A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

Novelist Gunter Grass as a Man

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 15, 2015

GUNTER GRASS BIOGRAPHY

Günter Wilhelm Grass (German: [October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). He served as a teen-aged soldier in the Waffen SS starting in 1944, and was taken prisoner by U.S. forces in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. 

Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, he began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.

Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, which includes Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. 

His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). 

The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history."

Günter Grass's father, Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), was a Protestant ethnic German, and his mother, Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), was a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin.  

Grass was raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy when he was a child.  His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk Wrzeszcz). He had a sister, Waltraud, born in 1930.

Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943, aged 16, he became a Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force "helper"), then he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labor Service). In November 1944, shortly after his 17th birthday, he volunteered for submarine service with Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle class.

He was not accepted by the Navy and instead was drafted in late 1944 into the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg.  Grass did not reveal until 2006 that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS at that time.  His unit functioned as a regular Panzer Division, and he served with them from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945. He was captured in Marienbad and sent to a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp.  He was only seventeen years old.

In 1946 and 1947, Grass worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He became a founding member of the Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter. Grass worked as an author, graphic designer, and sculptor, travelling frequently. In 1953 he moved to West Berlin where he studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1960, he lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. In 1961 he voiced his opposition to the construction of the Berlin Wall.

From 1983 to 1986, he held the presidency of the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

GUNTER GRASS IN PERSPECTIVE

If anyone has read the works referred to here, I think they will agree that Grass is a comic, tortured, imaginative, and mystifying novelist of the most creative kind. 

My wonder was always why the Academy of the Nobel Prize Committee waited so long to give this man the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I can only assume it was because of his World War Two experience.

Consider the fact that he was eleven years old when Hitler’s Nazis army invaded Poland in September 1939, and went through several iterations from a Brown Shirt Youth to a combat soldier, being at the front and being captured as a prisoner of war, and he was still only a teenager at the war’s end in April 1945, seventeen years of age.

Of humble birth, but of a spirited temperament, he climbed that mountain to ultimate prominence in his many professions.  When in 2006, he admitted to having been a Nazi, he was treated as if a terrible traitor to human values when his whole war experience was only that of a boy.  It is not surprising near the end of his life to hear him saying, “I believe (in his country) to the end.”  Why shouldn’t he?

My best friend in the US Navy on the USS Salem (CA-139), flagship of the Sixth Fleet operating in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s, was Wolfgang Erdmann.

Wolfgang was one of those fourteen year olds Hitler was photographed tapping on the head in early 1945 who were to go into combat on the Eastern Front to fight the Russians who were advancing on Berlin.

He survived that chapter in his life, found his way to the United States, and was eventually drafted into the US Navy, where we met up on this ship. 

We often talked about the war, and his terrifying experience, experience I could not relate to at all, as I was in the safety of my home, my school, my community with no sense of danger and only the inconvenience of rationing.

Today, I wish to pay tribute to Gunter Grass for his art and for his life of service to others.  May his soul forever rest in peace.

*     *     *