The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front. The service was not voluntary but compulsory then for boys of my age, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. It happened while I was serving in the Luftwaffe auxiliary-a force made up of boys too young to be conscripts, who were deployed to defend Germany in its air war. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. Grass, right, in 1944, at sixteen, when he was drafted into the Labor Service.
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