Gunter Grass Memoir--Peeling the Onion

It's been raining and extremely humid since Tuesday. The mosquitoes are impossible to avoid when outdoors, so Sasha and I "get exercise," but I can't say that either one of us enjoys it. Thank goodness for books and Wimbledon on TV.


For my German Postwar Literary Challenge: Gunter Grass--how sorry I am that I have forgotten how to do the umlaut for the "u" in Gunter on the computer. I will try to remedy that. In any case, I've been mesmerized by this 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature winner's 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion, in which Grass (born in 1927) reveals all he can remember about his childhood after age 10, wartime, and immediate postwar experiences, including the (some would say) scandalous fact that he was a 17-year-old soldier in the Waffen SS from early 1945 until the war's end in early May of that year. His belated revelation of his few months of wartime activities caused enormous controversy in Germany and in literary circles. Why was he silent about his past for so long, many Germans wanted to know.


The controversy is intellectually interesting because of what it says about German collective memory and twenty-first century understandings about Germany's past, but for me personally as a far-removed observer, I think the facts speak for themselves: that his assignment to the SS (artillery) was not his choice, nor was enlistment his choice. As a teenaged boy who had yet to shave a beard, that's where the authorities assigned him.

Yet in the memoir, Grass takes full responsibility for all the questions he never asked, for the actions he did not take, and for the shame and bewilderment he has felt and still feels concerning Germany's actions in World War II and its perpetration of the Holocaust.

As a work of literature, Peeling the Onion is a tour de force and not to be missed. Every paragraph is immaculately rendered. Not to be missed!