Grass, Günter Wilhelm (1927– )

German writer. The grotesque humour and socialist feeling of his novels Die Blechtrommel/The Tin Drum (1959) and Der Butt/The Flounder (1977) are also characteristic of many of his poems. Deeply committed politically, Grass's works contain a mixture of scurrility, humour, tragedy, satire, and marvellously inventive imagery. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

Die Blechtrommel, one of the most successful post-war German novels, is narrated by a midget, Oskar, who willed himself to stop growing at the age of three, a device that enabled the Grass to hover between fantasy and realism and achieve a detachment to make the scenes and characters of German life before and during the Nazi regime stand out with extraordinary clarity and humour.

Grass was born in Danzig (now Gdańsk), studied at the art academies of Düsseldorf and Berlin, worked as a writer and sculptor (first in Paris and later in Berlin), and in 1958 won the coveted Group 47 prize for Die Blechtrommel while it was still unfinished. The brilliant, tightly controlled novella Katz und Maus/Cat and Mouse (1961) demonstrated Grass's ability to direct his satire with complete accuracy at the world of Nazi heroics. Hundejahre/Dog Years (1963) is another vast novel, with a wider political range than Die Blechtrommel, in which the world of political reality is ironically unmasked and seen from the perspective of a dog's fate. Grass left the immediacy of the pre-1945 era in Ortlich betäubt/Local Anaesthetic (1969), and presented a more contemporary German intellectualizing of the past and present. Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke/From the Diary of a Snail (1972) is an autobiographical stock-taking, and Der Bürger und seine Stimme/The Citizen and his Vote (1974) an important collection of speeches and essays. In 2000 he published My Century, a collection of a hundred short stories, one for each year of the 20th century, as well as a novel, Too Far Afield. Im Krebsgang/Crabwalk, a novel based on the sinking of a Nazi ship in 1945, followed in 2002, and the memoir Peeling the Onion in 2007.

In 2006 great controversy surrounded Grass' disclosure that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.