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The \"dacha\" was nothing like Dr. Zhivago's. Angelika didn't look like Pasternak's Lara, either. It was hard to say which was more kitsch: the white asbestos box or the bleached-blonde East German woman from whom we were trying to buy. This came out along with the photos: Angelika and Gunther in front of Caesar's, Bellagio, the Venetian. We sealed the deal, not realizing it included our new friend. Angelika cleaned teeth for what living she could manage. Her own smile was bright and brittle. We saw it more often than we wanted, once she started dropping in. She'd show up at midnight on her way to the local bar, or dump her son and disappear. She'd pop in on our barbecues, parade the boys past the beach on giant electric vehicles. My very Americanness, it seemed, was a lure.

Grass was 78 before he could bring himself to reveal in a new memoir that, as a teenager, he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. [Margarete Barthel] was 74 when she outed herself as a former SS guard at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Both were drafted into an arm of the SS late in the Second World War: Barthel, at age 20, into the women's auxiliary; Grass, at 17, into the army battalions. The German media were quick to label Grass's revelation a \"confession.'' Yet, seeing him speak publicly for the first time earlier this month and read from the memoir that contains his startling admission, I could not help but think of Barthel. Today, she is a warm and garrulous soul haunted by her nine months as a guard at Ravensbrueck, a slave labour camp for women outside Berlin, in which some 30,000 prisoners died. Unlike Barthel, [Elfriede Rinkel] joined the SS voluntarily. Decades later, both sought to justify their actions. Rinkel said she had done \"nothing wrong.'' Barthel relied on a defence that has long been her generation's favoured refrain: They were \"innocently guilty.''

She was, and still is, a nobody. He is Germany's most famous writer. But Margarete Barthel and Guenter Grass share a great deal in common.

[Guenter Grass] was 78 before he could bring himself to reveal in a new memoir that, as a teenager, he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. [Margarete Barthel] was 74 when she outed herself as a former SS guard at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Both were drafted into an arm of the SS late in World War II: Barthel, at age 20, into the women's auxiliary; Grass, at 17, into the army battalions. They both hid that shame for decades, until their consciences forced the truth out. The German media were quick to label Grass's revelation a \"confession.\" Yet, seeing him speak publicly for the first time earlier this month and read from the memoir that contains his startling admission, I could not help but think of Barthel. Today, she is a warm and garrulous soul haunted by her nine months as a guard at Ravensbrueck, a slave labor camp for women outside Berlin, in which some 30,000 prisoners died. A sense of guilt, and a need to understand why she did what she did, drove Barthel to speak to me last year for a Post profile I wrote about her life. She, like Grass, voluntarily disclosed her ugly secret. But to call either story a confession is to misunderstand German society -- and the nature of confession itself. The fury and sense of betrayal that Grass's admission sparked across Germany came less from his brief stint in the combat arm of Adolf Hitler's dreaded paramilitary force than from his longtime condemnation of other Germans who repressed their own Nazi pasts. Yet I have come to think that the roots of our collective disappointment run deeper. As an American writer living in Germany since 2003, married to a German journalist and raising our children here, I frequently confront reminders of this nation's Nazi past. Whether in political controversies surrounding historical exhibits or neo-Nazis or the personal stories of our German family and friends, the Holocaust is rarely far from the surface. What disturbs us, I suspect, is that with Grass and Barthel -- as with most Germans of their generation -- we are offered confession without true contrition.