Peeling the Onion
Gunter grass
Harvill Secker Rs 845

In his nobel lecture in 1999, Gunter Grass talked about his responsibility, as a writer, to shovel the “mountains of rubble and cadavers, fruit of the womb of German history”. This is a responsibility that he has taken upon himself throughout his writing career. In his latest work, a disturbing memoir of his boyhood and youth, Grass returns to the mountain of rubble to uncover a hitherto unacknowledged aspect of his past: his stint in the Hitler Youth and then, towards the desperate end of World War II, as a Panzer gunner with the Waffen SS.

Delving into memory to write about this part of his life, and the associated guilt and shame that haunt him to this day, Grass uses the metaphor of peeling an onion. “Each skin sweats words too long muffled,” a code that must be cracked by the narrator as he looks back. This memoir, painfully honest at times and stubbornly obscure at others, is the result of his attempt to decipher that code.

Grass was born in 1927 in Danzig where his parents ran a corner shop. The memoir begins with the end of his Danzig childhood when war exploded around the 10-year-old. He learnt to collect shrapnel and trade it for stamps. Looking back, Grass realises there were many warning signals that he missed as a boy, or that he chose to ignore: like the execution, by the Germans, of his Uncle Franz, a postman who was part of the defence of the Polish Post Office; and the disappearance of the narrator’s childhood friend Wolfgang Heinrichs, whose father, a Social Democrat, was sent to a concentration camp.

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