Nonfiction

[madupont]

You know what, elportenito, I have to admit you are getting short-changed in the current venue. I went and looked just to be sure but in the current listing, you certainly were short-changed, a continent was overlooked completely in spite of being designated "our valiant ally". If that is part of our exile plan, maybe the admin on board would forum a spot named Australia?

But I suppose, this is, as Nonfiction, the place where politics suddenly becomes nonfictional. I did it myself, by mentioning the Cassirers were more than one person.

I am now ready to discuss one person who had to remind everybody else that no one gets excused politically for considering themselves an individual. So, I will probably return to examining that "Norman Rockwell" era in my childhood that you mentioned, since some books stir up memories of exactly what that was about. Here forthwith is one of them, by a writer who shows you how that is done by, Peeling the Onion.

[madupont]

It certainly was not too many pages in, when I could begin to identify with Gunter Grass in childhood.  As I said elsewhere, he would have been the older neighbor kid in the neighborhood where I first came to consciousness of being part of the whole onion. We were just on opposite sides of the ocean. My brother (who would just about have been born by the time that Gunter gets to pg.7), having been to Berlin, would have to agree with the writer, as he told me so in the few short years before his death, just as Grass says, memory is like peeling an onion, it gets more pungent as the dry layer is removed, and sharpens at the core.

Gunter had begun to talk about collecting "cards" that came with tobacco, cigarettes by the end of the 1930s, the way boys collect things. Girls did too, we collected playing cards, by hook or by crook and called them "trading cards" bound together in  thick packs by rubber bands.
But being in Europe, Gunter accumulated his deck made up of reproductions of what our Metropolitan Museum of Art refers to as,"European Paintings"; but you can check any of these out if you are curious by going to the Mets web-site.

I quickly realized that was another aspect which we shared in common, besides the pack-rat tendency to collect something, his formative aesthetic was conveniently arranged in boxes (consider this "Joseph Cornell, Early Medieval"), whereas I could page through a huge volume, almost too heavy for my size to handle, my mother had acquired somewhere of these renowned paintings on suitable heavy printing stock with each print protected by a sheet of vellum. I think that I know why now, that she had acquired it.  You will find the answer for yourself about Frau Grass, somewhere about --

pg.7
"Even as a ten-year-old I was able to tell Hans Baldung, called Grien, from Matthias Grunewald; Frans Hals from Rembrandt; and Filippo Lippi from Cimabue -- all at first glance.
...I was an A student -- at least in art. From my first year at the gymnasium I was utterly hopeless when it came to mathematics..."

pg.10
"This Kashubian side of the family...seemed to have been swallowed up. By whom?"

As for myself, I noticed as soon as I saw the photo of his parents in The New Yorker, that they looked so familiar to people seen in my childhood.  But Grass goes on to speak of one in particular, an uncle, Franz Krause. born Franciszek Krauze, who was executed for resisting while on his job at the Polish Post Office.

I realize after ten pages, yes, The New Yorker version with photos was an excerpt invisibly edited to cover the important first main points of Peeling the Onion.

When you first begin to peel the layers from your life, you remember a memory of the last time you remembered that memory but the very process will begin to reveal to you things you have forgotten about the very beginning of your life and from thereon.

My hometown had a quite a large community of Kashubians who had come to the new world and lived on what was quaintly called "the Polish South side".  One would have had to go look for them, to inspect a Kashubian. As in their homeland, they preferred to live as close to the water as possible, I was going to say,"on the water" but was afraid you might misunderstand. Yes, as on the Baltic, as Grass has often written about, in The Flounder, perhaps, you get the description of the earliest Baltic culture, and in my hometown, they sometimes did live right on out over the water on stilts, docks actually.

In 1870 they lived at Jones Island, USA,"The village, whose population peaked at nearly 1,600 was a picturesque jumble of homes,saloons,fish sheds,and net reels...The Kashubians never obtained a land title and were evicted from the area in 1925."(this is not a quote from Gunther Grass but I just wanted to give the comparison, including the date, so that you could see how things are, were,and remain often the same. The predominant population of the over all City was German. This was a tiny area that now no longer exists but has been renovated, renewed, with vistas I was told would come true).

So, Gunter Grass' mother was a Kashubian and her brother was executed for resisting Nazi proceedure. Sometime I will tell you about a place where I went in Christmas season with my mother, and her friends and their children, over here. As the years went by, I met more and more people who had lived on the Baltic in childhood.

