Günter Grass

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Grass (credit: Authenticated News International)

(born Oct. 16, 1927, Danzig) German novelist, poet, and playwright. Grass was involved in the Hitler Youth, was drafted at age 17 and wounded in battle, and became a prisoner of war. His extraordinary first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), brought him international fame, and he became the literary spokesman for the German generation that grew up in the Nazi era. Together with Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963), it forms a trilogy set in Danzig (now Gdansk, Pol.). His other works, all politically topical, include The Flounder (1977); The Call of the Toad (1992), about the uneasy relationship between Poland and reunified Germany; A Broad Field (1995), controversial for expressing his view that reunification was a mistake; and My Century (1999). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. Grass's disclosure in his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006; Peeling the Onion) that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS (the elite military wing of the Nazi Party) during World War II caused widespread controversy.

For more information on Günter Wilhelm Grass, visit Britannica.com.

The German novelist, playwright, and poet Günter Grass (born 1927) is internationally known as one of the most important literary figures of postwar Germany; he is also known as an exemplar of his own saying, "The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open."

Born in the free city of Danzig (Now Gdansk, Poland) on Oct. 16, 1927, 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. At 15 he served as an air force auxiliary; he was called to the front and was wounded in 1945. Confined to a hospital bed and then a prisoner of war, Grass later was forced to view the liberated Dachau concentration camp. He left the army at the age of 18, angry about the loss of his childhood, about the fierce and ugly German nationalism which had robbed him of it, and about the almost total destruction of the city of his youth.

Rather than pursue a school-room education, Grass wandered about, working as a farmhand, then miner, then stonemason's apprentice. He became aware of class differences and antagonisms; he developed a dislike for idealists with abstract theories and ideologies and a preference for pluralist skeptics of the non-ideological Left. Everafter, for Grass, in art or in politics, experience was always more significant than theory.

In 1949 he began to study painting at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, at nights supporting himself as the drummer in a jazz band. He also started to write, poems at first, beginning slowly, experimenting with forms, working out his relationship with the past. When he moved to the Academy of Art in Berlin in 1953, he later said, "I came as a writer."

Grass married a ballet student named Anna Schwarz, and (the story has it) it was she who sent some of his poems to a radio station competition; he won third prize, and was then published in the magazine of the "Gruppe 47," a group of writers working to develop a postwar renaissance of German literature. In 1958, Grass again turned to Gruppe 47, this time to read two chapters of his new novel. He won first prize. The novel was published a year later, and brought Grass immediate worldwide attention. It was The Tin Drum.

The Tin Drum's narrator, a complex and self-contradictory drummer named Oskar, a dwarf, leads readers through the events of the war and postwar years through a distorted and exaggerated perspective. The second novel in what came to be known as the Danzig Trilogy, Cat and Mouse (1961), features a hero deformed by his times, playing the cat to the world's mouse, rendered impotent by time's unalterable concern with the trivial. The basic idea of the story is that no single perspective can do justice to a plural reality. The last of the trilogy, Dog Years (1963), deals with the ways in which the past (and its myths) help shape and determine the present. 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.

Grass's work as a poet and playwright would not have established his reputation as a significant contemporary writer. There are foreshadowings of images and themes that appear in later prose works. His poetry has been translated in Selected Poems (1966), In the Egg and Other Poems (1977) and Novemberland: Selected Poems, 1956-93. His most popular and controversial play The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising: A German Tragedy (1965, English translation, 1977) deals with the role of the committed artist in society, one of Grass's constant concerns and one that led in the mid-1960s to his direct involvement in politics as a supporter of Willy Brandt and the Social Democratic Party

An ardent socialist, Grass campaigned actively in German politics and denounced the re-emergence of reactionary groups, and his contemporary political concerns formed the core of his later novels. Local Anesthetic (1969) 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. The Flounder (1977), perhaps Grass's funniest novel, deals with the history of women's emancipation and does not find, in the attitudes of radical feminists, a convincing alternative to the male-dominated past. 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 getting better.

