For many Germans, Grass became the liberal conscience of the country, urging it to confront the demons of the past honestly, and even arguing against reunification after the Berlin Wall fell, fearing that Germany could return to the old aggression seen in the past. He was no stranger to controversy, either with his writing or with his own personal life, particularly with a past that some have called into question.
Still, he was largely honored today, after word of his passing spread. German president Joachim Gauck offered condolences to the Nobel Prize winner’s widow Ute Grass. He then paid tribute to him in a statement:
“Günter Grass moved, enthralled, and made the people of our country think with his literature and his art. His literary work won him recognition early across the world, as witnessed not least by his Nobel prize.
“His novels, short stories, and his poetry reflect the great hopes and fallacies, the fears and desires of whole generations.”
Grass's best known work is The Tin Drum, a story about a boy who refuses to grow up as he sees the violent and chaotic world of adults caught up in the Nazi frenzy all around him. Grass penned some other important works, including The Fisherman and His Wife, The Rat, and Too Far Afield, which explored German reunification from a German perspective. His last novel was Crabwalk, published in 2002.
Despite some of his most famous writings centering on the theme of getting Germans to confront the demons of their past, Grass himself had a past that many were highly critical of, and some, such as Siegfried Mews, an expert on Günter Grass and professor emeritus of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, outright question why Grass did not reveal this dubious past earlier, and view him as being guilty of hypocrisy.
Grass was only six years old when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took over in Germany. Germany took over his hometown of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), and Grass became a member of the Hitler Youth Movement. He spoke about what it felt like to be a member of that group, explaining it in a way that many defenders of the Hitler Youth described it following the war, almost as simply a German version of the Boys Scouts, although critics argued that it had much darker overtones. Here is how Grass described it:
"It was marvelous for [a] 10-years-old boy to go with this group. There was a tent, and with a flag, and playing Boy Scouts like this. It wasn't political at all in the beginning. It became more and more political. It was really successful propaganda done by the Nazis.
"I became a soldier when I was 16, the last year of the war," he recalls. By the time he was 17 "the war was over, and I was in an American prison camp — a prisoner of war. And slowly, slowly I discovered what really has happened. And [in] the beginning I didn't believe — I thought it was propaganda what they were telling us. It's not possible the German people has done this."
Grass contended that he only truly understood the entire truth as he followed the Nuremberg Trials. He recalled:
"I listened to the radio, and I heard my former Youth Leader ... And he said yes, it's true. It's terrible. But from this moment on, it was clear for me what has happened. And this knowledge never left me."
However, some viewed Grass most cynically once he finally revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Wafen-SS, an elite combat unit/military police for the Nazis.
Mews argued that Grass's having kept this fact secret for so long made him a hypocrite:
"When President Reagan visited the Federal Republic in the late '80s," Mews explains, "he and Chancellor [Helmut] Kohl visited the cemetery — and there were graves of Waffen-SS members. And Grass condemned this act without mentioning that he himself might have been one of those who were lying there in the cemetery."
Mews says Grass never adequately explained why he kept his service in the Waffen-SS a secret. "He should have said it earlier," Mews says. "But on the other hand, I don't think it invalidates his work, his fiction. And his dramas and his activities in the service of building a better, a more democratic Germany after the war."
Despite the criticism, Mews did suggest that the author's past did not discredit his literary contributions, as well as his political influence and drive to get Germany to come to terms with a haunted past in a more direct and honest manner.
Most of the information in this blog entry, as well as all of the quotes, were taken from the two following articles (see links):
Günter Grass, Who Confronted Germany's Past As Well As His Own, Dies At 87 APRIL 13, 2015 7:30 AM ET TOM VITALE
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