Alphabet Authors ~ G is for Grass

I found this idea on Simon's blog @ Stuck in a Book. He picks an author for each letter of the alphabet, sharing which of their books he's read, which I ones he owns, how he came across them etc.

Now G, I could only choose on of Germany's greatest authors of all time and if you think Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, I must disappoint you. My favourite German G-author is Günter Grass.

These are his novels I read:
- "Cat and Mouse" (GE: Katz und Maus. Danziger Trilogie 2) - 1961
- "Crabwalk" (GE: Im Krebsgang) - 2002
- "Five Decades" (GE: Fünf Jahrzehnte) - 1999
- "The Tin Drum" (GE: Die Blechtrommel. Danziger Trilogie 1) - 1959

And here are some of his non-fiction books:
- "The Box: Tales From the Darkroom" (GE: Die Box. Dunkelkammergeschichten) - 2008
- "Grimm's Words. A Declaration of Love" (GE: Grimms Wörter. Eine Liebeserklärung) - 2010
- "My Century" (GE: Mein Jahrhundert) - 1999
- "Peeling the Onion" (GE: Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) - 2006

All of them fantastic reads.

Facts about Günter Grass
Born 16 October 1927 as Günter Wilhelm Graß 16 October 1927 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk)
Died 13 April 2015 (aged 87) in Lübeck, Germany

He is mostly known for his contribution to "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" which means which means coping with the past, struggling with the goal to overcome the past. It describes the processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, society, and culture.

His novel "The Tin Drum" was made into a film and received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 1979.

He received several international prizes. As well as being an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature (in 1993), he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for his "... frolicsome black fables [that] portray the forgotten face of history".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

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This is part of an ongoing series where I will write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.

Grass, Günter "Cat and Mouse"

Grass, Günter "Cat and Mouse" (German: Katz und Maus. Danziger Trilogie 2) - 1961

After "The Tin Drum", this is the second book in the Danzig trilogy. Again, we have some young people living in Danzig but the two stories have nothing to do with each other. Plus, the former is a tome, 800+ pages, the second a novella.

However, the writing is as interesting as the first, in the typical Grass style, jumping from one thought to the next, sometimes just fragments, sometimes allusions but always sticking to the story, showing us the looming war, the ever-dominant Hitler and his party that ended and ruined so many lives.

Günter Grass has just a way to make us feel like being there, living through this age of fear and terror, without even describing it, going into the horrible details, they are there, hovering in the background, determining the destiny of everyone involved.

A chilling novel, a gripping book. Günter Grass is certainly one of the greatest German authors.

From the back cover:

"To compensate for his unusually large Adam’s apple - source of both discomfort and distress - fourteen year old Joachim Mahlke turns himself into athlete and ace diver. Soon he is known to his peers and his nation as 'The Great Mahlke'. But to his enemies, he remains a target. He is different and doomed in a country scarred by the war.

Cat and Mouse was first published in 1961, two years after Gunter Grass’ controversial and applauded masterpiece, The Tin Drum. Once again Grass turns his attention on Danzig. With a subtle blend of humour and power, Cat and Mouse ostensibly relates the rise of Mahlke from clown to hero. But Mahlke’s outlandish antics hide the darkness at the heart of a nation torn by Nazi violence, the war, and its aftermath."

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

When visiting Lübeck a couple of years ago, I was happy to be able to visit the house where he lived. You can read about my experience here.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Grass, Günter "The Tin Drum"

Grass, Günter "The Tin Drum" (German: Die Blechtrommel. Danziger Trilogie 1) - 1959

Günter Grass is one of my favourite Nobel Prize winners, certainly one of the best German authors we ever had. His style is unique, his language superb.

How to describe this book? To even try would be like rewriting the whole story which is, of course, impossible.

Why is it so important? The story represents not only a part of our history that is told from a completely different perspective than most books of the war, it also describes how many things could have been through the magic realism genre.

Oscar Matzerath was born in the then free city of Danzig (now the Polish city Gdańsk). When he is three years old, he decides not to grow anymore. He tells us the story of his grandmother and through his narration we go through WWII, the occupation of Poland and the post-war life of many refugees who went to West Germany.

Oscar incorporates many different characters, the grown-up child, the obsessive drummer, the evil of this world, the actor who wants to show us how it's done. He is many people in one, hard to grasp but so much one of us that we seem to know him.

This is certainly not one of the easiest books to read but it is totally worth it. It is a story you will never forget. I will continue reading the two other books of the "Danzig Trilogy": "Cat and Mouse" (Katz und Maus) and "Dog Years" (Hundejahre).

