The last word on a Nazi boyhood

Memoir:Layers of incident, routine and monumental, make up any life. All layers, all interconnected like the skin of an onion. Trust Günter Grass - ever inventive artist as witness, one-time Hitler Youth member, Luftwaffe auxiliary, prisoner of war, long-time critic of German reunification and 1999 Noble Literature Laureate - to strike the perfect metaphor.

Trust Günter Grass to tell his story, his life, without a crumb of sentiment or self-pity. Above all, trust him. He peels his particular onion with the candour and irony that have shaped his fabulist fiction for close on 50 years and this beautifully gruff, no nonsense account of his early life is direct and conversational, though not without jolts of profoundly human remorse.

It is the book that readers of Grass, who is now 80, will have expected; wry and personal but not too intimate. For all the open regret and sadness, there is no blood on the carpet, no score-settling, and no name-dropping - just a casually delivered statement of intent: "I want to have the last word."

It is an interesting comment coming from the author of one of literature's defining narratives, The Tin Drum. His flamboyant debut, which was published in 1959, made him famous and has, deservedly as the finest novel of the 20th century, kept him famous, sustained as it has been by an active career - Grass as writer, visual artist, commentator, polemicist, world traveller and tireless chronicler of Germany's clouded past. He is also custodian of her uneasy present. Her history has inspired his fiction, but now it is his war experience that has incited a rethink about his credibility as moral conscience.

Yet Grass's wartime adventures have always informed his darkly exuberant fiction. When he writes "I kept silent", it seems odd. Exactly how silent has he been? Has it not always been presumed that he was in the Hitler Youth and served in the German army? He continues, "But because so many kept silent, the temptation is great to discount one's own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself all but abstractly . . . " Unlike most autobiographers, he presents himself as neither a hero nor a victim. War ended his childhood. He was a boy soldier, but then Germany had many boy soldiers. "As a member of the Hitler Youth I was, in fact, a Young Nazi. A believer till the end. Not what one would call fanatical, not leading the pack, but with my eye, as if by reflex, fixed on the flag that was to mean 'more than death' to us. I kept pace in the rank and file . . . I saw my fatherland threatened, surrounded by enemies."

NO HE DOESN'T claim to be a gulled innocent, more like a bored teenager, and admits to being a terrified soldier who wet his pants. Yet this random memoir does have a hero: Helene Knoff, Grass's wonderful mother, whom he has immortalised - not idealised - in a loving portrait as a cheerful, practical romantic given to daydreams and playing tunes on her piano. She came from Kashubian stock, a member of a minority living in Danzig who, at any particular time, could be found to be insufficiently Polish or German, whichever satisfied the demands of the day. Her father had been killed early on in the first World War, and two of her brothers also died at the front, followed by a third in the great 1918 influenza epidemic. No wonder she loved her wayward son with an all-forgiving passion and always believed he would be an artist.

Helene ran the family's modest corner shop with saving measures of kindness and robust common sense. It was she who, finally exasperated by the mounting debts of her customers, despatched the boy to call in the credit. "She gave me just one specific piece of advice: 'Friday is payday. Friday evening is the best time to collect.'" Enticement was the promise of pocket money, calculated off 5 per cent of his collections. "And so at the age of ten or eleven I became a resourceful and, when all was said and done, successful debt collector. I was not to be bought off by an apple or cheap sweets. I came up with words capable of melting hardened debtors' hearts . . . I was not deterred by threats. I would stick my foot in the door when I felt it was about to be slammed. I was particularly aggressive on Fridays, making references to pay packets, but not even Sundays were sacred for me. And on holidays, great and small, I was at it all day long."

He was so effective at extracting money that his mother was impelled, "for ethical reasons", to reduce his percentage from five to three. She may have been too busy to read, but she gathered sufficient classic books to set the young Grass off on a lifetime's reading. His formal schooling was undistinguished, yet he attended long enough to suggest he was artistic.

Grass knows himself well, and he plots the process that made him a writer. At times, he recalls his younger self in third person, but there is nothing coy about his occasional use of this distancing device. Tenacity has proved an abiding characteristic, as has his astute sensitivity to history's echoes and reverberations.

