Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  And as I clumsily interrogate and thereby clearly overtax the twelve-year-old, I weigh each step I take in this fast-fading present, hear myself breathing, hear myself coughing, and live my way, as cheerfully as possible, towards death.

  FRANZ KRAUSE, MY executed uncle, left a wife and four children, who ranged in age from somewhat older to three years younger than me. I was no longer allowed to play with them. They had to vacate their Old Town apartment on the Brabank – it had come with the job – and move to the country between Zuckau and Ramkau, where the widow had a cottage and piece of land. And there, in hilly Kashubia, the postman’s children live to this day, plagued by the usual ailments of age. They have different memories: they missed their father, while mine was too present.

  This employee of the Polish Post Office was an anxious, timid family man, not made for a hero’s death, whose name appears on a bronze memorial plaque as Franciszek Krauze, and as such has entered eternity.

  WHEN AFTER MUCH effort I was issued a visa for Poland in March of ’58 and travelled from Paris via Warsaw to Gdańsk, a city still emerging from rubble, to seek out the former Danzig, I poked behind the façades of the ruins and along Brösen Beach, moved on to the reading room of the Municipal Library, the grounds of the still-standing Pestalozzi School, and the living rooms-cum-kitchens of two surviving Polish Post Office clerks, and then, having gathered a modicum of raw material for the novel, I went to see the surviving relatives in the countryside. I was greeted at the door of their cottage by the executed postman’s mother, with the irrefutable: ‘Ginterchen! My, how you’ve grown!’

  We had become so foreign, so alien to each other, that at first I had to assuage her doubts by producing my passport, but then she took me to see her potato field, which today lies underneath the cement runway of Gdańsk Airport.

  BY THE SUMMER of the following year, the war had grown into a world war, and during our holidays at the Baltic beaches we gymnasium students would not only rehash local events but carry on about happenings beyond our borders. We were entirely taken up with the Wehrmacht’s occupation of Norway, though well into June the news bulletins were trumpeting the French campaign as a blitzkrieg and celebrating the surrender of our hereditary enemy. Rotterdam, Antwerp, Dunkirk, Paris, the Atlantic coast … each new conquest was a geography lesson: blow after blow, victory after victory.

  And yet all our pre-and post-swim admiration went to ‘the heroes of Narvik’. We may have been lazing in the family bathing area, but the fjords under siege ‘up in Norway’ were where we longed to be. Here we were smeared with Nivea cream; there, we could have been covered with glory.

  Thanks to the setbacks dealt the English, our never-ending hero-worship was directed at the navy, and several of us, myself included, dreamed of enlisting, if only the war lasted another three or four years, preferably in the submarine corps. Sitting there in our bathing suits, we would hold contests to see who could name the greatest number of military feats, beginning with Weddigen’s U9 submarine triumphs in World War I, then Lieutenant-Commander Prien sinking the Royal Oak, and always coming back to the ‘hard-fought victory’ at Narvik.

  One day, one of our gang – his name was Wolfgang Heinrichs, an acknowledged ballad singer who would even venture an opera aria upon request, but who had a maimed left hand that made him unfit for the navy and therefore an object of our sympathy – said plainly, ‘You must be crazy, all of you!’

  Then he counted off on the fingers of his unmaimed hand how many of our destroyers had been sunk or badly damaged at Narvik. The five fingers on that hand did not suffice.

  He went into almost professional detail, pointing out that one of the 1,800-ton ships – he called it by name – had had to be grounded. He knew all the particulars of the battle, even the weaponry on England’s Warspite and its speed in knots. True, we too, seaport children that we were, could rattle off the specifications of our own and foreign vessels: the tonnage, the size of the crew, the number of torpedo tubes, the year of launching, but we were surprised at how well informed he was about Narvik, because his knowledge went far beyond what had come through to us from the Wehrmacht’s daily radio bulletins.

  ‘You haven’t a clue about what really went on up there in the north. There were heavy losses! Damned heavy!’

  Surprised or not, we simply accepted what he said. Nobody asked Wolfgang Heinrichs where he had got his amazing information. I certainly didn’t.

