The Grass Debate Continues

Far from fading quietly from the media-dominated public sphere, Günter Grass, who turned eighty on 16 October 2007, continues to provide grist for the publicity mills. The latest, notorious case in point is the uproar that ensued as a result of the writer's unforeseen as well as astounding "confession" of having been a member of the Waffen-SS—a revelation he made in an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (12 August 2006) in conjunction with the publication of his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel [Zwiebel]. The fierce debate, which quickly assumed an international dimension but was primarily waged in the German media, seemed to resurrect the image of the ugly German and to tarnish the Germans' newly acquired reputation as gracious, cosmopolitan hosts of the soccer world cup championship in the summer of 2006 whose display of a moderate dose of patriotism did not cause offense. The Grass controversy, which has been amply documented in two collections, edited respectively by Willi Gorzny (2006)¹ and Martin Kölbel (2007),² has lost its topicality but has gained, one may assume, academic respectability as evidenced by Britta Gries's Die Grass-Debatte [Debatte] as well as several contributions in the two collections of essays discussed below. In Debatte Gries goes beyond documentation and establishes as the framework encompassing the various arguments the continuing, but changing perception of the Nazi past by three selected, non-successive generations in both the Federal Republic and the former German Democratic Republic.

In the first part of Debatte, Gries briefly recapitulates the origin and significance of the fairly pervasive term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which originated as late as 1955 (see 12), and sketches four, occasionally overlapping, phases of the attempts to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism: the juridical prosecution of perpetrators, the compensation of victims of the NS regime, the delayed scholarly study of National Socialism, and the gradual emergence of a memory culture. The difficulties inherent in adequately addressing a calamitous phase of German history, Gries appears to imply, are in large part attributable to the generational affiliation of the participants in the debate. Gries cursorily reviews various concepts current in the social sciences, but in the first part of her study she goes to considerable lengths to develop her model of generations that she derives primarily from eminent sociologist Karl Mannheim as well as cultural anthropologist Aleida Assmann and sociologist Heinz Bude. Apart from the obvious precondition of being of approximately the same age, she considers the shared experience of a common fate and general circumstances or the collective participation in a major historical event to be determining factors in the construct of a generation. Thus Gries distinguishes the generation of the "Zeitzeugen" (of the NS regime) from both those of 1968 and the "Enkelgeneration der Zeitzeugen" ("Enkelgeneration") with their differing perceptions. Inasmuch as the representatives of "Zeitzeugen" include persons (of primarily male gender) whose socialization took place in either in the Weimar Republic or in Nazi Germany, Gries divides them into the subgroup of the Weimar generation (born between 1900 and 1912) and that of the "Flakhelfer" (born between 1926 and 1930); Grass, needless to say, is a foremost representative of the latter group. The members of the generation of 1968 (born between 1938 and 1948) grew up in the economically prospering Federal Republic of the 1950s; they are characterized by their fierce opposition to the prevailing silence about the NS past—particularly on the part of the "Zeitzeugen." The members of the "Enkelgeneration" (born between 1970 and 1978) experienced the disappearance of the GDR and reunification, but their knowledge of...