Günter Grass

Grass was born in the Free City of Danzig on 16 October 1927, to Wilhelm Grass (1899–1979), a Lutheran Protestant of German origin, and Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898–1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin. He identified as Kashubian. 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 younger 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 (Reich Labour Service). In November 1944, shortly after his 17th birthday, Grass volunteered for submarine service with Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine, "to get out of the confinement felt as a teenager in his parents' house", which he considered stuffy Catholic lower middle-class.

After the Navy refused him, he was called up for 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. He was captured in Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně, Czech Republic) and sent to a US prisoner-of-war camp in Bad Aibling, Bavaria.

From 1946 to 1947, Grass worked in a mine and received training in stonemasonry. He studied sculpture and graphics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He also was a cofounder of Group 47, organized by Hans Werner Richter. Grass worked as a writer, graphic designer, and sculptor, traveling frequently.

In 1953 he moved to West Berlin and 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 publicly objected to the erection of the Berlin Wall.

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

In 1954 Grass married Anna Margareta Schwarz, a Swiss dancer, which ended in divorce in 1978. He and Schwarz had four children: Franz (born 1957), Raoul (1957), Laura (1961), and Bruno (1965). They separated in 1972, and he began a relationship with Veronika Schröter, with whom he had a daughter, Helene (1974). He also had a daughter, Nele (1979), with Ingrid Kruger.

In 1979 he married Ute Grunert, an organist, to whom he was married up until his death. He had two stepsons from his second marriage, Malte and Hans. He had 18 grandchildren at his death.

Grass spent summers on a Danish island, spring and summer in southern Portugal, and was a fan of football club SC Freiburg.

Grass was for several decades a supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and its policies. He took part in German and international political debate on several occasions. During Willy Brandt's chancellorship, Grass was an active supporter. Grass criticized left-wing radicals and instead argued in favor of the "snail's pace", as he put it, of democratic reform (Aus dem Tagebuch einer Schnecke, literally "from the diary of a snail"). Books containing his speeches and essays have been published throughout his literary career.

In the 1980s, Grass became active in the peace movement and visited Calcutta for six months. A diary with drawings was published as Zunge zeigen, an allusion to Kali's tongue.

During the events leading up to the reunification of Germany in 1989–90, Grass argued for the continued separation of the two German states. He asserted that a unified Germany would be likely to resume its role as belligerent nation-state. This argument estranged many Germans, who came to see him as too much of a moralizing figure.

In 2001, Grass proposed the creation of a German-Polish museum for art lost to other countries during the War. The Hague Convention of 1907 requires the return of art that had been evacuated, stolen or seized. Some countries refused to repatriate some of the looted art.

On 4 April 2012, Grass's poem "What Must Be Said" (Was gesagt werden muss) was published in several European newspapers. Grass expressed his concern about the hypocrisy of German military support (the delivery of a submarine) of Israel, which might use such equipment to launch nuclear warheads against Iran, which "could wipe out the Iranian people". He hoped that many would demand "that the governments of both Iran and Israel allow an international authority free and open inspection of the nuclear potential and capability of both." In response, Israel declared him persona non grata in that country.

According to Avi Primor, president of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations, Grass was the only important German cultural figure who had refused to meet with him when he served as Israeli ambassador to Germany. Primor noted: "One explanation for [Grass']s strange behavior might be found in the fact that Grass (who despite his poem is probably not the bitter enemy of Israel that one would imagine) had certain personal difficulties with Israel that were not necessarily of his own making." Primor said that during Grass's earlier visit to Israel, he

"was confronted with the anger of an Israeli public that booed him in successive public appearances. To be sure, the Israeli protestors were not targeting Grass personally and their anger had nothing at all to do with his literature. It was the German effort to establish cultural relations with Israel to which they objected. Grass, however, did not see it that way and may well have felt personally slighted."

Grass supported the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organization that campaigns for democratic reform of the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.

On 26 April 2012, Grass wrote a poem criticizing European policy in the treatment of Greece in the European debt crisis. In "Europe's Disgrace", Grass accuses Europe of condemning Greece to poverty, a country "whose mind conceived Europe".

Just a few days before he died, Grass completed his last book, Vonne Endlichkait. The title is in East Prussian dialect, the native dialect of Grass, and means "About Finitude". According to his publisher Gerhard Steidl, the book was "a literary experiment", combining short prose texts, poems, and pencil drawings by the writer. The book was published in August 2015.