Bookplanet: more Gunter Grass SS shit

1. WAFFEN SS ADMISSION
Grass Seeks to Cleanse Reputation
In a German TV interview, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass defends admitting so late that he served in the Waffen SS during World War II, but sheds little light on his long silence. Criticism continues to mount, but the ranks of those defending the author are also growing.

Stung by widespread criticism over his late public confession that he was a member of the Waffen SS in the final months of World War II, Günter Grass has gone on the defensive this week, in an interview with Germany's main public broadcaster ARD. Grass made the announcement on the eve of the publication of his memoir covering his war-time youth, "Peeling the Onion."

"Those who want to judge can judge," Grass told German ARD in an interview to be aired on Thursday night. He also accused his critics of conducting a kind of character assassination aimed at throwing everything he had accomplished in his later life into question. Discussing his decades-long silence on the issue, the author said: "This life I led later was characterized, among other things, by this sense of shame."

When asked why he didn't come clean about his past earlier, Grass replied, "I didn't do it and now I have to deal with the consequences." The truth, however, is that the confession made by Grass in an interview last Friday was actually his second. After being captured by the American military and put in a camp for prisoners of war in 1945, Grass told US authorities he had been a member of the Waffen SS.

FROM "PEELING THE ONION"

"What I had openly accepted with the foolish pride of my youth was the very same thing I wanted to conceal from myself with a delayed sense of shame after the war. But the burden remained, and no one could make it lighter. True, the war crimes later revealed were never heard of during my training time as a tank rifleman - -a training time that dulled my mind for all of that fall and the following winter. But while I didn't know of these specific crimes, I did know I was part of a system that had planned, organized and carried out the destruction of millions of people. Even if I allowed myself to be convinced that I hadn't contributed actively, something - -all too easily called complicity - -has remained until today. I will certainly have to continue living with it during my remaining years."

At the age of 17, Grass was drafted into the "Frundsberg" tank division of Hitler's dreaded elite troops. "I was drafted into the Waffen SS but was never involved in any crimes," the author told ARD. "But I still needed to write about this in a broader context one day."

Grass said he felt the work he had done as an author and an outspoken public citizen was sufficient to compensate for what he did as a youth during the years Germany was controlled by the Nazis.

Despite the growing uproar over his confession, Grass has said he will not retreat from public life. "I will continue to express myself as an author and as a citizen," he said.

Still, Grass said little about his experiences in the Waffen SS in interview, instead calling on people to read his book. "The only thing I can say about this is: It's a theme in this book. I spent three years working on it and it includes everything I have to say about this issue."

Fury at home and abroad

In the meantime, international criticism -- especially in neighboring Poland -- is growing. Born in Gdansk, then the German city of Danzig, Grass has long been an honorary citizen of the city. Former Polish President Lech Walesa, also a honorary citizen himself, said the author should voluntarily give up his citizenship. In an interview published Monday in the Polish newspaper Dziennik , Walesa said: "I have had the luck, as a Nobel winner from Gdansk, that we have never met. That has saved me from having to shake his hand. Today I would not shake his hand."

In addition, a member of Poland's governing Law and Justic Party (PiS), Jacek Kurski, announced he would start an initiative to have Grass stripped of his honorary citizenship. "It is unacceptable that Gdansk, which had been the first city to sacrifice the blood of its people in World War II, have as its honorary citizen a member of the Waffen SS," Kurski said, according to Radio Polonia.

In Germany, the Central Council of Jews has condemned the author's late admission. "The fact that this admission comes so close to the publication of his new book leads one to suspect that this is a PR measure to market his new work," said the group's president, Charlotte Knobloch. That, she suggested, indicated a departure for a writer who had always acted as an "exacting moral watchdog."

But others have stepped up to defend Grass, including British writer Salman Rushdie and American author John Irving. "I feel that the outrage is a little bit manufactured," Rushdie told reporters. "There is no suggestion as far as I can see that he was ever involved in any kind of war crimes." Today, Rushdie argued, "he remains the great writer that he was a couple of days ago."

"Grass remains a hero to me, both as a writer and as a moral compass; his courage, both as a writer and as a citizen of Germany, is exemplary, a courage heightened, not lessened, by his most recent revelation," Irving, long a friend of the author, told the Associated Press. "The fulminating in the German media has been obnoxious."


2. Rushdie jumps to Grass's defence

Rushdie told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the news was "disappointing".

But he said the writer's work was "not undone" by the revelations and that his past was a "youthful mistake".

Grass's autobiography has gone on sale in German bookshops two weeks early following increased interest after the disclosure in a newspaper interview.

"There is great interest in the book," said a spokeswoman for bookshop Dussmann in Berlin.

