Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
(from Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield")
When Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, "Tell us ... what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" And, Jesus answered them, "Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, 'I am the Messiah!' and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet."
(from Matthew 24)
"Hans left home on his own ...
Went into the world alone."
(a German nursery rhyme popular in the 1930s)
As children of conflict, how can we even dream of peace? That's the haunting question gnawing at some of the world's greatest minds these days as our tiny planet rumbles further into this era of seemingly endless wars -- and rumors of wars.
And, right now, that question is painfully clawing its way to the surface of one of our greatest minds: the Nobel Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass, who 10 months ago revealed that his own wartime service in the 1940s, as a teenager, was actually in the dreaded Waffen-SS. For years, he had vaguely dismissed his wartime years as virtually irrelevant to the German war effort. (That's Grass at right in the black and white photo in 1944, temporarily in the uniform of German Labor Service.)
Grass' reflections, just published in English, are not only an important landmark in the public understanding of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but they're also like peering through a skeleton-key hole into the long-locked-away artifacts in a grandparent's attic. Fascinating, dusty stuff -- but also, in many cases, deeply disturbing in their implications. And, even more than that, this little memoir is likely to rank with Stephen Crane and Erich Maria Remarque as required reading for years to come in courses on the global literature of war and peace.
If you aren't a regular reader of the New Yorker, we strongly urge either finding a copy of the June 4 issue with Tony Soprano on the cover -- or Click Here to read the online text of Grass' memoir of those years, "How I Spent the War: A Recruit in the Waffen SS."
Unfamiliar with Grass?
Well, for Baby Boomers coming of age on college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Grass' sprawling, satyrical, surreal novel about Germany's descent into Fascism, "The Tin Drum," was a cultural watershed. The tale is written as the memoir of the war-traumatized dwarf Oskar Matzerath, who winds up locked away in an asylum, reflecting back on the decades in which the Nazi Party rose to power and devastated Europe. The novel skewers and screams at readers on a whole host of social and moral issues, but the central themes cluster around the absurdity, cruelty, selfishness and blindness of most of the adult authorities in the world.
Grass seemed to argue that only Outsiders, especially artists and musicians, could hope to rise above the powerful desires that lead to the insanity of global conflict. Like Thoreau, Grass argued for beating a different cadence even in the face of mortal danger. The novel's title refers to Oskar's prize possession, a bizarre little "tin drum" that he plays compulsively and that comes to embody his life's vocation as an angrily prophetic artist.
That summary barely captures the energy of the novel, which later was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1979 by German director Volker Schlöndorff. But, perhaps the summary suggests why it captured the creative imagination of a restless generation of American college students, disturbed by the Vietnam War, depressed about the lingering Cold War and generally eager to rush to the creative barricades in the hope of carving out a new world.
And, now?
Now, safely settled in a new millennium and approaching his ninth decade of life, Grass finally is admitting the shockingly high stakes of his creative strategy. We now realize that much of the passion in his novels and political activism was fueled by his personal guilt and shame over the moral failings of his teenage years. His fierce creativity as an adult now looks much like a flight from the humiliating blindness of his youth.
But the next question is: How different was Grass from millions of other youth? Many American World War II veterans still are coming to terms with their own youthful wartime experiences. The critical success of Clint Eastwood's twin films about Iwo Jima -- one from an American perspective and one from a Japanese perspective -- spring from the same half-century-long trauma that yawns like a Grand Canyon between the 1940s and today.
To his credit, Grass seems to realize that he now is draping his life across a public window frame -- and that his admissions are, indeed, guilty. No, he never so much as fired a shot at another human. No, his service never took him to concentration camps. But these admissions are of guilt, nonetheless.
For example, he admits in his memoir to having been part of the hazing of a German boy who apparently was a member of a pacifist religious minority -- a hazing so terrible that the boy was repeatedly beaten and eventually was sent to a concentration camp.
Overall, this memoir is a costly admission, even late in Grass' life. After years as an international symbol of the post-war search for peace and political reform, Grass' bombshell about his wartime record has been savagely skewered by many of his critics. The most frequently quoted critique came from German journalist Joachim Fest, frequently one of Grass' conservative political foes, who declared before his own death late last year: "After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."
And that was among the milder critiques!
But there's one more question worth raising -- and it is the reason we so strongly recommend reading Grass' memoir: If someone so blinded by the mists of war as young Gunter Grass could emerge from that youthful era of morally repugnant self interest to become a prophetic and hopeful voice for an entire generation, then cannot we, too, rise above our moral failings to become something resembling Our Better Selves?
Even if we're often, deep inside, toggling together those Better Selves with duct tape, glue and staples to hold together our fractured skeletons? If this thug of a youth can emerge as Gunter Grass, can't we, too, help to build better people of ourselves?
With this memoir, Grass is throwing open the attic door and letting us glimpse the fractures and failings gathering dust for so long. "What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it. ... I will have to live with it for the rest of my life."
But, please, read his story for yourself. If you're a already a reader of Grass' novels, you'll find tantalizing clues to some of the most powerful metaphors in his fiction. And you'll find an old man honestly admitting how a tragically blind and bull-headed youth once set out to make his way in a war-torn world -- and wound up inflicting scars so deep that their pain would resonate for good and for ill around the world.
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