Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Günter Grass

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Skins Beneath the Skin

  Encapsulations

  His Name Was Wedontdothat

  How I Learned Fear

  Guests at Table

  At and Below the Surface

  The Third Hunger

  How I Became a Smoker

  Berlin Air

  While Cancer, Soundless

  The Wedding Gifts I Received

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest memoir that evokes Grass’ modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians and concludes with the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris.

  Grass’ parents ran a corner shop, but his mother, whom he adored, encouraged him towards books and music. Like most of his peers, he joined the Hitler Youth and in 1944, when he was just 17, he was sent to the Eastern front with the Waffen SS and found himself facing Russian tanks and machine guns. Recovering from shrapnel wounds in a military hospital, he had the good fortune to be taken prisoner by the Americans.

  In the aftermath of the war, following a stint as a miner, Grass survived by trading on the black market and resolved to become an artist, eventually enrolling at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. While living as an artist in Berlin with his first wife Anna, a ballet dancer, he started to concentrate on writing poetry. It was after the couple moved to Paris that the first sentence of the novel he had been determined to write and that would make his reputation came to him: ‘Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital’.

  Peeling the Onion is the story of a remarkable life and is, without question, one of Günter Grass’ finest works.

  About the Author

  Günter Grass (1927–2015) was Germany’s most celebrated post-war writer. He was a creative artist of remarkable versatility: novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, graphic artist. Grass’s first novel, The Tin Drum, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

  ALSO BY GÜNTER GRASS

  The Tin Drum

  Cat and Mouse

  Dog Years

  The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising

  Four Plays

  Speak Out!

  Local Anaesthetic

  From the Diary of a Snail

  Inmarypraise

  In the Egg and Other Poems

  The Flounder

  The Meeting at Telgte

  Headbirths

  Drawings and Words 1954–1977

  On Writing and Politics 1967–1983

  Etchings and Words 1972–1982

  The Rat

  Show Your Tongue

  Two States – One Nation?

  The Call of the Toad

  My Century

  Too Far Afield

  Crabwalk

  Dedicated to everyone from whom I have learned

  Günter Grass

  PEELING THE ONION

  Translated from the German by

  Michael Henry Heim

  SKINS BENEATH THE SKIN

  TODAY, AS IN years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great: He was going on twelve, though he still loved sitting in his mother’s lap, when such and such began and ended. But can something that had a beginning and an end be pinpointed with such precision? In my case it can.

  My childhood came to an end when, in the city where I grew up, the war broke out in several places at once. It began with an unmistakable bang – the broadsiding of a ship and the approach of dive-bombers over the Neufahrwasser dock area, which lay opposite the Polish military base at Westerplatte, and, farther off, the carefully aimed shots of two armoured reconnaissance cars during the battle for the Polish Post Office in the Old Town of Danzig – and was heralded closer to home by our radio – a Volksempfänger, ‘people’s receiver’ – which stood on the sideboard in the living room. Thus the end of my childhood was proclaimed with words of iron in a ground-floor flat of a three-storey building on Labesweg, in Langfuhr.

  Even the time of day sticks in my mind. From then on, the airport of the Free State near the Baltic Chocolate factory handled more than just civilian planes. From the skylight in the roof of our building we could see smoke mounting duskily over the Free Port each time there was a new attack and a light wind from the north-west.

  But the moment I try to remember that distant artillery fire from the Schleswig-Holstein, which had been retired from active duty after the Battle of Jutland and could no longer be used as anything but a training ship for cadets, and the layered sounds of the Stukas or Stutzkampfflugzeug, ‘dive-bombers’ – so called because high above the combat zone they would tip to one side, then lunge down on their target, releasing their bombs at the last moment – I am faced with a question: Why go back to my childhood and its clear and immutable end date, when everything that happened to me between milk teeth and permanent ones – my first day at school, scraped knees, marbles, the earliest secrets of the confessional and later agonies of faith – all merged in the jumble of jottings that has since been associated with a person who, no sooner had he been put down on paper, refused to grow and shattered all manner of glass with his song, kept two wooden sticks at the ready, and thanks to a tin drum made a name for himself that thereafter existed in quotable form between book covers and claims immortality in heaven knows how many languages?

  Because this as well as that deserves to be part of the record. Because something flagrantly significant could be missing. Because certain things at certain times fell into the well before the lid went on: the holes I left uncovered until later, growth I could not halt, the linguistic give-and-take I had with lost objects. And let this, too, be said: because I want to have the last word.

  MEMORY LIKES TO play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way.

  When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.

  Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.

  Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered, that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise as a photograph: The tarpaper roof of the shed behind our building shimmered in the July heat and in the still air smelled of malt lozenges …

  The washable collar of my primary school teacher, Fräulein Spollenhauer, was made of celluloid and was so tight it put creases in her neck …

  The propeller-shaped bows in the hair of the girls on the Zoppot Promenade when the police band played its snappy melodies …

  My first Boletus edulis …

  When we were excused from school because of the heat …

  When my tonsils flared up again …

  When I swallowed my questions …

  The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does it speak the truth. What happened before and after the end of my childhood knocks at the door with facts an
d went worse than wished for and demands to be told now this way, now that, and leads to tall tales.

  WHEN WAR BROKE out to a spell of glorious late-summer weather in Danzig and environs, and the Westerplatte’s Polish defenders capitulated after seven days of resistance, I, that is, the boy I apparently was, gathered up a handful of bomb-and shell-splinters near the Neufahrwasser dock, which was easily accessible by tram via Saspe and Brösen, and traded them, at a time when the war seemed to exist only in radio bulletins, for stamps, coloured picture cards from cigarette packets, books both dog-eared and hot off the press – including Sven Hedin’s Voyage Through the Gobi Desert – and heaven knows what else.

  An imprecise memory sometimes comes a matchstick’s length closer to the truth, albeit along crooked paths.

  It is mostly objects that my memory rubs against, my knees bump into, or that leave a repellent aftertaste: the tile stove … the frame used for beating carpets behind the house … the toilet on the half-landing … the suitcase in the attic … a piece of amber the size of a dove’s egg …

  If you can still feel your mother’s hair-clips or your father’s handkerchief knotted at four corners in the summer heat or recall the exchange value of various jagged grenade-and bomb-splinters, you will know stories – if only as entertainment – that are closer to reality than life itself.

  THE PICTURE CARDS I so eagerly collected in my boyhood and youth were obtained with coupons that came in the packs out of which my mother tapped her cigarettes after closing the shop. ‘Ciggies’, she called the accessories to her modest vice, and celebrated the nightly ritual with a glass of Cointreau. If the mood was upon her, she could make smoke rings hover.

  The pictures I lusted after were colour reproductions of European masterpieces. From them I learned early on to mispronounce the names of Giorgione, Mantegna, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Caravaggio. The naked back of a reclining woman gazing into a mirror held up by a winged boy has been inextricably coupled in my mind since childhood with the name of Velázquez. What left the deepest imprint on me in Jan van Eyck’s Singing Angels was the profile of the hindmost angel: what I would have given to have curly hair like him or like Albrecht Dürer. Of the Dürer self-portrait hanging in the Prado in Madrid one might ask: Why did the master paint himself wearing gloves? Why are the strange cap and right lower sleeve so conspicuously striped? What makes him so self-assured? And why did he write his age – he was all of twenty-six – under the window ledge?

  Today I know that a cigarette-picture service in Hamburg-Bahrenfeld supplied these magnificent reproductions for the coupons as well as square albums, which had to be ordered separately. Now that I have reclaimed all three albums, thanks to my Lübeck gallery that maintains a second-hand bookshop on Königstrasse, I can confirm that the number of copies of the Renaissance volume, published in 1938, ran to at least 450,000.

  Turning page after page, I see myself at the living-room table, pasting in the pictures. This time it is the late Gothic as represented by the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch: the saint in a group of very human-looking beasts. It is almost a ritual, the glue squirting out of the yellow Uhu tube …

  Many collectors, hopelessly gone on art, probably took to smoking immoderately. I, however, took advantage of all the smokers who had no use for their coupons. I accumulated, traded, and pasted in more and more pictures, relating to them initially as a child would, but later with increasing sensitivity: Parmigianino’s lanky Madonna, whose head budding on a long neck towers above the pillars that soared heavenward in the background, aroused the twelve-year-old to rub himself ardently, angel-like, against her right knee.

  I lived through pictures, and because the son was so set on a complete collection, the mother in addition to the takings from her moderate consumption – she was a devoted smoker of flat, gold-tipped Egyptian cigarettes – slipped him a number of coupons contributed by one or another customer who couldn’t care less about art. Sometimes the grocer father would bring the much-coveted coupons home from his business trips. My cabinetmaker grandfather’s apprentices, diligent smokers all, also subscribed to my cause. The albums, full of blank spaces surrounded by explanatory texts, must have been Christmas or birthday presents.

  I guarded all three as a single treasure: the blue album, which contained Gothic and early Renaissance art; the red album, which regaled me with the high Renaissance; and the golden yellow one, in which I was still trying to piece together the Baroque. I was distressed by the blanks calling for Rubens and van Dyck. I lacked reinforcements. Once the war began, the coupon boom died down. Civilian smokers turned into soldiers who puffed on their Junos and R6s far from home. One of my most reliable suppliers, a coachman at the local brewery, was killed during the battle for Modlin Fortress.

