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Günter Grass
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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 Gdansk, Poland). Since 1945, he has lived in West Germany (now 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. His works frequently have a strong left wing, socialist political dimension, and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
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Encyclopedia
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 Gdansk, Poland). Since 1945, he has lived in West Germany (now 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. His works frequently have a strong left wing, socialist political dimension, and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 2006, Grass caused a controversy with his disclosure of Waffen-SS service during the final months of World War II.
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 . Grass was raised a Catholic. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdansk-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 . 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.
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."
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.
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
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 that have cooperated with Germany, Poland and Russia refuse to repatriate some of the looted art .
Disclosure of Waffen-SS Membership
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 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. .
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.". To the BBC, Grass said in 2006 :
Joachim Fest, conservative German journalist, historian and biographer of Adolf Hitler, told the German weekly Der Spiegel about Grass's disclosure:
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.
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.
Grass's biographer Michael Jürgs spoke of "the end of a moral institution" .
Lech Walesa had initially criticized Grass 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 Gdansk 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 Gdansk. 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 ordered by city's authorities, the vast majority of Gdansk citizens did not support Kurski's position. The mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, said that he opposed submitting the affair to the municipal council because it was not for the council to judge history.
Major works
- Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (poems, 1956)
- Die bösen Köche. Ein Drama (play, 1956)
- Hochwasser. Ein Stück in zwei Akten (play, 1957)
- Onkel, Onkel. Ein Spiel in vier Akten (play, 1958)
- Danziger Trilogie
- The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (1959)
- Katz und Maus (1961)
- Hundejahre (1963)
- Gleisdreieck (poems, 1960)
- Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (play, 1966)
- Ausgefragt (poems, 1967)
- Über das Selbstverständliche. Reden - Aufsätze - Offene Briefe - Kommentare (speeches, essays, 1968)
- Örtlich betäubt (1969)
- Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972)
- 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)
- Das Treffen in Telgte (1979)
- Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980)
- Widerstand lernen. Politische Gegenreden 1980–1983 (political speeches, 1984)
- Die Rättin (1986)
- Zunge zeigen. Ein Tagebuch in Zeichnungen (1988)
- Unkenrufe (1992)
- Ein weites Feld (1995)
- Mein Jahrhundert (1999)
- Im Krebsgang (2002)
- Letzte Tänze (poems, 2003)
- Peeling the Onion (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) (2006)
- Dummer August (poems, 2007)
- Die Box (2008)
English translations
- The Danzig Trilogy
- The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966)
- Four Plays (1967)
- Speak out! Speeches, Open Letters, Commentaries (1969)
- Local Anaesthetic (1970)
- From the Diary of a Snail (1973)
- In the Egg and Other Poems (1977)
- The Meeting at Telgte (1981)
- The Flounder (1978)
- Headbirths, or, the Germans are Dying Out (1982)
- The Rat (1987)
- Show Your Tongue (1987)
- Two States One Nation? (1990)
- The Call of the Toad (1992)
- My Century (1999)
- Too Far Afield (2000)
- Crabwalk (2002)
- Peeling the Onion (2007)
External links
- (in English, also available in French, German, and Swedish)
- (in German)
- (in German)
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- (in German)
- The Guardian article
- (in English)
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- (in English)
Interviews
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