Peeling the Onion: A Memoir (Hardcover)

With the publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959, Günter Grass established himself as a magical storyteller and a persistent pest. In fact, his unique talent has been to do both at once: to hector, albeit artfully, his readers, particularly his German readers, into confronting a past-specifically World War II-they have often preferred to ignore. Grass’s main targets have never wavered: forgetfulness and silence. In his Nobel lecture (he won the prize in 1999), he stated what had already become obvious over the course of his career: “Writers are by definition unable to leave the past in peace: they are quick to open closed wounds, peer behind closed doors, find skeletons in the cupboard . . . In other words, nothing is sacred . . . ”
Except, it would seem, Grass’s reputation, at least until the appearance, last August, of his memoir, Peeling the Onion, in German. Grass never denied that as a teenager he was seduced by Nazism or conscripted into the army, but in Peeling the Onion he finally acknowledges a fact he curiously never got around to acknowledging before: as a seventeen-year-old, he served in the Waffen SS, a unit notorious for repressing conquered populations, among other war crimes. “The past catches up to us,” Grass also said in his Nobel Lecture and so it has. The last remaining skeleton turns out to be his.
Grass’s adversaries, of whom there are many, particularly on the Right, have accused him of hypocrisy. Even his friends haven’t known what to make of this long overdue revelation. In an interview, just before the book came out, Grass explained that his silence had weighed heavily on him. And it was, he added, an important reason for writing the book. In Peeling the Onion, Grass has this to say: “For decades I refused to admit to the word (Waffen) and to the double letters (SS). What I had accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it.”
The account of what Grass actually did in the war is concise and also, given its controversial nature, oddly compartmentalised. He couldn’t feel worse, and he can hardly get it all out of the way fast enough. Anyone expecting to find a self-flagellating or, for that matter, soul-searching explanation in Peeling the Onion, now out in English, as to why Grass kept this secret is likely to be disappointed. The question is never addressed.
Grass’s clipped confession aside, Peeling the Onion does meticulously cover its author’s early years-from the beginning of the war to his first efforts as a writer in the late 1950s. Grass’s literary gifts are varied, even incongruous-he is polemical and playful-and that’s evident in this memoir, too. We get his memories of the family hero, his uncle, who died defending the post office against the Nazis; in addition, we get the author’s recollections of being dance-crazy after the war:

“We, the defeated, couldn’t get enough of the twelve-bar liberation offered by our transatlantic victors. “Don’t Fence Me In . . . ” We needed to celebrate our survival and forget the chance scenes staged by war. What was shameful or horrific we left to lurk below the surface.”

Grass also speculates about what might have happened if he had switched paths with Joseph, a religious young soldier he befriended during the last days of the war. Of Joseph and “the pious rubbish” he read to Grass while the two huddled in a tent, Grass thought, “He won’t amount to much.” Joseph, incidentally, was Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope.
Mostly, though, Peeling the Onion is a compelling mix of mundane minutiae and unimaginable hardship. Grass, who turns 80 this year, remains a keen observer of the way people in the worst conditions cling to the smallest comforts. There was, for instance, Grass’s stint in an American P.O.W. camp, and his recollection of the hunger that gnawed at him ceaselessly. Despite that, a fellow prisoner, a gourmand, gave Grass and others elaborate cooking lessons or what were, more accurately, lessons in magical realism. Imagination became a life-saving substitute for missing ingredients. For Grass, a hunger for food was twinned with a hunger for art.
After the war ended, Grass also learned something about the temptation of silence. His sister, for instance, avoided talking about what happened to her during the last days of the war. “There was no sign whatever of what she had seen or possibly suffered in Danzig (Grass’s hometown, also known as Gdansk, its Polish name) when the Russians came,” Grass writes. “It wasn’t something we talked about.”
After the war, Grass also had new preoccupations. He pursued his dream of becoming a sculptor and apprenticed as a stonemason. There were plenty of buildings to be repaired in post-war Germany; and there was “always a call for tombstones.” Grass’s journeys through his defeated nation also serve as a preview of the picaresque adventures of The Tin Drum’s anti-hero, Oskar Matzerath. Like his most famous creation, Grass searches for what is still salvageable in the midst of widespread physical and moral devastation.
The memoir’s title also speaks to the duality of its purpose. Grass is not just intent on revealing the past; he is intent on regretting it. The truth comes with tears. He could have been a better son, a better brother, a better husband, a better citizen, a better man. When the war had just begun and one of his teachers disappeared for disagreeing with the Nazi party line, Grass relied on his “status as a child to play dumb.” He accepted his teacher’s absence “without a murmur, and once more, dodged the word why, so that now, as I peel the onion, my silence pounds in my ears.”
He also uses the opportunity provided by Peeling the Onion to pay a moving tribute to his mother. After the war, Grass was, to his enduring shame, too busy reinventing himself-from aspiring sculptor to troublemaking writer-to pay attention to what his mother had gone through or to the fact that she was, as he blithely carried on with his life, succumbing to cancer. The memory haunts him still:

“. . . she, who gave me, her darling boy, everything and received little; she, who is my vale of joy and my vale of tears and who, when I wrote before and write now, looks over my shoulder even after death and says ‘Cross that out; it’s ugly,’ but I rarely listened to her and when I did it was too late; she, who was born in pain and died in pain, set me free to write and write; she, whom I would so like to kiss awake on paper still-white, so she could travel with me, only me, and see beauty, only beauty, and finally say, ‘That I should live to see such beauty…’; she, my mother, died on January 24, 1954. I wept later. Much later.”

Literary memoirs, the best of them, always walk a fine line between the self-serving and the self-excoriating, and while Grass is hard on himself in Peeling the Onion, where his mother is concerned, for example, he’s not hard enough, especially when it comes to the long overdue revelation at the core of the book-his time in the SS. Confession may be good for the soul, but this kind of episode in this kind of book requires more. It requires an explanation.
Of course, there may be no good answer as to why a self-confessed troublemaker like Grass, a man who dedicated himself to shaming others for their secrets, took so long to announce his own “recurrent sense of shame.” There may also be a good answer. It could be, as some observers have suggested, that this one stubborn lie was precisely what spurred Grass on, what made him such a tireless advocate for the uncomfortable truth. Either way, it’s incumbent on Grass to at least try to come to terms with his denial, with his more than 60 years of silence. That he never really seems to do this, makes Peeling the Onion-an often heartfelt memoir-ultimately more puzzling than poignant.
Joel Yanofsky (Books in Canada)

The German edition of this memoir by Nobel Prize–winning novelist Grass caused a stir with its revelations about the author's youthful service in the Waffen SS combat unit during the last months of WWII. According to his deliberately disjointed, impressionistic account of the war, Grass never fired a shot and spent his time fleeing both the Russians and German military police hunting for deserters, but he dutifully shoulders a joint responsibility for Nazi war crimes and a guilt and shame that gnaw, gnaw, ceaselessly. With less to repudiate in his postwar life as a budding sculptor and poet up to his 1959 breakthrough with The Tin Drum, he grows more engaged in his story as he recounts love affairs, bohemian idylls (he once played in an impromptu jazz quartet with Louis Armstrong) and his attempts to sift emotional wreckage from the past. Along the way, Grass notes people and events that he reworked into fictional characters and plots, and does quirky profiles of influential figures, including his penis and typewriter. In this otherwise very novelistic memoir, there's not much of a narrative arc, beyond the satisfaction of the author's perpetual hungers for food, sex and art, but Grass's powerfully evocative memories are spellbinding. (June)
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