Chroniques patagones

Les spéculations n'ont pas manqués ni ne manquent quant aux motivations qui amenèrent Günter Grass à dissimuler son passé nazi durant plus de 60 ans et aux raisons qui l'ont poussé à dévoiler la vérité dans son autobiographie qui paraît actuellement en Allemagne. De fait, nombreux sont ceux qui attribuent ces révélations et le scandale qui les entourent à une cynique campagne publicitaire destinée à booster les ventes. Toutefois, la semaine dernière, le Daily Telegraph rapportait des faits intéressants qui éclairent sous un jour nouveau la confession de Günter Grass :

This morning many front pages printed a photograph of his imprisonment record from his days as a PoW under the US forces which, complete with his fingerprints, identifies him as a private in the Waffen-SS.

It’s also been discovered there is a file on him in the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi, which would have been made public next spring.

It has been suggested the Grass wanted to preempt the information emerging from a secondary source by publishing his own account first.

His name also appears in black and white among the names of 350,000 SS members which the Federal Archive received from the Americans’ Berlin Documentation Center in 1994. So it turns out there was a story waiting to be discovered all along. Journalists here are kicking themselves.

This afternoon the incriminating autobiography “Peeling the Onion” appeared in bookshops for the first time, its publication date having been brought forward by its tiny publishing house, Seidl, by about two weeks.

The print run is 150,000 – huge by German standards. But owing to the attention the book has so far received, the publishers are reported to be ready to go with a second print run soon.

Il semble donc bien que, sans la menace de voir son secret honteux dévoilé par d'autres, Günter Grass se serait, hypocritement, tu encore longtemps sur son engagement dans les Waffen-SS.