The Grass Affair

The head of Germany's Central Council of Jews is the latest to join in the grazing frenzy over the belated admission by Günter Grass that he served in the Waffen-SS. "His long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities," Charlotte Knobloch said. "We adored him not only as a moral icon, but as a figure who was telling the truth even when the truth hurts," complained Michael Jürgs, Grass' biographer.

Grass was born in 1927; he was twelve when the war broke out, six when Hitler became Chancellor, seventeen when he was called up for military service, having volunteered and been rejected for the submarine corps two years earlier. When he joined the Waffen-SS he was an adolescent, presumably with no real memory of life before Hitler, certainly with a social and political consciousness shaped entirely in the context of war and all-pervasive Nazi propaganda; and as a member of the Waffen-SS he was a soldier, not a concentration-camp guard or an ethnic cleanser in the Einsatzgruppen. He was a teenage soldier. Certainly he should have spoken earlier; but the plangent pronouncements of Michael Jürgs (not to mention the undisguised gloating of some pompous asses in the press) come perilously close to the undignified indignation of a husband walking out on his wife when, after thirty years of marriage, she tells him she wasn't a virgin when they met.

Those who suggest that Grass should give up his Nobel Prize are perhaps unaware that the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded on grounds of literary merit, not autobiographical virtue. If the Nobel Committee satisfied itself that Grass produced outstanding works of an idealistic nature, then Grass is entitled to the prize, no matter what he may have done before or since. The honorary citizenship of Gdansk, which Lech Walesa no longer wishes to share with him, is presumably a matter for the city fathers; although again it was presumably awarded because of what Grass wrote, not what he did, or what he failed to admit he did, during the war.

In the view of Charlotte Knobloch, it seems, the suppression of a particular truth negates truths which have previously been told. This seems an odd way of looking at it. Either Grass' previous criticisms of Germany's dealings with its history are valid, or else they are not valid. If they are not valid, then presumably their absurdity is neither increased nor decreased by Grass' concealment of his own past. But if Grass' criticisms of Germany's dealings with its history are valid, then they are, by definition, not absurdities. Valid criticism is, by definition, necessary and desirable, and to the extent that Grass has made a career out of valid criticism he deserves credit for it. The fact of Grass' hypocrisy in making such criticisms while failing to be honest about his own history is a secondary and purely private matter, fit for the attention of Grass himself and for those who require "moral icons" in place of those rare human beings who are capable of being truthful at least some of the time.