A Willful Blurring of Memory

...Grass is expert at a kind of kinesthetic re-creation of the sounds, smells and taste of the experience of growing up in a too-small apartment with a communal toilet adjacent to the grocery store his mother ran...

...publication date...

...His literary star never again ascended to the heights of The Tin Drum, but Grass, with his vocal positions on everything from the resurgence of German capitalism (which he blamed on American influence) to the decline in the national fertility rate (which he blamed on feminism), has never been far out of the headlines...

...Ah, what a slippery fellow this himself is—the “he” that is “the son” that is the “I” that is the inf initely regressed narrator who brings us this seemingly casual but meticulously orchestrated welter of memories: “What happened before and after the end of my childhood knocks at the door with facts . . . and demands to be told now this way, now that, and leads to tall tales...

...In 2003 he attracted global attention with his novel Crabwalk, an account of the Allied attack on the Wilhelm Gustloff, an overloaded Nazi cruise ship converted into a refugee carrier, that killed 9,000 people, including thousands of children...

...The page and a half toward the end in which Grass expresses regret about not having attended to his mother in her f inal illness contain some of the most poignant and deeply felt writing in the book...

...The fact that he never denied having lived through the entire National Socialist period, initially as a compliant observer filled with “untroubled, unquestioning fervor,” then as an active facilitator, gave him additional credence: Who better to project the image of the good German, the German with a post facto conscience, than someone who had witnessed the country’s lurch into darkness firsthand...

...The change in the tone from collective shame to collective anger— from Germans seeing themselves as perpetrators to seeing themselves as unsung victims—was evident in best-selling books such as Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945, and was more complexly delineated in W.S...

...A letter of solidarity that Grass received, signed by 46 Arab intellectuals, praised his membership in the Waffen SS as deserving of respect, and interpreted the criticism aimed at him as “diverting attention from the Israeli crimes against Palestine and Lebanon...

...Oddly, though, Grass’ admissions to having bought into the destructive program of the Third Reich, and to having had difficulty believing in the extermination of the Jews even after being shown photos of BergenBelsen and Ravensbrück and being taken on a “brief re-education tour of Dachau,” where he and his cohort were “classified as young Nazis,” seem only to have added a bit of youthful brio—call it mischievous machismo—to his old-crusader image...

...His provocative and suavely indirect way of dealing with the legacy of the Nazi era by implicating ordinary folk as much as the SS vanguard cut two ways: It raised hackles among those in power and inspired hero-worship among members of the postwar generation just coming to an accounting with the Third Reich and the genocidal sins of their fathers...

...Until very recently, Grass’ official biography noted that he was born in 1927 and briefly served as a teenage soldier of the Third Reich before being captured as a POW...

...The impecunious artist (he has studied to be a sculptor) becomes friends with the poet Paul Celan...

...If Peeling the Onion is an engrossing albeit emotionally distant portrait of the artist as Hitler youth, it is also as brazenly disingenuous a memoir as has come down the pike in many a year...

...Nevertheless, he seemed comfortable with the reconf igured stance...

...Having very quickly set himself up as Germany’s moral compass—a man willing to root out every former Nazi, neoNazi or Nazi manqué no matter how high up the political ladder—he was showered with honors and literary awards in both his native country and abroad...

...pedant that it is, it will have its way...

...Marxist critic John Berger wrote a piece in the British Guardian defending Grass’ honor against “righteous moralists...

...There has always been a quality of bravado about his fiction, a can-you-top-this imaginative largess: Ascertainable historical events (the rise of National Socialism, the establishment of the Third Reich, genetic engineering) and picturesque details verging on the grotesque (a dwarf with an earpiercing voice...

...its final (unfulfilled) mission was to get Hitler out of Berlin...

...It is easy to warm to his way with small, domestic details that form a picture of family life in a city on the banks of the Vistula River when the Nazis came to power...

...The book announces its deliberately obfuscating mode—its willful blurring of memory—early on, in explaining the tired metaphor of the title: “Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third . . . [then] a fourth and fifth wait whispering...

...Grass’ professed change in outlook is worth noting because of what it portends about the strain of quiet opportunism that has consistently run alongside his more demonstrative moral outrage...

...If the child is father to the man, one wonders what sort of man a child as unreflective and resolutely incurious as young Günter—who, according to his own account, failed to ask “Why...

...Among other things, one gathers that Grass is enormously proud of his graphic gifts (he has drawn since childhood), and that he is something of an amateur chef: His descriptions of dishes he has prepared are mouth-watering in the extreme...

...Reactions ranged from outright condemnation of the duplicity (recently deceased biographer Joachim C. Fest announced, “I wouldn’t buy a used car from this man”) and demands that he return his Nobel Prize, to equally vocal admiration for his honesty and courage...

