Pounding out fable and truth on his Olivetti

MEMOIR: The BoxBy Günter Grass, translated by Krishna Winston Harvill Secker, 195pp. £16.99

CONSIDERING THE FURY surrounding Peeling the Onion, his lively if random memoir, on its German publication, in 2006, it is interesting to see that Günter Grass, that most inventive and determined of artists, has decided to continue his story. But then he has always been controversial.

In that first volume he wrote about his membership of Hitler Youth and confirmed that he had served the Fatherland, aged 17, as a soldier in the Luftwaffe. It was better than being in school. But it was not a game; he recalls wetting his pants in terror. Reaction in his own country, never mind the rest of the world, was outrage: here was the moral chronicler of Germany’s clouded past finally admitting to have been part of it. The problem was his silence; although his wartime experiences have always shaped his dark fictions, he had never quite spelled out that he had been conscripted into the Waffen SS.

Peeling the Onion brings Grass from birth and boyhood – the child sent out by his exasperated mother to collect the debts run up in the family's modest corner shop – to first fame. Throughout that episodic opening instalment he moves between the first person and the third, effectively distancing himself from his younger, often bored, teenage self. He is neither hero nor victim, merely a survivor. But there is a hero: his mother, Helene Knoff, hailing from Kashubian stock, a minority living in Danzig, never either sufficiently Polish or German to please anyone. The book ends with Grass a young husband, living in Paris and about to become famous, at 32, with the publication of his satirical debut, The Tin Drum(1959).

And so he has remained famous and driven, capable of pulling off a late post-Nobel Prize masterpiece with Crabwalk(2002). In The Box, named in honour of the camera wielded by Marie, a family friend and relentless photographer who recorded everything, he demonstrates exactly how resourceful he is; he continues his story by allowing a chorus of voices – those of his eight grown children by four women – to construct it during a succession of gatherings.

It is very clever, very Grass. The sense of guilt running through this narrative has little to do with the war; it is a father’s guilt at having always been too busy, with work, with moving between his women, to have even played with his children. The respective siblings piece together the family story through a jumble of memories; the narrative thread is Dad and whatever book he happened to be writing – indeed, often struggling over. It is touching and sad; the regret is obvious, but so too is an awareness of how every story becomes wider and more complex as children move out into the world to make their individual lives and mistakes.

It is an artist's testimony. Grass presents the utter selfishness of creativity, the consummate self-absorption required for the task. In Peeling the OnionGrass announces: "I want to have the last word." Apparently he felt there was more to be said – the third volume, Grimms' Words, has just been published in Germany – while in this second part he gathers his special team of witnesses, the children who were onlookers as Grass worked. "In those days, all he had to do was whistle and the words came rushing . . . an inexhaustible wellspring . . . the background swarming with activity and the foreground filled with larger than life characters."

His exuberant fabulist fiction, an earthy blend of history, myth and imagination, came fast and furious – Cat and Mouse (1961), Dog Years (1963), The Flounder (1977), The Rat (1986), The Call of the Toad (1992)– its sheer physicality aided no doubt by Grass having initially trained as a stonemason and subsequently having become a visual artist; he has sketched and painted throughout his life, often illustrating his writings.

Marie, possibly the Maria to whom The Boxis dedicated, is an increasingly eccentric presence throughout it. Always there, camera in hand, she remains an elderly girl busy with mourning. Widowed when her beloved Hans goes and dies on her, she is part of the family – perhaps, it is suggested, even one of Grass's lovers. He had promised Hans that he would look after her, and she in turn keeps a visual record of the ever-expanding clan. Many of the photographs are strange, even prophetic. The women are never named. There were great romances: they flared; they died. He finally found love and has remained with his current wife for more than 30 years. But his greatest love of all was the one he had for his mother.

There is a great deal of cross talk, disputed facts, contradictions, hurt feelings: memory is a minefield. It can also comfort; it encourages collaboration, even agreement. “Marie was some years older than our father, am I right, big brother?”

Then there is a glimmer of what it must have been like for those children from different mothers. “Father must have been in his mid thirties, but already so famous that when we went shopping at the outdoor market people would turn to look at him and whisper.” Then there is an isolated comment that becomes communal as a lone voice adds: “It took a while for us to get used to that.”

In common with Peeling the Onion, The Boxis candid, never sentimental. The theme is survival. Grass admits he has spent most of his life in his head, although he certainly likes to cook. For a while he kept a rat in a cage while he worked. The critics may have complained at times, but Grass has always enjoyed big sales, and the money was used to buy houses, spaces in which to work. His material needs have always been modest. The only defensive moment in the narrative occurs when he has one of his children remark: "That's just how he is. Always was. I have to work through it, he said. All of us witnessed how later in life he had to work through the stuff he'd experienced when he was a boy in shorts. All that Nazi shit, up one side and down the other. Everything he knew about war, the things that terrified him, and why he'd survived."

It is a different kind of memoir. Grass is gruff but not given to settling scores. The distance is sustained. In common with another great writer, and fellow Nobel literature laureate, JM Coetzee, Grass is emotionally elusive and never quite bleeds on the carpet. His country’s history is his story, his inspiration, his burden. Aware he was the detached father who kept on writing, battling the flood of stories and words, the politics and polemics that overshadowed their respective childhoods, he imagines their perceptions of him.

The enduring image is obvious: Grass not only created Oskar Matzerath, the anti-hero of The Tin Drum; he is his alter ego, body and soul, trapped by the past and the huge cast of creatures populating his imagination. Just as the anti-heroic witness of his most famous novel relentlessly beats his drum, so Gunter Grass continues to pound out fable and truth on an Olivetti typewriter wherever he happens to find a desk.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times