If you peel an onion, you find a nazi
August 23rd 2006 03:20
The controversy in the literary world last week was about one of its most famous stars, Gunter Grass admitting that he had been an SS agent in the past. Grass is famous for using Germany as his punching bag, for its collective amnesia for German past excesses. He is also famous for taking those extraordinary positions that only pundits of his kind are able to do: glorifying the prison house that was East Germany, opposing German reunification because it meant that East Germany would become like the West and not the other way round, trashing Ronald Reagan for his visit to a war cemetery that housed SS agents, his former comrades as it turns out. Grass is coming out with a new biography and has decided to use the occasion of its release to issue the obligatory late life mea culpa. The biography is called Peeling The Onion.
It offers a couple of interesting vignettes. He crawled under a Soviet rocket launcher when his unit was fighting the Russians and wet his pants. “I see myself, as I had learned, crawl under the tank…For three minutes, an eternity, the organ played. Beset by fear, I wet myself. Then silence…" Those who are familiar with his The Tin Drum know his fondness for this particular body fluid. It may not have been a sign of fear; you feel the micturating pressure when you are terribly excited too.
When the war ended he was picked up by Americans and released by them after he confessed his SS role. Nobody had bothered to look for the document in the military archives, in itself a symbol of the collective amnesia of Germans that Grass was so found of excoriating. The surrender to the Yankees, the confession—humiliation enough to warrant a lifetime of bitterness.
Who knows? And who can judge? "Anyone who wants to pass judgment can pass judgment," the author says at one place. He lived with this shame for years, he says elsewhere. His greatest fear is that he will be made a persona non grata. Can you detect any shame in these fruit-cakey confessions, in that title of his biography? I can’t. It almost looks like he enjoys this.
The press is suitably apologetic and the big papers like The New York Times have already sounded the bugle of the defensive. The criticism is from the conservatives, The New York Times notes, which probably makes it automatically discredited. But Grass’s past, his long non-disclosure of the facts do not or should not affect how we read his work which is beautiful in itself. I don’t know. If anything, this incident proves that we need a fight against another kind of amnesia. The one against the complicity of the Left with every kind of fundamentalism, whether in the past or the present.
Source : The Times of London
It offers a couple of interesting vignettes. He crawled under a Soviet rocket launcher when his unit was fighting the Russians and wet his pants. “I see myself, as I had learned, crawl under the tank…For three minutes, an eternity, the organ played. Beset by fear, I wet myself. Then silence…" Those who are familiar with his The Tin Drum know his fondness for this particular body fluid. It may not have been a sign of fear; you feel the micturating pressure when you are terribly excited too.
When the war ended he was picked up by Americans and released by them after he confessed his SS role. Nobody had bothered to look for the document in the military archives, in itself a symbol of the collective amnesia of Germans that Grass was so found of excoriating. The surrender to the Yankees, the confession—humiliation enough to warrant a lifetime of bitterness.
Who knows? And who can judge? "Anyone who wants to pass judgment can pass judgment," the author says at one place. He lived with this shame for years, he says elsewhere. His greatest fear is that he will be made a persona non grata. Can you detect any shame in these fruit-cakey confessions, in that title of his biography? I can’t. It almost looks like he enjoys this.
The press is suitably apologetic and the big papers like The New York Times have already sounded the bugle of the defensive. The criticism is from the conservatives, The New York Times notes, which probably makes it automatically discredited. But Grass’s past, his long non-disclosure of the facts do not or should not affect how we read his work which is beautiful in itself. I don’t know. If anything, this incident proves that we need a fight against another kind of amnesia. The one against the complicity of the Left with every kind of fundamentalism, whether in the past or the present.
Source : The Times of London
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Comment by jon
Orble News
Urban Hint
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Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
I've never been terribly clear on what having been a member of the Nazi party actually means. If you used to belong, is the imputation that you are a current anti-Semite? that you're of fundamentally flawed character? that you're a criminal and ought to be punished for your past deeds? that your ideas are produced in the service of ideology, and lack integrity? that you're a moral coward and should be ridiculed?
No doubt there are countless other possible implications.
But I haven't met one that I think necessarily follows...
Comment by nagster
Cenacle
Adrian, nothing ever necessarily follows any proposition. You have to look at the evidence to decide what follows. Here, we have evidence of outright hypocrisy if not moral turpitude of the highest order.