Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  Fear became a pack I could not throw off. Having, like the boy in the tale, gone forth to learn fear, I received daily lessons: ducking, dodging, cowering – such were the lapidary techniques of survival to be applied without drill. Woe betide the man unwilling to learn. Sometimes the only thing that helped was Luck, the child of Cunning and Chance.

  Later I would call to mind several situations from which escape had been possible only with the aid of luck and chance. I summoned them so often that they turned into stories, which, as the years went by, grew more and more pertinent the more insistent they became on being believable down to the last detail. Yet everything that has been preserved as danger survived in the war must be doubted, even if it boasts of concrete detail in stories claiming to be true and as tangible as the mosquito in my amber.

  IT IS A fact that twice in mid-April I ended up behind Russian lines as part of an improvised unit. It happened in the haste of retreat; both times I was attached to a reconnaissance troop with an unclear mission, and both times I was saved by luck if not by chance. Yet both situations occupied my dreams for years, offering variation after variation on my escape.

  I knew about close calls from books I had more devoured than read as a schoolboy. One of my teachers – Littschwager by name, a man who appreciated the flights into absurdity in my compositions – had pressed a cheap, easy-to-read edition of Simplicissimus into my hands with the recommendation, ‘It’s Baroque Realism, unbelievable but true, like everything Grimmelshausen wrote.’ I read myself silly.

  So I could have taken heart from my predecessors: If Simplicius the survival artist had the fortune and cunning to steer clear of dangers lurking behind every bush for the length of a war lasting a full thirty years, and if his soulmate, Heartbrother, with his watertight argumentation could save him at the last minute – as he did at the Battle of Wittstock – from the clutches of the quick-to-sentence military judge and thus enable Simplicius to write his heart out when the time came, then why shouldn’t Luck or another Heartbrother help me?

  MY FIRST OPPORTUNITY to croak under machine-gun fire or be taken prisoner and learn to survive in Siberia presented itself when a troop of six or seven men led by a sergeant attempted to break out of the cellar of a one-storey house. The house was in the Russian-occupied part of a village still under dispute.

  How we got behind Russian lines and into the cellar of this house, which was actually more of a hut, is unclear, but breaking out of it and racing to one of the houses on the other side of the street still occupied by Germans was supposed to save us. I hear the sergeant, a beanpole topped by a cocked field hat, saying, ‘Now or never!’

  The name of the disputed locality – it was in the sandy Lusatian region, a one-street village that stretched on and on – may never have been told us, or I may have forgotten it. Through the cellar window we could hear shots – single shots and machine-gun fire – going back and forth at intervals. There was nothing edible on the cellar shelves, but we could tell that the man living there, who had obviously cleared out just in time, had owned a bicycle shop, because he had used the cellar to hide his much-sought-after wares, quite a number of which were hanging by their front wheels from wooden racks, their tyres pumped and ready, even raring, to go.

  The sergeant must have been prone to snap decisions, because just after saying ‘Now or never!’ he whispered rather than commanded, ‘Get a move on. Grab a bike, each one of you, and make a run for it …’

  My embarrassed but precisely formulated response – ‘Sorry, Sergeant, I can’t ride a bike’ – must have sounded like a bad joke to him. Nobody laughed. There was no time to go into deeper reasons for my disgraceful failing: ‘My mother, who runs a no more than marginally profitable grocery, was unfortunately so chronically short of funds that she could not afford to buy me a bicycle, new or used, thus preventing me from acquiring a skill that might now possibly save my life …’

  Before I could go on to laud my early-acquired natatorial skills, however, the sergeant made another snap decision: ‘All right, then. Grab the machine gun and cover us. We’ll come back for you later …’

  It may be that one or another of the privates, while dutifully removing his bike from the rack, tried to allay my fear. If so, his words went unheeded. I was at the cellar window taking up a position with a weapon I had not been trained to operate. The doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire, however, because no sooner had the five or six men emerged from the cellar, bicycles – including girls’ bicycles – and all, than they were mown down by machine-gun fire out of nowhere, that is, from one side of the street or the other or both.

