It's only available to subscribers ...

... but Bernard-Henri Levy's pronouncement on Günter Grass (hat tip, Dave Lull) is certainly worth quoting - and reading in full if you can:


It's not a question of the great-writer-who-also-has-his-dark-side-and-shadowy-regions) who presented himself as--and who was--the conscience of Germany. I saw Grass in Berlin in 1983 on the birthday of Willy Brandt, first at the rostrum and later seated at the center of a group of friends and admirers--the thick hair and gruff voice, the oval glasses that made him look like Bertolt Brecht, his heavy face all atremble with emotion.
Grass exhorted--oh, how right he was!--his contemporaries in the "other," beautiful Germany to face up to the famous "past which hasn't passed." And now, 20 years later, we learn that he was in the same situation as those men with incomplete memories, haunted by secret crimes--those same men he had so virtuously invited to come to terms with their deepest selves. Posturing, then. Imposter. A statue with feet of clay. The professor of morality was the embodiment of the very immorality that he decried.