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German Nobel literature laureate Guenter Grass on Wednesday won a legal battle against the newspaper to which he made the shock confession that he had served with the Nazis' Waffen SS in World War II.
Grass, 78, gained an injunction against the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) stopping the respected broadsheet from re-publishing two letters Grass wrote to former Economy and Finance Minister Karl Schiller.
"The letters are protected by copyright," the Berlin district court ruled according to a written decision given by Grass's attorney Paul Hertin to German news agency DPA.
In the letters written in 1969 and 1970 and published last month in the FAZ, Grass urged Schiller to come clean about his Nazi past.
Schiller (1911-1994) had been a member of the Nazi party and its paramilitary organization SA, German for "Storm Division".
The court ruled the letters could now only be printed with Grass's permission. The FAZ said it would appeal the verdict.
The newspaper had argued that the public's right to know about the letters' content took precedence over Grass's right to privacy in light of the author's late revelation of his own Nazi-era secrets.
Grass told the FAZ in an interview in August that he had been conscripted into the elite corps responsible for some of the Nazis' worst atrocities at the age of 17, just months before the war's end, although he insisted he never fired a shot with the force.
The late announcement sparked deep disappointment in Germany in an author who had often served as a moral compass in the postwar period and demanded the country honestly reckon with the Third Reich.
The FAZ interview was published just before his latest memoir "Peeling Onions" hit bookstores, in which Grass describes his ideological seduction by the Nazis and his time in the notorious corps.
Grass railed against the FAZ last week during a visit to a major book fair, saying that the letters were "personal" and accusing the newspaper of "butchering the principles of good journalism".
His publisher Steidl said last week that the rights to "Peeling Onions" had been sold to another 33 countries.
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AFPEntertainment-Germany-history-WWII-literature-litigation
AFP 111203 GMT 10 06
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