I'm Not the Man I Used to Be (Page 3)

Ending his account with the publication of The Tin Drum is, of course, rather convenient, for it allows Grass to evade the lingering and legitimate question of why he never discussed his membership in the Waffen SS until now. Had he done so during the controversy over Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to the Bitburg cemetery, with its SS graves, or during the Historikerstreit, the German historians' quarrel over the uniqueness of Nazi crimes, his voice could have added substantially to the debate. There is no little irony in the fact that the vociferous and inquisitional demand for contrition and breast-beating should now confront an author who never hesitated to make such demands of others. Still, the Grass affair doesn't tell us much about the quality of his memoir. And his politics always had more bite in his literary writings than in his political pronouncements.

Peeling the onion, slippery skin after slippery skin, is a surprisingly apt metaphor for delving into one's memories. It captures the unreliability of all human memory, its layering and restructuring by partial forgetfulness and corrupted recollections. The other recurrent metaphor in the book is amber, evoking another kind of memory. Amber, tree sap hardened into a yellow-brown mineral, often encasing an insect and found plentifully on the Baltic beaches of Grass's lost Heimat, stands for the unchanging, petrified memory image. To give but one example: Looking at a honey-colored translucent piece of amber later in life, Grass sees not the proverbial encased insect but himself in full-length outline at 14 and naked. The amber serves here as a projection screen of an image of the pubescent boy ingrained in the narrator's mind, whereas the onion's skins need to be read one after another. Reading and seeing, writing and projecting the past are the two modes governing Grass's writing. The play between onion and amber thus brings a new literary dimension to that inevitable weaving together of Dichtung und Wahrheit, as Goethe had it--the mix of fiction and truth in all autobiography and memoir. The power of any memoir hinges on the right mix, and readers will part ways in assessing it. Critics who chide Grass for couching his Nazi past in literary metaphors, for questioning the reliability of his own memories, for admitting forgetfulness and for hiding behind some of the same complex narrative techniques we know from his novels may score political points, but they betray a simplistic understanding of the genre.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing we learn from Grass's memoir is how slowly he arrived at the character of Oskar Matzerath, and how hesitantly he moved from an apolitical understanding of art to writing perhaps the most powerful political novel of the postwar period. This section of the memoir reproduces in microcosm the history of the Federal Republic in those years--the initial confrontation with the political and cultural fallout from the Third Reich, culminating in the commemorative obsessions of more recent decades, when the politics of memory became a worldwide phenomenon. When Grass, who was living in Berlin at the time, witnessed the East German workers' revolt on June 17, 1953, near Potsdamer Platz, he had no hunger for politics or memory, nor any desire to write the great postwar German novel. He kept working as an artist and poet. He first won recognition as a writer almost by default, when he read his poems with the Group 47 in 1955. Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn--himself burdened by his initial support for Hitler but still a major literary figure in the early '50s--read Grass's poetry at the time and predicted that he would one day write prose.

Although Grass never gave up on poetry, he achieved fame for his novels, especially the Danzig trilogy. It is fascinating to read how the novel that ultimately won him the Nobel Prize emerged inchoately, indeed almost by accident. Toward the end of the memoir, Grass explains his shift from poetry to prose as a compulsion to abandon his earlier apolitical and aestheticist stance and to face the German past: "I could easily have engaged in productive time-wasting and made myself look interesting at Group 47 meetings with new artistic devices if the massive weight of the German past and hence my own could have somehow been ignored. But it stood in the way. It tripped me up. There was no getting around it. As if prescribed for me, it remained impenetrable: here was a lava flow that had barely cooled down, there a stretch of solid basalt, itself sitting on even older deposits. And layer upon layer had to be carried away, sorted, named. Words were needed. And a first sentence was still missing."

But then the compulsion to write, as he once put it in typically blunt fashion, hit him like diarrhea. The old Grass gave a political twist to the same idea when he wrote in his recent novel Crabwalk: "History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising." Indeed, this does sum up more than just the origins of The Tin Drum.

The critic Hans Mayer once divided German artists into martyrs and representatives. If Mann was a representative of German culture in the traditional sense, Grass, who likes to claim persecution by the media, never was a martyr but always a representative of the democratic postwar Western republic, warts and all. Like his Danzig trilogy, the author nearing the age of 80, with his mustache, his pipe and his political pronouncements, stands like a block of lava in the midst of a cultural formation that has become history. In that sense, for better or worse, Grass remains who he was before: a major representative of German post-World War II literature. And he remains so in a perhaps even deeper sense than before the late revelation and continuing evasion in his memoir.

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