> Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In May 1945, after service as a soldier in the Waffen SS, he was taken prisoner by U.S. forces and released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, he began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.
He volounteered for the Kriegsmarine, but that was in 1944 when Reich was in full retreat in the east, and so he was pulled into Waffen SS ranks instead.
He was, however, a member of the Nazi Waffen-SS in his youth, though he claims to never have fired a shot. The fact that he chose to make this public only very late in his life (and many years after he had receiced the Nobel prize) is what is really problematic, in my opinion.
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass#Beobachtung_d... (the English article doesn't mention it, hence the German version)
Still the point I was trying to make is that the man and the writer are different and if Mr. Grass worked for the SS instead of Stasi that doesn't make him any better as a man, does it?
I don't have much of an opinion either way of Mr. Grass, but I don't think volunteering to fight in the Army as a teenager reflects negatively on his character.
I believe criticisms were leveled at him mostly for not disclosing that he served in the SS until 60 years after the fact (despite Nazi criticism being a common theme in his writing).
When you join the army you are also joining what that army stands for. If you were a communist, certainly joining the US Marines would not be high on your priority list, would it?
Unfortunately having an opinion seems to be met with downvotes here at HN which is unfortunate for such a otherwise pleasant group of people.
Still, it is a great loss of a great writer.