This memoir by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Tin Drum takes us from his boyhood, to his wartime service in the Waffen SS, through the late 1950s. Revealing himself at his most intimate, he writes of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of 1950s Paris. "Powerfully evocative memories... spellbinding."—Publishers Weekly