Hoisted from June 4, 2007: Con Artist Guenter Grass Surfaces in the Pages of the New Yorker
An amazing con game Guenter Grass played for virtually his entire life: denouncing the western alliance for failing to grapple properly with Germany's unmasterable past, while at the same time doing all he could to hide and refuse to face his own membership in the criminal origination that was the Waffen-SS:
Hoisted from June 4, 2017: Guenter Grass Surfaces in the Pages of the New Yorker http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/guenter_grass_s.html: Ah. Guenter Grass in the New Yorker this week:
Guenter Grass: What is less certain is when I exchanged my [Waffen SS 10th Division "Frundsberg"] uniform jacket for one less onerous...
...Did I do so of my own accord? It was more likely the pfc. who, his eye on the runes on my collar, recommended the change of jacket. He could not have been pleased about my markings. Through me, though he did not put it in those terms, he had got into bad company. What he did say at some point, either in the larder of a cellar or while shaving or puffing on his cigarette, was: “Listen, boy, if those Ivans nab us, you’re in for it. They see those ornaments on your collar, they’ll shoot you in the neck. No questions asked.” How he did it I don’t know, but he managed to “organize”—as the soldiers used to say—an ordinary Wehrmacht jacket somewhere. One without bullet holes or bloodstains. It even fit. Minus the double rune, he liked me a lot better. I came to like me better, too...
And Guenter Grass in the New Yorker this week:
Guenter Grass: I most likely viewed the Waffen S.S. as an élite unit that was sent into action whenever a breach in the front line had to be stopped up. I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent. The boy... would be a tank gunner in a division that was named in honor of Jörg von Frundsberg... the “father of the Landsknechts”—crack infantry mercenaries. Someone who stood for freedom, liberation. Besides, the Waffen S.S. had a European aura to it: it included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch, and Belgian, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers; there were even said to be neutral Swedes on the Eastern Front in the defensive battle, as the rhetoric went, to save the West from the Bolshevik flood...
The argument that the SS was perceived as
élite... sent into action whenever a breach in the front... I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent...
is in interesting tension with
I exchanged my [SS] uniform jacket for one less onerous... [because] the pfc... could not have been pleased about my markings... [which meant] he had got into bad company.... Minus the double rune, he liked me a lot better. I came to like me better, too...
The "I came to like me better, too" is the tell—the naive, ignorant, and unobservant self that Guenter Grass asserts, "the boy" as he keeps calling him, would have had no reason to like himself better because he had shed the jacket of a unit that was "élite... sent... whenever a breach... had to be stopped up... freedom, liberation..." "The boy" knew that the SS stood for much much more than that.
Fritz Stern had things to say:
Fritz Stern: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/nine_from_fritz.html: In subsequent decades, some Germans were upset when I insisted that you had to be a village idiot not to have known about Dachau and some of the other camps during the 1930s. Hence I was interested to read not long ago that in July 1933 the celebrated violinist Adolf Busch wrote to his brohter Fritz, the conductor, that Germans nowadays prayed: "Lieber Gott, much mich stumm, dass ich nicht nacht Dachau kumm." Lord, make me dumb [mute], so I to Dachau do not come"...
Also cf.: Charles Maier (1988): The Unmasterable Past http://amzn.to/2rpDGF6: "First, as typified by President Reagan... Bitburg history unites oppressors and victims, Nazi perpetrators of violence with those who were struck down by it, in a common dialectic...
...Bitburg history courts the danger that is reminiscent of Hegel's remarkable discussion of master and slave in The Phenomenology of the Spirit. It confuses the formal, logical dependence of victim and victimizer (there can by definition exist no perpetrator without a victim), with a shared responsibility for the wrong committed. As Primo Levy has written, both victim and perpetrator seek to deny the memory of the crime: "we are confronted with a paradoxical analogy between the victim and the perpetrator... but the offender, and only he, has set and triggered it, and if he has come to suffer from his deed, it is just that he suffers; whereas it is an iniquity that the victim also suffers, as indeed he or she suffers, even after many years."
Second, Bitburg history finds it difficult to pin down any notions of collective responsibility. Admittedly the latter notion is one of the most problematic concepts.... In what sense does collective responsibility exist?... The tentative and brief response, I would suggest for the moment, is that insofar as a collection of people wishes to claim existence as a society or a nation, it must thereby accept existence as a community through time, hence must acknowledge that acts committed by earlier agents still bind or burden.... Insofar as past acts were acknowledged as injurious, this level of responsibility stipulates that whatever reparation is still possible must be attemped.
West German leaders have accepted that responsibility, not with consistent good grace, but to a major degree. Nor does this responsibility have a time limit. Responsibility for a burdened past can justifiably become less preoccupying as other experiences are added to the national legacy. The remoter descendants of those originally victimized have a more diluted claim to compensation. But like that half-life of radioactive material, there is no point at which responsibility simply goes away.