  I think I see a wriggling, then only twitching pile. Someone – the lanky sergeant? – turns head over heels as he falls. Then nothing moves. I may also see a front wheel sticking out of the pile, turning and turning.

  But it may be that this description of the slaughter is no more than an after-the-fact, staged image, because I had left my cellar-window post before the fatal shoot-out and had seen nothing, wanted to see nothing.

  I departed the bicycle shop owner’s house without the light machine gun entrusted to me, but with my rifle, and made a run for it through the back garden and creaky gate. Behind and between gardens I was hidden by bushes already in bud, and having left the village still ringing with gunfire on the q.t., I suddenly came to the tracks of a narrow-gauge railway bordered on both sides by shrubbery along embankments the height of a man. They ran straight in the presumed direction of our front. Silence. Only sparrows and titmice in the shrubbery.

  Not that I had learned a lesson from that sergeant for whom my inability to ride a bicycle had been nothing but a bad joke, but my impulse to follow the tracks like a prophetic directive proved to be the right decision.

  After little more than a kilometre of gravel and wooden ties I saw an undamaged bridge arching the tracks. Crossing it were jeeps and trucks carrying infantry, then a horse-drawn howitzer, then small groups of unmistakably German foot soldiers dragging their feet. Blindly I joined their column, since without evidence of an enemy wound a soldier on his own with no marching orders would be a likely candidate for the noose.

  I realize this survival story is hard to believe and smells strongly of artifice. In support of its kernel of truth let me point out that years later, whenever my sons and daughters tried to convince their father – deep in the woods with no one in sight – that learning to ride a bike was child’s play, he would venture no more than a quick try. Because when – in, say, Ulvshale Skov in Denmark – I let myself be lured onto a bicycle by cries like ‘Don’t be a coward!’ and ‘Come on, Papa!’ from Malte, Hänschen, and Helene, who had been bike-trained at a tender age, the son of a mother who had unwittingly saved his life by insisting there was never enough money for one of those ‘wire donkeys’, as she dubbed the two-wheelers, fell off.

  The only person capable of seducing me into a bit of courage – and that as her partner on a Dutch tandem – was my wife Ute, who told me in the early eighties that I needed more exercise. She sat in front and steered, while I on the back seat enjoyed the sight of her loose hair blowing in the wind. Thus assured, I could let my thoughts wander without being endangered by snap decisions.

  OF THE COURSE of my days and nights – how did I get through them? – after the breach in the Oder-Neisse Line, the oft-spliced film has little to show. Neither the previously eloquent onion skin nor the transparent amber bearing a primordial insect that looks as if it belonged to today’s world can be of any use. I must go back to Grimmelshausen, whom a comparable wartime chaos helped to learn fear, and conjure up the adventures of the hunter of Soest. Just as his description of the Battle of Wittstock focuses on the Dosse River and the marshlands in which the Kaiser’s men come to grief – the bloodbath artfully adorned with his writer-colleague Martin Opitz’s Baroque word stock – so my battle scenes reflect the region of Lusatia between Cottbus and Spremberg.

  Clearly the goal was to stabilize the front, starting
at the very spot where I was wandering in circles, and break through the ever-narrowing ring around Berlin with newly formed units. There, so it was said, the Führer was holed up.

  But the goal had spawned contradictory orders and led to a mishmash of mutually obstructive troop movements. Only the Silesian refugee columns tried to maintain a clear-cut direction: westwards.

  OH, HOW EASILY words came to me in the early sixties, when I was oblivious enough to think I could give the lie to the facts and pin clear-cut explanations on all sorts of absurdities. The floodgates were open, and page after page of bound words poured forth. Traditional narrative forms shed their age first in hot, then in cold word-baths. And the torture wrung cries of recognition out of defiantly tight lips. Every fart had its echo. Every point well taken was worth three sacrificed truths. And since everything proceeded according to the logic of fact, the contrary was also logically possible.

