A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Günter Grass. German novelist, lyricist, artist, and playwright, born on Oct. 16, 1927 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), the scene of his several novels, to Willy Grass (1899-1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene (née Knoff) Grass (1898-1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. Grass was raised a Catholic. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (Gda?sk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, who was born in 1930. Günter Grass was strongly influenced by the political climate of Germany in the era following the disasters of World War I. A Hitler "cub" at 10 and member of the "youth movement" at 14, the boy was infused with Nazi ideology. Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parent's house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class, and was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (1942) and in November 1944 into the Waffen-SS. Grass saw combat with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on April 20th 1945 and sent afterwards to an American POW camp. In 1946 and 1947 he worked in a mine and received a stonemason's education. Writing from his experience in the Luftwaffe and as a prisoner of war, Grass deplores fascist militarism. The anguish of war and the social and political problems that West Germany faced before reunification are the principal concerns of his fiction. In 1948 Grass enrolled as a student of painting and sculpture in the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. He studied in West Berlin at State Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (1953-55) and made journeys to Italy, France, and Spain. In 1954 he married Anna Margareta Schwartz - they were divorced in 1978. In 1979 Grass married Ute Grunert. In 1955 Grass became a member of the socially critical Gruppe 47 (later described with great warmth in The Meeting at Telgte), his first poetry was published in 1956 and his first play produced in 1957. From 1956 to 1960 he worked as a sculptor and writer in Paris. In 1960 he settled in West-Berlin. While staying in Paris in 1956, Grass started his hugely successful first novel, The Tin Drum. His other works from the late 1950s were mostly plays, which, like his verse, achieved only modest public acclaim. The Tin Drum caused a furor in Germany because of its depiction of the Nazis. The central character is Oscar Matzerath, who has refused to grow as a protest to the cruelties of German history. He communicates only through his toy drum. This novel, with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, was to form what is called the Danzig Trilogy. The Tin Drum was filmed in 1979 by Volker Schlöndorff, starring David Bennent (Oskar), Mario Adorf (Alfred Matzerath), Angela Winkler (Agnes Matzerath), Daniel Olbrychski, Katherina Thalbach, Mariella Oliveri. Dog Years ( 1965), is a monumental work that aroused considerable controversy. Set in Danzig, it deals, often grotesquely, with the Nazi years as it explores Germany’s destiny and conscience and the nature of individual flight from reality. The novel focused on the Nazi crimes and the postwar acceptability of former Nazis. Like The Tin Drum, its structure is circular, ending as it begins, suggestive of Grass's sense of despair. In the Danzig Trilogy and in later novels, the characters are often mythic or folkloric or grotesque (very small and/or very different), in order to make the ordinary and the usual appear in a different perspective. The novel Local Anaesthetic (1969) and the drama Davor, based on the novel, had Berlin as the scene of events. Local Anaesthetic is an attack on linguistic confusions Grass saw in the slogans of the radical Left, and From the Diary of a Snail (1972), his fictionalized account of his involvement with Brandt's 1969 campaign, he supports gradualism. In the 1960s Grass became active in politics, participating in election campaigns on behalf of the Social Democrat party and working as a ghost-writer for the leader of the Social Democrats, Willy Brandt (1913-1992), who was elected chancellor from 1969-74. In the 1970s and 1980s Grass expanded his subjects from recent German history and contemporary politics into other issues, such as feminism, the art of cooking, and ecology. He traveled to India for the first time in 1975 and in the late 1980s he spent some months in Calcutta. Grass' diary, Zunge Zeigen (1988), collected his impressions from the visit. In Headbirths: or, The Germans are Dying Out (1980), The Meeting at Telgte (1979), and The Rat (1986), Grass shows a world that is going to be worse because it is not getitbusng better. From 1986 to 1987 Grass lived in India, which he has depicted in Show Your Tongue (1988). From 1976 he has been coeditor of L and from 1980 Verlag L '80 publishers. Between the years 1983 and 1986 he was President of Berlin Academy of Arts. For a long time, Grass was considered the conscience of Germany's postwar generation, but that time has passed. In the 1990s, Grass still believed in "the literature of engagement" and that "to be engaged is to act," but his readers have changed. When his novel on German-Polish reconciliation The Call of the Toad came out in 1992, it was savagely reviewed in Germany as having nothing new to say. And on the subject of German re-unification, Grass had often said that the experience of Auschwitz was enough to prove that Germans should never again be allowed to live together in one nation; his 1995 novel based on that theme, Too Far Afield , provoked harsh literary and political attacks. Nevertheless, at the end of the year more than 175,000 copies were in print and the book was at the top of Germany's best-seller lists. In My Century (1999) he presents the history of the past century from a personal point of view, year by year. As a graphic artist, Grass has often been responsible for the covers and illustrations for his own works. As an essayist Grass has been prolific, dealing with several topics often embedded in historical context. Grass returned to nearly universal praise with Crabwalk (2002), his first 21st-century novel. In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for The Tin Drum. On 12 August 2006, in an interview about his forthcoming book Peeling the Onion, Grass stated that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. Before this interview, Grass was seen as someone who had been a typical member of the "Flakhelfer generation," one of those too young to see much fighting or to be involved with the Nazi regime in any way beyond its youth organizations. On August 15, 2006, the online edition of "Der Spiegel", "Spiegel Online", published three documents from U.S. forces dating from 1946, verifying Grass's Waffen-SS membership. However, as Grass has for many decades been an outspoken left-leaning critic of Germany's treatment of its Nazi past, his statement caused a great stir in the press. Rolf Hochhuth said it was "disgusting" that this same "politically correct" Grass had publicly criticized Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan's visit to a military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985, because it also contained graves of Waffen-SS soldiers. In September 2006, 46 authors, poets, artists and intellectuals from various Arab countries published a letter of solidarity with Grass, stating that his joining the SS-Waffen was simply a case of a young, misguided teenager doing his duty. |
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