gunter grass and frankfurter allgemeine and tin drum

When I was in Germany for 53 weeks in 1980-81, I made the acquaintance of many fellow German students, professors and other residents of the romantic and charming town of Tuebingen on the Neckar River. The names of two of their fellow countrymen were constantly on German lips in those days: Willie Brandt and Gunter Grass. The former was honored, even if controversial, because of his practice of "Ostpolitik": the attempt to re-establish friendly relations with the Soviet bloc. The latter was all the rage for reasons that I found more difficult to understand at the time. Grass was an author, an intellectual, a founder of the so-called "magical realism" in German literature, a figure of immense moral authority because, in some way, he was helping the people come to grips with the terror of the Nazi regime. And, you had to be in Germany in those days to realize how much the past, and especially the past of WWII, weighed on the German people. As one distinguished theologian said to me on one occasion in 1981:

"Here we are, the Germans. We have given to the world true scholarship and art. We have taught them how to think and study and learn and push back the frontiers of knowledge. And then, we have made the whole world suffer, not just once, but twice in this century."

It is this antinomy, this contradiction, at the heart of the German experience that becomes the fodder for Gunter Grass's fertile imagination and evocative prose, beginning with The Tin Drum in 1959. Gunter Grass, through his realistic, yet magical, depiction of the difficult, dirty, sordid and conflicting life of a young man who refuses to grow beyond 3' in height, was seen as one person who was in fact confronting the truth about the German past. Indeed, by confronting the truth, he was in a sense redeeming Germany for the Germans, giving them a new lease on life, showing them that their language need not just be used as the engine of propagandistic campaigns.

But now, on August 11, 2006, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine, probably the leading newspaper in Germany, Grass had to confess something. He confessed that he was not only a member of the Hitler Youth in his early days, which is "forgivable" by almost everyone, not only enlisted in the Army, but was himself a member of the feared, cruel and utterly inhumane "Waffen SS," ("Schutzstaffel"--or "Protective Staff") which originally began as Hitler's personal bodyguard but then morphed into the group responsible for carrying out his worst atrocities. Gunter Grass, the moral authority who had urged his fellow countrymen for more than 40 years to confront the truth of the past, was only now, in 2006, seeming to confront his own truth. And it was as sordid as anything that he described in The Tin Drum. In other words, the German people, and educated Westerners in general, are faced with the issue of whether Gunter Grass is a great moral hypocrite or, in some ways, that he is heroic for revealing this ugly truth about his past.

Wringing the Hands

So now the handwringing has begun. No one knows how many honors Grass will be stripped of before it is all over. Before Grass receives complete vilification, however, I have four things to say, not only about Grass but also about our lives and the way that history and our personal history intersect in unpredictable ways.

1. It is almost impossible for people 60 years after a wrenching event to fathom exactly what that event felt like to those involved in it. Gunter Grass was drafted and willingly entered the military and served in the SS. From the cold and analytical perspective of 2006, such a decision is more than troubling. From the perspective of 1944, however, such a decision is much more explicable. Let me introduce one event from our contemporary world to illustrate it. There is no doubt that the most wrenching event for Americans in general in the last generation was the 9/11/01 attacks on NYC, Washington DC and another jet which crashed in PA. Oh, we had the explosion of the "Challenger" in 1988 (or was it 1987?), the attempted assassination of President Reagan, the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, Iran Contra and several other events since 1980, but nothing remotely compared with the devastating and painful attack on us on 9/11. But, can you remember what it felt like in the wake of 9/11? I do. I recall thinking that the country had, in fact, gone mad. I recall thinking that we were in a most vulnerable state, and that we would eagerly have given over almost all of our rights to some figure in authority as long as he would promise to find and punish those responsible for this horror as well as assure us that we would be safe. George Bush, a President whose legitimacy as President was still being contested, and who really wasn't a person worthy to whom to give over all of our rights, achieved stratospheric approval ratings in the months following 9/11. And, in my judgment, he used this "grant of authority" which the American people gave him in an abusive way. He tried to enforce national conformity; he threatened artists who spoke out against him; he tried to squelch dissident voices (see the example of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson), he threw his weight around with abandon. We will be spending much of the next decade in this country extricating ourself from the immediate effects of the President's actions and probably most of the next century trying to come to grips with the cultural and religious issues in the wake of our response to 9/11. Nevertheless, the point should be clear. We reacted as a country in the Fall of 2001 in ways that will be difficult to explain to people born after 2010. They will discover all kinds of ways we acted foolishly, and perhaps illegally, in the wake of 9/11. Our ultimate recourse will probably be, "Well, you had to be there."

Thus, my first point, which is actually in defense of Gunter Grass, is that you really had to be there to understand why he did what he did. And, unfortunately, we weren't there.

Sorry, not finished yet. One more essay is needed.

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