NON– F I CTI ON

Peeling the Onion

Güünter Grass Harvill Secker / 432pp. / £18.99

[This review of the German edition, Beim Hääuten der Zwiebel, published by Steidl / 479pp. / €24]

Review by Michael Hamburger

THEfuss that has been made in the media about the belated ‘revelation’ of Güünter Grass’s brief teenage service in the Waffen-SS moves me to break a silence of nearly two decades as a book reviewer and critic. An association with him going back nearly half a century – as translator of his poems and one or two short prose works, as a personal friend and as reader of almost all his books, the earlier ones of which I wrote about when active as a critic – left me quite untroubled by the sensational news, but disgusted with the self-righteous calls of journalists and public figures for him to be punished and disgraced, stripped of his Nobel Prize and erased from politically-correct celebrity. It was no revelation to me, because as long ago as 1967 I had translated his autobiographical poem ‘Kleckerburg’, that ended with these lines (in my version):

...Baptized and vaccinated, schooled, confined. Bomb splinters meanwhile were my toys. And I grew up, was reared between the Holy Ghost and Hitler’s photograph. Ships’ sirens echo in my ears, lopped sentences and wind-blown cries, a few sound church bells, rifle fire and Baltic snatches: Blubb, pff, pshpsh.

The Holy Ghost is coupled with Hitler’s photograph because the Vatican had entered into a Concordat with the Hitler réégime ever since Grass’s early childhood in the Free State of Danzig, whose citizen he was by birth until it was incorporated into the Reich in 1939. The pressure on the Grass family of four in their two-room flat with no bathroom or lavatory of their own was especially acute because on his mother’s side he was of Slavic descent, and a relative of his mother’s has been executed for taking part in the defence of the Polish Post Office. This

branch of the family became unmentionable in his home, along with anything that might have stirred doubts about the réégime. Güünter’s father had joined the Party – another security measure for a family economically so insecure that in his childhood Güünter was sent out to collect small debts due to his parents’ grocery shop. This, and much more, may be read in Grass’s autobiographical account of his formative years, the essence of which is evident in his early poetry and prose fiction, transmuted into word-play, fables and tall stories that were his way of dealing with the otherwise unspeakable experience. Grass has done his best to record the facts without exchanging the privacy of the confessional for the sensationalism of mud-raking media; but minute documentation was not to be expected of a writer and artist so predominantly imaginative, even one who has always fed his fantasies with the most various researches and a loving attention to sensuous phenomena more significant to him than generalities and analysis. “I lived in images” is how he sums up this peculiarity in the new book, and later remarks that everything he looked at turned into a metaphor. The title of his book, a metaphor again, points to the main difficulty of all autobiographical writing, not least for writers of fiction – no wonder that in parts Grass’s account reads more like a picaresque novel than a chronicle of ‘real’ events. He was a visual artist, manual labourer and craftsman before he was ready to emerge as a writer. Memory is the onion of the title, and its many skins remain more visual, tactile or comestible than documentary in this book, quite apart from the unavoidable blanks in the peeling-down to an evasive core –most evasive where facts have long been overlaid by fictions, by what imagination made of them, although it isn’t only artists who make fictions of the facts of their lives. As Grass puts it, “to write is to give oneself up”, meaning that it is things and characters that take over, as they do in his graphic work and narratives, however idiosyncratic the rendering. Another metaphor for memory that recurs in the book is insects in amber – and this amber takes him back to the Baltic shores from which so much of his work has sprung. Though Grass was to come out in favour of representational art – as opposed to the abstract, decorative, or, now, rubbish-collecting – what he has never practiced is a naturalistic or psychological realism. Gaps in his memory are acknowledged; and he does not suppress the warnings he received, but could not yet face or act upon, of the nature of the réégime he served. A priest who taught him in one of his schools –a rare dissident at that time –disappeared in the local concentration camp. The same thing happened to a fellow soldier remarkable for conforming to the ideal Germanic type, who dropped his rifle every time on parade, with no word of explanation to anyone, being a conscientious objector whom Grass supposed to be a Jehovah’s Witness. Nor is he coy about the black market bartering to which he had to resort for survival before and after the war.

