Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  With anticipatory zeal, the future volunteer saw himself returning from victorious campaigns to one of the submarine bunkers on France’s Atlantic coast, safe at last from the enemy’s merciless depth charges. He would stand in formation with the crew next to the bearded lieutenant-commander, under pennants representing all the ships they had sunk. They had been presumed lost and would be given just the kind of welcome, brass band and all, that the moviegoer had seen over and over when his heroes returned home triumphant. No scenes of the boats that had gone down with every last man.

  No, it wasn’t the papers that fed my hero-worship. My parents didn’t subscribe to the Vorposten; they subscribed to the more objective, somewhat fuddy-duddy Danziger Neueste Nachrichten. It was the newsreels: I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white ‘truth’ they served up.

  They would come before the feature film. In the Langfuhr Cinema or the Old Town’s Elisabethkirchengasse Ufa Palace I would see Germany surrounded by enemies, valiantly fighting what had been defensive battles abroad – on Russia’s endless steppes, in the burning sands of the Libyan desert, along the protective Atlantic Wall, at the bottom of the sea – and on the home front I would see women turning out grenades, men assembling tanks: a bulwark against the Red Tide. The German folk in a life-and-death struggle. Fortress Europe standing up to Anglo-American imperialism at great cost. Every day the Neueste Nachrichten published more and more announcements rimmed in black and decorated with the thick black crosses indicating soldiers’ deaths for Führer, Folk, and Fatherland.

  Could this have stood behind my desire to enlist? Was one of the ingredients of my muddled daydreams a pinch of death wish? Did I yearn to see my name immortalized inside the black rim? I don’t believe so. I may have been an egotistical loner, but I was no stereotypical world-weary adolescent. Maybe just dumb?

  There are no data available about what goes on in the head of a fifteen-year-old who longs to enter a fray in which – he might well presume, as he knew from his books – death takes its toll. But there are any number of speculations: Is it the pressure of emotions with no outlet, the desire to be totally independent, the will to grow up overnight, to be a man among men?

  IT MUST HAVE been possible for a Luftwaffe auxiliary to trade a weekend leave for a Wednesday or Thursday off. In any case, one thing is clear: after one long day’s march I took the tram from Heubude to the Central Station and from there the train via Langfuhr and Zoppot to Gotenhafen, a city that in my childhood was called Gdingen in German and Gdynia in Polish. It had grown up too quickly and had no history to speak of. Modern flat-roofed construction ran all the way down to the harbour, where quays and moles faced the open sea. It was there that navy recruits were trained to handle submarines. There were other places as well – Pillau, for instance – but Gotenhafen was the closest.

  It took all of an hour to reach the goal of my dreams of heroism. Was it in March or during April showers? Yes, it was probably raining, the harbour misted over. The former Strength-Through-Joy ship Wilhelm Gustloff was moored and at anchor at the Oxhöft Quay: I’d heard it was being used as a floating barracks by a submarine training division, though I didn’t know for sure, the harbour and shipyard being off-limits to us.

  Sixty years later, a human lifetime away, I was finally able to write a novella, Crabwalk, about that ship, about its much-heralded launching, its much-loved peacetime cruises, and its wartime conversion into a quayside barracks, about its one last voyage, with a human cargo of a thousand recruits and several thousand refugees, and about its sinking on January 30, 1945, off the Stolpebank. I knew the catastrophe’s every detail: the temperature that day (twenty degrees below zero), the number of torpedoes (three) …

  Since I was reporting a swatch of time-compressed action, yet simultaneously writing fiction, I imagined myself into one of the submarine recruits on board the sinking Gustloff. I thus imagined what those seventeen-year-olds doomed to an early death in the icy Baltic must have had in their sailor-capped heads: first, girls promising instant bliss, then, heroic deeds to come. Like me, they believed in a miracle: the final victory.

  I found the recruitment office in a low, Polish-period building where behind a row of doors with signs bureaucratic rigamarole was processed, passed on, filed. After signing in, I was told to wait for my name to be called. There were two or three older boys ahead of me. I did not have much to say to them.

