Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

I made no mention of my determination to become an artist, limiting myself to something vague, like studying art history, whereupon he held out the possibility of support if I were willing and qualified to attend a Junker school for future leaders.

  Such schools were even now training young men with the proper national and racial consciousness to assume positions of responsibility that would need to be filled after the final victory to handle Lebensraum issues, resettle the non-German population, rebuild the cities, manage the economy. There would be posts in the financial sector, perhaps even in the arts you have your heart set on … Then he asked me what I could tell him about art.

  This kindly, avuncular figure, who wore rimless glasses and whose rank grows more questionable the more I think about it – could he really have been a storm trooper? – appeared genuinely interested in what he dignified by calling it my career, so I unravelled before him what I had skeined together on the basis of my cigarette cards and Knackfuss volumes. I talked nonstop, and like as not ostentatiously, about Dürer’s self-portraits, the Isenheim Altarpiece, and Tintoretto’s Miracle of Saint Mark, praising the apostle’s nosedive as an example of the artist’s bold use of perspective.

  Having criss-crossed his way through his three-volume, bird’s-eye view of art history and thus exhausted his accumulated knowledge, the future Junker school graduate added a few brash assertions about Caravaggio’s ‘gory genius’ and an overly enthusiastic tribute to Anselm Feuerbach and the Deutschrömer and, finally, Lovis Corinth, whom Lilli Kröhnert, his art teacher at Saint Peter’s, had called brilliant. As a result, he placed Corinth’s work far above anything you could see in the exhibition of contemporary painting at the House of German Art.

  With a shake of the head, my kindly old uncle waved me to the door. I had clearly disqualified myself for a position of responsibility after the final victory: no Junker school whisked me away from drill.

  THOUGH BELATEDLY, A present for my seventeenth birthday arrived in the mail: a package containing woollen socks, a cake that was mostly crumbs, and a double-sided letter full of clueless worries in my father’s fine penmanship. From then until Christmas, only letters; after Christmas, nothing.

  The noticeboard led us to believe that the Ardennes offensive – the Battle of the Bulge – was going swimmingly and would turn things around at last, but soon came the bulletin admitting that the Russians had entered East Prussia. Reports of the rape and murder of German women in the Gumbinnen region occupied my thoughts during the theory lectures.

  All day we saw enemy squadrons sending bundles of vapour trails through the frost-bright sky, wending their unimpeded way – where? It looked quite beautiful, actually, but where were our fighter pilots?

  There was still a lot of talk about the V1 and V2 rockets, to say nothing of the miracle weapon that was expected to materialize at any minute. Towards the end of February, when rumours of the Dresden firestorm started making the rounds, we took the oath. The moon was full, the night freezing cold. A chorus sang ‘If Others Prove Untrue, Yet We Shall Steadfast Be’, the song of the Waffen SS.

  SOON THEREAFTER I witnessed an event that should have made the downfall of the German Reich evident – the organized chaos of defeat moving slowly, then with dispatch, and finally at breakneck speed. Was I able to recognize what things were coming to? Did I realize what was going on with us, with me? Did the never-ending activity, the all-consuming need for a ladle of soup and crust of army bread, along with fears of various magnitudes, leave any room for insight into the general situation? Was the seventeen-year-old at all conscious of the beginning of the end, of the gradually increasing dimensions of what was later called the collapse?

  When my first attempt at sorting out and putting down on shiny white paper the confusion reigning in the head of a young soldier, whose oversize steel helmet keeps slipping, ended up as the novel Dog Years in the early sixties, the war as constant retreat gets mixed up in the pages of the diary kept by tank driver Harry Liebenau with the urgent entreaties of Harry’s cousin Tulla, who, rumours lead him to believe, has gone down into the Baltic’s icy deep on the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff.

  I, too, kept a diary of sorts. I kept it in a notebook that I lost along with my winter coat and other items in my pack either at Weisswasser or near Cottbus. It is not an easy loss to write off: it has often made me feel lost to myself.

  What did I scribble on those sheets of lined paper during breaks brief or extended?

