Bookplanet: Gunter Grass autobiography

1. Grassroots (from The Economist)

IN HIS teens, Günter Grass suffered three great hungers: first a hunger for food in an American prison camp in 1945 where near-starvation was part of the punishment. He took imaginary cooking lessons from a Bohemian chef, who described in great detail how to slaughter a pig and use every part, from its trotters to the deboned hog's head. The obsession with cooking and eating fatty food stayed with him.

On his release Mr Grass spent months as a labourer in a Düsseldorf potash works trying to satisfy his second hunger, for sex. Often the nearest he got was in the tram on the way to work, pressing himself against strap-hanging secretaries. However, thanks to earlier dancing lessons in Danzig, the Baltic town where he grew up, he was able to pull a few girls.

Mr Grass's third great hunger, to be an artist, had only partly been satisfied by wartime sketches and poems. In January 1947, he left his refugee parents, now living near Cologne, and tried for a place at sculpture school in Düsseldorf. His professor advised him to learn stonemasonry first; there was plenty of work making headstones. Later at art school in Berlin, Mr Grass progressed from carving conventional figures to out-sized statues of animals. After marriage, the birth of twin sons and a move to Paris, Mr Grass began working on “The Tin Drum”, which, after publication in 1959, made him famous.

This is the essence of “Beim Häuten der Zwiebel” (“Peeling the Onion”), an autobiography which explains the post-war Grass. But the first 150 pages are completely different—an apologia by an old man for not previously linking himself to the 17-year-old youth who in November 1944 joined the Waffen- SS, the combat divisions of Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel. The youth was a typical Nazi sheep, a willing subject for propaganda films, with typical schoolboy fantasies of winning laurels as a submariner. When the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed in July 1944, Mr Grass joined his neighbours in decrying the conspirators as “that brood of treacherous aristocrats”. He volunteered for U-boat service, but was drafted willy-nilly into the SS , an accident of history which thereafter was so shameful to Mr Grass that, despite his impeccable Social-Democrat credentials, he never found the right time to come clean.

Does this mean that much of his previous work, which focuses on Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”), has forfeited some of its artistic truth, as some critics and politicians have argued? No, it does not degrade Mr Grass as a fabulist of burlesque events, a veritable bestiary of characters: “Cat and Mouse”, “The Flounder”, “From the Diary of a Snail”, “Dog Years”. What is interesting, however, is the unconvincing nature of his wartime recollections. That section of the book is colourless and stereotyped. Many of the scenes could have been lifted—and the suspicion remains that they were—from Mr Grass's frequent visits to the cinema. The author himself makes many references to films and often throws doubts on his own memory and his ability to convince. There is no description of wartime friends, for example. Only one character stands out: the Aryan youth who at training camp refused to bear arms and one day disappeared. There is an episode in which Mr Grass's platoon tries to escape from the enemy by bicycle and is cut down. He, a non-cyclist, is the sole survivor. Even if this were true, he fails to suspend disbelief.

Contrast that with Mr Grass's mastery of character once the “dubious” few months in the SS are over. He meets a salt-of-the-earth corporal who helps him back to the German lines. Both are hit by shrapnel. Many later encounters with the Bohemian chef, with art professors and stonemasons, are the stuff of his later novels. A boy with a tin drum, who bursts in to a room in Switzerland in about 1952, becomes Oskar in his most successful work. Mr Grass may have satisfied his three hungers, but he has left a corner of doubt: why should his recollection of those few combatant months appear so weak?


2. Günter Grass Explains Silence on Nazi Past – by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

The German author Günter Grass has admitted to the mayor of Gdansk, Poland, the city of his birth, that he may have erred in waiting more than 60 years to reveal that he served in the Nazis' Waffen SS as a teenager in World War II, The Associated Press reported. "This silence may be judged as a mistake — that's exactly what's happening," Mr. Grass, 78, an honorary citizen of Gdansk and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote to Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, who had the letter read by an actor, Jan Kiszkis, at a news conference. "It may also be condemned." Mr. Grass went on to say that in 1942, as a "blinded 15- year-old," he asked to serve on the submarines, but was refused. "Instead, in September 1944, at the age of 17 — without my participation — I was made a member of the Waffen SS," he wrote. He added: "I would like to keep the right to say that I have understood this painful lesson that life taught me when I was a young man. My books and my political activity are the proof." After the letter was made public, the former president of Poland, Lech Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who had threatened to renounce his own honorary citizenship of Gdansk unless Mr. Grass offered an explanation, said he found it "convincing," adding, "and from now on I will no longer be in conflict with Mr. Grass."