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 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. Grass received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1999. The author has described himself
as "Spätaufklärer", a belated apostle of enlightment in an era that
has grown tired of reason.
"It's true: you're innocent. I, too, born almost late enough,
am held to be free from guilt. Only if I wanted to forget, if
you were unwilling to learn how it slowly happened, only then
might words of one syllable catch up with us: words like guilt
and shame; they, too, resolute snails, impossible to stop."
(From the Diary of a Snail, 1972)
Günter Grass was born in Gdansk, Poland (formerly Danzig, Germany),
the scene of his several novels. His father owned a grocery and
his mother was of Kashubian origin - Slavic people distinct from
the Poles both as to language and culture. Grass was educated at
Danzig Volksschule and Gymnasium. In the 1930s he joined the Hitler
Youth, was drafted into the army at the age of 16, and wounded in
a battle in 1945. In the same year he was imprisoned in Marienbad,
Czechoslovakia. Freed in 1946, Grass supported himself by working
on farms, in potash mine, and as a stonemason's apprentice.
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.
 Both
in Düsseldorf and Berlin Grass had written poetry, some of which
he read before Group 47, an influential circle of writers. From
1956 to 1960 he worked as a sculptor and writer in Paris, and settled
in 1960 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 appeared in 1959 and caused a furore 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. The
novel was the first part of Grass' 'Danzig trilogy', which continued
in the novella KATZ UND MAUS (1961, Cat and Mouse), depicting the
experiences on lower-middle-class youth in Danzig from 1939 to 1944.
HUNDEJAHRE (1963, Dog Years) Grass later regarded as a false start
on the third part. The novel focused on the Nazi crimes and the
post-war acceptability of former Nazis.
From Dangiz Grass turned his attention to Berlin. In the play DIE
PLEBEJER PROBEN DEN AUFSTAND (1966, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising)
Bertold Brecht appears as the Boss, who declines to leave his theatrical
preoccupations to support the East Berlin workers' reformist uprising.
The novel ÖRTLICH BETÄUBT (1969, Local Anaesthetic) and the drama
DAVOR, based on the novel, had Berlin as the scene of events.
After establishing his fame with the trilogy, Grass became active
in politics. He worked as a ghostwriter for the leader of the Social
Democrats, Willy Brandt (1913-1992), who was elected chancellor
from 1969-74. (Collection of speeches and essays: DER BÜRGER UND
SEINE STIMME, 1974 - The Citizen and his Voice).
 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. For AUS DEM TAGEBUCH EINER SCHNECKE
(1972, From the Diary of a Snail) Grass invented a 'diary' of his
travels as a campaigner for the Social Democrats and Willy Brandt
in the 1969 election. Interwoven with this account of the narrator
and the author, is a story about Hermann Ott, a collector of snails,
who takes a refuge from the Nazis with a Kashubian who wants to
become a German. DER BUTT (1977, The Flounder) plays with mythology
and time, spanning from prehistorical matriarchy to the Gdansk shipyards
of the 1970s. Grass portrays the development of civilisation as
a struggle between men's destructive dreams of grandeur and female
accomplishment. He also explores the historical role of cooks, sexual
roles, and feminism - there is a talking flounder, from the Grimms'
fairy tale 'The Fisherman and His Wife'.
"Only those who know and respect stasis in progress, who have
once and more than once given up, who have sat on an empty snail
shell and experienced the dark side of utopia can evaluate progress."
(From The Diary of a Snail, 1972)
Among Grass' works from the 1980s and 1990s are DIE RÄTTIN (1986,
The Rat), in which the narrator receives as a present a female rat,
who demonstrates in several stories that the rats will inherit the
earth. UNKENRUFE (1992, The Call of the Toad) is a story about to
widows, a German art historian and a Polish restorer. They go into
business together returning the remains of Germans exiled after
the war to Danzig. EIN WEITES FELD (1995) is set in the years of
German reunification 1989-91. It was the first major literary work
to deal with this historical event after the Berlin Wall was removed.
The protagonist, Theo Wuttke, has devoted his life to the study
of the 19th-century writer Theodor Fontane, and comments the daily
events by searching parallels to them from the history.
"Once more I open The Rat to the fifth chapter, in which the
laboratory rat, representing millions of other laboratory animals
in the cause of research, wins the Nobel Prize, and I am reminded
how few prizes have been awarded to projects that would rid the
world of the scourge of mankind: hunger."
