Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  There were plenty of people like that later on, people ‘who were only obeying orders’. First they belted out ‘No Land More Fair in These Fair Times …’, then they listed the mitigating circumstances that had blinded and misled them, feigning their own ignorance and vouching for one another’s. No matter how elaborate their excuses and protestations of newborn-babe innocence, these all-too-eloquent anecdotes and human-interest stories, densely inscribed on onion skins, are actually meant to divert attention from something intended to be forgotten, something that nevertheless refuses to go away.

  I reach for the transparent amber on the shelf over my desk to examine the extent to which my faith in the Führer withstood the verifiable cracks in its surface, the increasing whispers, and the retreat, now from France as well.

  But faith in the Führer was not hard to maintain – it was child’s play, in fact: he had remained safe and sound and was what he claimed to be, his gaze steady, ready to meet every eye, his field-grey uniform free of flashy medals. He was everywhere portrayed with only his Iron Cross from the Great War, majestic in his simplicity. The voice seemed to come from on high. He was impervious to attack. Did he not have the protection of something beyond understanding, of Providence?

  The only thing that rankled was the persistent memory of that blond, blue-eyed boy who never tired of saying ‘Wedontdothat’. From the time he was gone, he was sorely missed. He did not, however, become a role model.

  WE WERE DISMISSED soon after the assassination attempt. We handed in our drab uniforms and the spades we had presented mirror-bright at the final ceremonial roll-call, after which we heard ourselves sing the Labour Service anthem: ‘Brown like the earth our uniform …’

  Back in mufti, I was ashamed of my naked knees, my forever sagging kneesocks: I was beyond all that now, no longer a schoolboy. Back in summery Langfuhr the parents awaiting the homecomer were their same old selves but found their son, as they put it, ‘somewhat different’.

  The two-room flat I so detested weighed even more heavily on me, though things were much quieter within its wallpapered precincts, almost too quiet. Daddau was gone and with her the laughter and mayhem she provoked with her dinner-table antics and her hopping back and forth between living room and bedroom. There was no little sister who always wanted to play – only wanted to play – and kept closing my book. All that was left of her were her dolls and stuffed animals under the left-hand windowsill.

  By official decree, all schoolchildren had been evacuated to the country to save them from the enemy bombers’ attacks. Their teachers had gone with them, and the lessons continued in their refuge near the fishing village of Heisternest, on the Hela Peninsula. My sister wrote us postcards full of homesickness.

  My parents indulged me – Father with sauerbraten, Mother with the way she smiled whenever I launched into my Goethe paraphrase: We shall go south to where the lemons grow. But the son was tired of being a mama’s boy, even as the mother lived in dread of the postman. Her only hope she put into these words: ‘Maybe it will somehow be over before that.’

  It took less than two months for the induction letter to arrive, an interval of listless waiting of which I can retrieve only snippets of memories in no special order.

  It was like a relapse: as I had feared, after the Labour Service, I slipped back into the schoolboy-on-holiday pattern, though minus the beach, minus the necking and fumbling in the dunes behind the rose-hip bushes.

  Everywhere I went, I saw chests of drawers with photographs rimmed in black, heard people talking in subdued voices about men – sons, brothers – fallen in action. The Old Town looked shabby, as though anticipating gradual if not sudden decay. Blackout regulations made the night streets look eerie to their own inhabitants. Posters proclaimed THE WALLS HAVE EARS and COAL THIEVES ON THE PROWL wherever you turned. Shop windows displayed merchandise no one wanted. My mother offered a whipped-cream substitute called Sekosan over the counter but off ration.

  In front of the Central Station, on Mottlau Bridge and Speicher Island, at the entrance to the Schichau Shipyard and along the Hindenburgallee, the military police and Hitler Youth patrols would stop and check the identification papers of civilians, soldiers on leave, and the increasing number of girls who let themselves be accosted by privates as well as officers. There was talk of deserters, of a band of young toughs who had broken into the Food Supply Office or set a fire in the harbour area, of conspirators gathering in a Catholic church … Eventually, when I finally had the words at my command, I devoted several chapters to the ‘riff-raff’ to whom all these unbelievable activities were attributed.

