Peeling the Onion

by Günter Grass

  It was some time before I came gradually to understand and hesitantly to admit that I had unknowingly – or, more precisely, unwilling to know – taken part in a crime that did not diminish over the years and for which no statute of limitations would ever apply, a crime that grieves me still.

  Guilt and the shame it engendered can be said, like hunger, to gnaw, gnaw ceaselessly. Hunger I suffered only for a time, but shame …

  IT WAS NEITHER the education officer’s arguments nor the overly graphic photographs he showed us that broke through my obstinacy; no, I did not get over my block until a year later, when I heard the voice of my former Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, I don’t remember where, coming from the radio. Those accused by the Nuremberg tribunal of being war criminals were entitled to take the floor one last time before the verdict was read out. In an attempt to exonerate the Hitler Youth, Schirach asserted its ignorance, claiming that he and only he was aware of mass extermination as the final solution of the Jewish question.

  I had to believe him. I continued to believe him. But as long as I served as dishwasher and interpreter, I was obstinate. We had lost the war all right: the victors had more soldiers, tanks, and planes, never mind calories, than we had. But what about the pictures?

  When we argued with our Jewish coevals, they shouted ‘Nazis! You Nazis!’

  We responded, ‘Get out of here! Go to your Palestine!’ But then we would laugh together over the crazy Americans, especially the education officer, whom we embarrassed with questions about his country’s contemptible treatment of the ‘niggers’.

  Once tired of quarrelling, we would change the subject to women, first calling them whores, then putting them on a pedestal. Because the surviving sons of murdered Jewish parents were as hungry for their picture of womanhood as we POWs were for ours. And we both found the Amis and their pin-ups ridiculous.

  Once or twice one of the Jews, who was called Ben by the others, would silently push a tin can chock-full of thick meat fat and juices in my direction just after inspection and before we climbed into the backs of our trucks. It was against the rules to take leftovers back to our camp.

  I REMEMBER BEN as having curly red hair. I gave a talk about Ben and Dieter in March of ’67 in Tel Aviv. I had been invited by the university. I was thirty-nine at the time and had the reputation of being a troublemaker because of my tendency to bring out into the open what had too long been swept under the carpet.

  My lecture was entitled ‘A Talk About Accommodation’. I gave it in German because the audience consisted mainly of Jews of German origin. Part of it dealt with Ben and Dieter, the kitchen and laundry crews, and the education officer who tried to arbitrate between the estranged parties.

  I called the education officer Hermann Mautler. He had had to flee Austria in ’38, had emigrated to the United States, had earned a degree in history, and believed in reason. The story I inserted into the talk for the audience of survivors was the story of his failure, and when I read it today, at a distance of nearly four decades, his failure strikes me as related to my failures.

  True, I made up the name Hermann Mautler, but the fragile person whose real name I no longer know is more vivid to me than the obstinate youth I am trying to recognize in an early self-portrait. Because the Dieter in my story is only a part of me.

  HOW DO STORIES remain fresh? Since they are invariably unfinished, they require more than the usual quotient of invention. They always wait for the chance to move forwards or backwards. Like the story of Joseph, the Bavarian youth who was released early from the Bad Aibling camp and with whom I spent several long days squashing lice, chewing caraway seeds under a tarp in the rain, and telling fortunes with dice. A gentle know-it-all. His story must keep being told, because though we had very different plans for the future, he, like me, had written poetry from the time he was an altar boy …

  Only the story of Ben and Dieter must come to an end, because the kitchen crew in question was replaced by a group of older soldiers in the autumn just after I turned eighteen. The Jews stayed on a bit longer, probably until they managed to find a way to get to Palestine, where the promise of Israel as a sovereign state and war upon war stood ahead of them.

  The education officer may later have written a book about the problems of camp inmates of various origins during puberty and about his glorious defeat. As for me, a change of camp granted me something I did not know. It was called freedom.

