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Introduction
The novelist, artist, and sculptor Günter Grass was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on October 16, 1927. Drafted into the Luftwaffe (ground crew), Grass spent most of his service in an American POW camp, from which he was released in 1946—or so went his bio until recently. Shortly before the publication of his memoir Peeling Onions/Beim Häuten der Zwiebel in August 2006, Grass confessed that he actually had been a soldier in the notorious Waffen-SS, a special Nazi commando unit, when he was just 17 years old. The ensuing stir was more about the fact that Grass had kept this fact a secret than his actual military service. Grass has always presented himself as a moralist, often reprimanding his fellow Germans for not truly facing up to their World War II guilt. So his long-delayed confession was viewed by many as supreme hypocrisy. It also led some to call for the rejection of most of the awards and honors (including a Nobel Prize) the author has received over the years. But others pointed out that Grass is often controversial and with his confession he was helping his book become a bestseller.

From 1948 to 1956 Grass studied graphic art and sculpture in Düsseldorf and Berlin. Around the time of his first art exhibition in 1957, he began to write seriously. In 1959 Grass published his first novel, Die Blechtrommel/The Tin Drum, about the impact of the Nazis and World War II on post-war Germany. It became an international bestseller and was later made into an award-winning film (1979). Grass has long been active in the left-leaning German SPD (Social Democratic) party, and he has often stirred up controversy with his political stands. For example, he was a vigorous opponent of German reunification. Most of his early novels/novellas dealt with the German Nazi past in a surreal way—Grass's way of trying to come to terms with a part of German history that he experienced as a young man. Grass was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. His works include:

• The Tin Drum/Die Blechtrommel (1959, novel; movie, 1979)
• Cat and Mouse/Katz und Maus (1961, novella)
• Dog Years/Hundejahre (1963, novel)
• The three works above are known as the "Danzig Trilogy"
• Local Anaesthesia/Örtlich betäubt (1969, novel)
• The Flounder/Der Butt (1977, novel)
• The Rat/Die Rättin (1986, novel)
• Call of the Toad/Unkenrufe (1992, short story)
• A Wide Field/Ein weites Feld (1995, novel)
• My Century/Mein Jahrhundert (1999, anthology)
• Crabwalk/Im Krebsgang (novel, 2002)
• Peeling Onions/Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (memoir, 2006)

See the next page for links to many of these books.