Günter Grass

German-Polish writer and critic

• Born: October 16, 1927
• Birthplace: Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland)
• Died: April 13, 2015
• Place of death: Lübeck, Germany

Grass was one of the leading figures of postwar German literature. His novelThe Tin Drumforced Germans to confront their role in the formation of the Third Reich and in the horrors of the Holocaust, leading to a public uproar.

Early Life

Günter Grass (GEWN-tur grahs) was born in the free city of Danzig, later Gdańsk, Poland. His parents were middle-class merchants of German-Polish descent. The free state of Danzig was occupied by the Nazis when Grass was eleven years old, and, by the age of fourteen, he had become, as did most boys his age, a willing member of the Hitler Youth. At age fifteen, he tried to join the submarine service, but was rejected as too young; instead, he was taken into the Luftwaffe auxiliary service and then the labor service with other boys too young to be drafted.

From 1944 to 1945, Grass served in the German army. Wounded in April, 1945, he was sent to a hospital in Czechoslovakia, where he was captured by American troops. Taken one day by his American captors to the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau (outside Munich), Grass could not believe that the atrocities of the Holocaust could have taken place, and he thought it was a hoax perpetrated by the Americans. He finally realized the truth of the historical record after the start of the Nuremberg Trials on Nazi war crimes.

After the end of the war, Grass worked for a while as a farm laborer, and in 1947 he became a stonemason’s apprentice, spending time in a potash mine. He also performed in a jazz trio. He married Anna Schwarz, a dancer, in 1954. These various jobs did not suit his artistic nature, and from 1949 to 1956 he studied drawing and sculpture in Düsseldorf. In 1955, his wife submitted, without his knowledge, one of his poems to a poetry contest, and he won third prize. He then spent several years in Paris and worked on his writing projects and his graphic art. He exhibited his work and published collections of his etchings.

Life’s Work

During the early 1950s, Grass wrote a number of surrealistic poems, which he illustrated himself and which were published under the title Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (1956; the advantages of wind fowl). He also wrote several plays that suggest the love of the grotesque and bizarre that figures in so many of his later writings. Noch zehn Minuten bis Buffalo (1954, 1958; Only Ten Minutes to Buffalo, 1967) is one of the better-known plays from this early period. In 1958, the young author was asked to read at the prestigious Group 47 annual meeting of German writers and was awarded first prize. The epic novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum , 1961) was his first commercial success, and it generated intense public controversy because of its message that Germans should acknowledge their complicity in the rise of Nazism and in the Holocaust. The novel itself tells a grotesque and, at times, licentious story of Oskar Matzerath, a precocious dwarf, and his picaresque adventures before, during, and after World War II. Oskar, part Grigory Rasputin, the madman, and part Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet struggles in the course of the novel to find his true identity amid the chaos of his family life and the social and political upheavals of Germany during the Nazi era. The text incorporates many of Grass’s memories of and reflections on his own youth in Danzig. Because of the novel’s openness about sexuality, it scandalized many of the more conservative elements in German society at that time. The city government of Bremen, for example, refused to grant him the literary prize that the committee had awarded him.

The surrealistic style of The Tin Drum marks Grass, at least in part, as the heir to a well-known Prague writer of the early twentieth century, Franz Kafka. As in Kafka’s dreamlike stories, emotional states of mind are treated by Grass as if they were external events. Oskar, for example, distrusts the adult world, and so he refuses to grow up. He wills himself into not growing, and retains the physical stature of a child. When he is angry or upset, he screams, as does any child, but Oskar’s vocalizations have the unique ability to shatter glass. The effect of such a writing style is of an altered or miraculous “reality” in which subjective feelings become objective occurrences.

After the success of The Tin Drum, Grass was awarded the Berlin Critics Prize in 1960, and he moved from Paris to Berlin. His first marriage ended in divorce; he married again in 1979. An outspoken and independent-minded liberal, Grass rejected the materialistic consumer society of West Germany, refusing to own a car, television, or telephone.

Grass’s first novel became part of a series of narrative texts called Die Danziger Trilogie (the Danzig trilogy). The second work of the set, Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse , 1963), is a novella that describes the youth and early adulthood of the Christ-like figure Joachim Mahlke, as related by his childhood friend and eventual betrayer, Pilenz. Mahlke, a Danzig youth, is an overachiever who has an overly prominent Adam’s apple. He feels he must exceed the accomplishments of his fellows and thereby earns both their admiration and resentment. He becomes a superior swimmer and diver and eventually, in his pursuit of social acceptance, a war hero. In this story, as well as in The Tin Drum, Grass levels criticism at the German involvement with Nazism. Grass, along with his contemporary Heinrich Böll, was part of Germany’s postwar attempt to come to some kind of moral and social reckoning with the Nazi era. In Germany this artistic movement is known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past.

