Günter Grass on the loyalty of friends, the death penalty and war crimes

Subhoranjan Dasgupta: 2006 was not an easy year for you. The disclosure that you were a member of the Waffen SS provoked a bitter attack on you by the big and powerful press. You also hit back. Now, in 2007, how do you look back to this stormy phase—let us say, from a certain distance?

Günter Grass: At this moment, one cannot speak ‘from a certain distance’ because the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sustained the assault till the end of 2006. What am I to say? It was clearly a calculated attempt to divert the attention from my book, from the actual text, and to unleash nothing short of a vilificatory campaign.

But let me clear one major confusion which has spread far and wide. I was never a member of the Waffen SS, I did not opt for it. I was recruited or drafted into it at a time when such recruitment was in force all over Germany . I was only 17 years old then and I myself had no voluntary role to play in this affair of joining the SS for a few months.

Well, I have written about this entire phase in my book and I hope that the reader reads my text. My hope, in fact, is being fulfilled because the book has reached the readers in the last few months and they are reading the differentiated representation of what actually happened. I mean, differentiated from the campaign against me.

But you had friends who stood by you -- famous authors and critics like Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, John Irving, John Berger and others. How do you evaluate their reaction?

That was a big help for me. You have spoken of foreign authors only. But German authors like Christa Wolf, Adolf Busch and many others supported me. You know why? Because, creative and serious critical writing is their vocation. From their long and committed engagement with narratives -- fiction and autobiography -- they could draw the proper lessons.

They know how authors try to discover themselves in their autobiographies. For the same reason, that is, with the help of their knowledge and experience they could judge the nature of that hostile campaign and assault. They saw through it. They were a great help.

Your book Peeling the Onion will soon appear in many languages other than German --the translators have already begun their work. Your publisher, Steidl, is also bringing out a documentation of this heated controversy. Does this mean that you have won the battle?

I did not launch or conduct any war on my own. It was a well-orchestrated campaign against an author who could do very little all by himself. You know it is very difficult, almost impossible, to fight the big press. They simply download a situation on you and you can react only with those means which are at your disposal. I did not indulge in any counter-polemic. But I did say what I had to firmly and openly in many forums.

My publisher stood by me and I welcome his decision to publish the documentation attesting to this entire phase. Indeed, the help I received from him and my friends encouraged me to sustain my work during this phase of incessant attack. No, I did not give up writing. I wrote poetry which reflected my situation closely and honestly. Then I also etched and drew. Soon a new book of my poems will appear and this will record my emotional state.

Yes, the translation is also proceeding fine. Twenty translators met in Lübeck recently and for a full five days we examined the text meticulously. I am quite tense, I am waiting for the readers' reactions to my book from abroad.

In your ‘Blue Sofa’ Interview held at the last Frankfurt Book Fair you said that the big papers which were attacking you relentlessly observed almost a total silence over the criminal politics of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Does this mean that there was some sort of battle of ideology between the neo-liberal press and Grass, the doyen of the German Left?

That was of course an obvious example of cowardice and untruthfulness. My position vis-à-vis Iraq war has been quite clear. When Bush et al were threatening an invasion, I spoke and wrote against it. Further, when the attack began and the then German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and our then foreign minister Joschka Fischer decided not to take part in the war, I warmly applauded their decision.

For this, I was taken to task by the powerful press. However, now when the blatant lies that had been uttered by Bush and his company to justify the attack are staring them in the face, and when the defeat of the Republicans is a strong possibility, this very same media is trying to draw a balance and criticise. But this has come too late.

And what is your response to the execution of Saddam Hussain?

I am, as a matter of principle, against the death sentence and execution, no matter how grave the crime is. But the crucial issue here is related to war crimes. Now, if Saddam Hussain is guilty of perpetrating war crimes -- which he has, in fact, committed -- on the basis of the principles of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, Bush and Rumsfeld, too, should have stood beside Saddam Hussain inside the same prisoner's dock.

Why? Because both of them stand accused of committing the same war crimes against humanity. They should also have been punished. In other words, there is no essential difference among the three, all three should have been judged as war-criminals.

Subhoranjan Dasgupta interviewed Günter Grass