In Europe, the book of memoirs by Günter Grass was considered scandalous: in it, the largest writer of modern Germany and a Nobel laureate admits that in 45 he volunteered for the SS tank troops, where he managed to serve for two weeks without firing a single shot.
This story is typical for Grass: he does everything differently than the rest. In the days when desertion has become the norm, he goes to the army. In times of officially permitted cruelty, no harm is done to anyone. Even when he undertakes to write an autobiography, he approaches this task differently from most memoirists: The Onion of Memory covers only twenty years of the writer’s life — from the beginning of World War II to the publication of his main novel, The Tin Drum. With an ease uncharacteristic of this genre, Günter Grass combines real episodes with fictional ones, and from painful childhood memories he quickly, as if into a whirlpool, rushes into a story about the horrors of the era in which this childhood fell. “Undressing” the onion of memories, he strives for the highest, absolute truthfulness — peeling off the secondary layer by layer, approaches the core of his own personality and invites the reader to repeat his experience.
Foreigner, 592 p.