A Conversation with GÜNTER GRASS

Wednesday | June 27, 2007
7:00 PM
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In December 2006, Germany was rocked by the revelation that Günter Grass, one of its greatest living authors and doyen of the Left, was a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS. The Nobel laureate, who has been the country's moral guide for decades, admitted in an interview that he became a member of the infamous Nazi corps at the age of 17.

Driven by feelings of guilt and the need to reveal the details of his past, his new autobiography, Peeling the Onion, remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps but was rejected; two years later he was drafted into the Waffen-SS. "It was weighing on my mind. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. I forced myself to do it. It had to come out finally. It will stain me forever."

Celeste Bartos Forum
Humanities and Social Sciences Library
5th Avenue and 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018-2788

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