Günter Grass   'What Must Be Said'
Channel: No To Noahide Laws
Date: 2015-04-29

With Permission, From "Snordster W"s Channel

https://youtu.be/Ux79j1r9hvE

Published on Apr 14, 2015

The German Nobel Prize winning writer, Günter Grass, has passed away at the age of 87 in the German city of Lubeck. His innovative art and striking personality have been shrouded in controversy, his strong political statements spurred most heated debate.


https://www.youtube.com/user/Snordster?feature=watch

Günter Wilhelm Grass
16 October 1927 – 13 April 2015) was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Grass, who identified as Kashubian, was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). As a teenager, he served briefly as a drafted soldier in the Waffen SS, and was taken prisoner of war by U.S. 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 (1959), 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 (SPD). 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".

  Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), a Protestant of German origin, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. Grass was raised a Catholic and served as an altar boy when he was a child. His parents had a grocery store with an attached apartment in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk Wrzeszcz). He had a sister, Waltraud, born in 1930.

 Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. In 1943, at age 16, he became a Luftwaffenhelfer (Air Force "helper"). Soon thereafter, he was conscripted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labor Service). In November 1944, shortly after his 17th birthday, Grass volunteered for submarine service with the German Navy (Kriegsmarine), "to get out of the confinement felt as a teenager in his parents' house", which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle-class.

  The Navy did not accept him and he was instead drafted into the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg in late 1944. Grass did not reveal until 2006 that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS at that time. His unit functioned as a regular Panzer Division, and he served with them from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 (coincidentally, Hitler's last birthday). He was captured in Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně, Czech Republic) and sent to a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp in Bad Aibling, Bavaria.

  In 1946 and 1947, Grass worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry. For many years he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He became a founding member of the Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter. Grass worked as an author, graphic designer, and sculptor, traveling frequently. In 1953 he moved to West Berlin where he studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1960, he lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. In 1961 he voiced his opposition to the construction of the Berlin Wall.

From 1983 to 1986, he held the presidency of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.