Background
Gunter Grass was born in the free city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on October 16, 1927; the son of Wilhelm Grass and Helene Grass (née Knoff).
( A novel set in three parts, beginning in the 1920s and ...)
A novel set in three parts, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 1950s, that follows the lives of two friends from the prewar years in Germany through an apocalyptic period and its startling aftermath. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/015626112X/?tag=2022091-20
( In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prizewinning autho...)
In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prizewinning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onionwhich caused great controversy when it was published in Germanyreveals Grass at his most intimate.
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( Starusch, a 40-year-old teacher of German and history, ...)
Starusch, a 40-year-old teacher of German and history, undergoes protracted dental treatment in an office where TV is used to distract the patients. Under local anesthesia, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. A satirical portrait of social confusions. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156529408/?tag=2022091-20
(Two old men roam through Berlin stopping to eat hamburger...)
Two old men roam through Berlin stopping to eat hamburgers at Macdonald's, observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the wall in 1989: Theo Wuttke, former East German cultural functionary and Ludwig Hoftaller - Wuttke's shadow - a mid-level spy who can serve the Gestapo or the Stasi with equal dedication. Grass writes with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition and political acerbity for which he is celebrated. This novel will stand as perhaps the most complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's reunification will eventually come to mean.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0571206646/?tag=2022091-20
(It is impossible not to be impressed by Grasss inexhaus...)
It is impossible not to be impressed by Grasss inexhaustible desire to experiment with the novel and by the many good stories and passages of exquisite writing in The Box.Charles Simic, New York Review of Books In this inspired and daring work of fiction, Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, and especially of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, happy, loving, accusatorythey piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, a photographer and family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more than simple replication. They reveal a truth beyond ordinary life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: Was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? An audacious literary experiment, The Box is Grass at his best.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0547577648/?tag=2022091-20
( The final work of the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grassa...)
The final work of the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grassa witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, the world In spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, suddenly everything seems possible again: love letters, soliloquies, scenes of jealousy, swan songs, social satire, and moments of happiness crowd onto the page. Only an aging artist who has once more cheated death can set to work with such wisdom, defiance, and wit. A wealth of touching stories is condensed into artful miniatures. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose, and drawings, the Nobel Prize-winning author creates his final major work of art. A moving farewell gift, a sensual, melancholy summation of a life fully lived.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/054478538X/?tag=2022091-20
( It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is ...)
It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is caught by a fisherman at the very spot where millennia later Grass's home town, Danzig, will arise. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down through the ages they move together. As Grass blends his ingredients into a powerful brew, he shows himself at the peak of his linguistic inventiveness. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156319357/?tag=2022091-20
( Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for...)
Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now, but no book since The Tin Drum has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. "Scuttling backward to move forward," Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past. Winner of the Nobel Prize
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Gunter Grass was born in the free city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on October 16, 1927; the son of Wilhelm Grass and Helene Grass (née Knoff).
In 1949 he began to study painting at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, at nights supporting himself as the drummer in a jazz band. He also started to write, poems at first, beginning slowly, experimenting with forms, working out his relationship with the past. Later he moved to the Academy of Art in Berlin in 1953.
Grass became known to wide audience, when his wife sent some of his poems to a radio station competition; he was then published in the magazine of the "Gruppe 47, " a group of writers working to develop a postwar renaissance of German literature. In 1958, Grass again turned to Gruppe 47, this time to read two chapters of his new novel. The novel was published a year later, and brought Grass immediate worldwide attention. It was The Tin Drum. The Tin Drum's narrator, a complex and self-contradictory drummer named Oskar, a dwarf, leads readers through the events of the war and postwar years through a distorted and exaggerated perspective.
The second novel in what came to be known as the Danzig Trilogy, Cat and Mouse (1961), features a hero deformed by his times, playing the cat to the world's mouse, rendered impotent by time's unalterable concern with the trivial. The basic idea of the story is that no single perspective can do justice to a plural reality. The last of the trilogy, Dog Years (1963), deals with the ways in which the past (and its myths) help shape and determine the present. Like The Tin Drum, its structure is circular, ending as it begins, suggestive of Grass's sense of despair. In the Danzig Trilogy and in later novels, the characters are often mythic or folkloric or grotesque (very small and/or very different), in order to make the ordinary and the usual appear in a different perspective.