Grass, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, is widely admired as a novelist whose books frequently revisit the war years and is also known as an outspoken peace activist.

Grass said he felt ashamed of his service in the Waffen SS

Rushdie denied this made Grass a hypocrite.

"We don't not read the work of Ezra Pound, a Nazi sympathiser as an adult," he told Today.

"Grass has spent his adult life opposing the ideas he espoused as a child and that in itself is an act of courage, he's a friend of mine and I don't intend to change that," he added.

He described the secret as a "partial concealment".

"His stature comes from the fact he's a giant in the world of literature and the fact he's made mistakes," he added.

Another author, John Irving, also defended Grass, calling him a "hero".

"Grass remains a hero to me, both as a writer and as a moral compass; his courage, both as a writer and as a citizen of Germany, is exemplary, a courage heightened, not lessened, by his most recent revelation," Irving told the Associated Press agency.

Pre-empting archive release

But former Polish President Lech Walesa said earlier this week that Grass should give up his honorary citizenship of Gdansk, his birthplace, in light of the revelations.

Meanwhile, a regional newspaper in Germany has claimed Grass was pre-empting the release of the information about his SS history from the secret police archive next year.

The newspaper, Kolner Stadtanzeiger, said the information was contained in Nazi era records compiled by the Stasi, the secret police of the communist government of former East Germany.

The Waffen SS was the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's notorious elite force, which expanded to nearly one million members during the war.


3. This endless moral flutter
The same old issues, the same old voices. A plea for less Grass and more debate on the Middle East. By Eva Menasse and Michael Kumpfmüller

Günter Grass was in the Waffen SS as a boy and in three months, he didn't shoot once. The entire republic is in a tizzy and yet and yet... why are we left entirely cold? Joachim Fest, Ralph Giordano, Rolf Hochhuth, Martin Walser, Walter Jens, Erich Loest, Dieter Wellershoff and Walter Kempowski all express their understanding, their consternation, their disappointment, even their nausea – none of them is under 75. A class reunion of old German intellectuals who feel chronically inclined or obliged to enlighten us on the same topic: Hitler and me.

Please, no more confessions! Are there no other topics? Where are the voices on the current political and moral issues? It's time for this country to finally liberate itself from the self-reflections of its onion-skinned Nazi discourse , for it to avert its gaze from its own navel and to the larger world. It's time for the lessons of history, preached a hundred times, to finally be applied to the politics of the 21st century before they only – recalling Walser – generate more blind aggression. It's shameful that within three days, the Grass affair has elicted more statements and morally-grounded positions from German writers and thinkers than the war in Northern Israel and southern Lebanon did in the 33 days prior.

All the while, the debate on the Middle East, conducted by few major voices, was accompanied by the bass tone of the German past, impossible to ignore. But like a broken record, it's stuck on " Never again Auschwitz " – widely acknowledged to be an empty phrase that can be filled with anything at all. Leftist German pacifists, who have designed their lives to be the anti-thesis of their Nazi fathers' or grandfathers', demonstrate (as in Berlin in July) "side by side" with Arabs yelling "death to the Jews"! But nobody sees a scandal in that.

We retreat to dismayed pacifism, which may be comfortable in German living rooms but is not, unfortunately, a political position. A political position would be to consider under what circumstances war cannot be avoided. What does Grass have to say on that? And all the others? The well-practiced perpetrator-victim reversal would have also been worth a challenge. The TV pictures, the headlines, the majority of the published opinion wanted to make us believe: Israel is so strong, so aggressive, there are always fewer deaths there, so it must be to blame, somehow. For historical reasons, we Germans are always on the side of the weak. In other words, on the side of the Lebanese civilians. The Israeli civilians are safe in their bunkers .

But where were the German intellectuals who would have said: we don't need Auschwitz to speak out? We are on Israel's side not because Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews but because Israel is a democratic state with enemies that want to destroy not only it but all democratic societies of the West? This is not about Jews versus Arabs but about democracy versus murderous fanaticism , enlightenment versus the Middle Ages, human and civil rights versus martyrs and suicide bombers. Let's talk about the terrorist attacks that were prevented in London, let's talk about our relationship to Islam, let's talk about the limits of liberality. This is about us and our future.

No, our old men don't have the sense and courage for that. They stick to their favourite topics. There was no list of celebrities for Israel, but there is now a list of celebrities who object to the Breker exhibition (which Grass, on the other hand, supports). Given these same old reflexes, same old debates and protagonists, there is no room in this country for youth. The elders who lived through the Nazi era distort the perspective with their endless moral flutter. That's the true Methusaleh conspiracy

(This article originally appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Thursday August 17, 2006. The authors are both Berlin-based writers. The most recent book by Eva Menasse (born 1970) is "Vienna", by Michael Kumpfmüller (born 1961), "Durst".)


