Djelloul Marbrook

I read The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass more than twenty years after it was published in 1959, because I had read a lot about it. In 2000, forty years after it was published, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now, on the eve of publishing his autobiography, Peeling the Onion, at age 78 he has revealed that in the closing stages of World War II at age 17 he joined the infamous Waffen SS, the brutal political soldiers who carried out Nazi Germany’s Final Solution.

His official biography for sixty years has stated he served as an anti-aircraft gunner in the Luftwaffe, was wounded by the Russians in 1944 and held for several months by Americans as a military prisoner. He has been a leading critic of Germany’s behavior under Nazi rule, of neo-Nazism, and even of German reunification because he feared it would revive irredentist fervor.His shocking revelation to a newspaper has given rise to calls for him to give up his Nobel prize. Some have even called on him to give up all his literary prizes both on the grounds that he’s a hypocrite and that he wouldn’t have received them had his SS history been known.

The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), set in his native Danzig, now Polish Gdansk, moved me profoundly. I had been reading Vladimir Nabokov about the same time I read it, so my mind set the bar high for other writers’ work. I thought Grass’s parodic style—he had Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in mind—opened new possibilities for the novel, and by the early 1980s it was easy to see that it had done just that. Its liberties with time line and conventional narrative put exciting new tools in the hands of writers.

Now Lech Walesa, former Polish president and founder of the labor movement Solidarity and a Gdansk native, is demanding that the great seaport city revoke the honorary citizenship it gave Grass.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that the 17-year-old Grass should be seen as an innocent misled by Nazi propaganda, no matter how seductive it might have been. (Anyone who has ever seen Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will knows how magnetic Nazism could be.) I think society can’t afford to make such handsome gestures, and yet I recognize that this position is inconsistent with what I’m about to say, namely that it’s altogether commendable that an old man should confess and repent such an heinous past.

There aren’t any excuses for waiting sixty years to admit this squalid lie. Would worldwide acclaim have been allowed a veteran of the SS 10th Armored Division? Probably not, and Grass knew it. But he had art, illuminations, in him that he knew were worth sharing with us. This in itself doesn’t distinguish him from other writers, but the fact that he was right, that he did have a rare light within him to illuminate our lives, does. Should we accordingly forgive him? Of course; forgiveness is always in order. We should also lament the very human course of inaction he took. But the one thing we should not do is get all huffy and high and mighty about it.

There may be something as important—at this point anyway—to lament: that this agonized confession certainly won’t hurt book sales. Controversy is the best publicity a book can get; a $75,000 publicity budget wouldn’t get Peeling the Onion (and all his books, for that matter) as much attention. Besides, the SS is like the Mafia; we’re always up for hearing more about it. Its dread fascination is like staring at a raised cobra. And Grass knows this too.

So let him have his cake and eat it. He’s a great writer. Nothing will change that. Just as nothing changes the fact that when we watch marching armies the jack-booted Nazis are always top drawer, while the rubber-soled American liberators and the donkey-cart Russians are a sorry rabble by comparison. The Nazis even in full retreat looked splendid. We know that, and so do Gunter Grass and his publicists.

And when all that’s said it’s nonetheless admirable that he didn’t want to go to his grave, taking all his laurels, without confessiing, didn’t want to go on deceiving us. Maybe some document would have eventually shown us the truth. Maybe not. But, like the great writer he is, he showed us the truth, however belatedly, because it’s his chosen profession to do so.
Does his vehement anti-Nazism all these years now ring hollow? Not to me. We blunder, we fall, sometimes we dissemble, and we mend our souls and soldier on. I’m sad, perhaps miffed, but I’m not willing to throw a single stone. A society that allows itself to get apoplectic about Grass’s hypocrisy likes being in high dudgeon too much and is as prone to hypocrisy as Grass himself. He’s ashamed of himself, he says, and his critics should be ashamed of themselves, because most of us hear damned well the skeletons rattling in our own closets.