Günter Grass.

Günter Wilhelm Grass was born on October 16, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland. He grew up as the son of a merchant family who ran a grocery store. At age 15, he reported for military service in World War II, and in 1944 he became a member of the Waffen-SS, stationed in the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. After the war, he was a prisoner of war until 1946, then apprenticed as a stonemason before studying graphics and sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1948.

Grass first became active as a writer in 1957, producing short prose, poems, and plays. In 1958, he received the Group 47 sponsorship award for his manuscript The Tin Drum, which was published in 1959 and later adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1979 directed by Volker Schlöndorff. His subsequent novels Cat and Mouse 1961 and Dog Years 1963 formed the Danzig Trilogy. In 1977, he published The Butt, and in 1999 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his life’s work. He was also a political activist, supporting the SPD and opposing German reunification via annexation, as seen in his 1992 novel Prophecies of Doom.

Grass married Anna Margareta Schwartz in 1954; they divorced in 1978. In 1979, he married Ute Grunert. He had a daughter, Helene Grass, with architect and painter Veronika Schröter, and another child, Nele, born in 1979, with book editor Ingrid Krüger. His sister is Waltraud Grass. He was a member of the SPD from 1982 to 1993, resigning over asylum law changes. He also founded the Lübeck Literaturtreffen in 2005.

Günter Grass is remembered as one of Germany’s most significant post-war writers. His novel The Tin Drum is considered a masterpiece of magical realism and was awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980. He was ranked #1 on Cicero magazine’s list of the 500 leading German intellectuals in 2006. He received numerous honors including the Nobel Prize, the Georg Büchner Prize, and honorary doctorates from Harvard and the Free University of Berlin. Despite controversy over his late revelation of Waffen-SS membership, his literary and political influence endures.