NEW YORK — What kind of courage, or audacity even, is required to stage, in Washington, a play featuring Adolf Hitler — one provocatively titled "My Friend Hitler" and written no less than by Yukio Mishima? After all, not just Hitler, but anything associated with Hitler is condemned here. And Mishima has a certain kind of reputation.

Recently Gunter Grass has created a furor by writing in his autobiography, "Peeling the Onion," that he was a soldier of the Waffen-SS, the outfit the Nuremburg Tribunal termed criminal. The "outrage and amazement" at the belated "admission" have been such that The New Yorker excerpted the incriminating section, so to speak, even as the book was being published in English translation.

The reaction, I gather, was far stronger in Germany, but it's been great enough here, too, for the novelist John Irving, in The New York Times Book Review, and the historian Timothy Garten Ash, in The New York Review of Books, to feel compelled to defend Grass.