Seldom has the sound of clay feet shattering been more unmistakable than it was last year, when Günter Grass — the Nobel laureate and self-appointed conscience of postwar Germany — published his memoir “Beim Hauten der Zwiebel.” The book — now published in English as “Peeling the Onion” (Harcourt, 432 pages, $26) — covers the first third of Mr. Grass’s life, from his childhood in prewar Danzig through the 1959 publication of his novel “The Tin Drum,” in which that childhood was given epically grotesque form. But the headline-making revelations concerned what Mr. Grass was doing in 1944–45, during the chaotic last months of the Third Reich.

It had long been known that Mr. Grass, who was born in 1927, served in the military of the Nazi state. As the Red Army swept in from the east and the Americans and British advanced from the west, even teenagers like Mr. Grass — along with old men no longer fit for front-line duty — were drafted into improvised units, and ordered to mount a lastditch, suicidal defense of Germany. Some kind of military experience was practically inevitable for members of the so-called Flakhelfer generation — boys too young to be conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but old enough to serve as anti-aircraft auxiliaries.

Mr. Grass did, in fact, serve in an anti-aircraft battery, as he had long led the world to believe. But before the war was over, he now revealed, he also wore the uniform of the Waffen SS — and of this the world had no inkling. Such a disclosure would have been explosive for any writer of Mr. Grass’s stature. But it seemed especially disastrous for a writer who had spent his career urging his country to confront its past honestly, and who had been bitterly self-righteous towards political opponents whose moral bona fides he impugned.

This convenient silence — sustained for more than half a century, until the Nobel Prize was safe in his hands — struck Mr. Grass’s critics and political opponents as a gross hypocrisy. The literary critic Hellmuth Karasek, suggesting that Mr. Grass would never have received the Nobel if his SS past had been public knowledge, accused him of “a kind of cowardice and opportunism of conscience.” Lech Walesa called for Mr. Grass’s honorary citizenship of Gdansk, as his native city is now known, to be revoked: “If it had been known he was in the SS, he never would have been given the honor.” The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews said that “His long years of silence over his own SS past reduce his earlier statements to absurdities.” Even his own biographer, Michael Jürgs, called the revelation “the end of a moral institution.”

Now, a year after the controversy, we finally have the chance to read the book that started it. The first thing to be said about “Peeling the Onion” is that it is a fascinating book — much more readable than most of Mr. Grass’s fiction, whose earthy relentlessness can so easily pall. While it is the book’s wartime sections that have inevitably attracted the most comment, much of “Peeling the Onion” is devoted to Mr. Grass’s years of wandering through postwar Germany, as he learned a trade, fell in love, and discovered himself as a sculptor and poet.

The second half of the book, in fact, is a kind of picaresque, as Mr. Grass voraciously satisfies what he calls his three hungers — for food, sex, and art. Each of these subjects occupies a great deal of space in “Peeling the Onion,” and Mr. Grass emerges from its pages as an endlessly appetitive monstre sacré, in the tradition of Wagner or Picasso. This is no longer a fashionable way for artists to behave, and there is indeed something repellent about Mr. Grass’s larger-than-life egotism. As we see him wolf down jellied pigs heads and seduce peasant girls in haystacks, we get a clue to the Gargantuan scale of his ambition and self-image.

The most valuable thing about “Peeling the Onion,” however, is that — like Umberto Eco’s recent memoir, “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (2005) — it offers an unusual perspective on life under dictatorship. This is the point of view of the teenage boy, struggling to distinguish the inherent strangeness of growing up from the superadded strangeness of a fascist society, which is all that he has ever known. For an adolescent, Mr. Grass reminds us, the inner life is already violent; when that violence meets an answering violence from outside, the combination can be explosive.

So it was with Mr. Grass, who spent the war years as a brooding teenager in a too-small family apartment — irritated by his younger sister, in love with his artistic mother, and Oedipally enraged by his well-meaning father. He was an angry, disobedient boy, who got expelled from school after school, and found his only consolation in reading. Sometimes, while he read, his mother would exchange the cake or sausage he was snacking on for a bar of Palmolive soap, to see how long it would take him to notice: “She was especially jubilant when her son bit into the soap and only noticed after another three quarters of a page, as he had demonstrated to the amused visitor. Since then, my palate instantly recognizes the taste of Palmolive.”

That kind of prankish brutality seems echt German, and of a piece with the grotesqueries of Mr. Grass’s fiction. No wonder, then, that the withdrawn teenager compensated for his indignities with dreams of vengeful heroism, inspired equally by reports from the front and medieval tales of chivalry. “Even though the present,” Mr. Grass writes,

with the Führer’s speeches, the blitzkriegs, the submarine heroes, ace pilots, and suchlike military details, was a subject I knew backward and forward … I was simultaneously on the march with the Crusaders as they entered Jerusalem, I was a squire to the Emperor Barbarossa, fought fiercely as a knight of the order against the Prussians.

