Watch Out

The incident and its moral complications were first raised by the British journalists Ronald Payne, Christopher Dobson and John Miller in the 1980 book The Cruellest Night, but it was Grass’s book that revived interest in German wartime suffering.

His revelations will also fuel the row between Poland and Germany over a new Berlin exhibition dedicated to the worldwide fate of people driven from their homes by ethnic cleansing, concentrating on Germans expelled from what is now Polish territory in 1945.

Grass is above all celebrated for his evocation of Danzig during the early days of the Nazi regime in The Tin Drum, the 1957 novel that made his name overnight. Yet Danzig is now Gdansk and, since the days of Lech Walesa and the 1981 Solidarity strikes in its shipyards, as important an icon in Polish culture as it once was in German.

Grass was born in Danzig in 1927 and his father, whom he described as “a typical opportunistic fellow traveller” joined the Nazi party in 1936. At the end of the war, in circumstances that will now have to be re-examined, Grass ended up as an American prisoner of war.

In one of the most titillating snippets from the forthcoming autobiography, he recalls meeting and becoming friendly with a rather shy 17-year-old lad called Joseph who was also in the Bad Aibling prisoner-of-war camp. “I wanted to be an artist; he wanted to go into the church,” Grass recalls. He is unable, however, to confirm whether the lad was indeed Joseph Ratzinger, who admits to having been in the same camp and is now Pope Benedict XVI.

On his release in 1946 Grass took his school-leaving exam in Göttingen in the western zone of occupied Germany, worked for a year in a potash mine, before finding his parents on a refugee list and rejoining them working as labourers on a farm near Cologne. After a few weeks, however, he took a train to Düsseldorf where he found a job as a mason working on gravestones before going on to study sculpture and art, first there and then later in Berlin.

At the same time he was teaching himself to write and by 1956 had produced a slim volume of poetry and a play entitled Hochwasser (High Water). In that year he moved briefly to Paris with the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz, whom he had married in 1954 and remained with until 1978 (the following year he met and married the organist Ute Grunert, who until now has been the only one to share his secret).

In 1957 he joined Gruppe 47, a loose organisation of writers that included big names such as Alfred Andersch and Heinrich Böll, dedicated to exposing and overcoming Germany’s Nazi past and bringing a new start to literature and society in general. It is certain that his admission into the group would have been far more complicated had he admitted to being a former Waffen SS recruit. Arguably his conversion would have made his contribution all the more valid and important, but the mere fact could at that time have proved an insurmountable barrier.

But the publication of The Tin Drum and its sudden unexpected global success changed everything. Grass became the voice of the new German literature, surpassing all his contemporaries.

Its hero Oskar Matzerath, who stopped growing at the age of three in a perverse reaction to everything that was going on around him and forever after beat his childhood tin drum in fury, became a difficult, sinister leitmotif for stunted, emotionally damaged German society.

Grass’s insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.