Grass, Günter << grahs, GUN tuhr >> (1927-2015), was a German novelist, poet, playwright, artist, and essayist. He played a key role in German literary and intellectual life beginning in the late 1950’s. Grass was a prominent member of the “Group 47,” an association of writers who helped restore substance and integrity to German literature after the Nazi period. Grass won the 1999 Nobel Prize in literature.
Grass became internationally known for his innovative novels, which often combine raw realism with fantasy and grotesque narrative situations. His writing is predominantly devoted to social and political issues and advocates the values of democratic socialism. His best-known novel, The Tin Drum (1959), as well as Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963), critically analyzes fascism as a social disease. In his later writings, Grass criticized, often satirically, German society following World War II (1939-1945). These works include Local Anaesthetic (1969), From the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Flounder (1977), Headbirths, or the Germans Are Dying Out (1980), Too Far Afield (1995), and the play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966). The Rat (1986), Grass’s gloomiest novel, confronts the possibility of human self-destruction by nuclear war. His historical novel Crabwalk (2002) is based on an actual incident in World War II when a Russian submarine torpedoed a German ship carrying refugees. In the autobiographical novel The Box: Tales from the Darkroom (2008), a character resembling the author evaluates his life, partly through the memories of his children.
Grass was born on Oct. 16, 1927, in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), the setting for several of his novels. He wrote an autobiography, Peeling the Onion (2006). Before its publication, Grass admitted that he had served in the Waffen SS, a Nazi military unit accused of war crimes, when he was 17. Many Germans criticized Grass’s long delay in revealing his service in the Waffen SS. They claimed his silence had damaged his position as a moral conscience for postwar Germany. Grass died on April 13, 2015.
