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Gunter Grass's Mea Culpa.

Article Excerpt
In his recently published autobiography, Peeling the Onion, (2006) Nobel prize winning novelist, Gunter Grass, revealed that at the tender age of sixteen he had enlisted in the infamous Waffen SS.

One might suppose that this youthful transgression was effectively canceled by Grass's long career as Germany's premier novelist and self-appointed moral conscience. Grass may have assumed that his confession, however belated, would be taken as further proof of his moral rectitude. But that was not the case. His revelation was met with widespread outrage, not only, indeed not mainly, because of the sixteen-year-old's poor judgment, but because of the sixty-year silence, during which time Grass pointed his finger at countless others whose collusion with the Nazis was perhaps no greater than his own.

It is certainly not surprising that the objects of his righteous judgment should be incensed. But their reactions moved far beyond the range of normal resentment. A veritable storm of pent-up fury fixed itself on Grass, excoriating his hypocrisy, and more pointedly on the Judas-like treachery through which he garnered great personal success. Determined to rectify what they conceived as a great miscarriage of justice, there were some who insisted that Grass return the Nobel prize, which had been won, they felt, under false pretenses, for works that would have to be as deeply inauthentic as the writer himself.

Whatever conclusions we may draw concerning Grass's moral character and its bearing on his literary oeuvre, this display of ungarnered vengefulness is troubling, not only for...

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