Günter Grass

Günter Grass: Germany's Conscience, With a Sixty-Year Secret

For six decades, Günter Grass was celebrated as Germany's moral conscience — the novelist who forced his country to confront its Nazi past through fiction, opposed reunification on principle, and publicly condemned Ronald Reagan for visiting a cemetery that included SS graves. Then, in August 2006, at seventy-eight, he revealed that he himself had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager, a fact he had concealed for sixty years, and the moral authority he had built his career on came under direct, public attack.

A Childhood Under Hitler

Günter Grass was born October 16, 1927, in Danzig-Langfuhr, then a Free City on the Baltic and now Gdańsk, Poland, to a Protestant German father who ran a grocery and a Roman Catholic mother of Kashubian-Polish descent; he was raised Catholic alongside a younger sister. Grass was six years old when Hitler took power in Germany, and by ten he had joined the Hitler Youth. He attended the Danzig Gymnasium Conradinum and, as a teenager, volunteered for submarine service, but was instead conscripted at sixteen into the Reichsarbeitsdienst in 1942 and then, in November 1944 at age seventeen, into the Waffen-SS, serving as a tank gunner with the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. He saw combat from February 1945 until he was wounded on April 20, 1945, and subsequently held in American prisoner-of-war camps. Witnessing coverage of the Nuremberg trials afterward, by his own account, was what forced him to grasp the full reality of the Holocaust.

Rebuilding as an Artist

After the war, Grass worked as a stonemason before studying sculpture and graphic art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Universität der Künste in Berlin, training that shaped a parallel career as a visual artist and sculptor that ran alongside his writing for the rest of his life. His literary career began in earnest in 1956, and over roughly six decades he produced more than thirty plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, and memoirs.

The Tin Drum and the Danzig Trilogy

Grass's international reputation rests above all on The Tin Drum (1959), the story of a Danzig boy who protests the rise of Nazism by willing himself to stop growing, told in a mode of grotesque, satirical fantasy that became a landmark of European magic realism; the novel was later adapted into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Tin Drum formed the first part of what became known as the Danzig Trilogy, completed with Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963), all set in and around his native city and grappling directly with German complicity in Nazism. Later major works included The Flounder, The Rat, The Call of the Toad, Crabwalk (2002), and his 2006 memoir Peeling the Onion.

Germany's Conscience

Beyond fiction, Grass became one of postwar Germany's most prominent public intellectuals, using his standing to advocate for liberal political causes and to press his country to reckon honestly with its history. He was notably outspoken against German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he publicly condemned President Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to a German military cemetery that included SS graves — a position that would later be thrown back at him with particular force once his own SS service became known. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising an author "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history."

The 2006 Revelation

In August 2006, Grass disclosed publicly, after sixty years of silence, that he had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager during the war's final months. The revelation was treated as a serious breach of the moral authority he had spent decades cultivating; the critic Joachim Fest called Grass's late confession hypocritical given his long career as what one account described as a "smug" moral authority who had criticized others, including Reagan, for lesser associations with the SS. The scholar Siegfried Mews noted that the disclosure specifically exposed the contradiction between Grass's public condemnation of Reagan's cemetery visit and his own concealed service. Some defenders, including the novelist John Irving, argued his decades of literary achievement and genuine postwar democratic engagement should not be erased by conscription he underwent as a seventeen-year-old; the Polish leader Lech Wałęsa initially criticized Grass but later withdrew the criticism.

Later Life and Death

Grass married in 1954, divorced in 1978, and remarried in 1979, living between Berlin and Schleswig-Holstein and serving as president of Berlin's Akademie der Künste from 1983 to 1986. He settled in Behlendorf, in northern Germany, after 1995. He died April 13, 2015, in Lübeck, from a lung infection, at age eighty-seven, and was buried privately in Behlendorf twelve days later.

Why Grass Is Called a Genius

The literary case is grounded in a specific technical achievement: The Tin Drum's fusion of grotesque fantasy, satire, and unflinching historical subject matter created a new template — later termed magic realism in the European context — for how postwar German literature could confront Nazism without either sanitizing it or succumbing to despair, using a narrator who refuses to grow as a device for refusing complicity with the adult world that enabled fascism. That combination of formal invention and moral seriousness is what the Swedish Academy cited in awarding him the Nobel Prize. The counter-case is not a matter of interpretation but of Grass's own concealed biography: the writer most associated with demanding German honesty about the Nazi past spent sixty years withholding his own service in the Waffen-SS, only disclosing it once, by some critics' account, it could no longer stay hidden — a fact that does not erase the literary achievement of The Tin Drum but does complicate any simple reading of Grass as a figure of unblemished moral courage. His defenders' argument, that a seventeen-year-old's conscription is not equivalent to his decades of adult moral advocacy, and his critics' argument, that six decades of silence from a self-appointed national conscience is its own moral failure, remain genuinely unresolved rather than settled by his death.

Legacy

Grass's literary output is preserved and studied at the Günter Grass House in Lübeck, and The Tin Drum remains a fixture of both the postwar German literary canon and world literature more broadly, still read as one of the defining fictional accounts of how ordinary Germans lived through and evaded responsibility for Nazism. That legacy exists permanently alongside the unresolved question his own 2006 disclosure raised: whether a writer who spent a career demanding honesty from his country was, in the most personal matter of his own life, honest himself.

Achievements

• Nobel Prize in Literature — 1999
• Notable work: The Tin Drum
• Notable work: Cat and Mouse
• Notable work: Dog Years
• Notable work: Crabwalk
• Educated at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Berlin University of the Arts and Pestalozzischule
• Worked as lyricist, screenwriter and poet