Günter Grass

Günter Wilhelm Grass (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.

He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland).

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), a Lutheran Protestant of German origin, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin.

He identified as Kashubian.

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 younger sister, Waltraud, born in 1930.

Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum.

In 1943, at age 16, he became a Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force "helper").

Soon thereafter, he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labour Service).

As a teenager, 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.

In November 1944, shortly after his 17th birthday, Grass volunteered for submarine service with Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement felt as a teenager in his parents' house", which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle-class.

After the Navy refused him, he was called up for the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg in late 1944.

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 (now Mariánské Lázně, Czech Republic) and sent to a US prisoner-of-war camp in Bad Aibling, Bavaria.

He was released in April 1946.

From 1946 to 1947, Grass worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry.

He studied sculpture and graphics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

He also was a co-founder of Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter.

Grass worked as a writer, graphic designer, and sculptor, traveling frequently.

Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s.

In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.

In 1953 he moved to West Berlin and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts.

In 1954 Grass married Anna Margareta Schwarz, a Swiss dancer, which ended in divorce in 1978.

He and Schwarz had four children: Franz (born 1957), Raoul (1957), Laura (1961), and Bruno (1965).

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).

From 1960, he lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein.

In 1961 he publicly objected to the erection of the Berlin Wall.

They separated in 1972, and he began a relationship with Veronika Schröter, with whom he had a daughter, Helene (1974).

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.

He also had a daughter, Nele (1979), with Ingrid Kruger.

In 1979 he married Ute Grunert, an organist, to whom he was still married at his death.

He had two stepsons from his second marriage, Malte and Hans.

He had 18 grandchildren at his death.

Grass was a fan of Bundesliga Club SC Freiburg.

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

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".

Grass did not reveal until 2006 that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS at that time.