First of all: the facts. Beloved German author and moral compass Gunter Grass, author of The Tin Drum, Crabwalk, My Century, and many other works, revealed a few years ago in an interview about his then upcoming memoir Peeling the Onion that, as a teenager, he was drafted into the Nazi army and served in the Waffen-SS, the most brutal Nazi contingent. No one is denying that this is shocking and regrettable. But for some, admitting this has not been enough. There was at one point talk of revoking his Nobel Prize, and countless critics and intellectuals have registered their disgust and outrage at Grass’s previous silence. Others have stood up for Grass, suggesting that a mistake made in the man’s adolescent years hardly undoes his life’s work. I am a late-comer to this debate, and I’m not sure there’s much I can add to what everyone from Christopher Hitchens to John Irving has already said. But it’s impossible to defend someone who deserves to be defended too much, and I would also like to discuss some other issues raised by the controversy. For instance, what is the moral role of artists, if any? Also, to what extent should people be forgiven for their former political mistakes? I would also like to talk about the memoir itself, which partly deals with Grass’s brief military career.

It’s always easy for people who have never had to face serious moral and political decisions to criticize those who go in for the wrong side. (“Those who live in glass houses…”) And before critics start attacking Grass for the mistakes he made as a seventeen-year-old, they should ask themselves where they stand on the issues of today. For instance, Christopher Hitchens has been critical of Grass, but he has come out squarely for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What right does he have, as a man who is standing up for violence, war, and destruction in our own times, to criticize someone for an act of stupidity which occurred sixty years ago?

The truth is that none of us can know how we would have behaved in Nazi Germany, because none of us were there. So it’s a bit dismaying to see people who never had to ask themselves in their teenage years about concentration camps or genocide stepping up one after another to attack Grass. This attitude can also be seen in the criticisms which have come out against the new pope. While the man isn’t admirable for many reasons, the one aspect of his past which has received the most attention was his brief stint in the Hitler Youth as a young boy. But it turns out that Ratzinger was not a devoted member-he was simply expected to attend. Who can say that at eight or nine-years-old they wouldn’t have done the same thing? The young Ratzinger also saw the horror of the Hitler regime first hand-a family member of his was killed for being mentally handicapped. He was no hero in the war, but you can’t expect children to be. They are always the ones who suffer most in war, and most come out simply feeling bewildered. People who expect children to assume adult moral responsibilities or to make intelligent political decisions have obviously forgotten what it is to be young and ignorant-and that’s exactly what Gunter Grass was.

But then again, some would argue, Grass was seventeen, not a child, and he was a member of the Waffen-SS, not merely the regular army. If he’s not to blame, then who is? Well, he was drafted into the SS and did not join voluntarily for one thing, but the moral question still stands. It’s helpful to remember that Grass’s case is only the most recent in a long series of controversies surrounding intellectuals and their relationship to the Nazi atrocities. There was Knut Hamsun in Norway who never apologized for his fascist leanings. In English-speaking circles, T.S. Eliot was known to be a bit of an anti-Semite and right-winger, even if he never came out fully for the fascists. Ezra Pound was entirely pro-fascist and even ended up in chains at the end of the war after going to fight for Mussolini! There was also Wyndham Lewis, the author of The Apes of God, who was at one point an admirer of Hitler and who remained an anti-Semite to the end of his days. Probably the weirdest Nazi controversy involved P.G. Wodehouse, whose humorous novels about Wooster and Jeeves don’t exactly suggest a fascist tendency. But in 1941, when Wodehouse was captured and imprisoned by an advancing German army while staying on the continent, he agreed to do radio broadcasts for the Nazis. These pieces could not be called Nazi propaganda, but they were conducted under the auspices of the German army. Are these people to blame for their actions? And if they are guilty, why not Grass?

Of course, all of these people are guilty, because they were thinking, reasoning adults with all, or nearly all, of the information before them. Yet they still went in for racism, fascism, and totalitarianism, to a greater or lesser extent. There are some people who feel that the moral laws which apply to the rest of us don’t apply to artists. I tend to think this is bunk. What’s more, I think that works of art suffer when they are attached to evil doctrines. Of course, the Wodehouse novels are still funny and Eliot’s poetry is still interesting, but to read a passage from T.S. Eliot which is anti-Semitic today is uncomfortable. Art is changed by the “message” it conveys. So should all art have a moral message? No, but art that has an immoral message should be discredited, or at least, should be viewed with that message in mind.

But then, why should Grass be allowed to plead ignorance and not to these others? And actually, George Orwell tried to defend Wodehouse using that very excuse in 1944. Wodehouse, he contended, was not a fascist (probably true) and was merely a political naïf. This too is probably true, but it is hardly an excuse. Being unaware of the Nazi threat in 1941 was not like being unaware of the local mayoral election. Not to have an opinion on Hitler was almost as bad as supporting him. I don’t think that Wodehouse should be forgiven, even if his books should still be read and enjoyed. But the situation of Gunter Grass, as I will try to point out, is different.

Most people don’t remember what it was like to be seventeen. So we have Peeling the Onion to help us remember. Whether one likes Grass or not, it is an excellent book, even if it drags after the end of the war narrative. Sure it was dishonest of Grass not to have disclosed his SS-membership earlier, but this book makes up for it in candor. He does not attempt to retreat behind the ignorance excuse or to suggest that he was secretly anti-Nazi the whole time. He knows that he was a stupid teenager doing stupid things. He says he was in disbelief the first time he was shown photos of the death camps, which is probably true, but he doesn’t pretend that the images filled him with a sense of terrible personal guilt. He actually thought of Hitler as a liberator, and he tells us so. That’s what makes the book worthwhile. It doesn’t attempt to retell the past with 20/20 hindsight. It isn’t written from the perspective of an adult making excuses about his past or pretending to be something that he was not. It’s simply an honest account of war, which is always waged by children. Maybe it’s the lack of excuses which makes Grass’s repentance so real. But at any rate, anyone who reads the book will come away feeling for its author.

If there’s any lesson to be learned it’s this: everyone makes mistakes. It’s a cliché, but it’s absolutely true. Seventeen-year-olds tend to make more mistakes than most. It just isn’t fair to negate a lifetime’s work and a lifetime’s worth of political activism because of Grass’s SS stint (in which he did not kill a single person and accomplished absolutely nothing). In every life there are things we wish we hadn’t said or done, things which will embarrass us forever. The only way to decide whether or not a person is worthy of forgiveness is whether or not they are truly repentant. In that sense, I take the Catholic perspective. People can be redeemed as long as they genuinely recognize their own guilt and complicity in the crimes of the past. I can think of many people who definitely shouldn’t be forgiven for past crimes. For instance, there are the Southern politicians who “used to be” racist. They claim to have abandoned their hatred of black Americans, but go on in our own time to behave as bigots-either by opposing gay rights or by promoting semi-racist policies. Anyone could see that these people never really changed. But the case of Grass is very different. Had he rebuked his part in the war but then gone on to rail against immigrants, it would be obvious to all that he was still a Nazi, just under a different name. But Grass has spent his life fighting for social justice. In the Cold War, he took the only truly moral point of view as a “double rejecter”, both of American capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. His decades of work as an activist have more than made up for whatever he did as a young man. People can atone for the past, as long as they are honest about it and work for human rights and human dignity in the present. Grass has, with the publication of Peeling the Onion, now done both.