Günther Grass: "I Was a Member of the SS"

[Kellanved]

Just weeks before the publication of his autobiography, German Nobel Laureate Günter Grass admits that, between 1944-95, he was a member of Hitler's Weapons SS. The author says the shame of his youthful naivety has long haunted him and that it will now be his "Scarlet Letter."

Only a few weeks before the publication of his autobiography, German author Günter Grass has revealed something about himself that has long been a secret: He was a member of Hitler's Weapons SS in 1944 and 1945. In an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Grass owns up to his youthful naïveté and discusses the burden of this blemish on his past.

Grass's autobiography, due out in September, is titled "While Peeling the Onion." It unveils an explosive chapter in Günter Grass's life. Born in 1927 and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature, Grass was also a member of the Weapons SS.

Grass talks about the issue in an interview appearing in tomorrow's edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and in doing so makes a few corrections to the biographies that have been written to date about the author of "The Tin Drum" and many other works. Contrary to what was known about Grass in the past, he was not drafted in 1944 to serve in an anti-aircraft auxiliary unit. Instead, he was called up at the age of 17, when he was transferred from the Nazi labor service to the "Frundsberg" tank division, which was part of the Weapons SS.

...
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,431353,00.html

[rzemanfl]

1. "Waffen" means "weapons" in German? Never knew that. n/t

[reichstag911]

4. Me neither...

...but here ya go: http://www.ego4u.com/en/dictionary .

[rzemanfl]

6. Thanks, IMHO "armed" would have been a better translation. n/t

[Kellanved]

8. not really

The phrase doesn't really make sense in German either; "Waffen" isn't a verb.

[rzemanfl]

9. Maybe that's why everything I ever read called them the Waffen

SS and left it at that.

[Heidi]

2. Is the "95" in the 1944-95 a TYPO???

:wow:

[izzie]

3. We live in the times we were born in. Who really cares?

His art is what is important.

[bluerum]

5. I always read the Tin Drum as not so much an anti-war statement

as a statement about how insane society becomes when forced down the path of violence and war. In that sense The Tin Drum illustrates the horribly corrosive effects of a "war state".

[TreasonousBastard]

7. I wonder why he waited so long to clear...

that up. And it's not clear whether he was drafted in to the SS or volunteered for it when he was drafted. I can't judge him for being in the SS or taking so long to admit it-- the worth of one's life is rarely decided by one incident in youth when the world around him had gone mad.

And, I suppose, even though the SS was a wierd goup with an almost religious fervor for Nazism, he was on a tank crew, not a camp guard.