Chapter One
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 several places at once. It began
with an unmistakeable bang-the broadsiding of a ship and the
approach of dive bombers over the Neufahrwasser dock area,
which lay opposite the Polish military base at Westerplatte, and,
farther off, the carefully aimed shots of two armored reconnaissance
cars during the battle for the Polish Post Office in the
Old Town of Danzig-and was heralded closer to home by our
radio-a մDZäԲ, “people’s receiver”-which stood on
the sideboard in the living room. Thus the end of my childhood
was proclaimed with words of iron in a ground-floor flat of a
three-story building on Labesweg, in Langfuhr.
Even the time of day sticks in my mind. From then on, the
airport of the Free State near the Baltic Chocolate factory
handled more than just civilian planes. From the skylight in the
roof of our building we could see smoke mounting duskily over
the Free Port each time there was a new attack and a light wind
from the northwest.
But the moment I try to remember that distant artillery fire
from the Schleswig-Holstein, which had been retired from active
duty after the Battle of Jutland and could no longer be used as
anything but a training ship for cadets, and the layered sounds
of the Stukas or Stutzkampfflugzeug, “dive-bombers”-so called
because high above the combat zone they would tip to one side,
then lunge down on their target, releasing their bombs at the
last moment-I am faced with a question: Why go back to my
childhood and its clear and immutable end date, when everything
that happened to me between milk teeth and permanent
ones-my first day at school, scraped knees, marbles, the earliest
secrets of the confessional and later agonies of faith-all
merged in the jumble of jottings that has since been associated
with a person who, no sooner had he been put down on paper,
refused to grow and shattered all manner of glass with his song,
kept two wooden sticks at the ready, and thanks to a tin drum
made a name for himself that thereafter existed in quotable form
between book covers and claims immortality in heaven knows
how many languages?
Because this as well as that deserves to be part of the
record. Because something flagrantly significant could be missing.
Because certain things at certain times fell into the well
before the lid went on: the holes I left uncovered until later,
growth I could not halt, the linguistic give-and-take I had with
lost objects. And let this, too, be said: because I want to have
the last word.
* * *
Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to
hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself;
pedant that it is, it will have its way.
When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that
wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter.
It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or
otherwise disguised.
Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more
moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a
fourth and fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words
too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger
from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided
to encode himself.
Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered,
that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved,
because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often
hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part
that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise
as a photograph: The tarpaper roof of the shed behind our
building shimmered in the July heat and in the still air smelled
of malt lozenges …
The washable collar of my primary school teacher, Fräulein
Spollenhauer, was made of celluloid and was so tight it put
creases in her neck …
The propeller-shaped bows in the hair of the girls on the
Zoppot Promenade when the police band played its snappy
melodies …
My first Boletus edulis …
When we were excused from school because of the heat …
When my tonsils flared up again …
When I swallowed my questions …
The onion has many skins. A multitude of skins. Peeled, it
renews itself; chopped, it brings tears; only during peeling does
it speak the truth. What happened before and after the end of
my childhood knocks at the door with facts and went worse
than wished for and demands to be told now this way, now that,
and leads to tall tales.
When war broke out to a spell of glorious late-summer weather
in Danzig and environs, and the Westerplatte’s Polish defenders
capitulated after seven days of resistance, I, that is, the boy I apparently
was, gathered up a handful of bomb- and shell-splinters
near the Neufahrwasser dock, which was easily accessible by
tram via Saspe and Brösen, and traded them, at a time when the
war seemed to exist only in radio bulletins, for stamps, colored
picture cards from cigarette packets, books both dog-eared and
hot off the press-including Sven Hedin’s Voyage Through the
Gabi Desert-and heaven knows what else.
An imprecise memory sometimes comes a matchstick’s
length closer to the truth, albeit along crooked paths.
It is mostly objects that my memory rubs against, my knees
bump into, or that leave a repellent aftertaste: the tile stove …
the frame used for beating carpets behind the house … the toilet
on the half-landing … the suitcase in the attic … a piece of
amber the size of a dove’s egg …
If you can still feel your mother’s barrettes or your father’s
handkerchief knotted at four corners in the summer heat or recall
the exchange value of various jagged grenade- and bomb
splinters, you will know stories-if only as entertainment-that
are closer to reality than life itself.
The picture cards I so eagerly collected in my boyhood and
youth were obtained with coupons that came in the packs out
of which my mother tapped her cigarettes after closing the shop.