4. An Honorary Citizen's Fall From Grace
Relations between Germany and Poland have been tense lately. The admission by German writer and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass that he was a member of the Waffen SS has hardly improved the dour mood. Many Poles are reacting bitterly. "We always knew it," they say. "There are no good Germans."

Nobel Prize laureate Günter Grass was born in Gdansk, Poland, while it was still a German city. Will he have to give up his honorary citizenship?
Former Polish President Lech Walesa says of Günter Grass that he "won't shake his hand again." Some citizens of the German city of Gdansk, where Grass was born when the city was still German and called Danzig, want to strip him of his honorary citizenship there. What is the reason for these strong reactions from Poland? Do they reflect the feelings of most Poles?

Walesa -- leader of the Solidarity trade union movement, recipient of a Nobel Prize for Peace and the first president of an independent Poland -- is known for his flamboyant and sometimes thoughtless remarks. In fact it was one of those remarks that ended his political career. During a pre-election TV debate with a political rival, then-presidential candidate Aleksander Kwasniewski, Walesa refused to shake Kwasniewski's hand and told him: "The only thing you'll get from me is a kick!" Is Walesa's remark on Grass another slip? Perhaps, because Walesa said three days later that he admires Grass for his courage and doesn't rule out meeting him -- at the grave of Walesa's father, who spent time in a Nazi labor camp and died just after World War II.

But many people share Walesa's opinion that Gdansk would not have offered Grass honorary citizenship if his service in the Waffen SS had been public knowledge. Poles are disappointed by the new revelations and they resent that Grass kept them silent for so long. As Poland's liberal European Union representative and former Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek says: "The fact that he didn't come out and say it for 60 years makes judging this man a painful affair."

The ruckus raised by members of Poland's ruling Law and Justice Party is open to a different interpretation, though -- the right-wing populists are almost certainly playing a political game. Local elections will be held in Poland in about two months, and in Gdansk, the Law and Justice Party plans to use the Grass affair to denounce its opponents as a bunch of "pro-German weaklings." The party of the twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczsynski is presenting itself as the "steadfast defender of Polish honor," a role it will claim whenever it can.

The Long and Difficult Past

But the controversy doesn't just boil down to electoral tactics. Law and Justice, after all, assumes there's an audience for its brand of political marketing. And there is -- which is why the biting and even hysterical reactions in Poland reveal a hard truth about the relationship between Germans and Poles.

The 1990s saw a great Polish-German reconciliation -- it was a time when Poland's first non-communist Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl seemed to get along. The bishops of Germany and Poland laid the groundwork for the reconciliation by asking one another for forgiveness. Germany's substantial aid to

Poland during Solidarity's crucial years, the 1980s, also helped. When Communism crumbled in 1989 the consensus among Polish elites was that Germans were friends, a view that spread through other sectors of Polish society. Half a century after World War II, the Germans were seen as normal, warm-hearted people: Better to discuss the future with them than the difficult past. Anti-German tendencies were marginal. But today they're growing. Why?

Simply put: The Poles are no longer convinced that Germans remember World War II. In fact a conviction is spreading in Poland that Germans want to rewrite history. This is the result of work by Erika Steinbach , leader of the Federation of German Expellees, and by the Prussian Trust -- which is taking Polish citizens to European Union courts to claim compensation for property lost by Germans at the end of World War II.

I know most Germans view the Polish fears as hysterical. They think Erika Steinbach is a fringe figure, though the latest exhibition she organized in Berlin -- devoted to Germans driven from Poland during the war -- was well received. Poles take a different view: They can't approve of an exhibition, as the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny put it, where "the tragic consequences of the expulsions are emphasized too strongly, while the causes aren't emphasized enough." Tygodnik Powszechny is not an anti-German paper; it's done a lot to improve Polish-German relations. However, in Steinbach's exhibition, "The talk is always about the victims," according to the paper, "while those who caused the suffering -- Hitler and Stalin -- aren't mentioned enough." This is how history turns into a sticky pseudo-humanist mush whose motto is "We have all suffered." What's truly scandalous, though, is the text that introduces Steinbach's exhibition, comparing the German expulsions to genocide.

A commentator writing for the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany expressed his disappointment with Polish reactions to the exhibit. He blamed Poles for the internment camps where Germans were held in Poland after the war, and said they were a "taboo topic" for Germany's eastern European neighbor. This isn't true: The camps have been written about since Communism fell in 1989. But it's also a dangerous claim. Do we really have to bicker over which of us suffered a greater injustice?