...look the other way and you see a boy on one of the beaches along Danzig Bay, molding the wet sand into a highturreted citadel or collecting pieces of amber, looking for “escape routes leading into the blue yonder...

...He survives, somewhat suspiciously, without firing a single shot, but at one point, while everywhere around him people are being blown up, a Soviet grenade wounds his leg and shoulder...

...Narrated by a failed journalist born at the time of the disaster, the novel signified a departure for the author: He moved from his previous position as the selfappointed rattler of the skeletons in the post-Hitlerian closet to an identification with the newly fashionable (and, to my mind, unpersuasively argued) view that non-Nazi Germans were fellow-sufferers of the Holocaust along with the Jews...

...We were all young once and we all made mistakes...

...Alongside continuing to write f iction, Grass inserted himself into his country’s political life within minutes of gaining a public ear...

...It emerged that the young moralist-inthe-making (now nearing 80) believed fervently in his Führer’s principles and was part of a tank division involved in rear-guard action against the German Army in March and April 1945...

...a garrulous she-rat...

...Sebald’s On The Natural History of Destruction...

...And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself...

...Seemingly out of nowhere (he had worked in a potash mine and as a stonemason before enrolling in art schools in Düsseldorf and Berlin), he swaggered onto the world stage with his intrepid impersonations at the ready, his caustic and panoramic vision in hand, demanding a willing suspension of disbelief...

...In addition, a long article by Ian Buruma was published in the same magazine last September, while the sparks were flying...

...Always vocal about his Leftist politics, Grass became friendly with Willy Brandt in the early ’60s and actively campaigned on behalf of both Brandt’s election and the Social Democratic Party...

...despite the sudden disappearance of a friend’s father, or the brief internment of a favorite teacher in a concentration camp—could have turned out to be...

...This part of the memoir reminds me of the TV show 24, whose hero outlives every sort of casualty by dint of the fact that the show has to go on...

...Forgive and forget and leave the man his halo...

...and ignores the agonies of his dying mother...

...He was in the forefront of the protest against President Ronald Reagan’s and Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s controversial 1985 visit to Bitburg, where soldiers of Hitler’s elite Waffen SS unit were interred together with blameless Germans...

...Then again, there are those uncaptive and uncompliant readers who have never completely warmed to Grass’ overblown lyricism or his unstoppably picaresque narratives...

...Grass’ f irst novel, The Tin Drum, published in 1959 when he was 32, brought him immediate international celebrity...

...even its apologetic or ashamed moments have a swagger about them...

...Indeed, his literature has been categorized as part of an artistic movement that goes by the ungainly, choo-chootrain sort of term the German language delights in coughing up, V e rgangenheitsbewältigung (roughly, “coming to terms with the past...

...The book covers the years the Nazis came to power, including the crucial period of Grass’ service in the Waffen SS...

...of being responsible for the terrorism it is trying to defeat...

...To which I can only respond Gott im Himmel (God in Heaven), quoting my late German-Jewish mother, who at 16 scrambled out of Frankfurt for dear life with her family just around the time young Günter, still in shorts and still inclined to sit on his mother’s knee, was busy collecting cards featuring color reproductions of European masterpieces, obtainable with the coupons in packs of rationed cigarettes...

...watches American movies, especially those of Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple and Buster Keaton, “whose funny scenes made me sad and sad scenes made me laugh...

...We are taken up to 1959, shortly before fame was about to break and “success had become a habit” (what a smug phrase...

...The cat runs away with the spoon, and the writer makes off with the Nobel Prize...

...Play jazz with Louis Armstrong one night in a dance joint in Düsseldorf...

...ALTHOUGHHISSHIFT passed for a profound rethinking of guilt-ridden accountability, it explicitly contradicted Grass’ lifelong contention that all of Germany, from the humblest post office clerk to the highest ranking SS officer, was responsible for what transpired under the Third Reich...

...Yo u take this moralizing fabulist—part magical realist, part the third Grimm brother—at his grandstanding word, with its kitschy furbelows and pithy black humor, or you don’t take him at all...

...Grass’ schedule in New York included a soldout conversation with Norman Mailer at the New York Public Library and a reading at the 92nd Street Y, followed by a dialogue with Israeli historian Amos Elon There have been some dissenting voices—notably Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun and the ever-vigilant Christopher Hitchens in Slate...

...There is a well-meaning, ineffectual father and a sister who is three years younger, but for all intents and purposes there is only Günter and his doting mother...

...To them—to me—the salvo Grass fired with the publication of his memoir comes less as a shock than as an unsettling disclosure from a man who has mimed the gestures of self-interrogation without ever having actually posed himself a single difficult question...