Gunter Grass decides to go back and reintroduce himself to his mother's family, because there was no contact during the years of the Third Reich when they relocated in poverty and they were never talked about or mentioned by either his parents or himself following the execution. At pg.11, he says, "...but then she took me to see her potato field..."

 I laughed a little in recognition, before he described it is now under an airfield runway. Yes, even here, in the US, we grew potatoes across the street, behind the first and only row of houses opposite, in suburbia; and, how I hated digging potatoes, the feel of the dry dirt under the finger nails as you felt around to be sure you had removed all the potatoes. Or going out in the summer night, like the air raid warden did, so did we, walking in file to the potato patch, but in those days there was no stealth and taking of other peoples' crop as there is in community gardens in contemporary times.  I detested the slugs that slipped into my sandals as we walked through the wet grass in the dark. It was lights out. Mr. Martin, the man who invented the International Harvester blue enamel silo, was our air-raid warden.

Anybody who also lived through this time and wants to compare notes with those of Gunter Grass,wilkommen; or if you just want to read the book or have, this is the place to discuss his memoir which is a Nonfiction book.

[martinbeck3]

I read Dog Years and back then I thought it was his childhood he was describing.

[madupont]

In one sense; part of the Trilogy.  I prefer The Flounder. Was too busy with other things in my life back then when his novels began to appear(such as having a boy to raise who is now a ridiculous age).  But I did read his F.A.Z. comments  periodically before they recently turned on him. I particularly liked his small novel -- Crabwalk.

The controversy, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung separating from their long relationship with Grass, arises because he is considered one of the Flakhelfers' Generation  toward the end of WW2; you know, the little schoolboys whom Hitler went around and shook hands with while they manned the anti-aircraft guns, because the grown men were all at the front(s).   It was in this period when the troops on the Eastern Front were ordered back because the Allies were landing at Normandy, that I picked up the story.  At the very end of the war,Grass was now older, I knew that Pope Benedict XVI was one of the Flakhelfers; and several years ago when this topic came up in Western European forum with several Germans,Austrian,Swiss on board, I considered it silly to criticise those who had been essentially indoctrinated children during the war years.  Grass was less fortunate, because he was not taken into service at an earlier period (at the time they thought he was obviously too small), when the last push arrived, they inducted him into the Waffen SS.

Peeling the Onion, is the story of what he learned in training, how he survived,and then goes on from there to prison camp experience, his eventually going to Art schools in Vienna and Berlin, his marriage, his memories, his response to the rabid criticism which was to compose a volume of poems just to work through the anger.

[madupont]

Correction, reference to pg.10 The relative was not an uncle on his mother's side of the family but her cousin.

[madupont]

recap:Reply #56

Just as  Gunter Grass collection of cards in childhood was a fascinating way of going over paintings that he knew and directed him to a future as an art student, I recalled, well, yes, there were some kind of cards that the nuns used to issue to us to pass through the rows to the kid seated behind you until every child had one.  They were not "Holy Cards" but somewhat larger color reproductions of very similar subjects: Millet's,Angelus, was one of these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet_%28II%29_001.jpg

This became a very controversial and contested painting; you might say, a bone of contention.  This painted the same year would not have been questioned.  We did have brighter color reproduction however.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Millet_Gleaners.jpg

The name of his mother's cousin, Franz Kraus, immediately threw me. Down the block from my first home above Oscar's Austrian bakery,lived the Krause family. I had always known Margie(diminutive of Margaretta  but not pronounced with the soft "sh"sound of soft g. It was always pronounced with the harder but glottal sound in German), who was always  to take care of us children when our parents went to the farm. As I began to walk about places on my own, I would be able to walk to the Krause household and meet the rest of the Krause family. They were my father's patients. Her father who had an accident while working on the railroad. Her mother and her brother are very vague in my memory, no clarity, more withdrawn people. As was her sister Ruthie whose bedroom was in the attic but she was a secretary someplace; she worked outside the home. I remember that her hair was blond and rolled but dishwater dull. Our Margie was not considered attractive, she was an old-maid which meant that she was with us, on and off, for many years, coming and going  by bus or Dad would drop her off at her parents on the way to the downtown hospitals in later years. They pronounced their family name exactly as the name of Grass' mother's cousin in the East, Franciszek Krauze, who was executed by the Nazis.