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, A Broad Field, 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.

Further Reading

An early book in English on Günter Grass is W. Gordon Cunliffe, Günter Grass (1969). Other works on Glass include Ray Lewis White, Günter Grass in American: The Early Years (1981); Richard H. Lawson, Günter Grass (1985); Patrick O'Neil, Critical Essays on Günter Grass (1987); Michael Hollington, Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (1987); Alan Frank Keele, Understanding Günter Grass (1988).

Grass, Günter (1927– ), German writer, poet, and artist. He was born and educated in Danzig until he was called up to the German army at the age of 16. He was captured by the Americans, and after his release in 1946, worked as a farm labourer and as a miner before he trained as a stonemason and sculptor, later studying art at Düsseldorf and Berlin. He then moved to Paris for some years, where he started his career as a writer. His first novel, Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) is now recognized as the most important German post‐war novel. In 1977 he published Der Butt (The Flounder), an epic novel that combines fairy‐tale, mythological, and historical elements and that Grass actually wanted to designate as a fairy tale. It refers in its title and main motif to the Grimm fairy tale ‘Von dem Fischer un siine Fru’ (‘The Fisherman and his Wife’), the tale of a fisherman who spares the life of an enchanted flounder he has caught, but is sent back to the fish by his wife Ilsebill, who demands the granting of her wishes, until she is reduced to her former poverty after insisting on becoming God. In Grass's novel, the flounder has to face a tribunal of feminists who condemn the fairy tale as misogynistic, and accuse him of having caused the change from the matriarchy of mythological times to the patriarchal society that has prevailed since the neolithic period.

Bibliography

• Brady, Philip, McFarland, Timothy, and White, John J. (eds.), Günter Grass's Der Butt: Sexual Politics and the Male Myth of History (1990).
• Mews, Siegfried (ed.), ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’: Günter Grass's The Flounder in Critical Perspective (1983).
• Mouton, Janice, ‘Gnomes, Fairy‐Tale Heroes, and Oskar Matzerath’, Germanic Review, 56.1 (winter 1981).
• Pickar, Gertrud Bauer (ed.), Adventures of a Flounder: Critical Essays on Günter Grass' Der Butt (1982).

— Caroline Schatke

Grass, Günter (Danzig-Langfuhr, until 1939 the Free State of Danzig, now Gdańsk, 1927- ), the son of a Protestant grocer and a Catholic Kashubian mother, was educated at the Conradinum in Danzig and drafted into the army at the age of 17. Wounded near Cottbus, he recovered in a military hospital in Marienbad, subsequently spending several months in a US prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria, which he left with a lasting sense of guilt and responsibility. From 1947 he worked as a trainee stonemason in Düsseldorf before studying at the city's Kunstakademie. After travels to Italy and Paris he moved in 1953 to Berlin to study sculpture at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Having written his first poetry shortly after the war, he now emerged on the literary scene, winning a prize in a poetry competition (Die Vorzüge der Windhühner, 1956, also containing prose and drawings), and writing plays which achieved stage performance (Beritten hin und zurück, 1954; Hochwasser, 1954; Die bösen Köche, 1957; Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo, 1957; Onkel, Onkel, 1958); another volume of poetry, again accompanied by drawings, appeared as Gleisdreieck (1960). Although his style, ranging from surrealism to the grotesque, proceeded from literary influences, among them Ringelnatz and Rabelais, the concreteness of his writing derives from his skills in the fine arts, combining discipline with imaginative playfulness; this also shows in his tendency to draw the motifs of his narrative work before writing about them, usually aiming at an abrasive interplay between realism and fantasy. While in Paris (1956-60), Grass completed his first large-scale work, a small section of which, read to Gruppe 47 in 1958, won him the group's prize: almost instantly Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum) became West Germany's first sensational international success. Startlingly unconventional, it aims at a radical reckoning with the past by exposing the role of Grass's own class, the lower middle class (Kleinbürgertum) which, never having been an organized force, was easily misled by Hitler. His original representation of guilt and search for identity are equally evident in his next two, more stringently organized works, which later appeared jointly with Die Blechtrommel as the Danziger Trilogie (1974): first conceived as a single project with the working title ‘Kartoffelschalen’, they are the Novelle Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse) and the novel Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years). In the novella, the narrator, Pilenz, tells the story of his former schoolfriend, Joachim Mahlke, for whom he searches long after the war is over, plagued by his conscience for having betrayed him. Mahlke's conspicuous Adam's apple marks him as an outsider, whose yearning for a sense of belonging turns into an obsessive urge for recognition. He later fulfils the greatest ambition of his schooldays by winning a high NS military medal, but ends as a deserter in a submerged minesweeper, the sanctuary of his youth. The ambivalence of Mahlke's behaviour, accentuated by its grotesque representation, generates the work's challenging complexity.

