Madam, - At the risk of creating controversy I feel obliged to put in a word for the uniquely talented author Günter Grass who has recently (and belatedly) admitted having served in the Waffen SS, to which he was conscripted at the age of 17 (around the time that Pope Benedict was a member of the Hitler Youth). Grass has been condemned for urging the German public, both through his political work and in his novels, to examine their consciences and come to terms with the past, whilst concealing his own record.
Whether his volume of work would have existed if he had made such a confession earlier is debatable. In the Tin Drum (1959), Oskar's putative father, Matzarat, provides us with a grotesque and comic view of the National Socialist far truer than many of the caricatures to which English and American literature and film have subjected us over the years. Germany's suffering after the war, which could not be eradicated by economic prosperity, is poignantly portrayed in that same novel with the bizarre analogy of the "Zwiebelküche", a bar where citizens endlessly weep over peeled onions.
Grass has retained the onion symbol in the title of his newly published autobiography which may have prompted the confession.
He has continually displayed the courage to address issues which others preferred to ignore. Crabwalk, published in 2002, portrays the horror experienced by Grass's generation at the emergence of Neo-Nazism in the 1990s as well as the dilemma they face in not being allowed to acknowledge publicly and grieve for their losses.
The sinking of the cruise ship, Wilhelm Gustloff, heart-rendingly described in Crabwalk, was a far greater tragedy in terms of loss of life than the Titanic, but how many non-German readers have heard of it?
Grass has been accused of arrogance in his handling of his confession. Perhaps he feels that his age, his political work, the brilliance of his novels, (and he is also an extremely talented graphic artist), as well as his contribution to greater understanding of the German psyche for those who are willing to read his work, mitigate to some extent his omission. Perhaps we should consider Grass's career as a whole before condemning him. - Yours, etc,
ANNE CURRAN,
Ballyloughbeg,
Gaultier,
Co Waterford
Madam, - In Nazi Germany, Günter Grass was a teenage member of the elite Waffen-SS, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sang for them, and (as we know) the current Pope Benedict XVI was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth.
These examples suggest that no one under the Third Reich was left untainted.
And therein lies our dilemma as to how we view the other side of those lives and their achievements. - Yours, etc,
OLIVER McGRANE,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 16.