"It had to come out."

The Wikipedia entry on Günter Grass has already been amended. Can you spot the change in this excerpt?

"Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16, 1927. His parents had a grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdansk-Wrzeszcz). Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. He was drafted into the Arbeitsdienst and later the Waffen SS in 1944 and was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American POW camp."

If you did a double-take at "Waffen SS," you have a good eye. In an interview with Frank Schirrmacher and Hubert Spiegel for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1999) confesses, "This has been weighing on me. My silence all these years is among the reasons I've written this book," referring to a memoir to appear in just a few weeks, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Skinning the Onion).

In the interview, he explains that he didn't volunteer for Waffen SS, but was drafted into after he'd volunteered for the Marines, "which was just as crazy."

Updates, 8/12: Anne Padieu for the AFP, the BBC and Lee Glendinning in the Guardian.

Updates, 8/14: Grass is all over the feuilletons in the German papers and signandsight translates the gist of several arguments - and adds mention of weekend activities recognizing the 50th anniversary of Bertolt Brecht's death (watched a televised broadcast from the Brecht Fest last night - what an event!).

A euro | topics dossier.

Updates, 8/15: "Who will Grass the man become to us, his readership? Can art redeem the man?" wonders Tom Hall; and signandsight translates Roman Bucheli commentary for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Updates, 8/16: Samuel Loewenberg in the Guardian.

Liz Lopatto, blogging at the Kenyon Review, reminds us that Grass is an author, not a politician. Few authors, though, have come as close.

Carter Dougherty reports in the International Herald Tribune: "Taking advantage of the ferocious controversy around Grass's admission that he was briefly a member of the Waffen SS in the waning months of the war, Grass's publisher on Wednesday released the book weeks before the planned publication date of Sept 1."

Updates, 8/17: In the New York Times, Alan Riding gathers critical and supportive voices from across Europe.

Signandsight translates a clip from Volker Schlöndorff's open letter to Grass in die taz: "Someone as experienced with the media as you are, dear Günter, doesn't do such a thing by mistake, and certainly not because you underestimated the consequences or in an attempt to strategise: providing the rope as well... Once you had started to write beyond fiction, it was only a matter of time, and a question of style, until you would remove the skin, and not just of the onion. As an author you subject your own story, like your fictive heroes, to the only law that is sacred to you, that of art. And if this means that the public monument that is your lifework crumbles, it's not your fault. The monument is the victim of the same demons that have always being preying on you."

Perlentaucher lays out a chronology (in German).

Speaking up in defense of Grass: John Irving and Salman Rushdie.

Updates, 8/19: Another euro | topics dossier.

John Irving in the Guardian: "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."

"Please, no more confessions! Are there no other topics?" Signandsight translates Eva Menasse and Michael Kumpfmüller's plea in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Updates, 8/20: "When even the most outspoken German moralist wore the uniform of murderers, one might ask whether there is a single guiltless German in this generation," writes Daniel Kehlmann. Even so, as for the early novels, "which tell of the deep corruptibility of human beings, of the coexistence of mendacity and greatness and of the infinitely complex nature of guilt, will be with us for as long as people read books."

Also in the NYT, Peter Gay: "If he had come out of the Nazi closet earlier, say, in 1959 with his triumphant novel just published, people would have understood, and his own life would have been easier.... But it seems to me that he failed to come forward all these years simply because he was too ashamed. And if I am right, the affair will have a useful consequence: it will be a reminder, more than 60 years later, that his country had a great deal to be ashamed of."

Updates, 8/21: John Berger in the Guardian: "The righteous moralists are proposing that Grass should renounce all the honours that his life's work has received. Their proposition only shows that, by systematically refusing to acknowledge his experience, they have forgotten what honour consists of. He has not."

Spiegel Online translates an excerpt from a recent television interview with Grass.

And another dossier at euro | topics.

Updates, 8/22: Lawrence Van Gelder reports in the NYT on reactions from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel laureate José Saramago.

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens lays out the case against Grass with a somewhat surprisingly reasonable level of sobriety - until he drops the mask at the end and slips back to his usual growling and slurring.

Elizabeth Kiem in the Morning News: "For anyone to be shocked to learn that Grass was once less controlled in his embrace of ancient calls, fabulous and taboo, is to display an ignorance of his work or of human nature or both."

Update, 8/24: John Powers in the LA Weekly: "Mercifully, books take on lives of their own, so Grass' slipperiness in no way diminishes the quality of his best work; even now, I'd love to have written Dog Years or From the Diary of a Snail. Still, the Grass affair reminds us that an authorial persona is itself a fiction - the style is not necessarily the man - and it underscores the literary dangers of writers flaunting themselves as cultural monuments."

Posted by dwhudson at August 11, 2006 11:52 AM