[madupont]

 In, Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass says that he was very thankful his mother sent him around with the slips from the account book of her small store, to collect the debts from people who bought on credit. It was not only that he was persistent, going knocking on doors on Friday nights and Sundays as well. He was thankful  because his mother taught him the value of money

By the time that my mother sat me down with flash cards to multiply and divide as well as add and subtract, the boy who had been sent out because his mother could not very well go running around the street after dark, putting her foot in the door, Gunther had already been to the Eastern front and told to remove his insignia as the Russians advanced.

[madupont]

Excuse me, but I asked the administrator for permission to take up the Gunter Grass memoirs, Peeling the Onion.  He asked if there was any difficulty to report?

[madupont]

Most definitely!

Whew, so glad it wasn't just wishful thinking on my part.  Was Bob another potential reader or was it reader?

As for Kraus, with another "s" there's always Alison Krauss of the lovely voice, who is making or has just made an album---OK, OK, a CD--with Robert Plant of Led Zep fame.  Go figure! Or go listen (I will).!

[/quote]


I also discussed the timing on this with Bob in the Amer.Hist. forum so that he could fit the schedule of whatever they vote. He said something about being ready to start in October for your selection or his selection.

But this is the selection that was misrepresented in the Fiction Forum. I never received a reply as to how weezo was categorizing, although I clarified that it was decided in the O'Hagan televised interview of both Gunter Grass and Norman Mailer that this isn't Fiction.

[madupont]

The Pertinence of -- Peeling the Onion

thoughts on:
Pgs.35 and 36

 on Beginning to write for Hilf mit; if he had succeeded, Grass would have been branded a young Nazi.
He says that he, nevertheless, was...

"I kept pace in the rank and file...That is how I see myself in my rearview
mirror.

...But the onion might say timidly,...you've got a clean record.

...You didn't denounce anyone."

I don't know why it did not occur to me earlier that praise from Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night) would have implied something that I at first missed. When Gunter Grass writes of his own experience, and the publication takes place in English, he has written for us who laugh now and later discover we will be held accountable for the hype that went down, and our behavior  in the years from 2000 through now, and until it is over and some occupying authority  wants to Democratize you for being banal. (or, perhaps just hypocrits?)

[madupont]

"One dateless day--was I fourteen by then or still twelve?--in the attic of the Labesweg apartment building, where we occupied one of nineteen units, I was on the way to my favorite reading place, the threadbare armchair under the hinged skylight, when in one of the storage areas alloted to each of the units and partitioned off by slats I found a suitcase bound by string....

There are other,mutually interchangeable possibilities: according to air-raid regulations promulgated in mid-1942, all attics had to be cleared; the suitcase had turned up during the process and was opened by her[Mother],me, or a third party?"

These are the belongings of her three brothers who died in WW1. "The eldest brother, Arthur,...her favorite, saw himself--until a shot in the belly finished him off--as a poet crowned for glory.... ...a local Danzig paper occasionally published verses of multiple stanzas under his name,...and these clippings I found collected in the suitcase---in my momentous discovery,as Mother was later to call it.

Her son too was tempted to see it as momentous and, in the mid-sixties, when having suffered enough under the burden of lengthy novel manuscripts, he found himself producing short stories, he decided to sign them with the name of his mother's favorite brother and published them in a series of pamphlets put out by the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, a pleasure I indulged in partly to shield them from the malice of capricious critics, partly to illuminate the brief life of Arthur Knoff with a bit of posthumous glory.

Knoff's debut ----apart from poetic juvenilia, which owed much of its coloring to Eichendorff---was quite well received. Despite his recognizable similarity to a well-known author of the day, critics believed he was gifted and had a future. An Italian publisher felt it was too early to think of translating the stories, but she hoped they could expect something more monumental from him soon, something along the lines of a family chronicle. It was clear, people said,his talent was more conducive to the novel.

The stories of Arthur Knoff were in print for more than two decades, holding their own under the pseudonym until Klaus Roehler, who when sober was a rather fussy editor with Luchterhand-Verlag, unmasked my literary uncle one day when he was plastered."

[madupont]

I'm watching the James Gondolfini interviews : Alive Day, Home from Iraq, on HBO east.  I didn't even know it was on tonight. If you are not ready for looking at amputees of the Iraq war, be forewarned.