Grass's work as a poet and playwright would not have established his reputation as a significant contemporary writer. There are foreshadowings of images and themes that appear in later prose works. His poetry has been translated in Selected Poems (1966), In the Egg and Other Poems (1977) and Novemberland: Selected Poems, 1956-93. His most popular and controversial play The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising: A German Tragedy (1965, English translation, 1977) deals with the role of the committed artist in society, one of Grass's constant concerns and one that led in the mid-1960's to his direct involvement in politics as a supporter of Willy Brandt and the Social Democratic Party. Local Anesthetic (1969) is an attack on linguistic confusions Grass saw in the slogans of the radical Left, and From the Diary of a Snail (1972), his fictionalized account of his involvement with Brandt's 1969 campaign, he supports gradualism. The Flounder (1977), perhaps Grass's funniest novel, deals with the history of women's emancipation and does not find, in the attitudes of radical feminists, a convincing alternative to the male-dominated past. In Headbirths: or, The Germans are Dying Out (1980), The Meeting at Telgte (1979), and The Rat (1986), Grass shows a world that is going to be worse because it is not getting better. For a long time, Grass was considered the conscience of Germany's postwar generation, but that time has passed. In the 1990's, Grass still believed in "the literature of engagement" and that "to be engaged is to act, " but his readers have changed. When his novel on German-Polish reconciliation The Call of the Toad came out in 1992, it was savagely reviewed in Germany as having nothing new to say. And on the subject of German re-unification, Grass had often said that the experience of Auschwitz was enough to prove that Germans should never again be allowed to live together in one nation; his 1995 novel based on that theme, A Broad Field, provoked harsh literary and political attacks. Nevertheless, at the end of the year more than 175, 000 copies were in print and the book was at the top of Germany's best-seller lists.
In 2001, Grass proposed the creation of a German-Polish museum for art lost to other countries during the War.
On 4 April 2012, Grass's poem "What Must Be Said" was published in several European newspapers. Grass expressed his concern about the hypocrisy of German military support (the delivery of a submarine) for an Israel.
On 26 April 2012, Grass wrote a poem criticizing European policy for the treatment of Greece in the European sovereign-debt crisis.
( The final work of the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grassa...)
(Two old men roam through Berlin stopping to eat hamburger...)
( In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prizewinning autho...)
( A novel set in three parts, beginning in the 1920s and ...)
( Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for...)
(It is impossible not to be impressed by Grasss inexhaus...)
( It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is ...)
( Starusch, a 40-year-old teacher of German and history, ...)
Grass was raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy when he was a child.
Günter Grass was strongly influenced by the political climate of Germany in the era following the disasters of World War I. A Hitler "cub" at 10 and member of the "youth movement" at 14, the boy was infused with Nazi ideology. At 15 he served as an air force auxiliary; he was called to the front and was wounded in 1945. Confined to a hospital bed and then a prisoner of war, Grass later was forced to view the liberated Dachau concentration camp. He left the army at the age of 18, angry about the loss of his childhood, about the fierce and ugly German nationalism which had robbed him of it, and about the almost total destruction of the city of his youth.
In his later years Grass became an ardent socialist, campaigning actively in German politics and denouncing the re-emergence of reactionary groups, and his contemporary political concerns formed the core of his later novels.
During his youth, he became aware of class differences and antagonisms; he developed a dislike for idealists with abstract theories and ideologies and a preference for pluralist skeptics of the non-ideological Left. Everafter, for Grass, in art or in politics, experience was always more significant than theory.
Quotations: "The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open. "
In 1993 he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Grass married a ballet student named Anna Schwarz in 1954. The marriage ended in divorce in 1978. He and Schwarz had four children, Franz (born 1957), Raoul (1957), Laura (1961), and Bruno (1965).
He also had a relationship with Veronika Schroter and had a child with her, Helene (1974). Grass had a child with Ingrid Kruger, Nele (1979).
In 1979 he married Ute Grunert, an organist, to whom he was still married at his death.