Guenter Grass a member of SS?

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 10:08am

This does not surprise me somehow. Now the question I am battling with is why am I able to find some way to forgive him his past due to youth and the time in history and yet find it hard to forgive the Pope for the same and really lesser indiscretions? Double standard? Perhaps, yet one is a Nobel winning novelist the other the leader of the biggest cult in the world.
Nobel Nazi?

[Elphaba]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 10:16am

Waffen SS, not just plain old SS

[GuyfromGermany]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 10:20am

It's all over the news here today... Argh!

[FranklinShepard-Inc.]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 10:44am

It's really ugly, hmm.

Only good thing is, as far as I heard his very battallion seems not to have been involved in war crimes. Well, up to what they know now at least. But it doesn't make it really a lot better.

[Elphaba]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 10:48am

It's disturbing......I am so over the "I joined because I had to" or "because everyone did"...etc.
On the other hand the man is brilliant........I just don't know how to feel, and that ticks me off

[GuyfromGermany]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 10:54am

What's most disturbing is that he IS brilliant but joined nevertheless...

[Yawper]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 11:49am

Try applying some of the criteria you're using to situations of today and think about how differently things might look 60 years from now. During the Revolutionary War colonial minutemen were basically called terrorists for the way they conducted guerrilla warfare against the British troops. They took potshots at troops marching down roads instead of facing them upfront on the field of battle as was the proper gentlemen's way. Now the rebel founding fathers and colonial militias are American heroes. Would they be if they had lost? Probably not.

During WWII the US interred people of Japanese heritage and dehumanized Germans and Japanese through propaganda campaigns. One could say the same thing now about treatment of Muslim Arabs and 'terrorism'.

It's very easy to judge with hindsight.

[FranklinShepard-Inc.]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 12:21pm

You make a point, yawper, and yet two points which makes it really taste sour: a) he volunteered (though not originally to the SS, as far as I read he was eventually transferred to the SS) and b)he was one of the great post WW2 moral authorities (that is to say strongly anti-nazi moral authority) in Germany. It all looks strange now .

[Yawper]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 4:28pm

well point a) goes back to judging in hindsight - seriously the entire US Armed Forces right now are volunteer

and b) Grass experienced things up close and first hand - who better to speak out against it? Who can make the more compelling argument for rejecting something - a victim who was acted upon and is only guessing at mindsets and motivations or a former participant who knows what was really going on behind closed doors and rejects it? Which of two has the fullest understanding of the wrong and, most likely, better understands how the situation came to be?
Updated On: 8/12/06 at 04:28 PM

[FranklinShepard-Inc.]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 4:32pm

Well, point a) is debatable. But as for point b) Grass was always one who told people to disclose any facts about their past in the nazi-regime. So he appears a bit of a hypocrite now, as he seems to have put on different measures to other people than himself.

[StageManager2]

Posted: 8/12/06 at 4:56pm

Yawper, you bring up some interesting points.
Good analogies, too.