I am actually reading Gunter Grass Hundejahre and saw his movie die Blechtrommel.
I think he is a great writer, who joyned the SS in the last stage of the war as a young
boy, who was probably naieve and forced to joyn the Force.
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_BlechtrommelGünter GrassFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaGünter Wilhelm Grass (born October 16, 1927) is a Nobel Prize-winning German author. He was born in the Free City of Danzig. In 1945 he came as a refugee to West Germany, but in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood. He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism. His works frequently have a strong (left wing) political dimension, although he is a staunch critic of both right-wing and left-wing political extremism including communism. Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 2006, controversy followed his belated admission that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS in the last stages of World War II.
WorksEnglish-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 received dozens of international awards and in 1999 achieved the highest literary honour: 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.
LifeGrass was born in the Free City of Danzig on October 16, 1927, to Willy Grass (1899-1979), a Protestant ethnic German, and Helene (née Knoff) Grass (1898-1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. The couple had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gda?sk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine, and was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (1942) and in November 1944 into the Waffen-SS. Grass saw combat with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was was wounded on April 20th 1945 and sent afterwards 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).
Political activismGrass took an active role in
the Social-Democratic (
SPD)
party and supported
Willy Brandt's election campaign. He criticised left-wing radicals and instead argued in favour of the "snail's pace", as he put it, of democratic reform (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke).
In the 1980s, he became active in the peace movement and visited Calcutta for six months. A diary with drawings was published as Zunge zeigen, an allusion to Kali's tongue.
During the the events leading up to the unification of Germany in 1989-90, Grass argued for continued separation of the two Germanies, asserting that a unified Germany would necessarily resume its role as belligerent nation-state. In 2001 Grass proposed the creation of a German-Polish museum for art stolen by the Nazis.
Disclosure of Waffen-SS MembershipOn 11 August 2006, in an interview about his forthcoming book While Skinning an Onion, Grass stated that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. Before this interview, Grass was seen as someone who had been a typical member of the "
Flakhelfer generation", one of those too young to see much fighting or to be involved with the Nazi regime in any way beyond its youth organizations.
After an unsuccessful attempt to volunteer for the U-Boat fleet at age 15, Grass was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and then called up for the Waffen-SS in 1944. He was trained as a tank gunner and fought with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg until its surrender to US forces at Marienbad. At that point of the war, youths could be conscripted into the Waffen-SS instead of the army; this was unrelated to membership of the SS proper. Grass said:
"It happened as it did to many of my age. We were in the labour service and all at once, a year later, the call-up notice lay on the table. And only when I got to Dresden did I learn it was the Waffen-SS."As Grass has for many decades been an outspoken left-leaning critic of Germany's treatment of its Nazi past, his statement caused a great stir in the press. Grass's biographer
Michael Jürgs spoke of "
the end of a moral institution".
Lech Walesa has severely criticized Grass for keeping silent about his membership for 60 years. Also,
Joachim Fest, a German journalist and biographer of Adolf Hitler, told Der Spiegel:
"
After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."
Rolf Hochhuth said it was "
disgusting" that this same Grass, "
politically correctly", had publicly criticized Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan's visit to a military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985, because it also contained graves of Waffen-SS soldiers.
On August 14, 2006, the ruling party of Poland, the "
Law and Justice" party, called on Grass to relinquish his honorary citizenship of Gdansk.
Jacek Kurski stated, "
It is unacceptable for a city where the first blood was shed, where World War Two began, to have a Waffen-SS member as an honorary citizen." The mayor of Gdansk,
Pawel Adamowicz, said that he opposed submitting the affair to the municipal council because it was not for the council to judge history.
On August 15, 2006, the online edition of German weekly "Der Spiegel" published three documents of US forces dating from 1946, verifying the membership of
Günter Grass within the Waffen-SS.
From Der Spiegel English edition;
service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,431862,00.html
