| Tweet |
(回答先: ギュンター・グラスに感謝する（壊れる前に…） 投稿者 gataro 日時 2007 年 6 月 25 日 17:25:46)
元記事にはリンクが二つ貼ってあったが、投稿時につけ忘れている。
もう一つは下記のガーディアン記事のもの。
以下は http://books.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,2109580,00.html からの転載。
Look back in anger(Guardian Unlimited)
When Günter Grass revealed that he had served with the Waffen-SS, the German press reacted with outrage. Many people, however, have since thanked him. By James Meek
Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian
Few writers have reputations big enough to warrant a museum dedicated to their life and work after they die, but how many writers get their own museums while they are still alive? The most notable item in the Günter Grass-Haus in Lübeck is Günter Grass himself. In a room upstairs, a wide, dim space with low roof beams, like the captain's cabin in an old frigate, the writer can be found, hale enough at 79 to suck and blow thick swirls of pipe smoke between sentences.
Grass has been famous for almost half a century, ever since 1959, when his satirical-autobiographical masterpiece The Tin Drum, about a little Nazi-era boy who decides not to grow any bigger, was published. He has drawn directly on his life for his fiction ever since. I wondered why a writer whose work is so openly autobiographical should have chosen, now, to write a memoir. Peeling the Onion is curious in form, recording not only what happened but what might have happened. I suggested to Grass that his constant challenging of the accuracy of his memory, his manner of questioning on almost every page whether an event happened or not, made Peeling the Onion an un-memoir.
"Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be," he said. "You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting."
Since August 12 last year, when an interview Grass gave for the German publication of Peeling the Onion was published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany has found itself trying to understand a writer it thought it knew. In the interview, Grass revealed publicly for the first time that as a teenager in 1945 he served in the Waffen-SS, the military wing of Adolf Hitler's most loyal, most cruel force.
It was not the nature of the secret, but the fact the secret had been kept for 60 years that shocked the country. At the time Grass was only 17; he was drafted; the Waffen-SS, although its units were responsible for many atrocities, was by 1945 a sprawling, multinational, diminished army; Grass never fired a shot in anger. Why, then, had he hidden the fact of his service for so long, when he had made the moral duty of Germans to face up to their past his defining cause as a writer and leftwing polemicist?
In a front page comment piece in the FAZ under the headline The Confession, the journalist who carried out the interview, Frank Schirrmacher, set the tone for the odium which poured on to Grass's head over the subsequent days when he wrote: "Anyone familiar with the rhetoric of postwar excuses and finger-pointing might think they are not hearing right. The author who wanted to loosen all tongues, who took as his life's theme the secretiveness and suppression of the old Federal Republic of Germany, admits his own silence ... "
I'd been warned by Grass's British publisher that the writer was still smarting from the mauling he received in Germany - British newspapers were kinder - and that I should choose my moment to mention the Waffen-SS. In the end, though, Grass brought it up himself, after only 20 minutes. He was in Denmark, in one of his several homes, when the interview appeared, and he realised how badly it was being received. "The public's reaction hit me very hard. It was unexpected," he said. "I couldn't sleep at night.
"It was Tristram Shandy who helped me get over it all, to put everything in perspective. It made me laugh again, even though I didn't have anything to laugh about. I saw Laurence Sterne dealing with his critics in the book and I admired the sharp, precise and witty way he did it."
Grass argues, convincingly, that his boy self did more morally troubling things than wearing the twin SS runes on his collar at the tail-end of the war: failing to ask questions about the disappearance of his uncle (summarily executed by the Nazis), for instance, or the disappearance of his Latin teacher (taken to a concentration camp). When I asked him several times why he'd found it easier to talk publicly about those supposedly worse things, and kept the supposedly more minor transgression of being a boy soldier in the Waffen-SS hidden, the answers he gave were contradictory. It was as if he felt he could move at will between his speech-making, campaigning, morally crusading persona, and the persona of a separate, private, exclusively literary Grass.