...nothing is meant to be clear: “Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away...

...From them,” he writes, looking back on his youthful art-appreciating self with great benignity and an indulgent chuckle—oh what a winning knave he was!— “I learned early on to mispronounce the names of Giorgione, Mantegna, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Caravaggio...

...Believing,” Grass once wrote, “it means believing in our own lies...

...It is trying to set a crooked record straight without owning up to the record’s crookedness—trying, at one and the same time, to say that horrific events were witnessed and yet not witnessed...

...And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early...

...It praised the book for its “rare literary beauty” and extolled Grass as “one of the last examples of a German tradition that puts poets and thinkers on a high pedestal, from which they deliver, like prophets, their verdicts on the world...

...If anything, all the auguries have been good: A portion of the memoir appeared in the New Yorker a few weeks prior to its June 25 U.S...

...author, “Enchantment,” “Dreaming of Hitler” Günter Grass has never been a writer for readers who like nuanced distinctions, or lean toward the percussive registers of sensibility...

...a misogynist flounder) get mixed together higgledy-piggledy...

...What left the deepest imprint on me in Jan van Eyck’s Singing Angels was the profile of the hindmost angel: What I would have given to have curly hair like him or like Albrecht Dürer...

...and inhales the smells coming out of the various apartments as he collects grocery debts on behalf of his ledger-keeping mother: “There was the odor of elderly ladies—mothballs and Uralt Lavender cologne—and the schnapps breath of the retired widower...

...More important, does it matter...

...The revelation was carefully introduced for maximum shock effect in a prepublication interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on August 12, 2006, and the book’s publication date was then advanced by two weeks...

...It must be said that Peeling the Onion is often charmingly written and pungently evocative...

...They have similarly resisted his thunderous pronouncements on his own country (he opposed the German reunification on the ground that it might lead to a rerun of Nazism) and other countries (he has unfailingly vilified America as a force for evil in the world and in 2006, at an International Pen conference, accused the U.S...

...Memory contradicts itself...

...The young “schemer” (take him at his word) curls up in the low niche under the windowsill to read...

...It goes without saying that Grass’ peephole—whether looked through by a human or anthropomorphized alter ego—is bigger than anyone else’s peephole...

...He addressed the role of the engagé writer in society both through and beyond his art...

...On the third page of The Tin Drum, his antically unreliable yet all-seeing dwarf narrator, Oskar Matzerath, brashly states the author’s sweeping antimodernist claims: “But as far as I and Bruno my keeper are concerned, I beg leave to say that we are both heroes, very different heroes, he on his side of the peephole, and I on my side...

...It is an imperious authorial road that Grass strikes out on, one that begins by making readers complicit and ends by making them fools...

...And small wonder: Grass has invariably been skilled at sniffing out the zeitgeistof-the-month among the chic intelligentsia and hurrying to keep in step with it...

...NOTHING IS CLEAR...

...Look one way and you hear the crunch, crunch, crunch of storm troopers’ boots on gravel...

...A more clever media strategy could not have been devised...

...Peeling the Onion is all Grass’ way...

...When it was originally published in Germany last year the book set off an instant uproar because it revealed that, well beyond being a feckless Flakhelfer, 17-year old Grass had been a member of the Waffen SS...

...With so blithe an acceptance of the veils the mind puts up before unpalatable truths, it is impossible to know whether Grass did or felt as he says at any particular time: Did he really whistle the first line of a nursery rhyme in the pitchdark woods when he was on the run from Russian submachine guns, and then meet up with a fellow German looking for refuge who alerted him to his presence by whistling back the second rhyming line...

...visits the painter Giorgio Morandi in his studio where he and the woman who will become his first wife are shown blank canvases and offered sweet green liqueur in tiny glasses...

...It has about as much regard for the truth, however elusively glimpsed, as Albert Speer’s recollections...

...On these shores Peeling the Onion has produced a mere wavelet of disturbance...

...He became emblematic of the Flakhelfer group—the batch of boys too young to f ight who were conscripted into Hitler Youth organizations and paramilitary activities almost as an adolescent rite of passage...

...Share cigarettes and argue religion in POW camp with a Bavarian friend named Joseph who went on to become the present-day Pope...

...She smokes Egyptian cigarettes, likes to read and is unavailingly proud of her dreamy, artistic son—whom she feeds egg yolk mixed with sugar if he is sick...

...NOW COMES Grass’ memoir, Peeling the Onion...

...In taking up this revised position, which went beyond lamenting the fate of ordinary German citizens caught in the Allied bombings to viewing them as equal objects of Holocaustal forces, he was hardly alone...