Günter Grass

Born Günter Wilhelm Grass on October 16, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdańsk, Poland, the son of a German Protestant father and a Kashubian mother who ran a small grocery store. The city of his childhood, polyglot, contested, destroyed, became the obsessive landscape of his fiction. At fifteen he volunteered for submarine service and was rejected; at seventeen, in late 1944, he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, a fact he concealed for over sixty years. He was wounded, captured by American forces, and held as a prisoner of war until April 1946. After the war he worked as a farmhand, potash miner, stonemason's apprentice, and jazz drummer before studying sculpture and graphic arts at the Düsseldorf and Berlin academies. He moved to Paris in 1956 and there, in a cramped room, wrote Die Blechtrommel, The Tin Drum (1959), the story of Oskar Matzerath, a boy who refuses to grow, narrating the horrors of the Nazi era from beneath a table while beating his tin drum. It became a landmark of European magic realism and the first volume of the Danzig Trilogy, completed by Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963). Grass became the moral conscience of postwar Germany, an outspoken supporter of the Social Democrats and a persistent voice against collective amnesia. In 2006, just before publishing his memoir Peeling the Onion, he revealed his wartime service in the Waffen-SS, provoking a firestorm that many felt undermined decades of moral authority. In 1999 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "frolicsome black fables" that "portray the forgotten face of history." He died on April 13, 2015, in Lübeck, at eighty-seven.