Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  No one knew for sure. Graves under the cracked memorial slabs had probably supplied at least some of them. Bones, from whatever time, resemble one another at first sight. In Saint John’s, where sailors and barrel makers had their own altars, well-to-do merchants and shipowners had been laid to rest beneath slabs of sandstone and granite until the eighteenth century.

  No matter to whom the bones had belonged, they formed part of what had been preserved and thus bore witness. That was said to be one of the reasons why, starting in the fifties, the desolate church interior was used as a set for Polish films – that and the light falling through the partly boarded windows were effects that attracted directors and pleased cameramen.

  On one of my last visits to Danzig, I found Saint John’s different: no more stones, no more bones, large or small; the floor smooth, the windows glazed, the brick masonry renovated. I was giving a reading from Crabwalk, and the audience sat on chairs arranged in rows stretching all the way to the back of the hall.

  And while I was trying out the church’s acoustics and the ship full of human cargo sank line by line, the part of my mind that prefers moving backwards sought out the boy who left the city at a time when all its towers and gables were still intact.

  HOW I LEARNED FEAR

  COULD IT BE that during the journey to Berlin it was the memory of my first trip in that direction that so reduced me to a child? Was it in ’36, the year of the Olympic Games, or a year later?

  While still in primary school I was taken on a train to the Rhineland, all the way to the Dutch border, by an organization called Children Visit the Countryside. Because we were visiting the countryside at the time of the Free State, we children experienced a contemporary variant of the Punch-and-Judy show, going through first Free State customs, then two sets of differently uniformed Polish customs, and finally, at the Schneidemühl border station, the German customs and their set of uniforms. The customs officers had different ways of saluting: the Germans with a flat hand, the Poles with two fingers at the peak of the cap.

  These inspections took place at brief intervals. We children had our papers hanging from our necks in transparent cases, which made us very proud.

  From a peasant who raised dairy cattle and pigs, and whose son Matthias was my age, I learned how to cut asparagus from its carefully smoothed, raised beds in such a way as to avoid damaging it. So it must have been May. The name of the village was Breyell. Breyell was more Catholic than the Church of the Sacred Heart in Langfuhr. The peasant’s wife made Matthias and me go to confession every Saturday. I still believed in hell and knew plenty of sins.

  The road from the farmyard to the village school left no trace in my memory. Nor did much else. Though I do see countless colourful flies on the white-tiled walls of the peasant kitchen. The fat ones could be caught and subjected to an operation I had learned from a schoolmate whose love of animals knew no bounds: gluing coloured threads to their bodies. It was a grand sight to watch them fly off or circle the kitchen table trailing red, blue, or yellow tails.

  Matthias and I would compete to see how many flies we could catch from the wall with one hand. ‘Catching flies is better than idle lives,’ said Matthias’s grandmother, who would sit all day in her easy chair, fingering her rosary. Outside the land stretched flat. Three steeples away lay Holland …

  ONLY A CYNIC could have viewed my second trip west as children visiting the countryside. When, after a night’s journey broken by repeated stops, the train finally pulled in late to the Reich’s capital, it was going so slowly as to invite the passengers to write everything down or at least fill in the potential memory gaps ahead of time.

  Here is what I retained: there were houses, whole apartment houses, on fire on either side of the embankment; there were flames coming out of the windows of the upper stories, and glimpses of dark gorge-like streets and courtyards with trees. The only people I saw were isolated silhouettes. No crowds.

  Fires were considered normal by then: Berlin was in the throes of dissolution, and the situation worsened by the day. The city had just been bombed and the all-clear signal sounded. That was why the train was moving so slowly, offering what seemed like a personal sightseeing tour.

  Until then the moviegoer had seen only brief fade-ins and fade-outs of ruins, which served as illustrations for banners with slogans like We Are Not To Be Undone! or Our Walls May Crumble, Our Hearts Never! and the like.

  Goebbels, the Reich’s minister of propaganda, had recently appeared on the screen of the Tobis Palace, skilfully playing himself, bucking up men and women whose houses lay about them in ruins, shaking the hand of a soot-black air-raid warden and patting the heads of awkwardly grinning children.

  A few days before the induction letter lay on our table, I had visited an uncle on my mother’s side, a projectionist at the Tobis Palace who for years had been responsible for moviegoing experiences that, like The Bath on the Threshing Floor, were rated unsuitable for young audiences. Did I peek through the peephole next to the projector and watch Kolberg, with Heinrich George in the leading role, immediately after the newsreel showing Goebbels chatting with air-raid survivors?

  Later there were rumours from who knows what quarter to the effect that a number of the fellows who in period costumes had fought bravely against Napoleon for the cameras found themselves back in Kolberg the following year as combatants in the Volkssturm, the German Home Front Army, when Kolberg was under siege by real-life Russians and Poles. This time there was no one on hand to film their heroic deaths.

  People at the station seemed oblivious to the fires. It was business as usual: shoving crowds, curses, sudden salvos of laughter; soldiers on leave hurrying back to the front, soldiers on leave hurrying home; representatives from the female arm of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls, passing out hot drinks and giggling when the soldiers pawed them.

