German · b. 1927
German novelist and Nobel laureate, author of The Tin Drum, whose Danzig Trilogy confronted Germany's Nazi past through grotesque, carnivalesque fiction.
Günter Grass was born in Danzig — now Gdańsk — in 1927, in a city that was itself a kind of fiction: a Free City, technically neither German nor Polish, that existed between the wars as a diplomatic compromise and was obliterated by history. That vanished city became the gravitational center of his greatest work. The Tin Drum, published in 1959, introduced Oskar Matzerath, a boy who refuses to grow at age three and who drums his way through the rise of Nazism, the fall of Danzig, and the chaos of postwar Germany. The novel was a thunderclap in German literature — riotous, grotesque, sexually frank, and morally merciless — arriving at a moment when most of West Germany was still preferring silence about what had happened.
The Danzig Trilogy, completed by Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, established Grass as the conscience of the Federal Republic, a role he took seriously and sometimes wore too heavily. The Flounder, published in 1977, was a sprawling feminist-inflected fable stretching across centuries of Prussian history. Crabwalk, appearing in 2002, returned to the war’s end to examine a maritime catastrophe — the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff — that German literature had largely avoided, arguing that German suffering and German guilt were not mutually exclusive subjects. His later political essays were often belligerent and occasionally wrongheaded, but they were never indifferent.
The 1999 Nobel Prize was awarded, the Swedish Academy said, for his portrayal of “the forgotten face of history.” Seven years later, Grass revealed in his memoir Peeling the Onion that he had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager, a disclosure that stunned the literary world and invited accusations of hypocrisy from a man who had spent decades urging Germans to confront their past. His defenders noted the complexity of a seventeen-year-old conscript; his critics noted the decades of silence. The controversy shrinks nothing in The Tin Drum, which remains one of the essential European novels of the twentieth century.
by Günter Grass
Oskar Matzerath, narrating from a mental institution, recounts how at age three he decided to stop growing, and how he witnessed the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the collapse of Danzig through the perspective of a child in an adult world — beating his tin drum and shattering glass with his voice.
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by Günter Grass
Danzig, World War II: the narrator Pilenz obsessively remembers Mahlke, his schoolmate with an enormous Adam's apple—the 'mouse' to a cat's pounce—who became a war hero and then a deserter. The second book of Grass's Danzig Trilogy is the most concentrated and the most disturbing.
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by Günter Grass
A German shepherd dog—passing from a miller's family to a German boy to Hitler himself—becomes the thread connecting three narrators' accounts of Danzig, the Nazi period, and postwar West Germany. The third and most complex volume of the Danzig Trilogy.
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by Günter Grass
A magical flounder advises men throughout German history—from the Neolithic to the 1970s. Now the flounder has been caught and is being tried by a feminist tribunal. Meanwhile, a narrator who has been alive throughout all of human history recounts his relationship with nine cooks across three millennia. Grass's most formally extravagant novel.
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The best German literature — from The Magic Mountain and The Tin Drum to The Trial and The Metamorphosis. Essential reading from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
guide
Günter Grass's complete bibliography in order — from The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse to Dog Years. Best starting points for new readers of the Nobel laureate.
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Where to start with Günter Grass — whether to begin with The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, or The Flounder. A complete reading guide to Grass's Danzig novels.
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Grass's Oskar Matzerath — who stops growing at three and watches the twentieth century from below adult eye level — is one of fiction's great unreliable witnesses. These books share its dark humor, its European modernist ambition, and its determination to make historical atrocity visible through strange and distorted forms.
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