WSJ Editorial: Gunter Grass, Tin Moralist
Nobel laureate Günter Grass, author of the postwar classic "The Tin Drum" and self-styled conscience of Germany, is a darling of the anti-American and anti-globalization set. He is also a former member of Hitler's Waffen SS.
This previously unknown biographical tidbit emerged Saturday, 61 years after the fact. In an interview with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to promote his forthcoming autobiography, Mr. Grass offered that he volunteered for a U-boat unit in 1943 at age 15, but was turned down. A year later, he was drafted into the Waffen SS, a special unit notorious for its role in the Holocaust. He served in the closing year of the war but the details are still fuzzy. He didn't explain why he kept all this secret, except to say he felt ashamed. Cynics smelled a PR stunt to boost book sales. Others rushed to forgive him. Mr. Grass, after all, was only a teenager in a country at war, and by his own account never fired a shot.
Harder to ignore is Mr. Grass's silence all these years. His fiction as well as his political activism is built around the facts of his life, from his birth in "Free Danzig" to his experiences in wartime and postwar Germany. The new detail on his resume is not exactly small. But it does shed some interesting light on his public moralizing, for which his passion has often seemed greater than for his fiction.
To wit: In that same interview, Mr. Grass remembers that as an American prisoner of war he saw white GIs mistreat black comrades. "All of a sudden," he says, "I was confronted with direct racism." Let's see if we get this straight. A man who just confessed to serving in an elite Nazi unit, who belonged to the Hitler youth and who may have found it hard not to notice the disappearance of Jews from his native Danzig, claims that his first experience of racism came in a U.S. camp. Even in the Waffen SS, Mr. Grass felt morally superior to those damn Yanks, and he still does six decades later.
In 1968, he claimed the U.S. was "continuing war crimes in Vietnam, which, as German war crimes, had been rightly condemned at the Nuremberg Tribunal, including by American judges." Perhaps lowering Americans to the level of Nazis helped Mr. Grass's personal catharsis. Next he sought to establish German moral superiority as a direct result of having once been a Nazi state. In Saturday's interview, Mr. Grass muses about his country's accomplishment in confronting its past, concluding that "winning makes you dumb. The victors think they don't have to deal with the sins of the past."
This is an old Grass theory. Shortly after the start of the Iraq war in 2003, he said that "The word of the current American President 'You are either with us or against us' weighs as an echo of a barbaric era on all current events." He contrasts America's war for "economic interests" and moral decline with Germany's new superiority. "After two world wars with criminal consequences, for which we have to assume responsibility, we have, and it was difficult enough, learned from history and understood the lessons."
Had the U.S. followed Mr. Grass's advice 65 years ago, his career in the Waffen SS might have lasted longer than several months. But in a Continent liberated by American blood and treasure, this "peace" activist can, along with fellow European Nobelists Harold Pinter, Dario Fo and José Saramago, bash the U.S. in comfort and freedom.
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This previously unknown biographical tidbit emerged Saturday, 61 years after the fact. In an interview with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to promote his forthcoming autobiography, Mr. Grass offered that he volunteered for a U-boat unit in 1943 at age 15, but was turned down. A year later, he was drafted into the Waffen SS, a special unit notorious for its role in the Holocaust. He served in the closing year of the war but the details are still fuzzy. He didn't explain why he kept all this secret, except to say he felt ashamed. Cynics smelled a PR stunt to boost book sales. Others rushed to forgive him. Mr. Grass, after all, was only a teenager in a country at war, and by his own account never fired a shot.
Harder to ignore is Mr. Grass's silence all these years. His fiction as well as his political activism is built around the facts of his life, from his birth in "Free Danzig" to his experiences in wartime and postwar Germany. The new detail on his resume is not exactly small. But it does shed some interesting light on his public moralizing, for which his passion has often seemed greater than for his fiction.
To wit: In that same interview, Mr. Grass remembers that as an American prisoner of war he saw white GIs mistreat black comrades. "All of a sudden," he says, "I was confronted with direct racism." Let's see if we get this straight. A man who just confessed to serving in an elite Nazi unit, who belonged to the Hitler youth and who may have found it hard not to notice the disappearance of Jews from his native Danzig, claims that his first experience of racism came in a U.S. camp. Even in the Waffen SS, Mr. Grass felt morally superior to those damn Yanks, and he still does six decades later.
In 1968, he claimed the U.S. was "continuing war crimes in Vietnam, which, as German war crimes, had been rightly condemned at the Nuremberg Tribunal, including by American judges." Perhaps lowering Americans to the level of Nazis helped Mr. Grass's personal catharsis. Next he sought to establish German moral superiority as a direct result of having once been a Nazi state. In Saturday's interview, Mr. Grass muses about his country's accomplishment in confronting its past, concluding that "winning makes you dumb. The victors think they don't have to deal with the sins of the past."
This is an old Grass theory. Shortly after the start of the Iraq war in 2003, he said that "The word of the current American President 'You are either with us or against us' weighs as an echo of a barbaric era on all current events." He contrasts America's war for "economic interests" and moral decline with Germany's new superiority. "After two world wars with criminal consequences, for which we have to assume responsibility, we have, and it was difficult enough, learned from history and understood the lessons."
Had the U.S. followed Mr. Grass's advice 65 years ago, his career in the Waffen SS might have lasted longer than several months. But in a Continent liberated by American blood and treasure, this "peace" activist can, along with fellow European Nobelists Harold Pinter, Dario Fo and José Saramago, bash the U.S. in comfort and freedom.