Peeling the Onion First Edition

by Günter Grass (Author), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)

39 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0156035347

ISBN-10: 0156035340

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Condition: Used - Very Good

In Stock. Sold by Midas Mulligan Marketplace, Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

54 Used from $5.49

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Select delivery location

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Only 2 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by System Marketing and Fulfilled by Amazon.

This item ships to France. Want it Monday, July 2? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

List Price: $24.95
Save: $5.75 (23%)

27 New from $19.19

Select delivery location

Turn on 1-Click ordering

More Buying Choices

27 New from $19.19 54 Used from $5.49 3 Collectible from $7.50

84 used & new from $5.49

See All Buying Options

Free%20Two-Day%20Shipping%20for%20College%20Students%20with%20Amazon%20Student

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize–winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published.

During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion—which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany—reveals Grass at his most intimate.

Frequently bought together

Total price: $31.59

These items are shipped from and sold by different sellers. Show details

Buy the selected items together

This item:Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass Paperback $19.20
Only 2 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by System Marketing and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
Crabwalk by Günter Grass Paperback $12.39
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Günter Grass

37

Paperback
$12.39
Gunter Grass

26

Paperback
$13.65
Günter Grass

1,366

Paperback
$10.99
Günter Grass

5

Paperback
$29.98
Timur Vermes

298

Paperback
$9.50
Günter Grass

11

Paperback
$17.98

Editorial Reviews

Review

PRAISE FOR PEELING THE ONION

"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grass’s best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery."―Ian Buruma, The New Yorker

"Peeling the Onion is wakeful, twitchy, suspicious, shambling, and yet also―if we are still permitted to use this word as a compliment―sincere."―John Leonard, Harper's Magazine

From the Back Cover

"Grass has written a memoir of rare literary beauty . . . Peeling the Onion, like Grasss best novels, is filled with striking poetic imagery."?The New Yorker

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize?winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS at age seventeen. Wounded by shrapnel, he was taken prisoner by American forces and spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion reveals Grass at his most intimate.

"A fascinating, multilayered memoir . . . Peeling the Onion is well worth delving into." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Peeling the Onion is more than the stories of a soldier--it is a beautiful account of the ebbings of deprivations and the flowing of relief, both physical and metaphysical." --Los Angeles Times

Gunter Grass was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927 and is the widely acclaimed author of plays, essays, poems, and numerous novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. He lives in Germany.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Mariner Books; First edition (June 2, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0156035340
ISBN-13: 978-0156035347
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 39 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #764,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #241 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Regional & Cultural > European > German
- #524 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > European > German
- #569 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Literature > World Literature > European

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Customer Reviews

Write a customer review

See all 39 customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

H. Peter Nennhaus

Old memories

November 19, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Peeling the onion is meant to imply turning back the pages of memory with the intention of facing the pluses and minuses of your past. For Grass that covers the period of the Third Reich and the early postwar years and therefore includes the tearful memories of his country as well. While that was quite common among Germans who lived through that catastrophic period – I grew up there myself at that time – I am not sure most readers were aware of much probing or reassessing of past events or actions, be it positive or negative. Instead you follow the story of his early youth in a German/Kashubian family in Danzig, of the war, his brief military service and after that his struggle to make a living in his devastated and impoverished country, until he hit the jackpot publishing The Tin Drum in 1959. In as much as his numerous books since then have revolved around the same subject, you wonder about the purpose of publishing another book like that in 2006. While his acclaimed gift of storytelling was at times enjoyable – I loved his marvelous account of the abstract cooking course attended by starving POWs given by a Bessarabian chef – it often blended into a chatty, non-structured rendering of trivia. There were pointless passages such as how he became a smoker, lacking interest and stretching the reader’s patience paragraph after paragraph. Once again, as he did half a century before, he tortured his readers with half-page sentences that are difficult to parse or even plunged into ungrammatical word salads of similar lengths. His brief service in a Waffen-SS unit casts no blame on him in my opinion or at least does so less than his self-centered disregard for his suffering parents after the national collapse.

For those of us who lived then, this book reawakens old and often painful memories. For post-war generations and certainly Americans it is a historical lesson taught by a disheartened and cynical eyewitness. In either case, I don’t think it stirs up much dust any more.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Nobel Prize Winner in Literature Gunter Grass peels the onion of his SS past to reveal his soul.