  The sergeant and leading seaman I spoke to rejected me out of hand: I was too young; my age group hadn’t come up yet; it would soon enough; no reason for excessive haste.

  They were smoking and drinking coffee with milk out of big, bulbous cups. One of the – from my perspective – elderly gentlemen (the sergeant?) was sharpening a supply of pencils while I spoke. Or did I pick up this dramatic detail from some movie or other?

  Was the Luftwaffe auxiliary in uniform or in mufti? Short trousers and kneesocks, perhaps? Did he stand at attention, the requisite distance from the desk, and deliver a timid but much rehearsed ‘I hereby volunteer for service in the submarine corps’?

  Was he asked to take a seat?

  Did he see himself as courageous, already displaying signs of heroism?

  A blurred image is the only answer.

  I must have stood my ground even as I was told there was no need for submarine volunteers at present: they had stopped accepting applications. And then they said, as we all know, the war was not being fought entirely under water, and they would make a note of my name and pass it on to other branches of the military. Provisions were being made for new Panzer divisions. There would be possibilities galore once your age group came up. ‘Patience, young man, patience. We’ll come and get you soon enough …’

  Did the volunteer prove flexible? ‘If submarines are out, well, why not tanks …?’

  Did he ask about the latest models? ‘Would I get to drive one of the new Tigers?’

  Again, it was the newsreels that had been the moviegoer’s first training camp: he had seen Rommel’s tanks in the desert sand.

  I may also have shown off the knowledge I had cribbed from Weyer and Köhler’s Fleet Calendar. I was even familiar with the particulars of Japanese battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruisers and their victories in the Pacific: the taking of Singapore, the battle for the Philippines. To this day I can spout the weaponry and speed in knots of the heavy cruisers Kurutaka and Kako. The memory likes to hoard scrap metal, objects promising to stand up to time even in their eroded state.

  At a certain point, though, the avuncular sarge and rather brusque seaman must have heard enough as they broke off our discussion and assured me my application would be looked upon with favour. But first came Labour Service, after all. Not even enlisted men could get out of Labour Service. ‘That’s where you do your rifle drills. And learn what real army discipline means …’

  As I summon forth the boy I was then, making him stand at attention in laced-up, spit-shined shoes and striped kneesocks topped by naked knees, and taking care to avoid second-hand images from the screen or from the page, I seem to hear the two middle-aged – or old, in my young eyes – gentlemen in uniform laughing sardonically, thinking perhaps of what the boy still in shorts had in store: the sergeant’s left sleeve was empty.

  TIME PASSED. WE boys grew accustomed to barracks life, to bunk beds, to a summer without Baltic beaches and bathing. The Heideggerian turns of phrase of a corporal who claimed to have studied philosophy threaded their way through our school slang. ‘You forgetful-of-being dogs, you!’ he would scream at us. ‘We’ll knock the essentiality out of you yet!’ The sight of us put him in mind of ‘the facticity of a pile of shit’. But otherwise he was harmless. No slave driver he. Just someone who liked to hear himself talk. The boy later put him to use in the Dog Years’ Materniads.

  When the wind blew from the north, it wafted an evil stench our way from a mass of indefinable whitish substance near the factory grounds over by the port. The things I saw and smelled. Things that left their ma
rk. Other things, too. And we ate God knows what.

  Towards the end of August a group of Ukrainian ‘volunteer labourers’ moved into a barracks erected especially for them. They were not much older than we were, and their job was to free the gunners from such non-essential activities as kitchen duty and building earthworks. In the evening they would sit quietly in front of the tool shed.

  But between rifle drills and ballistics lectures we would hunt long-tailed rats with them, in the washroom, behind the barracks kitchen, in the dugouts under the eight-point-eight artillery. One of us – or was it one of them? – would catch them with his bare hands. For every ten tails presented we received a reward: the Luftwaffe auxiliaries got fruit drops, the veteran ack-ack soldiers got cigarettes, and the Hiwis (which is what we called the Ukrainians – it was short for Hilfwillige, ‘volunteer labourer’), got a kind of tobacco they liked, called makhorka.

