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...
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The German novelist, playwright, and poet Günter Grass (born 1927) is internationally known as one of the most important literary figures of postwar Germany; he is also known as an exemplar of hi...
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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...
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Günter Grass, although best known for his fiction, has also had a significant career as a playwright. Some of his most original plays were conceived between 1953 and 1959, before the publication ...
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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. 6...
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Critical Essay by Paul Zweig
Like much American fiction of the 1960s, The Flounder represents a variety of what I would like to call kitchensink modernism: form and control are out the window; anythin...
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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 paints...
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Critical Essay by Michael Hollington
[Günter Grass's] novel Der Butt (The Flounder) … seems to have put paid to the view that his recent work exhibits a continuous decline from th...
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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 per...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
The Flounder is even more epic in conception, if not in scale, than Günter Grass's previous big novels. (p. 57)
[All] major historical periods and sociopolit...
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Critical Essay by Morris Dickstein
"The Flounder" is one of those monstrous miscellanies like Rabelais's "Gargantua and Pantagruel," Burton's "Anatomy ...
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Critical Essay by Nigel Dennis
Grass has said that he wrote [The Flounder] as a fiftieth-birthday present to himself, and a birthday present need be pleasing only to the recipient. Much of The Flounde...
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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, ...
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Critical Essay by Leonard Forster
For most readers Günter Grass's work is so dominated by the Danzig trilogy that it is difficult to see what he wrote after it in the proper perspective....
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Guy Davenport
The Meeting at Telgte is an imaginary conference of German writers toward the end of the Thirty Years War when, as after another disastrous and unbelievably violent 30 ...
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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 t...
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Critical Essay by J. P. Stern
With the deaths of Thomas Mann in 1955 and of Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in 1956, a major era in the history of German literature comes to an end. These three are ...
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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: novelist...
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Critical Essay by Donald Newlove
[The Meeting at Telgte,] in Grass's hands, is a novel without dialogue that aspires to instant literary embronzification as the poets squabble in dactyls, mock ...
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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 Ame...
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Critical Essay by Phoebe-lou Adams
Since his seventeenth-century authors are all historical figures [in The Meeting at Telgte],… Mr. Grass has counted on a German audience's familiarity ...
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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 dr...
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Critical Essay by Salman Rushdie
[In The Meeting at Telgte,] Günter Grass has taken the story of a group of writers who set about the task of seeing sharply, but with a sense of humor, and proj...
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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 outstanding a ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Hollington
In approaching Grass as a poet and a dramatist, it is extremely difficult to forget that Grass has gained pre-eminent recognition as a novelist: in what follows I ...
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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 read...
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Critical Essay by Joel Agee
There are ropewalkers, lion tamers, and clowns among novelists; also bareback riders, trapeze artists, strong men, and illusionists; and once in awhile an impresario will a...
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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'...
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Critical Essay by John Sutherland
Headbirths is a novelist's diary or quarry, unprocessed working materials published long before their time….
Grass is fashioning a new discourse and cla...
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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 ...
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Günter Grass
Guenter (Wilhelm) Grass
