At 17, Günter Grass was sent to the front at the end of World War II. More than six decades later, the admission that he had been a soldier in the Waffen-SS turned one of Germany's most famous writers into the center of an international scandal.
Grass was born on October 16, 1927, in Danzig, now Gdańsk. In 1959, he published the novel “The Tin Drum“, which made him a literary star and one of the most recognizable voices of post-war Germany. In 1999, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his works that make sense of the traumas and forgotten aspects of German history.
The recognition of the Waffen-SS
In August 2006, shortly before the publication of his memoirs “To peel the onion“, Grass admitted that in 1944 he had been mobilized into the 10th Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS “Frundsberg“. Until then, he had spoken publicly about his service as an anti-aircraft aide, but had not revealed his affiliation with the Waffen-SS.
Grass himself stated that he had been drafted, not a volunteer, and that he had not participated in war crimes. At the same time, he admitted that as a teenager he had perceived the Waffen-SS as an elite military unit. He later explained his long silence by shame.
“People can criticize me, that's something I have to accept”, Grass said in an interview quoted by “The Guardian“.The scandal is related not only to his short service, but also to the fact that for decades Grass was perceived as Germany's moral corrector and a persistent critic of the unwillingness to talk about the crimes of the Nazi regime. His critics accused him of hypocrisy and demanded that he return the Nobel Prize. Lech Walesa even called for him to give up his honorary citizenship of Gdańsk, but later withdrew this request.
The dispute over German unification
Grass was involved in political conflicts even before the recognition of the war. In 1990, he opposed the rapid reunification of Germany, because in his opinion, East Germany was being incorporated into the Federal Republic, instead of the two countries gradually building a common model.
His position is reflected in the novel “Wide Field“, published in 1995. The book caused a sharp reaction in Germany. The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki demonstratively tore up the novel in front of the cover of “Der Spiegel“, and Grass was accused of idealizing the German Democratic Republic and not understanding the public mood after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1993, he left the German Social Democratic Party because of its support for stricter asylum rules. Thus, his political positions often prove to be as controversial as his literary provocations.
„What Must Be Said“
In April 2012, Grass again caused international controversy with the poem „What Must Be Said“. In it, he criticized Israel's nuclear program, warned of a possible strike against Iran, and questioned Germany's supply of submarines to Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the text morally equated Israel with Iran. Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Grass persona non grata and banned him from entering the country. Netanyahu said the poem "speaks little about Israel and a lot about Mr. Grass himself."
Grass' critics see the text as anti-Semitic and an attempt to shift Germany's historical guilt onto Israel. His defenders insist that criticism of the Israeli government's actions should not automatically be defined as anti-Semitism. A few weeks later, Grass published "The European Shame," this time about the treatment of Greece during the debt crisis.
Günter Grass died on April 13, 2015, at the age of 87. What remains after him is "The Tin Drum", the Nobel Prize and the debate over whether a writer can be both a convincing moral critic of history and a man forced to belatedly acknowledge his own participation in it.
Sources: ndr.de, theguardian.com