Peeling the onion

Resource Information

The work Peeling the onion represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in City of Westminster Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Peeling the onion

Statement of responsibility

Gunter Grass ; translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim

Creator

• Grass, Gunter, 1927-2015

Subject

• Authors, German -- 20th century -- Biography
• Autobiography: literary
• Biography
• Biography & non-fiction prose
• Grass, Gunter, 1927-2015
• Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers
• Literature: history & criticism
• Modern & contemporary fiction
• Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000

Genre

• Biography

Language

• eng
• ger
• eng

Summary

'Peeling the Onion' is an honest memoir that evokes Gunter Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians and concludes with the writing of his masterpiece, 'The Tin Drum' in Paris.

Member of

• Beim Hauten der Zwiebel

Biography type

autobiography

Cataloging source

StDuBDS

Dewey number

• 833.914
• 833.9'14
• 833.914
• 833.914
• 833.914

Index

no index present

LC call number

PT2613.R338

Literary form

non fiction

Summary expansion

Peeling the Onion is a searingly honest memoir that evokes Grass' modest upbringing in Danzig, his time as a boy soldier fighting the Russians and concludes with the writing of his masterpiece, The Tin Drum, in Paris. Grass' parents ran a corner shop, but his mother, whom he adored, encouraged him towards books and music. Like most of his peers, he joined the Hitler Youth and in 1944, when he was just 17, he was sent to the Eastern front with the Waffen SS and found himself facing Russian tanks and machine guns. Recovering from shrapnel wounds in a military hospital, he had the good fortune to be taken prisoner by the Americans. In the aftermath of the war, following a stint as a miner, Grass survived by trading on the black market and resolved to become an artist, eventually enrolling at the Academy of Arts in D?sseldorf. While living as an artist in Berlin with his first wife Anna, a ballet dancer, he started to concentrate on writing poetry. It was after the couple moved to Paris that the first sentence of the novel he had been determined to write and that would make his reputation came to him: 'Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital'. Peeling the Onion is the story of a remarkable life and is, without question, one of G?nter Grass' finest works