Memory's long shadow

Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass wanted to be the first to reveal his days in the Nazi Waffen-SS.

By Heller McAlpin

from the July 17, 2007 edition

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Would Günter Grass have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 had he decades ago made public his long-suppressed source of shame: namely, that at the age of 17 he was drafted into the elite Nazi Waffen-SS as a tank gunner?

Probably not – despite his having written (beginning in 1959 with "The Tin Drum"), what are arguably the most penetrating books probing what he calls "the massive weight of the German past."

And would his memoir, Peeling the Onion, garner as much attention without his belated confession?

Again, probably not – despite its trenchant exploration of the roots of Grass's artistic flowering and the capricious nature of "Lady Memory ... prone to migraines and reputed to smile at the highest bidder."

Why reveal his terrible secret now, as he approaches his 80th birthday? "Because I want to have the last word," Grass writes in this fascinating, multilayered memoir that covers not just his war years but takes us from his Danzig childhood through his work as a potash miner, stonecutter, sculptor, and poet to the publication of his first novel at age 32.

He clearly won't have the last word. But well aware that enterprising biographers were sure to unearth his inconvenient truth, which "fell into the well before the lid went on," Grass decided to beat them to the punch.

"Why only now?" Grass opened his 2002 novel, "Crabwalk." The narrator of that book, excavating the truth about the sinking of a German cruise-ship-turned-refugee-camp, confessed that "The words still don't come easily."

They probably didn't here, either. In fact, Grass writes in the first person about the boy who loved art, yet distances himself from "the boy bearing my name" in the Luftwaffe auxiliary by writing about him in the third person.

The most problematic aspect of Grass's secret isn't his role in the war but his role in burying it.

"What I had accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame," Grass writes. "But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it." Many find the long duplicity particularly galling in a writer who has spent his career outspokenly forcing others to face their role in Germany's disgrace.

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