Günter Grass, Nobel Prize-winning German author best known to English-speaking readers for his first novel The Tin Drum, returns to the Y for the first time in 15 years to read from his memoir, Peeling the Onion, on the day it debuts in U.S. bookstores. Shortly prior to its European publication last year, he admitted to serving in the Waffen-SS during WW II, a revelation integral to his story which caused no shortage of controversy in Germany. The New Yorker has an extensive excerpt in this week’s issue:

Not until after my thigh was bandaged did they bandage my left shoulder, which was hardly bleeding, though it was likely that a foreign object made of metal, however small, had lodged there. The hole it had made in my new uniform jacket was all but invisible. The dangling arm was now supported by a sling. As evident as the war was all around us, it was suddenly over for me.

We were loaded onto a train that evening. It must have been the night of the twentieth to the twenty-first of April, because the Army doctor, the orderlies, and my fellow walking wounded were making the same complaints I’d heard being bandied about the field kitchen that afternoon: Where were the extras they’d passed around every year on the Führer’s birthday? No cigarettes, no sardines, no bottle of Doppelkorn per four men, no nothing. All the soldiers—even me, a nonsmoker—found this situation more upsetting and of greater import than the fall of the German Reich so obviously taking place.