You've all probably heard by now that Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass has revealed what must be the last secret he'll ever tell the public. He was a Nazi. According to today's NYTimes, Grass was recruited at 17 into the "notorious Nazi Corps." (The Nazi's were notorious?)
Grass has long been a bright spot for the post-WWII Germans, as a writer of remorse and conscience, as evidenced in his lovely Nobel Lecture from 1999.
"I wanted to make it clear to myself and my readers, not without a bit of a chip on my shoulder, that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion, that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature in all its grandeur and pettiness: the churches and cemeteries, the sounds of the shipyards and smells of the faintly lapping Baltic, a language on its way out yet still stable-warm and grumble-rich, sins in need of confession, and crimes tolerated if never exonerated."
The Times mentioned also that the response in Germany is not one of anger about the Nazi role he played, but of the secrecy that surrounded it for so many years. Does this matter, that at 17 a great writer was recruited to be a Nazi? I'm not sure.
3 comments:
The problem (for some) is not that he was a Nazi, but that he joined/drafted into the Waffen SS, the elite Nazis who were responsible for the Holocaust.
yeah. the notorious nazis. (i.e. SS)
Our recent pope was a nazi too.
now he's the pope.
The problem is not that Gunther was joined/drafted into the elite waffen ss which did such and such. The problem is that he never spoke about it until now. This situation is very similer to Heidegger's.
Silence is often deemed complicity.
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