Life Sentences

Well, kind of. Peeling the Onion, which covers the writer's youth and apprenticeship, is full of auctorial doubt. Incidents blur and dissolve as Grass struggles to recall what he was thinking, feeling or doing five, six and seven decades ago. Often he doesn't succeed.

Not that he lets himself off the hook. Far from it. The Danzig synagogues burn and the Jewish shops are looted, and the 11-year-old watches without wonder. A beloved uncle defends the city's Polish Post Office from German takeover, is captured and executed. The family stops speaking of him. Grass's Latin teacher disappears, probably denounced by a student. Grass's sleep is untroubled.

"A believer till the end," he calls himself. "No doubts clouded my faith; nothing subversive like the clandestine distribution of leaflets can let me off the hook; no Göring joke made me suspicious. No, I saw my fatherland threatened, surrounded by enemies."

Grass and other Germans were taken in, he says, but they also wanted to be seduced. It's human nature to follow, to obey orders. He allows himself only this slender, partial exculpation: "It was a dictatorship. It's much more terrible not to ask questions in a democracy."

In movies -- and, very rarely, real life -- there's a singular moment when the hero is sparked into rebellion. Bookish people like to believe books can do this. Grass read All Quiet on the Western Front as a youth. The Nazis recognized the power of Remarque's tale of the futility and horror of war; they banned it. Grass loved the book but went to war anyway.

"I don't have this naive belief that literature can change the world," he said. "It can only change it a little bit, and even then it takes a long time. Look at this country. It's been a long time since the Enlightenment, and yet you're still arguing about whether Darwin was right."

Grass will be 80 in October, although he looks younger. In Onion he lists the three great desires that drove him forward as a young man: the hunger for sex, for food, for art. He's well-fed now, and at his age the sexual life -- he waved a hand dismissively. But art remains. In addition to the writing of prose and poetry, he makes etchings and lithographs and draws and paints. One of the events he attended here was a party at the Steven Kasher Gallery to launch an exhibit of his prints. (The show was supposed to be accompanied by the U.S. publication of the first two volumes of Grass's catalogue raisonné, but the books have been delayed until September.)

His English is surprisingly good, especially considering how little chance he has had to speak it. An interpreter accompanied him everywhere but was rarely needed. He was also escorted by his German editor, an assistant to his German publisher, a secretary, his American publicist and, shadowing him constantly, the German media, which filmed American reporters and American readers asking Grass questions about German history. The controversy won't die.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine -- the leading German paper -- "is still going after me," the writer said, neither boasting nor complaining but merely stating a fact. His critics, he added, "ignored the book. Sometimes I have a feeling they were jealous that I was always able to stay independent of money, of power." But the people got it. At public appearances, he recounted, they would come up to him and say for the first time they understood their fathers, their uncles.

This seemed to me rampant ego. A book that made Germans rethink their family dynamics? Books don't change things, I wrote in my notebook, except his.

A few hours later, at the 92nd Street Y, a packed crowd watched Amos Elon, an Israeli writer from the same generation as Grass, do battle with the novelist. "I'm trying to put myself in your frame of mind," Elon said, making clear how difficult he found the task. "Your own uncle was summarily executed . . . and still you thought this was a just cause? Your own uncle?"

Egged on by Elon, Grass said that even after the war, as an American POW, he was slow to realize the truth. He thought the death camps were propaganda.