Gunter Grass and the Waffen SS
Perhaps some readers will recall Paul de Man, the literary critic who hid a Nazi past. De Man cut a wide swath in academia. I won’t bore you with de Man’s once-chic criticisms, but in my view they were reductionist interpretations laced with nihilism. Language is always indicative and every communication has “contigencies.” Those are not new insights. de Man and his crowd, however, basically argued for meaninglessness. All that filled the empty volume of meaninglessness was the power to impose an interpretation. I recall getting in a discussion with a senior faculty member at Columbia U. in 1983, while standing in the corridor of the 6th floor of Philosophy Hall. The professor had been in a discussion with Hillis Miller (of Yale) about de Man and Jacques Derrida. He told me students needed to know that “interpretation is contingent.” I told him that de Man and the structuralist-deconstructionist crowd were anything but cutting edge. I called them a peculiar kind of fascist, and ”Nazi-like.” They believed everything was based on the power to impose meaning. They are power freaks themselves. My take? Art exposes meaning– these guys miss the joy and mystery of creativity, of sharing experience and imagination with other people. They opt for nihilistic control instead of surprise and understanding. As the prof walked back to his office –and yes, I believe he was shaking his head– I thought, “Well, Austin, you’re the token conservative grad student.” Though I saw him often after that hallway conversation, we never discussed de Man, etc, again. I had been damned blunt.
I think it was three or four years later that we learned of de Man’s Nazi-connected past. Bingo– of course the man fled to “contingent” interpretations. He was hiding from his own past. He was putting his own life “under erasure.” (”Under erasure” was a cool term for the deconstructionists. It meant lots of things– what it meant could change depending on the audience, cocktail party, time of day, etc.)
Here’s the capper: Following those revelations I received a letter from the professor. He said he had often thought about what I had said regarding de Man. And now de Man’s dark secret had emerged. The professor credited me with genuine critical insight and the guts to say what I said.
I just did a quick search and found that de Man died in late 1983. The revelations appeared after his death– which is in line with my memory. The wikipedia entry says de Man wrote around 200 articles for Nazi-controlled publications. (See the wikipedia entry for one of de Man’s “solutions” for the “Jewish problem.”) De Man’s uncle was a collaborationist politican in Belgium.
Now we learn that Nobel laureate novelist Gunter Grass –darling of the European left intelligentsia– tromped around, albeit briefly, in the Waffen SS. Grass neglected to tell us about his youthful experience, which is odd, because Grass has spent a lifetime telling us about what’s wrong with the world, and in particular what’s wrong with America.
The New York Times’ lede:
In novels, plays, essays and newspaper interviews, Günter Grass has often told Germans what they did not want to hear: about their history, about their politics, even about themselves. For many on the left, since the 1960’s he has come to represent the conscience of a country with much to lament.
After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, he explained his obsession with Germany’s past. “There were extenuating circumstances,” he told the Swedish Academy, “mountains of rubble and cadavers, fruit of the womb of German history. The more I shoveled, the more it grew. It simply could not be ignored.”
But now, at 78, Mr. Grass has stunned Germany by confessing that he too has a buried past. In an interview with a leading German newspaper, he revealed that in the final months of World War II, when he was 17, he was drafted by the Waffen SS, the military branch of the notorious Nazi corps that played an important role in the Holocaust and other atrocities.
The reaction in Germany to this admission has been one of disbelief and indignation: not that a teenager should have been recruited into the Waffen SS as Hitler struggled to avoid defeat, but that the country’s most prominent writer should have hidden this while hectoring others for their political and social sins from the comfort of the moral high ground.
No kdding? Grass has imposed a guilt-trip on the rest of us to mask his own guilty-past.
Two other telling excerpts:
Mr. Grass is of course hardly the first former SS soldier to have covered his tracks, but since the publication of his most famous novel, “The Tin Drum,” in 1959 he has enjoyed a unique place in German society as both the country’s most outspoken political intellectual and its most famous international author.
