10 - Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion

Summary

In an interview published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on 12 August 2006 in advance of his new book Peeling the Onion, Günter Grass divulged that he had served with the Waffen SS from late 1944 until his capture by American forces on 8 May 1945. In the weeks that followed, writers, literary critics, historians and politicians disagreed on whether this belated confession had enhanced the Nobel-prize-winning author's moral authority or rather undermined his insistence over almost sixty years on the need to confront the Nazi past. Grass's biographer Michael Jürgs, for example, asked in the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel whether the affair denoted the 'end of a moral authority' (12 August). The more acerbic conservative journalist, editor and Hitler biographer Joachim Fest seized the opportunity to condemn a longtime political opponent, writing in the popular daily tabloid Bild: 'I'd no longer even buy a used car from this man' (13 August). In this chapter, I am concerned less with the furore caused in Germany and abroad by the more or less incidental confession made by Grass in his FAZ interview than with the literary text within which this confession is elaborated. I argue that there are (at least) two approaches that may be taken to Peeling the Onion. In the first half of the chapter, correspondingly I look at Grass's presentation of his wartime experiences and at the manner in which he establishes his biography as 'exemplary', in the sense of 'typical' but also in the sense of an 'example to be followed'.