Günter Grass

Günter Grass and I have nothing in common except for this: we both grew up in Europe during World War II. I am almost ten years younger than Grass, so I cannot remember anything but war during my childhood. Grass, by contrast, has some memories of what was regarded, perhaps jokingly, as peacetime. What is more, his circumstances were very different from mine: Grass’s family were accepted, more or less anyway, as legitimate members of the new Europe Hitler was trying to forge. My family, remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, assimilated and secular Jews, patriotic Hungarians among them, were dubbed vermin and pariahs. Some of my relatives perished in the death camps. Yet, despite all that, Grass and I are products of the same world and share never-to-be- forgotten images of devastation, suffering, cruelty and the odd moment of human compassion that illuminated the darkness of those terrible years. I remember the ruined cities, the endless processions of people seeking safety, the piles of bodies, the stench of death. I did not see corpses of soldiers, executed immediately after drum-head courts martial, hanging from trees. But I did see people battered to death on the streets, and I heard the rattle of machine-gun fire on the bank of the Danube in Budapest a moment or two after my mother and I managed to slip away from a queue of women and children heading for a horrible death.

These memories returned with particular force when I read the English version of Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Screams of protest went up in Germany when this expansive memoir by the 1999 Nobel laureate hit the bookshops. That in itself was hardly surprising. Ever since the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959, Grass has been going out of his way to be provocative, to point the finger at his fellow Germans. In novel after novel, poem after poem, he reminded them of their murky history in the first half of the twentieth century. Time and again he insisted that the beneficiaries of the Nazi regime were doing very nicely, thank you, in West Germany, the paradise of the post-World War II economic miracle. Before long, a classic Pavlovian reaction emerged among critics and commentators. As soon as a new work by Grass was announced, the barking started.

After the Berlin Wall came down Grass changed tack a little. He was still excoriating former Nazis and their sympathisers, who were busily plundering the resources of the old GDR. A new note was sounded, however. In a long, turgid and often tedious novel known in English as Too Far Afield, released in 1995, a little over fifty years after the Red Army captured Berlin, Grass had the temerity to suggest that some valuable aspects of life were lost when the Stasi-controlled totalitarian state – vividly depicted film The Lives of Others – collapsed. The fuss was extraordinary. I happened to be in Germany at the time, a guest of the German Federal government. What I witnessed week after week as the media and the literati howled for Grass’s blood made our own noisy literary scandals gentle and genteel by comparison. The latest cause célèbre broke out in 2006. This time, however, the boot was on the other foot. Peeling the Onion – a commonplace and eventually tiresome conceit – deals with the first thirty years or so of Grass’s life. He was born in 1927 in Danzig, now the Polish city Gdansk, famous as the heartland of Solidarity, the Vatican-backed workers’ movement that helped topple the Soviet empire. At the time of Grass’s birth Danzig was a predominantly German-speaking free city-state surrounded by what many saw as a menacing sea of Slavs. Grass’s parents were small shopkeepers who struggled to make ends meet in a poky two-room flat with a communal lavatory on the landing. The elder Grass was enthusiastic when Hitler took over the city. His wife was much more ambivalent. Their daughter was too young to understand what was going on. But Günter, the adolescent son, was beguiled by Dr Goebbels’s propaganda machine: patriotic broadcasts, carefully edited newsreels of stunning victories and numberless deeds of amazing heroism. He lusted for adventure, setting his sights on becoming a submariner.

Life (and perhaps death) beneath the waves was not to be his lot. In the last months of 1944, just short of his seventeenth birthday, he joined the army and was assigned to a unit of the Waffen SS. He saw some action and much chaos in Germany and Bohemia. Soon, Grass insists, the infatuation with the glory of the Fatherland faded. He was captured by the Americans, interned in various camps, including one at Marienbad (nowadays Marianske Lazne) a once luxurious spa resort. He was soon set free and embarked on a career of working in mines, as a stonecutter, an aspiring sculptor and artists, occasional poet and eventually a world-renowned (and reviled) novelist, the conscience of his nation. That is, at least, how Grass tells the story of his adventures with the Waffen SS. The uproar the followed the publication of this book in Germany often questioned the reliability of his disclaimers – he has recently started a lawsuit for defamation. He was, he insists, merely a misguided boy, not a fanatic or an ideologue. By the time he signed up, he suggests, the Waffen SS was no more than a pale shadow of its former gory self. Some commentators agree with him: not every sector of that notorious organisation committed war crimes for which the organisation as a whole was condemned. Others are not so forgiving: even in the dying days of the Third Reich, being accepted by the Waffen SS was no mean accomplishment. The truth, as ever, probably lies somewhere in the middle. Yet what is so troubling about this memoir is not the fact itself but the way Grass consistently tries to pick his way around one awkward spot: the decades of denial, of drawing a veil over what may have been no more than adolescent folly. As always, it’s the attempted cover-up that does the most damage.

These matters occupy no more than a third of a long book. Yet they cast a shadow over the rest. Of course, Grass can write wonderfully: there are vivid descriptions of wartime and postwar Germany in these pages. Among several memorable anecdotes one stands out: how in a prisoner of war camp he played games of chance with a deeply religious young man from Bavaria called Joseph. His surname, Grass insists without real evidence, might have been Ratzinger, thus identifying the youth as the future Pope Benedict. Another anecdote tells of an impromptu jam-session with the great Satchmo. The death of Grass’s mother is movingly described. His own Italian journey – a must for Germans ever since Goethe’s time – is wonderfully well told. And for Grass enthusiasts there are countless details that identify the genesis of his novels, particularly of The Tin Drum – where this memoir stops short – and any amount of literary-artistic gossip. It may be ungenerous, but I couldn’t banish the suspicion that much of this book is window-dressing. As Grass peels away layer after layer of the onion of the past, one note, like a Wagnerian leitmotiv, is constantly sounded: he can’t remember things, memory is so treacherous. Many will be disinclined to believe him, justly so perhaps. Yet that insistence on the treacherousness of memory struck a chord for me. How can we, fallible human beings, untangle our motives, the impulses that led us to act in one way and not in another? Perhaps Grass should be believed when he writes early in book that “memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away … to dress up, often needlessly.” In any event – though I know this will upset some people – does it matter all that much whether he is telling what he sees as the truth or embellishing it? In one sense, of course, it matters greatly: Grass is a prominent contemporary literary figure whose work has always been polemical in significant though oblique ways. He should therefore be held accountable, in Germany above all and among those who suffered from the barbarism of the a regime that Grass served, no matter how unwillingly or unenthusiastically. In another sense, though, Peeling the Onion will live on into a world where these preoccupations have receded into a more distant history. It is impossible to tell what future generations will value in this book, or indeed whether it will be remembered. I would like to think, however, that once the dust has settled, readers will continue to be attracted to this memoir, as they will continue, I hope, to be attracted to The Tin Drum, Dog Years, The Flounder and the other extraordinary works by this pugnacious, troubling but immensely gifted writer.

"This is an expanded version of a review first published in The Sydney Morning Herald"

The Book

Grass, Günter: Peeling the Onion / translated by Michael Henry Heim – Random House, 2008 – 432 pages
ISBN: 9780099507598
Original title: Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (German)