“Ciggies,” she called the accessories to her modest vice, and celebrated
the nightly ritual with a glass of Cointreau. If the mood
was upon her, she could make smoke rings hover.
The pictures I lusted after were color reproductions of European
masterpieces. From them I learned early on to mispronounce
the names of Giorgione, Mantegna, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio,
and Caravaggio. The naked back of a reclining woman gazing
into a mirror held up by a winged boy has been inextricably
coupled in my mind since childhood with the name of Velázquez.
What left the deepest imprint on me in Jan van Eyck’s
Singing Angels was the profile of the hindmost angel: what I
would have given to have curly hair like him or like Albrecht
Dürer. Of the Dürer self-portrait hanging in the Prado in
Madrid one might ask: Why did the master paint himself wearing
gloves? Why are the strange cap and right lower sleeve so
conspicuously striped? What makes him so self-assured? And
why did he write his age-he was all of twenty-six-under the
window ledge?
Today I know that a cigarette-picture service in Hamburg-Bahrenfeld
supplied these magnificent reproductions for the
coupons as well as square albums, which had to be ordered separately.
Now that I have reclaimed all three albums, thanks to
my Lübeck gallery that maintains a second-hand bookshop on
Königstrasse, I can confirm that the number of copies of the Renaissance
volume, published in 1938, ran to at least 450,000.
Turning page after page, I see myself at the living-room table,
pasting in the pictures. This time it is the late Gothic as represented
by the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus
Bosch: the saint in a group of very human-looking beasts. It is almost
a ritual, the glue squirting out of the yellow Uhu tube …
Many collectors, hopelessly gone on art, probably took to
smoking immoderately. I, however, took advantage of all the
smokers who had no use for their coupons. I accumulated,
traded, and pasted in more and more pictures, relating to them
initially as a child would, but later with increasing sensitivity:
Parmigianino’s lanky Madonna, whose head budding on a long
neck towers above the pillars that soared heavenward in the background,
aroused the twelve-year-old to rub himself ardently,
angel-like, against her right knee.
I lived through pictures, and because the son was so set on
a complete collection, the mother in addition to the takings
from her moderate consumption-she was a devoted smoker of
flat, gold-tipped Egyptian cigarettes-slipped him a number of
coupons contributed by one or another customer who couldn’t
care less about art. Sometimes the grocer father would bring
the much-coveted coupons home from his business trips. My
cabinetmaker grandfather’s apprentices, diligent smokers all,
also subscribed to my cause. The albums, full of blank spaces
surrounded by explanatory texts, must have been Christmas or
birthday presents.
I guarded all three as a single treasure: the blue album, which
contained Gothic and early Renaissance art; the red album,
which regaled me with the high Renaissance; and the golden
yellow one, in which I was still trying to piece together the
Baroque. I was distressed by the blanks calling for Rubens and
van Dyck. I lacked reinforcements. Once the war began, the
coupon boom died down. Civilian smokers turned into soldiers
who puffed on their Junos and R6s far from home. One of my
most reliable suppliers, a coachman at the local brewery, was
killed during the battle for Modlin Fortress.
Then other series started competing: animals, flowers,
glossies of German history, and the powdered faces of popular
movie stars.
Besides, early in the war every household began to receive
ration cards, and these included special slips for the consumption
of tobacco products. However, as I had managed to secure
a basic education in art history with the help of the Reemtsma
cigarette company in prewar times, the officially ordained shortage
did not affect me inordinately. I could fill in the gaps by and
by. I was, for example, able to trade Raphael’s Dresden Madonna,
of which I had a duplicate, for Caravaggio’s Cupid, a deal that
did not pay off fully until later.
Even as a ten-year-old I was able to tell Hans Baldung, called
Grien, from Matthias Grünewald; Frans Hals from Rembrandt;
and Filippo Lippi from Cimabue-all at first glance.
Who painted the Madonna in the rose bower? Or the
Madonna with the blue mantle and apple and Child? Quizzed
by the mother, who covered the title and painter’s name with
two fingers, the son answered without missing a beat.
In these domestic guessing games and in school too I was an
A student-at least in art. From my first year at the gymnasium
I was utterly hopeless when it came to mathematics, chemistry,
and physics. I was perfectly good at doing sums in my head but
had trouble making equations with two unknowns come out
right on paper. Until my second year I could compensate with
As and Bs in German, English, history, and geography, and even
my much-praised sketches and watercolors, whether done from
nature or my imagination, seemed to help, but third-year Latin
tipped the balance, and I had to repeat the whole year along
with my fellow dunces. That upset me less than it did my parents:
from early on I had prepared escape routes leading into the
blue yonder.