The 1960s were years of travel, speeches, and prizes, including the Büchner Prize, which Grass received in 1965, just after a vigorous election campaign for Willy Brandt's SPD. Although he did not join the party until 1982, he repeated his campaign on an even larger scale in 1969 when Brandt was elected chancellor. His publications, too, were dominated by his political concerns. A collection of poetry, Ausgefragt (1967, with drawings), was followed by his play on the East Berlin revolt of 17 June 1953 (see Deutsche Demokratische Republik), Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand. Ein deutsches Trauerspiel (1966), in which he criticizes Brecht (‘Der Chef’ of the play) as representing the passivity of intellectuals. He reconsidered their role in politics in örtlich betäubt (1969; Local Anaesthetic), introducing a new flash-back technique, and Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972; From the Diary of a Snail). Here Grass, recognizably the dentist of the previous work, responds to his children's question why he used his fame as a writer for the cause of the SPD. Both works show his pragmatic and moral attitude towards politics, characteristics he admired in Brandt, and also his scepticism, which he associates with the colour grey and the slow pace of the snail. ‘The word Paradise frightens my snail’, he tells his children in order to reinforce his opposition to utopian illusions. He illustrates this point by weaving fiction into the story of his childhood and the persecution of Danzig's Jewish citizens. In conclusion, he appends his speech delivered on the quincentenary of the birth of A. Dürer, Vom Stillstand im Fortschritt (Stasis in Progress), consisting of ‘Variations’ on Dürer's engraving ‘Melencolia I’ (1514). Defining the causes of melancholy and its relationship to Utopia in an ideological and social context, he considers melancholy an essential precondition of Utopia, for it shows insight into history and the awareness of guilt.

Having withdrawn to a house bought in Wewelsfleth (Schleswig-Holstein) and remarried, Grass produced his next major project, Der Butt (1977; The Flounder), which resembles the picaresque mode of Die Blechtrommel; the section set in the baroque period, in which the young Gryphius meets Opitz, forms the prelude to his renowned story Das Treffen in Telgte (1979; The Meeting in Telgte). In Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980; Headbirths or The Germans are Dying Out) Grass's experimentation with different layers of time, always proceeding from contemporary issues and bearing the imprint of his experience, takes the form of a collection of diverse ideas for a film, planned with Volker Schlöndorff, on travels to Asia. Its fictitious part introduces a childless couple using the journey to decide their longstanding problem whether to start a family, a motif reflecting Germany's concern about its declining birthrate, alluded to in the ironic subtitle. The sceptical, often comic representation of issues relating to procreation borders on the absurd, as in the Sisyphus motif with its implicit reference to Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) by Camus. During the 1980s Grass produced one major work, Die Rättin (1986; The Rat), a novel of extravagant fantasy in which the author/narrator and his female greyish brown rat (Wanderratte), having survived the nuclear catastrophe in a space capsule, witness the emergence of a posthuman world through the tireless toil and fertility of rats, immortal survivors who have turned into human hybrids. Composed of a scenic kaleidoscope of motifs showing what we cherish and what we have failed to do to prevent the end of our world, the novel, fashioned as a polemic between the narrator and his talkative rat, had a mixed reception. Having donated his house to the Land Berlin in commemoration of A. Döblin and settled near Mölln, Grass then travelled to Calcutta, recording his impressions in the diary Zunge zeigen (1987). Other publications of the late 1980s include a collection of etchings and lithographs (1986), the first Werkausgabe (10 vols., ed. V. Neuhaus, 1987), and Die Gedichte 1955-1986 (1988).