  Then other series started competing: animals, flowers, glossies of German history, and the powdered faces of popular movie stars.

  Besides, early in the war every household began to receive ration cards, and these included special slips for the consumption of tobacco products. However, as I had managed to secure a basic education in art history with the help of the Reemtsma cigarette company in pre-war times, the officially ordained shortage did not affect me inordinately. I could fill in the gaps by and by. I was, for example, able to trade Raphael’s Dresden Madonna, of which I had a duplicate, for Caravaggio’s Cupid, a deal that did not pay off fully until later.

  EVEN AS A ten-year-old I was able to tell Hans Baldung, called Grien, from Matthias Grünewald; Frans Hals from Rembrandt; and Filippo Lippi from Cimabue – all at first glance.

  Who painted the Madonna in the rose bower? Or the Madonna with the blue mantle and apple and Child? Quizzed by the mother, who covered the title and painter’s name with two fingers, the son answered without missing a beat.

  In these domestic guessing games and in school too I was an A student – at least in art. From my first year at the gymnasium I was utterly hopeless when it came to mathematics, chemistry, and physics. I was perfectly good at doing sums in my head but had trouble making equations with two unknowns come out right on paper. Until my second year I could compensate with As and Bs in German, English, history, and geography, and even my much-praised sketches and watercolours, whether done from nature or my imagination, seemed to help, but third-year Latin tipped the balance, and I had to repeat the whole year along with my fellow dunces. That upset me less than it did my parents: from early on I had prepared escape routes leading into the blue yonder.

  Nowadays, a grandfather’s confession that at school he was partly lazy, partly unambitious, but in the end an out-and-out dunce is not much comfort to grandchildren suffering from low marks or inept teachers. They groan as if they have pedagogical boulders hung round their necks, as if school were a penal colony, as if the demands of the classroom sour their sweetest dreams. Well, playground anxiety never troubled my sleep.

  WHEN I WAS a child – before I donned the red school cap, before I started collecting cigarette cards – I would go down to one of the beaches along Danzig Bay as soon as summer with its endless promise came, and mould the wet sand into the high towers and walls of a citadel which I peopled with fantastical characters. Over and over the sea buried the structure, its towering turrets collapsing noiselessly. And yet again wet sand ran through my fingers.

  ‘Kleckerburg’ is the title of a long poem I wrote in the mid-sixties, in other words, when the forty-year-old father of three sons and a daughter seemed to have settled into a bourgeois existence. Like the hero of his first novel, its author had made a name for himself by trapping his dual self between the covers of a book and taking it thus tamed to market.

  The poem is about my background and the sounds of the Baltic. ‘Born in Kleckerburg, west of,’ it begins, then poses questions: ‘Born when? And where? Why?’ In a verbal torrent it evokes loss and memory, lost and found in sentence fragments: ‘The gulls are not gulls but.’

  At the end of the poem, which stakes out my territory between
the Holy Ghost and Hitler’s photograph, conjuring the beginning of the war with shell-splinters and muzzle-flashes, childhood peters out. Only the Baltic keeps going, in German, in Polish: ‘Blubb, pifff, pshsh …’

  THE WAR WAS in its infancy when a cousin of my mother, Uncle Franz, a postman who took part in the defence of the Polish Post Office on the Heveliusplatz, was summarily executed by the Germans – along with nearly all the survivors of that brief battle. The military judge who pronounced, justified, and signed the death sentence went on pronouncing and signing sentences in Schleswig-Holstein long after the war, unscathed. A common story during Chancellor Adenauer’s interminable term of office.

  Later I adapted the skirmish over the Polish Post Office to my narrative prose style, changing the personnel and inserting a chatty description of the fall of a house of cards. My family was much less chatty. Our suddenly absent uncle, much beloved above and beyond or despite his politics and a frequent guest, along with his children, Irmgard, Grego, Magda, and little Kasimir for Sunday coffee and cake or an afternoon round of skat with my parents, was no longer mentioned. His name was passed over in silence, as if he had never existed, as if everything connected with him and his family were unspeakable.

  This Kashubian side of the family – my mother’s side – with its cosy parlour babble, seemed to have been swallowed up. By whom?

  Nor did I, even though my childhood had ended with the onset of the war, ask any insistent questions.

  Or was it because I was no longer a child that I dared not ask?

  Is it only children who, as in fairy tales, ask the right questions?

  Can it have been the fear of an answer that would turn my world upside down that made me hold my tongue?

  A demeaning disgrace it is to find such a blot on the sixth or seventh skin of that garden-variety, readily available, memory-boosting onion. So I write about the disgrace, and the shame limping in its wake. Rarely used words wielded in the service of belated compensation as my now lenient, now stringent eyes remain focused on a boy still in shorts, snooping into hidden affairs, yet failing to ask ‘Why?’