 If Sally would call me with her satelite phone, I'd be able to inform her that last week Reuters published an article about Günter Grass serving in the Waffen-SS. This is the kind of stuff that GVB wants to hear about.
It's very puzzling since so much of his stature as a post war German writer was based on his demand that Germany come to terms with it's WW2 past. I guess I'm surprised that it took him 60 years to tell his tale.
The Stoning of Günter Grass
Wow. That made me stop to think, shook my assumptions and judgements.
From the Pierre Tristam link above: It isn’t as if confessing to one’s every personal dissonance is owed a world into which none of us chooses to spend those brief years as forcibly invited guests, in places and in circumstances and on terms never of our choosing. We only choose what we do with the trundles of crap handed us on the first day, and even then, the choice is limited. Grass had the misfortune of being born in Danzig on the eve of World War II. He was 17 when he was drafted by a machinery of death that was crumpling everything in its scope. What was I doing at 17? Bad example, maybe: Being born in Lebanon on the eve of a civil war wasn’t exactly being handed a platter of Turkish delights. I could have been drafted into the Phalangist militia, as close a descendant of the Waffen SS as you might get in Lebanon. I remember as a 12-year-old believing them to be Lebanese Christendom’s saviors, too. We all have our shames, our necessary closets. And anyway, what on earth is the difference between believing Nazi or Phalangist propaganda as a teen-ager, and believing all that “flotsam and jetsam” taught us by the Catholic Church, whose pound-for-pound record as a genocidal machine over two millennia (a stretch of time Hitler only aspired to) either rivals or exceeds the Nazis? All that original sin.
Rushdie defends Grass
And my fave catholic joke (by way of Anthony Easton's unmedicated blog) In early 1945 a young Hitlerjugend soldier, about 17, is crouched in a sniper's nest. the orders are clear: shoot anything that moves, unless it's a German soldier. After a while he sees a young priest walking down the street. The priest is moving and, of course, he's not wearing a German soldier's uniform. So the young sniper aims at the priest's head and is about to pull the trigger.
Suddenly, God's voice booms down from the heavens: "Stop! That young Polish priest will one day be Pope. Do not kill him!".
The German boy keeps the priest in the line of fire, thinks about the situation for a moment and then says: "OK, here's a deal: if I don't kill him then I get to be Pope, too".
|
It's very puzzling since so much of his stature as a post war German writer was based on his demand that Germany come to terms with it's WW2 past. I guess I'm surprised that it took him 60 years to tell his tale.
- L.M. 8-14-2006 10:34 pm
The Stoning of Günter Grass
- L.M. 8-17-2006 6:30 am
Wow. That made me stop to think, shook my assumptions and judgements.
- galenagalaxian 8-17-2006 6:45 am
From the Pierre Tristam link above:
All that original sin.- L.M. 8-17-2006 6:54 am
Rushdie defends Grass
And my fave catholic joke (by way of Anthony Easton's unmedicated blog)
- L.M. 8-17-2006 11:02 pm