Günter Grass Timeline

Günter Grass 40

1927 Günter Grass born in Danzig Günter Wilhelm Grass is born in Langfuhr, a suburb of the Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland), to Wilhelm Grass, a Protestant German grocer, and Helene née Knoff, a Catholic Polish-German woman. The family runs a small grocery shop whose customers are often too poor to pay their bills.
1933 Hitler comes to power — Danzig's political climate shifts The Nazi rise to power in Germany profoundly shapes the political atmosphere in Danzig. As a child, Grass absorbs the ideological world of National Socialism without the critical tools to question it — a fact that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
1937 Enrolls at the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum Grass begins secondary school at the Conradinum gymnasium in Danzig, a formative experience cut short by the outbreak of war. He is a mediocre student but shows early aptitude for drawing and language.
1939 Germany annexes Danzig; war begins When Germany absorbs the Free City of Danzig on 1 September 1939 and launches the invasion of Poland — beginning the Second World War — Grass is eleven years old and living at the epicentre of the catastrophe.
1942 Joins the Hitler Youth Grass is enrolled in the Hitler Youth at ten, and by the early 1940s is a committed participant in its ideology — drilling, singing nationalist songs and absorbing the propaganda that surrounds him on all sides. He later describes this period as one of complete ideological indoctrination.
1943 – 1944 Volunteers for the submarine service — rejected At fifteen, eager to escape the confinement of his parents' home and thrilled by the romantic notion of military service, Grass volunteers for the submarine service. He is rejected as too young.
1944 Drafted into the Waffen-SS At seventeen, Grass is called up into the Waffen-SS — specifically the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg — and stationed in Dresden. He does not volunteer for the SS specifically; the assignment is made for him. He later insists he was barely aware of the full implications of what the SS represented, and that he felt no shame at the time.
1945 Wounded in battle; taken prisoner by American forces Grass is wounded in combat near the end of the war and is captured by American forces. He is held as a prisoner of war until 1946, spending his captivity in camps in Bavaria, where the scale of Nazi atrocities gradually becomes clear.
1946 Released from captivity; begins reckoning with the past Released from the POW camp, Grass works as a farmhand and a potash miner in the Rhineland, beginning the long, slow process of confronting what he participated in. The shame he later describes as lifelong begins to take root in these years.
1947 Studies sculpture and graphic arts in Düsseldorf Grass enrolls at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study sculpture and graphic design, beginning a parallel life as a visual artist that runs alongside his literary career for the rest of his life.
1951 Continues studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Berlin Grass moves to Berlin to continue his art education, absorbing the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of post-war divided Germany — a landscape of ruins, guilt and reconstruction that will define his entire literary oeuvre.
1954 Marries Anna Schwarz Grass marries Swiss dancer Anna Margaretha Schwarz, with whom he will have four children — Franz, Raoul, Laura and Bruno. The marriage lasts until 1978. Anna's Swiss Catholic background adds another cultural layer to Grass's already complex sense of identity.
1955 Joins Gruppe 47 Grass becomes a member of Gruppe 47, the influential literary association founded by Hans Werner Richter that gathers Germany's most important post-war writers. Membership places him at the centre of the new West German literary scene and introduces him to Heinrich Böll, Ingeborg Bachmann and others.
1956 First poetry collection published Grass publishes his first collection of poems, Die Vorzüge der Windhühner, establishing himself as a writer of unusual imagery and dark humour. He is living in Paris with Anna, working as a sculptor, graphic artist and writer simultaneously.
1957 First play produced His first play, Flood, is staged — an early indication that Grass's literary ambitions extend beyond any single genre. Throughout his career he will write for the page, the stage and the gallery wall simultaneously.
1958 Wins the Gruppe 47 prize Grass reads an early excerpt of what will become The Tin Drum at a Gruppe 47 meeting and wins the group's prize — a pivotal moment that confirms the importance of what he is working on and marks him as the most significant new voice in German literature.
1959 Publication of The Tin Drum Grass publishes Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), his first novel. The book — narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a dwarf who refuses to grow up in protest against the adult world and its moral catastrophes — is immediately recognised as a masterpiece. It scandalises German society, is banned in several towns, and becomes one of the defining works of post-war European literature.
1961 Cat and Mouse published Grass publishes Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse), the second part of what becomes known as the Danzig Trilogy — a novella exploring guilt, adolescence and the war through the story of a young man in Danzig.
1961 Moves to West Berlin Grass moves permanently to West Berlin, the city that becomes his base and the setting for his growing political engagement. West Berlin's isolated, politically charged atmosphere suits his temperament perfectly.
1963 Dog Years published — Danzig Trilogy complete Hundejahre (Dog Years) completes the Danzig Trilogy, a monumental and sprawling novel that traces German history from the 1920s to the post-war period through the intertwined lives of two Danzig-born men. Together the trilogy establishes Grass as the literary conscience of his generation.
1965 – 1969 Campaigns for Willy Brandt and the SPD Grass becomes an active speechwriter and campaign worker for Willy Brandt and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) during the 1965, 1969 and 1972 federal elections — one of the most visible examples of a major German literary figure directly engaging in electoral politics.
1965 Wins the Georg Büchner Prize Grass receives the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize, one of the highest literary honours in the German-speaking world, in recognition of the Danzig Trilogy and his growing stature as a political voice.
1969 Willy Brandt wins — Ostpolitik begins The SPD's victory in 1969 brings Brandt to the chancellorship, and Grass celebrates both a personal and political triumph. Brandt's Ostpolitik — the policy of reconciliation with Eastern Europe — partly reflects values Grass has publicly championed.
1972 Publishes From the Diary of a Snail Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke — part fiction, part political diary — documents Grass's work on the 1969 and 1972 election campaigns while exploring the history of Danzig's Jewish community during the Holocaust. It is a rare integration of fiction and political memoir.
1977 The Flounder published Der Butt (The Flounder) is published — a vast, playful feminist-inflected novel spanning thousands of years of history, tracing the relationship between men and women through mythology, cookery and storytelling. It becomes an international bestseller and extends his reputation beyond Germany.
1978 Divorce from Anna Schwarz Grass and Anna divorce after 24 years of marriage. The same year he begins a relationship with Ute Grunert, an organist, whom he will marry in 1979.
1979 Marries Ute Grunert Grass marries Ute Grunert, with whom he will remain until his death. Together they have two more children — Helene and Hans.
1979 The Tin Drum wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film Volker Schlöndorff's film adaptation of The Tin Drum wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, introducing Grass's work to a vast new global audience and cementing the novel's status as a cultural landmark.
1980 Headbirths published; anti-nuclear activism intensifies Kopfgeburten (Headbirths) appears — a short, essayistic novel engaging with global population, ecology and German political life. Throughout the early 1980s Grass is increasingly active in the German peace movement, speaking against the deployment of NATO nuclear missiles on German soil.
1986 President of the Akademie der Künste Grass serves as president of the prestigious Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Berlin from 1983 to 1986, using the position to champion artistic freedom and political engagement.
1990 Opposes German reunification When the Berlin Wall falls and reunification becomes reality, Grass speaks out — alone among major German cultural figures — against it. He compares the speed of reunification to Hitler's annexation of Austria and warns it will revive German nationalism. The position is widely condemned at the time but Grass never recants.
1992 The Call of the Toad published Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad) is published — a quiet, melancholic novel about German-Polish reconciliation set in Gdańsk, reflecting Grass's lifelong preoccupation with the city of his birth and its complex German-Polish-Jewish histories.
1995 Too Far Afield published — the Treuhand novel Ein weites Feld, Grass's controversial novel about German reunification and its aftermath, provokes the most hostile critical reception of his career. Der Spiegel critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki tears up the novel on a television programme in front of a live audience — one of the most dramatic moments in post-war German literary culture.
1999 Nobel Prize in Literature The Swedish Academy awards Grass the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing his "frolicsome black fables that portray the forgotten face of history." The prize is the culmination of four decades at the centre of German literary and political life.
1999 Nobel Prize lecture: "Continuing Losses" In his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, Grass reflects on the relationship between literature and politics, on guilt and memory, and on the duty of the writer to speak uncomfortable truths.
2002 Crabwalk published Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk) is published — a novella about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, in which Soviet submarines sank a German refugee ship killing over 9,000 people, one of the greatest maritime disasters in history. The book opens a long-avoided chapter of German memory — German civilian suffering — and becomes a major bestseller.
2006 Confesses to Waffen-SS membership in memoir In his autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion), Grass reveals for the first time that he served in the Waffen-SS as a seventeen-year-old — not merely in an anti-aircraft unit as previously stated. The disclosure, sixty years after the fact, devastates his reputation as Germany's moral conscience. Critics demand he return his Nobel Prize; Poland withdraws his honorary citizenship of Gdańsk.
2006 Defends himself publicly In a series of interviews, Grass defends the timing of his disclosure: "My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book. It had to come out, finally." The debate about whether shame justified delay, or whether delay was cynical self-protection, continues for years.
2012 Poem "What Must Be Said" sparks Israeli controversy Grass publishes a poem — Was gesagt werden muss (What Must Be Said) — in which he accuses Israel of threatening world peace with its nuclear arsenal and suggests Germany's planned submarine sale to Israel is irresponsible. Israel bans him from entering the country. The poem is widely condemned as clumsy and antisemitic; Grass insists he spoke from conscience.
2015 Günter Grass dies in Lübeck aged 87 Günter Grass dies on 13 April 2015 in a clinic in Lübeck, after a brief illness, at the age of 87. He is survived by his wife Ute and six children. His death prompts an outpouring of tributes from world leaders and writers, and a renewed debate about whether his moral authority — undermined by his late confession — can be separated from his literary achievement.