The peeling-off of the onion’s layers may also bring tears to the eyes. But it has never been Grass’s way to indulge in such self-pity. So the regrets about his war service are only hinted at in the book, more cursorily by far than the three hungers that obsessed him in those years since puberty: for food, when he was on bare subsistence rations in an American POW camp and elsewhere; for sexual gratification; and for fulfillment as an artist, whether in words, pencil, brush or any other of his multiple media. (While learning to be a sculptor, after employment as a stonemason making headstones and graveyard monuments, he performed music too for a time, on a washboard in a skiffle band). His three hungers urged him to survive, and they had a much stronger hold on him than any ideal or ideology that might have propelled him to martyrdom. To survive he had to be as tough and impervious as he could make himself. The tragedies in his book are not his own, except by compassion, but those of his friends and companions less lucky than he was in successive activities, chosen or enforced. He mentions that he shed no tears even on the death of his mother, to whom he had remained closest of all, until long after the event. When he was released at last into relative freedom, he opted not to attend a course for those who had missed schooling and the ‘Abitur’, the matriculation considered requisite for success on any social order. When educational courses were offered in a POW camp, along with pictures of the extermination camp horrors that converted him (while others dismissed them as propaganda, saying: “No German could have done such things”), it was a cookery course that he chose; and he was to add cookery to his many other skills and accomplishments. Those who have had it in for Grass ever since he committed himself to a libertarian socialism – neither MarxistMaoist, when that was dominant in the 60s and 70s, nor global capitalism when that became the norm – will continue to

question the timing of his more factual account of the unregenerate past. Yet had he been known to have served in the Waffen-SS – never mind when, why and how – Grass would not have been eligible for participation in the Gruppe 47, an anti-Nazi group of writers who became a powerful pressure group in the early 50s; and it was through this participation that he emerged as a poet and found his first publisher, before writing The Tin Drum, which was to establish his fame. Nor could he have been active on behalf of the Social Democratic Party, as he was at a later period, when he felt it to be his duty as a citizen to put his reputation and eloquence at the disposal of that cause. It was by this activity, not very congenial to him, that he proved his metanoia, made up for his juvenile indoctrination. It was never his ambition to be a praeceptor Germaniae. If he was that to others, his new book ought to puncture that delusion. It presents him as a very fallible and carnal creature, with no pretensions to intellectual, moral or spiritual exemplariness, only with talents that needed to be fulfilled by intense application – as they have been. What matters, surely, is that he made ample amends for his youthful error, for instance by funding support for the Gypsies or Romanies of Europe, whom Hitler’s ideology of resentment also marked out for immediate and total extermination, and who are still persecuted by those with a similar mentality. The only privilege Grass has ever claimed for himself is that of the court fool or clown who, even under autocratic monarchies, had the liberty of uttering subversive or grotesque truths, as in Shakespeare’s plays, usually under the mere threat of a whipping if they overstepped the mark. Grass’s most memorable character, the tin drummer, is a re-embodiment of that archetype. It was not the function of such entertainers to analyse themselves and their quirks, rather to make their patrons laugh or smile, of course, but to shock them too,

for moments at least, into being less sure than they were of their power. This court fool’s freedom rested on a magnanimity now conspicuous by its absence in would-be public matters. So what is on trial in this affair is not Grass, his memory or his honesty, but the quality of our political-cum-cultural correctness.

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DON’T TURN ROUND

Don’t go into the wood, in the wood is the wood. Whoever walks in the wood, looks for trees, will not be looked for later in the wood.

Have no fear, fear smells of fear. Whoever smells of fear will be smelled out by heroes who smell like heroes.

Don’t drink from the sea, the sea tastes of more sea. Whoever drinks from the sea henceforth feels a thirst only for oceans.

Don’t build a home, or you’ll be at home. Whoever is at home waits for late callers and opens the door.

Don’t write a letter, archives will boast of letters you post. Whoever writes the letter lends his name to the posthumous paper game.

Güünter Grass, trans. Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger’s collection of poems Circling the Square, and his translations of Paul Celan, are published by Anvil Press.

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 43