  By the time I was transferred to the Lüneburg Heath early in the winter I was low on Siegfried Line pins but still well stocked with razor blades. We travelled in army trucks over empty autobahns through rolling, then flat, landscapes that stretched out peacefully before us. We were being transferred, we were told, only to be released. An occasional bombed autobahn bridge or burned-out tank reminded us of the horrors we had survived. No sooner had we arrived than we moved into barracks in the Münster camp.

  The English guards took an interest in one of my remaining items for barter: the tiny Siegfried Line bunker pins. But they eventually stamped my papers, disinfected me, gave me my final ration, and released me into the British Occupation Zone. There I found a vast rubble-lined reservation, and there I was to try on that unknown quantity, freedom.

  IT IS DISAPPOINTING at first sight: peeling the onion makes the eyes water. What would be legible to clear vision is clouded over. My amber captures its inclusion with greater definition: it appears for a time to be a mosquito or tiny spider. But then it can bring something else to mind, like the grenade-splinter encapsulated in my left shoulder as a souvenir – so to speak.

  What do I retain from the war and my camp experience besides episodes that have been bound together into anecdotes or wish to remain variable as true stories?

  First, incredulity, when the concentration camp pictures startled me with their black-and-whiteness; then, speechlessness. Also the lessons fear and hunger taught me. And the ability, thanks to the cooking course with no equipment but blackboard and chalk dust, to summon up what I fervently desire, even the unattainable, with all its smells and noises. I also learned to invite dinner guests from distant places and times, friends I miss, who died young or who speak to me only from books, friends pronounced dead yet very much alive.

  They bring news from another star, carry on their quarrels at table, or seek redemption in pious-sounding tall tales because they have been frozen into medieval stone images.

  Later I expanded my time period and wrote The Flounder, in the course of which I welcome guests from every century to my table, serving Skåne herring during Dorothea’s Gothic times, the tripe the Abbess Margarete Rusch made for her father’s final meal, the meal before he was executed, the cod in dill sauce Agnes cooked for the ailing poet Martin Opitz, the potato soup Amanda prepared for Ollefritz, as well as the mushroom garnish Sophie used to stuff the calf’s head that Napoleon’s governor, General Rapp, escaped by the skin of his teeth, and the kidneys in mustard sauce Lena Stubbe served August Bebel when she showed him her Proletarian Cookbook …

  In the days of gnawing hunger I paid close attention to my master. As soon as the ingredients were available at a reasonable price, I put air soups, cloud dumplings, and weathercocks on my menu. The I that disappeared in those early years must have been an empty vessel. Among those who filled it, a Bessarabian chef deserves a place all his own. What I would give to make a place at my table for the gentleman who said, ‘But please, gentlemen …’

  AT AND BELOW THE SURFACE

  NO MORE BARBED wire to dictate horizontal and vertical lines of sight. With only the lightest of luggage, including two pounds of bartered tea, he or I was transferred into a state called freedom, limited though it was to the British Occupation Zone.

  But who had granted freedom to whom? How to make use of this gift? What did it promise, this two-syllable word that could be explained, expanded, or extenuated, even negated, by any number of epithets.

  Snippets of memory strung together – now this way, now that – but a
lways with gaps. I trace the silhouette of a person who happened to survive, but no, I see a smudged yet otherwise blank sheet of paper that is, could be, or would like to be me, the imprecise outline of an existence to come.

  Someone who still parts his hair on the left and is still five foot six and a half. Someone in dyed military garb who now shaves his down once a week and sees the freedom offered to him as a hard road to travel. Yet he takes the first step.

  Besides, ideals come to call – he is an earnest, contemplative young man seeking meaning among the ruins – that are falteringly rejected.

  For now, at least, I can’t seem to come up with a picture of my condition at that point. The facts are too few and unclear. I am eighteen. By the time I am released, I am no longer underweight. I am louse-free, I wear rubber-soled American boots, and I look all right in the mirror.

