Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  Thus my trial by fire in narrative prose found a premature end on a corpse-strewn battlefield. Had this notebook survived, it would have been of interest only to fragment fetishists.

  To bring back the strangled and the beheaded, the quartered and the burnt, the corpses dangling from the oaks as crow fodder – to bring them back in later chapters as ghosts, and scare the hell out of the remaining rank and file population could not have been further from my mind: I was never partial to ghost stories. But it may be that this early case of writer’s block, brought on by my uneconomical treatment of fictional personnel, led me later, as a carefully calculating author, to be more sparing of the heroes of my novels.

  Oskar Matzerath survived as a media mogul. And with him, his grandmother, his babka, for whose hundred-and-seventh birthday celebration, in the criss-crossed time-frame of the novel The Rat, he even took upon himself the strain of a trip to Kashubia – and that despite the agony of serious prostate problems.

  And because Tulla Pokriefke’s early demise could be only presumed – in fact she was rescued at the age of seventeen, and very pregnant, from the sinking refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff – she was ready for recall as a seventeen-year-old survivor when the novella Crabwalk was ready for paper. She is now the grandmother of a young rightist radical who glorifies his ‘martyrs’ on the Internet.

  The same holds for my favourite Jenny Brunies who, though badly damaged and forever down with a cold, managed to out-live Dog Years, much as I too have been spared, the better to rediscover myself over and over in new pastures.

  In the end, the immoderate youth, a sketch of my still-to-be revealed self, was unable to enter the competition of the children’s newspaper Hilf mit!. Or, to put it in a more favourable light, I was spared participation, possibly prizeworthy, in a National Socialist competition for the literary youth of the Greater German Reich. Because had a successful first story been crowned with a second or third prize – to say nothing of first – the premature debut of my literary career would have been Nazi-tarnished; it would have been tantamount to handing the evidence – complete with chapter and verse – to the always ravenous journalists on a silver platter. I could have been labelled a Young Nazi, and, thus handicapped, declared a collaborator, indelibly branded. There would have been no shortage of judges.

  But I can take care of the labelling and branding myself. As a member of the Hitler Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi. A believer till the end. Not what one would call fanatical, not leading the pack, but with my eye, as if by reflex, fixed on the flag that was to mean ‘more than death’ to us, I kept pace in the rank and file. No doubts clouded my faith; nothing subversive like the clandestine distribution of leaflets can let me off the hook; no Göring joke made me suspicious. No, I saw my fatherland threatened, surrounded by enemies.

  I HAD BEEN properly appalled by the ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’ horror stories that were plastered all over the local Nazi daily, Danziger Vorposten, which made all Poles out to be treacherous murderers, and I perceived every German deed as justifiable retribution. If I had any criticism, it was against the local party bigwigs – known as golden pheasants because of their gold braiding – who had wormed their way out of active duty at the front and who would bore us, after we had marched past the requisite rostra, with their tedious speeches, speeches that took in vain the holy name of the Führer we so believed in – no, I so believed in, believed in with untroubled, unquestioning fervour, until everything fell, as our song foresaw – ‘So onward we’ll march, ever onward, till everything falls to pieces’ – to pieces.

  THAT IS HOW I see myself in my rear-view mirror. The image cannot be wiped out: it is not chalk on a blackboard; it is permanent. And though with time a few erasures have appeared in them, the songs are still there too: ‘Onward, onward! Trumpets are blaring their fanfare! Onward, onward! Youth knows nothing of danger!’ Claiming ‘They seduced us!’ does not excuse the youths who sang them and hence does not excuse me. No, we let ourselves, I let myself, be seduced.

  But, the onion might say timidly, pointing to a few unblemished spots on the eighth skin, you’ve got a clean record. You were just a foolish boy, you did nothing bad: you didn’t denounce anyone, the neighbour, for example, who dared tell that cynical joke about Göring, the fat Reichsmarschall; you didn’t turn in the soldier on leave from the front who bragged of steering clear of assignments that might get him the Knight’s Cross; nor were you the one to denounce the history teacher who had dared, if only in subordinate clauses, to question the ‘final victory’ and call the German people ‘a herd of sheep’, and who, to top it all, was hated by the entire school.