"There are no good Germans"

This is the general mood surrounding the Grass affair. He has, of course, earned his credentials as a man who wants to reconcile Germany and Poland -- which is one reason the affair provokes such strong emotions among Polish Germanophobes and Germanophiles alike. The Germanophobes cry out: "See, there are no good Germans!" The Germanophiles are overcome by a sense of resignation. "Do even the best of Germans need to have skeletons in the closet?" they whisper.

None of this means that hysterical criticism of Grass or anti-German rants dominate in Poland. The chairman of the Polish Bishop's Conference, Archbishop Jozef Michalik, has praised Grass: "I think he is a greater man today for having confessed and excused others. I think he is a greater authority and a greater writer than he was before, when he received the Nobel Prize."

And Adam Michnik, the legendary Solidarity activist and current editor of the liberal Gazeta Wyborcza , has condemned Walesa's first remarks as "unintelligent and undignified." "Is it so difficult for us Poles to understand the drama of those young Germans who were agitated by the totalitarian and indoctrinating propaganda of the Nazis?" Michnik asks. But he adds: "We, the Poles, are right to expect from German public opinion an understanding of how the activities of Erika Steinbach and her assistants offend our collective memory and moral sentiments. We are also right to view those activities as obstacles on the path of Polish-German reconciliation."

Of course the Grass affair is painful. He will certainly not be stripped of his honorary citizenship in Gdansk. But that alone won't improve the increasingly tense mood between Poles and Germans -- a mood that needs improvement on both sides of the border.

(The author, Marcin Bosaki, is the foreign affairs commentator of Gazeta Wyborcza and headed the newspaper's foreign affairs department from 2000 to 2006.)


5. An Open Letter to Günter Grass -- BY DANIEL JOHNSON

Dear Günter Grass,

First: why an open letter? I have never written one before, whereas you have written dozens. You are, so to speak, Europe's leading man of open letters. I admit that the idea of turning the tables on you did appeal to me.

But there is another, more personal reason for my decision to address you in this way. In a newspaper interview about your autobiography, "Peeling the Onion," you have admitted after 60 years, that you belonged to the Waffen SS. I want to make you aware of my feeling of betrayal — a feeling I believe I share with most of your countrymen. And I want to show solidarity with the victims, living and dead, of the regime you tried so hard to prolong.

A public intellectual like yourself is, of course, entitled to preserve a private sphere. But there are certain biographical facts about which it is necessary to be open, as I am sure you would agree. You do not need me to tell you that, for a German of your generation, frankness about your activities during the Third Reich is not merely a moral imperative, but a sine qua non for any kind of public role.

Let me first recall a memorable scene in 1970: Willy Brandt falling on his knees at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. It was the most moving and powerful image of German repentance of the whole postwar era. You were there at his side, representing German culture, as the German chancellor went to sign his historic treaty with Poland and made his spontaneous gesture of atonement for the Holocaust.

Afterward, you wrote to thank Brandt effusively for the privilege of "being allowed to be moved." What strikes me now is the artificiality, not only of the language but also the emotion. For how could a man living a lie respond adequately on such an occasion?

You were his friend and ally; you campaigned for him. What would this great German statesman, an émigré who risked his life for the anti-Nazi resistance, have said if he had known about your past and your deceit? Would he have tolerated your presence? He is dead, but we know how a great Polish leader, Lech Walesa, feels about you. He says that Gdansk, your native Danzig, would never have given you the freedom of the city if the Poles had known about your past. Do you not see the damage you have done to Germany's good name?

Another memorable scene: Bitburg cemetery in 1985. President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl commemorated the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, at the height of anti-American agitation. In the snow-covered military cemetery, graves of Waffen SS soldiers were discovered. Americans were scandalized, Germans embarrassed, but the ceremony went ahead.

You joined in the denunciation of Reagan and Kohl for appearing to pay tribute to the dead of the SS. Somehow, though, it didn't occur to you to say that you could easily have been one of them.

Do I need to remind you of the many public figures who have been disgraced over the discovery of a disreputable past? Do you recall Germany's best-loved chat show host, Werner Hofer? Aged 74, he was ignominiously sacked after it emerged that he had written Nazi propaganda during the war.

Or perhaps you heard the great opera singer, the late Elizabeth Schwarzkopf? She kept her Nazi activities quiet until after she retired, and she took to the grave the secret of which senior Nazi's casting couch launched her career.

But the most celebrated case was, of course, Kurt Waldheim. As a staff officer in the Balkans he was a small cog in the Nazi war machine that was committing terrible crimes there — and yet as U.N. Secretary General he conveniently omitted to mention any details about his wartime record.

Waldheim's silence changed the history of Austria, for better and worse. But the curious thing was — as I discovered when I interviewed him in the Hofburg Palace — that he refused to believe that he had done anything wrong. He never apologized, never explained. Nor, by the way, have you.