  FIFTY YEARS LATER, when traces of what at the time was called ‘German unity’, for want of a better term, began to appear, my wife, Ute, and I visited her native island, Hiddensee. Just off the East German coast, it lies between the Baltic and a shallow bay and is less endangered by stormy tides than by the tourist trade.

  There are no cars on Hiddensee, so we took a long hike over the heath to the town of Neuendorf, where we visited a childhood friend of my wife’s, Martin Gruhn, who, years after a daring rowboat escape to Sweden from the German Democratic Republic, had decided to return to the Workers’ and Peasants’ State and retire there. He did not look the part of an adventurer: he was too domestic, too settled.

  Over coffee and cake we chatted about this and that: his career as a manager in the West, the many trips to India, Australia, and elsewhere he made on behalf of Krupp. He told us about his failed attempt to enter the world of joint East-West business ventures and about the only joy remaining to him, trap-fishing in local waters.

  Then the obviously satisfied returnee changed the subject abruptly: he had a friend who lived in Vitte, another of the three villages on the island, who absolutely insisted that he had shared a school bench with me in Danzig. Heinrichs was his name, Wolfgang Heinrichs.

  Pursuing the matter, I learned that yes, his left hand was maimed and yes, he had a good voice, ‘though he seldom puts it to use any more’.

  For a while Ute and he switched exclusively to island matters, spinning yarns in which the living and the dead went on in their Low German dialect. Martin Gruhn, who had realized his boyhood dream and seen the world, proudly showed us the masks, colourful rugs, and carved fetishes on the walls. We had one last schnapps.

  ON OUR WAY across the heath Ute and I searched for the house behind the dunes where Heinrichs lived with his wife. The door was opened by a giant of a man, breathing heavily. The only thing about him I recognized was his maimed hand. After a short hesitation, the school friends embraced and were somewhat moved.

  We sat on the veranda, determined to be cheerful, and later all four of us went to a restaurant, for fish: crisply fried flounder. No, he had no desire any more to sing ‘Erlkönig’, but it was not long before we got to his beach talk of the summer of ’40, still a mystery to me after all the intervening years.

  ‘How did you know more than we did?’ I wanted to hear. ‘How did you know what we, as you put it, hadn’t a clue about? Where did you get the precise number of sunken and badly damaged destroyers at Narvik? And everything else you knew? For instance, that after a few bull’s-eyes and with two torpedoes – all fired from shore – an outdated Norwegian coastal artillery unit sank the heavy cruiser Blücher in the Oslo Fjord?’

  Heinrichs’s otherwise impassive face showed the hint of a smile as he spoke. He had been roundly beaten by his father when he went home and mocked our ignorance. After all, his braggadocio could have had consequences. There were plenty of informers, not the least among schoolchildren. His father had listened regularly to British radio, and he had passed his knowledge on to his son under a strict vow of silence.

  ‘Right,’ Heinrichs said, his father had been a true anti-Fascist, not one of your after-the-fact, self-proclaimed variety. He said this as though he, the son, felt the need to run himself down as after the fact and self-proclaimed.

  And then I heard a tale of woe that, like a muffled wail, had completely passed me by – me, his school friend – because I did not ask, because here, too, I had failed to ask questions. Not even after Wolfgang Heinrichs suddenly disappeared from school, our venera
ble Conradinum.

  Shortly after the summer holidays, maybe even while the last grains of beach sand were trickling out of our hair, our friend was either missing or was not, and nobody was willing to query the meaning of that casually tossed ‘vanished without trace’, and I again failed to utter, swallowed the word why.

  Only now, after all those years, did I learn what had happened. During the Free State period Heinrichs’s father had been a member of the German Social Democratic Party and later a Social Democrat member of Parliament, and had opposed the Nazi Party bigwigs Rauschning and Greiser and the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours camaraderie that led to the alliance between the German Nationals and the Nazis in the municipal senate. He was kept under observation until early autumn of 1940, when the Gestapo arrested him. He was sent to the concentration camp that was set up near the Frisches Haff just after Danzig was annexed to the Reich. It was named after a neighbouring fishing village, Sutthof, and could be reached by taking the narrow-gauge railway from the Werder Station in town, then the ferry that crossed the Vistula at Schiewenhorst. It was a two-hour trip.