  No matter how successful we were at collecting loot, we no more than stemmed the tide. The Kaiserhafen battery could not even begin to celebrate a victory over the creatures. Perhaps this is why decades later I gave the floor for the length of a novel to an indestructible rodent. I would dream of rats separately and in clans. The rats made fun of me because I kept hoping. They knew better; they dug in before it was too late. Only they had the wherewithal to survive mankind and its squabbles …

  SHORTLY AFTER MY sixteenth birthday I was transferred with part of the Kaiserhafen team to the Brösen-Glettkau beach battery, which was equipped with four-barrelled anti-aircraft artillery to protect the nearby airport from strafing. There we had more rabbits than long-tailed quarry.

  During my free time I would disappear into the dunes and, sheltered from the wind, scribble autumn poems into a notebook. Overripe rose hips, the daily tedium, mussels and Weltschmerz, wind-bent shore grass, and a rubber boot washed ashore provided the inspiration, and when fog rolled in, what I called my love pains would pay off. After storms there were fragments, or, if I was lucky, hazelnut-sized nuggets of amber to be gathered from among the tangles of seaweed. Once I even found a nugget big as a walnut, containing a centipede-like insect that had survived the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Roman Empire, and who knows what else. But I no longer moulded wet-sand citadels.

  Things at home ran their wartime course. I managed to keep the animosity I felt towards my father within bounds for the length of my weekend leaves. I presumably enjoyed disdaining him: first, because he existed; next, because he would stand or sit in the living room wearing a suit and tie and felt slippers; next, because he was forever mixing pastry dough in the same stoneware bowl while clothed in the same apron; next, because he was always the one who carefully tore up the newspapers into toilet paper; and finally, because having been declared ‘exempt from military service’, he would never go to the front and therefore never get out of my hair. But my father did give me a Kinzle wristwatch for my birthday.

  Mother had all but stopped playing the piano. Her take on the general situation boiled down to the following: ‘I have my doubts.’ Though I once heard her say, ‘Too bad Hess is gone. I liked him better than our Führer …’ She was also known to come out with, ‘I can’t understand why they’ve got it in for the Jews. We used to have a haberdashery sales rep by the name of Zuckermann. As nice as could be and always gave a discount.’

  After Sunday supper she would cover the table with the food ration stamps for all the goods she had been allocated. Then she’d paste them onto newsprint with a mixture of potato starch and water. She was required to hand them over to the officials, as the volume of groceries delivered had to correspond to the volume of stamps collected. The Max-Halbe-Platz branch of Kaisers Kaffee had closed its doors, and our clientele increased.

  I often helped her with the pasting. The Danziger Neueste Nachrichten provided not only the day’s events but also the backing for the stamps. Flour-and sugar-stamps may therefore have obscured the report by the Wehrmacht’s high command that tried to tone down the retreat by dubbing it a front-straightening operation. Names of cities being evacuated were names I had learned when they were being taken. Stamps for shortening and cooking oil concealed pages of announcements of soldiers fallen in battle; stamps for peas and beans covered up cinema schedules, which still changed from week to week, or classified advertisements.

  Father sometimes lent a hand as well. The stamp-pasting process brought us all closer. He called his wife Lenchen; he was Willy to her. They called me ‘son’. Daddau, my sister, she never helped.

  While the paste dried, the Sunday music-by-request programme would broadcast all of Mother’s old favourites: ‘Oh, Alas, Alack, I’ve Lost Her’ … ‘Hark to the Dove’s Sweet Song’ … Alone, Once More Alone’ … Solveig’s song, ‘Cold Winter May Leave Us’ … ‘Bells of Our Homeland’ …

  All winter long the front moved closer to home. Bulletins virtually ceased, but more and more bombardment victims were seeking refuge in our city and its environs. They included my father’s sister, Aunt Elli, with her invalid husband and twin girls, both of whom I liked – one in particular. They had come from Berlin with the few belongings they had managed to salvage to a city the war had left whole, a city so ensconced in its stolid brick obsolescence that it seemed as if no battles would ever come near it.

