Günter Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.
He was born in the Free City of Danzig. At age 17, he was drafted into the military and served from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS. He was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.
Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".
Early life
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Wilhelm Grass, a Lutheran Protestant of German origin, and Helene Grass, a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. He identified as Kashubian. Grass was raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy when he was a child. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr. He had a younger sister, Waltraud, born in 1930.Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943, at age 16, he became a Luftwaffenhelfer. Soon thereafter, he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst. In November 1944, shortly after his 17th birthday, Grass volunteered for submarine service with Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement felt as a teenager in his parents' house", which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle-class.
After the Navy refused him, he was called up for the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg in late 1944. Grass did not reveal until 2006 that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS at that time. His unit functioned as a regular Panzer Division, and he served with them from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945. He was captured in Marienbad and sent to a US prisoner-of-war camp in Bad Aibling, Bavaria.
From 1946 to 1947, Grass worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry. He studied sculpture and graphics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He also was a cofounder of Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter. Grass worked as a writer, graphic designer, and sculptor, traveling frequently.
In 1953 he moved to West Berlin and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1960, he lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. In 1961 he publicly objected to the erection of the Berlin Wall.
From 1983 to 1986, he held the presidency of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
Major works
Danzig Trilogy
Grass's best-known work is The Tin Drum, published in 1959. It was followed in 1961 by Cat and Mouse, a novella, and in 1963 by the novel Dog Years.The books are collectively called the Danzig Trilogy and focus on the rise of Nazism and how World War II affected Danzig. It had been separated from Germany after World War I and was designated as the Free City of Danzig.
Dog Years is considered a sequel of sorts to The Tin Drum, as it features some of the same characters. It portrays the area's mixed ethnicities and complex historical background in lyrical prose that is highly evocative.
The Tin Drum established Grass as one of the leading authors of Germany. It set a high bar of comparison for all of his subsequent works, which critics often compared unfavorably to this early work. In West Germany of the late 1950s and early '60s, the book was controversial. The city of Bremen revoked a prize it bestowed on Grass because of what its leaders considered the "immorality" of his debut novel. When Grass received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1999, the Nobel Committee stated that the publication of The Tin Drum "was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction".
''The Flounder''
The 1977 novel The Flounder is based on the folktale of "The Fisherman and His Wife", and deals with the struggle between the sexes. It has been read as an anti-feminist novel. In the novel the magical flounder of the folk tale represents male triumphalism and the patriarchy. It is caught by a group of 1970s feminists, who put it on trial. The book interrogates male-female relations from the past and the present through the relationship between the narrator and his wife who, like the wife in the folk tale, insatiably craves more. Although the book could be read as a defense of women and a denunciation of male chauvinism, it was largely harshly critiqued and rejected by feminists. They rejected its portrayal of violence, sexualization and objectification, and what they perceived as male narcissism and gender essentialism.''My Century'' and ''Crabwalk''
In My Century Grass covered many of the 20th-century's brutal historic events, conveyed in short pieces of a few pages by year, forming a mosaic of expression.In 2002, Grass returned to the forefront of world literature with Crabwalk. This novella, one of whose main characters first appeared in Cat and Mouse, was Grass's most successful work in decades. It dealt with the events of a refugee ship, full of thousands of Germans, being sunk by a Soviet Russian submarine, killing most on board. It was one of a number of works since the late 20th century that have explored the victimization of Germans in World War II.
Memoir trilogy
In 2006, Grass published the first volume in a trilogy of autobiographic memoirs. Titled Peeling the Onion, it dealt with his childhood, war years, early efforts as a sculptor and poet, and finally his literary success with the publication of The Tin Drum. In a pre-publication interview, Grass revealed for the first time that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS, and not only served as a Flakhelfer, as he had long claimed. On being asked about his decision to make a public confession, he answered: "It was a weight on me, my silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote the book. It had to come out in the end."In response to the interview and the book, many critics accused him of hypocrisy for having hidden this part of his past, while simultaneously being a strong voice for ethics and morality in the public debate. The book was praised for its depictions of the German postwar generation, and the social and moral development of a nation burdened simultaneously by destruction and a deep sense of guilt. Throughout the memoir, Grass plays with the frailty of memory, for which the layers of the onion are a metaphor. Grass second-guesses his own memories, throws his own autobiographical statements into doubt, and questions whether the person inhabiting his past was really him. This struggle with memory comes to represent the struggle of the German people during the same period with Germany's Nazi past.
He published the second volume of the trilogy, The Box in 2008; and the third, Grimms Wörter, the title referring to the Brothers Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch, in 2010.
Main themes and literary style
Grass's work is centered on World War II and its effects on Germany and the German people. He critiques the forms of ideological reasoning that undergirded the Nazi regime. He uses the location of the city of Danzig/Gdańsk and its ambiguous historical status between Germany and Poland to stand as a symbol of the ambiguity between and among ethnic groups. Grass's ancestry includes both German and Slavic family members, some of whom fought on opposite sides of the war. His works also show a sustained concern for the marginal and marginalized subjects, such as Oskar Matzerath, the dwarf in The Tin Drum, whose body was considered an aberration unworthy of life in the Nazi ideology, or the Roma and Sinti people deemed impure and unworthy by the Nazis and subjected to eugenics and genocide, as were the Jews.Grass's literary style combines elements of magic realism with a penchant for questioning. He complicates questions of authorship by intermingling realistic autobiographical elements with unreliable narrators and fantastic events or happenings that create irony or satirize events to form social critiques.
Reception by critics and colleagues
Grass's work has tended to divide the critics into those who have considered his experiments and style to be sublime and those who have found it to be tied down by his political posturing. American critics, such as John Updike, have found the mixture of politics and social critique in his works to diminish its artistic qualities. In his various critiques of Grass's works, Updike wrote that Grass had been consumed by his "strenuous career as celebrity-author-artist-Socialist" and said about one of his later novels that "he can't be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches... from the front lines of his engagement". Even if frequently critical of Grass, Updike considered him to be "one of the very, very few authors whose next novel one has no intention of missing".Grass's literary style has been widely influential. John Irving called Grass "simply the most original and versatile writer alive". According to Mews, critics have noted parallels between Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Tin Drum. Similarly, Salman Rushdie has acknowledged a debt to Grass's work, particularly The Tin Drum; in addition, Mews has said parallels to Grass's work have been pointed out in Rushdie's own oeuvre.