Memory's long shadow

Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass wanted to be the first to reveal his days in the Nazi Waffen-SS.

from the July 17, 2007 edition

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As Grass tells it, he was a naive, unquestioning teenager eager to get away from his family's cramped apartment in Danzig (now Gdansk). At 15, he tried to join the submarine corps but was rejected. A poor student "expelled from two schools for obstreperous behavior," his formal schooling came to an effective end when, despite his parents' antifascist leanings, he voluntarily joined the Hitler Youth. He was attracted in part by the uniform.

"I can take care of the labeling and branding myself," he writes in self-censure. "As a member of the Hitler Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi."

Like others of his generation, Grass was conscripted into the Reich's Labor Service before being drafted at 16 and assigned to the Waffen-SS.

By the time Grass reached the eastern front, Hitler's army was in chaotic retreat. Fleeing from Russian artillery, he was as afraid of being hung by the Nazis if caught without marching orders as he was of being captured by "the Ivans." He claims that he never fired a shot and was ignorant of the Reich's atrocities until he was shown pictures by his American captors in a POW camp.

The protean poet, novelist, and visual artist has long used organic matter – mice, cats, snails, flounder, and crabs – as touchstones for his work. In "Peeling the Onion," he employs the root vegetable, with its many layers of paper-thin skin and its tendency to produce blinding tears when cut to its core, as an extended metaphor for the multiple leaves and obfuscations of memory.

In Grass's case, paring the layers is complicated by his lifelong storytelling compulsion. Over the years he has transmuted so many of his experiences into literature that even he now has trouble keeping track of which version actually happened. This habitual blurring of the truth – possibly a protective device – is at times frustrating.

"My sister doesn't believe my stories on principle," he notes after trying to convince her that the devout, fellow 17-year-old POW with whom he chewed caraway seeds to stave off hunger may well have been Josef Ratzinger, the current pontiff.

Grass highlights three hungers – for food, sex, and art – as his driving motivators. His robust appetites in all three realms have led to an unusually stuffed life. "Peeling the Onion" is well worth delving into, beyond the sensationally moldy patches on its surface.

• Heller McAlpin is a freelance writer in New York.

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