Wizblog

Movin' Product

The admission by Nobel Laureate Günter Grass that he served as a member of the Waffen SS as a young man during World War II is drawing impassioned reviews. The furor (sorry) will help move books for Grass. There's little doubt that was his intention when he finally admitted his deception. His reaction to the criticism included this statement:

"I'll certainly be hearing accusations about that for a long time. The only thing I can say is: I worked on that question in this book and everything I have to say about the matter is in it."

Daniel Johnson's An Open Letter to Günter Grass in the New York Sun is a great read. Here's a bit:

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.

Lech Walesa has demanded that Grass give up his honorary citizenship of Gdansk, the author's birthplace.

"This situation needs to be cleared up," Walesa, a Nobel peace prize winner who once worked as an electrician in the Gdansk shipyards, told Poland's TVN24 private television station.

"If there is no clarification I will renounce my citizenship of Gdansk -- I will not be able to remain in the same company as Mr. Grass."

The German novelist, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1999, revealed his SS past last week, stunning Germany and drawing criticism in Poland.

"It will be difficult for me to hold out my hand to an SS man who contributed to the death of my father and to that of other people, and to the destruction of Gdansk. It's in this city that the war started" in 1939, Walesa said.

Walesa also accused Grass of courting publicity for the writer's new memoir, "Peeling Onions", which went on sale Wednesday.

"He wanted to sell his book and it's clear that he has sold it, because a second print run is underway," Walesa said.

"I can understand a confession from a Christian point of view. We should understand people and help them. But if someone wants to create publicity for himself, I don't want to be a part of that."

Christopher Hitchens. You know what to do.

Grass was one of those who dragged the Nazi period into everything, including into discussions where it did not belong. When German reunification finally occurred after 1989, he referred to it with scorn as an Anschluss whereby the West had annexed the former "German Democratic Republic." When challenged on the absurdity of this, he wielded the truncheon of moral blackmail and said that, after Auschwitz, his critics had no right to speak about history. At a discussion in a Berlin theater at about that time, I heard him defend these propositions and felt that I was listening to a near-perfect example of bogus pseudo-intellectuality. By this stage, he had already become something of a specialist in half-baked moral equivalences. At the PEN conference in New York in the mid-1980s, for example, he had sonorously announced that conditions in the South Bronx put the United States on a par with the Soviet Union … I didn't like being lectured by a second-rater then and I like it no better when I discover I was being admonished by a member, however junior or conscripted, of Heinrich Himmler's corps d'elite.

Posted by dan at August 22, 2006 12:14 PM | TrackBack