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).

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

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.

(gün'tər gräs) , 1927–, German novelist, lyricist, artist, and playwright, b. Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Writing from his experience in the Hitler Youth, the German army, 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.

His novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; tr. The Tin Drum, 1961), which brought him world renown, reveals his bizarre sense of humor and superb linguistic gifts. Related by Oskar Matzerath, a strange dwarf drummer, it aroused controversy in Germany with its idiosyncratic yet clear-eyed portrayal of recent German history from the prewar period, through the Nazi regime, to the Wirtschaftswunder of the postwar era. His second novel, Hundejahre (1963; tr. Dog Years, 1965), is a monumental work that also 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. Grass's early poems and plays are marked by a sensitivity for imagery and a tendency toward symbolism and ambiguity (see Selected Poems, tr. 1966; Four Plays, tr. 1967; New Poems, tr. 1968).

His later works mainly reflect a period of intense political activism. Student unrest in Berlin and the political “generation gap” are the themes of his novel Örtlich betäubt (1969; tr. Local Anaesthetic, 1970) and a play adaptation, Davor (1970; tr. Max, 1972). Grass's reflections on his life in Berlin and his political activities are the basis for the novel Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972; tr. From the Diary of a Snail, 1973). His highly acclaimed novel Der Butt (1977; tr. The Flounder, 1978), which contrasts the destructiveness of men with the sanity of women, examines such matters as politics, feminism, and the art of cooking.

Grass's major 1990s work, the novel Ein Weites Feld (1995; tr. A Broad Field, 1995; tr. Too Far Afield, 2000) was widely criticized for rambling plotlessness. It also caused controversy because of its implied condemnation of Germany as an inherently dangerous nation forever inclined to authoritarianism, as well as for its suggested disapproval of reunification. Grass returned to nearly universal praise with Im Krebsgang (2002; tr. Crabwalk, 2002), his first 21st-century novel. Hauntingly descriptive, it centers on a real wartime occurence, the 1945 Soviet torpedoing of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff that killed more than 9,000. Mingling tragedy with irony, Grass uses this event, mixed with the fictional story of a single German family, to illuminate various phases in 20th-century German history, creating a story that moves, crablike, backward and forward through the detritus of crime and guilt in Germany's recent past.

Grass's other works include a collection of speeches and open letters entitled Speak Out! (tr. 1969) and the novels Mariazuehren (1973; tr. Inmarypraise, 1974) and Unkenrufe (1992; tr. The Call of the Toad, 1992). In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “frolicsome black fables [that] portray the forgotten face of history.” Grass's memoir Beim Haüten der Zwiebel [peeling the onion] (2006), which follows his life from childhood to 1959 and the publication of The Tin Drum, is a sensitive examination of his past and a meditation on the nature of memory. In it, Grass, whom many have long considered Germany's moral conscience and who has constantly urged his fellow countrymen to face up to the shame of their Nazi history, shocked many Germans and troubled other admirers with his belated admission that as a youth, late in World War II, he had served in the Nazi Waffen SS.

Bibliography

See J. Preece, The Life and Work of Gunter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (2001); M. Hollington, Gunter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society (1980); R. H. Lawson, Gunter Grass (1984); P. O'Neill, ed., Critical Essays on Gunter Grass (1987); A. Frank, Understanding Gunter Grass (1988).

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