Some of his positions, like fighting Germany’s amnesia about its wartime record, have been embraced by the country as a whole, but others have stirred controversy, notably when he opposed German unification in 1990 as a threat to Europe and later described East Germany’s “annexation” by West Germany as a colonial act…
One particular stance has been recalled in recent days. In 1985 Mr. Grass was fiercely critical of President Ronald Reagan and West Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl, for visiting a German war cemetery in Bitburg, where some two dozen former SS officers were among those buried.
Now because Mr. Grass has invariably taken leftist positions, his loudest critics are, unsurprisingly, conservatives.
Hah. That’ll be the party line of his defenders — not that the man misled us, not that the assumed a moral pretense and used that pretense to viciously attack his “political opponents” — nope, Grass will be given a pass because he’s being attacked by “conservatives.”
For what it’s worth, I had enjoyed a couple of Grass’ books, though I found “Tin Drum” to be a mishmash of a novel. I took a contemporary German lit course in 1981 and the teacher was a big fan of Grass’. The man can write and write with passion and pizzazz.
Another excerpt from the Times’ article, quoting a Dutch paper (and I agree with the statement):
“Parts of his work will retain their eternal beauty,” the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad noted in an editorial. “But the creator of ‘The Tin Drum’ has been disqualified as a critic of that age-old German ailment — suppression of the memory of the war.”
The literary world (a planet of diminishing magnitude) is rushing to Grass’ defense. Salman Rushdie has weighed in on behalf of Grass. Rushdie says Grass committed a “partial concealment.” Looks more like an essential concealment given the author’s subject matter and politics, and it certainly became a calculated concealment after his rise to notoriety.
I’m not sure how much a revelation would have hindered his literary career. It would certainly have taken the edge off of his criticism of Reagan, though. An acknowledgement might have strengthened his moral voice. According to the Spiegel Grass did tell the US troops who captured him in 1945 that he had belonged to the SS. The Spiegel article says Grass was held by the US Army “third division” (likely the 3rd Infantry) and that Grass said he was a marksman in 10th SS Panzer Division. The big bad US Army paid former SS marksman Grass $107.20 when it released him from a prisoner work camp in April 1946.
Grass is allegedly stunned at the “hostile” reactions. Grass’ reaction reminds me of Eason Jordan’s after Jordan revealed that CNN had toed Saddam’s propaganda line in order to keep its Baghdad bureau open.
Spiegel OnLine adds more.
Excerpt:
“Those who want to judge can judge,” Grass told German ARD in an interview to be aired on Thursday night. He also accused his critics of conducting a kind of character assassination aimed at throwing everything he had accomplished in his later life into question. Discussing his decades-long silence on the issue, the author said: “This life I led later was characterized, among other things, by this sense of shame.”
Judge not lest ye be judged– that’s sound spiritual advice. That verse speaks to profound experience, and acknowledges that the power of final judgment is God’s, not man’s. But that’s not the wisdom Grass invokes. Note the verbal trick in Grass’ phrase “those who want to judge.” He’s dismissing any negative reaction to his belated revelation as a desire, as an act of revenge. Pish.
Grass built a political and public reputation on judging Germany. He has also practiced fashionable anti-Americanism, which has polished his rep in left-wing literary circles (circles of diminishing magnitude). He acknowledges in the Spiegel interview that much of his work and activism is compensation — that has the ring of truth and I welcome it.
*Drafted* into the SS? I can’t say it’s impossible, but as I recall the SS was elite, and unlikely to have been filled by draftees. I believe recruits were expected to show Nazi party credentials, as well.  ED NOTE: Grass admitted to being in Hitler Youth — many if not most young Germans of his age were members at one time or another. No doubt “impressment” into Waffen-SS service in late ‘44 occurred. However, Grass took Reagan to task for visiting Bitburg and therein lies a problem. As I recall Reagan said that in his opinion many Germans in that Bitburg cemetery simply served. Grass could have backed the Gipper up on that, but it wouldn’t have helped his standing with Euro-intellectuals. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Reagan should have gone to Bitburg, but the old guy thought it would actually help a NATO ally if he did. Remember, the lefties called Reagan “Hitler.” Thanks for the comment.
