Günter Grass

Gunter Grass

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist recounts his childhood, youth, and career, including revelations about his service in the Waffen SS combat unit at the end of World War II.

Peeling the Onion

رواية

سنوات الكلاب

Allegorical novel about a female rat who engages the narrator in dialogues on who will inherit a land devastated by war.

The Rat

«Descascando a Cebola», a polémica autobiografia de Günter Grass, aborda a vida do escritor entre 1939 e 1959. Começa quando, ao completar 12 anos, a Alemanha entra em guerra. Confessa ter integrado as Waffen-SS quando a guerra já estava perdida para a Alemanha, mas o delírio ainda fazia supor outro destino para o seu povo e país. Grass relembra também a sua adolescência na destruída Alemanha do pós-guerra, a fome e as privações, o seu trabalho como mineiro e a decisão de exilar-se em Paris onde escreveu «O Tambor», a obra que lhe deu notoriedade internacional e permitiu que recuperasse a auto-estima após a derrota.

Descascando a Cebola

Helen Wolff

Kurt Wolff

The preeminent German novelist argues against the union of the two Germanys into one state dominated by West Germany

Two States--one Nation?

Starusch, a 40 year old teacher of German and history, undergoes protracted dental treatment in an office where TV is used to distract the patients. Under local anesthesia, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. A satirical portrait of social confusions.

Local Anaesthetic

Hailed by critics and readers alike as Gunter Grass's best book since The Tin Drum, Crabwalk is an engrossing account of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and a critical meditation on Germany's struggle with its wartime memories.

Crabwalk

Presents a fictional exploration of the worst maritime disaster in history, the 1945 sinking of a German cruise ship packed with refugees by a Soviet sub--a disaster that killed nine thousand people.

David Bennent

The Tin Drum

Cat and mouse: In an attempt to compensate for his unsightly Adam's apple, Mahlke sets out to become a great athlete.

The Danzig Trilogy

The greatest German novel since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of Oskar Matzerath, thirty years old, detained in a mental hospital, convicted of a murder he did not commit. On the day of his third birthday, Oskar had "declared, resolved, and determined [to] stop right there, remain as I was, stay the same size, cling to the same attire" (striped pullover and patent-leather shoes). That same day Oskar receives his first tin drum, and from then on it is the means of his expression, allowing him to draw forth memories from the past as well as judgments about the horrors, injustices, and eccentricities he observes through the long nightmare of the Nazi era. As that era ebbs bloodily away, as drum succeeds drum, Oskar participates in the German postwar economic miracle -- working variously in the black market, as an artist's model, in a troupe of traveling musicians. With the onset of affluence and fame, Oskar decides to grow a few inches, only to develop a humpback. But despite his newfound status (and stature), Oskar remains haunted by the deaths of his parents, afflicted by his responsibility for past sins -- and so assumes guilt for a murder he did not commit as an act of atonement and an opportunity to find consolation.The rhythms of Oskar's drums are intricate and insistent, and they lead us, often by way of shocking fantasies, through the dark forest of German history. Through Oskar's piercing, outspoken voice and deformed little figure, through the imaginative distortion and exaggeration of historical experience, a pathetically hilarious yet startlingly true portrayal of the human situation comes into view.

The Tin Drum, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translation in 1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young author to the forefront of world literature. This fiftieth anniversary edition, translated by Breon Mitchell, is more faithful to Grass's style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After fifty years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass's amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers. And Oskar's midget friends--Bebra, the great circus master, and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke, the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jews--waiting to be discovered and rediscovered.

Collected verses testify to the wit, inventiveness, serious intent, political and moral commitment, and metaphysical insights of the modern German poet and novelist

In the Egg and Other Poems

Show Your Tongue

"On the publication of his first novel, The Tin Drum, Günter Grass was acclaimed internationally as the most imaginative and powerful novelist to come out of postwar Germany. Cat and Mouse has the same setting that The Tin Drum made famous: Danzig and its petty bourgeoisie. But the art form is deliberately different. Brief and compact, it focuses on the extraordinary fate and person of one hero, Joachim Mahlke, fourteen years old when the story starts. Mahlke is set apart from his fellows by an unusual excrescence of cartilage, a huge Adam's apple, sign and symbol of precocious virility, at once embarrassing and stimulating to its bearer. When a classmate sics a cat on Mahlke's "mouse," he unwittingly launches him on a hero's career. In order to compensate for his mouse, Mahlke turns himself into an athlete and ace diver who brings up from a half-submerged ship all kinds of hardware to string around his neck. He becomes "The Great Mahlke," first to his classmates and later to the nation. Mahlke's mentors, however, refuse to be impressed. For the cat watching him, ready to pounce, is a society of petty men. Not even by gaining his country's highest honor, the Order of Merit, the most dazzling piece of hardware to cover his protuberance, does Mahlke succeed in conciliating his enemies. Mahlke is different, Mahlke is doomed. With ferocious virtuosity, Gunter Grass maps the local and mental circumstances of Mahlke's dramatic and pathetic struggle, compelling the reader's participation and belief."--Book jacket.

Cat and Mouse

A dwarf drummer found guilty of a crime he did not commit writes his memoirs from a mental hospital in postwar Germany

Gunter Grass

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