  Since the picture palaces were generally open for business, the moviegoer took advantage of his leaves to escort one of his Berlin-accented cousins to Quax, Crash Pilot with Heinz Rühmann, and Homeland with Zarah Leander. We may have sat together through other films as well. My cousin was a year older than I and more dexterous in the dark.

  Presumably the signature I had put to paper in a Gotenhafen office to enlist in this or that arm of the service had in the course of that winter been treated as a whim and vanished without consequences. The urge to break away, to flee to any front that would have me, had lost its force. My desire was moving in another direction: I read Eichendorff and Lenau at their most romantic, pored over Kleist’s Kohlhaas and Hölderlin’s Hyperion, and stood guard by the ack-ack guns lost in thought, my eyes wandering over the frozen sea. There, in the fog above the roadstead, freighters were riding at anchor, Swedish freighters, perhaps.

  It was at about this time, in the dead of winter, that the military post delivered the letter that the black-plaited object of my exceedingly fervent first love had written in her best handwriting and whose spelling mistakes I had felt constrained to correct. What she wrote vanished into thin air. Before bliss came to pass, it shattered to pieces.

  For years after the war I searched through the Red Cross missing-persons lists and the newspaper for Germans expelled from Danzig, the Danziger Heimatblättchen der Vetriebenen, which occasionally reported on reunions of students from the Gudrun School, for the name of a girl whose form kept changing, who at one moment seemed but an arm’s length away and at the next completely unreal, and who had first one name, then another, in my books.

  Once, in the mid-sixties, I thought I saw her at the main entrance to Cologne Cathedral, much the worse for wear, begging. When I addressed her, a practically toothless woman, she babbled something back in the local dialect …

  And when in the late nineties, back in Gdańsk to attend the debut of an adaptation of my Call of the Toad staged in the cramped quarters of a private apartment, Ute and I passed an old building on what had once been Brunshöferweg, I said, ‘This is where she lived’ and felt a fool.

  WHAT I HAD lost seemed impossible to get over at first, but I dealt with it in time. There was that cousin I liked, after all. Besides, work, boring as it was, was going okay. Our instructors, war-weary NCOs, weren’t particularly hard on us and seemed grateful to be far from the fray, ‘putting the fear of God’ into ‘you muttonheads’.

  The waves broke monotonously against the battery’s beach position. Rifle practice consisted of shooting at rabbits or – though it was forbidden – seagulls with small-calibre weapons. I waged a futile battle against pimples. When it rained and we were off dut
y, we played card games or board games.

  This leisurely pace could have gone on all spring, which had finally come, and into the summer, but shortly after I was called in for the physical given to all potential recruits, in the building of the local military command near the Wiebenwall, I received official notification that I had been inducted into the Reich’s Labour Service.

  I was not the only one who received that piece of certified mail. It all went like clockwork, according to age group. Length of service: three months. I was to report in late April or early May. A whole group of us were discharged from our Luftwaffe auxiliary unit, which was immediately replenished by an influx of Danzig schoolboys, and suddenly I was back in short trousers and kneesocks. Looking in the mirror or visiting friends with pretty sisters I felt I no longer had anything to offer. It had all happened quickly and close to home while at the same time and far away the dead were having tin dog tags removed from their necks and the living were having iron medals hung round theirs.

  Throughout the winter and into spring my knowledge of geography had been expanding again with reports of front movements in the east (Kiev evacuated), of battles for islands in the Pacific between the Japanese and the Americans, of developments in southern Europe. After our Italian allies broke with us, a move we saw as base treason, and our parachutists liberated Il Duce from his hideout in the Abruzzi Apennines – Skorzeny was the latest hero’s name – came the battle for the ruins of Monte Cassino Abbey. The British and Americans had landed on the coast just south of Rome and were extending a bridgehead that was still under fire when I had to give up my chic Luftwaffe auxiliary uniform for the less than flattering Labour Service garb. Shit-brown, it made us look shitty, we would say. The most ludicrous part of it was the headgear, a felt hat that looked like a big bump with a crease down the middle and seemed to have been made only to be torn off. We dubbed it ‘arse with a handle’.