Some writers stay hidden from us, as The Catcher in the Rye's J.D. Salinger, others live outrageously public lives, as Hemingway and Mailer. Some are withdrawn, others are extroverts, but as far as we can gather few have felt it necessary to lie to us about their lives, to pretend they have been something that they have not been. Of course, we are not writing about someone like James Frey and his 'Million Little Pieces' and 'My Friend Leonard', two books which were touted as memoirs but turned out to contain fictionalized events. In other words, Frey is the opposite of the kind of writer to whom we refer in this commentary—he is someone who claims to write about real events but ends up giving us fiction without telling us so. It is supposed to be the other way around with good writers: they give us fiction that contains the wisdom of truth.

We do not have to like the life that a writer leads, or any other artist, for that matter. A true artist, of whatever stripe, can hold our attention even if we don't ever wish to be associated with him or her. We admire Richard Wagner's music and in consequence ignore his personal views, his reprehensible moral attitudes. By ignoring the "terrible man" in Owen Lee's words, we allow ourselves to enjoy his music. He may have been an open anti-Semite, but even in Israel, his music is now played. We can name numerous artists of every persuasion whose work we admire even though we care little about their moral and political views. Pablo Picasso is among those. We simply separate the art from the creator's personal life.

So why does one feel differently about German author Günter Grass, winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in 1999? This summer he admitted, as a prelude to the release of his biography (Peeling the Onion), that he had been a member of the German Waffen SS. The answer to our response lies in part in that the admission has come 61 years too late. It is a simple fact that Wagner, or whomever we despise as a person, never hid his personal views. Wagner did not preach one thing and live another, although some might say that since he associated freely with many Jewish artists and used their expertise to stage his works, he can be seen as not quite living up to his publicly stated views. Grass, however, deliberately chose to remain silent about his past for 61 years. Worse, he lied to his countrymen and the world by claiming he was merely a 'flakhelfer' (a youth impressed into the service of operating anti-aircraft guns) during World War II.

As a writer and social activist Grass harangued his fellow Germans through his socialist politics, and with the aid of his books, to open up about their Nazi past. To the world, as a whole, he gave the impression of an outraged socialist, who had nothing to do with the past. Yet, it took him until now to tell us all that as a youth he served in the notorious murder machine we simply call the SS (it stands for Schutzstaffel) that was Hitler's personal 'honour' guard, an elite group that eventually reached a strength of 900,000 members. There were two groups of SS—the one that served in a civilian capacity (seen by some as the more dangerous group) and the military (Waffen) SS. Neither were benevolent social clubs as anyone can tell you who had the misfortune of encountering them.

Grass insists that he did not volunteer to join the Waffen SS, even though it was an elite group that not everyone could join. Instead, he claims, he was drafted into its service at age 16, in the final year of World War II. There may be some veracity to this claim, although at a mere 1.71m (a little over 5'7") he hardly lived up to the SS's 'ideal' German male. Even if Grass tells us the truth, it does not negate that he also had to admit that he was fully infected with the belief that Germany would ultimately win this war, that he was an enthusiastic Hitler Youth, and that he volunteered at age 15 to join the German submarine service, but was rejected.

His statement of having been fully infected by the national socialist belief of final victory rings true when one takes a look at his Prisoner of War Preliminary Record. It reveals he was not captured until May 8, 1945, on the very day on which German and Allied commands ratified Germany's final surrender document. Of course, we may excuse him because he had been wounded and so may not have been able to surrender on his own before then.

Grass claims that his volunteering to join the U-boot service led to his being called up to join the Waffen SS. If the SS did take notice of this fact, its command might well have thought that his act of volunteering at such a young age was a strapping thing to do for someone so young. Not everyone wanted to go into a service that had such a high degree of loss despite the glamour the Nazis associated with going beneath the sea to harass the oceans and kill thousands of mariners from the silent depths of the sea. And so we will attempt to believe he had called attention to himself as an enthusiastic volunteer, someone the Waffen SS needed in 1944 because it needed to swell its ranks.

Grass tells us that he volunteered for the U-boat service because he wanted to escape his family's narrow petit bourgeois life and a two-room flat in Danzing. As for the SS, he claimed he only knew that it was an elite military group, and did not know that it served not only as guards for concentration camps, but as a mop-up group whenever ordinary military rules either failed or could not achieve Hitler's and Himmler's aims -namely the eradication not only of Jews, but also of any group standing in the way of the Nazis philosophy. It was the SS that put down the Warsaw uprising among many other events. General Erwin Rommel, who throughout the war was respected by his allied opponents, hated the Waffen SS, and did not want any of its units to serve in his area of command.

