15 - Günter Grass and his contemporaries in East and West

Summary

Writing in the German daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in August 2006 at the time of the controversy over Günter Grass's membership of the Waffen SS, the sociologist Heinz Bude launched a hymn of praise to those he called the 'schoolboy soldiers'. By this term he meant the people born between 1926 and 1929, who, like Grass, went more or less straight from school into the final stages of the Second World War. Referring not just to writers and intellectuals but also to the recently elected 'German Pope' Joseph Ratzinger, he maintained that they continue to form 'the foundation of the Republic', as well as providing 'the material for our collective self-concern'. The reason Bude gives for this predominant role is the opportunity offered by their date of birth. Given the social and political changes they have experienced, they have been able to observe 'how patterns of behaviour were exchanged and points of identification shifted', something that has not been possible for subsequent generations (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17 August 2006). Others, too, reflected at the time of the Grass debate on the important role played by people born in the second half of the Weimar Republic. Extending the years in question to include 1930, Eckhard Fuhr, in an article for the daily Die Welt (28 August 2006), came up with fifteen influential names, mainly writers and intellectuals, whilst also suggesting that this list is far from complete. He also used, admittedly within quotation marks, the term frequently employed for the people in question: 'the anti-aircraft auxiliary [Flakhelfer] generation' (the term refers to the kind of military service into which these seventeen- and eighteen-year olds were first conscripted).