Grass – classics during his lifetime – Aftonbladet

1959 is a centrally years of postwar literature.

After the release of the Günter Grass debut novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) was itself nothing more literary alike.

The Second World War and Nazi crimes had during the fourteen years since the end of the war looming as a major obstacle to cross or pass by, primarily, of course, for German writers. Günter Grass became the first man who found a way for the narrative prose to tackle the modern historical monster.

With its completely unique and inimitable fabuleringsförmåga throws himself Grass in The Tin Drum in the German 1900s story based on his childhood hometown Danzig. But not with himself at the center but with a narrator, who at the age of three decided to stop growing and then ruthlessly penetrating sharp eye and considerable magic, yes surrealist forces devote themselves to uncover the adult world.

The Tin Drum is a firework of amazing stories, while it burns straight into it at this time poorly processed German guilt. The Tin Drum brought an immediate sensation, translated, read and discussed throughout the literary world. Today it is counted since long as one of last century’s most important novels. Not only German but unremarkable.

Günter Grass, the following two novels, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years is also localized to Danzig and usually in conjunction with The Tin Drum designated as his “Danzig Trilogy”, but really hear most together by Grass highly personal style, his manic, restless hectic imaginative, he still lurching wildly successful merge together with dizzying historical perspectives and contemporary criticism.

This applies particularly to the immense novel, dogs, there is not Hitler himself but well Hitler’s German shepherd Prinz carries the story.

In another of his greatest novels, The Flounder of 1977, the time perspective is even more extensive, the last four thousand years, which is seen as the nine months in fishes wife Ilsebills pregnancy (she who in the saga drives her husband to want more and more wealth and the power of the magic flounder). The novel is a fiercely imaginative discussion of the male and the female gender diverse historical liabilities. Grass is not merciful to the male sex but was still severely criticized by the seventies women’s movement.

And here is in some ways the essence of Grass’s writing, combining its remarkable fabuleringsdrift with the ability to open controversial historical perspective. He has also done in a long series of short novels.

From The Tin Drum issuance until at least 2012, when he published an Israel-critical poem, it has Germany been fierce polemics surrounding Günter Grass. In half a century, he was the nation’s conscience, in one moment devoted follower of the SPD in the next one of the party’s sharpest critics, Willy Brandt chief ally in the politics of reconciliation with the East but also a sharp Critics of the Federal Republic of ways to treat the GDR at the reunion.

Günter Grass constant scourging of the German inability to deal with the debt after Hitler led to a formidable storm of indignation when he in his autobiographical book To peel an onion in 2006 revealed that he age of seventeen in 1944 enrolled into the Waffen-SS.

And even though the fact was hardly reprehensible, it seems undeniable that strange that he concealed it for sixty years.

Günter Grass was deeply rooted in his own time, but it is not likely that his writings for the sake or just because’ll ever lose its topicality. And it is almost unique to one author to the point become a classic during his lifetime, as he has been so hotly debated, worshiped and reviled.