GÜNTER GRASS self-destructed at the beginning of Europe’s literary season. However, what, to foreign observers, may look like a near-fatal fall from the moral high horse Grass had saddled in the 1960s may not be the inevitable punishment for unbridled hubris. Rather, it may be a simple case of my pragmatic mother’s axiom that old folks show their true character as they lose the will to compromise.
Grass, who will turn 80 next fall, caused outrage in Germany not because he revealed in his new memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) that he had served in the Waffen-SS as a 17-year-old, but because he, who for much of his career had harassed politicians, intellectuals, and ordinary Germans into facing their Nazi past, seemed so unashamed when he revealed that he had, for more than half a century, concealed his own brown secret.
