For Gunter Wilhelm Grass no symbols are more durable than those crafted from his immediate experience. Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland, was at the time of Grass's birth in 1927 a free city, a German-speaking island in the Polish Corridor to the Baltic created after World War I. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they began to organize in Danzig; bringing Danzig home to the Reich became one of their most popular rallying cries. In the early morning of 1 September 1939 the first shots of World War II were fired in the attack on the Polish post office in Danzig. Grass has said that in Danzig the Nazis' rise to power occurred slowly, so that one could take notes.
From his perspective as a child, the impressionable and gifted boy simultaneously noted minute details of life in a petit-bourgeois family in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr and the making of world war and holocaust. Grass's artistic search for the causes of global evil still concentrates on minutiae: subtleties of language, prejudice, political accommodation, misplaced sexual and religious fervor.
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