  Whether life in the camps has cured me of my youthful grimacing is uncertain. My only possessions are the exotically packed English tea that the as yet non-smoker has hoarded in exchange for cigarettes, silver pins, and the enormous supply of razor blades. Apart from a few odds and ends and scribblings, they are all my haversack contains. And what of the picture my inner life displays? It seems the godless Catholic was familiar with all the virulent questions of faith and at the same time did not give a damn. To suspect an atheist lurking within would have meant to ascribe another religion to him.

  He meditates. Nothing quotable results. Outwardly a few things have not faded: the German Army trousers, a US Army anorak, padded and dyed a rusty red. A woollen cap – it, too, US Army issue – provides olive-drab warmth. He looks nearly civilian. Only the haversack is still field grey.

  TO BE RELEASED, I had to give an address. It was provided by Philipp, a friend my age, along with greetings to his mother. He was a good-looking boy with an angelic face, dimples, and a contagious smile. Like me, he had the gift of frivolity, the kind that had made volunteers of us.

  He had to stay behind at the Münster camp and was later shipped to Britain with a labour detachment. I was allowed out because an X-ray (praise be to Roentgen) had shown my bean-sized grenade-splinter to have encapsulated in my left shoulder. It has remained there to this day, my little souvenir analogous to the beetle outlasting time in its amber prison. When, trying to show off – first to Anna, now to Ute – I pulled back my left arm, left-handed as I am, to throw a stone or a ball, it would send me tangible signals: Hey! Stop! Let me sleep!

  So, unlike Philipp, I was considered unfit for work below ground in the Welsh coal mines. I promised to assure his mother he’d be home soon. That is how my first officially registered residence as a free man came to be Cologne-Mülheim, a pile of debris with an occasional miraculously surviving street sign stuck to what was left of a façade, or hung on a pole sticking out of the rubble, which was also sprouting lush patches of dandelions about to blossom.

  Later, while scavenging the American and French occupation zones like a stray dog for food, a place to sleep, and – driven by that other hunger – skin-on-skin contact, I was led or misled by similar street signs past other ruins and over rubble harbouring missing persons.

  Awake or dreaming, I am still treading these makeshift paths between damaged masonry, pausing on a mound of debris for a better view, my teeth grinding, the stone and mortar dust in the air …

  MY FRIEND’S MOTHER, a nimble woman with dyed or natural blue-black hair and a cigarette always dangling from her lips, gave me an unceremonious introduction to the black market. The euphemistically named four-fruit marmalade and artificial honey, American peanut butter and gramophone needles, flints and torch batteries would cross the kitchen table for me to weigh or count. I could also cash in my razor blades on the side. I soon had money. From morning till night there was a stream of customers with items to trade. Furs – I recall a silver fox – were worth their weight in butter.

  Philipp’s sister pranced through the daily round of transactions like a graceful doll, as if before an imagined public. She was the image of her brother. She wore silk stockings, changed hats regularly, smelled of spring, but could be fondled only in long-fingered dreams. Can it be that – floating past like an angel – she stroked my hair?

  By way of compensation I would slip off to the movies. I can still see the local film palace intact among the ruins. In peace as in war, its main attraction was Romance in a Minor Key, starring such one-time favourites as Marianne Hoppe, Paul Dahlke, and Ferdinand Marian, now in disrepute because of his role in Jew Süss.

  Romance in a Minor Key had served to stimulate desires, some years before, when I was in the Luftwaffe auxiliary. Whenever ‘An Hour Between Day and Dreams’ summoned Hoppe to the screen … she in front of a shop window … she struggling with temptation … she alone with her grief … her immaculately scrubbed face … the jewel on her neck … her fleeting smile … her beauty, her everlasting beauty …

  The heart-throb of my youth died only three or four years ago. She was over ninety.

  LIKE THE HUNGRY outside Cologne’s Hohe Strasse shops, my questions now form a queue:

  Did the aimless black marketeer who bore my name use his machinations as an excuse to extend his time away from the classroom and postpone his final examinations? Did I think of apprenticing myself to a craftsman, and if so in what trade?

  Did I miss my father, mother, and sister so terribly that I made regular trips to the offices that posted refugee lists?