  What flights of fancy freed me from the matters at hand or the boredom that loomed whenever we had to wait for the eternal straggler or the field kitchen or the orders that would send us off in this or that direction?

  Did intimations of spring move me to rhymed couplets?

  Did I wallow in apocalyptic thoughts?

  And even if it yielded no abstruse idea to decipher, no vernal verse to transcribe, no desired doubts to glean, the lost notebook could have thrown some light on the question: What did the battle-ready recruit do?

  Did he sit in a tank as a gunner or as a gun loader?

  Did he switch from cardboard to moving targets?

  Where and when was I assigned to what unit?

  I can’t seem to turn the other members of the Jörg von Frundsberg division, which now feels quite unreal, into flesh and blood. From the training camp in the Bohemian Woods we were transferred group by group to a number of outlying garrisons: one lot set off in the direction of Vienna, another was sent to defend Stettin. Mine was taken one night on a freight train via Tetschen-Bodenbach to Dresden, then farther east into Lower Silesia, where the front was reputed to be.

  All that remains in my mind of Dresden is the smell of burning and the sight – through the slightly open sliding door of the freight car – of charred bundles piled one on top of the other between tracks and in front of scorched façades. Some claimed to have seen shrivelled corpses, others heaven knows what. We covered up our horror then by quarrelling over what had happened, much as today what happened in Dresden lies buried under verbiage.

  We seemed to have arrived at a reality only to abandon it or exchange it for something that claimed to be another reality. After being shifted from one direction to the next, we finally found the company we had been assigned to and joined its as yet incomplete squad in an evacuated school. The school benches piled up outside were being sawed into firewood by the kitchen crew. The accommodation awaiting us in the courtyard made it clear that the barracks existence I had led since my days as a Luftwaffe auxiliary was not over yet.

  There we sat, waiting for our famous Tiger tanks to arrive. The wait proved long but, given the regular meals and loose discipline, tolerable. We even got to see movies. Did I have a second crack at We Make Music, which featured a gaily whistling Ilse Werner and had served as a jazz substitute in my schooldays? Or was it there I first saw Kolberg?

  How long did this motley troop composed of Wehrmacht regulars and ground personnel garnered from surrendered air bases wait for those tanks – and for the army postal service, which never came?

  I cannot put a date to it. I picture that period as a film pieced together out of random episodes – now in fast, now in slow motion, jumping forward, jumping back, breaking off, then starting up again with a completely different script and plot.

  The only person I remember clearly is an NCO sitting with us at the long wooden table we take our mess tins to, your typical ‘front swine’. Forced to heed an urgent call of nature, he plucks a glass eye out of his right socket with a practised pinch and plunks it, bright blue, onto the middle of the palm-sized slab of meat which – along with boiled potatoes, cabbage, and brown gravy – each of us is allocated for lunch. He shouts, ‘I’m keeping a glass eye on it,’ and we sit there agape till he returns from the shithouse.

  What does memory cling to? A still life with a practical goal and no pretensions to art. There were plenty of soldiers marked by their wounds who returned to active duty straight from the field hospital: it didn’t take much by the
end to be declared fit for combat.

  Eventually we received three or four Jagdpanthers, Hunting Panthers, instead of the promised Königstigers, King Tigers. There they stood under their camouflage netting: guns with no revolving turret. And although we lacked the training to operate them, we had to clear out of the barracks and mount them in our capacity as escorts, equipped with rifles and other assault weapons.

  The front was supposedly the Silesian town of Sagan, which had been recaptured but was still under fire. From Sagan there was to be an offensive, or so we were told, to liberate Breslau, which the Russians had besieged and which was therefore being called the fortress city, but we got no farther than Weisswasser, where we fell apart as a company and I lost the pack containing my diary and the winter coat buckled onto it …

  AT THAT POINT the film rips, and when I splice it together and switch the projector back on, all I get is a jumble of images: somewhere I throw away my threadbare footcloths and put on the woollen socks we have found in an evacuated military storehouse, which also contained piles of undershirts and tarpaulins. We have stopped in an alluvial plain and I am stroking the first pussy willows.

