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    Peeling the Onion: A Memoir
    Peeling the Onion: A Memoir
    Peeling the Onion: A Memoir
    Audiobook15 hours

    Peeling the Onion: A Memoir

    Written by Günter Grass

    Narrated by Norman Dietz

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when his book The Tin Drum was published.

    During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

    Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion-which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany-reveals Grass at his most intimate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 20, 2007
    ISBN9781400175062
    Peeling the Onion: A Memoir
    Author

    Günter Grass

    GÜNTER GRASS (1927–2015), Germany's most celebrated contemporary writer, attained worldwide renown with the publication of his novel The Tin Drum in 1959. A man of remarkable versatility, Grass was a poet, playwright, social critic, graphic artist, and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.  

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    Reviews for Peeling the Onion

    4/5

    129 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Beautifully written and evocative memoir tracing Gunter Grass’ s childhood, teenage years, WWII, and his nascent creative force which bloomed fully in the fifties.
    • 5/5
      They had tried doing it by themselves in her room with a cheap onion, but it wasn't the same. You needed an audience. It was so much easier to cry in company. It gave you a real sense of brotherhood in sorrow when to the right and left of you and in the gallery overhead your fellow students were all crying their hearts out. The Tin Drum

      The Goodreads/Amazon imbroglio only shocked me by being so predictable. Not to sound like a hungover Schopenhauer, but decay and disagreeable ends are to be expected, aren't they? When Herr Grass acknowledged that he'd been in the SS, my knees did feel weak. I did call most everything into question, then I kept on. Grass was in NYC shortly thereafter, he gave a reading from Peeling The Onion and my best friend Joel attended, bought me copy and had the author sign such. I was moved by his memoir. I suffer from being human myself. Dark times place everything in crisis. Normal metrics distort and blur.
    • 5/5
      Günter Grass is one of the best novelists to come out of Germany. In PEELING THE ONION, Grass’ memoir of his life up until the 1959 publishing of his first major novel, THE TIN DRUM, he reflects on the objects, people, and situations that ultimately wove their way into his stories. As in the peeling of an onion, one layer leads to the next, but all are part and parcel of the whole, which is his life.

      It helps if one is familiar with Grass’ writings before reading this memoir. I myself have read THE TIN DRUM, and I found this memoir fascinating in the revelations of what was behind some of the details in that wonderful story. The style is almost free-flowing reminiscing, but in the end Grass masterfully wraps it all together as if carefully closing up the onion layers he had slowly peeled away.

      I love Grass’ writing. It feels like he is speaking directly to me. It’s as if we were talking over a cup of coffee. He isn’t a perfect man and he expects us to understand that without having to make excuses. I’m so glad he wrote this book!
    • 3/5
      Unreliable memoirs; but not merely of a houseboat on London's bohemian fringe. Here it's coming of age in Nazi Germany and serving in the Waffen SS. Peeling back layers of onion skin is one of several metaphors of detachment Grass resorts to for not recalling quite what he did or why, as is switching to the third person or passive voice. Yet he can portray clearly the mindset and motives of the future Pope Ratzinger whose path he briefly crosses in a postwar internment camp. It is a long time ago but more candour would have been better. Still, some interesting passages, and plenty of "Tin Drum" prehistory.
    • 2/5
      Laborious reading that starts off fine but the style is tiresome within the first four chapters. Tons of names and locations which make it difficult to keep everything straight. A good complementary read to his book, The Tin Drum.
    • 5/5
      A magnificent and brutally honest memoir. Having been conscripted into the SS youth, the author describes what it was to be an adolescent in a war. He was forced into service, yet makes no bones about having believed in Nazi ideology, until the horrors of the war, having to face the reality of concentration camps, and the corruption he witnessed from politicians and profiteers afterward, transform the young man he became in post-war Germany, into an accomplished painter and sculptor, and anti-war political activist. He spends the rests of his life shamed and trying to redress his youthful infatuation with Fascist ideology. The book, by the way, is beautifully illustrated with his sketches. Everybody can learn from this story about the follies of youth and how easy it is to manipulate the young with group-belonging "ideals". In the end, the book is an elegy to his mother, who never failed to believe in him and love him, and who died tragically before he was able to truly appreciate her. Her love--and death--fueled and inspired him to become a writer. As for me, I plan to read ALL his books!
    • 3/5
      somewhat disappointing memoir. it losses momentum as it goes.