Tin Memories

Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass, 2007

Danzig in 1900 Danzig in 1900

A memoir of his youth, sometimes in the third person, this is an extraordinary exercise in recovering memories of a momentous past, starting in Danzig, an old city that ceased to exist in 1939 and was utterly destroyed by the Russians at the end of the war. Like his city, all documentary evidence to substantiate that this memoir is not a complete fictional work of the imagination is lost to history. Many characters and situations encountered here have found their way into Grass’s fiction. The veracity of his recovered memories really don’t matter much anyway in this compelling work.

Old Danzig Old Danzig

Having grown up in a family that was expelled from house and home, in contrast to writers of my generation who grew up in one place — on Lake Constance, in Nuremberg, in the North German lowlands — and are therefore in full possession of their school records and juvenilia, and having ipso facto no concrete evidence of my early years, I can call only the the most questionable of witnesses to the stand: Lady Memory, a capricious creature prone to migraines and reputed to smile at the highest bidder.

Written with wit and humor, we see the young Gunter Grass at age 11, armed with his mother’s ledger, traveling the neighborhood to collect debts owed the family grocery, earning 5% of debts collected, money that allowed him to see all the movies including Chaplin and Keaton, collecting in turn a lifetime of remembered smells, and learning skills which would later enable him to negotiate and argue with deaf publishers.

During his obligatory youth service we are treated to the Heideggerianisms of the drill Corporal; “You forgetful-of-being dogs, you!” and “We’ll knock the essentiality out of you yet!”. Grass also relates memories of the the very Arian looking blond Jehovah’s Witness (conscientious objector) Wedondothat, who after repeatedly refusing to hold a rifle, is sent to a concentration camp.

Grass laments the limited effects of literature on our lives when, after reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front about the horrors of WWI, Grass volunteers for the the heroic submarine or tank corps.

He is drafted at age 16 into the Waffen SS and is trained as a Tiger tank gunman. During his training and in the war Grass never sees an actual Tiger tank. His only experience in battle with a tank is hiding underneath an antique alongside his commander as the Russians blow the group apart. His inability to ride a bicycle saves his life, and a wily veteran Pfc tells him to get rid of his Waffen SS jacket before a Russian cuts his throat. Twice he finds himself holding a machine gun he is not trained to use and which he never does.

An American POW in Bad Aibling camp, Grass meets a caraway seed chewing camp mate with whom he throws dice who later becomes the Roman Pope. Shown American photos of the Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbruck concentration camps, the POWs decide they must be American propaganda. Grass is taken on a young Nazi reeducation tour of Dachau and the young Nazis decide that the recent plaster in the showers (gas chambers) must mean the Americans built them.

Of his wartime experience Grass writes:

… the questions I had failed to ask … my petrified faith … the Hitler Youth campfires … my desire to die a hero’s death like Lieutenant Captain Prien of the submarines — and as a volunteer Labor Serviceman we called Wedondothat (the arian Jehovah’s Witness) … how Fate had saved the Fuhrer (from bomb assassination) … the Waffen SS oath of allegiance in the jangling cold: “if Others Prove Untrue, Yet We Shall Steadfast Be” … And the Stalin organ (Soviet rocket) and all the deaths it caused, mostly among the young and unprepared like me … the song I sang out of terror in the woods until an answer came … the Pfc who saved me but lost both legs to a Russian grenade while I was spared … My belief in the final victory to the bitter end … the lightly wounded soldier’s feverish dream of a girl with black braids … the gnawing hunger … a game of dice … the disbelief at the pictures of Bergen-Belsen, at the piles of corpses — look at them, go ahead look at them, don’t turn away, just because — to put it mildly — it is beyond description …

But because so many kept silent, the temptation is great to discount one’s own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself all but abstractly, in the third person; he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent…and what’s more, silent within, where there is plenty of room for hide and seek.

On postwar existentialism Grass writes:

The long standing affinity that I and my kind felt for existentialism — or what passed for existentialism at the time — was based on a French import adapted to German rubble conditions and could be worn as a mask becoming to us, the survivors of the “dark years,” as one of the circumlocutions for the period of Nazi hegemony had it: it fostered tragic poses. You saw yourself at a crossroads or before the abyss, according to your mood. All mankind was supposed to see itself in jeopardy. The poet Benn and the philosopher Heidegger furnished quotes for the apocalyptic mood. The background to it all was the thoroughly researched and soon to be expected death by the atom.

An art student in Düsseldorf, Grass plays the washboard in a jazz group performing at a pseudo Hungarian restaurant, one time joined by Louis Armstrong for six or seven minutes. Of the experience Grass writes:

The honor with which it crowned our attempts at entertainment means more to me than all the prizes I later won, including the most prized of all, which having been granted to me in my biblical old age, gave me an ironically distanced pleasure and has since stuck to me like one more job title.

Olivetti Lettera 22
Olivetti Lettera 22

Grass says he marveled at the miracle of language in James Joyce’s Ulysses combined with the Alfred Doblin masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz. He received an Olivetti Lettera portable typewriter as a wedding gift with which he has written since and that he calls his most faithful lover. Like all his wives, his faithful Olivetti Lettera had two sisters.

On his novel The Tin Drum, published in 1959, and written in Paris Grass writes:

But it (the German past) stood in the way. It tripped me up. There was no getting around it. As if prescribed for me, it remained impenetrable: here was a lava flow that had barely cooled down, there was a stretch of solid basalt, itself sitting on even older deposits. And layer upon layer had to be carried away, sorted, named. Words were needed.

Nobel Prize for Literature The Tin Drum

And if on the one hand Oskar was clever enough to use me, on the other he had the generosity to leave me the copyright to everything that occurred in his name… Oskar must always be first, Oskar knows all and tells all, Oskar laughs at my porous memory. For him, as is plain for all to read, the onion performs a different function, has a different meaning.

Gunter Grass birth chart