(from Nobel Lecture, 1999)
 From
1986 to 1987 Grass lived in India, which he has depicted in ZUNGE
ZEIGEN (1988, Show Your Tongue). From 1976 he has been co-editor
of L and from 1980 Verlag L '80 publishers. Between the years
1983 and 1986 he was President of Berlin Academy of Arts. Among
Grass' several awards are Gruppe 47 Prize (1958), Critics' Prize
(1960, Germany), Foreign Book Prize (1962, France), Bühner Prize
(1965), Fontane Prize (1968), Heuss Prize (1969), Mondello Prize
(1977, Palermo), Carl von Ossiersky Medal (1977), Viareggio-Versilia
Prize (1978), Majakowski Medal (1977), Feltrinelli Prize (1982),
Leonhard Frank Ring (1988). Grass has honorary degrees from three
colleges and universities. His later works include MEIN JAHRHUNDERT
(1999), a running commentary on the 20th century.
As an essayist Grass has been prolific, dealing with several topics.
He develops balanced arguments based on facts embedded in historical
context. However, for an outsider his mockeries of what he sees
to be the faults of Germany and German people, is many times hard
to understand. In 1989-91 Grass opposed Germany's hasty reunification
and in 1992 he dedicated a public address about the decline of political
culture in the United Germany to the Turkish victims of Mölln. In
his later essays Grass has criticized contemporary culture and politics.
"In Günter Grass's work the lyric forms a universal constant.
Not only is the lyric - together with sculpture and graphics -
Grass's earliest form of artistic expression, but right up to
the many poems in The Flounder he has never given it up."
(Volker Neuhaus in Günter Grass, 1979)
In ÜBER MEINEN LEHRER DÖBLIN, UND ANDERE VORTRÄGE (1968) Grass
declared his debt to Alfred Döblin, a writer-politician, although
in the artistic sense literary influences are not so clear. Grass'
comic fantasy is quite distinctive for German literature; he has
created narrators who are acutely conscious of their art of storytelling,
and in his poems he has approached surrealism. His novelistic style
is often described as baroque. In spite of the fantastic elements,
recent criticism inclines to regard such novels as The Tin Drum
as primarily historical or even realistic.
For further reading: The Sceptical Muse by Ann L. Mason
(1974); The 'Danzig Trilogy' of Günter Grass by John Reddick (1975);
Günter Grass: Wort, Zahl, Gott by Michael Harscheidt (1976); Günter
Grass: the Literature of Politics by A.V. Subiotto (1978); Günter
Grass: Atelier des métamorphoses by Nicole Casanova (1979); Günter
Grass: the Writer in a Pluralist Society by M. Hollington (1980);
Günter Grass by Ronald Hayman (1985); Günter Grass by Richard
H. Lawson (1985); Critical Essays on Günter Grass , ed. by Patrick
O'Neill (1987); Günter Grass's Der Butt by Philip Brady et al
(1990); Polyphonie und Improvisation by Klaus-Jurgen Roehm (1993),
Günter Grass His Critics by Siegfried Mews (1996); Metaphors in
Grass' Die Blechtrommel by Antoinette T. Delaney (1999); Günter
Grass Revisited by Patrick O¨Neill (1999) - Other writers who
combine fantastic element with realistic narrative: Italo Calvino,
Umberto Eco, Vladimir Nabokov. See also: Magic Realism
Die Blechtrommel - The Tin Drum. Film 1979, dir. by Volker
Schlöndorff, starring David Bennent (Oskar), Mario Adorf (Alfred
Matzerath), Angela Winkler (Agnes Matzerath), Daniel Olbrychski,
Katherina Thalbach, Mariella Oliveri. The story is set in Poland
and starts from the early 1900s. A peasant girl gives birth to
Agnes and after World War I Agnes marries Alfred, a grocer in
Danzig. She has an affair with her cousin Jan, who may be the
father of Oskar, who resolves not to grow at the age of three.
The boy becomes attached to his toy tin drum. Fascists take over
Danzig. Agnes dies after being forced to eat eels by Alfred, who
remarries. Oskar leads Jan to the besieged Polish post office,
where he is captured and executed by the Germans. Oskar THEN joins
a circus and returns at the end of the war to Danzig. Alfred is
shot as a collaborator and Oskar starts growing again. - Schlöndorff
later gave up on the idea of a sequel which would follow the rest
of the novel. 12-year-old David Bennent in the role of Oskar produced
a startling performance as Oscar.
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