Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass, translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim
London: Harvill Secker, 2007 (first German edition 2006) ISBN 9781846550621
I tend as a rule not to read biographies of authors, unless the life of the author is the mainspring of their work. Gunter Grass is an exemplar of that, mining his life to create amazing fiction over the years. I first encountered Grass in The Flounder rather than The Tin Drum, and I must say I found the latter not as powerful as the former, despite the fame it brought to the author. Be that as it may, I've been aware of this memoir since the controversy caused by it's publication, and thought it might give me some insight into Grass' works.
The controversy of course was the revelation that Grass - who famously has built his literary career on destroying the legacy of Nazi Germany - not only volunteered for the Wehrmacht, but was enlisted in the Waffen SS. Peeling the Onion deals with that and so much more as Grass reflects on his early life, up until his first marriage.
The book is a 400 page reflection on what Grass did do, what he didn't do, and how memory makes itself, sometimes out of nothing, sometimes with something small that gains a significance beyond it's worth, and sometimes eliding major events. The title of the book describes Grass' approach to writing his life: peeling the onion back layer by layer, investigating each skin to see what it can tell him about himself.
He spends much of the first half of the book investigating the question of what he actually did feel about the Nazis, and why in fact he volunteered for the army, much against his parent's wishes. He certainly never thought that the Nazi's were evil, he believed that Germany was fighting for it's existence, and in fact refused initially to believe the evidence of the Holocaust when a POW (as did most of his fellow prisoners).
His old self questions his young self about why he didn't protest, why did he follow the progress of the German Army and Navy on maps, why did he acquiesce to it all, and why did he volunteer to fight? As with many things in life, the answers are complex - youth desires to be a hero, youth wants away from parents, youth wants away from the boredom of the Luftwaffe Flak unit he was dragooned into. Age describes the folly of his choice, and shows via others that acquiescence to evil is not obligatory. His description of a fellow recruit who refused to bear arms ("wedontdothat") is a picture of what he could have done if he had the wisdom of age when he was a youth.
By the time he joined his unit, an SS Panzer Division , the final collapse of Germany was underway, and he spent his time fleeing from Russians, until he was wounded by shell splinters and was sent to hospital in Marienbad, where he was at war's end, and from where he became a POW.
His descriptions of his time in the various POW camps describe the hunger, which gave his attendance at a cooking class given by another POW who was a chef an added glamour. This is one skin of the onion that Grass remembers distinctly - a room full of hungry men preparing imaginary dishes... dishes that he went on to cook himself once he was settled and had the means to purchase ingredients. He also writes about the time he spend in a camp sheltering in a foxhole with a very catholic young soldier named Joseph....who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI? Maybe... and that's one of the tropes of this book, can we trust what our memory tells us, and can we trust what Grass is telling us? He never resolves this point, which weaves it's way through this book as a ghostly echo of the life Grass may have led if he hadn't abandoned his faith.
After his release, and having located his parents and sister in Dusseldorf, he headed there to pick up the pieces of his life. He never questioned his family about the traumas they suffered as Danzig was overrun, but he knew that what happened there to them changed them for ever. Grass describes how he was determined to become a sculptor and began an apprenticeship as a stone mason, where he helped rebuild Dusseldorf. Eventually he was accepted into art school, and began his new life as an artist.
He goes on to describe how it was his poetry that first garnered attention, after having been taken up by Group 47. By this time he was married to his first wife, and he had attended a fateful dinner party where the son of the host marched around banging on a tin drum. This unleashed his mind to produce his most famous novel, and made him a writer of renown.
Peeling the Onion tells us a lot about Grass the person - selfish, observant, obsessed with art and history, and from a young age understanding where he wanted to go, if not how to get there. It's a great piece of writing, a wonderful meditation on what memory is and how it can flatter to deceive, and how hard it is to arrive at any sort of "truth" about a life lived, especially in the tumultuous European 20th century.
A great book.
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