Peeling the Onion: Introspective Food for Thought
November 30, 2007
This past autumn has seen the publications of several noteworthy memoirs, authored by figures such as Clarence Thomas and Valerie Plame. The most controversial of these memoirs, however, is almost certainly Peeling the Onion by renowned German writer Günter Grass. In it, the Nobel laureate details his childhood and his path to becoming an artist, pausing in the middle to expound on his greatest confession — Grass, long considered to be a voice of morality for postwar Germany, served in the infamous Waffen-SS unit in the dying days of the Nazi regime.
Unsurprisingly, Grass has been both harshly denounced for his deception and stoutly defended for his honesty. Regardless, any issue of whether or not Grass should have revealed his military service is overshadowed by the question of what exactly led him to join the Waffen-SS to begin with. Throughout the memoir, Grass continually denies any simple explanations as to why he volunteered for military duty, leaving both reader and author with more questions than answers. The truth that becomes central to the book is that there are no comprehensible answers to explain the Nazis and the Holocaust, least of all for Grass himself.
Grass’s life story begins with his childhood in the German city of Danzig between the two World Wars. The son of a grocer, the young Günter Grass grows up through a series of childhood exploits, all overshadowed by the growing and unquestioned militarism that gradually becomes a given part of life in Danzig. When Adolf Hitler became the German chancellor in 1933, Grass was not quite six years old, and by the end of the war he was just pushing 18. While it might be tempting to conclude that a youthful naïveté led Grass to enter the army, he dismisses such possibilities.
The image that emerges as Grass enters adolescence is that of a young man yearning to leave behind the boring life of a grocer’s son and pursue adventure. Grass recognizes that such teenage angst and wanderlust cannot fully explain his decision to lie about his age and join the army, and he harshly rebukes himself for much of the memoir over this seemingly inexplicable decision. Still a teenager, Grass is unprepared for the realities of war, noting sardonically that he was, at the time, more concerned with “a futile battle against pimples.” What follows is an account of his brief military service in the final year of the war, most of which is spent running away from the advancing Soviets and narrowly evading bullets and bombs. After months of scurrying around battlefields without actually fighting, the young Grass is unceremoniously captured and sent to an American prisoner-of-war camp. It is here that Grass claims that he first received evidence of the full extent of the Holocaust, though he admits that he already knew about the existence of concentration camps, if not the horrors that occurred within them.
Although World War II is central to the memoir, the war is over by the midpoint of the book. What follows is an account of Grass’ struggle to find a place in a society completely upended by fascism and warfare. The remainder of the memoir shows Grass as a fledgling sculptor and writer, and it is in this section that the narrative unravels and loses its focus. After so many pages centered around the war, the second half of the book is a picaresque account of postwar boarding houses, as Grass recounts scattered episodes along his path to becoming a writer.
If there is a single theme running throughout the memoir, it is an analysis of memory itself. The title of the book comes from Grass’ metaphor that memory is like an onion, with many layers that must be delicately peeled off in order to reveal further layers below. In addition, Grass frequently alternates between presenting his story in the first-person voice and the third-person, referring to his former selves as “the smoker,” “the artist,” “the soldier,” “the non-smoker,” and many other labels. This reveals, perhaps, the reason why Grass cannot understand his own past actions; for while the teenager who joined the Waffen-SS was also Günter Grass, he is different from the aged writer of the same name, but the boundary between the two is impossible to locate. Peeling the Onion is thus in equal parts the memoir of a writer, a student, a soldier, an artist and a moralist, each distinct and yet all the same.
Peeling the Onion is available at the Tisch Library, as well as at most major bookstores and online retailers.