  What had the stronger smell: the smoke of the steam locomotives, compressed under the only slightly damaged roof of the station concourse, or the fires?

  I stood before a confusing array of signs indicating assembly points, registration desks, and the like. Two troop leaders – identifiable as such by the metal nameplates hanging from their necks, from these came their appellation ‘chain-hounds’ – told me where to go. In the hall with the ticket windows (in which of the Berlin stations was it?) I joined a group of recent recruits my own age and after a brief wait was handed marching orders naming Dresden as my destination.

  I can picture my fellow recruits jabbering. We are curious, as if on an adventure. We’re in a good mood. I hear myself laughing too loudly, what about I don’t know. We get marching rations. They include cigarettes. A non-smoker, I give mine away. What I get from one of the boys in exchange is something I associate exclusively with Christmas: marzipan potatoes rolled in cocoa powder. Crushed by the reality of it all, I think I’m dreaming.

  Suddenly an air-raid siren chased us all into the station’s voluminous basement, the nearest shelter. A motley crew was soon crammed together there, soldiers and civilians, and a lot of children. There were wounded soldiers lying on stretchers and leaning on crutches. There was also a troupe of music-hall performers that included midgets. They were all in costume: the siren had sent them directly from stage to cellar.

  While outside the ack-ack gunfire hammered on and bombs dropped far and near, they carried on their show: a dwarf juggler who kept ninepins, balls, and coloured hoops all in the air at one time had us mesmerized; a number of his colleagues performed acrobatic feats; a dainty little lady tied herself gracefully in knots while blowing kisses to the wildly applauding crowd. The troupe, whose job it was to entertain front-line soldiers, was led by a tiny old man who performed as a clown. He also coaxed a sweet, melancholy music out of a row of empty to full glasses by stroking their rims with his fingers, the smile never leaving his rouged lips. An image that stuck with me.

  As soon as the all-clear sounded, I took a tram to another station. Again I saw flames leaping out of
apartment windows, whole façades destroyed, long lines of streets reduced to rubble after nights of bombing. In the distance, a factory lit from within, as if for a ceremony. The train for Dresden waited for departure in the grey light of morning.

  NOTHING ABOUT THE journey there. Not a word about the content of the sandwiches in our marching rations and no anticipatory, no previously accrued thoughts to be deciphered. All that remains to be said and therefore to be questioned is that it was not until here, in a Dresden as yet untouched by the war, or, to be more precise, in the upper storey of an upper-middle-class mansion in the Weisser Hirsch district near Dresden-Neustadt, that I learned what division I had been attached to. My new marching orders made it clear where the recruit with my name was to undergo basic training: on a drill ground of the Waffen SS, as a Panzer gunner, somewhere far off in the Bohemian Woods …

  The question is: Was I frightened by what was obvious then in the recruitment office as I am terrified now by the double S, even as I write this more than sixty years later?

  There is nothing carved into the onion skin that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror. I more likely viewed the Waffen SS as an elite unit that was sent into action whenever a breach in the front line had to be stopped up, a pocket like Demyansk forced open, a stronghold like Kharkov regained. I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent. The boy, who saw himself as a man, was probably more concerned with the branch of the service: if he was not destined for the submarines, which hardly came up in the radio bulletins any longer, then he would be a tank gunner in a division which, as everyone in the Weisser Hirsch regional headquarters knew, was to be freshly raised under the name ‘Jörg von Frundsberg’.

  Von Frundsberg was known to me as the leader of the Swabian League during the sixteenth-century Peasant Wars, and as ‘father of the Landsknechts’ – crack infantry mercenaries. Someone who stood for freedom, liberation. Besides, the Waffen SS had a European aura to it: it included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch and Flemish, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers; there were even neutral Swedes on the eastern front in the defensive battle, as the rhetoric went, to save the West from the Bolshevik flood.

  So there were plenty of excuses. Yet for decades I refused to admit to the word, and to the double letters. What I had accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it.

  True, during the tank gunner training, which kept me numb throughout the autumn and winter, there was no mention of the war crimes that later came to light, but the ignorance I claim could not blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people. Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.

  BEHIND AND BETWEEN woods, in churned-up fields. Trees and barracks roofs weighed down with snow. The onion-domed helmet of a church in the distance. Not a word of Czech spoken on the drill ground, only German-commandese, which in the frosty air carried farther than usual.

  We were trained on outdated equipment – Panzer III and Panzer IV, which were used during the first years of the war – and driven like slaves. At first I thought that was how it had to be, but my initial supply of enthusiasm soon dwindled. All of us – recruits my age and old-timers who had been transferred to the Waffen SS as part of what was ironically called the Hermann Göring Fund – were drilled hard from dawn to dusk and, as we had been warned from the outset, constantly hauled over the coals.

