I wanted to write a long piece exploring the tension of Gunter Grass’ novels with his recent admission that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, but I was stymied by the fact that I’ve never read a word he wrote, probably due to my irrational bias that all Germans from that era were Nazis.
Anyway, Grass’ “frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history,” sez the website for the Nobel Prize, which Grass won in 1999. The site also tells us, “after military service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm laborer and miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin.” Which is true-ish. As is Grass’ own comment in his Nobel lecture, “Humans have much of the rat in them and vice versa.” I probably oughtta read that whole lecture sometime.
Now, I’m actually going to cut some slack for the 17-year-old Grass. Given that my dad lied about his age to join the military when he was a 16-year-old in Israel, I can pretty easily imagine a young Grass who wanted to join up, get away from his family and “help the war effort” or something.
I can even imagine a situation where he didn’t really understand that this could lead him into the SS. I don’t know the facts of military allocation during the war, so I can’t say that he’s lying about how he was assigned to the Waffen SS. And it certainly sounds like that unit was more devoted to combat operations than to the running of concentration camps and mass executions that other parts of the SS were engaged in.
War sweeps a lot of people up into decisions that they couldn’t imagine making in other circumstances. For a 17-year-old in a duty-bound society like that . . . well, I’m just saying that I don’t hold that piece of his history against him.
However, I am stuck trying to figure out what’s more unconscionable: not revealing till he was 78 the fact that he was in the Waffen SS, or only revealing it so he could have a sales peg for his new book.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried marketing literary books before and “I served in the SS” isn’t much worse than some of the angles I’ve seen.
(Oh, and to that writer at Time who argues that Grass wouldn’t have been such a good/important writer had he not kept this deep, dark secret all along: you’re a moral imbecile.)
It’s definitely the way he’s revealed this information that has freaked people out big time. As I understand it he hasn’t actually revealed any details about what he actually did during this time so who knows?! I also wonder why he suddenly decided to reveal this – had someone else found out?
One wacky rumor I read is that Grass took it easy on the East during his career because the KGB or the Stasi had the goods on his SS history.
My guess is that, since he’s an old guy, he was worried that this stuff would come out after his death and make him look worse. Or he really was looking to promote sales of his new book.
If you read that Nobel lecture, he makes an off-the-cuff remark about how his first writing project was as a child for a contest in a Hitler Youth newspaper. I think he tosses it off like that to show how young and uninformed he was, and maybe that’s a sublimated version of his SS story.
That’s what the end of this BBC story hints at:
Rushdie jumps to Grass’s defence:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4801327.stm
As you may recall, I don’t think Rushdie’s exactly the wisest guy around.
Although, as the official VM wife recently put it, “If Madonna’s become Jewish, then why is she still doing all this crucifixion stuff in her stage show?”
Tell the official VM wife I went to see Madonna last weekend (my wife is a fan….). She had this sly grin on her face as she was singing perched on her cross.
Are you sure that wasn’t botox?
Anyway, here’s a post discussing Grass vis-a-vis Paul De Man.