Although Grass conceived Germany as a cultural nation (Kulturnation), he was sceptical about the process of its political unification (Deutscher Lastenausgleich. Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot, 1990; Rede vom Verlust. Über den Niedergang der politischen Kultur im geeinten Deutschland, 1992). All his major concerns of this period are woven into the first substantial story of the 1990s, Unkenrufe (1992; The Call of the Toad), which is both evocative of the past and a warning about the future, written in a spirit of reconciliation. Its central motif, a ‘cemetery of reconciliation’ in Gdańsk, puts this spirit to the test in a baroque interplay between melancholy and the absurd. In his next work, Ein weites Feld (1995), Grass turned to the unification of Germany.

In Vier Jahrzehnte. Ein Werkstattbericht (1991) Grass published his drawings and notes, an indication of the unique function of the visual arts in his work. Although his fiction is at times digressive and controversial, he is the pre-eminent narrator of post-war Germany and has contributed decisively to the renewal of its language. A Studienausgabe (12 vols.) appeared in 1994.

Günter Grass
Born	Günter Wilhelm Grass 16 October 1927 (1927-10-16) (age 82) Danzig-Langfuhr, Free City of Danzig
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	German
Writing period	1956–present
Notable work(s)	The Tin Drum
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1999
Influences Bocaccio, François Rabelais, Grimmelshausen, Cervantès, Voltaire, Denis Diderot Laurence Sterne, Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Trakl, Ivan Goncharov, Theodor Fontane, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Alfred Döblin, Albert Camus, the Nouveau Roman, Vladimir Nabokov
Influenced Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie,Haruki Murakami[citation needed], John Irving, Philip Roth, Michel Tournier, Jose Saramago, António Lobo Antunes, Patrick Süskind, Graham Swift

Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a Nobel Prize-winning German author and playwright.

He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). In 1945, he came as a refugee to West Germany, but in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood.

He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism and the first part of his Danzig Trilogy. His works frequently have a left wing, social democrat political dimension, and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 2.1 Political activism 2.2 Disclosure of Waffen-SS Membership 3 Major works 3.1 Collections in English translation 4 References 5 External links 5.1 Interviews

Life

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Willy Grass (1899-1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898-1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin ^[1][2]. Grass was raised a Catholic. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, who was born in 1930.

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 parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class ^[3][4]. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-SS. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 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. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).

Works

English-speaking readers probably know Grass best as the author of The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), published in 1959 (and subsequently filmed 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 the area's mixed ethnicities and complex historical background in lyrical prose that is highly evocative.^[who?]

Grass received dozens of international awards and in 1999 achieved the highest literary honor: 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."

In 2002 Grass 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.^[who?]

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 of his drawings and sculptures, an archive and a library.

As a trained graphic artist, he has also created the distinctive cover art for his novels.

Political activism

Tadeusz Różewicz and Günter Grass, 2006

Grass took an active role in the Social-Democratic (SPD) party and supported Willy Brandt's election campaign. He criticised left-wing radicals and instead argued in favour of the "snail's pace", as he put it, of democratic reform (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke). Books containing his speeches and essays were released throughout his career.

In the 1980s, he became active in the peace movement and visited Calcutta for six months. A diary with drawings was published as Zunge zeigen, an allusion to Kali's tongue.

During the events leading up to the unification of Germany in 1989-90, Grass argued for continued separation of the two German states, asserting that a unified Germany would necessarily resume its role as belligerent nation-state.

In 2001, Grass proposed the creation of a German-Polish museum for art lost during the War. The Hague Convention of 1907 requires the return of art that had been evacuated, stolen or seized. Unlike many countries^{[citation needed]} that have cooperated with Germany, Poland and Russia refuse to repatriate some of the looted art [1] [2].