  Not long after Wolfgang’s father was arrested, his mother committed suicide, and Wolfgang and his sister were sent to their grandmother in the country, far enough away to have been forgotten by their schoolmates. Their father was eventually released from the camp to serve in a penal battalion whose job it was to clear the mines at the Russian front. The Ascension Commando was what this squad was ironically nicknamed, but despite its high mortality rate it gave him the chance to go over to the Russians.

  When the Second Soviet Army marched into the smouldering heap of rubble that was Danzig in March 1945, my schoolmate’s father marched in with the victors. He searched for and found his children, and when the war was over he took them out of Poland in a protected transport reserved for German anti-Fascists and chose the port of Stralsund, in the Soviet-occupied zone, as the future home for what remained of his family.

  There he was made head of the Landtag, the local parliamentary body, and as his political convictions had not been affected by the brainwashing to which he had been subjected in the concentration camp, he immediately founded a local Social Democratic association. But despite its popularity it fell on hard times after the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were forcibly amalgamated into the United Socialist Party. Heinrichs’s father refused to be brought into line from above and was harassed and threatened with arrest. An allusion was even made to the recently repopulated Buchenwald as a possible destination.

  He died several years later, embittered at having been shunted aside by his comrades. His son, however, was able to complete his studies in Rostock, together with his school friend Martin Gruhn, and soon made a name for himself in the field of economics. After his rowboat escape Gruhn pursued his study of economics first in Lund and then with Karl Schiller in Hamburg, while Heinrichs made a career for himself in the all-powerful Party, serving through every regime shift, including the one from Ulbricht to Honecker. He had been rewarded in his old age with the post of director of the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, a position so prominent that no sooner had the Wall come down and the dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants ceased to exist than the West German victors, the new masters of history, had had him ‘evaluated’ – that is, reduced to a cipher.

  Such had been the fate of many who were accused of falsifying their biographies and who always knew what in their actual biographies needed to be false.

  By the time we visited Heinrichs in Vitte he was seriously ill. His wife gave us to understand that there was reason for concern: he complained of a tightness in his chest and had trouble breathing. Yet he still found occasional employment as a tax consultant in Stralsund and was, she assured us, getting good at finding loopholes in the system.

  Wolfgang Heinrichs, a man laid low by German circumstances, died of a pulmonary embolism several months after our visit. He was a school friend, I had shared my youth with him – he sang ‘Die Uhr’ by Carl Loewe at a graduation ceremony and knew more about the navy than the rest of us put together – and he remained in my mind because I had been content to know nothing or to believe false information, because I had used my status as a child to play dumb and accepted his disappearance without a murmur, and once more dodged the word why, so that now, as I peel the onion, my silence pounds in my ears.

  GRANTED, THE PAIN could be worse. But laments such as If only I’d had a strong father like Wolfgang Heinrichs and not one who, when only thirty-six and when the pressure to do so in the Free State of Danzig was not yet particularly great, joined the Nazi Party are cheap and likely to trigger the kind of laughter the cynic in me laughs whenever I hear things like If only we had … If only we were …

  But I hadn’t, I wasn’t. My uncle was gone for good; my school friend had vanished. Yet the boy whose life I feel the need to trace was all too plainly present when atrocious deeds were being done. Nearly a year before the war began. Violence in broad daylight.

  When shortly after my eleventh birthday synagogues in Danzig and elsewhere were set aflame and Jewish merchants’ shop windows shattered, I took no part, yet I was very much a curious spectator; I watched as the small Langfuhr synagogue on Michaelisweg, not far from my school, the venerable Conradinum, was plundered, pillaged, and set on fire by a horde of SA men. And the witness of this extremely clamorous operation, which the municipal police – perhaps because the fire was so long in kindling – simply stood by and observed, was, at most, surprised.

  Nothing more. No matter how zealously I rummage through the foliage of my memory, I can find nothing in my favour. My childhood years seem to have been completely untroubled by doubt. No, I was a pushover, always game for everything that the times, which called themselves – exhilaratedly and exhilaratingly – modern, had to offer.

