MEMOIRS

CAROLEANGIER The Pounding Of Silence

PEELINGTHEONION

★By Güünter Grass (Translated by Michael Henry Heim) (Harvill Secker 425pp £18.99)

WHENTHIS BOOKwas published in Germany last year it unleashed a furore. The great castigator of the German people for their secrets and lies had kept his own secret for sixty years: he had ended the war in an SS unit. The press rounded on him. Grass was so shaken he couldn’t sleep. In fact it wasn’t the book itself that caused the storm, but an interview Grass gave for its publication. Newspapers have less space and time than books, and not for the first time the truth was distorted. The SS scandal was absurd. Grass was only seventeen at the time; he was drafted during the chaos at the end of the war; he never fired a shot; and he didn’t know that his destination was the SS until he arrived. It is almost as though the press had picked a paper tiger: an accusation so unfair that Germans reading it could feel, once more, unjustly reviled. In Peeling the OnionGrass does the opposite. He doesn’t let himself off lightly by admitting something everyone will forgive. The SS story is only one shameful episode among many, and far from the worst. Peeling the Onion is not a paper tiger, but a painful and courageous book. Forget the fake controversy and read it. Grass’s real accusation against himself is the other point the press made: not the service, but the silence. Not so much the silence afterwards, for sixty years, though that is disturbing, in a man who attacked it in others. But an even worse silence: the one before, during and immediately after the war. That is the one that Germans, and all of us, need to reflect on; and Peeling the Onion does. Grass was an ordinary Nazi boy from an ordinary Nazi family. He was a dreamer and a romantic, so a particularly easy pushover (his own word) for patriotism and heroics. He thrilled to the Olympics and adored Hitler. At eleven he watched a synagogue burn, feeling only curiosity and surprise. At fifteen he volunteered early, at sixteen he joined in the bullying of a boy who refused to bear arms. At seventeen he believed in Germany’s final victory to the bitter end; afterwards he refused to believe the pictures of Belsen until his own one-time leader, the ex-head of the Hitler Youth, admitted they were real. And all along, those awful silences: when his own partisan uncle was executed; when first a friend,

and then a teacher, disappeared from his school to Stutthof, a concentration camp nearby, about which he never asked either. The teacher, who survived, forgave him. But Grass does not forgive himself. He was only a boy, and betrayed no one, but he rejects all such excuses. He allowed himself to be seduced, he writes, while millions of people were killed in his name; if he had been born two years earlier, he might well have partaken. He could have known, but he kept silent. He ends his moving elegy for his friend: ‘My silence pounds in my ears.’ After the events last year, Grass said he was glad that he could no longer be the conscience of his nation. But he still is – more than ever; and ours as well. He and his fellow Germans could not believe that their leaders would lie, that a German war could be a crime, that Germans could ever do wrong. We are all the same. Criticising your country is harder than criticising yourself, since the latter will make you friends, while the former will make you enemies. But Peeling the Onion shows that if you don’t do it, as an individual and a nation you may lose your soul. It shows much else as well, being the memoir of a man and a writer as well as a German: Grass’s Lawrentian family, for instance (poor working class, with a philistine father, overshadowed sister, and adoring, aspiring mother); the three terrible months of his war, and his wanderings after; his numerous loves, and numerous jobs (as painter, poet, stonemason, sculptor) on the way to his real one as a writer; and thrilling glimpses into a writer’s mind, as it stores up characters and images – including the tin drum itself, seen with splendid improbability in a comfortable house in Switzerland. It is all vividly conveyed, in Grass’s characteristically pungent, if sometimes clotted prose (which the translator doesn’t do enough to smooth out for us, incidentally, even leaving Germanisms like ‘the by then Polish city of Gdansk’ untouched. Why? Grass deserves better). But even the writer is a German in the end. British critics have admired Grass’s interrogation of memory, his careful distinction between the eighty-year-old memoirist and his young self – hardly ever called ‘I’, but rather ‘he’, ‘whoever I was at the time’, or at best ‘someone who was definitely me’. This may well be a writer’s subtlety; but Grass tells us himself (on page twenty-eight) that it is German guilt as well. It is only to the last accusation against him – why he didn’t break his silence before – that he returns a purely writerly answer. He couldn’t write about the Wilhelm Gustloff, the ship that went down in 1945 with 9,400 German lives, or about his mother’s rape during the war, until sixty years later. And he couldn’t write his own story until sixty years later either. That’s just how he writes; and it’s the writing that matters. If he has to wait sixty years to write something properly, he will, whatever the cost. Grass doesn’t say all this in so many words in Peeling

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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