SS Man of the Left
By Stephen Brown and Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 28, 2006

In his voluminous political writings throughout the years, Gunter Grass always insisted that his role, as an artist and an intellectual of note, was to remind Germany of its profound national shame -- the Nazi era -- and “keep the wound open.” But earlier this month it emerged that for over sixty years the Nobel Prize-winning novelist had been concealing just such a wound from public view.

Grass stirred worldwide controversy when he admitted that he had been a member of Hitler's notorious Waffen SS in the final months of World War II. Having set himself up for decades as his country's moral conscience, in which capacity he was always urging his fellow countrymen to “come clean” about their wartime past and seek forgiveness, the moralizing Grass stood revealed as a hypocrite of colossal proportions.



But the timing of Grass’s confession is not inexplicable. It appears to be a cynical public relations ploy to promote sales of his forthcoming autobiography, Peeling the Onion. Hence Grass made his startling disclosure in a two-page interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's leading national newspapers. The first print run of his book has since sold out.



Grass’s revelation adds a new twist to the personal narrative he has carefully fashioned over the years. Heretofore, the conventional wisdom had it that Grass, like many of his generation, was drafted into the Nazi army, the Wehrmacht, serving as an anti-aircraft soldier, but was in no sense a true-believer in the Nazi cause. Grass did nothing to discourage the prevailing view and much to bolster it. He had long stressed that he and other German youth were “too young to have been a Nazi, but old enough to have been formed by the Nazi regime.”



Grass now tells a different story.
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