4. Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel The Final Battle with the Black Witch

Also schwieg ich, während ich sprach. “Erzähl mal von dir. Über dich. Wie du bist.” “Aber ehrlich, und nicht erfunden.”

(And so I kept silent, while I spoke. “Do tell about yourself. Yourself as you are.” “But honestly, without inventing.”)

Günter Grass: Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail, 1972, my tr.)

Günter Grass’s life (1927- ) has been very much of a piece in his writing, in his art and in his political and social concerns. He has been remarkably consistent, amid personal turmoil, in his pursuit and indictment of inhumanity, injustice and human suffering. In his political and social involvements he has written and spoken out against the wars of the twentieth century and of the holocausts and genocides that have come in their wake; he has opposed totalitarian governments which ignore and promote human suffering and the big industries that pollute the environment; he has both organized and participated in non-violent demonstrations against nuclear armament; he has always stood against social inequality, the persecution of minorities and the overpowering poverty and disease in the Third World; and, last but not least, he has always supported, morally and financially, fellow writers and dissidents persecuted for their works. He has always spoken out for peace, humanity, tolerance, freedom of speech and social democracy. It is, therefore, not too surprising if in Grass’s literary works the political and social motivation is always combined with the aesthetic impulse whereby, as the case may be, one novel may be more politically-minded, while another might give freer rein to aesthetic and metaphorical expression. Two things, however, can be said outright about Günter Grass, that sceptical yet hopeful optimist: For one, he has been in his literary work – like Wolfgang Borchert, Paul Celan, Hans Erich Nossack, Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch and Christa Wolf – the voice of a post-Holocaust and post-war 26 The Time before Death conscience speaking to a world in need of healing.1 And, secondly, he has a secure place among major twentieth-century writers, one need only mention two of his best novels Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) and Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977) which, with all his other works, finally brought him his long overdue Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.2 Like many German teenagers Grass had idolized the Führer and the heroic fighter pilots and others from the front lines who came to German schools to boost morale and the war effort. And so, in the summer of 1944, he volunteered for military service and, at the age of seventeen, towards the end of the year, he was called up for military duty. Fortunately for him, the War in Europe would only last another few months until the Allied victory in early May of 1945. When he was finally assigned to the army, he found himself in an SS unit which saw some action in Eastern Germany in a futile attempt to halt the Soviet Russian advance. In their retreat he was especially haunted by the sight of German officers and soldiers, some his own age, strung up along the roads by punitive Nazi squads roaming the countryside with orders to hang anyone separated from his unit, on suspicion of desertion. But luck and chance helped him survive a number of times and, after being wounded, he ended up in an American POW camp. Grass’s autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (In Peeling the Onion, 2006)3 – a memoir that can stand beside the best of his fiction – offers us a rich fare of a life remembered. Grass writes about his childhood, his teenage years, his early manhood up to the age of thirty-two, his family and his Kashubian origins; there is an account of his brief army service and of the horrific sights of war and of the devastation of Germany with millions of its people displaced; Grass’s autobiography is in part philosophical as when he talks about how he survived amid the social chaos thanks to luck and chance, and in part it is a paean to love, his love for his mother who held such a central place in his life and for his first wife Anna; it is also the story

1 See Constantin Ponomareff, “Günter Grass (1927- ): The Burden of Conscience,” in my The Silenced Vision. An Essay in Modern European Fiction (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 1979), pp. 39-62; Constantin V. Ponomareff, “Chekhov’s Ghost in German Literature: From Böll to Christa Wolf,” in my The Spiritual Geography of Modern Writing. Essays on Dehumanization, Human Isolation and Transcendence (Amsterdam-Atlanta,GA: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 101-14; and my essay “Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum: The Sacred in Destructive Guise,” in Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson, The Curve of the Sacred. An Exploration of Human Spirituality (Amsterdam-New York, N.Y.: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 37-40. 2 The best biography of Grass that I have read to date is Michael Jürgs, Bürger Grass. Biografie eines deutschen Dichters (Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 2002). 3 Günter Grass, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006). All translations are mine, except where otherwise indicated.