CULTURE

War and remembrance

By Angelina Davydova

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

For The St. Petersburg Times Nobel Prize-winning writer Gunter Grass, whose confession that he was in the Waffen-SS caused a scandal in 2006.

Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass visited St. Petersburg last month to read from his latest book “Peeling the Onion” (2006) at the Philological Faculty of St. Petersburg State University.

The book, which can be described as an auto-biographical novel, reveals that the 79-year old writer, for many decades an outspoken left-leaning critic of Germany’s treatment of its Nazi past, was a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II. Grass was accused of hypocrisy after admitting his membership for the first time in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

In Der Speigel during the scandal that followed, conservative historian Joachim Fest said: “After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late. I can’t understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off.”

Grass, who found fame with his 1959 book “The Tin Drum,” was visiting St. Petersburg for the third time after trips in the 1970s and 1980s. However it is the first time Grass had given a public reading of his work in St. Petersburg.

Smoking a pipe and sipping red wine at a desk, Grass was informal in the stiffly academic environment of the Grand Hall of the Philological Faculty.

The hall was packed with students, teachers, and fans of German literature as well as those who have read “The Tin Drum” and those who simply came to gaze at a Nobel laureate. Whenever Grass glanced above the dark rims of his glasses, he saw hundreds of faces listening attentively to him and reading the Russian translation on a large screen next to his desk.

Grass began by reading a chapter from his 2002 novel “Crabwalk,” which is a fictionalized account of a modern-day journalist determined to investigate the real-life story of the World War II passenger vessel Wilhelm Gustloff.

The ship was evacuating thousands of German civilians from Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland, where Grass was born) in January 1945 when it was sunk by three torpedoes from a Soviet submarine led by Admiral Alexander Marinesko, later a highly-acclaimed Soviet hero. As many as 10,000 people were thought to have died in the attack.

The stories of the survivors, among whom is the future mother of the main protagonist, mix with a setting in contemporary Germany as the protagonist’s son keeps a blog about the ship’s fate. This little-known story, with its distinct human-interest angle, obviously touched the hearts and piqued the interest of Grass’ audience in St. Petersburg, many of whom grew up knowing very little about the Wilhelm Gustloff — despite the fact that the St. Petersburg submarine museum is named after Marinesko and he is remembered with monuments in Kaliningrad and Kronshtadt. When asked why he chose this particular story, and not, say, the bombing of Dresden, Grass answered that the late Kurt Vonnegut had already done that in his novel “Slaughterhouse 5,” while the Gustloff episode remains to a great extent unknown.

Grass also read from his latest novel “Peeling the Onion.” With its revelations of his Waffen-SS past, it was not surprising that most of the questions asked of Grass both after the reading and during a later meeting with journalists dealt with World War II, questions of history, totalitarian societies and dictatorships of the 20th century, as well as analysis of current politics.

Grass gave a candid account of the Waffen-SS scandal.

“It was made into a sensation, although I never made a great secret out of it. But I was glad that my family and my friends supported me and in a way the most important thing for me then was to give life to the book, to divide the destiny of the book and of myself. So as a therapeutic measure, and since in my second profession I am a graphic artist, I began writing poetry and drawing in order to express what I felt back then. This new book of poetry and drawings came out in spring earlier this year.”

However, nationalism continues to be a hot political issue. According to Grass, today’s right-wing extremism does not have much to do with fascism, although it still can be perceived as a threat. One side of the problem, Grass said, is modern politicians who go to the extreme with populist speeches and policies that support hate toward others. Another alarming aspect is the accessibility of extremist viewpoints on the Internet.

For The St. Petersburg Times Grass read from his book ‘Crabwalk.’

“Young people are easily attracted by pressure, by brutal power… they can easily believe in many things… The Second World War began when I was 12 and ended when I was 17. When Hitler came to power, I was six. We knew no other ideology, and the Hitler Youth [was a] movement [that] was [an act of] demonic genius: camping, singing by the bonfire, whatever can be attractive and promising to young people. We were blinded.”

Grass thinks that such potential threats continue to exist no matter which stage of development a society has reached.

“I am totally convinced such an extremist movement can also be observed in Russia,” Grass said. Young people, he said, are “vulnerable to any ideology, especially if there’s only one around. They’re easy prey.”

Discussion turned to the collapse in relations between Estonia and Russia earlier this year after Estonian authorities moved a Soviet-era World War II monument from a location in downtown Tallinn to a war cemetery. The move, revealing deep divisions between Russia and Estonia about the war and the meaning of the post-war Soviet occupation of Estonia, was perceived by Russia as a slap-in-the-face to the memory of Soviet sacrifices during the war.

“First of all one should treat monuments with respect, and in Estonia they didn’t seem to have any piety. But then one has to admit that Russia also overreacted and I’d very much like that Russia and the Russian president would react in a more decent and dignified way. You just have to look at proportions: Russia is a big country, and Estonia is very small, and Russia obviously overreacted.”

Grass said that many in Germany argue that endless discussions about World War II should wind down and that it is time to move on. “But whenever we say there’s enough discussion, there appear new, previously unknown facts and that makes us re-think and remember history over and over again. It would be good, if, also here, President Putin would meet with journalists or write a book about his service with the KGB, to tell people what kind of events he witnessed, what he lived through. It would be unarguably useful.”

Grass spoke about the relationship between history, reality and art. To him, literature should always reflect reality, and even though the latter can be monstrous, cruel and disgusting, its main task is not to make real life more beautiful.

As he said, “my topic was always to show the times of the 20th century.”

“It was my destiny to be born in the 20th century and live through all the terrors of National Socialism, to see soldiers on both sides, to see time beyond the borderline of humanistic ideals.”

Wherever there’s ideology, it is always unproductive for art: censorship provokes deviations, Grass argued.

“Sometimes literature lives its own life — with, for example, Joyce or Proust discovering inner monologues. But literature is widening, expanding the borderlines of reality, making all that’s happening richer. Take futurism for example… Or various genres of the early 20th century trying to understand a human being within the vortex of a city, of a megapolis. Art can turn the view of a watcher, audience, reader.”

The 79-year-old author also couldn’t avoid a question about the so-called death of traditional literature.

“It’s fashionable to say that the sun is setting on literature. They say the Internet is becoming more important — but I don’t believe in it. The book is left for intellectual reading, it’s an intimate act, it is something impossible to substitute. The book reaches the hearts and minds of a minority, but it has always been so. If there’s a technical catastrophe, all the electricity is gone, one can always light up a candle and continue reading a book.”

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