Has Grass come clean too late?

Dr Glen Reynolds asks: Should we forgive him - and others like him - for their blemished pasts?

IT is not just authors and academics who have been asking searching questions since the admission by the German Nobel Prize winner, Gunter Grass, that he was a member of the Waffen SS, was recruited into the SS tank division and served in Dresden towards the end of the Second World War.

Grass was not only the post-war voice of German conscience but, I think, represented a post-war spirit of self examination, reflection and restoration, both personally and collectively.

But is it right to attack the author now as a hypocrite who has fooled us all, not least those he has spent so much time attacking?

Are the far-right groups throughout Europe and the US correct in claiming that a literary fraud has been exposed?

A deeper look at the context of his newspaper admission (prior to the publication of his autobiography Peeling the Onion, and apparent simultaneous outing by newly opened intelligence files) illustrates the necessity for a more complex response from us all.

The attackers arguments are clear Grass, the great advocate of facing unpalatable truths, has lived up to his own standards, but a little late, demonstrated by literary achievements gratefully received by an author who was living a lie.

He should return the Nobel Prize for Literature. The accusation of hypocrisy, if only partial, is undeniable.

Grass has always admitted his Nazi affiliation in the context of a nationalistic family, society and the belief in truths which he subsequently had revealed to him as fundamental falsehoods.

Yet Grass now says that, although he had told the truth to his wife, those he deceived (as to his SS membership) included his children and his biographer Michael Jurgs, with whom he had worked for some time exploring his career as a youthful participant in Hitlers Reich, and the effect this had on his writing.

While the recent revelation may be healthy for the sales of the autobiography, the whole truth that was untold to members of his family and professional colleagues, may be the more damning implications for him personally.

His biographer said recently: "I'm deeply disappointed. If he had come clean earlier and said he was in the SS at 17 no one would have cared, but now it puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us".

Grass himself gives the rather weak explanation: "My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write this book. In the end, it simply had to come out".

Grass is best known internationally for his depiction of life in Danzig during the early days of the Nazi regime in the 1957 anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum, the book that brought him acclaim and personal fortune. It was subsequently made into a highly successful film. There is a part of his autobiography that curiously unites Grass with another contemporary figure who has been associated with a Nazi past. At the end of the Second World War, Grass was held as a prisoner of war in an American camp and he recalls meeting and becoming friendly with a rather shy 17-year-old called Joseph who was also in the Bad Aibling prisoner of war camp. Grass states: "I wanted to be an artist; he wanted to go into the church". Unfortunately, Grass cannot confirm whether the 17-year-old was the Joseph Ratzinger, who admits to having been in the same camp, and is now Pope Benedict XVI. There has, of course, been widespread coverage of the Popes childhood membership of the Hitler Youth, but it has been universally accepted that the Pope was a deeply reluctant participant and fought against such involvement before being effectively badgered into it. The position of Grass, who volunteered his involvement, was quite different.

Prior to literary fame, Grass joined Gruppe 47, a collective of writers that included Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Boll, committed to exposing and overcoming Germanys Nazi past and bringing a new start to literature and society in general. This was the springboard for Grass. But the publication of The Tin Drum and its unexpected global success changed everything. Grass became the voice of the new German literature, surpassing all his contemporaries. Grasss insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.

Some of Grasss colleagues and friends, notably Salman Rushdie, have recently adopted the view that you should look at the life work of the author in its entirety, that you should wrap up an author in their work as opposed to condemning them for such isolated acts of juvenile idiocy. However, rather less weighty an argument was Rushdies view that the Waffen SS was merely a military wing, as distinct from those in the SS who governed the camps and committed war crimes. So I think that the Grass issue begs the question: How far should we forgive past wrongs and, in the case of Grass, forgive teenage madness? Brought right up to date, the same issue surrounds us in the UK for example: to what extent should society forgive the recently released murderers of Jamie Bulger?

Certainly, Grass spent 70 years attacking racism, the establishment and capitalism in general. On a similar vein with a UK emphasis, the disgraced British Tory MP John Profumo, (following the scandal involving supplying cold war intelligence to the Soviet Union via mistresses), subsequently received a peerage for a lifetimes work helping the poor. But a separate issue is whether a view of a writer should be separated from what they have written, painted or composed?

The celebrated French author, Louis- Ferdinand Celine, based his writings on his service at the front during the First World War, his travels through Africa, and his service as a League of Nations doctor. But Celine was a virulent anti-Semite.

He is now generally regarded as one of the most important and influential as well as controversial 20th-century French novelists. Surely, the question needs to be asked as to whether the anti-Semitism or the racism is reflected in the works of the writer?

Another example is in relation to the poet Ezra Pound. We may not read the one-time fascist rhetoric of Pound, but can choose to "cherry-pick" that poetry which recognises him as a great writer. And, historically, there is of course the ongoing arguments over Wagner and his adoration by some Nazis, and the supposed indirect affiliation to that regime if you enjoy, as I do, the beauty of Parsifal or the Ring cycle.

So, in relation to Pound, Wagner and others, do you accept the abhorrent views of the writer if the rhetoric is not reflected in what you read or listen to?

And, moreover, if those views took place during adolescence and were not reflected in their later life work, surely if forgiveness, confession and reconciliation means anything it must exist here? If Grass is guilty of anything it is in the fact that he was not fully open about his past, not least to his loved ones. Perhaps many of us may be guilty of that, but it should be judged by what we do about it and the atonement we make.

I hope Grass's writings and his lifetimes work to counter those early views formed in a juvenile nationalistic environment have not been scarred by his personal misjudgement and late confession.