  Did I hear an early cuckoo? Did I count its calls?

  And then I see my first bodies. Soldiers young and old, in Wehrmacht uniforms. Hanging from trees still bare along the road, from linden trees in the marketplaces. With cardboard signs on their chests branding them as cowards and subversive elements. A boy my age – his hair, like mine, parted on the left – dangling next to a middle-aged officer of indeterminate rank or, rather, stripped of his rank by a court martial. A procession of corpses we ride past with our deafening tank-track rattle. No thoughts, only images.

  Off to the side I see peasants working their fields, furrow after furrow, as if nothing were wrong. One has a cow hitched to his plough. Crows following the plough.

  Then I see more refugees, filling the streets in long processions: horse carts and overladen handcarts pushed and pulled by old women and adolescents; I see children clutching dolls, perched on suitcases and rope-bound bundles. An old man is pulling a cart containing two lambs hoping to survive the war. The image collector sees more than he can take in.

  At a stop during the retreat I set my sights on a girl whose name is – this time I’m sure – Susanne. She is fleeing Breslau with her grandmother. Now she is stroking my hair. She lets me hold her hand, though nothing more. This exciting event takes place in the undamaged stable of a farmhouse that has been riddled with bullets. A calf looks on. If only the story had a message that would have justified sacrificing that bore named Truth.

  But all I probably noted in my diary was: ‘Susanne wears a necklace made of cherry-red wooden beads. …’ Or was it a completely different girl who wore the necklace, not the flaxen-haired one but the girl with the long black plaits, whose name I refuse to tell?

  Anything that occurred outside my field of vision does not make it into my cobbled-together film. Since rumours are rife, I will have heard that the Russians have taken my native city; what I don’t know, however, is that the Old Town has long since been turned into one big heap of smoking rubble and that the ruins of the burnt-out brick church are waiting for photographers whose mission it will be to document each and every steeple stump, each and every fragment of the façade before reconstruction gets under way, so that schoolchildren will later recognize …

  In my thoughts, though, the image of the city was still unblemished: the steeples could be counted from left to right; every gable ornament was in place, the paths to and from school intact. I also forced myself to see my mother behind the counter, my father in the kitchen. Could I have been tormented by the fear that my parents, together with my sister and their scant luggage, had in the end found room on the Gustloff?

  AT THIS POINT the reel of my first contact with the enemy must be singled out from the arbitrary concatenation of images produced and directed by Chance, though with no indication of place or time or even of my having laid eyes on that enemy.

  One can only assume that the encounter took place some time in mid-April, when, after lengthy artillery bombardment, the Soviet armies had broken through the German lines along the Oder and Neisse between Forst and Muskau to take revenge for their ravished land and millions of dead, to conquer, to triumph.

  I see our Jagdpanthers, a few armoured personnel carriers, several trucks, the field kitchen, and a thrown-together troop of infantrymen and tank gunners taking up position in a grove of young trees, either to launch a counter-offensive or form a line of defence.

  Buds on the trees – birches among others. The sun giving warmth. The birds chirping. We wait, half drowsing. Someone no older than I am is playing a harmonica. A private lathers up, starts shaving. And then, out of the blue – or was the birds’ sudden silence a loud enough warning? – a Stalin organ overhead.

  There is no time to wonder where the expression comes from. Is it the way it howls, hisses, and whines? Two or three rocket launchers blanket the grove. They are ruthlessly thorough, mowing down whatever cover the young trees might promise. There is no place to hide, or is there? For a simple gunner, at least.

  I see myself doing as I was taught: crawling under one of the Jagdpanthers, where I find someone else – the driver, the gunner, the commander? – measuring the space between sump and soil. Our boots touch. We are protected by the tracks on either side. The organ goes on playing for what is most likely a three-minute eternity – scared to death, I piss my pants – and then silence.

  Beside me chattering teeth.

