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Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter 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, this book reveals Grass at his most intimate.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
It helps if one is familiar with Grass’ writings before reading this memoir. I myself have read THE TIN DRUM, and I found this memoir fascinating in the revelations of what was behind some of the details in that wonderful story. The style is almost free-flowing reminiscing, but in the end Grass masterfully wraps it all together as if carefully closing up the onion layers he had slowly peeled away.
I love Grass’ writing. It feels like he is speaking directly to me. It’s as if we were talking over a cup of coffee. He isn’t a perfect man and he expects us to understand that without having to make excuses. I’m so glad he wrote this book!
The Goodreads/Amazon imbroglio only shocked me by being so predictable. Not to sound like a hungover Schopenhauer, but decay and disagreeable ends are to be expected, aren't they? When Herr Grass acknowledged that he'd been in the SS, my knees did feel weak. I did call most everything into question, then I kept on. Grass was in NYC shortly thereafter, he gave a reading from Peeling The Onion and my best friend Joel attended, bought me copy and had the author sign such. I was moved by his memoir. I suffer from being human myself. Dark times place everything in crisis. Normal metrics distort and blur.