Peeling the Onion, by Günter Grass, Harvill Secker, ISBN 978-1846550621; $59.95 website
The publication of Günter Grass’s memoir comes surrounded by considerable controversy due to revelations last year that the Nobel laureate had been a member of the Waffen SS. We have long known that Grass was a member of the Hitler Youth, was drafted into anti-aircraft batteries in the final stages of World War II and had ended up as an American POW. We didn’t know that as a 17-year-old he had volunteered for the armed services and had then been assigned to Nazism’s elite unit.
The ensuing furore was clearly charged by culture wars over questions of complicity with Germany’s Nazi past. Grass’s work had always posed important questions about Germany’s failure to come to terms with the past; this latest revelation focused attention on his own failure in this area. Peeling the Onion unsettles our reading of that previous work while also perhaps representing its most developed achievement.
The memoir deals with a common theme in German letters: the growth and education of the young artist, albeit refracted through the extreme conditions of Nazi Germany. It skips over Grass’s very early years, beginning in the period beyond childhood innocence — which he puts at eleven or twelve years old — and continues up until the publication of his first and defining work, The Tin Drum. If the hero of that first novel refused to grow up, this was clearly not an option for Grass.
The memoir’s central metaphor suggests the attempt to redress the ambiguities of memory, to peel away its layers and reveal things covered over. The narrative begins in Grass’s native city of Danzig (present day Gdansk), one of the places to witness the opening salvos of the Second World War.
Grass worries about his past thoughts and actions, often disallowing the comfort of retrospective justification and excuse. This work may not satisfy critics expecting some more direct form of confession, but it does powerfully underline the ordinariness of responsibility.
Grass didn’t have a choice when he was drafted into the Luftwaffe auxiliaries and the Labour Service but he doesn’t allow this to excuse him or others.
The sequence in the book causing the most controversy addresses and focuses on the period where Grass actually volunteered for active duty in an attempt to join the submarine fleet. This was partly for the mundane reason of trying