Polish party asks Grass to give up honorary title

GDANSK, Poland, Aug 14 (Reuters) Poland's ruling party called on German author Guenter Grass on Monday to give up his honorary citizenship of the port city Gdansk after his belated confession that he was once a member of Hitler's Waffen SS.

The admission from the 78-year-old, famous for his 1957 novel ''The Tin Drum'', came in a newspaper interview on Saturday before the release in September of his autobiography ''Peeling Onions'' in which he explains why he joined at age 17.

''It is unacceptable for a city where the first blood was shed, where World War Two began, to have a Waffen-SS member as an honorary citizen,'' Jacek Kurski, a member of the ruling Law and Justice party and parliamentary deputy from Gdansk, told a news conference.

''It would be good if Grass gave up the title voluntarily.'' Kurski said his party would propose a resolution to the Gdansk city council to strip Grass of his honorary citizenship if the author failed to surrender it on his own.

Grass was born in Gdansk, and he has featured the city on the Baltic Sea, known as Danzig in German, in his prose.

Former Polish president Lech Walesa, himself an honorary citizen of Gdansk and a Nobel peace prize winner, urged Grass to give up the honorary title himself rather than wait for Gdansk officials to strip him of it.

''Who will talk to him here now or invite him?'' Walesa told Reuters. ''I am happy we never met, that I never had to shake his hand. I lost my father in the war and Grass was in the SS.'' Polish and German communities lived together in Gdansk before the war, but most of the German population fled as the war ended or were later expelled.

Grass had previously said he was drafted in 1944 to help anti-aircraft gun teams. He was held as a prisoner of war until 1946. After the war, he became an outspoken pacifist and icon of the German left.

Grass told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saturday the secret had been weighing on his mind and was one of the reasons he wrote the book which details his war service. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1999.

His confession has sparked an outcry from historians, writers and politicians, with some critics blaming him more for waiting to confess than for joining the SS.

REUTERS MQA RN1835