  Thus, the point of the chapter concluding the second part of Dog Years was to make some sense out of the Führer’s underground bunker, and ipso facto, of the battle for Berlin, which followed a path of total insanity. The search for a lost German shepherd, who answered to the name of Prinz and was said to be the Führer’s favourite pet, suggested to me a language that combined meandering Heidegger-German – ‘nothingness nullifies unexposedly’ – and the clumsy, noun-laden diction of the Wehrmacht High Command, whose verbal overflow washed away even the most minor objections: ‘As per Führer-orders, the Twenty-Fifth Armoured Infantry Division is instructed to close the Cottbus-front breach and ensure against canine breakthrough. … The primordial manifestness of the Führer-dog is through-determined by distantiality. … The nothingness through-determined by distantiality is acknowledged in the Steiner Group space as nothingness. … Nothingness is coming-into-being between the armoured enemy and our spearheads …’

  But where I was, or was supposed to be – the Cottbus-front breach? – there were no spearheads, or, for that matter, recognizable military cohesion. The Frundsberg division could also have been acknowledged by the ominous Steiner Group as nothingness (though it may well have been attached to it): it had been reduced to a few hastily cobbled together remnants reacting to inconsistent orders. Everything was falling apart, nothing was proceeding as planned until – and now the film starts up again and brings me back into the picture – the lone tank gunner was given a new assignment at the whim of a higher power.

  DEALT THIS HAND by my old acquaintance Fate, I found myself in a group of twelve to fifteen men, with no heavy artillery and therefore classified as a raiding party, belonging to an ascension commando – soldiers’ slang for suicide squad. Since I had managed to lose my rifle as well as the tarpaulin that had sheltered me from the rain, I was given a sub-machine gun of Italian manufacture, which, had there been occasion for me to use it, would have been in unsure hands.

  I recall a meeting of steel helmets shadowing sullen men’s and fearful boys’ faces, of which mine would have been third from the left had anyone taken a picture of the lost troop.

  Again we were led by an old-timer of a sergeant, this one with broad shoulders but a less than brilliant career. Our orders were to advance and seek contact with the enemy.

  Dusk was descending, and after a number of false starts we wandered onto a forest path churned up by tank tracks. The tracks had been made only hours before, we learned, by a column of Tigers and armoured personnel carriers racing forward to serve as an advance guard. But hard as we tried to make radio contact with them, all that came over our walkie-talkie was gibberish and static.

  The tree stock on both sides of the road was highly repetitive, pine giving way to pine, towering pines right and left. We may have had no heavy artillery to weigh us down, but we had picked up an old man along the way – his armband identified him as a member of the Volkssturm, the Home Front Army – as well as two lightly wounded soldiers, both of them, like twins, with lame left legs. The man from the Volkssturm was constantly babbling about something, quarrelling with God or cursing his neighbour; the wounded men had to be helped along, half carried. We made slow progress.

  After further vain attempts at contacting the tank brigade, the sergeant called for a halt. Putting to use his evident front-line savvy, he had decided to wait for the armoured personnel carriers that were expected for the retreat, in the hope that they would provide transport for at least the hobblers and the Home Front bore. We’d had it for the day in any case. Luckily, he singled me out to stand watch and ordered me to keep my eyes open.

  I see another picture: Myself in my own imagination. Myself under my sliding helmet. Myself obeying an order. Myself eager to do a good job.

  And that, tired as I was, I did. Because it was not long before I spied a speck of light in the now night-black path running through the woods. It divided in two as it drew nearer. After delivering my required report – ‘Motorized vehicle, probably armoured personnel carrier, straight ahead!’ – I positioned myself in the middle of the path so as to be easily spotted and, according to my orders, ready to stop the tank with – since I am left-handed – a raised left hand.

  My first intimation of surprise may have come from the fact that the rapidly approaching vehicle had its headlights on full beam, and when it came to a halt two steps in front of me I realized why. Only Russians would waste lights like that …

  ‘It’s the Ivans!’ I shouted to the group at the side of the road but did not take the time to differentiate the gunners sitting cheek by jowl on the enemy tank and thus meet my first Soviet soldier face to face. I broke rank before they could shoot, diving into a stand of young pines to the right of the road, out of sight, though not out of danger.

