Peeling the Onion - Günter Grass

Category: Autobiography & Biographies, History
Language: English
Keywords: France Germany Memoir The Tin Drum World War II

Written by Günter Grass
Read by Norman Dietz
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

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 his book The Tin Drum was published.

During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of 15 but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he 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 50s, Peeling the Onion, which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany, reveals Grass at his most intimate.

The first part of Günter’s “Memoir” Trilogy (of which the finale, Grimms’ Words: A Declaration of Love, was never published in English).

Audio Release Date:
July 19 2007

15 hrs and 28 mins