Word: grassed
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...Poland, where relations with Germany have rarely been cordial and where ties have deteriorated in recent years, the news was seized on by leading right-wing politicians to condemn him. Grass last year wrote Walesa and the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamwicz, to explain why he had taken so long to admit the full details of his war record. He said it had taken him until his later years to find the right formula to discuss his decision. "It's only now, with age, that I have found a suitable way of talking about it from a wider perspective...
...memoir, Peeling the Onion, which was published in Germany last year and in the U.S. this summer, Grass revealed for the first time that, after joining the armed forces at age 16 in the fall of 1944, he was drafted into the SS, the fanatical branch of Adolf Hitler's army -although by the time he took up arms, the war was all but over. (He writes, credibly, that he never actually fired a shot.) Grass's memoir describes in detail the conditions he encountered in the chaotic retreat before the advancing Red Army in the closing months...
...feel sympathy for that generation," he said. "But I am a realist. The world has changed. From the period of wars, borders and communism we are passing to the period of ideas , information and globalization. A generation is passing from that one to this one? - and Grass, he said, is helping int that transition...
...anxious to welcome him back . One of those greeting him was Gdansk novelist Pawel Huelle, who praised the German writer for his intellectual contributions as well as for his frequent public statements that Germany had no claim on lands lost to Poland in the war. "For all his life Grass has been against erasing memory, erasing history and putting responsibility just on history and Adolf Hitler," Huelle wrote in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza. "His analysis of fascism and German crimes have always showed that it wasn't a devil that tempted Germans but ordinary people who for their benefit accepted...
...visit has certainly prompted widespread commentary in Poland. Gazeta Wyborcza editor and celebrated anti-communist dissident Adam Michnik penned this birthday greeting: "Grass teaches how to love freedom and truth or, simply put, life, how to love people how to love literature, he can do it, and we love...