Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering
- 2 The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings
- 3 Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye?
- 4 “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates
- 5 Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm
- 6 Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath
- 7 “A Different Family Story”: German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun
- 8 The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Family Texts
- 9 “Why only now?”: The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a “Memory Taboo” in Günter Grass's Novella
- 10 Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator
- 11 Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte's Air Raids Epic
- 12 Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?
- 13 Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders
- 14 Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the “German Experience” of the Second World War?
- 15 “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust”
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
12 - Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering
- 2 The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings
- 3 Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye?
- 4 “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates
- 5 Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm
- 6 Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath
- 7 “A Different Family Story”: German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun
- 8 The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Family Texts
- 9 “Why only now?”: The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a “Memory Taboo” in Günter Grass's Novella
- 10 Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator
- 11 Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte's Air Raids Epic
- 12 Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?
- 13 Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders
- 14 Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the “German Experience” of the Second World War?
- 15 “Secondary Suffering” and Victimhood: The “Other” of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's “Die Beschneidung” and Maxim Biller's “Harlem Holocaust”
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
WHAT DO I RETAIN FROM THE WAR and my camp experience besides episodes that have been bound together into anecdotes or wish to remain variable as true stories?” Günter Grass's narrator asks this question at the end of the wartime section of his 2006 autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). He concludes that the ability to create a literary feast out of the stuff of his imagination, to invite invisible guests to a dazzlingly heterogeneous dinner table, is the most lasting element of his wartime and immediate postwar experiences. Grass tells us, then, that this period has provided the material for his subsequent literary production, as a brief glance over his extensive back catalogue would readily show. How, then, does Grass blend together the two categories of “anecdotes” and “variable true stories” to “have the last word” on the representation of his life in the literary sphere (PO 2)? Is Beim Häuten der Zwiebel an ethically probing account of his youthful self, or an anecdotal romp?
In this chapter, I examine those aesthetic and ethical pitfalls of the anecdotal approach that conflict with Grass's scrutiny of German wartime suffering and wartime culpability. I address Grass's ethics of representation through close readings of two moments in particular in the wartime and camp sections of his autobiography that throw up disturbing questions about Grass's self-representation — not so much about his own youthful self — he constantly calls his articulation of his identity and ethical choices into question — but rather more about the cast of characters who surround him.
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- Information
- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009