  I heard shouting in two languages immediately overlayered by gunfire, until only the Russian sub-machine guns had their say.

  Crawling my way through the dense pine thicket and slowly increasing my distance from the road, I was shot at from right and left but not hit, which was not necessarily the case with the group around the sergeant: the old man was no longer cursing God or his neighbour or calling for various scores to be settled. The only voices I heard were Russian voices, now quite far off. Someone was laughing. He must have been in a good mood.

  Because the dry twigs made such a racket, the isolated tank gunner stopped inching forward on his elbows as he had been trained to do, and played dead, as if he could escape the march of history and, with his Italian sub-machine gun and two magazines of ammunition, he could still be considered battle ready. Not until the enemy tank, which had been followed by others, started moving did he begin to crawl forward again, and he crawled on until the pine cover turned into a mature wood with Prussian-neat rows. No, I had no desire to go back and find only corpses; besides, the pale lights and engine noises coming from the road confirmed the enemy’s advance.

  I moved deeper and deeper into the woods, a half-moon shining through a moderately cloudy sky, actually and suddenly – or only wishfully – which meant that the lone soldier did not bump into tree trunks very often. He was, however, so engulfed by the smell of resin that he felt encapsulated in it, like the insect that has come down to the present in my piece of amber and now claims to embody me. There it lies on the shelf with other such objects I have found, waiting to be held up to the light and interrogated. Spider, tick, or beetle, it will deliver its message if you’re patient enough …

  BUT WHAT DO I see when I hold up the lone tank gunner by half-moonlight and view him as an early edition of the man to come?

  He looks like a character who has escaped from a Grimm’s fairy tale. He is about to cry. He clearly doesn’t like the story in which he appears. He would much rather resemble the title character of a book that is always so close to him he feels he can reach out and touch it. Right: he feels like the hero from Grimmelshausen’s stable, the man for whom the world is a tortuous labyrinth of a madhouse that can be escaped only through pen and ink as a character named Soonother. A trick he has used since his schooldays: making words to
help him get on with life.

  So everything that happens now has been nurtured in the greenhouse of suppositions. He may have been this way or that, but all I can see is an aimless wanderer, appearing and disappearing nebulously between and behind tree trunks of uniform size, until he is finally recaptured by the image-seeker as the soldier with the helmet that keeps sliding down over his eyes.

  He is still armed, still holding his sub-machine gun at the ready. A gas mask dangles uselessly from him like an elongated drum. All he has left in his haversack is a few crumbs from his last ration. His canteen is half empty. The Kienzle luminous-dial wristwatch, the birthday present from his father, has long since stopped.

  If only he had the leather dice cup and three ivory dice that he claimed shortly after the war’s end and that he and a friend his age used to tell the future when they were prisoners together at the Bad Aibling camp. The friend will be called Joseph, and he will be so single-mindedly Catholic that he will want to be a priest, a bishop, maybe even a cardinal … But that is another story, whose origins are lost and have no business here in the dark wood.

  Now he is asleep, propped against a tree. Now he awakes with a start, though without the coat he lost at Weisswasser he is not cold. Now he casts a shadow like the tree trunks because it is day, but he cannot find his way out of the wood and stumbles around in a circle without knowing it, takes some crumbly zwieback out of his haversack, unscrews the top of his canteen, and drinks, sending the helmet back over his neck. He does not know how time passes to the minute, and has nothing to help him foretell the future, but he longs for a friend, as yet nameless, and tries in vain to be the Simplicius who can find his way out of any danger and therefore becomes the universally celebrated hunter of Soest, whose foraging expeditions yield nutritious loot like pumpernickel and Westphalian ham. Now it is dark again and an owl is calling, and, hungry and abandoned under the moderately cloudy night sky, he chews his last crumbs.