  In The Tin Drum, one of the ringleaders is called Störtebeker. He survives the war and mutates logically in the post-war period into an anti-confrontational teacher by the name of Starusch, a supremely adjusted type who in another novel, Local Anaesthetic, is morbidly fearful of pain and assesses everything with the formula ‘on the one hand … on the other …’

  All I did was listen. When I visited schoolmates who, whether they had volunteered or not, were awaiting induction letters as a kind of redemption, I would hear rumours of other schoolmates who had suddenly disappeared, ‘gone underground’, as they put it. One of these, whose father was a high-ranking police inspector in the Rhineland, told us about a band of youths known as the Edelweiss Pirates who were shaking people up in bombed-out Cologne.

  Out of habit more than interest, I would go to the movies. Watching Romance in a Minor Key at the Langgasse Tobis Palace, I couldn’t help comparing Marianne Hoppe to the beauties on the cigarette picture-cards of years past: the Renaissance women had something of her well-defined profile.

  I also whiled away the time in the backstreets of the Old Town and in the Jäschkental Wood, unconsciously gathering details that eventually turned into an enduring source of material. I can still picture myself sitting in the pews of the Gothic churches, from Trinity to Saint John’s, imprinting every ogive and brickwork buttress in my mind.

  I also had my reading places. The attic was still my favourite, although without its threadbare armchair and the clutter in its slatted storage-area, which had been removed because they would act as tinder in case of firebombing, it was now merely a space under undamaged roof tiles, swept clean in anticipation of things to come. For the same reason, there was a row of water buckets standing next to a few fire-swatters and a barrel of sand.

  But what did I read beneath the skylight? Probably The Picture of Dorian Gray, a dog-eared, leather-bound edition, one of my mother’s treasures. Wilde’s copious roster of sins outdoing one another provided me with a suitable mirror.

  It was most likely at this time that I borrowed Merezhkov-sky’s Leonardo da Vinci from somebody and devoured it in the attic. I would sit on an upside-down fire bucket and read more than I could digest. I was especially drawn to heroes who took me out of myself and into other spheres: Jürg Jenatsch, August Welumsegler, Der grüne Heinrich, David Copperfield, or the Three Musketeers – all three at once.

  I can’t say for sure when I plucked All Quiet on the Western Front from my uncle’s bookshelf. Was it not until I was waiting to be called up or was it at the same time that I read Jünger’s Storm of Steel, a war diary that my German teacher at Saint Peter’s had prescribed as good preparation for the front?

  The teacher, a stiff-legged veteran of World War I whose name was Littschwager, praised the ‘fantastically colourful’ and ‘vivid’ quality of my compositions and even their ‘exceptionally daring wordplay’, though he bemoaned their ‘total lack of gravity’ – gravity, in his opinion, being called for by the ‘fateful trials to which the Fatherland is being subjected’.

  Whether it was as a schoolboy or as a recently discharged Labour Serviceman, I found Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in the bookcase of my father’s youngest brother. As the man in charge of transporting the barrack components – walls, windows, doors – turned out by the five apprentices who kept my grandfather’s saw in operation no
nstop, Uncle Friedel was exempt from military service. He spent a lot of time down at the port or shipyard, because more and more emergency barracks for Ostarbeiter, workers brought in from occupied territories in the East, needed to be assembled and wound around with barbed-wire fences.

  I assume my uncle had no idea that Remarque’s novel, the story of the pitiful death of a young enlisted man in the First World War, was on the index; I hadn’t. To this day the delayed effect of that early reading experience is with me. The way one pair of boots keeps changing owners who one after the other give up the ghost …

  Over and over, author and book remind me of how little I understood as a youth and how limited an effect literature may have. A sobering thought.

  WHEN I WAS in Ticino with my first wife, Anna, and our four children in the mid-sixties – my daughter Laura and I on the lookout for mountain deer along the wooded slopes because they would lick salt from our hands – I took the opportunity to pay a visit to Remarque, arranged by my American publisher Helen Wolff, in his villa stuffed with antiques on the Lago Maggiore. I told him about the hot and cold baths of my readings: Jünger’s celebration of war as an adventure and test of manhood had fascinated me; his contention that war makes a murderer of every soldier had made my blood run cold.