Like many other successful books, "The Tin Drum" was made into a film and received the Academy Award for best Foreign Language Picture.

From the back cover:

"Meet Oskar Matzerath, 'the eternal three-year-old drummer.' On the morning of his third birthday, dressed in a striped pullover and patent leather shoes, and clutching his drumsticks and his new tin drum, young Oskar makes an irrevocable decision: 'It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer; that I would stop right there, remain as I was - and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire.' Here is a Peter Pan story with a vengeance. But instead of Never-Never Land, Günter Grass gives us Danzig, a contested city on the Polish-German border; instead of Captain Hook and his pirates, we have the Nazis. And in place of Peter himself is Oskar, a twisted puer aeternis with a scream that can shatter glass and a drum rather than a shadow. First published in 1959, The Tin Drum's depiction of the Nazi era created a furor in Germany, for the world of Grass's making is rife with corrupt politicians and brutal grocers in brown shirts: 

There was once a grocer who closed his store one day in November, because something was doing in town; taking his son Oskar by the hand, he boarded a Number 5 streetcar and rode to the Langasser Gate, because there as in Zoppot and Langfuhr the synagogue was on fire. The synagogue had almost burned down and the firemen were looking on, taking care that the flames should not spread to other buildings. Outside the wrecked synagogue, men in uniform and others in civilian clothes piled up books, ritual objects, and strange kinds of cloth. The mound was set on fire and the grocer took advantage of the opportunity to warm his fingers and his feelings over the public blaze. 

As Oskar grows older (though not taller), portents of war transform into the thing itself. Danzig is the first casualty when, in the summer of 1939, residents turn against each other in a pitched battle between Poles and Germans. In the years that follow, Oskar goes from one picaresque adventure to the next - he joins a troupe of traveling musicians; he becomes the leader of a group of anarchists; he falls in love; he becomes a recording artist - until some time after the war, he is convicted of murder and confined to a mental hospital. 

The Tin Drum uses savage comedy and a stiff dose of magical realism to capture not only the madness of war, but also the black cancer at the heart of humanity that allows such degradations to occur. Grass wields his humor like a knife - yes, he'll make you laugh, but he'll make you bleed, as well. There have been many novels written about World War II, but only a handful can truly be called great; The Tin Drum, without a doubt, is one. - Alix Wilber"

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

When visiting Lübeck a couple of years ago, I was happy to be able to visit the house where he lived. You can read about my experience here.

Grass, Günter "The Box: Tales from the Darkroom"

Grass, Günter "The Box: Tales from the Darkroom" (German: Die Box. Dunkelkammergeschichten) (Autobiographical Trilogy #2) - 2008

I think I can easily say that Günter Grass is one of my favourite authors. This novel is the sequel to "Peeling the Onion", the first book in his autobiographical trilogy.

In this book, he lets his children tell his story, or rather the part of his life where he has the children. There are quite a few of them, six of his own, two of his last wife, they all get together during various events and tell their side of their youth, of growing up together and/or apart. They also tell us about the mysterious photo box of one of the author's friends, Maria Rama. Her camera can show you the past and the future. It shows the wishes and desires of everyone on the pictures. It makes the story even more interesting, more imaginative. What could happen, what could have happened, I like that.

Even though this is more a novel than a real autobiography, I still think it tells a lot about the author's life and that time in Germany. A fascinating story.

I'm looking forward to number three of this series "Grimms Wörter. Eine Liebeserklärung" (Grimm's Words. A Love Declaration).

From the back cover:

"'Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters - four, five, six, eight in number - and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they are sitting around a table and begin to talk . .'

In an audacious literary experiment, Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory - they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass’s assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God?

Recalling J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime and Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Box is an inspired and daring work of fiction. In its candor, wit, and earthiness, it is Grass at his best."

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Grass, Günter "Peeling the Onion"

Grass, Günter "Peeling the Onion" (German: Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) - 2006

Günter Grass, one of Germany's greatest authors, has written a biography, not just one but three books where he talks about his life, growing up in between the two wars that were going to destroy the Europe that was known before, becoming a German soldier in WWII, spending his years in Russia, coming back to a country that was destroyed, a different part of the country than where he came from, as well. His first steps into becoming an artist, his apprenticeship as a stonemason in order to become a sculptor. Many, many stories.

Günter Grass doesn't keep anything a secret. He mentions how and why he volunteered to go to war. He also describes many events that he was going to use in his many novels later. Even if you haven't read any of his novels, this is a great account not just of the life of a writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature but also of a simple German boy who was born at the wrong time.

If you grew up in post-war Germany with parents who had been about the author's age (like me), a lot of the stories sound familiar (apart from the volunteering part).

Brilliant, remarkable writing. I am not surprised this author received the highest prize you can get.

I read this in the original German edition and am looking forward to the two next parts of the trilogy:

"Die Box. Dunkelkammergeschichten" (The Box: Tales from the Darkroom) (Autobiographical Trilogy #2) - 2008
"Grimms Wörter. Eine Liebeserklärung" (Autobiographical Trilogy #3, no translation, yet) - 2010

Klappentext:

"In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published.

During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion -- which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany -- reveals Grass at his most intimate."

As any good author, he has also read a lot and mentions many of them in the book.
Beecher Stowe, Harriet "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - 1852
Coster, Charles de "The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak" - 1867
Dahn, Felix "Ein Kampf um Rom" (A Struggle for Rome) - 1876
Dickens, Charles "David Copperfield" - 1849
Döblin, Alfred "Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf" (Berlin Alexanderplatz) - 1929
Dos Passos, John "Manhattan Transfer" - 1925
Dostoevsky, Fyodor "Demons" - 1872
Dumas, Alexandre "The Three Musketeers" - 1844
Fallada, Hans "Little Man, What Now?" - 1932
Faulkner, William "Light in August" - 1932
Fülöp-Müller, René "Der heilige Teufel. Rasputin und die Frauen" (Rasputin: The Holy Devil) - 1927
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von "Wahlverwandschaften" (Elective Affinities) - 1809
Greene, Graham "The Heart of the Matter" - 1948
Hamsun, Knut "August" - 1930
Hamsun, Knut "Hunger" - 1890
Joyce, James "Ulysses" - 1922
Jünger, Ernst "In Stahlgewittern" (Storm of Steel) - 1920
Keller, Gottfried "Ferien vom Ich" [Holidays from myself] - 1915
Keller, Gottfried "Green Henry" - 1853
Lagerlöf, Selma "Gösta Berling's Saga" - 1891
Mereschkowski, Dmitry "The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci" (Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи) - 1900
Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand "Jürg Jenatsch. Thirty Years War" (Jürg Jenatsch) - 1876
Miłosz, Czesław "The Captive Mind" (Zniewolony umysł) - 1953
Raabe, Wilhelm "Chronik der Sperlingsgasse" [Chronicles of Starling Alley] - 1856
Raabe, Wilhelm "Hungerpastor" [Hungerpastor] - 1864
Remarque, Erich Maria "All Quiet on the Western Front" (Im Westen nichts Neues) - 1829
Storm, Theodor "The Rider on the White Horse" (Der Schimmelreiter) - 1888
Wilde, Oscar "The Picture of Dorian Gray" - 1890

And some authors where he didn't mention a particular book.
Aristotle - 384-322 BC
Dickens, Charles - 1812-1870
Heidegger, Martin - 1889-1976
Spinoza, Baruch - 1632-77
Sudermann, Hermann - 1857-1928
Twain, Mark - 1835-1910

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Grass, Günter "My Century"

Grass, Günter "My Century" (German: Mein Jahrhundert) - 1999

Günter Grass is not really one of my favourite authors, not one of my favourite German authors or one of my favourite Nobel Prize authors. However, he is growing on me and has shown why he really deserved the Nobel Prize with this work. One hundred years in one hundred stories, told from different perspectives, from the rich and the poor, the left and the right, those that left and those that stayed. Men, women, children, everyone got the chance to tell their story that is so particular for that part of the century. If you want to understand what Germans went through and achieved in that time, this is a good point to start.

This is not the BIG book about the century, the book that tells us all how things happened, no, these are more little glimpses through the keyhole into the living rooms and into the hearts of all those Germans that lived in the 20th century.

I am not a huge fan of short stories, either. But this is so much more than just a collection of short stories. Many of them sounded familiar to me, either because I myself have lived or seen them, after all, I have seen almost half of that century, or because I have been told them by my parents and grandparents (some of them were even born in the century before). You cannot possibly agree with every single story because they are too different, they show a broad overview over every aspect of life, every political party, every personal viewpoint.

Certainly, there are stories that might need more explanation to someone who knows nothing about German history (besides that they started THE war) but I still believe that this book teaches us something, at least wets the appetite to know more about certain parts of the history.

Some stories are also personal, they are almost like a mini-biography of the author. If you know nothing about him, that might be hard to understand, just see it as part of the trial to bring one country's century into one book. Not an easy task but Günter Grass managed it quite well.

