The True Story of the SS-Mann Grass ...

The True Story of the SS-Mann Grass does not exist; not in the soul-searching commentaries of the German press, nor in the condemning opeds of the American elite media. The hypocrisy of this tempest in a tea-pot is more blatant in Germany because there is no German moral authority in the matter of Nazi Evil. There is on the American side, a kind of birthright assumption that self-righteousness does very well on its own, without being informed. Nobel Prize winner and one of the most persistently audible curators of  German bad conscience, Grass has not suffered seriously from the revelations about his stint in the Waffen-SS  in pre-publication interviews about his memoirs Beim Häuten der Zwiebel  (skinning the onion). Nor will there be many questions about the book's artfully arranged memory stories since they do not make claims to redemption. Still, where Grass and his publisher were too shrewd not to use intimations of Nazi Evil for the promotion of the book, they also did not want to leave the truth question to the vagaries of suspicion. Going on the attack with the "explosive" bit of information might stir the interest of some of the usual watchdogs, but it was better to have "offensive" revelations already in the open when the book arrived. By the time the Wiesenthal center let it be known that they were waiting for permission from Grass to search his papers--"We feel that there's an incredible lack of clarity . . . The time has come to come clean" (NYT Aug.23)--the Nobel Committee had already declined demands coming from some German intellectuals to strip Grass of his prize. The Swedes can afford not to be spooked where the Germans and the Americans cannot, if for very different reasons.

German reactions to Grass's revelations of his youthful sin and maturely managed shame were split: there was Schadenfreude pointing out the irony of Grass's notoriously verbose, longtime wrath in the matter of  the shameful German past and now outing himself as a heinous "SS-Mann." There were also more "sensitive" attempts to see his "dark secret" as an enduringly rich stimulus for his work, finding in his large oeuvre many direct or indirect references to his war experiences as a 15-17 year old. And then there were quite a few sensible comments from across the political spectrum about the by now more widely known high number of teenage boys conscripted by the Waffen-SS in the last two years of the war under chaotic conditions. No one could have foreseen then our desire for absolute moral-political cleanliness in these matters now; if only we managed to be half-way that fastidious in present political problem-situations, let's say Lebanon or Iraq.

At the age of 15 the enterprising young Grass had volunteered for service on a submarine and was rejected; but two years later the SS was desperate for cannon fodder and ready for him. Even a historian of the Nazi period like Norbert Frei known for his harsh judgments of a collectively guilty German past, said that Grass's membership in the Waffen-SS  was "no big deal." In 1944, it was no longer an elite fighting unit but took whatever it could get, mainly boys conscripted from the school bench, whole junior classes that in some cases were wiped out to the last boy. Looked at soberly, Grass was never an evil "SS-Mann" but a boy thrown, like so many others, into the hellish end stage of the worst war in Western historical memory.

Grass was truly lucky to become an American POW on May 8, 1945 after signing and fingerprinting the appropriate, still preserved papers. The now 17 year-old from Danzig would have been much worse off, would probably not have survived to write the thousands and thousands of pages of baroque self-absorbed, moralizing, sometimes brilliant prose, had he been taken POW by the Russian army. The Americans wrote down that he had been Lade-Schütze (loading the guns) of the 10th SS-Panzer-Division "Frundsberg" and that his "civilian profession" was "Schüler-pupil." Later he would remember that he never got to fire a single shot. For a year he washed dishes for an American Air Force kitchen, was probably reasonably well fed and paid $107.20 for his work. POW Günter Grass, number 31G6078785, was released on April 24, 1946. A note on one of the documents bears the date "10. November 1944" and the remark "W.-SS," possibly the date of  being drafted by the Waffen- SS that had not been known previously. Spiegel (online August 15, 2006) easily obtained copies of these documents from the Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle  (Army information office) in Berlin.

These facts would be too banal for the Wiesenthal Center suspecting that some dark, evil deed might come to light, never mind what Grass remembered. The memories of people under suspicion are always untrustworthy. Males of a certain age, referred to in Germany as the Flakhelfer Generation (anti-aircraft) because this is what these teenage boys mostly did and how they died in large numbers, might have volunteered for the Marine,the Luftwaffe, or the Waffen-SS. Regardless of their conduct and of the historical contexts of  their joining this organization, W.W.II related suspicions generally stick--even to the notoriously mild-mannered German Pope. Though Grass is now attaching "shame" to his SS experience when talking publicly about his memoirs, as a private memory it might just have been too common to make much of it. The fact that many of the sensible reactions to the "Grass affair" still thought regrettable his long silence about it reflects more on the specific German compulsion for confession in these matters than on Grass's general moral obligation to "come clean." As a boy, like many others, he believed in the greatness of Nazi Germany, as do some of the most intriguing and compelling adolescent characters in his novels for whom he drew on his own youthful experiences. Arguably, he got the Nobel Prize for having done so; where his narratives of war and violence work, his readers would indeed learn from the troubled German past.