Recently an obscure Nobel Prize-winning novelist died. Among his writings, Gunter Grass was most famous for his Danzig trilogy, at least one of which, the Tin Drum, was turned into a movie in 1979. Normally, the death of a Nobel laureate would not be of sufficient interest to be noted, but this particular person has enough baggage it is worthwhile to untangle his life and see its implications. To be sure, Gunter Grass lived a dramatic life. Born and raised in the free city of Danzig in the interwar period, he had a complicated heritage. Of mixed Kashubian and German descent, in adult life he promoted his Kashubian identity. During his teenage years, memorably, he played up his German ancestry [1]. His writings seem to obsess over growing up, over the complications of German identity among the guilt of World War II, and he doubts memory, even his own, as he sought to rebuilt his identity out of the ruins of a disastrous war in which he played a dishonorable part. He was declared a persona non grata in Israel for accusing Israel of genocidal intentions against Iran [2], a harsh claim and an especially hypocritical one for someone who volunteered during his teenage years to serve in the military and ended up in the Waffen SS during the latter days of World War II.
How is one to judge such a man? Both at the beginning of his life and late in life, his behavior regarding Israel and the Jewish people was highly to be blamed. While a teenager, he volunteered for service in the German military, seeking to enlist in the submarine service at seventeen, and being declined for this, ended up being drafted into the Waffen SS as a solder in a panzer division, for which he became a prisoner of war when captured by the Americans. This is a young man who left a Catholic home and, looking for adventure [3], joined one of the worst causes in all of human history (along with, it must be said, the cause of the Confederacy in the American Civil War and the Japanese cause in World War II as well). Then, after covering up this unpleasant and inconvenient fact for decades while he promoted himself as some kind of moral authority to condemn the West (in particular the United States) for being militaristic, he accuses Israel of genocidal intentions, when he himself had volunteered to serve in a military that acted out genocidal intentions against the Jewish people. My friends involved in psychology would call this projection; as a moralist I would call it rank hypocrisy, and fully agree with Israel’s decision to declare him a persona non grata, especially given his open unfriendliness to Israeli ambassadors [4]. Such an anti-Semite does not have any claim to moral authority.
This does not mean that other areas of his life were full of great moral excellence either. His writings were full of leftist, politically correct posturing that masqueraded itself as magical realism. He married twice, and though he was not single for long between the two marriages he still managed to have two children while separated from his wife with two other women. Yet despite these flaws, he condemned Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl (then the leader of West Germany) for visiting a military cemetery that contained the graves of former Waffen SS soldiers (like himself), before he admitted his own past. For his strong political voice, and strident and consistent political activism, he was given many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, and his style greatly influenced many fellow travelers. Yet his own life leaves much to be desired, especially for its lack of honesty and transparency in coming to terms with his moral identity [5].
To be sure, one would want to forgive Grass for his faults of youth, despite the enormity of his mistake in volunteering to serve in the Nazi German military. Many seventeen year olds make mistakes they soon live to regret, after all. Yet this man seemed to make the same mistakes over and over again, and he took deliberately provocative positions that showed him to be a direct hypocrite, all without making him more gentle and more understanding in his rhetoric towards others. A man who was himself an ashamed veteran of the Waffen SS should not condemn a rival political figure for honoring the graves of war dead, seeing as he was desirous of honor so much that he hid the truth of his own youth to curry favor with a politically correct postwar cultural and political elite. A man who himself had participated in a force guilty of genocidal behavior was the last person qualified to condemn Israel, a nation prickly and defensive but hardly interested in wiping out tens of millions of Iranians. This is hypocrisy of the worst sort. This is not even entering into his gender politics, where he drew the ire of women for chauvinism in some of his novels, or the questionable ethics of his own behavior towards women in his life. May God have mercy on his soul; history will have little kind to say about his life, for he condemned more honorable men than himself for sins he was flagrantly and unrepentantly guilty of in his own life, only to turn around and cast doubt on memory because it made him a guilty man for trafficking so long in fiction about his own life. It takes a rare breed of hypocrite to accomplish that.
[1] See, for example:
http://www.focus.de/tagesthema/literatur-portraet-der-unbequeme-nationaldichter_id_4608522.html
[2] See, for example:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/05/gunter-grass-what-must-be-said?intcmp=239
[3] See, for example:
[4] See, for example:
Click to access 6-2-8-AviPrimor.pdf
[5] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/09/vergangenheitsbewaltigung/
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