Grass Houses

[posted by Callimachus]

A scathing summation of Gunter Grass, by Amir Taheri

Even today, Grass is still nostalgic about East Germany.

Here is what he told FAZ: "After my capture (by the Americans) I was freed in the West. I had to cope with all the errors and detours on my own. Other members of my generation, however, Cristina Wolf for example, or Erich Loest, ended up in the east (East Germany) which already had a new and credible ideology. There, they saw resistance fighters who had taken part in the Spanish Civil War and who had suffered under Hitler, and could be regarded as models. In the West (Germany), however, there was none of that. We had (Chancellor Konrad) Adenauer, with all the lies and his rancid Catholicism. Its society was characterised by the narrow petty-bourgeois spirit."

Grass always looked for a "credible ideology" and never thought it possible to live as a free man without any ideology but with a set of firm ethical principles. As a youth, he found his dream ideology in Nazism, and as an older man, he saw it in reflected in the Berlin Wall. He clearly preferred Walter Ulbricht who built the war [wall?] to Konrad Adenauer who built the German democracy. During half a century, he supported the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe, the Maoists in China, the Castro brothers in Cuba, the Vietcong in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and, later, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

In doing so, he proved that he had learned the lesson that Waffen SS had taught him : the worst enemy of the people is democracy, especially the United States whose armies destroyed Hitler and, whose ideology later defeated Communism in the Cold War.

In his interview, Grass also recalls the "crimes committed by Britain, France and Holland in their colonial history." But, he does not have a single word about the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hochi Minh, Pol Pot, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and other heroes of "Grass-land".

An astonishing observation in his biography reflects Grass's hatred for the US.

He recalls the moment when GIs arrive at the camp where Grass was a war prisoner. Grass says that one GI, a white man from Virginia would not directly talk to another GI, a black man, driving a truck. In the truck taking Grass and other prisoners to the camp, the white Virginian, whom Grass describes as "a good man but a bit stupid", asks Grass to relay orders to the American black driver.


This may or may not be true. Even today, there may be a Virginian redneck who would not talk to a black fellow-American soldier.

However, what is interesting is Grass's conclusion.

He writes: "I cannot say I was shocked, but, suddenly, I discovered racism."

That Grass did not find the Virginian soldier's behaviour shocking is no surprise. After all Grass was a Waffen SS volunteer.

What is shocking is that Grass claims that until then he had not been confronted with racism. Living under Hitler for 13 years, and not having noticed racism? Grass must have been deaf and blind.

Good German

[posted by Callimachus]

One has to wonder how we've managed to decide Günter Grass, whatever his virtues, was the moral voice of authority in the Germany of his generation when there also was the available model set by Joachim Fest

Fest’s views were moulded profoundly by his family life during the Third Reich. He was born in Berlin in 1926 into middle-class and highly cultured family headed by his father, Johannes, a schoolteacher, who was and remained Fest’s role model. Johannes Fest was dismissed after the Nazis took power in 1933, and the family with five children lost much of its status and material comfort. However, he refused utterly any compromise with the regime.

In a memoir of his early years, which is about to be published in Germany, Joachim Fest recalls his mother’s suggestion, as she contemplated the family’s increasing poverty, that her husband should compromise and join the Nazi Party, “as it wouldn’t change anything."

“On the contrary,” he replied, “it would change everything.”

Joachim Fest was expelled from his Berlin school for caricaturing Hitler and sent with his brothers to a Catholic boarding school in Freiburg. From there, as he approached the age for military service, he decided to volunteer for the armed forces rather than risk being conscripted into the SS. His father disagreed, writing that: “One doesn’t volunteer to take part in Hitler’s criminal war, not even to avoid the SS.” But in the end Fest went ahead, and was taken prisoner by the Americans in France. His father, meanwhile, suffered a much worse fate, taken by the Russians as they entered Berlin and kept for years in the Soviet Union until he was sent back, a broken man.

There were good Germans. They did not sit silent when the fascists came. But it wasn't enough. And they suffered along with the rest.

Snake in the Grass

If there's one thing that makes me sick
It's when someone tries to hide behind politics

The Ramones: "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"

Nice post on Grass' recent revelation here. I couldn't finish "The Tin Drum" or "The Flounder," but I enjoy Grass' more recent work, especially "My Century" and "Crabwalk." I'm thinking if there's a place to dig for clues it's in the chapters of "My Century" where the aging German journalists gather and reminisce about what they did during the war.

The Germans have their own take on this, their own grappling to do, but the point of much of the criticism from the U.S. seems to be Grass' commentary on Reagan's 1985 trip to Bitburg cemetery.

One of my walk-on extra parts in the stage of Cold War history was to have been in the room at the White House when Reagan made that ill-received remark about some young SS soldiers being victims of Naziism. I thought he was right then and I still think so. But really the whole flap was about American politics, not German history.

Look at a German literary intellectual like Brecht, who reacted to the Nazis in the absolutely correct way yet still behaved like an asshole for the rest of his career. He'd have cut a far more insulting figure than Grass to Americans had Brecht been around in the 1980s. At least Brecht's comments about America can be mitigated by the excuse of his having been hauled before HUAC. Frankly, you'd be hard-pressed to find any German intellectuals anywhere in that era who had good things to say about the U.S. or Reagan. Believe me, I was there.

