In a famous bon mot Max Frisch attested that Bertolt Brecht demonstrated ‘the overwhelming ineffectiveness of a classic’, which suggested that eminence is gained at the expense of critical impact. Once elevated to exemplary status, the famed author and his oeuvre lead the esteemed life of canonical masters, admired and revered, but no longer owning their original challenge and vitality. By all accounts, this fate has not befallen Günter Grass. Germany’s most famous author and public intellectual, Nobel Prize laureate, an icon of postwar German literature and culture, and known the world over for his brilliant first novel, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), Grass holds memberships both in the German national and the international canon of world literature, and he continues to excite and provoke readers as well as influencing debates on memory, history and the role of the writer and literature. Probably no other recent work demonstrates Grass’s continued impact as author and public figure more powerfully than his autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006), a primarily first-person account of the years 1939 to 1959. Ending with the publication of Die Blechtrommel, which catapulted the young author into instant success and fame, the autobiography not only corresponds thematically to his first hit, but it seems to rival it in terms of the outrage, scorn and admiration heaped on it. The discussion also revealed that any Grass publication, particularly one as controversial as his autobiography, cannot be divested from the ‘brand name’ Grass, and its dominant position in German letters and culture.

The scandal caused by the autobiography and by the interview in Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 11 August 2006 preceding it, in which Grass revealed for the first time his membership in the Waffen-SS, has been aptly described as the ‘literary-political equivalent of a nuclear explosion’, and the fall-out was correspondingly vast and vicious. Initially, most of the attention focused on the motives of Grass’s sixty-years-long silence and its effects on his reputation as Germany’s most outspoken critic of the Nazi past and denial. Subsequent analyses examined Grass’s revelation within contemporary German memory discourses while also emphasising the work’s literary qualities, particularly Grass’s ingenious play with autobiographical conventions and the unreliability of memory and narration. Scholars also began to reassess Grass’s novels and speeches in the light of his belated admission. Guilt and shame, already known to be prominent forces in Grass’s oeuvre, took on new meanings, and Katharina Hall rightly contends that his earlier publications, specifically the narrators in the Danzig Trilogy, may have pointed at Grass’s secret all along. Different interpretations of the autobiography – whether focused on its key (memory) tropes, authorial images and ethics of Grass’s self-presentation, the transformation of private failings into an ‘exemplary’ biography, or the dominant thematic clusters, memory, war and art – all demonstrate what Taberner aptly calls ‘the polyvalency of Grass’s output; all of Grass’s literary texts … are capable of many different approaches and interpretations’. Taberner’s claim is well borne out by Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, whose titular memory metaphor already suggests that detecting the ‘true’ person or the ‘real’ event, a promise inherent to autobiographical genre conventions, may turn out to be futile. Instead the text shows a process of recollection that will reveal layer upon layer of memory and times past but is void of any core.