Gunter Grass eBooks

Günter Grass is a German author and the recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Poland in 1927, he went to West Germany in 1945 as a refugee. He had been drafted into the Waffen-SS as a teenager, and had been sent to an American prisoner-of-war camp a year later. Grass worked as a stonemason during the late 1940s, and studied sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts.

As an author, Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, published in 1959. The European magic realism novel was the start of his Danzig Trilogy. It reflected his home town in the time of his childhood, and the novels portray the experiences of the area during the rise of Nazism and World War II. The trilogy was completed with 1961’s Cat and Mouse and 1963’s Dog Years.

Grass has also written a number of plays. His first, The Wicked Cooks, was written in 1956. In the same year, he published a book of poetry. He is also well known for his political work, being a supporter of the Social Democratic Party and an activist in the peace movement. He notably opposed the reunification of Germany. Grass has published several volumes of political speeches and essays.

In 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, being noted as an author whose work portrays “the forgotten face of history.” Since 2007, he has also published three volumes of his memoir.