John Irving reviews Günter Grass’s autobiography
Jul 6th, 2007 by Paul Moor
When this book, now published in English translation as Peeling the Onion, appeared here in Germany last year, it caused one hell of a flap because Grass’s previous books (which won him the Nobel Prize) had long since established him as a sort of living conscience of the German nation and now here he for the first time mentioned – sixty-two long years after the fact – his having briefly served, as a teen-ager, in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS, the military fighting auxiliary of the arch-criminal “General” SS that administered all Hitler’s concentration camps, including the six specific extermination camps the SS established on the soil of occupied Poland. Here you have two salient paragraphs from John Irving’s lengthy review:
” . . . It’s important to understand that the man has made enemies. Twenty-five books and the Nobel Prize (in 1999) precede Grass’s autobiography, “Peeling the Onion,” which was published in German (“Beim Houten der Zwiebel”) last summer to a chorus of controversy. While it was acceptable to Grass’s critics that he had volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of 15, the revelation that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, the combat force of the SS, in 1944, when he was 17, was a shock. Grass spent the final months of the war with the force — later convicted en masse of war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal.
“Why had he waited so long to tell? his critics asked. (As if there had ever been a time when he wouldn’t have been criticized for it!) A historian, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wondered why the revelation had come out “in such a tortured way.” (As if there wasn’t ample evidence of what was “tortured” about Grass in all the books leading up to this one!) Another writer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine conjectured that the last, unfulfilled mission of Grass’s Frundsberg tank division was to get Hitler out of Berlin. (“In other words, Grass could have freed Hitler.”) A writer in the tageszeitung accused Grass of “calculating”; shouldn’t he have written to the Swedish Academy and offered a premature refusal? (“A former Waffen-SS man would never have been considered for this prize.”) A piece in the [Swiss] Neue Zürcher Zeitung said of Grass: “Posing as a self-assured moralist…. ” and so on. Both the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau complained about the lateness of the admission. But good writers write about the important stuff before they blab about it; good writers don’t tell stories before they’ve written them. . . !
John Irving makes no secret of his virtually boundless admiration for his German colleague (and apparently friend: he writes that he’ll probably attend one of two big birthday parties planned soon to celebrate Grass’s eightieth). By clicking here you can read his entire review from day after tomorrow’s “New York Times Book Review”.
