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.

42 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007