BERLIN (EJP)--- German Nobel prize-winning author Guenter Grass has spoken of his "shame" in his first television interview since revealing that he served in the Nazis’ notorious Waffen SS in the final months of WWII.

"What I am experiencing is an attempt to make me a non-person, to cast doubt on everything I did in my life after that. And this later life has been marked by shame," Grass said in the interview with ARD television shown in part on Tuesday night. The full interview is to be broadcast on Thursday.

Grass, whose first novel The Tin Drum in 1959 established him as a literary giant and icon of the German left, has come under widespread attack for his shock confession that he enrolled in the SS when he was 17 in the waning months of the war.

Asked why he had waited until the twilight of his life to reveal his guilty secret, 78-year-old Grass said that was the central theme of his autobiography "Peeling Onions".

"It is the subject of the book, I worked on it for three years, and everything I have to say on the subject is in it. Whoever wants to judge me, may judge me," he said in the interview given while on holiday in Denmark.

The book comes out on September 1.

Literary giant

For over four decades, Grass had been considered one of contemporary Germany’s most notable moral authorities. Much of his literature portrays images of his life.

He was one of 12 million Germans expelled from Germany’s eastern provinces or neighbouring countries. Nevertheless, his novels articulated his yearning for understanding and reconciliation, primarily between Germans and their eastern neighbours. Today, his childhood city of Danzig is the Polish city of Gdansk.

The admission of his SS past came in a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper interview,

At the age of 15, Grass said that had a dire need to get away from home. He thought that his ticket out of a “restrictive and narrow family environment” could have been the navy. He was rejected.

Two years later, the Waffen SS called him up for duty. In the last months of the war, the SS was in dire need of replenishing its manpower and was therefore less selective in accepting new recruits – also allowing men to join who were not necessarily devout supporters of Nazi ideology. Nevertheless, it only accepted men who had, at some point, made a voluntarily request to join.

Grass claimed that he had been overwhelmed by the secret he had been carrying around with himself for 61 years. “The years of silence finally swung me to write this book,” Grass told the FAZ.

Critics concerned

Award winning author Klaus Theweleit said in a Tagespiegel newspaper interview that he believed that Grass had another motive for having revealed his secret – namely to use it as a publicity ploy for his upcoming book.

Book critic Hellmuth Karasek told NDR radio he believed that Grass would never have received the Nobel Prize had his tainted past been publicly known before. “Grass certainly earned the Nobel Prize more than any other German author – but now we are seeing things in a different light,’ Karasek said.

Although most celebrities and public figures that were interviewed in newspapers and on television were disappointed concerning Grass’ omission of such an important aspect of his life, most agreed that Grass’ life-long commitment to reconciliation and dialogue more that compensated for his transgressions as a youth.

“What is important is not what Grass did when he was 17. What counts is what he has done since – which has been to hold up the political and moral values of our controversial democracy,” Klaus Staek, president of Berlin’s Academy of Arts told ZDF television.

Grass achieved international acclaim with his 1959 semi-autobiography, The Tin Drum. The film version won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1980. Grass won the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature for his writing talent "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history," according to the Nobel organisation.