Historical Figure
Günter Grass
1927–2015
German author and artist (1927–2015)
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Biography
Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Timeline
The story of Günter Grass, told in moments.
Drafted into the Waffen-SS at 17. He served in the final months of the war. He didn't reveal this publicly until 2006. The confession shook Germany.
The Tin Drum published. A boy refuses to grow past age three. He drums incessantly. The novel was filthy, surreal, brilliant. It made Grass the defining German writer of the postwar era.
Won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee praised his "frolicsome black fables." He used the acceptance speech to attack NATO's bombing of Serbia.
In Their Own Words (4)
Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.
As quoted in The Boys' Crusade (2003) by Paul Fussell, pg xv, 2003
We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!
The Rat (1986), p. 6, 1986
I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
"On Stasis and Progress"' in Diary of a Snail (1972), 1972
Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred.
The Tin Drum Book 1, "Rasputin and the Alphabet" (1959), as translated by Ralph Manheim (1961), 1959
Artifacts (15)
Grass and Pool
Ansel Adams
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