Günter Grass
(b. 1927)

Günter Grass lived through the darkest period of German history, the era of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. Grass who was born in Danzig, now the Polish city of Gdansk, was drafted into the army at age sixteen. His experiences at war and witnessing the horrors of Dachau led him to reject Nazism. Grass's experiences of that nightmarish period are at the heart of his writing and political activities.

In 1954, he moved to Berlin and married Anna Schwarz and began publishing poems, plays, and essays and even started a novel. The novel was The Tin Drum, a survey of the Nazi era that mixed fairy tale, fantasy, and realism. It won him much praise and literary awards.

Grass's political activities like his writing reflect his belief in human possibility. He worked during the Cold War for peace by bringing writers from East and West Germany together. In 1999, Grass's achievements earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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