Opinion: A Late Confession Is Better Than No Confession At All

Oskar Matzerath, the obscene and earth-bound narrator of Grass's most famous novel "The Tin Drum" willfully stopped growing at the age of three and, hence, observed the world from the vantage point of a child, looking up from below. Günter Grass himself, on the other hand, always acted as if he had somehow grown taller than the rest of the world; as if his head was, in fact, dwelling in a stratosphere of pure, guiltless thought; a moral emporium beyond anybody else's reach.

In post-war Germany, Günter Grass became a moral institution and a powerful force of reflection on what it meant to have had a Nazi past. As "the conscience of the post-war generation," Grass made a significant contribution to Germany's development into an open, democratic society that it is today.

Yet it is in the nature of any authority -- whether it's moral, political or military -- to be talking down to its subjects. Günter Grass has been talking down to Germans for decades: when he, for a long time, looked favorably towards the Soviet Union while turning a blind eye toward the prison house that was the German Democratic Republic; when he allowed himself to be shocked by the way East Germans abandoned their socialist dreams and rushed across the border in pursuit of capitalist commodities; when he said that the two Germanys should not be united because Germans had every reason to fear themselves as a unit.

Günter Grass always knew better.

A shocking revelation

Which is why his belated confession that he had been a member of the notorious Waffen SS combat troops -- admittedly, as a 17-year-old boy in 1944 -- has come as such a shock to everybody, both in Germany and abroad. People don't like to see the untouchables strip themselves naked. If anything, people like to do the mud-dragging themselves.

It is absolutely inexcusable that Günter Grass waited more than half of a century to come clean, after having spent that same half of a century teaching Germans the moral imperative of coming to terms with their past. It is disappointing and discomforting that Grass, who once spoke passionately about the need of "preventing the past from coming to an end," kept his own past hidden away for so long. It is sad and embarrassing to see a man of his stature resort to sentimentality ("I have carried this blemish for 60 years") or narcissism -- he described the current avalanche of criticism on him as "an attempt at turning him into an non-person."

Yet if anybody ever believed in the infallibility of Günter Grass as a kind of leftist answer to the Holy Father, then they were simply too naive for their own good. Infallibility is not a human trait.

The end of a moral authority

Some commentators have pointed out that Grass's literary oeuvre will need to be completely reevaluated. This is hardly true. His monumental literary achievement will not be shaken one bit by the revelation of his weakness as a human being.

Those who -- like Wolfgang Börnsen, the parliamentary spokesman on cultural affairs for the conservative Christian Democratic Union -- believe that Grass should "honorably return the (Nobel) prize" -- are still unable to come to terms with a simple fact that Günter Grass, the writer, Günter Grass, the moralist, and Günter Grass, the father who didn't tell his children that he was a member of the Waffen SS, are not the same persona and deserve to be seen and judged independently. The fall of the moralist is not the fall of the writer.

When all is said and done, however, it should be remembered that it was Grass alone who revealed his own hypocrisy. When he came out with the story -- which will, no doubt, help him increase the sales of his forthcoming autobiography -- he also decided that truth was more important than the comfort of secrecy. For the first time, perhaps, he stopped looking down on people.

He should have spoken out earlier, but belated truth is still better than no truth at all.

Toma Tasovac is an editor for the English site of DW-WORLD.DE and an expert on German literature.