Gunter Grass is one of the shining lights in the literary world. The man's won a Nobel Prize, after all, and that's a rare enough event. These days, it's his outspoken anti-war stance that really stands out, due to a most unpleasant incident in his youth.
Speaking of youth, that would be Hitler Youth in Gunter's case. The man who wrote the anti-war allegory The Tin Drum turns out to be a raging, full of hot air hypocrite. Anti-war indeed, but at the end of 1944, he was not so anti-war as all that. No, he up and joined the Waffen-SS.
Could he have signed on as an ordinary grunt, a volunteer in the Wehrmacht, to do his bit for Nazi Germany in the closing days of the war? That particular question hasn't come up, and so we are left with one nasty fact. Gunter Grass was in the SS, the most vile, most murderous unit that Heinrich Himmler directed into everlasting infamy.
Why admit to it now? After all, he kept it a secret for sixty years. One might naturally assume that someone found out and was going to spill, leaving your man with little choice but to embarrass himself by admitting his membership in the SS, or letting someone else humiliate him.
And back in Germany, the anti-war crowd is dazed. Grass was the voice and the face of pacifism, the man who flapped his gums over the Nazi question. Turns out he was a Nazi himself, and doesn't that put a whole new spin on his rhetoric? They're sure spinning in Germany, where a few prize commissions are seriously thinking of revoking the awards to the famed novelist. Joachim Fest, who wrote Gunter's biography, is absolutely in shock. How could Grass set himself up as the national conscience and turn out to be one of the enemy?
What's left to do but rush out and read some of Gunter's anti-war prose? Should be good for a top laugh, roaring over the hypocrisy of the gobshite.
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