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 tanks andmachine guns. Recovering from shrapnel wounds in a military hospital, hehad the good fortune to be taken prisoner by the Americans.In the aftermathof the war, following a stint as a miner, Grass survived by trading on theblack market and resolved to become an artist, eventually enrolling at theAcademy of Arts in Dusseldorf. While living as an artist in Berlin with hisfirst wife Anna, a ballet dancer, he started to concentrate on writingpoetry. It was after the couple moved to Paris that the first sentence ofthe novel he had been determined to write and that would make hisreputation came to him: 'Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital'.