Despite this, it must be difficult for you to see anything in common between Waldheim's case and your own. What has an ambitious bureaucrat, an unscrupulous mediocrity like him to do with a great writer like you? Let me tell you: Waldheim was a classic example of a phenomenon, which Nazi Germany created and for which the German language promptly created the perfect expression: der Schreibtischtäter, the "desk criminal."

You relished using that neologism back in the 1960s, denouncing the conservative government of Konrad Adenauer for its Atlanticism, its Cold War rhetoric, its eagerness to rearm and join NATO, because Adenauer, though his own record was impeccable — he had been sacked as Mayor of Cologne and later imprisoned by the Nazis — did not scruple to promote former Nazis whom he found useful.

There was Hans Globke, who had written a legal commentary on the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws, and became the chancellor's right-hand man. There was General Gehlen, the intelligence chief, who did not mind whether he spied for Hitler or Adenauer. And there was Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, who had merely been a Nazi Party member throughout the Third Reich, an ordinary opportunist, but who later rose to become Chancellor of West Germany.

That was a scandal in your eyes, and in one of your open letters you called on him to resign — for the crime of having been a Nazi. You never let the German right forget its shady past for one second. But you must have prayed that nobody remembered your own.

Oh yes, you made the most of your moral superiority over those Schreibtischtäter.You pissed on them from a very great height indeed. Except that it now seems that you were one of them. You were a desk criminal, too, only your crimes were committed in the front line and concealed at the desk for the next six decades.

You spent your life signing books, not death warrants. But you were in a different league of culpability from the Kiesingers and Globkes and Waldheims. You, unlike them, were a member of the Waffen SS. The Waffen SS was declared a criminal organization by the Nuremberg tribunal just after the war.

You knew this, I assume, because you have often said that you were one of the millions of Germans who did not believe the Holocaust could have been perpetrated by the nation of Goethe, until you were convinced by the evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

You were fortunate to escape retribution at the time, and even more fortunate to have done so for 60 years. Why did you finally come clean? You say yourself: "It had to come out." But why? Were there incriminating documents? Had you confided in your family or friends? Was some young historian finally on your trail? Or did your conscience prompt you to come clean before you died – better late than never? I should like to think so.

But the absence of contrition — indeed, of any self-awareness beyond self-justification — in your interview excludes that possibility. I am afraid that the most cynical motive is also the most plausible: You had an autobiography to sell. The media spectacle, the national soul-searching that you must have known would be unleashed, had one overriding purpose: to make sure that your latest — very possibly your last — book would be a best seller.

There is a studied vagueness about your references to your past, but about one thing you were quite clear: you were not personally responsible for the Nazi crimes. In your speech "Writing After Auschwitz," given 16 years ago, for instance, you recall the young poets of the 1950s: "All of us … were aware, some clearly, some vaguely, that we belonged to the Auschwitz generation — not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals."

Even more tellingly, in a speech you gave before Israeli audiences in 1967, you stated: "You can tell by the date of my birth that I was too young to have been a Nazi but old enough to have been moulded by [the Nazi] system … The man who is speaking to you, then, is neither a proven antifascist nor an ex-National Socialist, but rather the accidental product of a crop of young men who were either born too early or infected too late. Innocent through no merit of my own, I became part of a postwar period that was never to be a period of real peace."

How ingeniously you deflected the suspicions of your listeners, many of whom must have been Holocaust survivors, by disclaiming any pretense of opposition. You were merely innocent through no merit of your own. In what sense innocent? Too young to have been a Nazi party member, but not too young to have volunteered at age 15 to fight for Hitler's Reich!

You tell us that you did not ask to join the Waffen SS, but rather the U-boats — whose recruits were also notoriously hard-line Nazis, by the way. The historian Joachim Fest does not believe this story, and neither do I. (He says he would not buy a used car from you now, and who can blame him?)

By the time you volunteered in 1943, it was clear to all but those blinded by ideology that Germany was losing the war. By joining up in the Waffen SS, you were joining the Nazi elite, a band of bloody brothers who believed they were destined to rule Europe. They did not take just anyone.

You tell us in your interview that you wrote your first, unpublished novel around this time, now conveniently lost. It was set in the idealized medieval world of Teutonic knights that, as you omit to mention, was a favorite of Goebbels's propaganda films. You never finished it, you tell us, because after the first chapter all the characters were dead.

You make light of it, but it is further proof that you, along with many German teenagers, were steeped in the Nazi death cult. You and your comrades were careless of how many people you killed, for to you they were scarcely human. Your mentality was not unlike that of the Islamist suicide bombers of today.

