Günter Grass

Günter Grass (born October 16, 1927, Danzig [now Gdańsk, Poland]—died April 13, 2015, Lübeck, Germany) was a German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker who, with his extraordinary first novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum), became the literary spokesman for the German generation that grew up in the Nazi era and survived World War II. In 1999 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Background and experience during World War II

In his native Danzig, Grass passed through the Hitler Youth movement and was drafted during the war. As he revealed in 2006, he was called up to the Waffen-SS (the elite military wing of the Nazi Party) at age 17, two years after he had been refused as a volunteer for submarine duty. He was wounded in battle and became a prisoner of war in 1945. Later, while an art student in Düsseldorf, he supported himself as a dealer in the black market, a tombstone cutter, and a drummer in a jazz band. Encouraged by the writers’ association Gruppe 47, he produced poems and plays, at first with little success.

(Read Britannica’s essay “War Stories: 13 Modern Writers Who Served in War.”)

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War stories: 13 modern writers who served in war: Günter Grass

The Tin Drum and the “Danzig trilogy”

In 1956 Grass went to Paris and wrote Die Blechtrommel. This exuberant picaresque novel, written in a variety of styles, imaginatively distorts and exaggerates his personal experiences—the Polish-German dualism of Danzig, the creeping Nazification of average families, the attrition of the war years, the coming of the Russians, and the complacent atmosphere of West Germany’s postwar “economic miracle.” Underlying the anarchic fantasy is the moral earnestness that earned Grass the role of “conscience of his generation.” In 1979 it was made into a film that won (in a tie with Apocalypse Now) the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival and received the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

Die Blechtrommel was followed by Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse) and an epic novel, Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years); the three together came to be known as the “Danzig trilogy.”

Other novels and fictional works

Grass’s other novels—always politically topical—include Örtlich Betäubt (1969; Local Anaesthetic), a protest against the Vietnam War; Der Butt (1977; The Flounder), a ribald fable of the war between the sexes from the Stone Age to the present; Das Treffen in Telgte (1979; The Meeting at Telgte), a hypothetical “Gruppe 1647” meeting of authors at the close of the Thirty Years’ War; Kopfgeburten; oder, die Deutschen sterben aus (1980; Headbirths; or, The Germans Are Dying Out), which describes a young couple’s agonizing over whether to have a child in the face of a population explosion and the threat of nuclear war; Die Rättin (1986; The Rat), a vision of the end of the human race that expresses Grass’s fear of nuclear holocaust and environmental disaster; and Unkenrufe (1992; The Call of the Toad), which concerns the uneasy relationship between Poland and Germany.

In 1995 Grass published Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield), an ambitious novel treating Germany’s reunification in 1990. The work was vehemently attacked by German critics, who denounced Grass’s portrayal of reunification as “misconstrued” and “unreadable.” Grass, whose leftist political views were often not well received, was outspoken in his belief that Germany lacked “the politically organized power to renew itself.” Mein Jahrhundert (1999; My Century), a collection of 100 related stories, was less overtly political than many of his earlier works. In it Grass relates the events of the 20th century using a story for each year, each with a different narrator.

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Nobel Prize and a controversial memoir

Grass was a longtime participant in Social Democratic Party politics in West Berlin, fighting for social and literary causes. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, there were many who believed that his strong, and sometimes unpopular, political beliefs had prevented him from receiving the prize far earlier. Grass’s disclosure of his membership in the Waffen-SS, which came just before publication of his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006; Peeling the Onion), caused widespread controversy, with some arguing that it undercut his moral authority. He had previously claimed that he had been drafted into an air defense unit in 1944.

Later works

Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland: Tagebuch 1990 (2009; From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990) was a diary of his experiences in East and West Germany during the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. Grass wrote two more volumes of autobiography, Die Box (2008; The Box) and Grimms Wörter: eine Liebeserklärung (2010; Grimms’ Words: A Declaration of Love), the latter of which explores Grass’s political past through a loving analysis of the Brothers Grimm.