Günter Grass Triggers a Rather Tired Debate

Bill Niven, Nottingham Trent University

On 11 August 2006, in an interview with Frank Schirrmacher and Hubert
Spiegel of the _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_, Günter Grass--revealing
details of his forthcoming autobiography _Peeling the Onion_ (_Beim
Häuten der Zwiebel_, Steidl 2006)--admitted to having been a member of
the Waffen SS Tank Division Frundsberg towards the end of the war; while
he had applied, at the tender age of 17, for a posting in the submarine
service, he was called up instead by the Waffen SS, an organisation that
was recruiting increasing numbers of "ordinary" Germans in late 1944 and
1945 [1]. The reaction in Germany to this revelation has been, as might
be expected, intense, ranging from admiration for his belated
confession, to surprise, shock, indignation and anger. Overall, there
has been more criticism and disappointment, than support for the ageing
Grass. Henryk M. Broder, with his characteristically caustic wit,
remarked: "middle-class Germany in the year 2006 is reacting to the
confession like a family that's found out shortly before grandma's 80th
birthday that, in her youth, she'd been a prostitute" [2]. Trenchant as
this comparison is, however, it fails to capture the precise nature of
the indignation. While there might be those in the family disgusted by
grandma's fling with prostitution, no one in Germany seems to be
disgusted at the fact of Grass's membership in the Waffen SS. "I'm not
reproaching him for being in the Waffen SS", writes the historian
Joachim Fest; "what is inexcusable is that he kept silent about it and
at the same time adopted the role of moral conscience" [3]. Membership
in the Waffen SS, then, is a venial crime; keeping quiet afterwards is
the greater sin. As German commentators heap opprobrium on Grass for
keeping his lips sealed, they quietly go about rehabilitating the Waffen
SS, as if Oradour-sur-Glan and the other crimes committed by this
so-called "elite unit" were a paltry matter. Of course Grass--at least
so he claims--did not know he was being drafted into the Waffen SS until
he reached his recruiting station in Dresden. Of course, too, the Waffen
SS was much more of a regular fighting unit in the final months of the
war than it had been hitherto, and many members, such as Grass, will not
have been involved in crimes. But the current blanket exculpation of
those recruited into the Waffen SS by the German press is breathtakingly
misguided nevertheless for that. By absolving Grass of guilt for being
in the Waffen SS, Fest no doubt hopes to demonstrate that Grass's
silence on this membership can be made to appear all the more
unnecessary. But then if being in the Waffen SS was but a peccadillo so
late in the war, why _should_ Grass have bothered mentioning it? Fest
cannot legitimately exculpate Grass for his Waffen SS membership and
then inculpate him for not owning up to it. But he tries to do this
anyway, and he's not the only one.

The tenor of the criticism of Grass, then, is as follows: the great
writer, who in his works and his public pronouncements called for
Germany to confront its National Socialist past and soon established
himself as something of a moral authority, failed to confront his own
past. What he expected from others, namely critical self-scrutiny, he
was unable to deliver himself. In short he was a hypocrite, at best
someone whose public life was a sham. And he was a manipulator of his
own autobiography, choosing to conceal an unpleasant fact so as not to
threaten his career. Now that Grass has come clean, so the critics
claim, he can no longer be taken seriously, at least not as a spokesman
on public morality. The headlines of newspaper articles say it all: "The
Fall of the Moralist," proclaims _Stern_ on its cover [4]; "The
Tin-Drummer: Late Confession of a Moral Apostle", we read on the cover
of _Der Spiegel_, which shows Grass drumming away on a Waffen SS helmet
[5]; and the magazine _Focus_ promises its readers everything they want
to know about the "fall of a moralist" (both _Focus_ and _Stern_ play,
of course, on the ambiguity of the word "Fall" in German, which can mean
both "fall" and "case") [6]. At the same time, in yet another of those
inconsistencies that are the hallmark of this debate, some commentators
have been quick to express a (sometimes cynically formulated) admiration
for Grass's manipulation of the media [7]. When he fell on his sword, it
was in the presence of literary critic Frank Schirrmacher, a man known
for his ability to create excellent publicity. The publication of
Schirrmacher's and Hubert Spiegel's interview with Grass on 12th August
promptly stimulated massive interest in his autobiography. Grass's
publisher, Steidl, then released the first print run of Grass's
autobiography earlier than anticipated to feed the hunger of the nation
for more gory details (which the autobiography hardly provides). 150,000
copies were sold out within no time at all in a blaze of national and
international publicity. On 17th August, for instance, at one of
Berlin's biggest bookshops (Dussmann), prospective Grass purchasers were
given their chance for instant television stardom when they were
interviewed by television teams from various European countries as to
what they thought of Grass and what they hoped to learn from his book.