But, we cannot really believe that Grass thought the SS was only an elite group. When the Second World War started, there was fighting in Danzig, his hometown. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he tells us about his mother's favourite cousin, who like herself was a Kashubian, and a frequent visitor to Grass's home. This cousin worked at Danzig's Polish post office. "When the war broke out the Hevelius Square post office building was defended for a time against the SS-Heimwehr. My uncle belonged to those who surrendered, all of whom were summarily tried and shot by firing squad. Suddenly he was no more. Suddenly and permanently his name was no longer mentioned. He became a nonperson," the writer told his audience.

Are we to believe that a boy of twelve-and-a-half does not know or understand the implications of what the 'elite' SS troops had done to a member of his family? Are we even more to believe he could not understand by age 16 what had happened to the formerly beloved cousin of his mother at the hand of the SS? We do not believe so.

Grass's true fame really rests on only one book, The Tin Drum. It is an 'interesting' book, but we never saw it as a book that achieved what it purported to do. Yes, it spoke about the unspeakable in Germany, the Nazi years and even mentions Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass), which certainly also happened in Danzig. But when one reads the novel more closely, it becomes clear that Grass takes no stand on either side of the issues. He avoids any real confrontation with his fellow citizens. The child, Oskar Matzerath, who decides at age three never to grow up, and after throwing himself down the cellar stairs, only communicates through the playing of a tin drum, is the main protagonist. Oskar, however, turns out to be neither anti-Nazi, nor is he particularly moral. He is an observer of the Nazi period but not a critic of it.

My objection to the book is the same that I have against Thomas Mann's 1947 novel, Dr. Faustus. Both books are obtuse. Neither book speaks honestly to the reading public, but leaves the interpretation to the individual. In Mann's case, anyone reading the book now or decades from now without knowing about the Hitler period, will have no clue what the author is driving at. Readers may well see it as a treaties on Beethoven as seen through the eyes of Theodor Adorno—from whom Mann gained much of the knowledge he had about musical composition—who told the world that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (Nach Ausschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch)." Few will see this Dr. Faustus as an allegory related to Germany's darkest moment in history. In Grass's case, The Tin Drum is irreverent, and full of verbal dexterity signifying very little. A much later book, Ein Weites Feld(1995), the title of which has been translated erroneously as 'Too Far Afield' when it should have been 'A broad Subject', deals with the unification of East and West Germany (to which Grass objected). In German it was a book filled with historic meanderings of some interest, in its translation—which is atrocious—it became a provincial work that made little sense to a non-German reader whose bewilderment was not helped by the addition of a historic timetable (with often incorrect facts and dates). Grass's 1992 book, Unkenruf (The Call of the Toad) hides racism behind sarcasm and satire. His Crabwalk (Krebsgang) of 2002 presaged what we now have to face. From reading it we should not have been surprised by the writer's revelations. In this book Grass became a whiner, someone who wants justice for the suffering of the Germans who drowned when a Russian submarine captain sank their ship, which was stuffed with thousands of refugees and soldiers escaping from the eastern front. Yes, it was a disaster, but here Grass compared apples not to oranges—which at least is another fruit—but to potatoes. In it he bemoaned that the Titanic gets so much attention than the Gustloff, a ship with a far greater loss of life, but which is hardly known, even in Germany. Had he mentioned the Lusitania, we might have a comparison, but then, he wouldn't since this ship sank at the hands of a celebrated German 'war' hero. By writing this book he joined the writers seeking justice for the Germans who were bombed during the war. We can only say that however sad this was, when one belonged to a society that started the bombing of cities all over Europe, then one cannot complain when people retaliate.

Going back to The Tin Drum, Grass has plenty to say about the famous 'soul' of the Germans—we do get tired of this affectation—but the book really never truly names any of the crimes committed, nor does it show any empathy for the victims of this crime. So, in the end, the conclusion we draw is that like so many Germans in the eastern part of the country, Grass managed to convert his narrow national socialistic indoctrination into a quasi-socialistic one without batting an eye. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, when people suppress their feelings for a long time, when they reach old age, as Grass has now at 79, they no longer manage to hide who or what they are or were. Grass had to admit his former allegiance for two reasons: 1. sooner or later researchers would have come across his war record—as they now have; 2. his personal convictions are becoming too transparent in his later writings. Grass may not have wanted to see innocent people die when he became a soldier, but his Hitler Youth indoctrination at an early age has retained its grip on him. Crabwalk makes that clear, and so does The Call of the Toad.