Günter Grass Confronts His Past in Peeling the Onion
Peeling the Onion / Günter Grass / Harcourt, 2007 / 640 pages
In Günter Grass’ classic novel The Tin Drum, Oskar Matzereth decides at the age of three to stop growing up. From a body locked in perpetual infancy, he witnesses the ascension and destruction of the Third Reich. Although innocent of Nazi crimes, this small monster impishly destroys those who love him.
For Grass, Oscar’s age and naiveté do not excuse his crimes. In detailing his own Nazi wartime experiences in his recently translated memoir, Peeling the Onion (Harcourt, 2007), Grass returns to the question of responsibility for the folly of youth. He invites, even demands, condemnation for never asking why teachers disappeared and synagogues burned, for having proudly supported the Fuhrer’s campaigns. Most passionately of all, he wants the reader to know, he regrets voluntarily enlisting in the Waffen-SS, the elite arm of Hitler’s military. And yet, he reminds us that all of these actions were undertaken with a child’s understanding of the political significance of the war. His deepest shame stems not from the larger implications of his involvement, but from the ramifications within his own family.
Demands for Grass to return his Nobel Prize for Literature sounded last year after the German publication of Peeling the Onion. Critics condemned his Waffen-SS admission as coming sixty years too late. Grass’s biographer Michael Jurgs was quoted in London’s Sunday Times saying, “€œIf he had come clean earlier and said he was in the SS at 17, no one would have cared, but now it puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us.”
Readers felt betrayed by Grass’s full-hearted participation, given the revulsion for Nazism he later propounded. Gergor Dotzauer wrote in Der Tagesspiegel, “€œGünter Grass, Germany’s most celebrated living writer, the Nobel Prize winner, the conscience of the nation, the writer of legends, was a member of the Waffen-SS: A cheap joke of history? Or a truth whose bitterness cannot yet be fully measured?”
In Peeling the Onion, Grass professes his own his guilt louder and more clearly than any critic could. “I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized and carried out the extermination of millions of people,â€\xc2\x9d he writes. Here and there, however, he slips in reminders that he was only fifteen years old; he was compromised by propaganda; and he never pulled a trigger while in combat.
If one can trust Grass’s account, faulty memories and all, then like any other teenager, his thoughts were turned to escaping his parents and sleeping with girls rather than racial supremacy and ethnic cleansing. Although his wartime association was certainly undesirable, he appears to have committed no crime. Oskar Matzereth is born fully conscious; he perceives and understands the truth of all he witnesses from his first moment of existence. With each carefully chosen word of Peeling the Onion, Grass tells of his horror at not having understood until too late.
So why the intense self-recrimination? Why dramatically seek out condemnation?
Grass left his family to become the mighty soldier and artist of Nazi propaganda. Instead, he wet himself in combat, lost most of his sketchbooks and diaries, and left his family undefended against the conquering Russians. Looking for glory, he found disgrace.
In the name of ideology, he dismissed a stifling familial love to attain aesthetic purity. In the name of art, Grass abandoned his family. He left them without defense as pillaging Russian soldiers destroyed Danzig, attacking his mother and traumatizing his sister.
Peeling the Onion results from Grass’s undying need to create art, to validate his mother’s sacrifices. It is a work in which he can express his adoration of her as well as chart his momentous growth into the artist that she dreamt he would become. Grass explains, “From my youth time I was a liar. My mother, she liked this kind of storytelling, my promises of where I would take her and what I would do – this was the basis for my writing, for telling stories.”
And, so he plays with the medium, stretching and personalizing it, building a worthy shrine.
