Historical records matching Günter Wilhelm Grass
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About Günter Wilhelm Grass
Günter Wilhelm Grass (1927-2015) was a German-Kashubian novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). As a teenager, he served as a drafted soldier from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS and 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 him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history". Wikipedia EN
Life
Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Willy Grass (1899–1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. Grass was raised a Catholic. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, who was born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, volunteered into the Waffen-SS. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American POW camp.
In 1946 and 1947 he worked in a mine and received a stonemason's education. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and travelled frequently. He married in 1954 and since 1960 has lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
Works
English-speaking readers probably know Grass best as the author of The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), published in 1959 (and subsequently filmed by director Volker Schlöndorff in 1979). It was followed in 1961 by the novella Cat and Mouse (Katz und Maus) and in 1963 by the novel Dog Years (Hundejahre), which together with The Tin Drum form what is known as The Danzig Trilogy. All three works deal with the rise of Nazism and with the war experience in the unique cultural setting of Danzig and the delta of the Vistula River. Dog Years, in many respects a sequel to The Tin Drum, portrays the area's mixed ethnicities and complex historical background in lyrical prose that is highly evocative.
Grass has received dozens of international awards and in 1999 achieved the highest literary honor: the Nobel Prize for Literature. His literature is commonly categorized as part of the artistic movement of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, roughly translated as "coming to terms with the past."
In 2002 Grass returned to the forefront of world literature with Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang). This novella, one of whose main characters first appeared in Cat and Mouse, was Grass' most successful work in decades.
Representatives of the City of Bremen joined together to establish the Günter Grass Foundation, with the aim of establishing a centralized collection of his numerous works, especially his many personal readings, videos and films. The Günter Grass House in Lübeck houses exhibitions of his drawings and sculptures, an archive and a library.
As a trained graphic artist, he has also created the distinctive cover art for his novels.
He was elected in 1993 an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
See also: "Günter Grass - Photo Gallery". Nobelprize.org.
Über Günter Wilhelm Grass (Deutsch)
Günter Wilhelm Grass (1927-2015) war ein deutscher Schriftsteller, Bildhauer, Maler und Grafiker. Grass gehörte seit 1957 zur Gruppe 47 und wurde mit seinem Debütroman Die Blechtrommel 1959 zu einem international geachteten Autor der deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur. Grass’ Werk und Rolle als Autor und politischer Intellektueller war und ist Gegenstand umfangreicher Forschung sowie des Medieninteresses im In- und Ausland. Seine zentrale Motivation war der Verlust seiner Heimat Danzig und die Auseinandersetzung mit der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit, die sich vielfach in seinen Werken widerspiegelt. Seine Popularität als Schriftsteller nutzte er häufig, um das politische und gesellschaftliche Tagesgeschehen öffentlich zu kommentieren. Er war langjährig in Wahlkämpfen für die SPD und die Grünen aktiv und präsent. Grass’ Bücher wurden in zahlreiche Sprachen übersetzt und teilweise verfilmt. Im Jahr 1999 erhielt er den Nobelpreis für Literatur; er wurde mit einer Vielzahl weiterer Auszeichnungen geehrt. Wikipedia DE
About Günter Wilhelm Grass (Polski)
Günter Wilhelm Grass (1927-2015) – niemiecki pisarz narodowości niemiecko-kaszubskiej, laureat Nagrody Nobla w dziedzinie literatury w 1999 roku. Doktor honoris causa Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego za wybitną twórczość literacką oraz wkład w polsko-niemieckie pojednanie (1993) oraz Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu (1990). W 1993 Rada Miasta przyznała pisarzowi tytuł Honorowego Obywatela Miasta Gdańska. Członek Niemieckiego Centrum PEN. Wikipedia PL
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Günter Wilhelm Grass's Timeline
| 1927 |
October 16, 1927
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Gdańsk (Freie Stadt Danzig), pomorskie, Poland
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