Günter Grass

German Literature

'Peeling of the Onion' - Revelation by Günter Grass (22.8.2006)

The German version with a comment can be found at:

Das Schälen der Zwiebel - Günter Grass bei der SS

These two articles were written in 2006 in response to the autobiography of Günter Grass with the title 'the Peeling of the Onion' about to be published in Germany at that time. They are posted now on this website due to a recent interview with Günter Grass by Tom Segev and published by the newspaper Haaretz on the occasion of 'Peeling of the Onion' having been translated into Hebrew and due to be released shortly in Israel. In that interview a crucial question reappears about the position of Günter Grass: insofar as he portrays Germans as being not merely perpetrators of war and of the Holocaust, but as well victims of war, it stirs up new controversies on how Germans should relate to the Holocaust. This more so the case of this writer as Günter Grass confessed in that autobiography that he he joined the SS at the age of seventeen. Since he broke that silence about his past only sixty years later, it raises more than one question about the role of silence in post war Germany. Linked to that is the risk to relativize responsibility for what happened during the years 1933-45 as if sins during a youthful age can happen to anyone. That raises the prospect that the youth of today is equally at risk to commit a similar mistake. The philosopher Ernst Bloch even said young people can catch very quickly 'right wing fire', or else be drawn into things which brings them ever closer to commit crimes against humanity. This was a question raised after the bombings on the tube in London in 2005, but can also be related to the shooting spree in Norway. The interview was published under the title

"The German who needed a fig leaf "

in Haaretz 26.08.2011, see

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/the-german-who-needed-a-fig-leaf-1.380883

and has been followed by further controversies surrounding particular statements made by Günter Grass during that interview. See

"Wirbel um Holocaust-Aussagen - Israelischer Historiker verteidigt Günter Grass"

Von Stefan Kuzmany

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,784170,00.html

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Günter Grass

German Literature

"The German who needed a fig leaf "