By Mike Swanson
Berlin, (DPA) For some, Gunter Grass is a towering literary figure, a magnificent storyteller, who in the words of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Prize committee “has done mankind a genuine service”.
For others, he is a self-appointed moralist for post-war Germany, a righteous polemicist who attacked his fellow countrymen for their collective amnesia of Nazism while at the same time failing to own up to his own lapses in recalling the past.
Grass, arguably one of Europe’s greatest living writers, can look back on half a century of literary success and political commitment when he celebrates his 80th birthday Tuesday.
Tributes have already been pouring in to the last Nobel literature laureate of the 20th century, who was born in 1927 of German-Polish parents in Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland.
“For me, Gunter Grass is one of the greatest writers of our times, whose inflexibility, courage and emancipatory conviction I admire greatly,” former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said.
His international breakthrough came in 1959 with The Tin Drum, an allegorical novel set in his hometown that was turned into a successful film by director Volker Schloendorff.
When he published The Tin Drum, “it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction,” the Swedish Academy wrote.
Other works followed, including Cat and Mouse, Dog Days, From the Diary of a Snail, The Flounder and The Rat.
A left-winger and pacifist, Grass became active in politics in the 1960s and took part in election campaigns on behalf of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and its leader at the time, Willy Brandt.
He advocated a Germany free from fanaticism and totalitarian ideologies in his political speeches and essays and used The Flounder and The Rat to reflect on his commitment to the peace and environmental movements.
Later on he became a vocal critic of the US invasion of Iraq and argued that military might alone was not enough to defeat terrorism. A global equilibrium between north and south was needed, he said.
It was his 2006 novel Peeling the Onion that aroused the most controversy. The book, spanning 20 years of the author’s youth, included the shock admission that he was briefly a member of Hitler’s Waffen SS during the latter part of World War II.
The disclosure rocked Grass’ reputation as a moral authority, and some of his adversaries even claimed the revelation was no more than an exercise in damage control before others exposed the truth.
Grass faced scathing criticism for keeping quiet about his SS role for more than half a century. There were calls for him to be stripped of his Nobel Prize and to be deprived of the honorary citizenship of his native Gdansk.
Grass described himself as “a belated apostle of enlightenment” in an era that has grown tired of reason. In his excavation of the past, he goes deeper than most.
This was vividly demonstrated in his 2002 novel Crabwalk, in which Grass deals with the fate of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship packed with refugees that was hit by a Soviet torpedo in the Baltic Sea and sank with the loss of 9,000 lives in January 1945.
“At the moment we are about to dismantle (democracy). A hysterical fear of terrorism is turning us more and more into a nation of surveillance,” he said.
Today, Grass lives with his second wife Ute near the north German port of Luebeck, where a small museum called the Gunter Grass House contains the original manuscripts of some of his works.