Farewell Gunter Grass
Novelist / Poet / Playwright
1927-2015
Gunter Grass cemented his reputation as one of the most important postwar German authors with The Tin Drum, which addresses the dark page in German history of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's rise. While this book focused on the years before World War II, Grass later penned two others which became the Danzig Trilogy; the second centering on the war years and the last volume dealing with the postwar era. All of the three are set in Danzig, the writer's childhood home, and use mythic or folkloric characters who are often physically unusual in order to force a new perspective of the events of the time. Thanks to these and other politically outspoken works, the left-leaning Grass was once widely known as the conscience of Germany's postwar generation. A prolific writer, he has created several plays and works of poetry in addition to more than 45 books. In 1999, he was honored with the Nobel Prize in literature.
Source: "Gunter Grass." Newsmakers. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Biography in Context. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.
