From 1999 NYTimes article "A Cloud of Witness", by Peter Gay:

"More significantly, Grass always before able to face horror and disaster, seems at this late date to be losing his nerve in ''My Century.'' Trying to capture the terrible years of World War II, he does not invent independent scenes between 1939 and 1945, but chooses a get-together of German war correspondents in 1962 reminiscing about their experiences, as though this catastrophe were too much to bear. It is in that distancing section that Grass alludes tersely, almost casually, to the Nazis' mass murder of European Jews, as though he has found that, too, impossible to confront head-on."

...

"Finally, to add but one more instance to a list that could be enlarged at will, we hear of ''the Spiegel affair'' without further comment, an entry incomprehensible unless we know that in 1962 the government arrested editors and correspondents of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel for publishing a ''treasonous'' article, a ham-handed police action only too reminiscent of Nazi tactics that grew into a great scandal and eventually led to the resignation of Franz Josef Strauss, the powerful minister of defense."