  Were my sufferings limited to my own person or did they extend to the state of the world? More specifically, did I partake in what was beginning to be called, with and without quotation marks, German collective guilt? Can it be that my grief encompassed only my loss of house, home, and family and nothing more? What other losses might I have mourned?

  The onion gives the following answers, though not without blank spots:

  I made no attempt to enrol in an academic institution in Cologne, nor was I tempted by an apprenticeship.

  I submitted no application to the bureaux in charge of registering refugees from the eastern part of the country or whose houses had been destroyed in bombing raids. I still had a clear picture of my mother, but did not miss her terribly. I wrote no homesick verse.

  Nor did I feel any guilt.

  Thus the aimless wanderer amidst ruins and rubble appears to have been concerned with himself alone: no other concerns can I remember. Or did I flee with ineffable pain to the sanctum of the Cologne Cathedral? The colossus and its two towers looked rather the worse for wear when the city that had grown around it lay flattened and in ruins.

  What I know for sure is that in the spring Philipp’s sister – I may have been getting on her nerves – helped me find work on a farm in the Lower Rhine district of Bergheim-Erft. It must have been in the spring, because I can see myself after a bit of last-minute training stumbling behind a plough or leading a horse by the halter while the farmer made the furrows. In the fields from dawn to dusk. There was enough to eat. But then there was the other hunger, which neither mush nor must could still, the one that fed my need, enlarged it, inflamed it.

  I shared a cramped room with a retarded farmhand. There was an East Prussian girl working on the farm as a milkmaid – she and her elderly father, who was good for nothing more than force-feeding pigs, had been officially foisted on the farmer – but the farmer, who besides pigs kept twelve cows and four horses, had commandeered her for himself. The only thing he did with his wife was go to church. Sunday after Sunday. He was a good Catholic.

  On the proscenium of my mind I pictured Elsabe, for such was her name, standing large and heavy-boned by the garden fence or in shadow by the farm gate or brightly lit between two milk canisters. Wherever she stood, walked, bent, an image arose. So compelling was the stable smell she emitted that between thinning turnip rows and chopping firewood I penned a good ten rickety-rhymed poems in its wake.

  There was little that was lyrical about my surroundings: farm after farm in the sunlight, one big blur of countryside in
the rain, flat except for village steeples.

  The snoring farmhand by night, the farmer’s shouts by day, and through it all visions of a dozen cows milked by a goddess with ash-blond eyelashes. It was too much for me. I moved on, ravenous, though I had eaten my fill. The hunger that remained, a densely written onion skin be my witness, was of a different nature.

  I WENT AS far as the Saarland, where the address given me by another Münster camp crony secured me a genuine feather bed in the attic of a small house where he lived with his mother, who treated me like a second son.

  It may sound cosy, but the Saarland was harder hit by hunger than other places. The French occupation forces seemed to punish all Saarlanders retrospectively, not simply those who had voted in favour of returning to the Reich in the plebiscite of ’35.

  My pal and I – I never knew his name: we all called him Kongo – he wanted to join the French Foreign Legion and liked to picture himself fighting rebellious Berbers under the desert sky – took crowded trains into the countryside, all the way to the mountainous Hunsrück region, which seemed like the end of the world to us.

  Train journeys of this kind were quite common, and were known as ‘hamster trips’. Farm to farm, we bartered the rest of my English tea, razor blades, and the ever sought-after flints I had been given as payment on the Cologne black market for potatoes and cabbage. There were times we came away empty-handed. But I had more to offer than items that could be weighed or counted.

  One day I did a frivolous but sympathetic palm-reading for a visibly pregnant peasant woman who happily shared table and bed with the French ‘foreign worker’ assigned her during the war. So pleased was the woman with my reading – I had prophesied that her husband would remain absent if not for ever then at least for the foreseeable future – that she rewarded me with a hunk of smoked bacon in addition to my honorarium of a slab of sheep’s-milk cheese. The man had been reported missing in action at the eastern front in 1943, but was still very much in evidence in a framed photograph.