[madupont]

"I was drawn again and again to my hiding place.  The hinged skylight gave me an unobstructed view of the back courtyards,the chestnut trees, the tarred roof of the candy factory, the postage-stamp gardens, the half-covered sheds,the carpet-beating frames, the rabbit warrens, all the way to the houses on Luisenstrasse, Herthastrasse, and Marienstrasse, which bordered the spacious square. But I saw further than that... I followed a flight pattern into the somewhere, just as now on my flight back, I am trying to land in a place where no relics, no worn-out armchair, nothing I can touch or lay my hands on awaits me.

Oh, if only there were a suitcase, or at least a cardboard box, full of my earliest scribblings. But not a fragment from my first poems, not a page from the Kashubian novel remains; not one of the muddled fantasies or fastidiously detailed moss-covered bricks  I drew or painted has survived. Neither the rhymed verse in Sutterlin script nor the black-and-white hatched drawings found a place in the luggage my parents packed for our escape. Nor is there an exercise book of school compositions that earned "good" or "very good" despite my execrable spelling. There is no record whatsoever of my beginnings.

Or, should I tell myself, "How good not a scrap has remained!"?

For how embarrassing it would be if the preadolescent's gushings included a poem, dated April 20, influenced by the panegyric style of such Hitler Youth bards as Menzel, Baumann, or von Schirach and celebrating the Fuhrer  in  hymn-like terms reflecting the  young poet's unbending faith.  Rhymes like
Ehre gebare ("may honor give birth to"), Blut und Glut ("blood and ardor"), Fanfaren und Gefahren (Fanfares and dangers"), would have been awful to face later on. Of if some racist claptrap had found its way into a passage in my first novel at the expense of the poor Kashubians: A long-faced knight beheads round-faced Slavs by the dozen.  And suchlike products of the delusions that come of brainwashing.

At best, I can be certain that should a stack of drawings be found, if not in the attic then in the basement, not one of them would depict a highly decorated war hero like Lieutenant Captain Prien or Galland the fighter pilot, though I thought of them both as idols.

What if? The speculations induced by the contents of lost suitcases are as futile as they are inevitable.

What treacherous whispers might go on in a detergent box that the mother used to pack her son's belongings when the family was forced to flee and that she overlooked in the rush to depart?

What else would it take to expose a man needy of a fig leaf?

Having grown up in a family that was expelled from house and home, in contrast to writers of my generation who grew up in one place---on Lake Constance, in Nuremberg, in the North German lowlands-----and are therefore in full possession of their school records and juvenilia, and having ipso facto no concrete evidence of my early years, I can call only the most questionable of witnesses to the stand: Lady Memory, a capricious creature prone to migraines and reputed to smile at the highest bidder.


So what we need here are other means, helpful in other ways.  Objects round or angular waiting on the shelf above the stand-up desk. Found objects, which,when invoked with sufficient intensity, will begin to reveal their mysteries.

No, not coins or clay shards. They are honey-colored and translucent,their hues ate autumn's red and gold. Fragments the size of cherries, and this one, large as a duck's egg.

The gold from my Baltic pond: amber. Found on Baltic beaches or bought a year ago now in a Lithuanian town once called Memel from a dealer hawking his wares on the street. The standard tourist fare, polished and buffed----amber chains and bracelets, amber paperweights and boxes---- but some of it uncut or only partially smoothed pieces."

Would you believe that Gunter Grass makes the description of the amber, which preserves the biological life of the past, his intro to his own sexuality?

[madupont]

His Name Was Wedontdothat

What are lacking are the links in a process no one stopped,...in the case of the fatal step of the fifteen-year-old-schoolboy in uniform. It is clear: I volunteered for active duty. When? Why?

...It happened while I was serving as a Luftwaffe auxiliary---which was not voluntary, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills.
...The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home.  ...At first there were attempts to keep school going, but as classes were too often interrupted by field exercises, the mostly frail, elderly teachers refused to travel the wearisome dirt road to our battery.

...But massive raids----the kind known as firestorms that Cologne, Hamburg,Berlin, and the Ruhr Basin cities suffered, and that we knew of only through rumors...

...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 forever in the musty classroom barracks.  When bored, we feel back into childlike behavior, or regaled one another with made-up sexual exploits.

