Posted on 08/18/2006 10:38:20 AM PDT by lizol
Nobel laureate's memoirs sell out after SS confession
By Lee Glendinning and agencies
The publishers have brought forward the release date and German bookshops are struggling to keep up supplies.
Such is the demand for Gunter Grass's autobiography, which has stunned Germany with revelations that the Nobel-prize winning novelist once served in Hitler's Waffen SS as a teenager.
Grass, 78 - regarded by many as Germany's moral arbiter - recounted the secret shame that has weighed upon him for decades following his involvement in the elite military force, in a pre-publication interview with a German newspaper last weekend.
His admissions ignited furious debate across the country, with calls that he be stripped of his literary awards and of his honorary citizenship of the Polish port of Gdansk, where he was born. Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland and a Nobel peace laureate, said today that he might renounce his own honorary citizenship of Gdansk if Grass keeps his.
Far from affecting sales, the controversy has rapidly whipped up interest in his memoirs, entitled Peeling Onions. Steidl, the publisher, has now delivered 130,000 books out of a print run of 150,000. A reprint of a further 100,000 is hastily being carried out, and the timetables for publishing translated copies are being brought forward.
"It’s astonishing," said Bianca Kroemer, spokeswoman for Berlin’s Dussmann bookshop. "By the end of the first day a quarter of our stock had gone – that’s due to the SS story."
Grass won international acclaim upon publication in 1959 of his first novel, The Tin Drum, which is set in Gdansk. He fast became the country’s best known post-war writer, producing sprawling literary accounts of life in Nazi Germany which encouraged Germans to confront their past.
Last night he gave a television interview in which he confessed more about how he had fallen under the sway of national socialism during the early war years. The author said the Nazis made a big impression on him from the age of 13, and he had thought that joining the Waffen SS would provide a direct route to Hitler.
"I was caught up in the ideology," he said. "I was blinded by it. I wanted to be a hero and perhaps play some sort of role."
But the reality of fighting on the eastern front was very far from his dreams. Peeling Onions contains graphic descriptions of combat and the fear he experienced. "I see myself crawling under a tank, as I had been taught... Beset by fear, I wet myself," he writes.
"Bodies lay scattered, alone and piled up, dead, alive, contorted, skewered by branches, dusted by grenade splinters."
The Waffen SS was a highly-trained Nazi combat unit, initially comprising volunteers, which participated in the Holocaust. By the end of the war, however, most members were drafted and many were under 18.
Grass also describes his guilt at his war record. "For decades I refused to admit the word and the (SS) double letters. What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth, I was silent about after the war out of a growing shame."
Grass said in the interview on the ARD channel on German television that he could give no reason for waiting so long to tell his story. Despite his shame, he insisted he did not feel guilty.
"I was not aware of any guilt. I was drafted in and played no part in any crime, but I always had the need to tell people about it in a broader context," he said.
"As far as verifiable crimes are concerned, nothing happened of that sort."
The Steidl spokeswoman denied that Grass had acted to pre-empt the release of information from the archives of the East German secret police, as some newspapers have reported.
Grass had previously admitted no more than that he had served in an air defence unit. In reality, when he volunteered for submarine duty at 15 and was rejected, he was instead called up to Waffen SS.
The author said he knew nothing of the crimes of the Nazis when he was young, and found it "impossible to accept at first" when the death camps were revealed after the war.
Grass conceded he had acted "very late or too late" by waiting for more than 60 years to reveal his secret but said he believed he had used his life since his wartime experiences to constantly denouncing Germany’s Nazi past.
Now though, he feels insulted by the severe criticism he has faced.
"What I am experiencing is an attempt to make me a persona non grata, to cast doubt on everything I did in my life after that. And this later life had been marked by shame."
Germany has responded however, with accusations of hypocrisy. Michael Juergs, his biographer,spoke of "the end of a moral authority".
Bernd Neumann, the culture minister added: "Gunter Grass’s literary work remains intact but his status as a moral reference point, which he has always seen himself as, has been damaged."
A group representing Germans expelled from their homes after the war has called upon Grass to donate the proceeds from his memoirs to Polish victims because, it claimed, the admissions have boosted sales of his new book, but damaged German-Polish relations.
One of the few to come to his defence was Volker Schloendorff, the director of the film version of Grass’ 1959 classic The Tin Drum. In an open letter published in Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, he said the confession saw Grass apply the same scrutiny to himself that he does to his fictional characters.
"I hope that you feel greatly liberated by no longer having to be a living monument," he said.
Grass says he waited so long to finally tell his secret because he wanted to use the book to fully explain his past.
"It is the subject of the book, I worked on it for three years, and everything I have to say on the subject is in it. Whoever wants to judge me, may judge me."
"Grass, 78 - regarded by many as Germany's moral arbiter - recounted the secret shame that has weighed upon him for decades following his involvement in the elite military force, in a pre-publication interview with a German newspaper last weekend."
Hey, Herr Gunther. How does it feel to fall of that high horse you've been riding???
Reminds me of that character Christopher Plummer played in "Inside Man"
Now we know why he admitted it.
It just struck me that it is only natural that Pope Benedict was greatly abused because he was drafted into the Germany Army because he has become the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, much reviled by the Left, while Gunther Grass's membership in the Waffen SS (by either choice or draft) will be forgiven because he adopted Leftist causes & socialism (without the "National" infront of it) as his own.
He is lying. The special operations were well known in the SS. He may have been drafted, but considering how many civilians were murdered during this time in that area, he would have known about it. Perhaps he did not participate, but I have my doubts.
I'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank.
I'm sure, still it's always amusing to see people like this unmasked.
Amen to that. As always, "Follow the money."
"Those big-shot writers could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar. "
--Mickey Spillane
I haven't read anything he wrote and don't know anything about him.
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