Günter Grass's 60 years of silence

IN A RECENT interview with the German newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung , German novelist and 1999 Nobel Prize recipient Günter Grass revealed a secret he had concealed for more than 60 years: During World War II, he had served in the elite Waffen SS unit of the German armed services, a unit that was entrusted by Adolf Hitler with the mission of running the Nazis' concentration camps, and that was declared a criminal organization during the postwar Nuremberg trials.

The revelation of Grass's wartime record, which coincides with the German release of his memoir ``Peeling Onions," is shocking, not merely because of his fame, but because of his stature as a representative of postwar moral rigor.

The author of ``The Tin Drum," in which a 3-year-old boy permanently stunts his own growth to avoid the depredations of an adult world inexorably sliding toward the horrors of Nazism, Grass was more than a writer for Germans. He was perhaps the preeminent figure of postwar West Germany, representing a new national culture that was temperate, peace-loving, and horrified by Nazi criminality. Grass was a prominent critic of the German desire to forget or erase its Nazi past, castigating then-chancellor Helmut Kohl for his 1985 visit to a Bitburg cemetery where Waffen SS members were buried.

Now it emerges that Grass was himself a Waffen SS member. He is far from the first prominent European of his era to be humiliated by Nazi links. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger acknowledged his wartime membership in the Hitler Youth before becoming pope in 2005; literary critic Paul de Man was posthumously exposed as an anti-Semitic polemicist for Nazi publications; and former Austrian president and UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim was dogged by allegations of his service in the Nazi SA and complicity in war crimes.

Grass's past is at once more understandable and infinitely more disturbing. Grass was only 17 when he was called up into service, and most of it took place in Dresden. Grass would surely prefer to be associated with the Dresden dead, victims of war's inhumanity, than the Nazi tormentors, and by dint of the law, he is not without merit. After the war, hearings held by the Allies amnestied nearly all of Germany's young, and even those who had served in units like the Waffen SS were cleared of responsibility if, like Grass, they had been conscripted into service. And yet, as Tina Rosenberg reflects in her study of Europe's Nazi and Communist horrors, ``The Haunted Land," the apportioning of guilt extends beyond the courts of law. The responsibilities of the Allied occupiers of postwar Germany to stabilize the country led to excruciating compromises with evil, in which unrepentant former Nazis held prominent places in West German governments, and no less than half of West German judges in 1970 had been on the bench under the Nazis.

The responsibilities of artists and public figures to be truthful about their pasts fall under a different set of guidelines. Artists establish a bond of trust with their audiences; Grass's silent pledge to his readers was that he was unblemished by Nazism, the moral voice of a country struggling to come to terms with its bottomless capacity for evil. Just in this past year, James Frey and other writers have been publicly raked over the coals for their shortcomings as truth-tellers; how much more serious, then, is Grass's elision of his service in one of the 20th century's most brutal military units?

Grass can be understood, if not quite forgiven, for his SS service. After all, standing up against National Socialism was an effective death sentence, and who could expect such heroics from an adolescent who had spent the overwhelming bulk of his life under Hitler? Rather, what is deeply disturbing in Grass's case is his long silence on his wartime activity. His silence has gone a long way toward drowning out the acclamation garnered during his remarkable literary career, and has raised the ugly possibility that Grass waited until after he had collected his literary Nobel before coming clean about his Nazi past. Even his longtime admirers have had their hackles raised by Grass's remarkable intellectual dishonesty in eliding any mention of his SS service in his position as a lion of the German left.

There is a sense in which Grass has become a revered figure under false pretenses, pretending to be wholly free of taint when, in fact, he had served in one of Nazism's most notoriously brutal bands of thugs. Grass's Nobel should be rescinded -- because he has refused his admirers the choice of balancing his Nazi past against his literary gifts, and because the moral culpability engendered by having assisted the Nazis, whatever the circumstances, can never be erased. The belching black smoke of the crematoria has darkened Grass's once-snowy white robes, and the effect is profoundly disheartening.

Saul Austerlitz is a frequent contributor to the Globe.