But then who was manipulating whom, here? Was it not more the case that
Schirrmacher was using Grass? Schirrmacher has become something of a
specialist for prepublication scandals; in the ongoing war with the
_Süddeutsche Zeitung_ for hegemony in matters cultural, they are clearly
an excellent strategy for gaining the upper hand. Schirrmacher's last
publicity stunt was the prepublication condemnation of Martin Walser's
_Death of a Critic_ (_Tod eines Kritikers_) in 2002. In the case of
Grass, it seems that Hubert Spiegel had caught wind of the fact that
Grass had been in the SS. He told Schirrmacher, whereupon the two of
them, armed with a bottle of grappa (apparently a favourite tipple of
Grass's), set off to interview Grass, who promptly obliged by confessing
[8]. It seems unlikely, to me, that Grass deliberately timed and placed
his interview to boost the sales of his autobiography. I doubt he has
the need to resort to such measures, especially given the recent
international success of _Crabwalk_ (_Im Krebsgang_, 2003)--although
this cannot be excluded. It is much more likely that Schirrmacher sensed
an excellent opportunity to give a lift to the ever-ailing profile of
the _Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung_'s feuilleton. What we have here, in
other words, is yet another of Germany's media scandals, carefully
staged and superbly performed by all the actors involved.

Should Grass hand back his Nobel Prize? The Nobel Prize Committee has
already ruled out revoking it, and indeed it was right to do so, for if
it started with such revocations, it would surely have to continue. It
would not take long before someone pointed out, for instance, that
Camilo José Cela, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989, surely
had no right to it either, given his activities as censor for the Franco
regime. Should Grass at least surrender his honorary citizenship of the
Polish town of Danzig, which even erected a little monument to Oscar
Matzerath, hero of Grass's _The Tin Drum_ (_Die Blechtrommel_, 1959)?
Although former union leader Lech Walesa originally called for Grass to
do so, he has since changed his mind; in any case, according to a survey
conducted amongst 1,000 of Danzig's citizens, more than 52% are against
Grass handing back his citizenship; and 72% are against the idea that he
should be stripped of it by Danzig's Town Council [9]. Should Grass at
least hand over the proceeds from sales of his autobiography to the
Poles as restitution, as the head of the _Centre Against Expulsions_
(_Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen_), Erika Steinbach, has suggested [10]?
That this suggestion should come from someone whose exhibition on ethnic
expulsions in Berlin has done nothing but damage to Polish-German
relations seems a little strange. The best way to palliate the Poles at
present would be to shut down this exhibition--and preferably soon,
before the Poles demand the return of all the exhibits which they lent
out to the exhibition's organisers; in fact, they have already demanded
the return of the bell retrieved from the sunken wreck of the _Wilhelm
Gustloff_.

The idea that Grass should "pay" in some way for his Waffen SS past,
and/or for not confessing to it, is an idea, one can imagine, that will
appeal to some on the right. Isn't it time that the left should pay up?
Given that Günter Grass, the greatest critic of the Federal Republic,
has turned out to be a hollow and self-righteous fake, what has the left
got to say for itself any more that could be relied upon? In fact, are
not all intellectuals now thoroughly discredited as arbiters of public
morality? Not so long ago we learnt that Walter Jens had been an NSDAP
member. Karl Corino revealed that Stephan Hermlin had touched up his
autobiography to exaggerate his role in the resistance, while W.G.
Sebald claimed (unfairly, as it turned out) that Alfred Andersch had got
divorced from his half-Jewish wife in 1943 in order to be accepted into
the _Reichsschrifttumskammer_. Is not Grass's act of self-criticism the
ultimate self-emasculation of the left, and the ultimate blow to the
authority of the writer as an institution? If so, then Schirrmacher will
have got his way, because of course there is more to his agenda than
boosting the sales of the _FAZ_. Ever since the attacks on Christa Wolf
in 1990, which widened out into an attack on the moral credibility of
writers in the _Gruppe 47_, Schirrmacher has been at the forefront of
those seeking to promote a German literature freed of the didactic
ballast and ambition which has been the hallmark of much post-war German
literature. What better way to do this than to knock down the great
representatives of this tradition one after the other: first Christa
Wolf, then Martin Walser, and now Günter Grass--although to be fair to
Schirrmacher, Grass knocked himself down. Nevertheless, Schirrmacher was
there when he did it. And he was quick to communicate it to the rest of
the world.

