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 of his best-selling novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; translated as The Tin Drum, 1962).

Grass was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on 16 October 1927 to middle-class parents, Willy and Helena Knoff Grass. He attended school until 1944, when he was drafted into the military. He was wounded near Cottbus in 1945 and ended the war in an American prisoner-of-war camp in Bavaria. After his release the not yet eighteen-year-old Grass worked in a potash mine. In 1946 he found his parents and sister, who had left Gdansk and were living in miserable refugee conditions in West Germany. Grass decided to become a sculptor; he found the academy of fine arts in Düsseldorf partially destroyed and closed, but he entered into...