September 21, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Gunter Grass (1928-2015) is the world famous native of Danzig where he grew up in a lower middle class apartment. Grass was drafted into the Waffen SS in the last few months of World Wart II. He spent time as a POW of the American Army and then traveled around Germany for a few years of self-exploration and a search for a meaningful career. Grass was hungry for food, sex and art. He became an apprentice stonemason and later studied art in Paris. He became a bestselling author of such famous novels as The Tin Drum, The Flounder, Cat and Mouse as well as several other novels, poems and short stories. He was deeply ashamed of his Nazi past and fought hard for good causes in post-war Germany. Peeling the Onion is a memoir of his youthful years in war destroyed Germany. Several stories are tragic but others bring a smile to your face. I enjoyed the book, learned more about a Nobel Prize for Literature author and gained information on post war Germany. Recommended!

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

James Lunn

who answered to the name of Prinz and was said to be the Führer's favourite pet, suggested to me a language that combined ...

November 1, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

No previous exposure to Grass, but came across a review of this book, and subsequently purchased the book. To see a German person who lived through the war years struggling with the question of "unappropriated war guilt" is admirable. Some criticize the work as "too little too late" to which one might reply "better late than never". My own view is that even the English-speaking West has not yet come to terms with these issues and that Grass's work is realistic in it's obliqueness. If your a Heidegger tragic- read it and weep:
Thus, the point of the chapter concluding the second part of Dog Years was to make some sense out of the Führer's underground bunker, and ipso facto, of the battle for Berlin, which followed a path of total insanity. The search for a lost German shepherd, who answered to the name of Prinz and was said to be the Führer's favourite pet, suggested to me a language that combined meandering Heidegger-German — 'nothingness nullifies unexposedly' — and the clumsy, noun-laden diction of the Wehrmacht High Command, whose verbal overflow washed away even the most minor objections: As per Führer-orders, the Twenty-Fifth Armoured Infantry Division is instructed to close the Cottbus-front breach and ensure against canine break-through. .. . The primordial manifestness of the Führer-dog is through-determined by distantiality. . . . The nothingness through-determined by distantiality is acknowledged in the Steiner Group space as nothingness.... Nothingness is coming-into-being between the armoured enemy and our spearheads ...'(pp 132-133)
Joseph Ratzinger gets a mention too.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Not Helpful

Comment

Most recent customer reviews

robert curry

One Star

all books met or surpassed my expectations

Published 1 year ago

Savannah

it was a great book and highly recommended

Based on my conversation with the person to whom I gifted this book to, it was a great book and highly recommended.

Published 1 year ago

Marcy Christmas

Five Stars

excellent autobiography

Published 1 year ago

Mitylene Kuc

Germany the way it was

Peeling the Onion is the memoir of Gunter Grass from age 15 years, and a detailed account of younger years.Read more

Published on October 15, 2015

LIA BRILLHART

Chilling. Helpful in understanding the German people who came ...

Chilling. Helpful in understanding the German people who came of age right before and during WWII.

Published on May 29, 2015

R. M. PetersonTop Contributor: Poetry Books

A remarkable yet all-so-human person

When the nearly eighty-year-old Günter Grass published PEELING THE ONION, his memoir of his youth, there was a firestorm over the revelation that as a seventeen-year-old he had...Read more

Published on May 18, 2015

Rita Jerins

Five Stars

The book was very interesting. It came on time.

Published on May 17, 2015

Carlos G. Benhumea

Four Stars

Good Book!

Published on July 28, 2014

Pen Name

Review of Peeling the Onion

This is a thorough, evocative, honest, and creative search by the author of The Tin Drum, inter alia, regarding his life and times, commencing as a youth in Nazi Germany.

Published on June 1, 2013

Priyam

A Wonderful Read

he was only a Caravaggio lover. maybe that is how he'd like to be introduced. he loved Caravaggio, and validated that by collecting little cards of the master's work you got when...Read more

Published on September 21, 2012

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: Peeling the Onion

Set up a giveaway

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Günter Grass

5

Paperback
$29.98
Dr. Cara DiMarco

9

Paperback
$15.99
Günter Grass

31

Paperback
$17.95
Günter Grass

37

Paperback
$12.39
Günter Grass

1,366

Paperback
$10.99
Gunter Grass

26

Paperback
$13.65

Peeling the Onion First Edition

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Buy used On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $9.95 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Buy new On clicking this link, a new layer will be open $19.20 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Turn on 1-Click ordering

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the Back Cover

Product details

Customer Reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Most recent customer reviews

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Buy used On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$9.95 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

Buy new On clicking this link, a new layer will be open

$19.20 On clicking this link, a new layer will be open