Having progressed from the Hitler Youth he was then trained as a Luftwaffe auxiliary, "which was not voluntary, though we experienced it as liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. The way we boys saw it, our uniforms attracted all eyes . . . We got to use our eight-point eight guns only two or three times, when a few enemy bombers were sighted in our air space in the beam of the searchlights. It all looked very festive . . . " He had a share in shooting down a Lancaster bomber for which another battery was credited. "As a rule, however, service in the Luftwaffe auxiliary was dreary, though dreary in a different way from school. We were especially turned off by nightly guard duty and ballistic classes, which dragged on for ever in the musty classroom barracks" - which should read "barracks classroom".

HE EVOKES A 15-year-old boy excited by war as an adventure, particularly as home was a flat sharing a toilet with three other flats. Wondering why he wanted to enlist, he asks: "Did I yearn to see my name immortalised inside the black rim [of a death announcement]? I don't believe so. I may have been an egotistical loner, but I was no stereotypical world-weary adolescent. Maybe just dumb?"

Grass articulates all the ambiguities of the war. He refers to the plight of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a peacetime cruiser that was used to transport several thousand refugees and a thousand recruits. It was sunk on January 30th, 1945, and the tragedy was never mourned because it was a German casualty. In Crabwalk (2002), Grass told its story, one that had waited more than 60 years to be told because the dead were German.

By the age of 16, he had become enamoured of history, and admits that, although he had "never met anyone who could be called well-born", he had no hatred of the wealthy: "I would have been only too happy to serve as a squire to Frederick II in 13th-century Palermo." Grass was a boy who read Remarque's All Quiet On the Western Front. When he went off to fight the Russians, his father went with him to the train station - his mother was too upset, and only asked him to come back safe. As a PoW he heard about the dropping of two atomic bombs "on Japanese cities I'd never heard of".

He also recalls the American "education officer" who showed him and his fellow prisoners black-and-white pictures: "I saw the piles of corpses, the ovens; I saw the starving and the starved, the skeletal bodies of the survivors from another world. I couldn't believe it."

The war, his hunger, his shame and the experiences that gave him The Tin Drum, shape his memories. There is also the young artist, the trained stonemason, aspiring sculptor who falls prey to the visual image and then discovers words.

"Memory rests on memory," he writes, and there are some gentle passages about his first marriage, to Anna, who his mother immediately could see was a lady, a class removed from his other girlfriends. Their love grew and then it died. He laments the failure of that marriage. Even more moving are his memories of his mother's last days - that courageous woman who had bargained with the Russian soldiers, pleading that they rape her, not her daughter. Heroic to the end, she refused to speak of it. "That's all in the past now . . . the past is the past."

THROUGHOUT THE MEMOIR, like the chorus of a song, is that famous opening line: "Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital . . . " Narrated by Oskar Matzerath, The Tin Drum is a detailed examination of Germany during the years charting the rise and fall of the Third Reich and beyond. Fantasy and history are juxtaposed in a dazzling performance. Oskar, aged three, decides to stop growing. Protected from adults by his glass-shattering voice, he pretends to be backward. When he plays his tin drum he sees all. It is a masterpiece. Grass revisits the writing of it, when he and his young wife were living in Paris. Writing it proved crucial for him: "I had made a start." More great books followed, including Cat and Mouse (1961), Dog Years (1963), The Flounder (1977), The Rat (1985), The Call of the Toad (1992), the majestic, post- reunification Berlin picaresque Too Far Afield (1995) and, most recently, the dignified memorial Crabwalk.

War - that war - it always comes back to the war, and Grass's fiction, in all its fantasy, horror and realism, is rooted in it: Germany's story, Germany's shame. Yet this is also the evolution of an artist and of a son, a brother, a husband and a father, and of a writer who still favours old-style typewriters and took up smoking late. His love for his mother dominates, if in a subtle, understated way, as does his awareness of his detached relationship with his inoffensive father, who lived on until 1979, aged 80, and looked peaceful in his coffin.

No, Peeling The Onion is not as relentlessly emotional as Amos Oz's magnificent A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003), nor is it as picture-gallery-inclusive as James Salter's Burning The Days (1997). Instead it has much in common, particularly as regards tone, structure and the apparently random parade of memory, with Arthur Miller's Timebends (1987). One can imagine Grass deliberating, thinking, remembering as he writes. He has written great books, made important statements, and raised many hackles. In 1999 he published Mein Jahrhundert (My Century), a book of 100 stories. It is his salute to his country, his time. If all his life, all his curiosity, all his love of history is in his fiction, this memoir, which ends with the publication of the The Tin Drum, is the book he had to write.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Peeling the Onion By Günter Grass, translated by Michael Henry Heim Harvill Secker, 425pp. £18.99