July 11, 2007
Irving and Grass Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 AM EST In 2006 the novelist Günter Grass published a memoir, Peeling the Onion, revealing that as an adolescent he had served in SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. The memoir has now been translated into English, with one section appearing in the June 4th issue of The New Yorker. This revelation about Grass’s military experience has produced something of a controversy, and in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the novelist John Irving has written a very long and in some ways peculiar defense of Grass, one raising some questions about the legitimate uses of hindsight, for Irving loudly scorns those who have criticized Grass “from the cowardly standpoint of hindsight.” What did Grass do that was so terribly wrong? During the Second World War, I think, nothing. On the evidence he has now made available, Grass was conscripted into the Waffen SS as a seventeen-year-old, during which service he never fired a shot in anger, but failed to take a morally sophisticated view of the Third Reich, a defect that ought to be set against his having been raised in a totalitarian society. It is hard to condemn such actions and inactions, and relatively few have done so. The critics have instead condemned Grass for his tardiness in revealing these details, in the context of his pronounced self-righteousness and sometimes execrable political judgment thereafter. After all, Grass served as Germany’s national scold for half a century, while concealing his very ordinary life between 1943 and 1945. Much of what Grass said in that self-assumed role was ridiculous, or worse. Amazingly, Irving quotes some of it while intending to praise: “In 1979, Grass wrote: ‘There’s no shortage of great Führer figures; a bigoted preacher in Washington and an ailing philistine in Moscow.’” Jimmy Carter was (and remains) a sometimes exasperating prig, and one who has said some foolish things, but any comparison between Carter and Adolf Hitler is surely an example of moral idiocy, and a comparison of Hitler to Brezhnev isn’t all that much better, especially if what Grass found most offensive in Brezhnev was philistinism, rather than, say, invading Czechoslovakia. The generally reliable Ian Buruma recently reported that a few years later Grass made a similarly ludicrous comparison: he likened the stationing of U.S. Pershing missiles on German soil to the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. This was poisonous nonsense; it sounded bad at the time, and it may sound a little worse when you discover that the speaker was a former SS man. Germans themselves understandably tended to find irritating Grass’s insistence that East Germany had no right to voluntarily join a democratic West Germany, and when voluntary unification did occur, Grass compared it to the Anschluss (Hitler’s annexation of Austria). When Der Spiegel five years later ran a cover depicting a Grass novel being torn apart, Irving writes that “The magazine might as well have conducted a book burning.” Well, a Nazi book burning, which the remark necessarily recalls, generally involved the banning by law of the books being burnt, and eventually, in a number of cases, the incineration of their authors, whereas the reunified German state in which Der Spiegel published that cover was not much for burning either books or people. Hindsight has not been kind to the Reagan:Hitler comparison, and Irving’s remark on book burning suggests that he has as feeble an understanding of the historical peculiarities of the Third Reich as does his hero, and also a curious notion of courage, and of its opposite, cowardice. With respect to courage and cowardice, Irving several times praises Grass’s courage, while impugning the cowardice of his critics: “Grass’s most egregious critic—Christopher Hitchens, in Slate—calls him ‘something of a bigmouth and a fraud, and also something of a hypocrite.’ It is Grass’s craven critics—the fatuous Hitchens among them—who should feel ashamed.” Why courageous? Wherefore craven? It took initially significant literary gifts but no vast courage to be Günter Grass in West Germany, where Grass made a very good career out of being the self-appointed national scold. Christopher Hitchens, whose self-described contrarianism seems genuinely fearless, is an odd man to call a craven critic, and while many find Hitchens maddening, few have ever called him fatuous—reckless and vitriolic, maybe, but not fatuous. As alliteration, both “Grass’s most egregious” and “craven critics” recall Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism”: comically bad writing under the curious misapprehension that it is good writing. Irving’s piece is on more than one occasion unintentionally amusing: For example, while it begins with praise of Grass’s literary gifts, Irving implies that these literary gifts are not least so great an achievement, for which much should be forgiven if anything at all need be forgiven, because they served to inspire Irving to become a novelist. Irving’s second sentence, in a piece approaching 4500 words, notes that “. . . Dickens made me want to be a writer—but it was reading “The Tin Drum” at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Günter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens’s full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language . . .” Justifying more than sixty years of bullying and evasiveness on the grounds that Grass is indirectly responsible for producing The Cider House Rules is not a risk-free rhetorical strategy. Similarly, Irving praises Grass’s “moral certainty,” a quality less consistently alluring than Irving seems to think it is, in Grass or in anyone else. So it turns out that hindsight, which is proverbially said to be always 20/20, can on occasion fall sadly short of that high rating. In this case, hindsight has failed not Grass’s enemies, but his friends.
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