Disclosure of Waffen-SS Membership

Günter Grass' prisoner of war record, indicating his membership of a Waffen-SS unit.

On 12 August 2006, in an interview [3] 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 15 August 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. [4].

After an unsuccessful attempt to volunteer for the U-Boat fleet at age 15, Grass was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service), and was then called up for the Waffen-SS in 1944. At that point of the war, youths could be conscripted into the Waffen-SS instead of the army (Wehrmacht); this was unrelated to membership of the SS proper.

Grass was trained as a tank gunner and fought with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg until its surrender to U.S. forces at Marienbad. In 2007, Grass published an account of his wartime experience in The New Yorker, including an attempt to "string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist."^[5]. To the BBC, Grass said in 2006 [5]:

It happened as it did to many of my age. We were in the labour service and all at once, a year later, the call-up notice lay on the table. And only when I got to Dresden did I learn it was the Waffen-SS.

Joachim Fest, conservative German journalist, historian and biographer of Adolf Hitler, told the German weekly Der Spiegel about Grass's disclosure:

After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off.^[6]

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 the same vein, the historian Michael Wolffsohn has accused Grass of hypocrisy in not earlier disclosing his SS membership. Also, Christopher Hitchens has pointed out that there have been critics who have called Grass' admission to be merely a publicity stunt to sell more copies of his new book.^[7] Many have come to Grass' defense based upon the fact the involuntary Waffen-SS membership was very early in Grass' life, starting when he was drafted shortly after his seventeenth birthday, and also precisely because he has always been publicly critical of Germany's Nazi past, unlike many of his conservative critics. For example, novelist John Irving has criticised those who would dismiss the achievements of a lifetime because of a mistake made as a teenager.^[8]

Grass's biographer Michael Jürgs spoke of "the end of a moral institution" [6]. Lech Wałęsa had initially criticized Grass [7] for keeping silent about his SS membership for 60 years but after a few days had publicly withdrawn his criticism after reading the letter of Grass to the mayor of Gdańsk and admitted that Grass "set the good example for the others." On 14 August 2006, the ruling party of Poland, the "Law and Justice" party, called on Grass to relinquish his honorary citizenship of Gdańsk. Jacek Kurski stated, "It is unacceptable for a city where the first blood was shed, where World War II began, to have a Waffen-SS member as an honorary citizen." However, according to a poll [8][9] ordered by city's authorities, the vast majority of Gdańsk citizens did not support Kurski's position. The mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, said that he opposed submitting the affair to the municipal council because it was not for the council to judge history.^[9]

Major works

• Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (poems, 1956)
• Die bösen Köche. Ein Drama (play, 1956) translated as The Wicked Cooks in Four Plays (1967)
• Hochwasser. Ein Stück in zwei Akten (play, 1957) The Flood
• Onkel, Onkel. Ein Spiel in vier Akten (play, 1958) Mister, Mister
• Danziger Trilogie
  • 'Die Blechtrommel (1959) trans. The Tin Drum (1959)
  • Katz und Maus (1961) trans. Cat and Mouse (1963)
  • Hundejahre (1963) trans. Dog Years (1965)
• Gleisdreieck (poems, 1960)
• Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (play, 1966) trans. The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966)
• Ausgefragt (poems, 1967)
• Über das Selbstverständliche. Reden - Aufsätze - Offene Briefe - Kommentare (speeches, essays, 1968) trans. Speak out! Speeches, Open Letters, Commentaries (1969) with 3 additional pieces
• Örtlich betäubt (1969) trans. Local Anaesthetic (1970)
• Davor (play, 1970) trans. Max (1972) on a plot from Local Anaesthetic
• Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972) trans. From the Diary of a Snail (1973)
• Der Bürger und seine Stimme. Reden Aufsätze Kommentare (speeches, essays, 1974)
• Denkzettel. Politische Reden und Aufsätze 1965-1976 (political essays and speeches, 1978)
• Der Butt (1977) trans. The Flounder (1978)
• Das Treffen in Telgte (1979) trans. The Meeting at Telgte (1981)
• Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980) trans. Headbirths, or, the Germans are Dying Out (1982)
• Widerstand lernen. Politische Gegenreden 1980–1983 (political speeches, 1984)
• Die Rättin (1986) trans. The Rat (1987)
• Zunge zeigen. Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen ("A Diary in Drawings", 1988) trans. Show Your Tongue (1989)
• Unkenrufe (1992) trans. The Call of the Toad (1992)
• Ein weites Feld (1995) trans. Too Far Afield (2000)
• Mein Jahrhundert (1999) trans. My Century (1999)
• Im Krebsgang (2002) trans. Crabwalk (2002)
• Letzte Tänze (poems, 2003)
• Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006) trans. Peeling the Onion (2007)
• Dummer August (poems, 2007)
• Die Box (2008)

