Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar

I have a new post, Anti-hagiography, at The Sharpener:

Sometimes our ‘saints’ need to be disrobed.

Gunter Grass, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, has recently admitted to serving in the Waffen-SS during the last days of World War Two. This story is being dressed up as exposing Grass as a hypocrite. I argue that the story is does nothing of the sort. But it does contain the spectacle of another, similarly moustachioed Central European 20th Century living ‘saint’ inadvertently flashing the gallery the some of the more vulgar parts of his character. This post is not about the revelations volunteered by Grass, but the reaction of Lech Walesa to this stone being ploughed to the surface.

Read the rest of Anti-hagiography.