Maxima Culpa
So, Gunter Grass was an SS Nazi. And this comes out just after I bought a remaindered copy of Crabwalk, his most recently celebrated novel, so I am faced with finally getting around to reading this celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning, anti-Nazi author’s work just when his reputation blows up. I suppose if I’d read The Tin Drum or something back when I first encountered it (or even had seen the movie), I’d have something to work with in coming to terms with what it all means, but instead have to contend with Mr. Grass’s past’s effect at the same time as I come to assess his work. Looking at his time in the service of the monsters of Europe, he doesn’t present a history entirely different from that of another former SS soldier, one more recently elevated to a position of even higher moral authority than a literature prize: Pope Benedict XVI. Well, except for the fact that Grass actually volunteered and believed in the war up until the Nuremburg trials showed him the reality. And both men kept their past pretty well covered up, though one by silence, the other by, well, not lies exactly, but not the full truth. Is Grass discredited then? Or can we say, in making this revelation, he finally has come to admit his sins and repent them even while he has long been attempting to atone for them?