The last photograph of Hitler shows him decorating lads like you. All the evidence points to you having been not only a fanatical Nazi but a dangerous one too, eager to wear the death's head insignia of the SS.

The truth that now emerges, Mr. Grass, is that you were one of the last-ditch defenders of the Third Reich. You were a soldier in the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundberg. Let us be clear: The Waffen SS did not run the death camps, but its troops — some 900,000 of them by the end — were deeply implicated in the Holocaust and responsible for many of the worst atrocities of the war.

We await with interest your account of your own part in these war crimes, but your memoirs will be treated by historians with suspicion, as no more reliable than those of other SS men — Adolf Eichmann's, for instance, which he wrote while awaiting his trial and execution.

No doubt the comparison shocks you. But Eichmann, like you, was an imposter. He, too, reinvented himself after the war rather than face up to his past. True: He was a senior officer, responsible for rounding up millions of Jews to be sent to death camps, while you were a young soldier. But you both tried to exculpate yourselves by pleading that you were only obeying orders.

The most striking difference is that he was found out 45 years ago, and paid for his crimes with his life. You got away with it.

What we do know is that your panzer division saw action on both the Eastern and Western fronts in 1944-45, notably during the Allied airborne landings at Arnhem. Your bitter, bloody and ruthless resistance there and elsewhere postponed Germany's inevitable defeat. While you were making your heroic last stand, Jews and other helpless "enemies of the Reich" were still being murdered in the camps and, later, on the death marches — thousands of them every day.

In the last weeks of the war, you were wounded in a battle near Cottbuss. Apparently your unit was under orders to rescue Adolf Hitler from the bunker in Berlin, in order to let him complete his self-appointed mission to exterminate the European Jews. As it turned out, Hitler preferred to die by his own hand in Berlin.

At the time, did you regret your failure to the Führer to whom you had solemnly sworn allegiance? You, once considered the greatest post-war German writer, nearly died trying to save Hitler!

Unlike most of your comrades, you survived. Even after his death, you and your comrades were to continue the war as terrorist "werewolves." But you were hospitalized and managed to surrender to the Americans. You spent a year in a prisoner of war camp — far less than many of your comrades. After your release, you were able to reinvent yourself.

Thereafter you kept silent about your part in the greatest crime in history for more than 60 years. You kept silent about your past when other intellectuals were discredited for membership in the same Waffen SS.

You kept silent about your past when debates raged about whether Germans were collectively guilty, about whether the Nazi genocide was unique, about the appropriate way to commemorate the war and the Holocaust.

Open Letter to Günter Grass Part II -- BY DANIEL JOHNSON

Dear Günter Grass,

What makes most Germans feel betrayed is not the fact that you were a member of the Waffen SS, a criminal organization, but that you made the fateful decision not to share with anybody the most important single fact about yourself.

Not with your fellow writers in the Gruppe 47, most of whom were, like you, war veterans, who gave you your first breaks; not with the publishers and the book trade that marketed you as the voice of a new, untainted but angry young generation, and above all not with the reading public, which has remained true to you since you broke onto the literary scene in 1959 with your first novel, "The Tin Drum."

It was, and is, a modern classic. It was followed in quick succession by two more war novels, "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years." Over the years you have returned again and again to the war years for inspiration. Four years ago you published "Crabwalk," your fictionalized depiction of the tragic sinking of the liner Wilhelm Gustloff, laden with German refugees fleeing the Russians in the last days of the war — a subject dear to the hearts of old Nazis that, had you not been a life-long Leftist, would have cast doubt on where your true sympathies lay. But you did not vouchsafe your readers that essential detail about what you were doing at the time.

Throughout your fiction there are characters in denial, whose bad faith or failure to come clean have terrible consequences. From the first, you invested "the power of silence" with supernatural force. Variations on the theme are repeated over and over again in your work. You urged Germans to break their unhealthy silence about the Holocaust, the "inability to mourn" in the catchphrase of the day. But you did not follow your own advice.

I have before me two of your books. The first, a translation of your speeches and, yes, open letters, is entitled "Speak Out!" Published in 1968, it is introduced by Michael Harrington, a leading American liberal, who praises you for your outspoken courage as a public intellectual. The ironies here are too obvious.

The other volume is your 1960 collection of poems, "Gleisdreieck," as always beautifully illustrated by the author. One of the best is "Nursery Rhyme": "Wer spricht hier, spricht und schweigt?/Wer schweigt, wird angezeigt./Wer hier spricht, hat verschwiegen,/wo seine Gründe liegen." (Who speaks here or keeps mum?/Here we denounce the dumb./To speak here is to hide/deep reasons kept inside.) Yet, strange to say, nobody ever thought to ask whether you, too, might have had something to hide.