  That was true: ratting on students to our janitor, turning them in to the Nazi block or ward leader – that was not my style. But when our Latin teacher, who because he was a priest as well had himself addressed as ‘Monsignor’, was suddenly no longer there to test us on our vocabulary, when he suddenly disappeared, I again asked no questions even though the moment he was gone the word ‘Stutthof’ was on everyone’s lips by way of warning.

  I was fourteen when our People’s Receiver started to broadcast bulletins preceded by brass-and-drum fanfares announcing victorious sieges on the Russian steppes. Day after day Liszt’s Preludes was misappropriated, and while my knowledge of geography was soaring, my Latin hovered at unsatisfactory.

  After yet another change of school I found myself at Saint John’s, an Old Town gymnasium on Fleischergasse near the Municipal Museum and the Church of the Trinity, an institution that turned out to rest upon a Gothic cellar and whose low-ceilinged corridors found their way into Dog Years. That is why I later had no trouble enrolling two of my characters – Eddie Amsel and Walter Matern, simultaneous friends and foes – in the school and having them make their way from the locker room to the Franciscan corridors.

  When after a few months my Latin teacher, Monsignor Stachnik, returned to Saint John’s and started teaching again, I again failed to pose any urgent questions, although I had the reputation of being obstreperous in general and a big-mouth in particular.

  Oh, well, he wouldn’t have answered them anyway. That’s the way it always was when people were let out of the camps. He didn’t look any different, and questions would have only added to his problems.

  Still, I must have been sufficiently disturbed by my own silence to have felt the need to erect an unmistakable monument to the man – he was not only my Latin teacher but also the former head of the Free State Centrist Party and a tireless spokesman for the blessed Dorothea von Montau – in my deliberately retrogressive novel The Flounder. Monsignor Stachnik and his Gothic hermitess. His efforts to have her canonized. He would go into raptures whenever we prompted him to talk about her slimming cure. We had no trouble luring him away from the formal garden of Latin syntax: all we had to do was to bring up the woman who was, to him, Saint Dorothea.

  What had spoiled her marriage with the armourer?

  What miracles were ascribed to her?

  Why had she had herself immured in the cathedral at Marienwerder?

  Did she still have a beautiful figure after losing all that weight?

  All these things, and his invariably closed collar, I called forth from my memory to pay him tribute.

  BUT THIS BELATED hymn of praise was not completely to Monsignor Stachnik’s liking. We assessed the penitent Dorothea’s life and her death by starvation from quite different perspectives. When my wife and I were travelling through the countryside around Münster in the mid-seventies, researching the remnants of Baroque local colour for The Meeting at Telgte, we paid him a visit. He had taken up residence in a nunnery in his old age and had a spacious and comfortably furnished cell conducive to conversation. I carefully avoided provoking any conflict on this very Catholic soil. Ute, a Protestant by birth, was a bit surprised at the elderly gentleman’s serene existence in the midst of a community of nuns, who appeared before us, in their all-concealing habits, only to let us in.

  In a coquettish ton
e that I had never heard from him in his teaching days, he called himself the cock of the walk. The figure before me was also rounder than my memory had preserved it: refectory cooking clearly agreed with him.

  We did not spend much time on Dorothea, who had finally been beatified. In matters political he was still very much the centrist, a position he felt was poorly upheld by the Christian Democrats at the time. He praised Father Wiehnke, my confessor at the Sacred Heart Church, because he had looked after the Catholic workers in his congregation ‘with great valour’. He reminisced about this or that teacher at Saint John’s and about the principal, whose two sons, as he put it, had ‘found their death’ with the battleship Bismarck.

  Yet he looked back with reluctance: ‘Those were hard times, they were …’ ‘No, no. Nobody denounced me …’

  That I was bad at Latin had mercifully slipped through the cracks.