  I had read about it in books. I intentionally suppressed the names of the slave drivers, even the worst of them. All that I learned from the experience was mute compliance or clever tricks. I got out of drill once by feigning jaundice – I swallowed some heated oil from sardine tins – and once because of an outbreak of boils that swept the camp, but the chronically packed infirmary could offer only temporary refuge. Then back to the torture.

  Our instructors, who were young in years but had been turned into hard-boiled cynics by their year or two at the front, were eager now, as NCOs and proud bearers of close-combat and frozen-flesh medals, to pass on the experience they had gained at the Kuban bridgehead and in tank warfare at Kursk. They would do so in bitter earnest or with merciless wit or however they felt like. Now loudly, now softly, they plied us with military lingo and outdid one another in bullying us with newfangled or time-honoured army tortures.

  A lot of it escapes my memory, but one method they had of humiliating us recruits sticks in my mind, though I am not certain whether the reaction on the part of the bullied party was merely wishful thinking or whether my act of vengeance actually took place, and in the form of a tale I could tell. In any case, it is a tale with a point.

  It is early morning. I am making my faltering way through a snowy patch of pitch-black woods with metal cans in both hands. I ran out there in double time, but have to return slowly. Hidden among the trees, but visible because of its lighted windows, is a castle-like farmhouse where important offices are located. Once I thought I heard music coming from there; today I’m positive it was a string quartet rehearsing Haydn or Mozart. But that has nothing to do with my story, which took place in total silence.

  For days I had been ordered by the troop leaders to see to their breakfast, which meant hauling two cans of coffee especially for them. The coffee had to arrive hot and was repeatedly warmed up throughout the day. It came from the canteen on the other side of the woods. The malt or barley substitute that we recruits got – and that was rumoured to be mixed with bicarbonate of soda to keep our urges down – also came from there. What I delivered piping hot to the head troop leader and the five or six troop leaders who had preferential treatment owed its taste to genuine coffee beans. At least what emanated from the cans had the smell of authenticity.

  The way there and back not only cut my breakfast time in half, it also cut into the few minutes that remained for me to give my mud-encrusted uniform a few whacks and a brushing, so I was often late to morning roll-call and got punishment drill: running up and down a hill wearing a gas mask and heavy pack, picking up sticky clay on my boot soles as I went. It was a torture that inspired lifelong hatreds in the gas-masked recruit.

  Not surprisingly, I plotted my revenge to the last detail while howling behind the misted-up mask.

  On the way back from the canteen I make a stop behind one of the snow-laden pines. I can see the farmhouse gleaming in the distance, but it can’t see me. The woods are so quiet I can hear myself breathe. I pour two fingers of coffee into the snow, put the cans down, and piss first in one can, then the other, till they are full. The remainder between trees to colour the snow yellow.

  Then snow falls and covers my traces.

  Suddenly I go hot in the cold. I am overwhelmed with something akin to happiness.

  Inner whisper: Good. They’ll chug the stuff down – true, sweetened with sugar cubes, which they manage to hoard God-only-knows-how. Now, right now, for breakfast, and at noon, and then warmed up again at night: they always grab for the coffee pot when they’ve shouted their throats hoarse. I can just picture them, the troop leaders, the head troop leader. I keep count, swallow after swallow.

  And pot after pot of what I delivered, more or less hot, they did in fact down. Why doubt it? We may assume that my repeated revenge, my regular morning gesture of futility, helped me to endure the drills, and even the worst tortures, with an inner grin. Just before one of those punishment drills, a recruit in the company next to ours hanged himself with the strap of his gas mask.

  Otherwise I did everything I was ordered without a second thought. Crawling under the sump of our practice tank to the command ‘Measure ground clearance!’ Brief training on heavy equipment. Shooting at moving targets. Night marches with combat pack. Knee bends with rifle held a
t arm’s length. It was all supposed to make a man of me.

  Every once in a while we were rewarded with a delousing session in a hygiene barracks specially set up for the purpose, after which we could take a group shower naked and laugh over Hans Moser and Heinz Rühmann at the camp cinema.

  Letters came with less and less regularity. Afternoons we were force-fed theory. We learned about the tanks’ Maybach engine. I can’t recall one technical detail. To this day I cannot and will not drive. They drummed the Morse alphabet into us; not one letter remains.

  And once a week we yawned our way through a class in Lebensraum und Weltanschauung, in Blut und Boden … The verbal refuse left behind by that rhetoric has not decomposed: you can call it up on the Internet even now.

  CLEARER IN MY mind, because it can be told as a story, is an incident that took place outside the hazing routine. Several recruits, myself among them, were summoned one after another to the farmhouse I had found so intriguing during my morning excursions. Everywhere – behind the piano in the vestibule, along the winding staircase, and on the walls of my destination, a room the size of a banqueting hall – there were deer antlers and sumptuously framed paintings of hunting scenes, dark with age. The room was devoid of furniture, except for a desk with bulbous legs. Seated at the desk was a storm trooper who could have been a venerable teacher.

  Doing his best to look friendly, he told me to stand at ease, then asked me about my career plans after the final victory. He spoke like an affable uncle enquiring after the future of his favourite nephew.