Living with Which Past? Günter Grass and the German Guilt
By Frank Trommler

What is to be Learned?
Responding to Günter Grass's revelations that as a seventeen-year-old he was recruited by the Waffen-SS, Peter Gay, in his op-ed piece in The New York Times on August 20, 2006, draws this conclusion: "If I am right, the affair will have a useful consequence: it will be a reminder, more than 60 years later, that his country had a great deal to be ashamed of." (1) This conclusion by the eminent historian of modern Europe, who was born a Jew in Germany and had to leave the country in the late thirties, should be heeded above all condemnations of a writer who failed to be truthful about himself. Gay directs the attention to the big picture. And yet, it sounds like much we have heard before. Never to forget Germany's heinous crimes is as valid a reminder in 2006 as it was sixty years ago. However, do we really need Günter Grass's revelations for it? Is there more to be learned from this affair that has been unleashed by Grass's disclosure in his new autobiography, While Peeling the Onion?

I see more virtue in taking this reminder not as a conclusion but rather as a point of departure for a reflection of the affair. Starting with the Nuremberg Trials, powerful reminders accompanied Germany's resurgence after World War II. More fruitful is the question as to what the various generations of Germans did with the Nazi sins while the temptation was great to dodge the criticism inside and outside the country. How did this issue play out within the different generations? What did the reminder mean to those who grew up under national socialism? To those who grew up after the war? Yet, looking at the Grass affair, these questions seem to fade against the critics' obsession with Grass's long-time failure to reveal what he did as a seventeen-year-old. The frame of reference is less history itself but rather the phantom of the untarnished hero as the critic of history.

Longing for untarnished heroes in the moral realm has been honorable but not particularly satisfactory if one considers the precarious relationships of intellectuals in the twentieth century with fascism, national socialism, and Stalinism. Critics inside and outside of the two Germanys used such longing to their advantage, but in the long run the public judged the intellectual and artistic engagement with a treacherous reality according to its creative qualities rather than personal virtuousness. A good example can be drawn from the most influential spokesperson for the moral engagement with the Nazi past in the then-newly-founded Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss. As the first Bundespräsident, Heuss has been credited with making the memory of the crimes of the Nazi era a constitutive element of national political memory. (2) He rejected the notion of collective guilt of the Germans since it mirrored the Nazi perceptions of all Jews as "guilty." In its place Heuss proposed the idea of Kollektivscham, collective shame. This notion, often amended and enlarged, has proven to retain its power. It pointed to the many variations of guilt feelings that emerged in every different stage. And yet, what about Heuss's vote for the Ermächtigungsgesetz that paved the way to the Nazi dictatorship in 1933? Was it virtuous? Did Heuss atone for it? Indeed he did. He helped shape the political reference to the Nazi crimes as constitutive for the Federal Republic.

Grass's Atonement?
Grass's critics reject his assertion that writing The Tin Drum and other narratives was sufficient as a way of atoning for his omission. Was it sufficient? What does writing an extraordinary novel that has been praised as the quintessential, though satirical reminder of Germany's guilt say about the author? Does it make him virtuous? No. But it has allowed him to spearhead the drive toward accepting the everyday complicity of Germans in the Nazi mess. This drive, advancing between satirical provocation and moralistic finger pointing, has helped Germans to become respected members of the civilized world again. Grass has provided powerful symbols and metaphors for this drive that received appropriate attention in the citation of the Nobel Prize committee.

What I found validated by the recent revelations is the well-known wisdom that great art and literature do not necessarily come from virtuous people and that advocates of great causes, whether politicians or intellectuals, often lack in personal virtues. What I learned as a literary historian is the fact that the one element of Grass's earlier narratives, especially in The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years, that projects a deeply unsettling feeling of guilt is not just a device to provide a balancing layer of irritation and mystification to an otherwise revealing portrayal of German society, but in fact represents a slice of Grass's personal life. Without projecting Grass's own situation squarely onto the narratives, one can learn that their fascination with metaphors of guilt, usually interpreted as "the German predicament," also draws its strength from authentic experience. In the case of the successful narrator the wisdom is not "knowledge is power" but rather "experience is power." The overabundance of distancing devices in Grass's prose - for instance the constant switching between the first and the third person in The Tin Drum - might be fueled more by confessional intentions than previously assumed.

