Peeling the Onion

by Grass, Gunter

• ISBN13: 9780151014774
• ISBN10: 0151014779
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-25
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prizewinning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany reveals Grass at his most intimate.

Author Biography

Born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927, Günter Grass is the widely acclaimed author of plays, essays, poems, and numerous novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He lives in Germany.

Table of Contents

Skins Beneath the Skin	p. 1
Encapsulations	p. 28
His Name Was Wedontdothat	p. 64
How I Learned Fear	p. 105
Guests at Table	p. 160
At and Below the Surface	p. 202
The Third Hunger	p. 248
How I Became a Smoker	p. 292
Berlin Air
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Skins Beneath the SkinToday, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great: He was going on twelve, though he still loved sitting in his mothers lap, when such and such began and ended. But can something that had a beginning and an end be pinpointed with such precision? In my case it can.My childhood came to an end when, in the city where I grew up, the war broke out in several places at once. It began with an unmistakeable bang the broadsiding of a ship and the approach of dive bombers over the Neufahrwasser dock area, which lay opposite the Polish military base at Westerplatte, and, farther off, the carefully aimed shots of two armored reconnaissance cars during the battle for the Polish Post Office in the Old Town of Danzig and was heralded closer to home by our radio a Volksempfnger, peoples receiver which stood on the sideboard in the living room. Thus the end of my childhood was proclaimed with words of iron in a ground-floor flat of a three-story building on Labesweg, in Langfuhr.Even the time of day sticks in my mind. From then on, the airport of the Free State near the Baltic Chocolate factory handled more than just civilian planes. From the skylight in the roof of our building we could see smoke mounting duskily over the Free Port each time there was a new attack and a light wind from the northwest. But the moment I try to remember that distant artillery fire from the Schleswig-Holstein, which had been retired from active duty after the Battle of Jutland and could no longer be used as anything but a training ship for cadets, and the layered sounds of the Stukas or Stutzkampfflugzeug, dive-bombers so called because high above the combat zone they would tip to one side, then lunge down on their target, releasing their bombs at the last moment I am faced with a question: Why go back to my childhood and its clear and immutable end date, when everything that happened to me between milk teeth and permanent ones my first day at school, scraped knees, marbles, the earliest secrets of the confessional and later agonies of faith all merged in the jumble of jottings that has since been associated with a person who, no sooner had he been put down on paper, refused to grow and shattered all manner of glass with his song, kept two wooden sticks at the ready, and thanks to a tin drum made a name for himself that thereafter existed in quotable form between book covers and claims immortality in heaven knows how many languages? Because this as well as that deserves to be part of the record. Because something flagrantly significant could be missing. Because certain things at certain times fell into the well before the lid went on: the holes I left uncovered until later, growth I could not halt, the linguistic give-and-take I had with lost objects. And let this, too, be said: because I want to have the last word.Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needless

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Excerpted from Peeling the Onion
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