The other volume is your 1960 collection of poems, Gleisdreieck, as always beautifully illustrated by the author. One of the best is "Nursery Rhyme": "Wer spricht hier, spricht und schweigt?/Wer schweigt, wird angezeigt./Wer hier spricht, hat verschwiegen,/wo seine Gründe liegen." (Who speaks here or keeps mum?/Here we denounce the dumb./To speak here is to hide/deep reasons kept inside.) Yet, strange to say, nobody ever thought to ask whether you, too, might have had something to hide.

Granted: you are not the inmate of a mental hospital. Unlike Oskar Mazerath, the diminutive hero of The Tin Drum, you do not play the drum incessantly nor utter shrieks so high-pitched they shatter glass. Oskar, your brainchild, disguises himself as a retarded infant with a mental age of three in order to bear witness to the sinister events around him, Germany's descent into the abyss of the Third Reich.

Oskar's unbearable scream is a protest, all the more eloquent for being inarticulate, against that silence in the face of depravity that made Hitler possible. In Oskar, you created one of our most memorable metaphors for the moral insanity of Nazism.

Now, however, you have forced us to read your books again, and in an ambiguous light. In your interview last weekend, you sought to justify your decision to volunteer as a teenage revolt against the narrow confines of your petty bourgeois home. To thus romanticise your youthful Nazi allegiance is, frankly, sickening, but maybe that is how you saw it at the time.

If so, The Tin Drum may not be the novel we thought it was. Your harsh social satire is aimed at the people you grew up with, small shopkeepers with a bust of Hitler beside that of Beethoven. In real life, however, your bid for freedom was not directed against the Nazis, but for a more radical version of the ideology: the death or glory paganism of the Waffen SS.