ride simply for being famous, let alone popular. Herbert von Karajan may have been an outstanding conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, but this would not erase the fact that he joined the Nazi party twice — these were the acts of an adult, after all.

Grass was no adult, as Gay says. He can therefore be seen as less complicite in the crime. So why not come forward sooner? The answer, it appears, is an echo of his novels — which essentially damn his fellow Germans for their own willed amnesia following the end of World War II:

The uncomfortable question that remains for Mr. Grass is this: Why did he keep this interlude as a servant of the regime so tight a secret? If, as we are told, his wife was the only other person whom he informed, then the Grasses made a huge mistake. If he had come out of the Nazi closet earlier, say, in 1959 with his triumphant novel just published, people would have understood, and his own life would have been easier.

I am not Mr. Grass’s analyst, nor have I ever met him. But it seems to me that he failed to come forward all these years simply because he was too ashamed. And if I am right, the affair will have a useful consequence: it will be a reminder, more than 60 years later, that his country had a great deal to be ashamed of.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Hank Kalet

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The Grass affair

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Slow down, part 2