Günter Grass | |
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 Grass in 1982 | |
| Born | Günter Wilhelm Grass 16 October 1927 |
| Died | 13 April 2015 (aged 87) Lübeck, Germany |
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| Language | German |
| Period | 1956–2013 |
| Literary movement | Vergangenheitsbewältigung |
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| Spouse | Anna Margareta Schwarz (m. 1954; div. 1978)Ute Grunert (m. 1979) |
| Children | 6 |
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Günter Wilhelm Grass (German: [ˈɡʏntɐ ˈɡʁas] ⓘ;[1][2] 16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.[3][4][5][6]
He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). At age 17, he was drafted into the military and served from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS. He was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass 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, the other two being 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. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history."
The Flounder
The 1977 novel The Flounder (Der Butt) is based on the folktale of "The Fisherman and His Wife", and deals with the struggle between the sexes. It has been read as an anti-feminist novel. In the novel the magical flounder of the folk tale represents male triumphalism and the patriarchy. It is caught by a group of 1970s feminists, who put it on trial. The book interrogates male-female relations from the past and the present through the relationship between the narrator and his wife who, like the wife in the folk tale, insatiably craves more.[27] Although the book could be read as a defense of women and a denunciation of male chauvinism, it was largely harshly critiqued and rejected by feminists. They rejected its portrayal of violence, sexualization and objectification, and what they perceived as male narcissism and gender essentialism.