Nobel laureate Grass hurt at outcry over SS admission

Hamburg (dpa) - Guenter Grass, 78, the Nobel laureate often acclaimed as Germany's greatest living writer, said Monday he had been hurt at criticism of his concealment of his Waffen SS past.

His disclosure that he volunteered as a 15-year-old to fight for Nazi Germany and was called up by the Waffen SS in early 1945 has triggered a storm of controversy, along with demands that Grass return such honours as the 1999 Nobel Prize and honorary citizenship of Gdansk.

Questioned by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Grass refused to comment on his revelation, saying "If I started, I'd never be able to stop commenting."

Eastern Europeans were shocked at Grass's association with the atrocity-scarred Waffen SS, the Nazi Party's private army.

Grass's first and most famed fictional work, The Tin Drum, describes Nazi influence in Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk.

In Germany, where most men over the age of 75 served the Nazis in some way, the criticism focussed on why Grass inspired a generation to expose closet Nazis while concealing his own teenage misdeed.

Newspaper editorialists Monday applied German's rich vocabulary to describe moralizing, sanctimonious goody-goodies.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany's national council of Jews, said, "He set himself up as the purist, moral thunderer."

In her remarks, to appear Thursday in the mass circulation Bild, she said, "He fiercely criticized politicians and society over their Nazi past. All those years of silence about his own SS past makes all that talk absurd."

While Grass was roasted by the media and centre-right parties that have suffered under decades of Grass's contempt, many elderly authors sprang to their old friend's defence, saying it was never too late to come clean.

Grass said his memoirs up to 1959, to be published next month, would explore in detail how the shameful secret had tortured him.

He reiterated that he had never fired a shot while in the Waffen SS, an army that was originally only open to the most fanatical Nazis, but by 1945, as defeat loomed, accepted anyone it could get.

Describing his hurt, Grass said, "Some people are trying to blackball me. I'm so glad that other voices do not agree with them. I can only hope that all the commentators read my book."

The book, Peeling the Onion, set to be published September 1, would describe his youthful enthusiasm for the Nazis with total honesty. The publisher denied the disclosure was a publicity stunt to sell more books.

"We were surprised at this response," said a spokeswoman for Steidl Verlag.

Grass said Monday that he served in the Waffen SS in the Dresden area from the end of February 1945, when he swore its oath, until April 20, 1945, when he was stood down with an injury. He denied he had ever fired a shot or committed any crimes.

Asked the reason for his silence, he said, "I did not discover the literary form to do so until I had decided to write down what happened to me as a young man." The theme of the book was his own naivety.

Poland's ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) called on Grass to give up his honorary citizenship of his Baltic city of birth.

"No member of the Waffen SS can be an honorary citizen of any Polish city, especially not Gdansk where World War II erupted," PiS member of parliament Jacek Kurski told reporters Monday.

Solidarity legend and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa expressed doubts over whether Grass would have received the Nobel Prize for Literature had he admitted to his SS past earlier.

"It's bad that he has admitted to this so late, but it's good he did it at all," Walesa told Poland's Dziennik newspaper Monday.

Walesa, perhaps the most famous citizen of the city of Gdansk, said he would refuse to shake Grass's hand from now on.

"I was lucky that as Nobel winners from Gdansk we never met: this saved me from shaking his hand. Today I would not shake his hand," Walesa told Dziennik.

Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH