GRASS, GNTER

born Oct. 16, 1927, Danzig [now Gdansk, Pol.] in full Gnter Wilhelm Grass German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker who, with his extraordinary first novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum), became the literary spokesman for the German generation that grew up in the Nazi era and survived the war. In 1999 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his accomplishments. In his native Danzig, Grass passed through the Hitler Youth movement, was drafted at 16, wounded in battle, and became a prisoner of war. Later, while an art student in Dsseldorf, he supported himself as a dealer in the black market, a tombstone cutter, and a drummer in a jazz band. Encouraged by the writers' association Gruppe 47, he produced poems and plays, at first with little success. In 1956 he went to Paris and wrote Die Blechtrommel (filmed 1979). This exuberant, picaresque novel, written in a variety of styles, imaginatively distorts and exaggerates his personal experiences-the Polish-German dualism of Danzig, the creeping Nazification of average families, the attrition of the war years, the coming of the Russians, and the complacent atmosphere of West Germany's postwar "economic miracle." Underlying the anarchic fantasy is the moral earnestness that has earned Grass the role of "conscience of his generation." It was followed by Katz und Maus (1961; Cat and Mouse) and an epic novel, Hundejahre (1963; Dog Years); the three together form a trilogy set in Danzig. His other novels-always politically topical-include rtlich Betubt (1969; Local Anaesthetic), a protest against the Vietnam War; Der Butt (1977; The Flounder), a ribald fable of the war between the sexes from the Stone Age to the present; Das Treffen in Telgte (1979; The Meeting at Telgte), a hypothetical "Gruppe 1647" meeting of authors at the close of the Thirty Years' War; Kopfgeburten: oder die Deutschen sterben aus (1980; Headbirths; or, The Germans Are Dying Out), which describes a young couple's agonizing over whether to have a child in the face of a population explosion and the threat of nuclear war; Die Rttin (1986; The Rat), a vision of the end of the human race that expressed Grass's fear of nuclear holocaust and environmental disaster; and Unkenrufe (1992; The Call of the Toad), which concerned the uneasy relationship between Poland and Germany. In 1995 Grass published Ein weites Feld ("A Broad Field"), an ambitious novel treating Germany's reunification in 1990. The work was vehemently attacked by German critics, who denounced Grass's portrayal of reunification as "misconstrued" and "unreadable." Grass, whose leftist political views were often not well received, was outspoken in his belief that Germany lacked "the politically organized power to renew itself." Mein Jahrhundert (1999; My Century), a collection of 100 related stories, was less overtly political than many of his earlier works. In it Grass relates the events of the 20th century using a story for each year, each with a different narrator. Grass was a long-time participant in Social Democratic Party politics in West Berlin, fighting for social and literary causes. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, there were many who believed that his strong, and sometimes unpopular, political beliefs had prevented him from receiving the prize far earlier.