Günther Grass, the moral conscience of Germany, knew that sooner or later the facts, which he had kept hidden from the public and from Michael Jürgs, his biographer, would come out. To save his reputation, he knew that it was much better to disclose the fact and and give his own interpretation of the events. Historian
Joachim Fest summed it up in 2006:
“I do not
understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as
the nation’s bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then
admit that he himself was deeply involved. I don’t
know how he could play this double role for so long.”
Benjamin Weinthal
writes in the Jerusalem Post:
German novelist Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning author of
The Tin Drum, an epic treatment of the Nazi era, died on Monday at the age of 87, his publishers said. [...] A seasoned left-wing campaigner, he
was a towering figure in West Germans’ efforts to keep the door open to
their communist-ruled neighbors in the East during the Cold War.
Yet
Grass opposed hasty reunification after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,
and hoped a new generation of German authors from the East would nourish
their work on “western arrogance.” [...]
Not even 12 when war broke out, Grass
was forced like other youngsters to join paramilitary organizations,
and entered the Hitler Youth at 14.
Drafted into a Waffen-SS
tank division in 1944, he experienced the full horrors of war, when
more than half his company of mostly 17-year-olds were ripped to pieces
in three minutes of shelling. But
the fact that he did not
reveal this part of his history until 2006 brought accusations that he
had been hypocritical when attacking others for failing properly to
face up to Germany’s Nazi past and cost him some of his moral
authority.
For Israel, Grass was a highly controversial author and public intellectual. In
2012, Grass penned a poem titled “What must be said” for Munich’s
liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, accusing Israel of planning to
launch a nuclear attack on Iran to “extinguish the Iranian people.” His poem earned him a ban on traveling to Israel, which Grass compared to his treatment by East Germany’s Stasi.
“Why do I say only now... that
the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace?
Because that must be said which it may already be too late to say
tomorrow,” he wrote in the poem, which was criticized by some in Germany
as anti-Semitic. Grass blamed Netanyahu as “the man who damages Israel the most.”
When
asked by Spiegel magazine “Do you believe him when he [Grass] writes
in his poem that he feels 'connected' to the State of Israel?” the
German- Jewish historian, Michael Wolffsohn, said “I have never believed
him. He was never a friend of the Jewish people – this is a myth he
constructed himself. During his very first visit to Israel, on the
occasion of the first German-Israeli culture week in 1971, he already
acted like a bull in a china shop, and lectured the Israeli audience on
historical and moral issues.”
Grass’s anti-Israel poem prompted
criticism from leading politicians in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
Christian Democratic Union party. Philipp Mißfelder, a Christian
Democratic Union and foreign policy spokesman in the Bundestag, said
“the poem is tasteless and unhistoric and shows a lack of knowledge
about the situation in the Middle East.”
The general secretary
of the CDU Hermann Gröhe said he was horrified over the tone of the
poem and that Grass misjudged completely that Iran is determined to
obtain nuclear weapons.
Grass did not renounce the views contained in his poem and in subsequent interviews
continued to attack the Jewish state.
In
2003, three years before he disclosed his membership in the Waffen-SS
in an interview with the German daily FAZ, he wrote a Los Angeles Times
piece
arguing that president George W. Bush and his government “are
diminishing democratic values.” He further compared US policies with
al-Qaida. More.
The New York Times
wrote in 2006: "The reaction in Germany to this admission has been one of disbelief and
indignation: not that a teenager should have been recruited into the
Waffen SS as Hitler
struggled to avoid defeat, but that
the country’s most prominent writer
should have hidden this while hectoring others for their political and
social sins from the comfort of the moral high ground. “I do not
understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as
the nation’s bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then
admit that he himself was deeply involved,” Joachim Fest, a prominent
historian and biographer of Hitler, told the newspaper Bild. “I don’t
know how he could play this double role for so long.” 
