5 Things to know about Gunter Grass

Günter Grass, who died on April 13, 2015 was Germany’s Nobel Prize-winning author. Here are the 5 things that you must know about Gunter Grass.

1. Günter Wilhelm Grass was born on October 16, 1927 in Gdansk, Poland. In 1930s, he was a member of the Hitler Youth. He served as a soldier in World War -II and was taken as a prisoner in 1946 by United States. His first novel Tin Drum (1959) is a canonical text on magic realism. This novel was selected by the French as the best foreign language book of 1962. The Tin Drum is a story of Oscar Matzerath, a boy who refuses to grow up as a protest to the cruelty of German society during the war.
2. The novel Tin Drum is the first part of Grass’s Danzig trilogy. The two other novels are Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963). All the three novels of Danzing Trilogy focus on the interwar and wartime period in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland).
3. His novel Tin Drum was adapted to a movie of same name by director Volker Schlondorff. This movie won Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1979.
4. Other works of Günter Grass Local include Anaesthetic, The Flounder, Crabwalk, and Peeling the Onion.
5. Günter Wilhelm Grass was honored many times. He was awarded a distinguished service medal from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980, which he refused to accept. In 1999, he was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature for his frolicsome black fables that portray the forgotten face of history.