{"id":18453,"date":"2015-04-14T05:27:08","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T03:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=18453"},"modified":"2015-04-14T05:29:29","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T03:29:29","slug":"engaged-author-gunter-grass-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=18453","title":{"rendered":"Engaged author G\u00fcnter Grass dies"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The writer G\u00fcnter Grass, who broke the silences of the past for a generation of Germans, has died in hospital in L\u00fcbeck at the age of 87.<\/p>\n<p>German president Joachim Gauck led the tributes, offering his condolences to the writer\u2019s widow Ute Grass. \u201cG\u00fcnter Grass moved, enthralled, and made the people of our country think with his literature and his art,\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cHis literary work won him recognition early across the world, as witnessed not least by his Nobel prize.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_18455\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-18455\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-18455\" src=\"http:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"G\u00fcnter Grass\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass-148x99.jpg 148w, https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass-31x21.jpg 31w, https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass-38x25.jpg 38w, https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass-323x215.jpg 323w, https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/gunter_grass.jpg 405w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 85vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-18455\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">G\u00fcnter Grass<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cHis novels, short stories, and his poetry reflect the great hopes and fallacies, the fears and desires of whole generations,\u201d the statement continued.<\/p>\n<p>Tributes began to appear within minutes of the announcement of Grass\u2019 death on Twitter by his publisher, Steidl.<\/p>\n<p>In the UK, Salman Rushdie was one of the first authors to respond, tweeting:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>This is very sad. A true giant, inspiration, and friend. Drum for him, little Oskar. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/5b4Y7fTtin\">https:\/\/t.co\/5b4Y7fTtin<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SalmanRushdie\/status\/587547774742360065\">April 13, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk had warm personal memories: \u201cGrass learned a lot from Rabelais and Celine and was influential in development of \u2018magic realism\u2019 and Marquez. He taught us to base the story on the inventiveness of the writer no matter how cruel, harsh and political the story is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>He added: \u201cIn April 2010 when there was a mushroom cloud over Europe he was in Istanbul and stayed more than he planned. We went to restaurants and drank and drank and talked and talked &#8230; A generous, curious and a very warm friend who also wanted to be a painter at first!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Grass found success in every artistic form he explored \u2013 from poetry to drama and from sculpture to graphic art \u2013 but it wasn\u2019t until publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959 that he found the international reputation which brought him the Nobel prize for literature 40 years later. A speechwriter for the German chancellor Willy Brandt, Grass was never afraid to use the platform his fame afforded, campaigning for peace and the environment and speaking out against German reunification, which he compared to Hitler\u2019s \u201cannexation\u201d of Austria.<\/p>\n<p>Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig \u2013 now Gdansk \u2013 in 1927, \u201calmost late enough\u201d, as he said, to avoid involvement with the Nazi regime. Conscripted into the army in 1944 at the age of 16, he served as a tank gunner in the Waffen SS, bringing accusations of betrayal, hypocrisy and opportunism when he wrote about it in his 2006 autobiography, Peeling the Onion.<\/p>\n<p>The writer was surprised by the strength of the reaction, arguing that he thought at the time that the SS was merely \u201can elite unit\u201d, that he had spoken openly about his wartime record in the 1960s, and that he had spent a lifetime \u201cworking through\u201d the unquestioning beliefs of his youth in his writing. His war came to an end six months later having \u201cnever fired a shot\u201d, when he was wounded in Cottbus and captured in a military hospital by the US army. That he avoided committing war crimes was \u201cnot by merit\u201d, he insisted. \u201cIf I had been born three or four years earlier I would, surely, have seen myself caught up in those crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Instead he trained as a stonemason, studied art in D\u00fcsseldorf and Berlin, and joined Hans Werner Richter\u2019s Group 47 alongside writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Heinrich B\u00f6ll. After moving to Paris in 1956 he began working on a novel which told the story of Germany in the first half of the 20th century through the life of a boy who refuses to grow.<\/p>\n<p>A sprawling mixture of fantasy, family saga, bildungsroman and political fable, The Tin Drum was attacked by critics, denied the Bremen literature prize by outraged senators, burned in D\u00fcsseldorf and became a global bestseller.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to the Swedish Academy in 1999, Grass explained that the reaction taught him \u201cthat books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is undertaken out of love for one\u2019s country can be taken as soiling one\u2019s nest. From then on I have been controversial.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A steady stream of provocative interventions in debates around social justice, peace and the environment followed, alongside poetry, drama, drawings and novels. In 1977 Grass tackled sexual politics, hunger and the rise of civilisation with a 500-page version of the Grimm brothers\u2019 fairytale The Fisherman and His Wife. The Rat (1986) explored the apocalpyse, as a man dreams of a talking rat who tells him of the end of the human race, while 1995\u2019s Too Far Afield explored reunification through east German eyes \u2013 prompting Germany\u2019s foremost literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, to brand the novel a \u201ccomplete and utter failure\u201d and to appear on the cover of Der Spiegel ripping a copy in half.<\/p>\n<p>His last novel, 2002\u2019s Crabwalk, dived into the sinking of the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, while three volumes of memoir \u2013 Peeling the Onion, The Box and Grimms\u2019 Words \u2013 boldly ventured into troubled waters.<\/p>\n<p>Germany\u2019s political establishment responded immediately to the news of Grass\u2019s death. The head of the German Green party, Katrin G\u00f6ring-Eckardt, called Grass a \u201cgreat author, a critical spirit. A contemporary who had the ambition to put himself against the Zeitgeist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cG\u00fcnter Grass was a contentious intellectual &#8211; his literary work remains formidable,\u201d tweeted the head of the opposition Free Democratic party, Christian Lindner.<\/p>\n<p>The foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was \u201cdeeply dismayed\u201d at the news of the author\u2019s death, a tweet from his ministry said.<\/p>\n<p>Steinmeier is a member of the Social Democratic party, which Grass had a fraught relationship with &#8211; after campaigning for the party in 1960s and 70s, he became a member in 1982, only to leave ten years later in protest at its asylum policies.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cG\u00fcnter Grass was a contentious intellectual who interfered. We sometimes miss that today,\u201d SPD chairwoman Andrea Nahles said.<\/p>\n<p>While there were plenty of tributes recognising Grass as one of Germany\u2019s most important post-war writers, social media users swiftly revived many of the controversies of his divisive career, bringing up his membership of the SS and his alleged anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to the Paris Review in 1991, Grass made no apology for his abiding focus on Germany\u2019s difficult past. \u201cIf I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that,\u201d he said. \u201cThat hasn\u2019t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The controversy flared up again following by publication of his 2012 poem What Must be Said, in which he criticised Israeli policy. Published simultaneously in the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung, the Italian La Repubblica and Spanish El Pa\u00eds, the poem brought an angry response from the Israeli ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, who saw in it \u201ca disturbed relationship to his own past, the Jews, and Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his advanced age, Grass still led an active public life, and made vigorous public appearances in recent weeks. In a typically opinionated interview for state broadcaster WDR, which he gave in February after a live reading from Grimms\u2019 Words, Grass called his last book a \u201cdeclaration of love to the German language\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>He also talked about how the internet and the loss of the art of letter-writing had led to a \u201cnew illiteracy\u201d. \u201cOf course that has consequences,\u201d he said. \u201cIt leads to a poverty of language and allows everything to be forgotten that the Grimm brothers created with their glorious work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He also remained critical of western policy in the Middle East (\u201cnow we see the chaos we make in those countries with our western values\u201d), and talked about how his age had done nothing to soften his political engagement.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI have children and grandchildren, I ask myself every day: \u2018what are we leaving behind for them?\u2019 When I was 17, at the end of the war, everything was in ruins, but our generation, whether for good reason or not, had hope, we wanted to shape the future. That\u2019s very difficult for young people today, because the future is virtually fixed for them.\u201d &#8211; The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The writer G\u00fcnter Grass, who broke the silences of the past for a generation of Germans, has died in hospital in L\u00fcbeck at the age of 87. German president Joachim Gauck led the tributes, offering his condolences to the writer\u2019s widow Ute Grass. \u201cG\u00fcnter Grass moved, enthralled, and made the people of our country think &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=18453\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Engaged author G\u00fcnter Grass dies&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[422,3],"tags":[11472,1008,6352,6832],"class_list":["post-18453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-news","tag-danzig","tag-death","tag-gunter-grass","tag-nobel-prize"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18453"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18457,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18453\/revisions\/18457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}