St Grass and his devils

SPEAKING VOLUMES

What would you think of a writer's memoir that chronicled years of hardship, poverty and extreme hunger, where the writer set down his account of surviving as a soldier in one of the most cruel wars of recent times?

In his struggle to become a writer, this man stole notebooks and pencils instead of gold in the casual looting that accompanied the war. He had learned how to tell a good story much earlier in his life, working as a debt collector and "smelling, hearing and seeing" the "poverty and anxiety of large working-class families".

He acquired discipline after the war working as a stonemason. He found release and joy in dancing. He learned the art of description from a master chef who taught him and others in his battalion about the precise way to make blood sausage, the art of serving goose. His family lived in two rooms; his mother was raped during the war, though he only discovered this many years later, and never knew the details.

It's a great true story. But none of us are going to read Gunter Grass's autobiography, Peeling the Onion, as a straightforward writer's memoir. His memoirs were released in German a few months ago. With the English translation just out, the controversy over Grass' revelations about his army service will inevitably colour the way we read his book.

For most of his life as one of the greatest writers of our time, Gunter Grass said that he was conscripted into the army, bumbled around in the ranks, and saw the end of World War Two without blood on his hands. In his autobiography, the truth emerged: he had been part of the Waffen SS, one of the most dreaded and reviled branches of the Nazi army, and though he went through the war without causing bloodshed, he was far more complicit than he had admitted.

From the first sentence of Peeling the Onion, it is evident that Grass wrote this memoir as exculpation. "Today, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great," he writes. The third person offers a way out, a way of distancing oneself from one's life. Grass stumbles between first and third person, sticking to the first person 'I' for the most part, but reverting to a staccato, often monotone, third person voice when the more painful memories surface.

In Chapter Two, he writes, "One word evokes the other: Schulden, Schuld, debts, guilt. Two words so close and so deeply rooted in the soil of the German language... [Guilt] remains as sediment""not a stain to be removed or a spill to be wiped away... The brief inscription meant for me reads: I kept silent."

Reading his memoirs is a draining experience; shot through with guilt and the weight of too many years of silence, his voice is tired, insistent on accepting the burden of his own complicity. And yet, Gunter Grass did very little in World War Two. He saw a few corpses. Assigned the chore of carrying large containers of real coffee to senior officers when he and his fellow soldiers made do with unpleasant substitutes, he took his revenge by adding piss to the brew. He bumbled through the war: when he hides strawberry jam in his gas mask, a piece of shrapnel hits the mask and spills its contents over the seat of his trousers.

Like so many of his generation, he claims an ignorance of the concentration camps impossible for us to believe at this distance, but perfectly plausible in that time and that place. When American soldiers show Grass' and other Germans' pictures of Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbruck, their first reaction is disbelief: "Germans could never have done that." But Grass does believe, hesitantly and unwillingly at first, with finality towards the end: "Guilt and the shame it engendered can be said, like hunger, to gnaw, gnaw ceaselessly. Hunger I suffered only for a time but shame..."

Those trailing ellipses tell the whole story better than even Grass himself can. We would prefer our writers to be saints; it would have been fitting if the author of Crabwalk and The Tin Drum had spent his war in heroic defiance of the Nazi regime. But Grass, who has been silent on this key part of his life for decades, has finally set himself free by telling the truth, by unpeeling his most painful memories, layer by layer.

In the end, he tells the story of a young German boy whose greatest crime is not to ask any questions, to go along passively with the flow. In our eyes, the greatest crime that boy committed was to grow up to be Gunter Grass, extraordinary writer but ordinary, fallible human being. We would so much have preferred him to be St Gunter, but in Peeling the Onion, he makes it clear that haloes are not for him.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com