Günter Grass

Biography

Grass illustrated his first book of poems, The Advantages of Windfowl (Die Vorzüge der Windhühner), with his own drawings, working together with the publisher’s editor. Almost all his later books turned out the same way: poems appeared with graphics, and many of the novels came with drawings.

He was born on 16 October 1927 in Danzig, then a Free City, in the suburb of Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). His father, Wilhelm Grass, was a Protestant of German origin; his mother, Helene, was a Kashubian Catholic, and Grass himself said he was Kashubian. His parents kept a grocery shop with living quarters attached. The boy was brought up a Catholic and served as an altar boy at Mass. His drawing teacher at school noticed his ability and invited him to her studio in her garden.

In 1943, at sixteen, he became an anti-aircraft auxiliary and was then sent into the Reich Labour Service, the state work conscription. In November 1944 he was called up into the Waffen-SS, the armed branch of the SS, and assigned to the 10th SS Panzer Division “Frundsberg”. He was wounded on 20 April 1945, and on 8 May he was taken prisoner by American forces near Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně). Until 24 April 1946 he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp at Bad Aibling in Bavaria. Grass spoke publicly about his Waffen-SS service only in 2006, in an interview about his book Peeling the Onion.

After captivity he lived on odd jobs, then spent a year learning stonemasonry in Düsseldorf and in 1948 entered the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. He first studied under Josef Mages, then moved to Otto Pankok, who left his students a great deal of freedom. Grass later established a prize in Pankok’s name for work on behalf of the Sinti and Roma. He earned his living dressing shop windows and working as a doorman at the Café Zum Csikós, where he played the washboard in a small band. From 1953 to 1956 he studied in Berlin under the sculptor Karl Hartung, who in 1956 named him his top pupil. In those years Grass was marked by his stubborn commitment to representational art, at a time when abstraction dominated the art scene. He gave sculptures and drawings to an exhibition in Stuttgart, and exhibitions of his work took place in Stuttgart and Berlin in 1956–1957. The drawings he offered to an artists’ association for one of its exhibitions were rejected by the jury.

In 1954 he married Anna Schwarz, a Swiss student at a ballet school. From 1956 they lived in Paris, and in a basement studio on the Avenue d’Italie Grass modelled sculpture and wrote his first novel. The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) was finished in early 1959. He had read passages from it at a meeting of Group 47, a circle of German-language writers, in 1958, and received the group’s prize; he had belonged to it since 1957. The novel came out in 1959 and brought him international fame; Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963) followed, and together the three make up the Danzig Trilogy. The jury of the Bremen Literature Prize wanted to honour The Tin Drum, but the city’s senate objected, and the prize was not awarded. Volker Schlöndorff’s film of the novel won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979 and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Next came the play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising (1966), From the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Flounder (1977), The Rat (1986), The Call of the Toad (1992) and Crabwalk (2002). For decades he supported the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and wrote speeches for Willy Brandt, though he joined the party only in 1982. From August 1986 to January 1987 he lived in India, mainly in Calcutta, and brought back a diary in drawings, Show Your Tongue (Zunge zeigen). In 1990, on German reunification, he argued for a confederation of the two German states.

In 1999 the Nobel committee awarded him the prize for “frolicsome black fables” that portray “the forgotten face of history”. His poem “What Must Be Said” (2012), which criticised Israel, led Israel to declare him persona non grata.

In Lübeck there is the Günter Grass House, which holds most of his literary and artistic work. In my view, his drawings and sculptures cannot be treated as a sideline: he began with them and returned to them all his life. After 2013 he announced that he would write no more novels, and he worked mainly in watercolour.

Grass died on 13 April 2015 in Lübeck. He is buried in Behlendorf, where he had lived since 1995. His last book, About Finitude (Vonne Endlichkait), with short prose, poems and pencil drawings, was published in August 2015.