The third novel of the trilogy, Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years , 1965), also takes place in Danzig and picks up thematic elements as well as characters present in the first two works. It utilizes three narrators Eddi Amsel, Harry Liebenau, and Walter Matern, who offer a colorful and bizarre portrait of modern Germany and the horrors of the Nazi era. In 1966, Grass published a play, Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 1966), which takes a critical look at the revolutionary theater of Bertolt Brecht, and the discrepancies between artistic production and the realities of social and political change. Örtlich betäubt (1969; Local Anaesthetic , 1969) deals with issues of both World War II and the Vietnam War. It is a novel about the high school student Philipp Scherbaum, who protests the hypocrisy of the adult world and his teacher, Eberhard Starusch, himself a former rebel. A nameless dentist, who treats both student and teacher, offers commentary and wisdom to both his patients.

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, Grass became more involved with the German political scene, campaigning and writing speeches on behalf of the liberal Social Democratic Party. The semifictional text Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke (1972; From the Diary of a Snail , 1973) chronicles his political involvement during the 1969 West German election campaign and develops several fictional strands as well. The image of the snail comes to represent the steady but slow nature of social change and historical progress. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of the women’s movement in the United States and Europe, and Grass’s next novel, Der Butt (1977; The Flounder , 1978), takes a satiric look from a decidedly male perspective at feminism and gender relations. The story begins with a version of the “Fisherman and His Wife” fairy tale. In Grass’s book, the flounder, the archetype of the male, is caught by three German feminists who put him on public trial for crimes against humanity. It presents a series of chapters that examine in a humorous and outrageous manner the relationships of men and women throughout history. After this text, Grass worked in a more serious context in the novel Das Treffen in Telgte (1979; The Meeting at Telgte , 1981). The plot involves a fictitious meeting of German writers and artists toward the end of the exceedingly destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). The novel explores a typical concern of its author: the success or failure of the humanizing role that art and literature play in the “real” world of politics, greed, and war.

Grass’s next novel, Kopfgeburten: Oder, Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980; Headbirths: Or, The German Are Dying Out , 1982), again makes use of both diary material and fiction. The fictional plot involves two German schoolteachers, Harm and Dörte Peters, who are traveling throughout Asia, and trying to decide whether they should have a child. At that time, Grass himself traveled in Asia, and his diary observations on cultural and political differences between Germany and the East make up a major part of the text. His next novel, Die Rättin (1986; The Rat , 1987), is a sobering tale of Europe after a nuclear holocaust, narrated by a female rat who is one of the sole survivors. The novel reflects Grass’s pessimistic attitudes about the future of humankind amid the failed attempts to limit nuclear proliferation between the superpowers in the 1980s.

Although Grass is known primarily as a novelist, he published a wide variety of work in other literary forms. Several of his plays have already been noted; he also published a number of poetry collections. Gleisdreieck (1960), Ausgefragt (1967; New Poems, 1968), and“Ach Butt, dein Märchen geht böse aus”: Gedichte und Radierungen (1983; alas, Flounder, your fairy tale has an unhappy ending: poetry and etchings) present a variety of poems and illustrations that take up many of the same themes present in his narrative texts.

Some of Grass’s works elude generic classification. One such book is Zunge zeigen (1988; Show Your Tongue , 1989), based on a trip that Grass and his second wife, Ute, took to India between October, 1986, and January, 1987. Combining journal entries, poems, and drawings, this text takes up many of the themes that preoccupied Grass in his later work, particularly his apocalyptic vision of the contemporary world.

Never shy of controversy, Grass outraged many fellow Germans as East Germany and West Germany approached unification in 1990 by saying that unification might be a bad idea; a unified Germany, he said, would be powerful enough to relapse into its aggressively expansionist mentality. His novels from after unification likewise look dourly upon his nation. Unkenrufe (1992; The Call of the Toad , 1992) is a tale of romance between a Polish widow and German widower who form an organization to promote the burial of displaced people in their birth nations. The idea proves wildly successful, so much so that it belies its original benevolence and becomes a macabre, satiric success story for capitalism. Mein Jahrhundert (1999; My Century, 1999) challenges received historical knowledge by retelling the major events of the twentieth century from a variety of perspectives. En weites Feld (1995; Too Far Afield , 2000) concerns two shady characters after unification, both plagued by their disparate histories: Theo Wuttke, a failed journalist and functionary for the defunct German Democratic Republic, and a former West German spy named Ludwig Hoftaller. Wuttke tries again and again to escape Germany and his unsavory past only to be tracked down and exposed by Hoftaller.

In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his “frolicsome black fables” about people forgotten in official histories: the victims of beliefs once held but since disavowed and shunned. His next novel, Im Krebsgang (2002; Crabwalk , 2003) is an example of this style. It relates the horrific, forgotten tale of the worst maritime disaster in history and its aftermath in which a German cruise ship overloaded with Nazi refugees was sunk by a Russian submarine in January, 1945, leading to the deaths of nine thousand people.

