Günter Grass

Günter Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk, to a German Protestant father and a Kashubian Catholic mother who kept a grocery shop in the suburb of Langfuhr. Conscripted as a teenager, he served in the last months of the war in a Waffen-SS tank division, was wounded, and spent time as an American prisoner of war; he disclosed the SS service only in 2006. After the war he worked in a mine, trained as a stonemason and studied sculpture and graphic art in Düsseldorf and Berlin, joining the writers of Group 47.

The Tin Drum (1959), narrated by Oskar Matzerath, who stops growing at three and records the age on his drum, became the founding novel of West Germany’s literary reckoning with Nazism. With Cat and Mouse and Dog Years it forms the Danzig Trilogy, a world of grotesque comedy, Catholic ritual and lower-middle-class complicity. Later novels, among them The Flounder, ranged across centuries of history, while Crabwalk returned to the sinking of a refugee ship in 1945. He also wrote poetry and plays, and illustrated his own books.

Grass was a prominent supporter of the Social Democrats and a contentious public voice for half a century. The Nobel Prize came in 1999, forty years after The Tin Drum. His memoir Peeling the Onion (2006) caused an uproar with its account of his SS service. He died in Lübeck in 2015.