Authorial construction in from the diary of a snail and the meeting at telgte

When, in late 2006, it was revealed that Günter Grass had served for a short time towards the end of World War II in the Waffen SS, shock waves spread not just through Germany but the world. The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel summed up much of the hostile media coverage with a belligerent cover page and title story, ‘The Tin-Drummer: A Moral Apostle’s Late Confession’ (21 August), while fellow author John Irving fought back, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, ‘Günter Grass is my hero, as a writer and a moral compass’ (19 August). At stake throughout the debate was Grass’s public renown as Germany’s leading commentator on moral issues, since the 1960s often summed up in the trite phrase ‘Gewissen der Nation’, or ‘conscience of the nation’. The fact that Grass had not given an entirely accurate account of his actions during the war whilst at the same time shaming other public figures with skeletons to hide was not only felt seriously to undermine his moral standing. In the eyes of some of the author’s harshest critics, it also called for a complete re-evaluation of his literary work to date, including a return of the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded in 1999. Such outrage can only properly be understood in the wider context of Grass's public image. Like him or loathe him, media commentators and readers alike have been unanimous in seeing in Grass a straightforward example of a politically engaged author whose fiction can be readily interpreted in the context of current socio-political issues.