Günter Grass
born Oct. 16, 1927, Danzig [now
Gdańsk, Pol.]
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 the war. In 1999
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature for his accomplishments.
In his native Danzig, Grass passed
through the Hitler Youth movement and
was drafted during World War II. 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. In 1956 he
went to Paris and wrote Die Blechtrommel
(filmed 1979). 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.”
It was followed by Katz und Maus (1961;
Cat and Mouse) and an epic novel,
Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years); the three
together form a trilogy set in Danzig.
His 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 expressed Grass’s fear of
nuclear holocaust and environmental
disaster; and Unkenrufe (1992; The Call
of the Toad), which concerned the uneasy
relationship between Poland and Germany.
In 1995 Grass published Ein weites Feld
(“A Broad Field”), 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.
Grass was a long-time 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 he had been drafted
into an air defense unit in 1944.