Grass again ignited controversy during an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, conducted before the publication of his memoir Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (2006; Peeling the Onion , 2007). He revealed that he indeed had been a member of the Waffen-SS (an SS division), but not a member by choice. Public condemnation and accusations of hypocrisy were swift. Grass, a gunner in a Panzer division, saw only a week of combat and, he said, he never fired a shot; nevertheless, he shared responsibility for the Nazi atrocities. “What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame,” he wrote in 2007 in an article for The New Yorker. Although many defended him for his delayed confession, his numerous critics accused him of hypocrisy and a crass attempt to stir up publicity for his latest book.

Peeling the Onion is a memoir told with the techniques of fiction. It ponders his childhood in Danzig, his wartime enthusiasms and shattering disillusionment, and his artistic apprenticeship in Paris, successively peeling away layers of truth about his development. The second and third volume of his fictionalized memoirs—titled Die Box: Dunkelkammergeschichten (2008; The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, 2010), and Grimm's Wörter: eine Liebeserklärung (2010), respectively—continued to interweave reality and the imagined. In Die Box, an aging father—a clear Grass stand-in—gathers his eight children to unsparingly reminisce, over a series of hearty dinners, about their lives together as a family. Grimm's Wörter—subtitled "A Declaration of Love"—further abstracts the concept of a memoir. The book is part biography of the fairy tale writers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, focusing on their time spent editing Das deutsche Wörterbuch (The German Dictionary), and part self-reflection on Grass's lifetime. In between the second and third volumes of his memoirs, Grass released Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland: Tagebuch 1990 (2009; From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990, 2012), a collection of diary entries made during the reunification of East and West Germany that expressed his concerns over a potential resurgence of German nationalism.

Grass was president of the Berlin Academy of Arts from 1983 until 1986. In addition to his Nobel Prize, his numerous other awards and distinctions include an honorary citizenship of Gdańsk. Grass died at the age of eighty-seven on April 13, 2015, after a lung infection and subsequent illness. He was working on another book at the time of his death.

Significance

The playful sense of the absurd and grotesque that informs many of Grass’s works gave him a unique presence in the literary history of postwar Germany. He must be considered a consummate narrative artist who possessed a wild and decidedly Rabelaisian imagination. His surrealistic style appears at times as a forerunner of the magical realism found in the later works of Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez. The often bizarre characters that populate his fiction are highly entertaining and yet offer a singular and disturbing perspective on the historical and political events around them.

These grotesque and absurd elements in Grass’s work comprise a major dimension of the pointed satire that fuels his sharp social and political criticism. “I have my roots,” he declared in his Nobel lecture before the Swedish Academy, “in the Spanish or Moorish school of the picaresque novel. Tilting at windmills has remained a model for that school down through the ages, and the picaro’s very existence derives from the comic nature of defeat.”

Grass’s intent was to raise through satire, humor, and outrage, readers’ consciousness concerning politics and society. In this regard, his work represents what French philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre called une littérature engagée, a literature that directly addresses, or engages, the pressing concerns of society. Grass’s active participation in the political issues of West German society was an extension of the import of his writings. For future generations, Grass will be remembered as a highly talented artist who sought to take a stand on the problems that confronted his nation.

Bibliography

Berman, Russell A. "Roundtable on Günter Grass's "Was gesagt werden muss" (What Must Be Said)." German Studies Review 36.2 (2013): 381–83. Print.

Brunssen, Frank. "A Moral Authority? Günter Grass as the Conscience of the German Nation." Debatte: Review of Contemporary German Affairs 19.3 (2011): 565–84. Print.

Grass, Günter. The Günter Grass Reader. Ed. by Helmut Frielinghaus. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. Print.

Grass, Günter. “How I Spent the War.” The New Yorker, June 4, 2007. Print.

Hayman, Ronald. Günter Grass. London: Methuen, 1985. Print.

Hollington, Michael. Günter Grass: The Writer in a Pluralist Society. London: Boyars, 1980. Print.

Kinzer, Stephen. "Günter Grass Dies at 87; Writer Pried Open Germany's Past but Hid His Own." New York Times. New York Times, 13 Apr. 2015. Web. 4 May 2015.

Miles, Keith. Günter Grass. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975. Print.

Minden, Michael. "'Grass auseinandergeschrieben:' Günter Grass's Hundejahre and Mimesis." German Quarterly 86.1 (2013): 25–42. Print.

Müller, Jan-Werner. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.

O’Neill, Patrick. Günter Grass Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999.

Preece, Julian. The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.

Reddick, John. The “Danzig Trilogy” of Günter Grass: A Study of “The Tin Drum,” “Cat and Mouse,” and “The Dog Years.” New York: Harcourt, 1974. Print.