Günter Grass, who has died at the age of 87, was the most audacious German novelist of his generation. His first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), was narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a dwarf writing his memoirs in an insane asylum. That exhilarating work addressed Germany’s suspension of morality during the war from an oblique, almost fantasy-like perspective. It also dared to show suffering on the home front—then still a public taboo in Germany. Especially memorable was Grass’s matter-of-fact description of his hometown Danzig—later Polish Gdansk—engulfed by Russian fire: “what had taken several hundred years to build burned down in three days.”
The Tin Drum and the other novels in his “Danzig Trilogy”—Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963)—made his reputation. He was also political and made frequent interventions on behalf of the social democratic left. A friend of Willy Brandt, in 1970 Grass accompanied the German Chancellor to Poland when the politician famously sank to his knees in front of the monument to the Warsaw rebels. In later years he became a critic of America and clashed with writer Saul Bellow; a poem he wrote about Israel's nuclear policy got him banned from the country.
Three years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1999, he published Crabwalk, his fictional account of the Russian sinking of the German ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which cost the lives of 9,400 civilians, including 4,000 children. He was impeccably balanced, recognising the magnitude of the loss of life—it was the greatest shipping disaster in history—but also German culpability, not only for the war but in allowing military hardware to be carried on board.
His commitment to such honesty led some to regard Grass as the nation’s conscience—and he played up to the image of the pipe-smoking sage. But his reputation was tarnished in 2006 when he published Peeling the Onion, a memoir in which he said for the first time that as a teenager he had been in the Waffen SS. Grass has always admitted to volunteering for the war, but never until then that he been part of Hitler’s ideological killing machine. (Though he never fired a weapon.) Especially galling for some was that Grass had for years urged others to come clean about their Nazi pasts, in the full knowledge that he was concealing his own secret.
It might have been long in coming but the account in Peeling the Onion of his time fighting for Hitler is compelling. He did not try to exculpate himself: “No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer.” He gives a chilling portrayal of his own indoctrination. During his time in the Reich Labour Service, he writes of a blue-eyed and blond boy—“the epitome of ‘racial purity’”—who refused to take part in rifle drills, refused to even touch a gun. Rumours spread that he was a Jehovah’s Witness or “Bible nut”; but he never openly mentioned his religion. All he said was: Wirtunsowasnicht, “we don’t do that”, a phrase that would come to haunt Grass. When the blond boy was taken to a concentration camp, he admits he was relieved. His rebellion had set off a storm of doubt in the young Grass’s mind. Soon, though, he was drawn back into fervent Nazism: when he heard the news that the 1944 plot to kill Hitler had failed, he felt “something akin to piety… The Führer saved! The heavens were once more, or still, on our side.”
Unlike The Tin Drum, this memoir does not hide behind the skirts of magical realism. It looks directly at Nazism from the perspective of one who was a true believer, and went on to become a Nobel laureate. So why did it take Grass so long? He could be prickly about the question. When the writer Andrew O’Hagan asked him onstage at the New York Public Library why he had concealed his SS membership, he refused to answer. Later O’Hagan received a letter from one of Grass’s friends saying, “it was an offence to the great man,” to ask such a question.
But was it merely hauteur that stopped Grass speaking? In Peeling the Onion he wrote of those infamous double initials of the SS: “What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame.” Shame breeds silence. Grass’s mother, like many Germans, went along with the war. She also expressed doubts about Hitler and was puzzled, according to Grass, about “why they’ve got it in for the Jews.” Only after her death did he discover that she, like so many other German women under occupation, had been raped by Russian soldiers. She had never spoken of it. Even in his fiction Grass averts his eyes: in The Tin Drum, Russian soldiers rape a neighbour but spare Oksar’s stepmother because she is cradling a baby in her lap.
Many Germans had the double-shame of being perpetrator and victim. For them, as for Grass, they did not have the clean bravery of the boy who would not carry a gun or the saintliness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In that sense—rather than as the pipe-smoking man of wisdom—he came to embody Germany’s troubled post-war conscience.
