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Peeling the Onion
Interviewed on German television, Grass responded, when asked about the wartime narrative: "It weighed on me. My silence through all those years is one of the reasons I wrote this book. It had to get out at last." Since you either had to have very brave parents or be exceptionally brave yourself to avoid joining the Hitler Youth, not much blame can be attached to the 13-year-old Grass for being a joiner. When he was 16 and Germany was on the way to losing the war, he was drafted and volunteered to serve in submarines. He was rejected, conscripted into the Wehrmacht, sent to a still smouldering, destroyed Dresden and from there posted to an SS tank regiment. He was trained as a gunner, saw battle against the better-armed Russians, was wounded (he still has shrapnel in one arm) and became a POW in an American camp. Given the German passion for self-education, he attended cookery classes given by a chef of genius who lectured the near-starving prisoners on culinary matters entirely without ingredients, providing recipes that Grass, an enthusiastic domestic cook in his spare time, still uses. Released to find his own way home at 18 years of age, not knowing where his Danzig (now Gdansk) family was or even whether they were alive, he determined to be an artist — not a writer. His passion for art had been kindled by the cigarette-card reproductions of Renaissance paintings which he had collected as a child. He worked for a monumental mason in Düsseldorf, carving tombstones. Lodged in a Caritas hostel run by Franciscans, the senior monk there offered him a permanent sculpture studio, complete with blocks of Carrara marble, and the promise of a relatively comfortable existence in a still frozen and largely starving post-war world. Grass explained that he believed himself incapable of renouncing sex, which had by then become a "chronically incurable" hunger. Father Fulgentius resignedly "tucked his hands into the sleeves of his habit. ‘Ah yes’, he said, ‘the flesh.’" Grass’s accounts of his adventures with women are candid and touching and he muses on the fact that both his wives are one of three sisters, as was the foreman’s daughter with whom he dallied when he worked in a potash mine, as were the mothers of two of his other children. Grass adored his mother, seriously disliked his father and was close to his sister whom he rescued from a sadistically run convent where she was a novice nun. She remained as Catholic as Günter was anti-religious and he took pleasure in telling her about Joseph, a fellow POW with whom he struck up a firm friendship not harmed by the fact that Grass was determined to be a sculptor when the war was over and Joseph wanted to become a priest. Grass teases both her and the reader by suggesting that Joseph might well be Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. (The Pope, also a former member of the Hitler Youth, has recently turned 80 and Grass will be 80 this year.) The idea of Grass being invited to the Vatican for a chat about old times is curiously appealing. While sculpting, Grass wrote verse and, one day his wife and sister, without his knowledge, entered some of his poems in a radio competition. He won third prize, was invited to read at the key writers’ group Gruppe’47, found a publisher for his poetry and was, slowly, on his way. Peeling the Onion ends formally with the literary explosion that was the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959, but this exquisitely constructed narrative is dotted with many events from between 1959 and today. Some novelists’ memoirs are proof that all of their books are only skilfully worked autobiographies; some reveal that their books are pure works of imagination. Grass is neither — or both. This book is liberally sprinkled throughout, sometimes quite carefully and deliberately sign-posted, with copious references to characters and events which re-appear in the magic of Grass’s prose in The Tin Drum, Dog Years, Cat and Mouse, From the Diary of a Snail and later works such as the underrated but brilliant Crabwalk. With or without the signposts, these glimpses into his fiction’s origins give one that most pleasing of all literary frissons, the "shock of recognition". Above all, this is a wholly diverting book which plays fair with the reader while performing highly elaborate tricks with the nature of memory, as well as having multiple layers, like onions, which can both feed us and make us cry. As he writes in the first chapter: "When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised." Peeling the Onion is a genuine masterpiece. By arrangement with The Independent
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Günter
