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Günter Grass Quotes

Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.He was born in the Free City of Danzig . As a teenager, he served as a drafted soldier from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS and was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.

Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum , a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany . The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history". Wikipedia  

✵ 16. October 1927 – 13. April 2015
Günter Grass photo

Works

The Rat
The Rat
Günter Grass
Günter Grass: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous Günter Grass Quotes

“I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”

Günter Grass

"On Stasis and Progress"' in Diary of a Snail (1972)

“We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!”

Günter Grass book The Rat

The Rat (1986), p. 6

“Even if surrounded with explanations, Auschwitz can never be grasped.”

Günter Grass

As quoted in The Boys' Crusade (2003) by Paul Fussell, pg xv ISBN 0-679-64088-6

“Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred.”

Günter Grass

The Tin Drum Book 1, "Rasputin and the Alphabet" (1959), as translated by Ralph Manheim (1961)

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