This is CNN

Yesterday, I got to visit the Berlin Bureau of CNN, which is in the same building as Reuters, so it was a very short trip. The Berlin Bureau is small, and currently consists of only one person, Claudia the camerawoman...normally there are three or four people there, but still a lean operation. I went out yesterday with Claudia to a bookstore to do some more voxpops about reactions to author Gunter Grass´ revelation in a new book that he was a member of the Nazi Waffen SS in WWII...Today I interviewed author Dr. Rafael Seligmann for CNN about Grass...very interesting, although I am unsure why Grass would come out with this so late in life--some say to promote his book, which sounds feasible, except that I think he doesn´t need the money, some say it is a confession to clear his conscience, or that the news was going to come out anyway, so he included it in his autobiography as a pre-emptive maneuver...who knows what the real story is with that, but it is an intriguing story bc I have heard that Grass has been a kind of moral conscience for Germany in his career, and has maybe been critical of the military service of others, so for some of Grass´ critics, this comes across as hypocritical, although it seems to be agreed that the actual service in the SS as a seventeen year old is not the reason to be upset, but rather for the hypocrisy of acting as a moral compass and this dishonesty through the years which critics say sheds doubt on other aspects of his career, although perhaps not on his writing itself, for which he won a Nobel Prize...anyway, I´m rambling, but I can´t decide if this is just a marketing ploy to sell books, or an old timer coming clean as in a confession, or if it is really that big a deal anyway...some people didn´t think his military service was that big a deal, it was fairly common, and he was very young...complicated and intriguing story although probably not that important in the grand scheme...it does tie in well, though, to Germany´s current debate about whether to involve troops in the Middle East as a part of the UN Force...some are wary about having German troops in Israel, bc of the historic ramifications. It seems that often Germany cannot escape its past, and maybe that it embraces it and faces it too strongly, and makes decisions based on sins of a previous generations...I´m not really sure how accurate that last statement is, I don´t really have a great sense of this place yet, so I may be way off with that. Anyway, I´ve gone on pretty long here...class dismissed.