Peeling The Onion

Author: Grass, Günter

Brand: HarperVia

Edition: Reprint

Binding: paperback

Format: Illustrated

Number Of Pages: 448

Release Date: 02-06-2008

Part Number: Illustrated

Details: Product Description
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, 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.

Review
PRAISE FOR
PEELING THE ONION"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grass’s best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery."―IAN BURUMA
, THE NEW YORKER
From the Back Cover





"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grass’s best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery."?The New Yorker
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, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS at age seventeen. Wounded by shrapnel, he was taken prisoner by American forces and 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 reveals Grass at his most intimate.
"A fascinating, multilayered memoir . . . Peeling the Onion is well worth delving into." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Peeling the Onion is more than the stories of a soldier--it is a beautiful account of the ebbings of deprivations and the flowing of relief, both physical and metaphysical." --Los Angeles Times
Gunter Grass was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927 and is the widely acclaimed author of plays, essays, poems, and numerous novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He lives in Germany.
 





About the Author
GÜNTER GRASS (1927–2015), Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer, attained worldwide renown with the publication of his novel
The Tin Drum in 1959. A man of remarkable versatility, Grass was a poet, playwright, social critic, graphic artist, and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.
 
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.



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
Volksempfänger, “people’s receiver”—which s