Overview
In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prizewinning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when his book 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.
Synopsis
In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when his book "The Tin Drum" was published. Unabridged. 11 CDs.
The New York Times - William Grimes
"Peeling the Onion is a verbally dazzling but often infuriating piece of work, bristling with harsh self-criticism, murky evasions and coy revisions of a past that, Mr. Grass steadfastly insists, presents itself to his novelist's imagination as a parade of images and stories asking to be manipulated. Nothing is what it seems, especially to the author, who in this chronicle of his first 32 years, from his childhood in Danzig to the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959, often describes himself in the third person and treats himself as a fictional character in a story subject to memory s endless editing."
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Memoirs by Nobel Prize-winning authors possess intrinsic allure, but Günter Grass's Peeling the Onion grasps our attention in an entirely new way. Even before its original German-language release, the book gained front-page notice when Grass revealed that it exposed a grave secret he concealed for six decades: as a teenager during World War II, he had served in Hitler's Waffen-SS. This revelation, which contradicted his previous assertions, sparked volleys of attack and defense. At long last, English-language readers will be able to place that controversy within the context of Grass's own account of his life, from his childhood to the publication of The Tin Drum, which brought him worldwide fame.William Grimes
"Peeling the Onion is a verbally dazzling but often infuriating piece of work, bristling with harsh self-criticism, murky evasions and coy revisions of a past that, Mr. Grass steadfastly insists, presents itself to his novelist's imagination as a parade of images and stories asking to be manipulated. Nothing is what it seems, especially to the author, who in this chronicle of his first 32 years, from his childhood in Danzig to the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959, often describes himself in the third person and treats himself as a fictional character in a story subject to memory’s endless editing."— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The German edition of this memoir by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Grass caused a stir with its revelations about the author's youthful service in the Waffen SS combat unit during the last months of WWII. According to his deliberately disjointed, impressionistic account of the war, Grass never fired a shot and spent his time fleeing both the Russians and German military police hunting for deserters, but he dutifully shoulders a "joint responsibility" for Nazi war crimes and a guilt and shame that "gnaw, gnaw, ceaselessly." With less to repudiate in his postwar life as a budding sculptor and poet up to his 1959 breakthrough with The Tin Drum,he grows more engaged in his story as he recounts love affairs, bohemian idylls (he once played in an impromptu jazz quartet with Louis Armstrong) and his attempts to sift emotional wreckage from the past. Along the way, Grass notes people and events that he reworked into fictional characters and plots, and does quirky profiles of influential figures, including his penis and typewriter. In this otherwise very novelistic memoir, there's not much of a narrative arc, beyond the satisfaction of the author's perpetual "hungers" for food, sex and art, but Grass's powerfully evocative memories are spellbinding. (June)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
Nobel laureate Grass, Germany's greatest living author and moralist, shocked just about everyone last year when he revealed that he once was a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS. The real surprise, however, was not that he served in the infamous Nazi unit but that he concealed his service for decades while harshly criticizing his countrypeople for failing to deal adequately with their Nazi past. In this English translation of his latest autobiographical memoir, Grass tries to explain why his story is more complicated than it sounds and discloses how he was finally driven by guilt to reveal this shameful episode in his past. He sketches his life since early childhood in Danzig (now Gda ´nsk, Poland) and through the late 1950s, deliberately mixing his real life and the characters from his fictions in a process that, not unlike the peeling of an onion, uncovers layers and produces tears. The memoir's beauty and poetic tone should not be overshadowed by the controversy surrounding its author's mea culpa. In any case, as critics acknowledge, his legacy will be his rescue of the national language from linguistic abuse by the Nazis. Highly recommended for all large collections.
—Ali Houissa