It seemed to be the politically aware Grass who told me that, since the controversy began, the leftwing publisher Karl Wagenbach had found written records of discussions about Grass's teenage SS episode from the early 1960s. "At that time nobody was even interested in the fact and it wasn't a big deal. Wagenbach and I both remember that we talked for quite a long time about this particular issue and then forgot about it."
It seemed to be the same Grass who switched from speaking German into his imperfect English to explain why he had kept silent about his three-month stint in the Frundsberg SS division. "I feel a lot of shame about all this and it shut my mouth in this. But these three months I was involved in the story. And looking back I'm glad that it was only three months, because - " he switched back to German " - if I'd been born in, for example, 1925 and not 1927, and if I'd been drafted into the Waffen-SS earlier, I can't guarantee that I wouldn't have been involved in war crimes. The fact that, in the few days that I was at the front (if you can call it that, it was a retreat), I never fired my weapon, that's not something I can take credit for."
Yet it was the other Grass, the private, writerly figure, who gave a different reason for holding back - the natural ripening-time of remembered moments. "There are some authors who think they have to write their autobiography at the age of 30. I had to be 80," he said.
"I could only talk about [my Waffen-SS service] in a greater context. Talking about it in an isolated way wouldn't satisfy me. Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them."
Almost a year on, Grass is still defensive and angry. "It was obvious after a while that the attack, and the nastiness of the assault, came from one newspaper and was copied by others. It started with the sensational story and the headline The Confession, as if I had made a confession to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ... I sensed political motives behind it. I'm outspoken for the left and they thought this was the ideal opportunity to shut me up.
"I think it's a shame that we have Bild like you have the Sun. Now serious newspapers like FAZ and Spiegel use a bit of the tone of Bild. This is terrible."
Grass said he had been overwhelmed with supportive letters from Germans, thanking him for provoking the ageing generation which remembers the war to talk about it with their grandchildren.
Grass said that the "literary answer to the whole controversy" comes in one of his recent poems, My Flaws, part of a collection not yet published in English called Stupid August, a pun on the month the storm broke and the German name for a red-nosed clown. In a literal translation, the poem begins: "Late, they say, too late. / Delayed for decades. / I nodded: Yes, it took time, / Till I found words / For the over-used word 'shame'. / Along with everything which had made me known, / Flaws are attached to me / Clearly enough for people with flawless, pointing fingers."
The autobiography has been a bestseller in Germany. But one of the unfortunate effects of the uproar, from Grass's point of view, is that it obscures, for those who haven't read the book, the extent to which the writer excoriates his younger self in its pages. "As a member of the Hitler Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi. A believer till the end," he writes. Of the Waffen-SS service: "The ignorance I claim could not blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people."
Besides the confessional aspect, the controversy has masked other, equally difficult revelations in the book. "In my book, I don't just write for the first time about my life in the Hitler Youth, or how I behaved as an individual, or about my short time in the Waffen-SS, but also about what happened to my mother. It wasn't a unique case. She was raped several times during the occupation of Danzig by the Soviet army," Grass said.
"That's something else which I couldn't have written about in the years immediately after the war, or as I started writing. That also needed time. Other things seemed more important then - the crimes committed by the Germans and their ideological infatuation."
And this was the first time he had written about what happened to his mother? "Yes. In literary form, yes."
Although he had talked about it before, in interviews? "No, no ... I also didn't find out about it until after her death, from my sister, who was there."
I asked Grass what he thought about the claims that he had been a sort of moral compass for Germany, and was no longer. "Heinrich Böll was the first to get the title 'conscience of the German nation', then me," he said. "Both of us rejected the idea. And if people don't want to see me as the conscience of the nation any more, something which I never wanted, then I'm thankful. You can't delegate the conscience of a whole nation to a single man."
· Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To order a copy for 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875
- Waffen SS とドイツ国防軍兵士 ジャック・どんどん 2007/6/25 20:38:27
(0)
投稿コメント全ログ コメント即時配信 スレ建て依頼 削除コメント確認方法
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。
掲示板,ＭＬを含むこのサイトすべての
一切の引用、転載、リンクを許可いたします。確認メールは不要です。
引用元リンクを表示してください。