to Tim Drum. This was his first and most famous novel. The novel is a distorted exaggeration of Grass’s own life in Danzig. This fact-based novel depicts the Nazification of average German families. The story tells of the postwar “economic miracle.” Tin Drum has been translated into all major European languages and is well known all around the world. In 1979 they made his novel into a movie. Many of the novels that Grass is well known for are politically based, though it appears that he virtually ignores the Holocaust and the experiences of the Jews. He wrote Ortlich Belaubt (Local Anaesthetic) which was a protest against the Vietnam War. Grass later wrote Katz and Maus (Cat and Mouse) and the epic novel Hundejahre (Dog Years) along with Tim Drum formed a trilogy set in Danzig. He wrote a fable showing life from the Stone Ages until today about the war between the sexes called Der Butt (The Flounder). Grass also wrote of a hypothetical “Gruppe 1647” meeting of author at the close of the Thirty Years War, Das Treffen in Telgte (The Meeting at Telgte). (“Grass, Gunter”) His most touching novel, Kopfgeburten: oder die Deutschen sterben aus (Headbirths: or, The Germans are Dying), told of a pregnant couple who had to decide whether or not they should have their child if it was only going to be born into the threat of a nuclear war. As an artist Grass also does the illustrating for the covers of many of his books.In the 1970’s and 1980’s Grass started to write in areas other then Germany. He wrote on feminism, the art of cooking, and ecology. He later returned to writing about Germany. From 1986-1987 Grass lived in India, which he wrote a book about. Grass’s most recent novel, Ein Weites Feld (A Broad Field) was about Germany’s reunification in 1990. The novel got bad reviews and was said to be “misconstructed” and “unreadable” by...
