WHAT DO I RETAIN FROM THE WAR and my camp experience besides episodes that have been bound together into anecdotes or wish to remain variable as true stories?” Günter Grass's narrator asks this question at the end of the wartime section of his 2006 autobiography, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). He concludes that the ability to create a literary feast out of the stuff of his imagination, to invite invisible guests to a dazzlingly heterogeneous dinner table, is the most lasting element of his wartime and immediate postwar experiences. Grass tells us, then, that this period has provided the material for his subsequent literary production, as a brief glance over his extensive back catalogue would readily show. How, then, does Grass blend together the two categories of “anecdotes” and “variable true stories” to “have the last word” on the representation of his life in the literary sphere (PO 2)? Is Beim Häuten der Zwiebel an ethically probing account of his youthful self, or an anecdotal romp?

In this chapter, I examine those aesthetic and ethical pitfalls of the anecdotal approach that conflict with Grass's scrutiny of German wartime suffering and wartime culpability. I address Grass's ethics of representation through close readings of two moments in particular in the wartime and camp sections of his autobiography that throw up disturbing questions about Grass's self-representation — not so much about his own youthful self — he constantly calls his articulation of his identity and ethical choices into question — but rather more about the cast of characters who surround him.