  We spoke about Danzig when it was a picture postcard of towers and gables. He was glad to hear I had made repeated trips to Gdańsk – ‘I hear Holy Trinity has been restored to its former beauty’ – and when I brought up the topic of my silence during those years in school Monsignor Stachnik dismissed it with a smile and a wave of the hand. I thought I heard an ‘Ego te absolvo’.

  THOUGH SELDOM ADMONISHED by my moderately pious mother to go to church, I was early marked by Catholicism, and always crossed myself when I passed between the confessional and the main altar and altar of Our Lady. Monstrance and tabernacle were words I loved uttering, if only for their melodious sound. But what did I believe in before I believed only in the Führer?

  The Holy Ghost struck me as more fathomable than God the Father or God the Son. My faith, nurtured by the altar figures, the age-darkened paintings, and the incense-impregnated ghost-like atmosphere of the Sacred Heart Church, was more heathen than Christian. I felt physically close to the Virgin Mary: as Soonother, I was the archangel who recognized her.

  In addition, I was nurtured by the truths in books, truths that led lives of their own, lives rich in meaning, and it was in their hothouse beds that my own preposterous stories germinated. What, then, did the fourteen-year-old read?

  No religious tracts, that’s for sure, and no alliterative Blut und Boden propaganda: blood and soil were not for me. Nor was I attracted to Tom Mix or the endless volumes of our very own spinner of Westerns, Karl May, which my classmates couldn’t put down. Above all, I read everything – what luck! – that my mother’s bookcase had to offer.

  On the occasion of receiving a prize in Budapest about a year ago – a mantelpiece clock I found monstrous because it was set in a lead-grey casing that implied I had only leaden moments ahead of me – I asked my Hungarian editor, Imre Barna, if he knew who had written a novel that had bewildered me in my youth, a novel entitled Temptation in Budapest. Before long, a thick tome was delivered to me by a dealer in second-hand books. Its author, long since forgotten, was Franz Körmendi. His book, published by Propyläen Verlag in Berlin in 1933, is a five-hundred-page tale of men sitting around in coffee houses after World War I, bored and longing for happiness and stability. There is an undercurrent of proletarian revolution and counterrevolution and anarchist bombings. The hero is a rootless member of the coffee house group, poor but ambitious, who leaves the city on the Danube, goes out into the world, and returns with a rich wife, only to fall prey to a perplexing and in the end spurious love.

  It is as fresh a novel today as it was when it was published and I found it in my mother’s collection – a motley combination of books that the son made short work of and whose titles must remain unlisted for the time being because, hungry for more reading material, I now picture myself at a table in the Municipal Library near Saint Peter’s.

  Saint Peter’s was my intermediate stop. I was transferred there by decree of the school board after being expelled from the Langfuhr Conradinum for having been, as the son’s disappointed parents were informed, ‘unruly and shamelessly insolent’ to a physical education teacher who was known for torturing his pupils on the horizontal and parallel bars.

  But what does it mean to say, ‘I now picture myself in the Municipal Library’? With the help of the few snapshots my mother managed to save from the war I can put together another self-portrait of the adolescent I was then. The pimples I later vainly laid siege to with Pitralon lotion and almond bran have not yet made their appearance, but my protuberant lower lip and congenitally jutting jaw make me look less like a child. I am serious, almost sombre, the kind of prematurely pubescent pupil who can be expected to rise up against his teachers: rub him the wrong way and he’s likely to lay hands on you.

  Then there was the time a fat music teacher sang us ‘Heideröschen’ in his falsetto voice, and when we provided a jazz accompaniment of sounds and gestures I was the only one he scolded and dared to shake, which led me to grab his tie with my left hand and throttle him with it until it tore just under the knot (because of the war it was made out of paper). That incident provided the grounds for yet another transfer – as a pedagogical precaution, according to the euphemistic report – this time from Saint Peter’s to Saint John’s. No wonder I was cutting myself off from everybody, even from my mother.

