Peeling the Onion Book

"The story of a life. Of a childhood in Danzig that ends with the beginning of World War II. The family in a crowded two-room apartment - mother, father, sister, and the young Gunter, who collects cigarette cards featuring the masterpieces of Renaissance art, and dreams of enlisting in the submarine corps." "At age ten, he joins the Jungvolk; at age fifteen, he volunteers for the navy, but is rejected. "A believer till the end ... with untroubled, unquestioning fervor" - that is how Grass sees himself in his own rearview mirror. Two years later he is drafted and assigned to the Waffen-SS as a tank gunner. He is sent to the Eastern Front in the spring of 1945." "Wounded, Grass ends up in an American POW camp when the war ends. There he spends time taking abstract cooking classes (no ingredients, just words) and playing dice with a pious fellow prisoner, a Bavarian by the name of Joseph ... could it have been Joseph Ratzinger? And it is there that, in disbelief, he first sees photographs of Bergen-Belsen." "Released from camp, Grass hits the road - working deep underground in a mine near Hanover; carving tombstones and flirting with existentialism in Dusseldorf; making art and dancing to ragtime in Berlin with Anna, his first great love. He mourns his mother, "who was born in pain and died in pain, and set me free to write and write." He begins work on his great novel, The Tin Drum."--BOOK JACKET.Read More