(Grass is unable to  pinpoint the why of what happened next, other than the being away from the family home motivated him to want to be  independent. It does not take a lot of perception to recognise this motivation continues to promise much to today's recruits. More obvious today are the rationalized patriotic motives indoctrinated very quickly; they cover up the goofy adolescent ideas for  becoming independent on an offer of college tuition, so that you quickly forget your quirky willfulness.)

...I racked my brain for flight routes. They all ran in one directions: the front, one of the many fronts, as quickly as possible.  ...After Stalingrad, however, the front situation went down-hill...the moviegoer had seen over and over when his heroes returned home triumphant. No scenes of the boats that had gone down with every last man.

No, it wasn;t the papers that fed my hero worship. ...It was the newsreels: I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white "truth" they served up.

They would come before the feature film.   In the Langfuhr Cinema or the Old Town's Elizabethkirchengasse Ufa Palace I would see Germany surrounded by enemies, valiantly fighting what had been defensive battles abroad --- on Russia's endless steppes , in the burning sands of the Libyan desert, along the protective Atlantic Wall, at the bottom of the sea----and on the home front I would see women turning out grenades, men assembling tanks: a bulwark against the Red Tide. The German Folk in a life and death struggle. Fortress Europe standing up to Anglo-American imperialism at great cost.

...I may have been an egotistical loner, but I was no stereotypical world-weary adolescent. Maybe just dumb?

There are no data available about what goes on in the head of a fifteen-year-old who longs to enter a fray in which --- he might well presume, as he knew from his books --- death takes its toll. But there are any number of speculations: Is the pressure of emotions with no outlet, the desire to be totally independent, the will to grow up overnight, to be a man among men?

[madupont]

It must have been possible for a Luftwaffe auxiliary to trade a weekend leave for a Wednesday of Thursday off.  In any case, one thing is clear: after one long day's march I took the tram and the train via Langfuhr and Zoppot to Gotenhafen, a city that in my childhood was Gdingen in German and Gdynia in Polish,...ran all the way down to the harbor, where quays and moles faced the open sea. It was there that navy recruits were trained to handle submarines..

It took all of an hour to reach the goal of my dreams of heroism. ...probably raining, the hrbor misted over. The former Strength Through-Joy ship  Wilhelm Gustloff was moored and at anchor at the Oxhoft Quay: I'd heard it was being used as a floating barracks by a submarine training division, though I didn't know for sure, the harbor and shipyard being off-limits to us.

Sixty years later, a human lifetime away, I was finally able to write a novella, Crabwalk about that ship, about its much-heralded launching, its much-loved peacetime  cruises, and its wartime conversion into a quayside barracks, about its one last voyage, with a human cargo of a thousand recruits and several thousand refugees, and abouts it sinking on January 30, 1945, off the Stolpebank. I knew the catastrophe's every detail, the temperature that day (twenty degrees below zero), the number of torpedoes(three)...

Since I was reporting a swatch of rime-compressed action, yet simultaneously writing fiction, I imagined myself into one of the submarine recruits on board the sinking Gustloff. I thus imagined what those seventeen-year-olds doomed to an early death in the icy Baltic must have had in their Sailor-capped heads: first, girls promising instant bliss, then, heroic deeds to come. Like me, they believed in a miracle; the final victory.

The sergeant and seaman first class I spoke to rejected me out of hand: I was too young; my age group hadn't come up yet; it would soon enough; no reason for excessive haste. ...

Was the Luftwaffe auxiliary in uniform or in mufti? Short trousers and kneesocks, perhaps?...I was told there was no need for submarine volunteers at present: they had stopped accepting applications. And then they said, as we all know, the war was not being fought entirely under water, and they would make a note of my name and pass it on to other branches of the military.   ...But first came Labor Service, after all. Not even enlisted men could get out of Labor Service.

....Time passed. We boys grew accustomed to barracks life, to bunk beds, to a summer without Baltic beaches and bathing. The Heideggerian turns of phrase of a corporal who claimed to have studied philosophy threaded their way through our school slang, "You forgetful-of-being dogs, you!" he would scream at us. "We'll knock the essentiality out of you yet!"  The sight of us put him in mind of "the facticity of a pile of shit."

...And we ate God knows what.

[More later about the Hiwis (which is what we called the Ukrainians---it was short for Hilfwillige,"volunteer laborer")]