Gunter Grass

From Philosopedia

Gunter Grass (16 October 1927)

Günter Wilhelm Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig to Willy Grass (1899-1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898-1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. His parents, who had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz), also had a daughter, born in 1930.

He was raised a Catholic, attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum, and volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house."

In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-SS. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American POW camp.

In 1946 and 1947 he worked in a mine and received a stonemason's education. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and travelled frequently.

In 1954 and since 1960, Grass has lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).

In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His works in English include the following:

The Tin Drum (1959)

Cat and Mouse (1963)

Dog Years (1963)

Four Plays (1967) including "Ten Minutes to Buffalo"

In the Egg and Other Poems (1977)

Two States One Nation? (1990)

A Critique

Daniel Johnson, writing in The Telegraph (24 September 2006), descried Grass's autobiography, Beim Häuten zer Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion):

Grass, who is a genius of self-publicity, knew full well what kind of bombshell he was about to release. Yet his publishers do not seem to have had a clue. Their catalogue – printed before the scheisse hit the fan – omits any hint of its most sensational revelation, though they were quick to cash in.

For those who can't wait for the translation (due next autumn), I have read the German original. Although nearly 500 pages long, it leaves room for a sequel, for it deals with only the first two or three of the eight decades of the author's life: the narrative begins with the outbreak of the Second World War.

It has taken Grass a long time to peel his onion – and the result is a book that, like the vegetable, induces tears of irritation rather than emotion.

Devotees will relish picking over the picaresque narrative, with its characteristically lugubrious and lubricious tone, besides the retrospective commentary on his previous works, revealing the origins of characters and scenes in his novels.

As a moral reckoning with the Nazi past, however, Peeling the Onion is a failure – and not even an honourable one. For a writer who has built his entire reputation on his indictment of an older generation for supposedly evading responsibility, Grass shows little awareness of his own bad faith in concealing the shameful facts about himself.

Though he constantly interrogates his younger self in a rhetorical manner, the older Grass does his best to avoid confronting the awful truth. By using the third person, he distances himself from his Nazi alter ego. An onion has many layers but no heart.

His account of life in an American-run prisoner of war camp is an example. He admits that he was then still in denial about the Holocaust, and contemptuous of young Jewish concentration camp survivors, whose only crime was to do the Germans' laundry. Grass and his comrades told them to 'bugger off to Palestine.'

Years later, in 1967, Grass recalled the camp before an Israeli audience, having claimed that he was 'innocent through no merit of my own', thanks to his youth. (No mention of the SS!) The young Nazis and the young Jews, he claimed, had had much in common: 'No matter how each had survived the system, it was the same system that had moulded them both.' Such moral equivalence between persecutor and victim was bad enough then, but it is worse now, when Israelis have to endure monstrous comparisons with the Nazis.

A key story that he tells several times in this book also took place at the PoW camp. There he met a Bavarian with whom he wrote poetry, played dice and crushed lice. The 'gentle know-all' was called Joseph, from nearby Altötting. His Catholicism was 'as firm as the Atlantic Wall', he dreamt in Latin and his ambition was to study theology.

When Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI in 2005, Grass realised that his 'mate' Joseph must have been the future German Pope. He recounted it to his sister, a down-to-earth midwife, who dismissed it as 'another of your typical tall tales with which you fooled our mother already as a boy'.

Whether it is fact or fiction, the anecdote tells us more about Grass than he intends. After his release from captivity, he chanced on a Catholic charity. It was the Church – virtually the only institution still functioning after the fall of the Third Reich – that gave him a roof over his head, clothed him and helped him to realise his ambition to be an artist. Yet he is just as anti-Catholic as he was in his Nazi days.

Grass's teenage rebellion against his Catholic parents took the form of volunteering for the SS, which persecuted the Church and propagated paganism. When Grass finally abandoned Nazism, it was the viscerally anti-Catholic and anti-American Social Democrat leader Kurt Schumacher whose demagoguery impressed him.

What has really animated Grass, throughout his literary career, was the aim of depicting the Federal Republic as irredeemably tainted – as if its Atlanticism had been merely a cloak for surreptitious Nazism. Even after the Berlin Wall fell, he wanted to protect East Germans from their wicked Western neighbours by opposing German reunification. His claim that the Germans have only faced up to their past since the Left took control in the 1960s has gained widespread acceptance, but it is a pernicious myth. The socialist, atheist, anti-Western Germany of Günter Grass was not morally superior to the conservative, Christian, anti-Communist Germany of Joseph Ratzinger – rather the reverse.

Grass likes to see himself as a good European. So did his former commander, Heinrich Himmler, who drew recruits for the Waffen-SS from all over the continent. Having dilated on his own 'foolish pride' in this genocidal elite, Grass remarks: 'Enough excuses.' But this entire book is one long excuse for a life that, we can now see, was hopelessly compromised by hypocrisy.