Peeling away Grass's morality (FT)

Peeling away Grass’s morality
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: August 18 2006 19:26 Last updated: August 18 2006 19:26

The new autobiography by the novelist Günter Grass, Peeling Onions*, has subjected Germans to a week of media uproar. On the eve of publication, Mr Grass revealed to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he served, in the last months of the second world war, in the Waffen-SS. The black-uniformed SS started as Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguard. As it grew, it was given responsibility for running the Nazi death camps. It also spawned an elite combat unit, into which Mr Grass was drafted. The Waffen-SS was not the part of the SS most implicated in crimes against humanity and Mr Grass says he never fired a shot while he served.

But Mr Grass is often seen, at home and abroad, as the “conscience” of his nation. His revelation – and the realisation that, for six decades, he gave a false account of his role under the Nazis – has thrown Germans into moral disarray. Some applaud his courage, while others suggest he should give back the Nobel Prize he won in 1999. The novelist Martin Walser has leapt to Mr Grass’s defence, while the historian Joachim Fest assails him for hypocrisy. Charlotte Knoblauch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Berlin, suspects a publicity stunt. Mr Grass is laying into his critics, accusing them of trying to make him into a “non-person”.

Why this upsets people so much has to do with the way Mr Grass played his role as official conscience. First, he was pitiless. It is true that, until last week, Mr Grass had seemed not to spare himself. He has always admitted that he was enchanted by Nazism as a teenager, joined the Hitler Youth and was a true believer until the war’s end. “As a child, I witnessed how all this happened in broad daylight,” he said in the FAZ interview. “And, in fact, with enthusiasm and encouragement.” But minimising things by putting them into context was not always Grass’s signature approach. He specialised, rather, in moral keelhauling, dragging Germans over the sharpest barnacles of their past.

Second, he was a political partisan. He campaigned for the centre-left Social Democrats and opposed German reunification. Even in his FAZ interview, he attacked the Christian Democrats who built up the post-war German constitutional order. (“We had [the chancellor Konrad] Adenauer – horrible! – with all the lies, all that Catholic stuffiness.”) Never was his engagement more pointed than in 1985, when he assailed Helmut Kohl, then chancellor, for meeting Ronald Reagan, then US president, in Bitburg, at the grave site of soldiers who had – like Mr Grass himself, it turns out – fought with the Waffen-SS.

For decades, those born in the late 1920s – Mr Grass, Mr Walser, Mr Fest, the poet Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and others – have set the moral tone in Germany. Only recently have younger Germans begun to ask when they will get a say. Two novelists, Eva Menasse and Michael Kumpfmüller, complained in the Süddeutsche Zeitung this week that the Grass affair resembled a “class reunion of old German intellectuals” and that more ink had been spilt on it in three days than over Israel’s month-long struggle against Hizbollah. “No more confessions, please,” they wrote. “Is there nothing else to talk about? Where are the voices on current questions of politics and morals? It is high time for this country to free itself from the self-absorption of its onion-peeling Nazi discourse, and for turning our gaze away from our own navels and towards the world.”

Certainly, this is a different debate from the one that would have taken place 10 years ago. Mr Grass has outlived the era in which his country’s misdeeds were the primary focus of western public morality. But since these crimes have been addressed on terms partly set by Mr Grass, the question of where his moral authority came from is important. Why, among ex-Nazis, was he considered reliable, while others lived under a permanent cloud? Did he understand the war better? Had he performed a particularly thorough penance? (“Certainly, I believed that I had done enough with the writing I had done,” he said last week.) Or was he merely a member of an “in” crowd that had monopolised Germany’s self-understanding?

Siegen macht dumm Mr Grass has often said – winning makes you stupid. Military defeat, he thinks, has allowed Germans to face up to more of their past sins than the English, the French, the Dutch or the Belgians did after colonialism. But might not the same formula be applied to the intellectual left in post-war Europe? There has never been a battlefield rout more complete, nor a peace more Carthaginian, than that of “progressive” intellectuals over “conservative” ones in the past half century.

Mr Grass’s occasionally ferocious anti-Americanism, for instance, may stem from some post-war discovery, like his exposure to segregation in Bad Aibling in 1945. Last week, he recalled how in American camps the whites called the blacks “nigger” and kept them in segregated barracks. But it is not impossible that intellectual victory has led Mr Grass to miss something and that his anti-Americanism draws its inspiration from older sources.

The political scientist Claus Leggewie has observed that the builders of post-war German democracy were often “not shining heroes with spotless careers but people with dubious biographies”. They had something to prove. In Die Tageszeitung last week, Mr Leggewie described Mr Grass’s decades of judgmentalism as “a form of overcompensation”. If Mr Leggewie is right, then Germany is now debating a basic and troubling question about what political opinions are in the first place – whether they arise from looking at the world and reasoning about what is right, or from looking into one’s heart and taking a stand against what is most dangerously wrong.

*Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, Göttingen (Steidl Verlag)
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006