Every boy has such daydreams; only a boy living under Nazism, with its constant praise of blood and self-sacrifice, was encouraged to act on them. “I saw my fatherland threatened, surrounded by enemies,” Mr. Grass remembers. No wonder he tried to enlist, at the age of just 15, in the submarine corps, whose exploits were endlessly glamorized by propaganda films. Today, he recalls that the recruiting sergeant who turned him away — “Patience, young man, patience. We’ll come and get you soon enough” — was missing an arm. But at the time, this evidence of war’s cost didn’t even register.

Soon enough, the Nazi state did come for the teenage Mr. Grass. Like all young men, he did his stint as a Luftwaffe auxiliary and as a laborer. Then, when he was 17, in the last year of the war, came his conscription notice. “Nothing helps,” he writes today, when trying to remember the fatal letter. “The letterhead is blurred: the rank of the man behind the signature is unclear. … Memory, usually a chatterbox only too willing to tell its tales, draws a blank.” It is no wonder Mr. Grass would repress that particular memory, since the letterhead and rank would have disclosed that he was joining, not the Wehrmacht, but the Waffen SS.

At the time, Mr. Grass did not know about the concentration camps or the Einsatzgruppen. Even when he saw photographs of Nazi atrocities, after the war’s end, he found it impossible to credit them: “‘You mean Germans did that?’ we kept asking. ‘Germans could never have done that.'” But he was aware, like all Germans, that the SS were the Praetorian Guard of the Nazi regime, and that there was something glamorous about wearing their lightning-bolt decoration.

By the same token, as the Hitler regime came crashing down, the SS were conspicuous targets for revenge. The attitude of rank-andfile soldiers towards the SS is captured in one of Mr. Grass’s anecdotes from the last days of the war. As he and a fellow soldier — a PFC in the regular army — fled from the advancing “Ivans,” his companion advised him to switch his uniform for ordinary Wehrmacht grey: “Listen, boy, if those Ivans nab us, you’re in for it, with those ornaments on your collar, bullet to the back of the neck.”

Even in April 1945, then, it was clear that getting caught in an SS uniform would be bad news for Mr. Grass. It was a lesson he learned very well: For the next 60 years, he never mentioned that he wore it. When he finally chose to confess, in “Peeling the Onion,” it was, as he candidly writes, “because I want to have the last word.” Better to come out with it himself than leave the discovery to some posthumous researcher in the archives.

Yet if we take Mr. Grass’s word about his war experiences, the only thing he had to be ashamed of was the mere fact of wearing the SS uniform. He was emphatically not a stormtrooper of the kind that the initials conjure up — a distinction that sometimes escaped his critics last summer, when the scandal first broke. Not only did he commit no atrocities, he claims never even to have fired his gun at an enemy. Untrained and badly armed, his unit met only with disaster: On several occasions, he writes, he barely escaped with his life from Russian bombardments.

If Mr. Grass’s memories are accurate, then, he has nothing more to apologize for than any other member of his generation. But are his memories accurate? The unreliability of memory is one of the central themes of “Peeling the Onion,” and from time to time Mr. Grass deliberately teases the reader with stories that seem too good to be true. One of these has Louis Armstrong dropping by to jam with Mr. Grass’s jazz trio at a Düsseldorf restaurant. Another has Mr. Grass in a postwar prison camp, sharing a tent with Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Yet the lack of specificity in these stories, and their inherent improbability, makes Mr. Grass himself wonder if they might be invented. When his sister laughs at the Pope story — “It’s just another one of those yarns you told to pull the wool over Mama’s eyes” — Mr. Grass replies, “Who knows?”

Yet this kind of playful meditation on the perils of storytelling seems inadequate to the questions raised by Mr. Grass’s experience. His protestations of innocence of any serious crime are absolute, and surely accurate. But one would not be surprised to find that Mr. Grass’s impressionistic account of his wartime misadventures was incomplete. He himself is constantly speculating about his past: “So everything that happens now has been nurtured in the greenhouse of suppositions,” he writes.

Instead of such grandiose confessions of uncertainty, the reader would prefer to have a soberer, better documented, perhaps less dramatic account of what Mr. Grass can determine really happened. Similarly, instead of his rather melodramatic expressions of contrition — “I had used my status as a child to play dumb,” he writes — one longs for some more searching analysis of an adolescent’s moral experience, and a more measured judgment about what degree of responsibility a 15-year-old really bears for his actions and fantasies. A more careful and modest writer than Mr. Grass might have produced a more valuable memoir of the Nazi era than “Peeling the Onion.” But at least Mr. Grass has written a book that makes abundantly clear, for good and ill, what kind of writer he is.

akirsch@nysun.com