Gunter Grass - Waffen SS

he seems to be surprised at himself (and angry at others ?) for this to come out now .
perhaps walter will enlighten us ?
hbg

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The denial of true reflection

Modern moralists live in an experience vacuum; Günter Grass's idea of honour is beyond them

John Berger
Monday August 21, 2006
The Guardian


Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities. They have nothing to do, however, with judging the actions of others. Such judgments are the prerogative of (often self-proclaimed) moralists. In ethics there is a humility; moralists are usually righteous.
These thoughts come to my mind as I read the macabre denunciations being levelled today against Günter Grass. About him as a man and about his great work as a writer, they totally miss the point, and might be dismissed as laughable, but, as an index of a certain recent moral climate in Europe, they are troubling. They are an example of moral judgments made in a carefully constructed vacuum of experience. They are what is left after the emptying out of lived experience, and they are a strident denial of what we know in our bones to be real.

Günter Grass, aged 15 and dreaming of being a heroic warrior, volunteered to join the army and, when he was 17, accepted to enlist with the Waffen SS. After a few months, having participated in no atrocity - except that of wearing a uniform that rightly provoked an atrocious fear - he became a prisoner of war and started to learn, with horror, what the forces that he had enlisted with had perpetrated.
The rest of his life as a storyteller was devoted to grasping, narrating and explaining, with extensive fellow-feeling, the contradictions, cruelties, abysmal losses, wisdom, ignorance, cowardice and grace of people (person by person) under extreme historical stress. Very few other writers of our time have such a wide knowledge of articulate and inarticulate experience. Grass never shut his eyes. He became a writer of honour.

That he was naive when he was 17 means only that he was 17. Inside a story there are no mistakes, only the living through of mistakes. And he has lived through his, better than most of us would have done.

The moralists go on to condemn Grass further for waiting so long to make this short chapter of his early life public; he finally wrote and published his autobiography when he was in his 70s.

To me it is clear that he felt that it was only at this age that he could do any real justice to this incident, which was both a choice and an accident. And by "do justice" I mean to tell the story without any oversimplification, so that it could encourage true reflection in future readers. He chose the story's time with the courage of a burrowing storyteller.

For clarity's sake, I picture a triangle. One of its points is an extensive (and very painful) knowledge of human experience. Grass's writings represent such a point. The triangle's second point is ignorance, the direct opposite to the first. The bravura of Grass' decision to join the Waffen SS is represented here. The triangle's third point is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but the blank refusal of experience. And this is the moralists' point. Such refusals have a long history. Remember the Pharisees.

But what about the point of innocence, you may ask; where is that? It is sometimes there, right at the end of a story.

The righteous moralists are proposing that Grass should renounce all the honours that his life's work has received. Their proposition only shows that, by systematically refusing to acknowledge his experience, they have forgotten what honour consists of. He has not.

Setanta wrote:

It is also interesting that the document Walter provided shows him entering the Waffen SS in November, 1944, and describes him as a "student," which suggests to me that he was a trainee. You have a seventeen-year-old boy who enters the armed forces and goes into training in what are for his nation desparate times. Actually, given the situation in November, 1944, joining the Waffen SS was probably a rather smart move. He had a better shot at getting decent equipment, and what would have passed for decent rations in those dark days.

By the spring of 1945, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys were being put in field gray coats, given a coal scuttle helmet and a panzerfaust, and told to go out and find and kill an American tank. Should we hunt all of those horrible "Nazis" down? My mother served with a field hospital in Normandy. They got a lot of casualties from the 12th SS Panzergrenadier Division--the Hitler Jungen Division. Boys, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age . . . yeah, those were the worst of the Nazis, the little perishers. German officers taught her German lullabys phonetically, so she could sing them to sleep--they were badly wounded and terrified.

Actually, he says he was called up, and discovered it was for the Waffen SS....then that he feigned illness to try to avoid it.

The author of ``The Tin Drum,'' one of postwar Germany's literary masterpieces, said that he didn't kill anyone and that his subsequent life and work compensated for the mistakes of his youth. Grass said his decision to volunteer for combat was in part motivated by his eagerness to abandon his family confines in the northern coastal city of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.

Seems there's conflict here, because elsewhere he claims he volunteered

Heh, Walter, what's that supposed to mean? Is that your sorry excuse for being too lazy, getting a copy and reading the whole thing?

Gunter Grass: I needed time to reveal my Waffen-SS past

Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Wednesday September 13, 2006
The Guardian


Gunter Grass, the Nobel laureate whose confessions of SS membership during the second world war have shocked his native Germany, has denied lying about his past and claimed he simply needed time to tell his own story.
In an interview in Spain's El País newspaper, Grass replied to his critics while admitting he would probably have been involved in war crimes had he been a bit older and joined the notorious Waffen-SS earlier. "I was young, and I wanted to leave home. In my heart, it was something I agreed with," he said, explaining how he joined up as a 17-year-old in the dying stages of the war. "I considered the Waffen-SS to be an elite unit," he added. "If I had been born three or four years earlier I would, surely, have seen myself caught up in those crimes."

He kept this episode of his life, which he has now included in an autobiography, to himself for more than six decades because of a growing sense of shame.
"What was published later about the Waffen-SS, about all its crimes, was something I was not aware of until much later," he explained. "My sense of shame grew over time ... which is largely why this unique episode in my life was something that I kept to myself." He denied, however, actively hiding his past. "I've always admitted my involvement as a young man in the [Nazi] system," he said. "That has never been a secret."

Grass explained that, over time, he became more able to cope with his former self. "That made it possible to do something that was not at all easy - to take that child of 1939, who seemed like such a distant person to me, and converse with him," he said. "Little by little I managed to get through the layers to the person who grew up locked inside the ideological system of National Socialist era.

"People can criticise and that is something I have to accept. But I also reserve for myself the right to keep certain questions to myself until I find a way to express them," he said.

"I have not said anything false."

Grass only spent a short time at the front, at a time when the German army, and the Waffen-SS itself, was falling apart.

He was more ashamed, he said, that he had failed to react to his uncle's execution by the Nazi authorities or the imprisonment of one of his schoolteachers.

His mother was later repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers in their home city of Danzig.

Grass attacked his new critics, including the Hitler biographer Joachim Fest, who died yesterday. "He is the last person who can say anything about this after publishing a book which gives credit to all that Albert Speer said," he said. "Some people have tried to use this to wipe me out as a political citizen and say I must now keep my mouth shut. That is stupid."