NYC Letter: The Tin Drum

NURLESESPEICHER (READ-ONLY MEMORY)
Don't Forget To Buy My Book!

I WAS IN HITLER'S SS, ADMITS GÜNTER GRASS

BERLIN August 12, 2006 (Telegraph) - Germany was rocked by the revelations last night that Günter Grass, its greatest living author and doyen of the Left, was a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS.

The Nobel laureate,* who has been the country's moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview published today that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

The 78-year-old said he was driven by feelings of guilt to reveal the details of his "shameful" past in his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, due to be published next month.

He said his feelings of guilt developed only in later years.

Herr Grass has one of those multipolar moral compasses, where any of several directions conveniently point true.

What is so stunning about this confessional drama is not the confession but the timing. That a young Grass in the last year of the war found himself a random conscript in the by then less-than-elite grab bag of the Waffen-SS** is not morally scandalous. At the end of the war, we are not shocked to find Nazis manning a defense of the Fatherland with anyone to hand. Nor, if Herr Grass's account is to be credited, was his tenure morally repugnant. No, what is morally repugnant is that Herr Grass, a self-advertised Vergangenheitsbewältigungist*** very keen on others properly remembering their difficult pasts, sanitized this detail -- for some three score years -- to improve his popularity as an author, a political activist, a celebrity moralist. And a Vergangenheitsbewältigungist with a past easy on the Bewältigung.

Equally stunning is Herr Grass's disingenuousness about why he didn't set the record straight sooner. Herr Grass wants us to believe he is now compelled by truth. Yet he cannot manage the full circuit of truth. Herr Grass lied for sixty years because he lacked the moral courage to tell the truth. It is as simple as that. He cannot manage to tell this truth because he cannot manage to admit it.

Well, it does take a little shine off the moralist sheen.

* "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'." -- Günter Grass, Nobel Lecture, December 1999

** Assigned as a gunner to the Waffen-SS 10th Tank Division Frundsberg. The Waffen-SS was the combat adjunct of the Schutzstaffel, the military and security organization of the Nazi party.

*** Vergangenheitsbewältigung = Coming to terms with the past.

GRASS CAN'T 'NAME REASONS' FOR HIS SILENCE

FRANKFURT August 17, 2006 (IHT) - Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who shocked Germany with the revelation that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, on Thursday said that "could not precisely name the reasons" why he kept quiet about his brief military career for 60 years. [That this episode had] "always preoccupied me, was always present."

So Herr Grass hadn't simply forgotten or created a false memory. He knowingly lied, lived the lie, and promoted it the better to promote himself.

Grass said that he did "not participate in any crimes, but had the need to report about" his time in the Waffen SS "in a broader context."

But Grass admitted he could not explain why he waited so long to do so.

[Let us jump in here and offer a suggestion:

SS PAST OF GRASS 'WAS ABOUT TO BE UNCOVERED'

BERLIN August 17, 2006 (Telegraph) - The German author Günter Grass admitted that he had been in the Waffen-SS to pre-empt the release of the information from the East German secret police archive next year, a regional newspaper claimed. The information about Grass's past is contained in Nazi era records compiled by the Stasi, the secret police of the communist government of former East Germany. The files were used for blackmail, the Kölner Stadtanzeiger wrote.

Yes, exposure might provide the tipping point for confession.]

"I mean, that is easily said, and it is the question that I ask myself," Grass said, according to a transcript of the interview, his first television appearance since the controversy erupted. "I turned this into a subject of my book, this silence of mine."

A silence running to 480 pages without recourse to "precisely named reasons" and selling quite nicely at €24 full price.

GRASS BOOK ON SALE EARLY AFTER SS CONFESSION

BERLIN August 16, 2006 (Reuters) - German bookshops have started selling the autobiography of author Guenter Grass two weeks earlier than planned in response to a boom in demand after the Nobel laureate said he had served in Adolf Hitler's Waffen SS.

We do not think Herr Grass need return any awards for any good books he has written. Holding a fiction writer to the truth is a bit misguided. And if Herr Grass thinks himself still deserving of awards, trophies, prize packets, and honorary washroom keys for celebrity moralism, well, that is his business. What we do think is that if Herr Grass wants to come clean, he best stop serving the truth in halves.

Herr Grass, like Augustine, calculated the lie in his life against his felicities and decided, yes, someday truth will out -- sed noli modo.

Posted by Damian at August 20, 2006 08:00 AM