Peeling the Onion

Günter Grass's memoir traces his life from childhood in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) through his years as a soldier, prisoner of war, laborer, art student, and fledgling writer, concluding with his discovery of the first sentence of his landmark novel The Tin Drum in Paris in the late 1950s. Grass uses two governing metaphors for memory: the onion, whose skins reveal truths that are "seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing," and pieces of Baltic amber, whose encapsulated insects preserve the past in transparent but distorted form.

Grass declares that his childhood ended at the outbreak of World War II, when German forces attacked the Polish military base at Westerplatte, dive bombers struck the Neufahrwasser dock area, and fighting broke out at the Polish Post Office in Danzig's Old Town. Before the war, he collected bomb splinters to trade for stamps, amassed art reproductions through cigarette-coupon programs, and excelled in art and German at the Conradinum gymnasium while failing at mathematics and Latin. His mother, Helene, ran the family grocery single-handedly; his father, Wilhelm, handled windows and wholesalers. When the boy wanted pocket money, his mother gave him a ledger of customers' debts and a percentage of whatever he collected, a job that stored in him a lifetime's narrative material.

The family was touched early by violence. His mother's cousin, Uncle Franz, a postman who helped defend the Polish Post Office, was executed by the Germans, and the family never spoke his name again. Grass identifies this silence as the first instance of a recurring shame: his failure to ask "Why?" He confesses that he witnessed the November 1938 destruction of the Langfuhr synagogue by SA (Nazi paramilitary) storm troopers and was, "at most, surprised." He joined the Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth, voluntarily, drawn by its uniforms and campfire camaraderie, and acknowledges that he was "a Young Nazi. A believer till the end."

The memoir's most consequential revelation is that at fifteen, while serving as a Luftwaffe auxiliary, Grass volunteered for active military duty. He states that this cannot be excused as youthful folly. After compulsory Labor Service, a pre-military program of manual work and drill, during which he witnessed the arrest of a conscientious objector, a Jehovah's Witness whose unvarying refusal to touch a weapon was expressed in the phrase "We don't do that," Grass received his induction letter in September 1944. His mother wept at home; his father carried his suitcase to the platform and cried as the train departed.

In Dresden, Grass learned he had been assigned to the Waffen SS, the armed wing of the SS, specifically to an armored tank division being raised under the honorific name "Jörg von Frundsberg." He confronts this directly, admitting that the double SS rune did not repel him at the time; he saw the Waffen SS as an elite force with a "European aura." For decades he concealed this out of shame, stating that "there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility."

After brutal training in the Bohemian Woods, Grass experienced his baptism of fire in mid-April 1945, when a Soviet Katyusha rocket launcher blanketed his unit's position. He crawled under a Jagdpanther, a German tank destroyer, and emerged to find bodies strewn everywhere. In the chaos of retreat, he twice ended up behind Russian lines; during one episode, his inability to ride a bicycle saved his life when comrades who rode stolen bicycles from a cellar were cut down by machine-gun fire. An unnamed private first class (Pfc) from Berlin became his protector and advised him to swap his Waffen SS jacket for an ordinary Wehrmacht (regular German armed forces) uniform to avoid execution if captured. On approximately April 20, 1945, Soviet tank fire wounded Grass in the right thigh and lodged a fragment in his left shoulder.

Transported through hospitals to Marienbad in the Sudetenland, Grass arrived as the war ended. Hitler's death barely registered; the Führer "was gone as if he had never been." At an American POW camp in the Upper Palatinate, Grass experienced gnawing hunger under the Morgenthau Plan, an Allied policy that imposed severe ration limits of 850 calories daily. Among the camp's self-organized educational activities was an abstract cooking course in which a master chef used only a blackboard and chalk to teach famished pupils to butcher a pig, prepare blood sausage, and roast a goose with mugwort. These lessons taught Grass the power of conjuring the unattainable through words. When an American education officer showed photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück, Grass and his fellow prisoners refused to believe the evidence. His obstinacy broke only when he heard Baldur von Schirach, former head of the Hitler Youth, testify at the Nuremberg tribunal that he alone had known about the extermination of the Jews.

After release, Grass wandered through the British Occupation Zone, trading on the black market and working briefly on farms. In Göttingen, he walked out of a school for veterans when the history teacher opened with the Ems Dispatch, a Bismarck-era diplomatic provocation. He took a job in the Siegfried I potash mine near Hanover. During power outages, miners debated politics: Communists, unreconstructed Nazis, and Social Democrats competed for influence, with Communists and Nazis invariably uniting against the Social Democrats, replaying the dynamic that had destroyed the Weimar Republic. A locomotive driver took Grass to hear Social Democratic leader Kurt Schumacher speak, planting seeds of lifelong political engagement.

Grass reunited with his diminished family in the Rhineland, where his parents and sister had resettled after fleeing Danzig. When his father offered a desk job at a local mine, Grass declared his intention to become a sculptor and left for Düsseldorf. He found the Academy of Art open but deserted due to coal shortages; a professor advised him to apprentice first. Grass learned his craft at a tombstone firm before gaining admission to the Academy, where he studied sculpture and clashed with professors over artistic conventions. In the summer of 1952, visiting Switzerland, he met Anna Schwarz, a nineteen-year-old planning to study modern dance in Berlin. At a farewell party, a three-year-old boy crossed the room with a toy drum, an image that lodged permanently in Grass's imagination.

During these years, Grass's mother was dying of cancer. He visited her at Saint Vincent's Hospital in Cologne, where her bed had been moved into a windowless storeroom. She died on January 24, 1954, while he slept beside her. Only afterward did his sister reveal that their mother had offered herself to Soviet soldiers to protect her daughter during the fall of Danzig. Grass married Anna on April 20, 1954, in Lenzburg, Switzerland. Among the wedding gifts was an Olivetti Lettera portable typewriter, which he declares his lifelong companion.

In the spring of 1955, Grass read poems at a meeting of Group 47, a prominent postwar literary circle, and received enthusiastic praise. Luchterhand Verlag eventually published his poetry collection The Merits of Windfowl, which sold only 735 copies but established him as an author. In late 1956, Grass and Anna moved to Paris, where he converted a basement boiler room into a studio and befriended the poet Paul Celan. After the birth of twin sons and many false starts, Grass found the first sentence of The Tin Drum at his studio's damp wall: "Granted: I am an inmate at a mental institution . . ." Words poured forth, fueled by a 1958 trip to Gdańsk, where he visited his Kashubian great-aunt, a member of a people caught between German and Polish identities, and collected sensory details of his lost city. In October 1958, he won Group 47's prize. When The Tin Drum appeared in autumn 1959, he and Anna traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair "and danced till morning." The memoir closes with Grass declining to continue: "to tell of all that, I have neither the onions nor the desire."