  The elderly gentleman laughed softly to himself and in Prussian-inflected English passed on my youthful reading experience to his late-in-life love, the one-time film star Paulette Goddard, who had been Charlie Chaplin’s third wife. Then he showed off a few of his antiques, among them Chinese vases and woodcuts of the Madonna. No, we did not have a grappa together.

  But later, much later, when I was writing the stories for My Century, I was moved to bring the antipodes of Remarque and Jünger back into play. When I got to the First World War, I sat the two cavaliers at a table in the Zurich Storchen Hotel and set up a debate between them making a young Swiss historian – who, true to her kind, claimed neutrality – their foil. As wine-connoisseurs they were courteous to each other, but remained petulantly divided when it came to the meaning of deadly trench warfare: their war had never ended; they could not be reconciled; something had been left unsaid.

  But I, too, gazing out on the silver platter of Lago Maggiore, had left unsaid the confession that the fifteen-year-old schoolboy had volunteered for the submarine corps or the Panzer division despite having read his book, which enumerates more than enough varieties of death perpetrated by war. Then again, the émigré, weary of his superannuated fame, had been less than forthcoming about the famous novel that overshadowed everything he had written since.

  THERE IT WAS on the dinner table, the induction letter, frightening Father and Mother. Had Mother run to the piano and played something from the Rose Garden folk-song collection? And only then burst into tears?

  No, we have to rewind a bit. A few days before the paper with the official stamp struck my parents dumb, we had taken the train to Putzig via Zoppot and Gotenhafen to visit my evacuated sister. A bus then took all of us on to Heisternest. It was a benign August day.

  That the children’s home was near the sea is evidenced by a picture my mother preserved in a family photo album that survived the war and exile: brother and sister sitting side by side on the luminous sand that covered the length and breadth of the Hela Peninsula beach. Shortly before or after bathing in the Baltic I have put a brotherly right arm around her. Siblings who know next to nothing about each other. And would not be so close to each other again for a long time.

  She looks pretty, my sister, whom I’ve called Daddau since we were kids. She is laughing. Her brother, still somewhat boyish, though of manlike proportions, is doing his best to look seriously into the box camera’s lens.

  The father has taken advantage of the fine late-summer weather, and the picture comes out well. It is the last picture taken before I left.

  And what has long been repressed is now a fact. It lies in black-and-white on the table, signed, dated, and stamped: the induction letter. But what does it say, large print and small?

  NOTHING HELPS: THE letterhead is blurred; the rank of the man behind the signature is unclear, as if he had been demoted ex post facto. Memory, usually a chatterbox only too willing to tell its tales, draws a blank. Or am I at fault, unwilling to decode the message the onion skin contains?

  Exculpations leap to mind. The induction letter and its consequences, that has all been chewed over, turned first into words and then into a book, to the tune of seven hundred pages. Dog Years. All about how this fellow named Harry Liebenau starts a diary the day he goes into the army and writes letters to his cousin Tulla from his training camp at Fallingbostel, letters riddled with quotations from the nationalist poet Löns, and how later, no matter where his travel orders take him – from the Lüneburg Heath all the way to the retreating eastern front – he tries, and fails, to find a rhyme for Tulla in the letters. ‘I haven’t seen a Russian yet. Sometimes I stop thinking of Tulla. Our field kitchen is gone. I keep reading the same thing. The streets are clogged with refugees. They don’t believe in anything now. Löns and Heidegger are wrong about lots of things. In Bunzlau I saw five soldiers and two officers hanging from seven trees. This morning we shelled a wooded area. I couldn’t write for two days because we met up with the enemy. Many men died. After the war I’m going to write a book …’

  As for me, perched in knee-length trousers on the wooden seat of a third-class train compartment in September 1944, I had no future novel, no action-packed pages in mind, though I did intend to fill a notebook with my collected experiences.

