Gunter Grass

Günter Wilhelm Grass was born on October 16, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, the semi-autonomous port on the Baltic that is now Gdańsk, Poland ^[1]. His father, Willy Grass, was a German Protestant grocer; his mother, Helene, was Catholic and of Kashubian descent, a Slavic minority native to the region. The family lived in the working-class suburb of Langfuhr, in a small flat attached to their grocery shop, surroundings that Grass would later transform into the fictional territory of his most famous novels ^[2].

Any answer to the question of who was Gunter Grass has to begin with the war that consumed his adolescence. He joined the Jungvolk and then the Hitler Youth as a boy, absorbed the propaganda of the era, and at fifteen volunteered for submarine service, partly, he later said, to escape the cramped family home ^[3]. He was conscripted as a Luftwaffe auxiliary and labor-service worker before being called up in late 1944. In autumn 2006 he disclosed, in interviews accompanying his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), that his unit had been the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg of the Waffen-SS, a fact he had kept quiet for six decades ^[3]. He was seventeen, saw brief and chaotic combat in the final weeks of the war, was wounded, and ended the war in an American prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria ^[1].

After his release in 1946, Grass worked on a farm, in a potash mine, and as an apprentice stonemason carving tombstones in Düsseldorf. The training mattered: he thought of himself as a craftsman for the rest of his life, and sculpture and graphic art remained parallel careers alongside writing ^[2]. From 1948 he studied sculpture and graphics at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, then from 1953 at the Berlin University of the Arts under the sculptor Karl Hartung ^[1].

His literary start came through poetry. In 1955 he read at a meeting of Gruppe 47, the informal circle of writers led by Hans Werner Richter that dominated West German letters, and the group's encouragement pushed him toward prose ^[2]. A stipend allowed Grass and his first wife to move to Paris in 1956, where he lived cheaply in a basement flat and wrote the manuscript that would change his life. In 1958 Gruppe 47 awarded him its prize for a reading from the work in progress, and the following year Die Blechtrommel, The Tin Drum, appeared ^[4].

The novel's narrator, Oskar Matzerath, decides at the age of three to stop growing, beats a tin drum, and possesses a scream that shatters glass. Through this grotesque, unreliable witness, Grass retold the rise of Nazism, the destruction of Danzig, and the amnesiac prosperity of the postwar years. The book scandalized conservative critics, was burned by protesters in Düsseldorf, and sold enormously ^[4]. Almost overnight it made Grass the loudest new voice in German fiction.

The Tin Drum became the first part of what critics call the Danzig Trilogy. The novella Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse, 1961) and the sprawling novel Hundejahre (Dog Years, 1963) returned to the same streets and the same catastrophe, examining how ordinary neighbors slid into complicity ^[1]. Among the central Gunter Grass achievements is precisely this: he gave postwar German literature a way to write about guilt that was neither evasive nor sentimental, using fantasy, black comedy, and obsessive physical detail instead of pious abstraction ^[5].

Later books widened the range. Der Butt (The Flounder, 1977) ran through centuries of history via a talking fish borrowed from a Grimm tale; Das Treffen in Telgte (The Meeting at Telgte, 1979) imagined baroque poets gathering amid the Thirty Years' War; Die Rättin (The Rat, 1986) turned to apocalypse; Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995) tackled German reunification and provoked a famous demolition by the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki; Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002) revisited the 1945 sinking of the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff ^[5]. Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 film of The Tin Drum shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, carrying Oskar's story to a world audience ^[6].

In 1999 the Swedish Academy awarded Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing an author whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history ^[7]. He had by then collected most major German honors, including the Georg Büchner Prize in 1965, and his books had been translated into dozens of languages. He frequently illustrated his own work, and his etchings, lithographs, and bronze sculptures were exhibited internationally ^[2].

Grass never accepted the idea of the writer as a bystander. From the early 1960s he campaigned openly for the Social Democratic Party, touring West Germany by car during election seasons and delivering dozens of speeches, and he became a friend and informal speechwriter to Willy Brandt, who became chancellor in 1969 ^[1]. He argued for gradual reform over revolution, a position he defended in the novel Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (From the Diary of a Snail, 1972), and he irritated the radical left as reliably as he did the right ^[5].

His interventions kept coming. He opposed German reunification in 1990 on the grounds that Auschwitz forbade a single powerful German state, a stance that drew heavy criticism ^[5]. In 2012 his prose poem Was gesagt werden muss (What Must Be Said), which accused Israel of endangering world peace and criticized German submarine sales, set off an international storm, and Israel declared him persona non grata ^[8]. Together with the 2006 Waffen-SS revelation, which some saw as a confession too long delayed from a man who had lectured others on honesty about the past, these episodes ensured that the last decade of his life was spent in controversy as well as acclaim ^[3].

Grass married the Swiss ballet dancer Anna Schwarz in 1954, and the couple had four children, including twin sons, before divorcing in 1978 ^[1]. In 1979 he married the organist Ute Grunert. He fathered other children outside his marriages and eventually counted a large extended family of children and grandchildren, a subject he treated with dry humor in late autobiographical books ^[3].

Everyday craft anchored him. He cooked ambitiously, drew and sculpted daily, smoked a pipe in nearly every photograph, and wrote his drafts standing at a lectern ^[2]. From the 1980s onward his household base was the village of Behlendorf near Lübeck in northern Germany, with working periods spent elsewhere, including a year in Calcutta in 1986 and 1987 that produced the diary Zunge zeigen (Show Your Tongue) ^[5]. In 2002 the Günter Grass-Haus opened in Lübeck as a museum devoted to his literature and visual art, and he took an active interest in it during his lifetime ^[9].

Grass kept publishing into his ninth decade: the memoir trilogy that began with Peeling the Onion (2006) continued with Die Box (The Box, 2008) and Grimms Wörter (2010), and a final miscellany of prose, poems, and drawings, Vonne Endlichkait (Of All That Ends), appeared posthumously in 2015 ^[5]. He died of a lung infection in a Lübeck clinic on April 13, 2015, at the age of eighty-seven, and was buried in Behlendorf ^[10]. Obituaries around the world called him the defining literary figure of the Federal Republic, even as they weighed the SS disclosure and the late polemics ^[10].

The basic Gunter Grass facts, a Danzig childhood, a teenage soldier's shame, a stonemason's hands, a Nobel medal, only partly explain his standing. His deeper legacy is a method: memory treated as a moral obligation and fiction treated as the instrument for it. Writers as different as Salman Rushdie and John Irving have named The Tin Drum as a liberating model, and the mixture of historical weight and fantastic invention that Grass perfected became one of the templates for the world novel of the late twentieth century ^[6].

Any Gunter Grass biography therefore ends in tension rather than tidy summary. He insisted that Germans keep the past open like a wound, and his own concealment showed how hard that demand is to meet. The books remain: crowded, comic, angry, and grounded in a vanished city on the Baltic that he rebuilt sentence by sentence ^[4].