Peeling the Onion
By Gunter Grass
Harvill Secker £18.99, 432 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

When Gunter Grass’s autobiography, Peeling the Onion, was published in Germany last year, a storm broke. Grass revealed that, when called up for military service at the end of the second world war, he was assigned to an SS division. Grass never fired a shot – in fact, he spent the weeks terrified, attempting to hide from the relentless assault of the victorious Red Army. Even worse was the threat of the Wehrmacht’s military police, who hanged or shot any soldier found not with his unit.

Not that Grass’s brief SS service had been a secret. At the start of his literary career, nearly half a century ago, it had been reported. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, Grass had donned with pride the mantle of the arch left-liberal critic of all the right-wing politicians, judges, functionaries and businessmen connected to the Nazis who had pursued comfortable careers during the long Adenauer years. The fact that Grass had worn the uniform of the SS was seized on as proof of his hypocrisy, and his critics proclaimed Peeling the Onion a “confession”.

Now the English translation of his autobiography allows non-German readers to make their own judgment. Mine is that Grass has produced his most readable book ever.

Grass may have become a star of western literature, but he is a child of eastern Europe. So we are back in Grass’s Heimat of Danzig (now Gdansk), where Europe’s Teutonic and Slav tectonic plates meet and grate uneasily against each other.

His father ran a small shop and the family lived in a two-room flat over the store. Grass grew up listening to his parents’ weekend love-making and endless worries over money. His bookish and piano-playing mother adored him. In 1945 when the Red Army arrived, she sacrificed herself: in exchange for not touching Grass’s sister, his mother allowed herself to be systematically raped by Russian soldiers. These memories are not part of the Anglo-Saxon world’s history but they form part of the mentalite of the new Europe.

Here, Grass reverts to what he does best: he describes real people and tells their stories. This is the war viewed through the eyes of a teenager, who watched with awe as German military might smashed through Norway and France. He and his friends sunbathed on the golden sands of Sopot, the beach resort near Danzig where the infamous sign “No dogs or Jews” was placed. They dreamt of fighting in the fjords to conquer Norway. “Here we were smeared with Nivea cream; there, we could have been covered with glory.”

As the privations of war grew, Grass describes his three hungers - for food, for sex and for art. He had to wait until well after the war’s end to satisfy all three. Grass then became a fully signed-up social democrat with all the anti-military reflexes of the postwar German left. But here he describes his eager efforts as a young man to get into uniform. He tried to talk his way into the submarine service as a teenager, but was sent home by a kindly recruiting sergeant who knew the folly of panting desires for martial glory. When Grass finally did don a uniform, it was to spend most of the final weeks of the war in a phantom SS division, attempting to survive as Russian tanks, shells and rockets rained down their destruction. This part of the book stands as a classic of what being in a war is like.

Is this an accurate memoir or, as Grass peels away his onion layers, is he reverting to imagination and the novelist’s art? Like millions of German soldiers, he spent 1945 shuttling between PoW camps, before being discharged. In one such Bavarian camp, he meets a fellow teenage conscript, Josef, who was also lucky to survive. During intense conversations with Grass, Josef described his fervent Catholic beliefs and his need to serve God. Grass reveals that he thinks the young Bavarian Josef went on to become the current Pope. At this stage the reader may well exclaim “Come off it!” Sharing hungry PoW days with a future Pope is the novelist fantasising – not fact-checked memoir.

Little matter. Grass takes his story up to the mid-1950s. He writes beautifully of his sexual initiation, his work as a miner, his enrolment in art school, and his early marriage to a Swiss dancer and their life in Paris, where he wrote The Tin Drum.

As Grass peels his onion we are not sure how truthful his tears, or his memory, are. But there is no richer account of a European life in the years when modern Europe was invented. I cannot wait for the next volume.

Denis MacShane is a Labour MP and former Europe minister. His biography of Edward Heath was published by Haus last year