A reason for Gunter Grass's silence
Reese, Dagmar
GONTER GRASS'S belated revelation that he served in the Waffen-SS provokes a strange sense of helplessness. There is no evidence incriminating Grass in Nazi crimes, either directly or through...
...But it always draws a boundary...
...He was an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth and probably internalized its maxims...
...Kids love to lord it over other kids with "I know something you don't know...
...She is author of Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2006 and editor of Die BDM Generation...
...But some young Germans joined the Waffen-SS for ideological reasons...
...For that reason, Bude thought, Grass was a worthy Nobel Laureate from Germany...
...It is through secretiveness and a vow of silence that Tamino wins his beloved Pamina and gains acceptance into the temple order in Mozart's Magic Flute...
...Best to leave the burden of the past and memory to those who passed through its inferno...
...It is not necessarily evil...
...Young Germans who took the bait had various motives, including the prospect of very concrete privileges, such as training in one of the elite SS Junker schools...
...Instead, he probably kept this secret as a kind of wellspring: an impetus for his creativity, a goad for the imagination, a source of diabolical energy that nurtured his books and drove him to write...
...Berlin-Brandenburg, 2007...
...Grass's experiences at the time—early departure from school, a stint in the National Labor Service, then off to the front—were not all that special...
...Yet there is another element in this mix...
...In other words, his silence about being in the Waffen-SS was not due to a sense of guilt or implication in Nazi crimes...
...The content of the secret matters much less than belonging to those in the know...
...This is also why now, near the end of his life, the secret can be disclosed...
...The secret was his magic flute...
...In August 2006, Heinz Bude, writing in the Stiddeutsche Zeitung, described Grass as a person "who shows us where we come from as a nation...
...According to his own statement, he found himself involuntarily in the Waffen-SS...
...Yet in his case, there was a certain prehistory...
...DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 37...
...It made special use of this access in the later phase of the war to launch aggressive recruitment campaigns...
...POLITICS ABROAD That is the foundation, Simmel writes, for a "very pronounced feeling of ownership...
...In contrast, Papageno cannot tame his loquacity...
...This extra training meant they would not be sent immediately to the front...
...Bude's argument makes concealment into a kind of primal foundation for the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, its shadowy Urgrund...
...Silence and secretiveness were means to weld young people and to isolate them from their origins and history...
...So one may speculate that his agreement was a given when he received induction orders for the Waffen-SS, and this may perhaps account for his long silence over many decades...
...Hannah Arendt described the experience of the concentration camps as "life on the moon...
...Many of us, but not all, are within the folds of that secret...
...But many people who witnessed Nazism kept silent because there were no words for what they had seen...
...At all times and in all cultures, secret societies have used secrecy to nurture and develop their own sense of identity...
...Silence was a central element through which those young people differentiated themselves from others, from the external enemy, from their parents, or from the Weimar Republic...
...The Hitler Youth had a credo...
...Despite all rhetoric then, Grass's revelation is not primarily about guilt...
...What they saw was as far removed from everyday normalcy as the earth is from the moon...
...But that is not the source of controversy...
...He says that he never fired a shot, although this sounds more than improbable given the conditions of the place and time...
...There is no evidence incriminating Grass in Nazi crimes, either directly or through some complicity...
...he was drafted...
...He was too young, his service too brief...
...Later generations did not always ask questions, and among them were many who didn't want to know what truly had transpired...
...In fact, the Waffen-SS had privileged access to young males about to be drafted thanks to the Hitler Youth and the National Labor Service...
...The latter came from another military tradition, despite its wartime intermeshing with National Socialism...
...At the same time, the regime used these means to instrumentalize them, making young people useful for the purposes and ends of Nazism...
...DAGMAR REESE is a staff member of the research project on "Georg Simmel's Theories on Gender in `Fin de Siecle' Berlin" at the Moses Mendelssohn Center at the University of Potsdam...
...It fashions a consciousness of one's own person or group...
...Grass took an earlier first step that signaled that he was ambitious and blinded enough to plunge into a hopeless battle near the war's very end...
...There is "inside" and "outside," and all those outside are excluded...
...Translated from the German by Bill Templer...
...But the horror of the war could also remain lodged in the synapses...
...That is comprehensible only by the logic of the secret, a logic that turns into a zest for confession: "I knew something you didn't...
...Given the youth of its recruits, families often played a decisive role in the decision to join...
...There still are...
...What surprises people, and what they hold against him, is his long, long period of silence...
...Awareness of a secret creates tension, it builds up a feeling of power...
...There are, he admitted, excellent reasons at times for having a secret...
...Here you weren't 36 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 just some Joe Blow in the ranks, you were somebody...
...There were a lot of secrets in postwar Germany...
...In 1907, in a short essay on "The Secret," sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out that the secret is one of the "greatest intellectual achievements of humankind...
...He tried to volunteer for submarine service...
...For all ambitious "petit bourgeois," the Waffen-SS held out a special attraction because of its elite character...
...Gunter Grass was not recruited...
...It was a proactive decision for a Nazi military unit, in contrast to the Wehrmacht (the regular army...
...However, it was clear to many by 1944-1945 that the end was approaching, and signing up in the Waffen-SS was certainly not a way to protect your children...
...This silence is not comprehensible if Grass, as he contends, was drafted into the Waffen-SS and did not enlist...
...The ability to create and keep a secret, he proposed, distinguishes adults from children...
...But only a minority ended up in the Waffen-SS...
...Of course, the counter-argument is that there is no collective German "we," not just because the female half of the war generation was voiceless, but because not all its members joined the Waffen-SS...
...Female Youth in Germany and Austria in National Socialism) (Verlag BIT...
...This is why his revelation does not come as a remorseful confession, but is embedded in the edifice of his achievement...
...It extolled comradeship, bravery, and strength, but there was another prime virtue: secretiveness...
...Gunter Grass belonged to that generation...
...Weibliche Jugendliche in Deutschland and Osterreich im Nationalsozialismus (The Generation of the League of German Girls...
...He has taken a kind of vain retrospective glance at a distant errant youth that harbors an element of the strange and offensive...
...This was the youthful itinerary of many thousands of his generation...
...For some it was a matter of incriminating knowledge of crimes and fear of prosecution...
...Here is a self-confident writer who, even after the revelation, had no compunctions about involving himself in an election campaign in Berlin, as if nothing had happened...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