  The train pulled out of Danzig Central Station, left Langfuhr behind, and headed for Berlin. I had hoisted my cardboard suitcase, bought especially for the occasion, into the net above my seat. My thoughts were a jumble, even more muddled than usual. I can’t pick out one to quote, not even to mumble or stumble through. The only thing I hear is the crackle of the induction letter in the breast pocket of my tight jacket.

  MOTHER HAD REFUSED to accompany son to the station. She was smaller than I was, and when she hugged me in the living room she seemed to dissolve into tears between the piano and the grandfather clock. ‘All I ask is that you come back in one piece …’

  When Harry Liebenau said goodbye to his cousin Tulla Pokriefke, she was wearing the dashing cap of an assistant tram conductor. ‘Watch out you don’t get your nose shot off!’

  Father accompanied me. We didn’t say a word to each other on the tram. Then he had to buy a platform ticket. His velvet hat gave him a soigné, bourgeois look: a man in his middle forties who had managed to stay a civilian and stay alive.

  He insisted on carrying my cardboard suitcase. The man I had pushed away the moment I started growing, the man I blamed for the cramped two-room flat and the four-family toilet, the man I had wanted to murder with my Hitler Youth dagger and had stabbed many times over in my thoughts, the man whom somebody later built into a character who turned feelings into soups, the man who, though he was my father, I had never got close to except when we quarrelled, this vivacious, easygoing, easily tempted man with a mania for good posture and, as he put it, ‘nice, neat handwriting’, who loved me after his fashion, the eternal husband, called Willy by his wife, this man stood next to me as the train pulled in through a cloud of steam.

  I didn’t cry; he did. He hugged me; I hugged him back. I insist. Or did we only do the manly handshake thing?

  Were we provident, even stinting with our words: ‘Take care, my boy,’ ‘See you, Papa’? Did he take his hat off as the train rolled out of the station? Did he pat down his blond hair?

  Did he wave goodbye with his hat? Or his handkerchief? The handkerchief he would wear on his head on hot summer days – ridiculous! I thought – after tying its four tips in knots. Did I wave back out of the open window and watch him grow smaller and smaller?

  All I remember seeing clearly was the city with its towers against the evening sky in the distance. I also think I heard the bells of nearby Saint Catherine’s: ‘Be
ever true and forthright till to the grave thou comest …’

  OF ALL THE churches in the city that rose again out of the rubble stone by stone in the post-war years, it was Saint John’s over near the Mottlau that attracted me most during my visits to the city as it came increasingly – and by design – to resemble the city where I was born. Though unharmed on the outside, the church, built entirely of brick, had been badly burned and plundered within. For decades it served the Polish restoration team as a warehouse for undamaged fragments waiting to be reincorporated.

  When visiting in March 1958, I asked an old man, who was one of the few to identify himself, in the local dialect, as ‘emmer noch deitsch’, still German, what he could tell me about the church. I learned that when the city was subject first to bombing, then to heavy shelling, and Saint John’s was surrounded by whole streets of burning houses – Häkergasse and Johannisgasse, Neunaugengasse and Petersiliengasse – a hundred and more men, women, and children took refuge in the church. Those who were not suffocated or burned to death were hit by falling masonry, vault fragments, and plaster and buried alive. ‘But nobody wants to hear about that kind of thing nowadays,’ the old man said.

  Another story I heard, this one in Polish, took a different tack: because many women fled to Saint John’s, the Russians had set it on fire. Whoever did it, only the charred walls survived.

  Later people used the damaged but still standing church to store what they had picked up all over the city – stone gable ornamentation, bits and pieces of bas-reliefs, of balustrades from the Renaissance balconies along Brotbänkengasse, Heiligen Geistgasse, and Frauengasse, of Baroque door embrasures made of granite. Not only what was left of the tracery on the façade of the Artushof but anything yielded by the piles of rubble, anything of interest was carefully labelled, numbered, and stored for later use.

  Whenever I slipped inside the hall of the Gothic church – they were careless about locking the portal – I would find human bones, large and small, among the dust and piles of stones, and I could only wonder whether they were of late medieval origin or whether they should remind me of the men, women, and children who were said to have died in the flames of Saint John’s when the town and all its churches were burnt.