Anyone who expects writers to be personally heroic just because they're writers is making a big mistake. Lord Byrons are far between. And even he made a hash of his personal reputation and rewrote his past to his advantage. Lord knows what all was in the autobiography manuscript that Murray burned.

Fiction writers don't get to hector their contemporaries because they're perfect. Fact is, they're all more or less amoral vampires who sell out every emotional connection they make by mining it for fresh paragraphs for the publisher. Fiction writers lie for a living. They turn reality into something else.

No, they get that privilege for something else. Maybe it's because if they're good enough to read, they've been rooting down in the foul stuff inside themselves for so long they can smell it on other people. I suspect the whiff of it makes them physically ill. They fancy they are smelling it even when they're not, but they get it right often enough to be worth listening to.

Gunter Grass's Excellent Adventure

So, a couple of days ago, in the thick of connectivity problems, when my access was rather less than intermittent, I noticed that Gunter Grass was not as he'd presented himself to be.

Rather far from it.

Here's what I quickly tossed (read: snarked) off then, primarily out of surprised disillusionment and disappointment, but was unable to publish on blogger (note that the title of this post is the original, and the text below followed immediately from that):

"In timing, because, you know, "It had to come out finally." According to his timing, that is, seven years after winning a Nobel Prize, and, more important, following decades of living his life without bearing the cost of accountability against ... well, what came after.

Grass was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp and later became a prominent peace activist. He said he had volunteered for army service as a way of breaking away from home and family.

"For me it was primarily about getting out of there. Out of that corner, away from my family," he told the paper.

"I wanted to put an end to that and that's why I volunteered for the army.

Now he wants to put an end to something else--you put your own name on it. And the years in between? Ah, yes. Well. You know, that.

Well, he had to pick his own time, conveniently years and years after his prime--and when he's not risking much [or for as long], as it happens, in terms of security, opportunity, and even (how telling) reputation.

Let the laudatory tributes to his "bravery" and "honesty" begin. Or, a deep and deadly silence.

Not much difference between the two, really. Or is there?"

Tonight, I am moved to resurrect that post, partly out of a hope that I'll be able to slip one more post in before the inevitable technological kaput, as a test, but more important because I just now read this Times of London article about Grass' belated admission (confession?). I'm not feeling angered now in the way that I did a couple of days back, but sad? Yeah. More cynical? You bet.

"...It was Grass first and foremost who insisted the Germans “come clean” about their history and that his own generation should not try to pose as “victims” of Hitler’s National Socialist ideology.

Now the great advocate of facing unpalatable truths has lived up to his own standards, but a little late. ...

Grass now says that, although he had told the truth to his wife, those he deceived included his own children and his biographer Michael Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times yesterday: “I’m deeply disappointed. If he had come clean earlier and said he was in the SS at 17 no one would have cared, but now it puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us.”

You think that's what the general view will be? Color me cynical, in terms of rank-and-file people--or at least those who might have trumpeted Grass as one of their purer-than-thou own. Still, there's this:

But he has not got off lightly. In a separate commentary the FAZ lashed out at him for hypocrisy, recalling in particular his outspoken and now sanctimonious-sounding condemnation of the 1985 visit by Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Ronald Reagan to Bitburg cemetery where not only American soldiers but also Waffen SS men were buried. “Wouldn’t the debate have been more honest if we had known that one of those blind followers of the SS had grown up to be, like him, a famous champion of freedom and democracy? “We’re not talking about guilt or crimes here. Grass was still little more than a child,” the FAZ added, noting that at least the great author never pretended to have been part of the anti-Nazi resistance and admitted that he believed in Hitler right up until the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

But Grass has hidden behind his wall of silence in the post-war discussion when he could have made a crucial contribution by admitting the truth. Notably he was silent when another former Waffen SS man, Franz Schönhuber, now leader of the far-right Republikaner party, published his autobiography Ich War Dabei (I Was There), which insisted former members of the elite units were unfairly stigmatised.

The debate was heated because Schönhuber made the point that the Waffen SS were exclusively military units, effectively a branch of the regular army, rather than convinced Nazis. [Emphasis added.]

Callimachus is far, far better qualified than I to get into the nuts and bolts of this, and to evaluate whether or not Grass' subterfuge strengthens or not Schönhuber's point. (Purely from a logical standpoint, I don't see why that would necessarily be so.)

But I don't need Cal's historical expertise to grasp the larger point, as to Grass' honesty in an area that crucially counts and what he could have added to the discussion over the years, or the "smaller," more personal one: his dodging of the "come clean" imperative he has since espoused, and even demanded, and particularly as he insisted that his country's reputation would always be intertwined with the name Auschwitz.

Grass’s insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.

We're all flawed, and we all fall short of our standards. Starkly put, most of us simply fail to live up as we should or could. I'm not immune. Yet I, like most people, live on a little stage. Grass, on the other hand, has lived on a large stage--some might argue a higher plane--and used that vantage point to indict the honesty and intentions of people on stages little and large. Knowing, all the while.

Among other rewards for his pains, he received a Nobel Prize (yet another tarnish on that honor, but I digress), which he accepted relatively recently, still unsufficiently moved to confess (protest?). Now, we get this explanation for his Great Omission:

“My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write this book. In the end it simply had to come out.”

Yet another reward he claimed for himself: an end [time] of his own choosing.