Comment by Dave Hardy — 8/17/2006 @ 2:11 pm
Interesting insight. I never much liked Die Bleichtrommel and found Grass’ hectoring sanctimoniousness offensive over the years. I remember discussing Grass with a German friend who was a fellow graduate student in intellectual history in the early 1970s, and his saying after several drinks that it wouldn’t surprise him if Grass had been a leader in the Hitler Jugend. I guess Grass just kept taking the old slogan Deutschland Erwache! seriously even after the War - just for the other side of the old German nationalist/communist fight.
Comment by Cato — 8/17/2006 @ 2:52 pm
Great post. You might want to consider a link to something on Heidegger, and perhaps Knut Hamsun as well. It is cliche to restate that, at their extreme edges, rightist and leftist become indistinguishable. After all, what shoud logically stop “Intellectuals” who believe in nothing but power and the truth of forceful imposition, from flipping from extreme right to extreme left? Read Wolfgang Schwarzwaller’s “The Unknown Hitler” for some insight into the easy flip-flopping of extremist “artist” and “intellectuals” in Weimar Germany.
Comment by Sergio — 8/17/2006 @ 3:16 pm
On reflection, Grass’ status as cultural critic could only have been enhanced by the (what could have been a very self-serving)admission of his flawed history. His failure to confess alludes more to his well developed conscience than to any fraudulent deceit on his part. Â ED NOTE: This is hilarious.
Comment by D Rakich — 8/17/2006 @ 6:42 pm
NPR, today, referred to Grass’ having been “drafted” into the SS. I don’t know if the SS “drafted” anybody, putting a great deal into its volunteer status. Things were tough in Germany in 1945, and any number of drastic contingencies were adopted. But this was in 1944. Even if the SS, at the end, “drafted” guys, this was not at the end. So, no suprise, NPR was either deliberately giving the guy a pass, or letting its hard-won ignorance of practically anything important to innocently give the guy a pass. I go for the former. There are some things even NPR has to know.
Comment by Richard Aubrey — 8/17/2006 @ 7:01 pm
[…] Austin Bay, in discussing the Nazi Nobel writer, begins by channeling Jeff Goldstein’s semiotics post-lectures. […]
Pingback by Chapomatic » An Odd Connection — 8/17/2006 @ 7:20 pm
The Old man and his past : shallow thoughts on Günter Grass … I don’t know much about Günter Grass. I have never read one of his books even though I am an avid reader. When I heard of the controversy surrounding his admission that he served in Hitler’s army, I thought, “not…
Trackback by Globalclashes — 8/17/2006 @ 11:49 pm
A look at Gunter Grass’… confession that he belonged to the Waffen-SS as a youth. (Austin Bay)……
Trackback by Pajamas Media — 8/18/2006 @ 7:37 am
Because it matters, and I care: Even more on the anti-NSA surveillance ruling being celebrated by the a number of "progressives"… First, here's Mark Levin, discussing the New York Times' framing of the strained decision. Writes Levin:It seems to me that since the ACLU — the mother ship for the NYCLU and other affiliates — was one of the plaintiffs in the cas…
Trackback by protein wisdom — 8/18/2006 @ 12:30 pm
Hypocrisy follies… One of the many news items I missed while away on vacation was the scandal caused by the Leftist German author Guenter Grass’s revelation in his forthcoming autobiography that he had served in the Waffen SS at the end of…
Trackback by Public Secrets: from the files of the Irishspy — 8/19/2006 @ 11:48 am
