Günter Wilhelm Grass (German: [ˈɡʏntɐ ˈɡʁas] ; 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) 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 (now Gdańsk, Poland). 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 (1959), 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 (SPD).
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".
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), a Lutheran Protestant of German origin, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), 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 (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He had a younger sister, Waltraud, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943, at age 16, he became a Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force "helper"). Soon thereafter, he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labour Service). 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 (now Mariánské Lázně, Czech Republic) 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.
Grass's best-known work is The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), published in 1959 (and adapted as a film of the same name by director Volker Schlöndorff in 1979). It was followed in 1961 by Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus), a novella, and in 1963 by the novel Dog Years (Hundejahre).
The books are collectively called the Danzig Trilogy and focus on the rise of Nazism and how World War II affected Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). It had been separated from Germany after World War I and was designated as the Free City of Danzig (Freie Stadt Danzig).
Dog Years (1965) 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 1977 novel The Flounder (Der Butt) 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.
In My Century (Mein Jahrhundert, 1999) 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 (Im Krebsgang). 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.
In 2006, Grass published the first volume in a trilogy of autobiographic memoirs. Titled Peeling the Onion (Beim Häuten der Zwiebel), 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 (anti-aircraft assistant), 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."