Granted: you are not the inmate of a mental hospital. Unlike Oskar Mazerath, the diminutive hero of "The Tin Drum," you do not play the drum incessantly nor utter shrieks so high-pitched they shatter glass. Oskar, your brainchild, disguises himself as a retarded infant with a mental age of three in order to bear witness to the sinister events around him, Germany's descent into the abyss of the Third Reich.

Oskar's unbearable scream is a protest, all the more eloquent for being inarticulate, against that silence in the face of depravity that made Hitler possible. In Oskar, you created one of our most memorable metaphors for the moral insanity of Nazism.

Now, however, you have forced us to read your books again, and in an ambiguous light. In your interview last weekend, you sought to justify your decision to volunteer as a teenage revolt against the narrow confines of your petty bourgeois home. To thus romanticize your youthful Nazi allegiance is, frankly, sickening, but maybe that is how you saw it at the time.

If so, "The Tin Drum" may not be the novel we thought it was. Your harsh social satire is aimed at the people you grew up with, small shopkeepers with a bust of Hitler beside that of Beethoven. In real life, however, your bid for freedom was not directed against the Nazis, but for a more radical version of the ideology: the death or glory paganism of the Waffen SS.

Would the book have been read as it was, would it have won you the Nobel Prize, would Volker Schlöndorff have made it into a no less remarkable movie, if your background had been known?

But you are not a literary character. You are a writer: the most celebrated in Germany, perhaps even in Europe, and winner of every imaginable literary award, including the Nobel Prize.

For nearly half a century you have been recognized by your country's citizens as a moral arbiter, even (absurdly) as the conscience of Germany. In that capacity, you have sat in judgement on your fellow Germans, as indeed on America and just about everybody else.

Like your American counterpart Noam Chomsky, like countless writers and intellectuals of the left from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Harold Pinter, you have worked hard to discredit the political and economic system to which you owed your success: capitalism. You did your best over many years to undermine the Atlantic alliance — the same alliance, incidentally, that liberated Europe from the tyranny of your countrymen.

During the Cold War, and now in the war against Islamist terror, you have frequently made use of your hard-won liberty to make common cause with its enemies. You joined in the mythologizing of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist movement. You are a supporter of the European ideal, but only as a counterweight to America. You were delighted when Chancellor Schröder broke with President Bush over the Iraq issue, and legitimized the tide of anti-Americanism that then swept Germany.

Soon after the liberation of Iraq, I was told by one of your fellow writers that you were so angry with Tony Blair and George Bush that you were boycotting Britain and America. You probably won't know Aurel Kolnai's book "The War Against the West," a study of Nazism published in 1938. But its title sums up Hitler's struggle.

Now that we know how you began your career, with a thorough indoctrination in the Waffen SS, your lifelong loathing of the West takes on a new and sinister significance.

You have always presumed to occupy the moral high ground, condemning the elected leaders of the West on the somewhat dubious authority that Germans have traditionally accorded to intellectuals. I say dubious, because you know as well as anyone how that authority has been abused in the past.

Heaven knows, you had enough fun at the expense of Martin Heidegger in "Dog Years," mercilessly satirizing his "jargon of authenticity," his existential angst and phoney pathos, his pseudoprofundities and oracular orotundities. You know as well as I do how deeply the Nazi bacillus took root in German culture, and how the gullible Germans, stylizing themselves as the nation of "Dichter und Denker," of poets and philosophers, let themselves be manipulated by fanatics and fiends.

You didn't only lecture Nazi intellectuals, either. One of your many open letters reprimanded the East German writer Anna Seghers for lending her authority to the Berlin Wall in 1961. By the time the Wall came down in 1989, you seemed to have had a change of heart. You embarked on a quixotic campaign to persuade Germans that they would really be better off living in two states.

The only people who agreed with you were the old communist intellectuals who had done well out of the division of Germany.Yet even they, apologists for a totalitarian regime in which they no longer believed, were not as disingenuous as you.

It was part of your disguise to adopt as a badge of honor the old anti-Semitic insult "rootless cosmopolitan." Your friend Stefan Heym, communist time-server that he was, was the genuine article. As a Jew, he had been driven out of Germany in 1933, and returned in 1945 as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army. He might even have interrogated you. Luckily for you, he did not. The East Germans would have had no hesitation in blackening your name, despite the fact that your anti-Americanism and your lifelong campaign to detach West Germany from NATO were quite useful to them.

Why did you lie? For your 60-year silence was a lie, an unspoken reproach that forced you to lie again every time you sat down to write. Perhaps you no longer know why you did it. I have a theory, which may be mistaken, but which takes us back to your own "zero hour" at the end of the war.