  And I picture myself wearing the same brooding look on my way to the Municipal Library for whose existence we had the Hanseatic sense of civic duty to thank and which one could reasonably have assumed to have burned down when the entire city was in flames just before the end of the war. But when I visited the by then Polish city of Gdańsk in the spring of 1958 to search for traces of Danzig, that is, to take notes on loss, I found the Municipal Library intact, down to its old wood-panelled interior, so that I had no trouble seeing myself as an adolescent in knee-length trousers seated at one of its tables enjoying the use of its collection. Right: no pimples yet, but a lock of hair falling over the forehead; the bridge of the nose already arched; chin and lower lip thrust forward; the mouth twisted into a grimace. He still grimaces, and not only when he reads.

  TIME LAYS LAYER upon layer. What it covers is at best recovered through chinks. And it is through one such gap in time, which I do my best to enlarge, that I view him and myself simultaneously: he shamelessly young, I getting on in years; he reading the future in books, the past catching up with me. My cares are not his: what he fails to see as disgraceful, that is, what makes him feel no shame, I, who am more than related to him, must somehow grapple with. Sheet upon sheet of time consumed lies between us.

  While the thirty-year-old father of newborn twin sons, who has recently tried to balance out his protruding lower lip by growing a moustache, is poking around for local morsels to feed an always ravenous manuscript, his rejuvenated self will not let anything, not even him, the man in the corduroy suit, distract him.

  But my eyes can’t stay still. As I leaf through the 1939 issues of the Danziger Vorposten that have been brought to me from the stacks, I am only superficially involved in what the paper reports about everyday life at the beginning of the war. Granted, my thirty-year-old self is scribbling things in his notebook: the films being shown during the first week in September in Langfuhr and in the Old Town cinemas – Water for Canitoga with Hans Albers, for instance, at the Odeon near the Dominikswall – but at the same time his roaming eye catches sight of the fourteen-year-old boy sitting three tables away, engrossed in a richly illustrated volume of the Knackfuss World Artist Monographs.

  There is a pile of other volumes in the series beside him: he is clearly hoping to expand the knowledge he has gained from his cigarette cards. Without so much as raising his head, he sets aside the volume devoted to Max Klinger and opens another.

  While the grown-up morsel-collector copies out random market prices and stock quotations (Bemberg silk steady, grain commodities on the rise) and before he can be mortified by yet another multicolumn horror story – here is one that goes on for pages, squeezing the last gory drop out of the ‘massacre perpetrated by Polish monsters’ on September 3, ‘Bromberg Bloody Sunday’ – he see
s himself, no, sees the boy, who, thanks to Knackfuss has just admired the versatility of Klinger, painter, sculptor, draughtsman, and is now, after being fascinated by Caravaggio’s tumultuous biography, wishing he could have been an apprentice in Anselm Feuerbach’s studio. His current favourites are the Deutschrömer, the ‘German Romans’ of the mid-nineteenth century. He wants to become an artist, and famous, no doubt about it.

  The mature time-traveller from Paris, who may already be an artist but is not yet famous, realizes that his youthful counterpart is totally absorbed: even if he called out to him, he would get no response.

  THIS MEETING WITH myself is transferable: when I cut myself off from the world, I often see my younger self in different places, in the Jäschkental Forest or on the steps of the cast-iron Gutenberg monument. Or on the deserted shore before the beach season began, when I would take a pile of borrowed books down to the Baltic and huddle up in one of the empty wicker chairs to read, though my favourite reading place was the attic of our apartment building, where I could read under the skylight. I can also picture myself in our cramped apartment standing before my mother’s bookcase. It is more memorable than any other piece of furniture in the living room. It reaches only to my forehead. Its glass front and blue curtains are meant to protect the books’ spines from too much light. The wood is walnut with egg-and-dart edging. It is said to be the piece that an apprentice working at my paternal grandfather’s joining bench happened to finish just before my parents’ wedding and submitted to his master, my grandfather, as his bid to become a journeyman.

  Ever since, it had stood to the right of the living-room window, just beside my niche. Beneath the sill of the left-hand living-room window, which provided side lighting for the piano and the music open on its stand, my sister kept her poetry album and dolls and stuffed animals, my sister, who never cracked a grimace or a book, yet was Papa’s pet, because she was always cheerful and practically never made a fuss.