{"id":237,"date":"2006-08-14T02:41:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T10:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=237"},"modified":"2006-08-14T02:41:00","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T10:41:00","slug":"lit-politics-widows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/lit-politics-widows\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit, Politics, Widows"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Spending time in the mountains beyond net-reach, so have to wait til I get back to town to read, check what\u2019s going on, post, etc. Hope to put up some photos from the Pyrenean countryside soon. Meanwhile, below, a few noticings.<\/p>\n

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German writer G\u00fcnter Grass<\/span> has come out & said in an interview<\/a> with the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/span><\/b> that in the late months of WWII he served as an enthusiastic member of one of the Waffen SS units. It didn\u2019t last long, didn\u2019t do much if anything, and if he fesses up today one wonders if it has really to do with a case of bad conscience as he claims, or if it isn\u2019t more of a p.r. bit for his soon to be published autobiography \u2014 in which sais incident is detailed at greater length. Read more reactions on this here<\/a> in the excellent signandsight gathering. Here are some bits from Grass confession:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Said Grass: \u201cIt had to come out<\/b>, finally. The thing went as follows: I had volunteered, not for the Waffen-SS but for the submarines, which was just as crazy of me. But they were not taking anyone any more. Whereas the Waffen-SS took whatever they could get in the last months of the war, 1944\/45. That went for conscripts but also for older men, who often came from the Air Force \u2013 they were called \u2018Hermann G\u00f6ring donations.\u2019 The fewer intact airfields there were, the more ground personnel were stuck in army units or in units of the Waffen-SS. It was the same with the navy. And for me, I am sure I am remembering correctly, the Waffen-SS was at first not something scary<\/b>, but rather an elite unit that was always sent to trouble spots, and which, according to rumour, had the most casualties.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he volunteered mainly to \u201cget away<\/b>. From constrictions, from the family. I wanted to put an end to all that, and so I volunteered. And that\u2019s also something odd: I enlisted at the age of 15, and promptly forgot the details of the process. And it was the same for many of my birth year: We were in the work service<\/a> and suddenly, a year later, the conscription order<\/b> lay on the table. And that must be when I first realized: it is the Waffen-SS.\u201d Asked whether he had feelings of guilt, Grass answered: \u201cAt the time? No. Later on, this guilt feeling<\/b> burdened me as a disgrace<\/b>.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until he heard the testimony of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach<\/a> in the Nuremberg trials that he \u201cbelieved that the crimes had actually taken place.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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In Le Nouvel Observateur<\/span> an informative piece<\/a> on why the excellent 2-volume complete and annotated edition of Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s works published in the prestiguous Pl\u00e9iade edition in France is and will remain unavailable: Maria Kodama, the widow, has opposed it & is suing the excellent editor (& Borg\u00e8s confidant) Jean-Pierre Bern\u00e8s. A classical piece of misplaced widowy jealousy which can only be prejudicial to Borges\u2019s work. It reminds me of another famous Latin American writer\u2019s widow \u2014 Cesar Vallejo\u2019s \u2014 whose greed, incompetence and censoriousness in relation to her husband\u2019s work was notorious. And thinking back on an earlier post on Nietzsche and the misuse of his work and person by his mother and sister, I begin to think that there should be a way in which the works of dead writers (men & women, for I am sure that widowers are no better) should be held in some public domain format where it cannot be censored and suppressed by incompetent family members.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Since eight this morning there is supposedly a cease-fire in Lebanon. I\u2019ll believe it tomorrow or the day after. Meanwhile check out this video document<\/a> from YouTube.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spending time in the mountains beyond net-reach, so have to wait til I get back to town to read, check what\u2019s going on, post, etc. Hope to put up some photos from the Pyrenean...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}