A Look Back on How Gunter Grass Spent the War

By

Nathaniel B. Broyles PSY 294 Psychology of Exceptional Children and Adolescence Prof. Daniel Aaron June 14, 2011

Adolescence is a time when children are just beginning to explore the people whom they will eventually become as adults. The biological upheavals that children experience power the internal transformation of their personalities just as their outward appearances mature into the face and body they will carry through life as adults. Today, in the year 2011, adolescents have to wrestle with some of the same pressures and decisions that teenagers have faced in every time and every culture: sexuality, appearance, peer acceptance, and the role shift from adolescent to adult. Gunter Wilhelm Grass was one of millions of youth who faced not only those same dilemmas faced by the youth of today but did so amidst the backdrop of World War II. He was a German youth who was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and found himself immersed in a world of terror like he had never before imagined. Once might ask how it is that an ordinary German teenager from a middle-class family could himself a member of one of the most vilified militaries of the 20th century. The answer is that Gunter could do nothing less.

Gunter Wilhelm Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16, 1927 to Willy and Helene Grass. His parents ran a grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr and were of the Catholic faith. He had a younger sister who was born in 1930. The entire family lived in a small, cramped apartment attached to the grocery store. The conditions that the family lived in would be unacceptable to the majority of college students. Several other families also shared cramped apartment in the same building and there was only one communal toilet and bath facility to be shared among all of the families. Toilet paper was used newspaper that Willy Grass carefully cut into squares for his family s use. Gunter remembers watching his father perform the task of recycling the newspaper many, many times. There was no real privacy in the two-room apartment as the children, growing up, slept in the parent s bedroom. As a teenager, Gunter was gifted with the couch in the living room while his sister continued to sleep in the same room as their parents. For all of this, however, amidst the rationing and sacrificing for the war effort, Gunter lived what was considered to be a middle-class life.

In 1943, Gunter was serving with the Luftwaffe auxiliary. The auxiliary was made up of school boys who were too young to be conscripted into the real military but who could still serve the defense of their country by manning anti-aircraft guns and attempting to shoot down the allied bombers who were dropping bombs on their cities. He was, at that time, 15 years old and determined to enter active service. So, rather than travelling back to his parent s home one weekend, he made the trip by train to Gotenhafen and attempted to enlist in the navy and become a submariner. He had dreams of standing watch on a submarine s conning tower during stormy weather, swathed in oilskins, covered with spray. He was rejected as being too young at that time as his age group hadn t come up yet. He would eventually be conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the German Labor Service, before he was drafted into the Waffen-SS as a young tank gunner. He was now an official part of Germany s military machine, something he had dreamed of, hoped for, and which turned out to be something that he wanted no part of in the end.

In explaining how a young man could desire to become a member of Germany s military, there are a number of theories that can explain, in part, the reasoning behind such a wish. One popular theory, mentioned by Gunther himself in his article entitled How I Spent The War, hails from the works of Dr. Sigmund Freud. In his adolescence, Gunther was constantly pushed to find ways to get out of his home due to the hatred of a mother s boy for his father. The oedipal feelings experienced by Gunther made him feel ever more claustrophobic and constricted when in his parent s home. He constantly sought to pick fights with his father over the smallest of excuses, even though his eventempered father did not allow himself to rise to those occasions. Gunther also saw his father, increasingly as the war moved on, as cowardly since he was an able-bodied man who was excused from serving in the military on the basis of practicing an essential profession. All around him the able-bodied

men were off serving, leaving only the wounded, the old, and the women and children. The sense of nationalism instilled through propaganda that all German children at that time grew up experiencing told Gunther that this was unusual as it was supposed to be an honor and a duty to serve in uniform. He also, by virtue of being excused from service, would never go to the front and therefore never get out of my (his) hair.

Erik Erikson s fifth stage of development, identity vs. identity confusion, also illustrates quite clearly the thought processes that Gunther was going through at that time. During this period of development, adolescents are exploring themselves and the world around them in an attempt to reconcile the confusion they feel about who they are and their place in the world. They are transforming from the role of child into something new, exciting, and a little frightening. In Grass s case, as well as the thousands of German youth just like him, society had expectations of whom and what they were to become as adults. The propaganda preached by Germany s leaders gave the young men and women of Germany a guidebook to how they could fit in and be respected as adults in their own right. The way to do that was to dedicate oneself to protecting and preserving the Fatherland as a soldier or auxiliary. It is important for adolescents to have faith in something greater than themselves that they can use as measuring stick and, for many, it was the severe Nationalism that served that purpose.

One of the largest driving forces for any young person, and especially for adolescents, is the need to conform or to fit in with their peers. Humans are social animals and feel a real need to fit in with others like them. A person will be willing to do things that they might otherwise feel uncomfortable doing simply due to the need to be perceived as normal and part of the group. In Germany during World War II, it was normal that the able-bodied youth would serve in the military and do their part in prosecuting the war effort. So, for Gunter, it was to be expected that he would serve and service was

something that was to be welcomed and proud of. Nowhere in Gunter s own account of his service time is this more apparent than in his tale of the treatment of Wedontdothat, the German youth who was physically the Aryan ideal but who was possessed of a pacifistic streak that refused to be broken. Gunter and the rest of the training battalion that he belonged to severely hazed the young man at the behest of the drill instructors in an effort to break him. None of them saw anything wrong with this behavior and they all took part because everyone else was doing it and because it was expected of them. The need to belong to the group is a powerful thing and humans will do a great deal in order not to be excluded its protection.

There are many things that we can say about Gunter Grass s experiences as a German soldier. It is true that he served as a member of the Waffen-SS, although it was as a member of the regular military and not as what we perceive when we hear about the SS. It is also true that he fought for only a few months towards the end of the war when he was wounded and sent to serve the remainder of the war as a POW. It is also true that Gunter s service is easily explainable and understandable. There is no need to vilify Gunter for his actions or decisions 68 years ago. They were as inevitable as the tide due to the unique mingling of biological needs and cultural imperatives in that time and place. Through his own candid account, Grass has allowed his readers to see inside the mind of the German youth of his generation and allows them to see that many of the same questions, answers, and problems are the same today as they were in those troubled times.