  No, the chattering had begun even before the organ had played its piece to the end, nor did it stop when the screams of the wounded overpowered all other noise.

  Brief as the interval was, it was sufficient: my very first lesson taught me how to fear. Fear took possession of me. When I crawled out from under the Jagdpanther, I was no longer crawling the crawl I had practised. I see myself crawling through a churned-up forest floor of decomposed leaves, into which I pressed my face for as long as the Stalin organ set the tone; the smell of them clung to me long after.

  Still wobbly on my feet, I was assaulted by images. The birches looked as if they had been broken over somebody’s knee: the falling treetops had set off some of our explosives. There were bodies everywhere, one next to the other and one on top of the other, dead, still alive, writhing, impaled by branches, peppered with shell-splinters. Many were in acrobatic contortions. Body parts were strewn around.

  Isn’t that the boy who’d been tootling away on the harmonica? And there’s that private, his lather not yet dry …

  The survivors were either crawling here and there or, like me, rooted to the spot. Some wailed, though not wounded. I made not a sound; I just stood there in my piss-soaked pants, staring at the innards of a boy I had been shooting the breeze with. Death seemed to have shrunk his round face.

  But I had already read everything I write here. I had read it in Remarque or Céline, who – like Grimmelshausen before them in his description of the Battle of Wittstock, when the Swedes hacked the Kaiser’s troops to pieces – were merely quoting the scenes of horror handed down to them …

  Then, suddenly, the teeth-chatterer was at my side, pulling himself up to his full height and exhibiting the rather elevated Waffen SS rank on his collar, his Knight’s Cross medal only slightly awry under his chin, the very picture of a newsreel hero such as we schoolboys had been fed from the screen for years.

  ‘Get a move on, soldier,’ he barked at me, the witness to his fear. ‘Assemble all able men. On the double. Get them back into formation, chop-chop. Prepare for the counter-attack.’

  I watch him stepping over shattered bodies, both dead and alive. He looks ridiculous striding along, waving his arms, the picture-book hero no more. I later recalled him with gratitude, because his demeanour in the midst of the mutilated unit – only two Jagdpanthers and a few personnel carriers would still be of use in the field – completely undermined the image of the hero I had c
herished during my schooldays. Something had gone wrong. The foundation of my faith, which had first developed a crack because of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Wedontdothat, was weakening again, though it would eventually stabilize …

  FROM THEN ON, the units I belonged to had no names. Battalions, companies kept dissolving. The Frundsberg was no more – if it ever had been. The Soviet armies had moved on beyond the Oder and Neisse and formed a broad front. Our main battle lines, steamrollered and broken through, existed only on paper, but what did I know of battle lines and what they were or meant?

  In the chaos of retreat I sought to join up with scattered soldiers who were likewise trying to find their units. Even though I had had no direct contact with the enemy, I was scared to death. The soldiers hanging from the trees along the road were constant warning of the risk run by every one of us who could not prove that he belonged to a company or was on his way to this or that unit with signed and sealed travel orders.

  The central section of the eastern front, now pushing inexorably west, was under the command of the infamous General Schörner. According to ‘Schörner’s orders’, military police – bloodhounds, the lot of them – were to go after soldiers without marching papers and haul them, no matter what their rank, before mobile courts martial as malingerers, cowards, and deserters. They would then be summarily and conspicuously hanged. The phrase ‘hero-catcher on the prowl’ served as warning. Schörner and his orders were more to be feared than the enemy.

  I had Schörner on my back for a long time after the breakthrough between Forst and Muskau. In the mid-sixties I drafted a play, Lost Battles, meant to deal with the much-feared chief bloodhound. In the end, nothing came of this sandbox project: once more, fiction took the upper hand. But so relentlessly did that beast of a casual hangman hold me in his thrall that in the novel that replaced the play, Local Anaesthetic – which is about the jutting jaw of a teacher by the name of Starusch, its orthodontic treatment, and the side-effects thereof, and about a student who wishes to burn his dachshund Max in protest against the Vietnam War – Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner is in evidence under the name of Kring.