Peeling the Onion - Softcover

"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grass’s best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery."—The New Yorker

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize–winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS at age seventeen. Wounded by shrapnel, he was taken prisoner by American forces and 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 reveals Grass at his most intimate.

"A fascinating, multilayered memoir . . . Peeling the Onion is well worth delving into." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Peeling the Onion is more than the stories of a soldier--it is a beautiful account of the ebbings of deprivations and the flowing of relief, both physical and metaphysical." --Los Angeles Times

Gunter Grass was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927 and is the widely acclaimed author of plays, essays, poems, and numerous novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He lives in Germany.