Neal Ascherson

The history of modern Germany is, in part, a history of silences. There were questions one learned not to answer, and things one learned not to say because ‘there is no point in talking about all that.’ With Grass, we meet such a German silence in one of Europe’s most prolific writers and speakers, behind one of the loudest voices arguing for honesty and humanity. But it’s worth asking how total this silence really was. Grass’s family knew, of course. Maybe he told a few friends. More curiously, hundreds of young men must have known him in those months, during training or in action; if they survived, they surely recognised their old comrade in the famous West German writer and knew what unit he had served in. They said nothing. And journalists and literary researchers in recent years could have dug up the facts, which were lying around in openly available documents; Grass had registered as an ex-Waffen SS soldier when he was released by the Americans. But even if some of them turned up those papers, none of them mentioned it. It seems certain to me that a quite large number of people, far from all of them admirers of his work or his politics, were aware that Grass had been in the Waffen SS but thought that ‘there is no point in talking about all that.’

‘There is an hour of the day which falls between returning from the factory and the evening Appell, a distinctive, always bustling and liberated hour that I, for my part, always looked forward to and enjoyed the most while in the Lager; as it happened, this was generally also suppertime.’ This is the voice of Gyuri, a 14-year-old boy from a Jewish family in Budapest, remembering...

‘All history is the history of unintended consequences, but that is especially true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the gigantic struggles over the future of Amazonia or the Yangtze basin as much as to penitent thinking about what ‘development’ has done to the lands of the Danube, Dnieper or Rhone.

As soon as you realise how good it is, this book will frighten you. This is not just a history. It is a highly intrusive biography, especially if, like me, you belong to the British generations who were children before and during the war. When we were learning to read, Europe was a dark word, an inaccessible ‘over there’ place of suffering and menace. But as we grew up and the war...

His son goes on to revive some of Claud’s maxims about journalism, and to update them against his own experience. ‘All stories are written backwards,’ he once observed. ‘They are supposed to begin with the facts and develop from there, but in reality they begin with a journalist’s point of view from which the facts are subsequently organised.’ Patrick takes this disrespect even further. Reporters, he finds, ‘are ill-equipped to extract information which others do not want to impart’. Most great stories - Watergate, for instance - arise from deliberate leaks rather than from fearless investigation. ‘A journalist might like to be a spy but generally ends up as a conduit for information.’ True enough. I remember how in Warsaw the great German journalist Ludwig Zimmerer told his apprentice Chris Bobinski: ‘My boy, in this job you must learn to let your head be used as a latrine!’