En bombe har detonert i tysk offentlighet: Günter Grass (78) kjempet i Waffen SS på slutten av krigen. Akkurat at han deltok er ikke det som sjokkerer. Han var bare 17 år. Men at en forfatter hvis fremste oppgave har vært å rive ned løgner og forstillelse om Tysklands tunge fortid, selv har fortiet sin egen, er vanskelig å fatte.
Grass made the admission in a conversation with Frank Schirrmacher and Hubert Spiegel in the Saturday edition of the FAZ. The author, whose new autobiography, “Peeling Onions,” is due out in September, said he was drafted at the age of 17 into the Waffen-SS - the combat force of the SS - in the final months of World War II. He spent three months with the division. The division later was declared a criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Said Grass: “It had to come out, finally. The thing went as follows: I had volunteered, not for the Waffen-SS but for the submarines, which was just as crazy of me. But they were not taking anyone any more. Whereas the Waffen-SS took whatever they could get in the last months of the war, 1944/45. That went for conscripts but also for older men, who often came from the Air Force - they were called ‘Hermann Göring donations.’ The fewer intact airfields there were, the more ground personnel were stuck in army units or in units of the Waffen-SS. It was the same with the navy. And for me, I am sure I am remembering correctly, the Waffen-SS was at first not something scary, but rather an elite unit that was always sent to trouble spots, and which, according to rumour, had the most casualties.”
He said he volunteered mainly to “get away. From constrictions, from the family. I wanted to put an end to all that, and so I volunteered. And that’s also something odd: I enlisted at the age of 15, and promptly forgot the details of the process. And it was the same for many of my birth year: We were in the work service and suddenly, a year later, the conscription order lay on the table. And that must be when I first realized: it is the Waffen-SS.” Asked whether he had feelings of guilt, Grass answered: “At the time? No. Later on, this guilt feeling burdened me as a disgrace.” It wasn’t until he heard the testimony of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach in the Nuremberg trials that he “believed that the crimes had actually taken place.”
Later, he thought that “what I did in my writing was enough.” The 1950s did not seem to be the right time to confess. “We were under Adenauer, ghastly, with all those lies, with all that Catholic fug. The society of that day was fed by a kind of stuffiness that never existed under the Nazis.”
In an editorial, Frank Schirrmacher comments: “To be perfectly clear, it is not a question of guilt and crime. Grass was practically still a boy. And even later, he never portrayed himself as a resistance fighter.” And yet: “Anyone familiar with the rhetoric of post war excuses and finger-pointing might think they are not hearing right. The author who wanted to loosen all tongues, who took as his life’s theme the secretiveness and suppression of the old Federal Republic of Germany, admits his own silence which, according to his own words, must have been absolute. … How would it have been if Franz Schönhuber’s [former head of the extreme right-wing Republikaner party] Waffen-SS tract, ‘I was there,’ had been confronted with its counterpart, under the headline, ‘Me, too’?”
kilde: signandsight
Tyske aviser flommer over av kommentarer. Tidspunktet for avsløringen nevnes: Nettopp når Grass er ute med en ny bok. Er det for å gjøre seg interessant og øke salget? Noen mener han slipper bomben nå for å gjøre seg estetisk-etisk interessant. Det ligger et element av forfengelighet i avsløringen. Grass skriver i sin nye bok at han vurderte å skrive til De Aderton og fortelle at de ikke kunne gi ham litteraturprisen på grunn av hans fortid. Men gjorde det likevel ikke.
Grass har alltid vært voldsomt moralsk. Selv nå skriver han at han ikke kunne rykke ut med sin fortid under Adenaur-epoken, for den var full av forstillelse. Men han bidro jo selv til denne, skriver en lederskribent.
Alt Grass har skrevet blir nå sett i lys av denne avsløringen. På 50-tallet levde han fire år i Paris, og var venn med Paul Celan, den rumenske jøden som satte liv og forstand på spill for å kunne skrive om Røken fra gasskamrene. Grass sier at han murte seg inne og ga seg sin overdrevne frykt i vold. Det er ord som idag kommer i et annet lys.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14.08.2006
Gustav Seibt is less shocked by the fact itself than by the lateness of the admission. “Grass’ tendency to pass sharp moral judgements often seemed a bit ill-considered. Even now with his ‘admission’, he presents himself as deeply nauseated by the fug of the Adenauer era – and shows at the same time that he contributed to precisely this fug with his silence. And is the enormous dramatic effort with which Grass is now presenting himself to the public, not a last attempt to morally trap the error and to preserve a lack of ambiguity? Given the circumstances, it seems that what is being exposed is more foolery than guilt and it leaves an after-taste of vanity.”
Der Tagesspiegel, 12.08.2006
Gregor Dotzauer expressed shock: “Whoever hears this, whether disbelieving or stunned, may think it is a bad joke even after seeing it in convincing black and white, both in the literary recollection and in the interview. Günter Grass, Germany’s most celebrated living writer, the Nobel Prize winner, the conscience of the nation, the writer of legends, was a member of the Waffen-SS… A cheap joke of history? Or a truth whose bitterness cannot yet be fully measured? The categories flounder, because it gives rise to so many tones of meaning: for the work of Günter Grass, for his role as bearer of left-wing precepts, for the entire intellectual balance of the country, which his inner struggle and questions on foreign policy still fought out, against the backdrop of 12 long years under Hitler.”
Der Tagesspiegel, 12.08.2006
Gregor Dotzauer expressed shock: “Whoever hears this, whether disbelieving or stunned, may think it is a bad joke even after seeing it in convincing black and white, both in the literary recollection and in the interview. Günter Grass, Germany’s most celebrated living writer, the Nobel Prize winner, the conscience of the nation, the writer of legends, was a member of the Waffen-SS… A cheap joke of history? Or a truth whose bitterness cannot yet be fully measured? The categories flounder, because it gives rise to so many tones of meaning: for the work of Günter Grass, for his role as bearer of left-wing precepts, for the entire intellectual balance of the country, which his inner struggle and questions on foreign policy still fought out, against the backdrop of 12 long years under Hitler.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14.08.2006
“Posing as a self-assured moralist, and not without vanity, Günter Grass is trying to convert his admission of guilt into aesthetic-ethic capital.” Roman Bucheli is not impressed by Grass’ late admission to having been a member of the Waffen SS. He’s particularly appalled by his uninterrupted dogmatism. “More anger is on its way. The FAZ – which doesn’t exactly distinguish itself with tough questions – mentions the name Celan towards the end of the interview. At the end of the 1950s, Grass lived in Paris for four years and was friends with Paul Celan. Of him we learn: ‘He spent most of his time buried in his work and at the same time trapped in his real as well as excessive fears.’ Grass doesn’t waste any time considering the possibility that Celan’s ‘excessive fears’ might be founded in such haunting voids of silence to which he is only now conceding. Impossible to imagine what would have happened, had Celan known that his friend had been a member of the Waffen SS. Smugly, Grass adds to his memories of Celan: ‘When he read his poems aloud, you wanted to light candles.’”
