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Orders have more than doubled for German author Guenter Grass' autobiography in which he reveals that he served in the Nazi's Waffen SS force, his publisher Steidl said on Thursday.
Steidl had printed 150,000 hardback copies of "Peeling Onions" and 130,000 have been sold to stores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, said Claudia Glenewinkel, a spokeswoman for the Goettingen-based publisher.
She said bookshops had pre-orderd 60,000 copies of the memoir "before all the hype and hysteria" but orders more than doubled after Grass told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of the bombshell contained in the book at the weekend.
Grass said he was conscripted into the Waffen SS when he was 17 but claimed that he never fired a shot during the months he served with the notorious elite force just before the end of World War II.
He had previously only said he had served in an air defence unit.
"Peeling Onions" was originally meant to go on sale on September 1, but Steidl on Wednesday gave bookshops the go-ahead to start selling, Glenewinkel said.
"We changed the release date because people were coming into shops to ask for the book. One or two shops sold it and then there was a domino effect, so we told everybody they could sell."
Glenewinkel said a second print run had been ordered and the book was expected to be widely translated.
Nobel literature laureate Grass, 78, said this week that he was deeply ashamed of having served in the SS, which ran the Nazi death camps.
But he said he felt hurt by the bitter criticism heaped on him by the German press, historians and politicians for waiting more than 60 years to reveal the fact.
Grass was accused of hypocrisy because he has passed judgement on the wartime deeds of fellow Germans.
His biographer Michael Juergs has lamented "the end of a moral authority".
The director of the film version of Grass' 1959 classic "The Tin Drum", Volker Schloendorff, on Thursday joined the minority who has come to his defence.
In an open letter published in Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, he said the confession saw Grass apply the same scrutiny to himself that he does to his fictional characters.
"I hope that you feel greatly liberated by no longer having to be a living monument," he said.
"The Tin Drum" deals with Germany's Nazi past and established Grass both as a literary giant and an icon of the German left.
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AFPEntertainment-Germany-history-literature
AFP 171054 GMT 08 06
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