Günter Wilhelm Grass (1927–2015) was a German novelist, poet, and playwright who was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is acclaimed as the literary spokesperson for the German generation that grew up in the Nazi era and survived the war.
Born in Danzig (now Gdansk,) Poland, Grass lived through the Hitler Youth movement and got conscripted during World War II. He served in the Waffen-SS, the dishonorable military wing of Hitler’s establishment, which later got absorbed into the Nazi German army. He was injured and imprisoned by American troops and was one of the first Germans to be paraded through the Dachau concentration camp to confront the atrociousness of the Holocaust.
After the war, Grass worked in farming and mining before attending college for painting and sculpture. His early literary efforts were in poetry and plays. Grass’s noteworthy works include Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum; 1959) and Der Butt (The Flounder; 1977.) The Tin Drum is a German and world literary classic, and is acclaimed as the defining masterpiece of the Nazi experience from a German perspective.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Gunter Grass
The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: The Mind
Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: Belief
If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle—absolute busyness—then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy—and without consciousness.
—Gunter Grass
Art is uncompromising and life is full of compromises.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: Compromise
Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: Art, Artists
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: The Future, Future
Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information. We are unable to take it all in.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: Information
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 in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.
—Gunter Grass
Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.
—Gunter Grass
Topics: Despair
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Konrad Adenauer German Statesman
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German Poet
Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
Heinrich Boll German Writer
Thomas Mann German Novelist
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Colombian Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Hermann Hesse Swiss Novelist, Poet
Johann Gottfried Herder German Poet, Literary Critic
Heinrich Heine German Poet, Writer