Grass Defends Long Silence as Book Sales Soar

In an interview with German public broadcaster ARD on Wednesday evening, Grass said that he couldn't pinpoint the reason for his decision to keep silent on his brief service with the Waffen SS towards the end of World War II. Grass made the admission in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saturday. He said he had volunteered for submarine duty at 15 but was rejected and was later called up to the Waffen SS at 17 towards the end of the war.

He said that everything he had done since the end of the war counteracted the messages he'd been infused with during his teenage years in the Nazi era. He thought that "that would be enough," he told news presenter Ulrich Wickert.

"I was called into the Waffen SS, did not take part in any crime, but always felt the need to one day talk about this in a greater context," Grass said.

Grass, 78, famous for his first novel "The Tin Drum" and for becoming the moral voice of Germany's postwar generation, has come under heavy criticism for his belated admission.

The Waffen SS was a highly-trained Nazi combat unit,
initially made up of volunteers, which took part in the
Holocaust and committed war crimes. However, by the end of the war most members were drafted and many were under 18.

Grass, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1999, had previously said he was drafted in 1944 to help anti-aircraft gun teams. He was held as a prisoner of war until 1946. After the war, he become an outspoken pacifist. For decades he had demanded that Germans come to terms with their Nazi past by being open about it.

Book orders have doubled

Some critics have accused the Nobel prize-winning author of timing his confession to pique interest in his new autobiography, "Peeling Onions."

In response to the media furore, German bookshops have started selling the book two weeks earlier than planned.

"There is a very great interest in the book," said a spokeswoman for bookshop Dussmann in Berlin.

"The publisher had already delivered the book and so we will make the most of that interest and are starting to sell the book," she told Reuters.

Grass' publisher, Steidl, said on Thursday that orders have more than doubled for the autobiography.

Steidl had printed 150,000 hardback copies of "Peeling Onions" and 130,000 have been sold to stores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, said Claudia Glenewinkel, a spokeswoman for the Göttingen-based publisher.

She said bookshops had pre-ordered 60,000 copies of the memoir "before all the hype and hysteria" but orders more than doubled after Grass dropped his bombshell at the weekend.

"We changed the release date because people were coming into shops to ask for the book," Glenewinkel said. "One or two shops sold it and then there was a domino effect, so we told everybody they could sell."

Glenewinkel said a second print run had been ordered and the book was expected to be widely translated.

Supporters speak out

Since his admission, Grass has been on the receiving end of a barrage of criticism from writers, literary critics, historians and politicians who accuse him of hypocrisy. However, some supportive voices have emerged amid the din.

The director of the film version of "The Tin Drum," Volker Schlöndorff, on Thursday joined the minority who has come to his defence.

In an open letter published in Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, Schlöndorff said the confession saw Grass apply the same scrutiny to himself that he does to his fictional characters.

"I hope that you feel greatly liberated by no longer having to be a living monument," he said.

British writer Salman Rushdie, no stranger to criticism himself, also sprang to the defense of Günter Grass.

"I feel that the outrage is a little bit manufactured," Rushdie said.

Describing Grass' Waffen SS membership as a forgiveable mistake because of his youth, Rushdie told BBC Radio: "His stature comes from the fact that he is a giant in the world of literature."