The novelist who pried open Germany’s past but hid his own

Author: Gunter Grass Publisher: Penguin Books / 1963 Pages: 617

The German novelist, social critic and Nobel Prize winner, Gunter Grass has been called by many his country’s moral conscience but shortly before he died he stunned Europe when he revealed that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.

Grass was a man of titanic energy and zest and, besides his fiction writing, enjoyed the cut and thrust of political debate and relaxed by drawing, painting and making sculptures.

Bursting on to the literary scene with his bestselling novel The Tin Drum in 1959, Grass spent his life reminding his compatriots of the darkest time in their history, the crimes of the Nazi period, as well as challenging them on the triumphalism of unification in 1990, which he described as the annexation of East Germany by West Germany in which many citizens became victims.

He was always controversial, and sometimes bitterly attacked by critics at home for discussing German victimhood as well as German guilt.

Outside his country he was, inevitably, called Germany’s post-war conscience, a label he shared with the older writer Heinrich Boll.

In 1999, much later than expected, he won the Nobel prize for literature with the judges praising his “creative irreverence” and “cheerful destructiveness”.

Then, seven years later, he stunned the world by admitting in the autobiographical Peeling the Onion that at the age of 17 he had been drafted into the notorious Waffen-SS in the last few months of the Second World War.

Dog Years (German: Hundejahre) was first published in Germany in 1963, the third and last volume of the Danzig Trilogy, the other two being The Tin Drum and Catch and Mouse.

This novel consists of three different chronological parts, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel are friends. Eduard is half Jewish and at the young age of five is a genius at making scarecrows.

The narrator in Book One, the mine owner Brauxel, tells of the friendship of Walter and Eduard when they were children playing together in the Vistula estuary, which is a German-Polish borderland (thinterwar City of Danzig) peopled by Mennonites, Catholics and Protestants.

Eduard keeps a diary which he fills with drawings of ideals for scarecrows. The history of the country is told with cruel images of horror and violence from that past that echoes into the present, which becomes Hiter’s Germany.

The story in the second part of the book is narrated by Harry Liebenau and consists of letters from him addressed to his cousin Tulla.

This part of the story occurs during the war period when Amsel collected vast numbers of SA uniforms and dressed his scarecrows in them.

He also persuades childhood friend Walter to become a member of the SA in order to help him obtain the uniforms. But since the confusion in the country has reached its maximum at this point, inevitably the two friends end up on a collision course. At one point Walter denounces Amsel as a Jew, hits him in the face and knocks out all his teeth.

The last part of the novel is narrated by Walter and takes place after he finds a new friend, Prinz. They leave on a journey in the post-war West Germany, where they systematically attack former Nazis who are now posing as respectable officials throughout the country.