PEELING THE ONION

Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest memoir that evokes Grass' modestupbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians andconcludes with the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris.Grass' parents ran a corner shop, but his mother, whom he adored,encouraged him towards books and music. Like most of his peers, he joinedthe Hitler Youth and in 1944, when he was just 17, he was sent to theEastern front with the Waffen SS and found himself facing Russian tanksand machine guns. Recovering from shrapnel wounds in a military hospital,he had the good fortune to be taken prisoner by the Americans. In theaftermath of the war, following a stint as a miner, Grass survived bytrading on the black market and resolved to become an artist, eventuallyenrolling at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. While living as an artistin Berlin with his first wife Anna, a ballet dancer, he started toconcentrate on writing poetry. It was after the couple moved to Paris thatthe first sentence of the novel he had been determined to write and thatwould make his reputation came to him: ‘Granted: I am an inmate of amental hospital'. Peeling the Onion is the story of a remarkable life andis, without question, one of Günter Grass´ finest works.