A Blanket of Evasiveness

Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, or Peeling the Onion, the title of Günter Grass's memoir published in Germany in September 2006, has caused a noisy uproar there and elsewhere, for the book revives old and continuing debates about German war-guilt and the efforts of contemporary Germans to suppress or evade the past. Despite or because of his eminent novels and his Nobel Prize, his previous criticisms of his countrymen arouse a bitter response as he forgives himself for having served in the notorious Waffen-ss at age seventeen. His excuse now is that, while he became a willing part of the Nazi system, at seventeen he was only a child, unequipped to judge his government's or his own actions. Now at age seventy-eight his quasi-confession revives unhappy memories of German postwar history.

Anyone who has ever peeled an onion knows that you must first cut off the root and the dried top before you can peel it; hence the symbolism of Grass's title may be more appropriate than he knew. Those preliminary cuts of the onion represent, to my mind, the evasions of early realities in Grass's life, especially the claim that at seventeen he was a child. No one in those years was a child at age seventeen; hard times and war accelerate awareness and maturity in the young, no matter how unwelcome. Events erase childhood and enforce reflection, while after the fact age wants to modify or otherwise to ease both personal and national pain and guilt.

I first traveled to Germany briefly in 1950, then lived and professed literature one year in Salzburg, Austria, 1951–52, then in Berlin during the years 1953–59. During that time I came to think of German evasiveness about the war and the Russian invasion in terms of Hermann Broch's great trilogy (1931–32) concerning pre– and post–World War i in Germany, Die Schlafwandler—The Sleepwalkers. In Salzburg I met a former gamekeeper who had been a Nazi party member. Having been de-Nazified by the Americans in whose zone we were, he seemed a lost man. I had brought with me a twelve-gauge shotgun in the hopes of some duck-shooting. When the gamekeeper saw the weapon, he almost fainted in his longing to handle it; he was forbidden to touch weapons by the terms of his release. His wife, a housekeeper, assured me that he had been only a little Nazi, "Nur ein kleiner Nazi, Herr Professor."

At age thirty-four I was newly married and jobless when I was offered a full professorship in the Free University, Berlin. I accepted and was soon assured by a new colleague that I was the youngest Ordinarius since Nietzsche. (I was convinced that I was appointed not for merit but in the hope that I would attract American foundation support.) Under the Nazis, university appointees as civil servants had to swear allegiance to the party. I met only one noble man who refused the oath; he left for Columbia University to teach classics and returned to Berlin in 1954. From 1933 onward Jewish professors had cleared out, of course. Other professors who enlisted in the army had been imprisoned by the Russians, and as late as 1957 some were drifting back to the university, gaunt and spent from the labor camps. They too were sleepwalkers, unwilling or unable to talk about their experiences.

For about a year my English wife and I were suspected as spies by many of the civilians we met, a logical conclusion, since Berlin boiled with spies, Russian and American and British. Eventually we were accepted, but always the barrier of German suffering during the war and in the aftermath was silently erected. Neal Ascherson has written cogently, "The history of modern Germany is, in part, a history of silences. First there were things one learned not to say, soon followed by questions one learned not to ask, leading on to sights one learned not to see." One such...