Günter Grass Summary

Biography EssayGunter Grass is more than a writer; he is a phenomenon. Recognized in Germany by friend and foe alike as a formidable artistic and political force, abroad he is viewed almost as a perso... Read more

Günter Grass is more than a writer; he is a phenomenon. Recognized in Germany by friend and foe alike as a formidable artistic and political force, abroad he is viewed almost as a personification... Read more

Critical Essay by Ann L. Mason Grass has repeatedly expressed his scepticism about the use of symbols, associating this mode with Nazi propaganda and with ideological thought in general…. (p. ... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas Di Napoli [Grass's works] deal with the question of guilt, specifically Germany's guilt, but more importantly, universal existential guilt. The picture he pa... Read more

Critical Essay by William Mcpherson In The Flounder [Günter Grass] dishes up the history of the German branch of the human race from the end of the Stone Age to the present as seen from the pe... Read more

Critical Essay by Morris Dickstein "The Flounder" is one of those monstrous miscellanies like Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel," Burton's "Anatomy... Read more

Critical Essay by Keith Miles Günter Grass is the most consistently interesting and disturbing writer at work in Europe today. With his prodigious talents, unmistakable voice, alarming energy,... Read more

Critical Essay by Erik S. Mcmahon There is no room for upperclass pretensions or propriety in Gunter Grass's Germany, no matter the century. And, indeed, one imagines his mind as a farraginous... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Palencia-roth Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel may be read as a novel which proclaims the death of Faust as a hero in literature by showing the degeneration of ... Read more

Critical Essay by Henry Hatfield The term "universal man" has acquired bombastic overtones, but if any of our contemporaries deserves the appellation, it is Günter Grass: novelis... Read more

Critical Essay by Theodore Ziolkowski Try to imagine Walter Savage Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" rewritten by John Barth in Restoration English to parody a meeting of the Am... Read more

Critical Essay by Stephen Spender The Meeting at Telgte contains none of the ambitious devices of Herr Grass's earlier novels. There is none of the symbolic machinery of tin drum or flounder d... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Hamburger [This essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published in Dimension, Summer 1970.] When I ask myself what makes Günter Grass so outstandin... Read more

Critical Essay by Elisabeth Finne and Wes Blomster "I'm curious about the 80s," comments Günter Grass in his latest book [Kopfgeburten]. His curiosity is shared by the rea... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Gilman Famous writers tend to become institutions, or rather to institutionalize themselves. As designated seers or gadflies, they take on the burden of everyone else'... Read more

Critical Essay by John Updike Critics who urge upon American writers more social commitment and a more public role should ponder the cautionary case of Günter Grass. Here is a novelist who has... Read more