The German edition of this memoir by Nobel Prize.winning novelist Grass caused
a stir with its revelations about the author's youthful service in the Waffen
SS combat unit during the last months of WWII. According to his deliberately
disjointed, impressionistic account of the war, Grass never fired a shot and
spent his time fleeing both the Russians and German military police hunting
for deserters, but he dutifully shoulders a joint responsibility for Nazi war
crimes and a guilt and shame that gnaw, gnaw, ceaselessly. With less to
repudiate in his postwar life as a budding sculptor and poet up to his 1959
breakthrough with The Tin Drum, he grows more engaged in his story as he
recounts love affairs, bohemian idylls (he once played in an impromptu jazz
quartet with Louis Armstrong) and his attempts to sift emotional wreckage
from the past. Along the way, Grass notes people and events that he reworked
into fictional characters and plots, and does quirky profiles of influential
figures, including his penis and typewriter. In this otherwise very novelistic
memoir, there's not much of a narrative arc, beyond the satisfaction of the
author's perpetual hungers for food, sex and art, but Grass's powerfully
evocative memories are spellbinding.

Grass is ferociously critical (and contemptuous) of his younger self; time and
again he shows his behavior as essentially selfish, self-centered, egotistical,
and especially blind to both the love and sacrifices of others on his behalf;
his portrayal of his efforts to "free" himself from his family background is
not unfamiliar in portraits of young artists, but he shows himself both blind
to the needs and feelings of his parents and sister, as well as unable to
recognize or acknowledge their efforts to help him. We might conclude that he
is constructing a portrait of the kind of artist who is so enclosed in the
world of his creative consciousness that he cannot allow time for "normal"
human feelings or relationships. Again, that is a familiar characterization,
but his narration of his mother's death, in particular, portrays his own
behavior as almost inhumanly remote and unfeeling. And yet, at the same time,
we have constant signals that the feelings are there, beneath the surface,
later to emerge in his art--and the suggestion that the art is, after all,
more important.

The memoir, then, is simply not about his putative guilt or hypocrisy, nor is
it really about his self-centered behavior; it is about the creative act and
the ways in which the artist uses the matter of his or her life to create the
art that justifies her or his existence. Grass is not really focused on how
other people might "judge" his human relationships--his responsibility or lack
of it, his parental or grandparental love and generosity, or the lack of it;
whether his behavior fits our notions of how good people ought to behave is
really not interesting to him, nor really should it be to his readers. No doubt
a world full of Dr. Phils and Judge Judys will render their fatuous views in
the latest psychobabble, but Grass (and his admirers) will be impervious to all
that And those who read the book attentively (especially if they are familiar
with his novels) will see that the constant references to the ways memory may
trick us into taking a "story" for "reality" are really the point--not that
there is no reality, but that our access to it is always framed by the stories
we tell about it. Those who carp about his prizes or his literary eminence (and
who suggest that the latter is compromised, the former subject to return) have
not read, have certainly not understood, the artistic experience Grass has
offered in this very fine addition to his great oeuvre.

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