In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize–winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, whenThe Tin Drumwas published.During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties,Peeling the Onion—which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany—reveals Grass at his most intimate.
PRAISE FORPEELING THE ONION
Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . .Peeling the Onion,like Grasss best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery. Ian Buruma,The New Yorker
Peeling the Onionis wakeful, twitchy, suspicious, shambling, and yet alsoif we are still permitted to use this word as a complimentsincere. John Leonard,Harper's Magazine
Skins Beneath the Skin
Today, as in years past, the temptation to camouflage oneself in the third person remains great: He was going on twelve, though he still loved sitting in his mother’s lap, when such and such began and ended. But can something that had a beginning and an end be pinpointed with such precision? In my case it can.
My childhood came to an end when, in the city where I grew up, the war broke out in lƒÁ
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