I'm Not the Man I Used to Be (Page 2)

The reasons for Grass's silence lie safely hidden in the memoir. And in his public statements since Peeling the Onion was published in Germany late last summer, he has been no more forthcoming about his decision to remain silent about this aspect of his past, further fueling the outrage of his critics (not a few of them disappointed admirers). To many, his legacy not just as a public intellectual but as a writer has been seriously damaged. After my initial reaction, however, I felt increasingly reluctant to point the finger at someone whose self-righteous moralizing about German politics had annoyed me time and again over the past few decades--particularly his stubborn insistence on the division of Germany as permanent penance for the crimes of Nazism and his often shrill anti-Americanism. To moralize about Grass's lack of candor just seemed too easy.

And when I began to peel the onion by reading the memoir, I was further convinced that my sense of betrayal had overshot its mark. Grass comes down hard and unsentimentally on his inability as a young man to read the signs of the times--the nonconformist fellow student who one day disappeared from the classroom; the Catholic teacher who ended up in a nearby concentration camp; his mother's hints about the persecution of the Jews. Indoctrinated as he was, he saw and looked away. Günter Grass's éducation politique was slow in taking shape, and his memoir acknowledges it.

Reading the skins of the onion, Grass provides a vivid account of his adolescence in the cramped, petit-bourgeois Danzig milieu that made the Nazi promises of heroism and adventure on the seas look like such an appealing escape. The reality was decidedly less romantic: Grass survived by the skin of his teeth and sheer luck in the chaos of the war's last months, escaping through the woods after his tank unit was decimated in a surprise attack by the advancing Soviet army. Quite plausibly, he claims never to have fired a single shot. The new division of the Waffen SS into which he was drafted fell apart under the Soviet onslaught almost as soon as it was formed.

This is not the story of an exceptional youth but of a 17-year-old German everyman, viewed unsparingly by the same man six decades later. Of course, there are lapses of memory, uncertainties about details. Grass acknowledges them head-on, if sometimes a bit too coyly. Not everything is written securely in the peels of the onion. But the fact that he describes his youthful self alternately in the first and third person is not evidence of evasion, or of some mendacious effort to blur the line between memoir and fiction, as some have charged. Rather, this oscillation in perspective marks the distance between the memoirist and his teenage self.

As the narrative moves to the late 1940s and into the following decade, Grass remains true to his earlier self in his descriptions of young Günter's three desires: real hunger, especially in the "hunger years" immediately following the end of the war; adolescent hunger for sex; and a budding hunger for art. Everything Grass writes about life in Düsseldorf and Berlin at the time resonates vividly, evoked in his signature picaresque tone and with his typical focus on the absurd in everyday life. Of public culture and political history, however, he has strikingly little to say: Neither his later vocal hostility toward the Adenauer restoration nor his engagement with the Social Democrats is evident yet. Like many Germans after the war, Grass shunned politics and found consolation (and, in his case, a vocation) in art, mostly in poetry, drawing and sculpture.

The chapters on the late 1940s and '50s revolve around personal reminiscences--his reunion with his parents, who were dislocated to the Rhineland; his apprenticeship as a stonemason, making tombstones; and his study at the Düsseldorf art academy, where Joseph Beuys was also a student. Later there is the Berlin art scene, with its cold war battles over abstraction; his courtship of Swiss dancer Anna Schwarz; and his first success as a literary upstart reading his poems at a meeting of the soon-to-be-famous Group 47. Particularly arresting, and notable for their lack of sentimentality, are his memories of the rather taciturn railroad station goodbye to his unloved father when he left for the war; the great tribute paid to his beloved mother, who died of cancer too early to witness her son's success; and the account of rescuing his sister from an authoritarian Mother Superior and helping her become a midwife instead of a nun. By contrast, Grass's tales of his sexual exploits are rather adolescent, without much detail about his sexual partners. The only relationship treated with the delicacy of long-term intimacy and love is the one with Anna, his first wife.

Interesting though not revelatory are the brief accounts of his literary formation, his love for Cervantes, seventeenth-century novelist Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin Alexanderplatz. In the 1950s conflict between figuration in painting and Modernist abstraction, Grass sided with figuration, a position that reflected his own practice as a graphic artist. In the existentialist controversy of those years he sided with Camus and the absurd against Sartre's Marxist politics, but otherwise he remained wary of fashionable existentialist posing. The few pages describing the years spent in Paris in the late 1950s are remarkably pale. Probably because of his limited French and an even more limited budget, he had minimal connections with the Parisian intellectual scene, and his work on The Tin Drum consumed ever more of his time. Even now, it seems that the novel drains energy from the memoir. We hear but don't learn much about his Paris friendship with poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. The Algerian war rumbles on in the background. In 1958 Grass wins first prize with the Group 47, and in 1959 The Tin Drum appears, to enthusiastic acclaim and public controversy. A year later he and Anna and their children are back in Berlin, and then, all of a sudden, Grass runs out of onions and concludes his memoir.

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