But as far as I can tell at present, the Grass debate, "The Case of
Grass", or "The Fall of Grass" will not stir up as long-term a debate as
did the Walser-Bubis debate of 1998 (in which Schirrmacher also played a
significant part), or even the "Death of a Critic" debate of 2002. By
now, it is even in Germany common knowledge that writers are not perfect
human beings. Besides, German literature over the last few years has
already liberated itself from its notoriously leaden seriousness, and
Grass is not the leading figure that he was. Many younger German writers
spend their time writing and avoid making public pronouncements. In a
way, this is a rather anachronistic debate. Of course there are attempts
to use Grass's confession as a means of discrediting everything he has
ever said (and is still saying) about the Adenauer and Kohl eras. Thus
the CDU politician Bernhard Vogel lambasted Grass for his dismissal of
the Adenauer era with its "Catholic stuffiness", and for failing to
recognise the "cultural renewal" and the "modernisation drive" of the
Adenauer era [11]. It could transpire that the moral discrediting of
Grass as a person will lead to attempts to totally discredit his
political assessments in past and present. But they will not achieve
much. Critical assessments of the Adenauer and Kohl eras are provided by
many others apart from Grass. Nor is the tenability of his criticism
invalidated by the knowledge that the motives behind it may be more
complex than hitherto realised (such as the wish to over-compensate for
his own failure to confront his Nazi past).

In the final analysis, the Grass debate will probably fizzle out
because, although there are those in today's Germany and in Poland who
are looking to benefit from it politically, they are not in the
majority. Germany is currently governed by a CDU-SPD coalition that has
little interest in spoiling for yet another of those tedious fights over
the value of their respective contributions to the democratic
development of the Federal Republic--fights that were a trademark of the
debate surrounding the _Wehrmacht_ exhibition. What I certainly would
hope is that some thought is given to Grass's motives for his long
silence, some serious thought. Suggestions, on the one hand, that it was
the result of sheer self-interest, or, on the other, that Grass was in
some way "traumatized" seem to me too obvious, too neat, as
explanations. In a televised interview with  Ulrich Wickert shown on ARD
on Thursday, 17th August 2006, Grass, when asked why he had only
revealed the truth about his past now, replied: "It was buried deep
within me. I can't really say what the reasons were. It always
preoccupied me, it was always there ("präsent"), and I was of the
opinion that it was enough to do what I was doing as a writer, as a
citizen of this country--which was the opposite of all those things that
had shaped me in my young years during the Nazi period". There is enough
raw material in those seemingly self-contradictory sentences for an
entire dissertation.

NOTES:

[1] "'Warum ich nach sechzig Jahren mein Schweigen breche'",
_Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_, 12 August 2006, p. 33.
[2] Henryk M. Broder, "Happy Hour im Fegefeuer", _Die Weltwoche_, 17
August 2006, p. 3.
[3] "'Moral vom Billigmarkt'", _Die Weltwoche_, 17 August 2006, p. 10.
[4] "Günter Grass: Der Fall des Moralisten", _Stern_, 17 August 2006,
pp. 30-46. See also the editorial by Thomas Osterkorn, titled "'Die
Scheiße kommt hoch'", p. 3.
[5] "Der Blechtrommler: Spätes Bekenntnis eines Moral-Apostels", _Der
Spiegel_, 21 August 2006, pp. 46-68. See also "Hausmitteilung", p. 5.
[6] "Späte Beichte", _Focus_, 21 August 2006, here p. 6. See also 44-49,
and the editorial by Helmut Markwort.
[7] See, for instance, the article by the writer Georg Klein, "Unser
Armer Grandioser Greis", _Frankfurter Rundschau: Die Literarische Welt
(Beilage)_, 19 August 2006.
[8] Jürgen Schreiber, "Beichte beim Lieblingsfeind", _Der Tagesspiegel_,
20 August 2006, p. 3.
[9] "Mehrheit der Danziger für Ehrenbürgerschaft", _Die Welt_, 21 August
2006, p. 23.
[10] For a critical take on Steinbach's suggestion, see Matthias Kamann,
"Die Beleidigten von Warschau", _Die Welt_, 19 August 2006, p. 8.
[11] Bernhard Vogel, "Unhaltbarer Vergleich bei Grass" [Reader's
Letter], _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_, 16 August 2006, p. 8.

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