Critics demand Grass give book profits to charity

Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

Hamburg (dpa) - Critics in Germany called Thursday on Nobel Literature laureate Guenter Grass to donate royalties from his book about his Nazi past to some charity that helps victims of the Nazis.

The German author has caused a storm with the disclosure in the self-loathing book that he spent six months with the Waffen SS, the Nazi party's private army. The first print run of the book, Peeling the Onion, had almost sold out Thursday in just two days on sale.

One of Germany's leading literary journalists, Hellmuth Karasek, and the editor of a poetry magazine that has published Grass's work, Anton Leitner, suggested the outcry might have been provoked to boost book sales.

"The simplest way for you to show that you don't seek material profit from exposing your SS membership is to donate all your income from the book to victims of the Waffen SS," Leitner said in an open letter on his website.

In the guilt-ridden book, Grass, 78, dissects his odious teenage self, or "this youth with the same name as me," beginning with his indifference as an 11-year-old when the Nazis executed his uncle for taking part in a heroic Polish defence of Gdansk in 1939.

Grass was called up and began training to be a gunner in a panzer division of the Waffen SS in November 1944, but insists he never fired a shot as his squadron beat a disorderly retreat from the Red Army through eastern Germany in 1945.

The Vatican meanwhile declined comment on a passage in the book where Grass describes philosophical chats in a US internment camp in 1946 with "my chum Joseph," a youth the same age as Grass. The writer believes the youth was Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

Asked by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa if this could not be a case of mistaken identity, Grass said, "I can only assume it was him."

Ratzinger, who had been in a German home guard and a labour battalion, says in his own memoirs that he was interned at the same camp. The site, at Bad Aibling, housed 100,000 former combatants.

A spokeswoman at the Vatican press office said, "This is a question purely about the Holy Father's private life." She pointed out that a woman aide to the pope had been quoted in some newspapers saying that Pope Benedict had never mentioned having met Grass.

Grass said he said he had only made the mental connection last year when the pope was elected.

"I definitely spent a lot of time with a young guy my age - we were both 17 - in a dugout. It rained a lot and we were always under the tarpaulin. He came from Bavaria, he was intensely or fanatically Catholic and though he was just 17, he used to quote Latin.

"He wanted to rise through the Catholic hierarchy. I wanted to become an artist and be famous.

"As I was writing my book, a German was elected pope. I had heard of Cardinal Ratzinger ... and I read he had been in Bad Aibling.

"And I thought, I know this Joseph, this personality, this shyness, this stubbornness, this soft-spokenness," he told dpa.

Grass said he believed today's generation should read the book to understand what had happened to put their German grandparents' generation into a state of denial about their Nazi past, "keeping it to themselves and only talking about it now."

While the president of Germany's national council of Jews, Charlotte Knobloch, said that Grass's earlier attacks on politicians and society over their Nazi past had become "absurd" in the light of his own past, her deputy came to the writer's defence.

Grass's advocacy of "democracy, tolerance and reconciliation with Poland will remain good things for all time," said deputy president Dieter Graumann in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. However the double standard had lessened the writer's integrity.

The publisher, Steidl Verlag, said 130,000 of the 150,000 first copies of Peeling the Onion had been shipped to booksellers and a second impression had been ordered from the printers.

The book officially went on sale Wednesday, two weeks before the date originally planned. Booksellers around Germany said it was selling much more briskly than previous Grass books.

A public opinion survey in Germany showed 68 per cent of Germans did not believe the writer's credibility had been damaged.

The Forsa poll of 1,001 persons for N-TV television found 51 per cent believed Grass should have admitted his Waffen SS service sooner while 29 per cent said he had chosen the right time and 8 per cent said he should have kept it permanently secret.