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German writer and Nobel winner Gunther Grass, who has admitted to being in the Nazi SS during World War II, expanded on his past in an extraordinary letter printed in an Israeli newspaper Thursday.
"Until the end of my days I will carry the mark of Cain and the double 'S' on my forehead," Grass wrote in an editorial published in Hebrew in the left-leaning Haaretz daily.
The letter had been sent to an Israeli university college last October after it rescinded an offer to grant him an honorary doctorate when his SS past came to light, 60 years after the end of the war.
At the college's request, Grass agreed for the letter to be published in Haaretz, the newspaper said.
"I was young and I wasn't looking to ask questions. Instead, I believed blindly that Germany, until its unconditional surrender, was just in going to war. That is why I trod the path of hundreds of thousands of Germans my age," Grass wrote.
The writer was 16 years old in 1944 when he was called up to the Waffen SS, an elite Nazi combat unit that saw action throughout the war and many members of which were later found guilty of war crimes.
"I am aware of the gaping wounds opened by the letters SS in the memories of many citizens of Israel, and that is why from now until the end of my days, I will wear the mark of Cain and this double 'S' on my forehead," he wrote.
"I should only like to ask, however, whether my entire life, which rebounded in richness after I was 17, and my entire work as a writer, artist and committed citizen of my country, should not also be taken into consideration."
The author admitted for the first time in an interview in Germany in August that he had been called up into the Waffen SS at the tail end of World War II.
Before the interview, Grass had been seen as a typical representative of the generation in Germany that was too young to see much fighting or to be involved with the Nazi regime in any way other than its youth organizations.
Grass, whose works include "The Tin Drum" and "Cat and Mouse" and who is a committed socialist, was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1999.
jp/jm/srm
Israel-Germany-literature-history-WWII
AFP 091040 GMT 11 06
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