Can't spell Guenther Grass without SS...

Man, who would have thought that Guenther Grass, perhaps the best-known post-war German writer of the Left had been a member of the Waffen SS? Granted, he was 17 at the time and Germany was calling up the young and the elderly for duty, and he was conscripted, which meant he didn't exactly go out and volunteer.

But, wow. Talk about creating an interesting twist to a long-standing writer's story. Frankly, I'm surprised it stayed a secret for so long. Given Grass's visibility as a public intellectual -- one who at one time held that Germany should never reunite because it would only bring a return to the nationalism that gave rise to Nazi Germany -- you'd think someone would have pulled this little nugget out long ago, the way that Paul de Man's writing's for the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir came out almost 20 years ago, allowing some critics and even more reactionaries to denounce Deconstruction itself as a tool of fascism.

The BBC website points out that Grass's unit has not been directly implicated in any of the atrocities the SS so often perpetrated:

It has to be said, that up to now, the Frunsberg Division has not been implicated in any major atrocities or war crimes - even though the SS as a whole was classified as a criminal organisation after the war.

Grass himself claims that he "never fired any shots," and I certainly hope that it's true.

War is hell.