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The peeling-off of the onion’s layers may also bring tears to the eyes. But it has never been Grass’s way to indulge in such self-pity. So the regrets about his war service are only hinted at in the book, more cursorily by far than the three hungers that obsessed him in those years since puberty: for food, when he was on bare subsistence rations in an American POW camp and elsewhere; for sexual gratification; and for fulfillment as an artist, whether in words, pencil, brush or any other of his multiple media. (While learning to be a sculptor, after employment as a stonemason making headstones and graveyard monuments, he performed music too for a time, on a washboard in a skiffle band). His three hungers urged him to survive, and they had a much stronger hold on him than any ideal or ideology that might have propelled him to martyrdom. To survive he had to be as tough and impervious as he could make himself. The tragedies in his book are not his own, except by compassion, but those of his friends and companions less lucky than he was in successive activities, chosen or enforced. He mentions that he shed no tears even on the death of his mother, to whom he had remained closest of all, until long after the event. When he was released at last into relative freedom, he opted not to attend a course for those who had missed schooling and the ‘Abitur’, the matriculation considered requisite for success on any social order. When educational courses were offered in a POW camp, along with pictures of the extermination camp horrors that converted him (while others dismissed them as propaganda, saying: “No German could have done such things”), it was a cookery course that he chose; and he was to add cookery to his many other skills and accomplishments. Those who have had it in for Grass ever since he committed himself to a libertarian socialism – neither MarxistMaoist, when that was dominant in the 60s and 70s, nor global capitalism when that became the norm – will continue to

question the timing of his more factual account of the unregenerate past. Yet had he been known to have served in the Waffen-SS – never mind when, why and how – Grass would not have been eligible for participation in the Gruppe 47, an anti-Nazi group of writers who became a powerful pressure group in the early 50s; and it was through this participation that he emerged as a poet and found his first publisher, before writing The Tin Drum, which was to establish his fame. Nor could he have been active on behalf of the Social Democratic Party, as he was at a later period, when he felt it to be his duty as a citizen to put his reputation and eloquence at the disposal of that cause. It was by this activity, not very congenial to him, that he proved his metanoia, made up for his juvenile indoctrination. It was never his ambition to be a praeceptor Germaniae. If he was that to others, his new book ought to puncture that delusion. It presents him as a very fallible and carnal creature, with no pretensions to intellectual, moral or spiritual exemplariness, only with talents that needed to be fulfilled by intense application – as they have been. What matters, surely, is that he made ample amends for his youthful error, for instance by funding support for the Gypsies or Romanies of Europe, whom Hitler’s ideology of resentment also marked out for immediate and total extermination, and who are still persecuted by those with a similar mentality. The only privilege Grass has ever claimed for himself is that of the court fool or clown who, even under autocratic monarchies, had the liberty of uttering subversive or grotesque truths, as in Shakespeare’s plays, usually under the mere threat of a whipping if they overstepped the mark. Grass’s most memorable character, the tin drummer, is a re-embodiment of that archetype. It was not the function of such entertainers to analyse themselves and their quirks, rather to make their patrons laugh or smile, of course, but to shock them too,

for moments at least, into being less sure than they were of their power. This court fool’s freedom rested on a magnanimity now conspicuous by its absence in would-be public matters. So what is on trial in this affair is not Grass, his memory or his honesty, but the quality of our political-cum-cultural correctness.

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DON’T TURN ROUND

Don’t go into the wood, in the wood is the wood. Whoever walks in the wood, looks for trees, will not be looked for later in the wood.

Have no fear, fear smells of fear. Whoever smells of fear will be smelled out by heroes who smell like heroes.

Don’t drink from the sea, the sea tastes of more sea. Whoever drinks from the sea henceforth feels a thirst only for oceans.

Don’t build a home, or you’ll be at home. Whoever is at home waits for late callers and opens the door.

Don’t write a letter, archives will boast of letters you post. Whoever writes the letter lends his name to the posthumous paper game.

Güünter Grass, trans. Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger’s collection of poems Circling the Square, and his translations of Paul Celan, are published by Anvil Press.

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