Collections in English translation

• Four Plays (1967) including Ten Minutes to Buffalo
• In the Egg and Other Poems (1977)
• Two States One Nation? (1990)

References

1. ^ Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature, p. 302.
2. ^ "The Literary Encyclopedia", Günter Grass (b. 1927). Retrieved on 16 August 2006.
3. ^ "Katholischen Mief". Source: http://www.zeit.de/2006/34/Leiter-1-34
4. ^ Nobel prize winner Grass admits serving in SS Reuters, 11 Aug 2006
5. ^ Grass, Günter (2007-06-04). "How I Spent the War : A recruit in the Waffen S.S.". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/04/070604fa_fact_grass?currentPage=all. Retrieved 2007-05-24. 
6. ^ "Grass admits serving in Waffen SS". Reuters. 2006-08-13. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/13/news/grass.php. Retrieved 2006-08-13. 
7. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (2006-08-22). "Snake in the Grass". Slate.com. http://www.slate.com/id/2148094/. Retrieved 2006-08-23. 
8. ^ "Günter Grass is my hero, as a writer and a moral compass". The Guardian. 2006-08-19. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1853745,00.html. Retrieved 2006-08-19. 
9. ^ Rakowiec, Małgorzata (2006-08-14). "Grass asked to give up Polish title". Reuters. http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=1185192006. Retrieved 2006-08-14. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Günter Grass

• Works by or about Günter Grass in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Nobel prize Biobibliographical notes (in English, also available in French, German, and Swedish)
• Biographical timeline (in German)
• Concise biographical information, essays (in German)
• Grass' special links to Gdansk
• Less concise biographical information (in German)
• Grass admits serving with Waffen-SS The Guardian article
• Survey of reactions to Grass's disclosure of his time in the Waffen-SS from the German and international press (in English)
• Grass' "Shame" Over SS Service
• Günter Grass 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.
• Detailed article on his Waffen-SS membership (in English)

Interviews

• Gunter Grass discusses The Tin Drum on the BBC World Service programme World Book Club
• Video interview on PBS with Günter Grass by Charlie Rose
• 2007 Real Audio interview at NYPL with Günter Grass and Norman Mailer by Andrew O'Hagan
• Portrait on rosenthalusa.com

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Literature Saul Bellow (1976) · Vicente Aleixandre (1977) · Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) · Odysseas Elytis (1979) · Czesław Miłosz (1980) · Elias Canetti (1981) · Gabriel García Márquez (1982) · William Golding (1983) · Jaroslav Seifert (1984) · Claude Simon (1985) · Wole Soyinka (1986) · Joseph Brodsky (1987) · Naguib Mahfouz (1988) · Camilo José Cela (1989) · Octavio Paz (1990) · Nadine Gordimer (1991) · Derek Walcott (1992) · Toni Morrison (1993) · Kenzaburo Oe (1994) · Seamus Heaney (1995) · Wisława Szymborska (1996) · Dario Fo (1997) · José Saramago (1998) · Günter Grass (1999) · Gao Xingjian (2000) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

Persondata
NAME	Grass, Günter Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	16 October 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH	Danzig-Langfuhr, Free City of Danzig
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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