I cannot tell you how angry this revelation has made me, along witt the obfuscations of it by the left already pouring forth. Before checking out your comment I read and replied to a piece by Norman Birnbaum at the nation, here. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/birnbaum I would like to post here my message to Birnbaum. TO THE NATION You say, “it is grotesque that Grass should describe him [Jorg von Frundsberg] as if he were a forerunner of Che Guevara.” Amazing. In condemning Grass you bow to the very spirit that motivated him, both as a Nazi and as an enemy of the post-war bourgeois world that Nazism failed to defeat. Che, indeed! As with Che, so with Grass and you, it all boils down to the revolt against “bourgeois routine,” as you put it, does it not? For you now to speak, in the pages of the Nation of all places, of the “ultimate corrosive of democratic politics, cynical distrust of good intentions” is priceless. Five years of it have corroded vast amounts of pure metal here in America, thank you very much. But we are supposed to weep over Gunter Grass! What you all will not admit, but what is so apparent now in the blinding light, is that Grass’s Nazism, his opposition to Kohl and Adenauer, to NATO, the US nuclear shield, and the reunification of Germany, all of it is of one piece. It’s still the long march through the institutions, for you all, isn’t it? With Grass now still marching through them to the tin drum of the publishing game, all without the foggiest sense of the fragility, grace and decency of those institutions long before and long after you showed up. ED NOTE: Great comment. Thank you.
Comment by Jon Burack — 8/22/2006 @ 1:02 pm
[…] En av Grass motstÃ¥ndare […]
Pingback by editor@OurComments.org »Blog Archive » Günther Grass och trovärdighet — 8/22/2006 @ 10:48 pm
[…] ON WAFFEN SS-ITUDE: “Judge not lest ye be judged– that’s sound spiritual advice. That verse speaks to profound experience, and acknowledges that the power of final judgment is God’s, not man’s. But that’s not the wisdom Grass invokes. Note the verbal trick in Grass’ phrase “those who want to judge.†He’s dismissing any negative reaction to his belated revelation as a desire, as an act of revenge. Pish.” What does his Waffen-SS past tell us about Germany’s leading intellectual? …. (austinbay, spectator) […]
Pingback by CaNN :: We started it. — 8/24/2006 @ 10:57 am
[…] Austin Bay Blog […]
Pingback by Blogworld » A different take on Guenter Grass — 9/2/2006 @ 3:22 pm
You hypocritical piece of dirt. At least have the menschlichkeit to write honestly
Grass was recruited into to SS at the end of the war when he was only 17 years old!!
If you want to hold him blameworthy for being an SS member, then at least describe why you think that at 17 and drafted he was a responsible person and as evil as any adult Nazi Any curt woud demand that before finding a 17 year old guilty of serious crimes.Yet you praise the comments on your blog that speak of Grass’ “Nazism” DeMann was an adult
At that point in the war-in fact years before, the SS was recruiting nonAryans to fill their ever-dminishing ranks. They were accepting non Aryan Slavs, non Aryan Czechs, An Alabanian Muslim Volunteer brigade, anyone they could get- and without going through their geneologies to make sure they were Aryan
And, if you tried to evade the draft at that point in the war, you were likely to be shot
If ANY writer has dealt with his own and German guilt for Nazism, it has been Gunter Grass in almost very book he wrote. His work has redeemed any guilt he had
He didn’t bullshit his way out being hung like Speers with his book of lies
Nor ignore a knowing use ,command of, and “recruitment of’ of slave labor -slaves worked and starved to death like “Fly me to the Moon” Werner von Braun But of course your bragging that you essentially “browsed” through a couple of works of Grass is revealing about your depth of knwoledge
Where are your blog postings on them? On von Braun and on Speers, and since you were “hanging out ” in Philosophy a Colombia, tell us a bit about Heidegger.
It gives me great pleasure to know that you and your blog and nazi-sympathies will be long forgotten while Grass will still be read in re-print after reprint
Jay E Kantor, Phd
Comment by Jay E Kantor,PhD — 3/7/2009 @ 11:45 pm