I was a 17 year old boy in Calcutta when the Dell or the Bantam paperback edition of Grass’s “The Tin Drum” fell into my hands at a book stall opposite the Lighthouse cinema in Kolkata. There was an unusually tall Bengali standing next to me riffling through sci-fi books. I knew who he was. Satyajit Ray saw me pondering over Oskar Matzerath and smiled at me – rather sadly. Grass met Ray, a great moment.

Since then a lot of Grass has grown over it, Grass has discovered Baruipur, Kolkata, as his favourite haunt for a retreat, has written and sketched “Zunge Zeigen” (“Showing Your Tongue”), his second attempt to recruit the mysterious and inscrutable Goddess Kali of the Bengali’s for his own literary iconography: readers of “The Flounder” might remember his first attempt to invoke Kali as one of his ‘cooks’.

Showing your tongue is a sign of contrition or shame among Bengali’s, especially among women.

A troubled man

I was not fascinated by Günter Grass’s “magic realism” and believe that “realism is magic” to this day. I was fascinated by the gut man Grass, his immense appetites, the extreme physical and sensual undertones in his writing – not by his moral stances, which partially came later.

I remember seeing Grass’s sketches for the first time and asking myself: why is this man so fascinated by rats?

I remember that feeling of Grass above, but underneath a maze of strange holes and barrows and tunnels in which strange, unspeakable memories and desire live and scutter.

This is a very troubled man, I told myself.

The moral of the story

I came to Germany in 1979, that’s 10 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 27 years from today.

I did not foresee Grass’s turning into a moral authority, nor his strong and public love-hate relationship with the SPD; I hardly paid any attention to his various political comments: I merely saw a man who would never be able to give up smoking. Moralizing neither.

By then, I had met enough Germans with similar secrets in their past, similar to the one Grass has so casually revealed over the last weekend. Some of those I met spoke freely of their days in the Nazi ranks; none of them wrote novels; not one of them had the intention of writing an autobiography; and certainly none of them would be asked to return a Nobel Prize which they had never won.

Today it strikes me that Grass’s entire moralizing might have been in the nature of an act of contrition, that he was trying to be better than himself, or at least than his own past, and was constantly exhorting other people, fellow Germans to do the same.

Hara-kiri

On the other hand, Germany needed icons, and Grass was one of them. He had a role. He played that role to the hilt – keeping the dagger for himself.

Now he has done it, he has committed moral hara-kiri – and promoted his coming autobiography in the process. What else do we expect of a nearly octogenarian author at the end of his life? There is only one tragedy for a writer, and that is not to be read, to be overlooked. Grass is making sure that nobody overlooks his hara-kiri – and no yellow press journalist or greenhorn research scholar gets the credit for it while grubbing in the archives: Grass was in the Waffen SS!

Nobel Prize? I remember an English author, a Nobel Prize winning one, who used to have a relationship of a very strange kind with his own daughter. One of the footnotes of literature.

A German author

Then why is Grass’s hara-kiri getting so much attention, so much press? Is it because so many have kept silent and taken their secrets with them to the grave, over which Grass has grown and will continue to grow? If it’s not the Nazi’s, then it’s the STASI, tapes, files, documents, a whole nation constricted in its own history.

I know better than to blame a 17 year old for his “passions”, whether physical or political. And the seven decades’ silence has only made Grass a completely German author in my eyes, one who embodies German history, German passion, the German lust for life and – unfortunately, German moralizing, which is a form of agony.

Oskar Matzerath has finally grown up, he will not scream any more.

But we shall still have the tin drum.