I read the German original of this book.

From the back cover:

"In a work of great originality, Germany's most eminent writer examines the victories and terrors of the twentieth century, a period of astounding change for mankind. Great events and seemingly trivial occurrences, technical developments and scientific achievements, war and disasters, and new beginnings, all unfold to display our century in its glory and grimness. A rich and lively display of Grass's extraordinary imagination, the 100 interlinked stories in this volume-one for each year from 1900 to 1999-present a historical and social portrait for the millennium, a tale of our times in all its grandeur and all its horror."

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Grass, Günter "Crabwalk"

Grass, Günter "Crabwalk" (German: Im Krebsgang) - 2002

This book had been my suggestion because we always look for novels by authors from different countries. We haven't read many German books, so I thought, let's read a Grass. This author has never been an "easy" person, born in Danzig to Polish-German parents, raised Catholic, moved to West Germany as a young guy, he is strongly left-wing and will say what he thinks needs saying. He is a journalist and a sculptor/graphic artist.

A lot of our members found the book very hard to read. Why do translations of books into English always have to be so bad? We've made this experience again and again. Mind you, in this case, I can't really blame the translator too much, a lot of the conversations, especially by the narrator's mother, are in Pomeranian and even difficult to read in the original German version.

We had various members who started a couple of times until they finally finished it. Some of their remarks: I appreciate that he wrote it. This book caused a big stir in Germany when it came out. I understand German shame factor. I realized how oppressive and burdensome it is for children to have to live with parents' ambitions. Paul Pokriefke wanted to be a normal person, his mother Tulla wrote him off completely and transferred all her ambitions to her grandson. Germans shouldn't dwell on their past. A lot of people don't want them to forget, the hatred is still there. They show it on TV, remind you every year. "Victimization gives them power." I appreciated the father's love for his son, he stands by him. You need not stand up against this great machine. What is going on at the moment? We talked about the Neo-Nazism in several European countries. The truth is, all European countries had and have Nazis.

Even though this was probably one of the toughest reads for most, it was a great foundation for a very interesting discussion. It leads to so many different topics. I don't think anyone should be surprised to know that the author was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Oh, and someone remarked they were astonished by the fact that there were six times as many deaths on the Wilhelm Gustloff as there were on the Titanic, yet you never hear about it.

We discussed this in our international book club in August 2012.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Günter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now, but no book since The Tin Drum has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff. A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.

Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering.

'Scuttling backward to move forward,' Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past."

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Visiting the Buddenbrook House

During our last holidays, we visited the beautiful town of Lübeck, situated in the North of Germany, at the Baltic Sea. During the Cold War, this was the last town in North-Western Germany. Today, luckily, you wouldn't even be able to tell. You also can't tell that more than 1,000 houses were totally or partly destroyed in 1942 through Allied bombings. Today, it is full of old houses, huge churches, a pretty little river flowing through the town, and the home town to three Nobel prize winners. Willy Brandt was born here, our former chancellor who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1971 for his efforts to reconcile West Germany and the Eastern countries, East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union. Günter Grass, author, graphic artist, sculptor and Nobel Prize winner for Literature (in 1999), originally from Gdańsk (then Danzig) lives here now.

And then there is the family Mann. Heinrich Mann, the elder brother, and Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1929. Both very famous in their own right and known for a vast amount of novels, plays, short stories, essays and their social criticism, and both had to go into exile during the Nazi regime. The Mann family was a renowned merchant family, their father a Senator of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck. The brothers grew up in a large and wealthy family and drew the ideas for their subjects from their everyday life.

"Buddenbrooks" (GE: Buddenbrooks) is one of my favourite novels ever. We read it in the book club and I wrote a review about it here. You can visit the house of the family Mann, it has been transformed into a museum as the "Buddenbrook House".

In 1842, Johann Siegmund Mann jun. (Thomas' and Heinrich's grandfather) bought the house in the Mengstraße and today it is known as the house of the family Buddenbrook. A beautiful white house with a Baroque façade and a Rococo gable, in the middle of the town, just next to the largest church St. Marien. The two lowest stories have been transformed into a museum with information on the family Mann and the house itself, on the third floor, you can see two rooms that have been restored to look like the rooms in the book when the family is leaving the house. There are several little items strewn throughout the rooms with the respective passages from the novel to show what they mean.

I would have loved to have the whole house restored to see how the Buddenbrooks (or Manns) really lived, but on the whole, this was a very pleasant visit and I can only recommend to anyone who is interested in literature to read the book and visit the house if you are in the area.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.