When you started your life again after your release from POW camp, you decided to be an artist. That was your first love, and you were talented. You have never ceased to draw and print. Your collected graphic art, "In Kupfer, auf Stein" (In Copper, on Stone), documents an impressive body of work. But you were not content to be a humble printmaker. You wanted to be a great writer.

In literature, unlike art, you were a late developer. You did not get your first poem published until you were 28, and you were 32 by the time your first novel appeared. But you were determined to make your name as a writer. It was only when you became a literary celebrity that your secret became a huge liability. If you had grasped the nettle then, your new career, which meant so much to you, might have been stillborn. You chose silence.

And so you made your pen your accomplice, in one of the shabbiest deceits ever practised on a reading public — a German public that desperately needed you to be the person you presented yourself as. In the annals of European literature, I cannot recall a similar case. Literary hoaxes, even those in which the author has pretended to be an eyewitness to the Holocaust, are innocent by comparison.

You are often compared to Thomas Mann, but you are no more a Mann than you are a man. The only Mann character with whom you have much in common is Felix Krull, the confidence trickster. Your rise and fall recalls the greatest of all German myths, that of Faust, which Mann explicitly connected with Nazism.

Your fate, though, is not tragic, but comic. Your reputation, which was already in decline, now lies in ruins. It is no consolation that you may acquire a new following among the Germans you most affected to despise, those who think the Waffen SS has been much misunderstood.

I saw you once. I have only a dim memory of it, because it was well over 30 years ago, when I was a schoolboy of about the age at which you volunteered. You came to give a reading in London, together with two other German writers: your friend the novelist Siegfried Lenz and the East German poet Peter Huchel.

The other two were men of integrity, neither of whom concealed his conduct in the Third Reich. But you were the star turn, reading from your play about Brecht's role in the 1953 workers' revolt in East Berlin, "The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising." You were sympathetic to Brecht and his grubby compromises — praising Stalin and Ulbricht in public, writing bitter verses in private ("Would it not be easier for the government/ To dissolve the people/ And elect another?").

I should have seen then and there what kind of man you were. I remember warming to Huchel, by then a broken, disillusioned figure living in exile and waiting to die. But my German teacher had eyes only for you: the hero of the West German Left, the very model of a modern intellectual. I suppose I was impressed, too. I subsequently devoted much of my life to writing about German politics, history, and culture. You touched my life, as you touched countless others.

What, though, if we had known you for what you really were? Now that we do know your secret, the least most people might expect would be an act of contrition. But I, for one, do not expect it from you. You are not sorry, neither for what you did nor for what you did not do.

To apologize now would merely compound your insincerity. We want no more pilgrimages to Auschwitz. No, Mr. Grass, it is too late for that. You have lived and will die a fraud, a coward, and a hypocrite. One day you may be forgotten, but you will never be forgiven.

As I suspected, the East German communist secret police, the Stasi, knew all about your Waffen SS membership. The truth would have come out anyway when your Stasi file is published next year. Your decision to keep quiet actually exposed you to blackmail by the Stasi. It seems that the facts were also contained in American military archives. Your file might have surfaced at any time over the past 60 years, if anybody had cared to look.

I see, too, that your publishers are rushing out your memoirs early, to cash in on the worldwide publicity generated by your admission. They have also released brief extracts to tempt us. They disclose that you remained an unrepentant anti-Semite even after the war.

While working as a prisoner of war in the kitchens at a U.S. air base, you found yourself — almost certainly for the first time in your life — having to treat Jews as equals. Your co-workers were Jewish refugees, recently released from German concentration camps, who must have endured unimaginable suffering and humiliation at the hands of your comrades in the SS.

Not surprisingly, when a row broke out in the kitchen, they shouted: "Nazis, you Nazis!" Well, that was no more than the truth. You admit that you were proud to serve in the Waffen SS. So how did you respond? "We retorted: ‘Just go away to Palestine!'"

For you, it seems, the war wasn't over. You still wanted a Europe, and especially a Germany, that was Judenrein, ethnically cleansed of Jews. Given your hostility to Israel today, some 60 years later, we are entitled to ask whether your "denazification" went far enough.

From what we have seen of your memoirs, I do not expect to learn much from them. The extracts so far published do not explain the mystery of your silence. "I kept silent about it after the war out of a growing shame," you write.You still do not seem to understand that your silence was itself shameful.

Now that you are under intense though belated scrutiny, you are full of self-pity and self-justification. On German TV on Thursday night, you complained: "What I am experiencing is an attempt to make me a persona non grata, to cast doubt on everything I did in my life after that."

No, Mr. Grass: It was you who did that to yourself.

Yours sincerely,
Daniel Johnson