Europe discusses Grass's admission

Journalist Guy Dammann is interested in the reasons that drove Günter Grass to admit to his past. His response to the current situation - "'My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write [my autobiography 'Peeling onions']' - seems uniformly weak if nonetheless highly plausible, but, as with Conrad's Lord Jim, those with a guilty past are often the most zealous when it comes to repairing the present. If Grass's silence is also partly what spurred him on, then the route to condemnation is less easy. Hypocrisy is always ugly, but ugliness is no less important to literature than beauty. Grass's crime is to have betrayed those whose spokesman he has sought to be. For those of us lucky enough to have not required his services in this respect, he remains as powerful and as interesting a writer as before."

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