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Confessions of a super Grass
Gunter Grass's Peeling the Onion caused a furore when published in Germany; now available in English, it demands to be read, says Tim Gardam
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Tim Gardam
The Observer, Sunday 24 June 2007
Peeling The Onion by Gunter Grass
Buy Peeling The Onion at the Guardian bookshop
Peeling the Onion
by Gunter Grass
Harvill Secker £18.99, pp432
This is a book torn between the desire to confess and the need to obscure. When Peeling the Onion was published in Germany last year, Gunter Grass faced a hailstorm of disdain after he revealed that in the dying months of the Second World War he had been enlisted, aged 17, into the Waffen SS. Germany's radical conscience of the Cold War years, the Danzig-born champion of the Poles, the righteous polemicist who had torn at Germans' denial of their collective memory of Nazism, had suppressed the crucial fact of his personal complicity. Coming clean now, his adversaries charged, was no more than calculation - controlling the damage before others exposed the truth.
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