Peeling the Onion | 
| Author: Gunter Grass
Creator: Michael Henry Heim
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $3.38
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 268943
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0156035340
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780156035347
ASIN: 0156035340
Publication Date: June 2, 2008
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Product Description
In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize–winning author Guenter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Gunter's Memoirs September 3, 2008
A nice way of finding out who this author is and how he started on the road to the nobel prize . The early years in Danzig are fascinating and his experiences in war frightening in the extreme. Not being able to ride a bicycle probably saved his life and watching a huge Russian tank roll at him in the dark!!.... are some of the stories while in the Waffen SS which he had not previously disclosed. Much background leading up to the Tin Drum's genesis. Strongly recommended!
 An accidental writer December 17, 2007
Interesting book to learn how a great fiction writer put it all together. Though balanced with lots of things the Author doesn't remember, or only hints at, the memories are superb in explaining all that can be explained (and that the Author is willing to share) about the building-up of his books. Just don't expect a nice (American?) story behind these pages, since there is no tale here of self-redemption - this is the life the Author lived and how he chose to tell it.
A tale, a tall tale even, but so European November 28, 2007
I did not have the courage to read it in German, but I could not have done so that easily and fast. But in English it is worth a real lot and the time it takes to come to the closing page. But now what does this book tell us about Germany, about Europe, about the world as for that and why not about humanity? Germany is debated not so much in its nazi past but in its reconstruction, though it probably misses the deep desire of the anti-nazi belligerents to see it divided as long as possible. He is maybe too much against that today old fashioned communism of East Germany to see how much our parents wanted that division to last, but also to see that this brand of communism was definitely the result of a long history that the West encouraged for many decades. It is so good to corner your opponent so that he had to become atrociously dislikable to just survive the pack of hunting dogs. But we can survive this shortcoming. As for the reconstruction it had to be European, or even global in a way, and there too Gunter Grass is reverberating an echo from the world but does not help us understand this very world. Maybe his both scattered and clear political allegiance to the social-democrats does not help either, to the point of only mentioning Adenauer as a ghost from the past and de Gaulle as a brutal leader. Where is the dynamic of the world in all that? As for Europe he definitely over-emphasizes the fear many feel in front of the Russians, not understanding, even now, that it is pushing them into some isolated position as to the West and their looking for antagonistic alternatives, in Asia for example. But that is a very old heritage going back to the Teutonic Knights, Voltaire being one exception in this biased a priori stance. But then the book becomes amazingly clear and enlightening, when he gets out of these historical waste lands. He reveals his teenage past and enhances a human fact in human nature. Man is resilient because man can adapt to any situation. Man's instinct not only to survive but to thrive leads him to accept the limits and axioms of his historical or simply sociological environment to try to become someone. Man has nevertheless, in any situation, the instinct to look for a gap in the fence and imagine what could be beyond, at times experience it, like selling nazi pins to the American victors to manage to get some more food. The book is full of such anecdotes, some pathetic like his being the fellow POW of him the Joseph who was to become Pope Benedict, some poignant like this non-commissioned officer that helped him navigate through the end of the war just for this fellow soldier to lose his legs in the last military assault he will suffer. The personal dimension is endearing though maybe not quite clear and at times sentimental. But I like the way he presents his artistic career as being accidental and haphazard. It must have been anything but that, but that is so refreshing to believe that one can become a success with a lot of work but nevertheless more out of luck than anything else. It is of course not true but Grass's humility probably makes him discreet about the connections that really helped him. One instance is metaphorical: the wedding present of an Olivetti typing machine. One instance is just reduced to an accidental side circumstance: the buying of some kind of digs in Paris by his rich Swiss in-laws. Without that investment would he have been able to find the incipit of his first novel? He may have found an incipit, but things would have been quite different, including his first novel.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Best Grass yet November 26, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book more than any of his other work. Probably because the prose is less turgid than most, and I enjoy historical accounts more than fiction in any case. He doesn't quite seem to "tell all", but he tells quite a bit and reveals the real-life basis for many of the characters and locations in his novels.
It does take a bit of suspension of disbelief to imagine that a 17-year old Waffen SS soldier made it through terrible fighting at the end of the war without ever once firing a shot. I suppose it's possible, but seems highly unlikely to me. Other than that business I found the book a quick and very interesting read. A must for all fans of his work. I had no idea he started out as a sculptor and visual artist.
Seems like all the uproar when the book was released stems from a lot of people who've had an axe to grind with him for years. Admittedly, suddenly revealing he'd been a Waffen-SS volunteer after more than 50 years of silence and lambasting other's with "secrets" does reveal a heavy dose of hypocrisy. Doesn't change his incredible writing skill, though.
 Fiction is often truer than memoir October 11, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book was well-written, but the vagueness of what actually happened and lack of emotional depth of this memoir was disturbing. Has the author taken full responsibility for his actions? Why is this story being told only now? I get the impression that this man is a consummate narcissist. His fiction is truer than his non-fiction.
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