WHEN, IN AUGUST 2006, it became public knowledge that Günter Grass had served for a short time in the Waffen-SS at the end of the Second World War and had finally admitted to this in his new autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), the story unfolded not just in the German but also in the world media. Not only were the basic facts echoed in short press releases across the globe, consideration of the way Grass had related to this incriminating aspect of his biography throughout the course of his subsequent career ensured that the story continued to run in the world media for several months. Whether the angle taken was to explore the moral issues of joining the Waffen-SS in the first place (such an approach particularly suited the sensationalist reporting characteristic of the Bild-Zeitung, for example), or to question Grass's later legitimacy as a self-made “moralische Instanz,” or moralist, in postwar Germany (a line largely followed by his critics, many of whom collaborated on a lengthy cover story for Der Spiegel), ethical questions of “right” and “wrong” behavior were once again at the center of public debate in and about Germany.

This essay explicitly addresses such ethical issues of public self-presentation and reception. “Ethics,” understood in line with The Oxford English Dictionary definition as “a branch of knowledge that deals with the principles of human duty or the logic of moral discourse,” as well as “the rules of conduct recognized in a particular profession or area of life,” is a useful term through which to approach the sense of public accountability that has accompanied both scholarly and journalistic discussion of Grass in particular and of German postwar writing in general. I use the term in line with this common parlance quite deliberately, for although there is a growing body of specialist scholarship on the complex philosophical relationship between ethics and narrative discourse, it has so far tended to yield either abstract literary critical theory that is more concerned with reflecting on the general potential of narrative than to explain a text's immediate significance for its readers, or jargonized evaluation of an author's supposed “message.”