It's No Accident

You'd think that it would be getting a bit late for more shocking "guess who supported Hitler" cultural revelations. And you'd be right, because there's nothing morally consequential in the story of Guenter Grass that he hadn't already told us years ago.

Grass's decision to finally talk about the seven months he spent running away from the Red Army as a Waffen-SS conscript has nevertheless set off an all-too-predictable shitstorm of manufactured indignation from familiar quarters. Every cringeing mediocrity and every bilious, philistine lickspittle has seen this as an opportunity to gloat. These people are beneath contempt, and there is no justice in the world if one hundred years from now the reputation of Guenter Grass doesn't live on long after all of them are forgotten.

Let me be very clear: my defense of Grass is not solely -- nor even much at all -- a defense of Grass's art against condemnations based on crude political criteria. The "love the art, hate the man" argument is one with which I sympathize greatly in cases where it applies, and there should be no doubt that great art in the service of evil is still great art. But that is not the issue here.

Grass may be a great artist, and his work would deserve defense on those grounds alone, but in this case, Grass also happens to be a decent human being who is the subject of unfair calumnies. He has always said that as a teenager he was an unquestioning supporter of fascism, just as most people around him were. Youth and ignorance are not much of an excuse, but Grass has never said that they are; and Grass was no Sophie Scholl, but he has never claimed that he was. And while the Waffen-SS had been a fanatical volunteer force, by the time Grass was a member it was full of conscripts just like the Wehrmacht; the fact that Grass was himself a draftee only serves to illustrate this. If he had been a Waffen-SS volunteer, that would have added a dark and disturbing detail that made his tale an even more interesting and complex one -- but it still would not have discredited him, since he has never claimed to have been anti-Hitler at the time. But the real story is more pedestrian than that, banal in the true, before-Hannah-Arendt-ruined-it sense of that word: Grass was a believer, but not really moreso than a typical German youth of his day. His behavior does not redound to his credit -- far from it -- but neither does this latest detail add much to the contours of a story we already knew. And the fact remains that his entire subsequent career has been an effort to extirpate the evil he participated in as an adolescent.

All of this is more than can be said for a great many cultural figures who were older than Grass was at the time, and who through varying combinations of moral cowardice (Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwaengler), obsequious careerism (Herbert von Karajan), or outright ideological fanaticism (Leni Riefenstahl, Knut Hamsun) put their talents directly at the service of fascism. It is not only that these people supported Hitler (or at least acquiesced to him) at the time, even as heroes from Mann to Brecht resisted. It is that their subsequent behavior was so reprehensible as well: if they didn't attempt to justify their Hitler-era behavior, they attempted to excuse themselves as naive or apolitical. Grass has done nothing like that; he has always maintained that his childhood political allegiances were shameful, and that the entire country should repudiate the fascist legacy.

The current round of attacks on Grass has two motivations: (1) to demonstrate that the attempt to repudiate the fascist past is a meaningless exercise since Grass himself was not adequately forthright until now, and more importantly (2) to discredit Grass's own criticisms of the postwar BRD and the status quo.

There is no better illustration of this than the fact that all of Grass's enemies in the current fracas have been bringing up his criticisms of the Bitburg affair. In this view, you see, Grass had no standing to criticize Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan for laying a wreath in memory of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, because -- gasp! -- Grass was himself a member of the Waffen-SS.

This kind of thing is a prime example of why facile charges of "hypocrisy" are the first and last refuges of the lazy hack. We now know that Grass was a Waffen-SS conscript, but that does not change the fact that Grass was right to criticize Reagan and Kohl. Bitburg was a calculated political move to rehabilitate fascism after the fact, through maudlin invocation of the battlefield heroism and abused innocence of the boys "on both sides." It was no accident that someone from the United States (namely Pat Buchanan, who wrote Reagan's speech) could have come up with such a stunt, since this is a country that is dotted with statues of Robert E. Lee. (Talk about "moral equivalence"!) We now know that Grass was himself a member of the Waffen-SS, but this really is beside the point, since he has not suggested that he was merely a preyed-upon ignoramus, nor that his participation in the war on the side of Hitler -- even peripherally -- should be excused in any way. And it was not Grass, after all, who we all heard refer to the butchers of Malmedy and Oradour as "victims, too."

It's worth putting all of this very simply: the bootlicking toadies who are attacking Guenter Grass hate him not for his sins, but for his virtues. They hate him first -- we might as well not beat around the bush -- because he is so obviously more talented than they are. But they hate him secondly because they have a conventional wisdom and a status quo to defend, and to the extent that Guenter Grass departs from that, they need to strike out at him.

For them, it counts as a demerit for Grass that he opposed the deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe, because it is evidence of an unwillingness to confront "totalitarianism." There's that "moral equivalence" again: the pompous, reflexive habit of Western intellectuals to dress up every aggressive move of every squalid imperialist politician as the new moral cause, the latter-day parallel to the war against fascism. Every enemy of the moment is as bad as Hitlerite Germany, and anyone who questions that is a simpering appeaser. This is the same mentality that applauded the wrecking of Vietnam, Nicaragua, and dozens of other countries, and which was willing to tolerate the threat of the nuclear annihilation of the entire human race for fifty years, all in the name of fighting the Soviet bogeyman; these same people cheered for the war in Iraq, setting themselves up on pedestals as the moral ones in that little adventure as well -- and they will do the same for the next war, and the one after that.

As a herd, the entire collection of Western intellectuals from the liberals on rightwards -- and not a few to the left of that, even -- are a crowd of leg-spreading camp-followers, competing only to differentiate themselves in levels of kowtowing, to see who will be the next to share the beds of the biggest men in charge.

Grass doesn't do that, which is why he's a target. He's a Gulliver in a land of Lilliputians. Long may he reign!