Nowadays, a grandfather’s confession that at school he was
partly lazy, partly unambitious, but in the end an out-and-out
dunce is not much comfort to grandchildren suffering from
low marks or inept teachers. They groan as if they have pedagogical
boulders hung around their necks, as if school were
a penal colony, as if the demands of the classroom sour their
sweetest dreams. Well, playground anxiety never troubled my
sleep.
When I was a child-before I donned the red school cap, before
I started collecting cigarette cards-I would go down to
one of the beaches along Danzig Bay as soon as summer with its
endless promise came, and mold the wet sand into the high
towers and walls of a citadel which I peopled with fantastical
characters. Over and over the sea buried the structure, its towering
turrets collapsing noiselessly. And yet again wet sand ran
through my fingers.
“Kleckerburg” is the title of a long poem I wrote in the mid-sixties,
in other words, when the forty-year-old father of three
sons and a daughter seemed to have settled into a bourgeois existence.
Like the hero of his first novel, its author had made a
name for himself by trapping his dual self between the covers of
a book and taking it thus tamed to market.
The poem is about my background and the sounds of the
Baltic. “Born in Kleckerburg, west of,” it begins, then poses
questions: “Born when? And where? Why?” In a verbal torrent
it evokes loss and memory, lost and found in sentence fragments:
“The gulls are not gulls but.”
At the end of the poem, which stakes out my territory between
the Holy Ghost and Hitler’s photograph, conjuring the
beginning of the war with shell-splinters and muzzle-flashes,
childhood peters out. Only the Baltic keeps going, in German,
in Polish: “Blubb, pifff, pshsh …”
The war was in its infancy when a cousin of my mother, Uncle
Franz, a postman who took part in the defense of the Polish Post
Office on the Heveliusplatz, was summarily executed by the Germans-along
with nearly all the survivors of that brief battle.
The military judge who pronounced, justified, and signed the
death sentence went on pronouncing and signing sentences in
Schleswig-Holstein long after the war, unscathed. A common
story during Chancellor Adenauer’s interminable term of office.
Later I adapted the skirmish over the Polish Post Office to
my narrative prose style, changing the personnel and inserting a
chatty description of the fall of a house of cards. My family was
much less chatty. Our suddenly absent uncle, much beloved
above and beyond or despite his politics and a frequent guest,
along with his children, Irmgard, Grego, Magda, and little
Kasimir for Sunday coffee and cake or an afternoon round of
skat with my parents, was no longer mentioned. His name was
passed over in silence, as if he had never existed, as if everything
connected with him and his family were unspeakable.
This Kashubian side of the family-my mother’s side-with
its cozy kitchen babble, seemed to have been swallowed up.
By whom?
Nor did I, even though my childhood had ended with the
onset of the war, ask any insistent questions.
Or was it because I was no longer a child that I dared not ask?
Is it only children who, as in fairy tales, ask the right questions?
Can it have been the fear of an answer that would turn my
world upside down that made me hold my tongue?
A demeaning disgrace it is to find such a blot on the sixth or
seventh skin of that garden-variety, readily available, memory-boosting
onion. So I write about the disgrace, and the shame
limping in its wake. Rarely used words wielded in the service of
belated compensation as my now lenient, now stringent eyes remain
focused on a boy still in shorts, snooping into hidden affairs,
yet failing to ask “Why?”
And as I clumsily interrogate and thereby clearly overtax the
twelve-year-old, I weigh each step I take in this fast-fading present,
hear myself breathing, hear myself coughing, and live my
way, as cheerfully as possible, toward death.
Franz Krause, my executed uncle, left a wife and four children,
who ranged in age from somewhat older to three years younger
than me. I was no longer allowed to play with them. They had
to vacate their Old Town apartment on the Brabank-it had
come with the job-and move to the country between Zuckau
and Ramkau, where the widow had a cottage and piece of land.
And there, in hilly Kashubia, the postman’s children live to this
day, plagued by the usual ailments of age. They have different
memories: they missed their father, while mine was too present.
This employee of the Polish Post Office was an anxious,
timid family man, not made for a hero’s death, whose name appears
on a bronze memorial plaque as Franciszek Krauze, and as
such has entered eternity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Peeling the Onion
by Günter Grass
Copyright © 2006
by Steidl Verlag, Göttingen .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Harcourt, Inc.
Copyright © 2006
Steidl Verlag, Göttingen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-15-101477-4
