Günter Grass

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Image:Grass.JPG Günter Wilhelm Grass is a Nobel Prize-winning Kashubian-German author. He was born in Danzig (now Gdańsk) in 1927. Since 1945 he has lived in the former West Germany, but in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood. He is still best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism. His works frequently have a strong political dimension, and Grass himself has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

1 Life
2 Grass' Comments on World War II
- 2.1 Bibliography
- 2.2 English translations
3 External links

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Life

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16, 1927. His parents had a grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz).

Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. Drafted into the Arbeitsdienst, he was wounded in 1945 and sent to an American POW camp. In 1946 and 1947 he worked in a mine and received a stonemason's education. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and travelled frequently. He married in 1954 and since 1960 has lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. He took an active role in the Social-Democratic (SPD) party and supported Willy Brandt. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979.

Grass became active in the peace movement and visited Calcutta for six months.

From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).

During the revolution of 1989-90, Grass argued for continued separation of the two Germanies, asserting that a unified Germany would necessarily resume its role as belligerent nation-state. He abandoned his mission of gradual socialist reform through the existing West German political institutions. Grass instead adopted a philosophy of direct action, similar to that advocated by the younger generation of 1968.

English-speaking readers probably know Grass best as the author of The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), published in 1959 (film version by director Volker Schlöndorff in 1979). It was followed in 1961 by the novella Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus) and in 1963 by the novel Dog Years (Hundejahre), which together with The Tin Drum form what is known as The Danzig Trilogy. All three works deal with the rise of Nazism and with the war experience in the unique cultural setting of Danzig and the delta of the Vistula River. Dog Years, in many respects a sequel to The Tin Drum, portrays into the area's mixed ethnicities and complex historical background in lyrical prose that is highly evocative.

Grass received dozens of international awards and in 1999 achieved the highest literary honour: the Nobel Prize for Literature. His literature is commonly categorized as part of the artistic movement of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, roughly translated as "coming to terms with the past."

Representatives of the City of Bremen joined together to establish the Günter Grass Foundation, with the aim of establishing a centralized collection of his numerous works, especially his many personal readings, videos and films. The Günter Grass House in Lübeck houses exhibitions, an archive and a library.

In 2001 Grass proposed that a joint German-Polish museum for art stolen by the Nazis be set up.

In 2002 Grass, sometimes criticized as resting on his laurels after his early literary success, returned to the forefront of world literature with Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang). This novella, one of whose main characters first appeared in Cat and Mouse, was Grass' most successful work in decades.

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Grass' Comments on World War II

"My literary and political work was mostly involved with this German guilt. But in all these years I have had the feeling that we should also speak about our own victims." (Gunter Grass talks to Tom Rosenthal about being in Dresden after the bombing)

"We did begin this, we Germans, with Coventry and Liverpool and London, but Dresden was also a crime. There was no military reason to bomb the city." (ibid.)

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Bibliography

Danziger Trilogie
- Die Blechtrommel (1959)
- Katz und Maus (1961)
- Hundejahre (1963)
Örtlich betäubt (1969)
Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972)
Der Butt (1979)
Das Treffen in Telgte (1979)
Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980)
Die Rättin (1986)
Zunge zeigen. Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen (1988)
Unkenrufe (1992)
Ein weites Feld (1995)
Mein Jahrhundert (1999)
Im Krebsgang (2002)
Letzte Tänze (2003)