Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Wilhelm Grass has died at the age of 87.
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). He served as a soldier in the Nazi Waffen SS during World War II – a fact he did not reveal until 2006 – and was captured by US forces and released in April 1946. After the war he worked in a mine and then trained as a stonemason, becoming a sculptor. He only began writing in the 1950s.
Grass – who excelled in every artistic form he attempted, including poetry, drama and graphic art – is best known to English-language readers for his first novel, The Tin Drum, which was published in 1959. The book is considered a key text in European magic realism, and was the first of Grass’ Danzig Trilogy.
Grass won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, with the Swedish Academy praising him as a writer “whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history”:
When Günter Grass published “The Tin Drum” in 1959 it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction. Within the pages of this, his first novel, Grass recreated the lost world from which his creativity sprang, Danzig, his home town, as he remembered it from the years of his infancy before the catastrophe of war. Here he comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them. At the same time the novel breaks the bounds of realism by having as its protagonist and narrator an infernal intelligence in the body of a three-year-old, a monster who overpowers the fellow human beings he approaches with the help of a toy drum. The unforgettable Oskar Matzerath is an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action in everyday German provincial life just when this small world becomes involved in the insanity of the great world surrounding it. It is not too audacious to assume that “The Tin Drum” will become one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.
Read Grass’ 1991 interview in the Paris Review:
Born in 1927, in Germany, I was twelve years old when the war started and seventeen years old when it was over. I am overloaded with this German past. I’m not the only one; there are other authors who feel this. If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that. That hasn’t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.
This is very sad. A true giant, inspiration, and friend. Drum for him, little Oskar. https://t.co/5b4Y7fTtin
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) April 13, 2015
One of Gunter Grass's last public acts : supporting PEN's call for greater protection for refugees in Europe http://t.co/yZggbtpmz9
— PEN International (@pen_int) April 13, 2015
"Art is uncompromising & life is full of compromises" I'm very sad to learn #GunterGrass has passed away,he had many loyal readers in Turkey
— Elif Şafak / Shafak (@Elif_Safak) April 13, 2015
We've just heard that Günter Grass has died. More shortly. Here's his controversial poem What Must Be Said: http://t.co/wNauDJTDFT
— Guardian Books (@GuardianBooks) April 13, 2015
Book details
- The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
EAN: 9780099597575
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- My Century by Gunter Grass
EAN: 9780571203123
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- From Germany to Germany: Diary 1990 by Gunter Grass
EAN: 9781846554735
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- Peeling the Onion: A Memoir by Gunter Grass
EAN: 9780099507598
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Image courtesy of The Guardian