  There was a great deal, and it was tempting. On the radio and the screen the boxer Max Schmeling was triumphant. Representatives of the Winter Charity Fund circulated with tin boxes in front of Sternfeld’s department store shouting, ‘No one shall starve! No one shall freeze!’ German racing drivers like Bernd Rosemeyer in his Mercedes Silver Arrow were the fastest. People gaped at the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg shimmering over the city or on picture postcards. The newsreels showed our Condor Legion helping to free Spain from the Red menace with the most up-to-date weapons. We re-enacted Alcázar on the playground. Only a few months earlier we had thrilled to the Olympic Games, medal by medal, and later we had a marvel of a runner in Rudolf Harbig. The Third Reich glittered in the newsreel spotlight.

  During the final years of the Free State – I was ten at the time – the boy bearing my name voluntarily joined the Jungvolk, an organization that fed into the Hitler Youth. We were called Pimpfe, ‘tykes’, or – a term borrowed from the scouting movement – Wölflinge, ‘cubs’. At the top of my Christmas wish list for the year was the Jungvolk’s official uniform: cap, scarf, belt, and shoulder strap. True, I don’t recall being particularly thrilled at the idea of carrying a flag at rallies or aspiring to the braiding that went with the rank of group leader, but I did my part unquestioningly, even when the endless singing and drumming bored me to tears.

  The uniform wasn’t the only thing that made the group attractive. The wishful thought of its slogan, Youth Must Be Led by Youth! was backed up by promises of overnight hikes and other outdoor activities in the woods along the beach, of campfires among the erratic blocks dragged together to form a Germanic tribal meeting ground, a Thingstätte, in the hilly countryside south of the city, of midsummer night celebrations under starry skies and hymns to the dawn in clearings facing east. We sang as if our songs could make the Reich bigger and bigger.

  My unit leader, a working-class boy from Neuschottland, was barely two years older than I was, and a great guy who could tell a joke and walk on his hands. I admired him, laughed when he laughed, and trotted after him obediently.

  I was lured away from the stifling petit-bo
urgeois atmosphere of familial obligations, away from my father, from the over-the-counter gossip of the customers, the confines of the two-room flat where the only space I could call my own was the low niche under the sill of the right-hand living-room window. Its shelves were piled high with books and my cigarette picture-card albums. It was also where I kept the modelling clay that I turned into my first figurines, my Pelikan drawing pad, a set of twelve watercolours, a rather lackadaisical stamp collection, a pile of miscellaneous junk, and my secret notebooks.

  Few things do I see so clearly in retrospect as that niche under the windowsill, my refuge for years. (My sister, Waltraut, who was three years younger, was allotted the niche under the left-hand window.)

  Which leads me to something that can be said in my favour, namely, that I was not only a Pimpf in uniform who did his best to march in step while singing, ‘Our Fluttering Flag Drives Us On’, I was also a house mouse who guarded his niche treasures jealously. Even in formation I was a loner, though I took care not to stand out; I was a schemer whose mind was forever elsewhere.

  Besides, the move from primary to secondary school had made me a Conradiner. I was allowed to wear the traditional red student cap decorated with a golden C and felt entitled to be snooty: I was a student at an elite institution, even if my parents had to pay for the privilege in instalments with money they had put away with great difficulty. How much was involved I don’t know: it was a monthly burden almost never alluded to in the son’s presence.

  THE GROCERY SHOP, which adjoined a narrow hallway leading to the door to our apartment and which my mother, Helene Grass, managed single-handedly and with a keen business sense – my father, Wilhelm (Willy to everybody), dressed the shop window, dealt with the wholesalers, and penned the price tags – had a success rate of middling to poor. During the Free State period, when the currency was the gulden rather than the mark, customs restrictions made trade unpredictable. There was competition on every street corner. For permission to sell milk, cream, butter, and cheese in addition to groceries, we had to sacrifice the half of the kitchen that faced the street, which left only a windowless cubbyhole for the stove and icebox. The grocery chain Kaisers Kaffee siphoned off more and more business. The sales representatives would not deliver goods to our store unless all our bills were paid up, and too many of our customers bought on credit. The wives of customs officers, civil servants, and policemen were especially prone to adding new purchases to an old bill. They griped, they pinched pennies, they demanded discounts. Every Saturday after closing the shop, my parents would look at each other and say, ‘Once more we’ve barely broken even.’