The Case of Martin Walser
Not long ago another prominent German author, Martin Walser, raised a storm with his approach to the legacy of the Nazi past. The provocation was clearly different from the one that Grass's caused by the revelation about his membership in the Waffen-SS. Unlike Grass, who never wavered in reminding his countrymen of Auschwitz, Walser used the acceptance speech for the Peace Prize at the 1998 Frankfurt Book Fair for the lament that Auschwitz continued to be "instrumentalized" as a "moral cudgel" for Germans, as "a permanent exhibit of our shame." Responding most critically on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht in the company of Federal President Roman Herzog, Ignaz Bubis, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused Walser of "spiritual arson." He saw Walser's lament as a call for abandoning the manifestation of guilt about the complicity of Germans, even as a sign of anti-Semitism.

The cases are clearly different. Grass did not waver in reminding his countrymen of Auschwitz but did not address the full extent of his own involvement as a seventeen-year-old, as marginal as it might have been. As Walser pleaded for ending the reminders, his personal history was not part of the debate. And yet, I cannot but draw it in, going back to the early sixties when he was more adamant than any other German writer - with exceptions of Peter Weiss, the Jewish émigré, and Rolf Hochhuth, the accuser of the Pope in The Deputy - about building a new German drama on the thorough scrutiny of the Nazi past ("Eiche und Angora," "Der schwarze Schwan"). Walser implored his countrymen in his remarkable essay, "Unser Auschwitz" (Our Auschwitz), to accept that Auschwitz represented an indelible part of them. He even added to this admonition the ominous sentence: "One does not have to have been in the SS" [to realize this part].

I venture that Walser's frustration in 1998 would not have been so pointed if he had not engaged earlier with such intensity in the topics of guilt and moral indifference. Having done so publicly and prominently in the 1960s when career-minded historians kept their mouth shut about the need to educate the Germans about this part of themselves, Walser seems to have vented his frustration in 1998 about the fact that his plight had not led to redemption. Similar to Grass and other members of the generation that grew up under Nazism, Walser believed that this generation's mission was to repair Germany's moral standing. As intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and teachers pursued this mission, they held up the hope that some form of redemption from the guilt would reward them. Walser implied that time itself was opening the door for redemption. He had to be made aware that a return to an earlier normality is impossible in Germany; the new normality would always include Auschwitz. While Grass maintained his own blind spot of guilt, he always knew and reminded others that "repair" does not mean redemption.

New Generation, New Mindset?
This generation's inner drama has a distant ring for younger Germans who reached adulthood in 1968 and in the following decades. They have freed themselves from a German recovery mission while building and visiting memorials to the victims of the Nazi crimes. Their sense of atrocities has been shaped by Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, and other formidable criminals.

Against this growing indifference, Grass's case should be seen as a confirmation of the fact that each revelation in this realm has moral force only as far as the calamity is judged in its individuality. Helmut Kohl, by claiming the "grace of the late birth" as evidence of a generation's indemnification from the sins of Nazism, could still get away with generalizations. This approach does not hold up anymore. The old image applies: when you point with your finger, three fingers point back to you. When one speaks about culpability, the year 1945 is not the divider between guilt and innocence anymore.

No one knew this better than Bertolt Brecht, a member of the older generation Helmut Kohl was grateful not to belong to. In his most famous poem, "An die Nachgeborenen," (To the Coming Generations), Brecht asked the following generations to look with indulgence at those who had the misfortune to live during dark times. In a less well known and much shorter poem, however, he stepped out of this generational shelter and pointed the finger at himself as the one who is culpable. In "Böser Morgen" (Bad Morning) Brecht speaks of the silver poplar and the lake that are drained of all beauty; the world has become ugly.

"Why?" the speaker asks, and the poem ends:
"Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me
Like at a leper. They were work-roughened
And they were broken.

Oh, you who don't know! I cried,
Guilt-stricken."

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Footnotes:
1. "The Fictions of Günter Grass," WK 11, August 20, 2006
2. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory, p. 312

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Professor Frank Trommler is professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and was previously the head of AICGS's Humanities Program.

This essay appeared in the August 31, 2006 AICGS Advisor.